Master and Slave Morality

What are the two moralities?

In section 260 of Beyond Good and Evil (1886), in the ninth part, "What Is Noble?", Nietzsche wrote that after surveying the many moralities that had prevailed on earth he had found two basic types: "There is master morality and slave morality." He added at once that in all higher and mixed cultures there are attempts to mediate between the two, and still more often confusion and mutual misunderstanding, and that sometimes they stand side by side "even in the same human being, within a single soul". So this is less a classification of two classes of people than an account of two ways in which values arise.

Es gibt Herren-Moral und Sklaven-Moral

In master morality it is the rulers themselves who determine what is "good". They call their own elevated, proud states "good" and despise those in whom the opposite shows; in this morality "good" and "bad" mean "noble" and "contemptible". Slave morality works the other way round. The suffering distrust the powerful and call their power and dangerousness "evil", while they exalt as "good" the qualities that make the life of the weak bearable: pity, the helping hand, the warm heart, patience, industry, humility. In Nietzsche's words, "according to slave morality the 'evil' man arouses fear; according to master morality it is precisely the 'good' man who arouses fear."

Nach der Sklaven-Moral erregt also der »Böse« Furcht; nach der Herren-Moral ist es gerade der »Gute«, der Furcht erregt und erregen will

How did the slave revolt happen, in Nietzsche's account?

The first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) turned the distinction into a historical story. Its starting point is the famous sentence: "The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values." Those denied the true reaction, that of the deed, compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant Yes-saying to itself, slave morality says No from the outset to an "outside", an "other", a "non-self", "and this No is its creative deed".

Während alle vornehme Moral aus einem triumphierenden Ja-sagen zu sich selber herauswächst, sagt die Sklaven-Moral von vornherein Nein zu einem »Außerhalb«, zu einem »Anders«, zu einem »Nicht- selbst«: und dies Nein ist ihre schöpferische Tat.

Nietzsche pictured it with lambs and birds of prey. That lambs bear a grudge against great birds of prey is no surprise. Slave morality arises when the lambs say, "These birds of prey are evil; so whoever is least like a bird of prey, the lamb, should he not be good?", and demand that the birds of prey not be birds of prey. Nietzsche held that this revolt began with the priestly caste of ancient Judaism and, through Christianity, had been victorious for two thousand years. Antisemites later liked to quote this account, but Nietzsche himself wrote in the same book that ressentiment now "blooms most beautifully among anarchists and antisemites", and despised the antisemites.

How does it differ from Hegel's master and servant?

Despite the similar names, the concept differs from the dialectic of "master and servant" (Herr und Knecht) in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). For Hegel, master and servant arise from a life-and-death struggle for recognition, and the labouring servant, by working on things, gains self-consciousness and ends by surpassing the master; Marx took over this dialectic of labour. Nietzsche has no such historical advance. The slaves won not by gaining freedom through labour but by inverting the masters' values and taming them with morality, and Nietzsche saw this not as progress but as the diminution of man.

Nietzsche carried the diagnosis straight into modern politics. Section 202 of Beyond Good and Evil sees the democratic movement as heir to Christianity and lumps in "the clumsy philosophasters and fraternity enthusiasts who call themselves socialists and want a 'free society'" as the same herd-animal morality. What he resented was that they reject the very concepts of "master" and "servant".

How did Marxists criticise the theory?

The first Marxist to confront the theory head on was Franz Mehring. In his essay "On the Philosophy and Poetry of Capitalism" (1891) he wrote that Nietzsche was not, as some claimed, "the social philosopher of the aristocracy" but "the social philosopher of capitalism". Nietzsche, Mehring argued, did know class struggle and a corresponding "master" and "slave morality", but he knew it "not as a dialectical process of world history in which a development from lower to higher takes place, but as an unshakeable and immovable law of nature".

Nietzsche kennt zwar auch einen Klassenkampf und eine ihm entsprechende „Herren-“ und „Sklavenmoral“, aber er kennt ihn nicht als einen dialektischen Prozess der Weltgeschichte, in welchem sich eine Entwicklung von Niederem zu Höherem vollzieht, sondern als ein unerschütterliches und unverrückbares Naturgesetz.

Mehring summed up the difference: the relativity of morality was already present in germ in Hegel, but from it Nietzsche drew "not, like Engels and Marx, the historical conditionedness of morality, but the unconditional nullity of all morality". Marxism resembles Nietzsche in holding that morality arises from class relations. But Marxism starts from the analysis that the morality of the ruling class becomes the ruling morality of a society and moves towards the emancipation of the oppressed, whereas Nietzsche, from the same observation, sought to rehabilitate the morality of the rulers. Mehring added that Nietzsche's contempt for the weak was no different from the reasoning of the English opponents of the poor law whom Marx quoted in Capital. György Lukács later continued this line, reading Nietzsche's critique of morality as a philosophy of bourgeois reaction against the socialist labour movement.