Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research

https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-021-00233-x

The Idea of ‘Moral Relativism’ in the Philosophy of Friedrich

Nietzsche

Avothung Ezung1 

Received: 21 July 2019 / Revised: 18 June 2020 / Accepted: 25 February 2021

© ICPR 2021

Abstract
In this paper, I shall apply the idea of ‘moral relativism’ in the philosophy of Frie-
drich Nietzsche. The concept of ‘moral relativism’ has been closely related to post-
modernism, and in particular proponents of Aristotlian reject Nietzsche’s kind of
relativism, yet the issues remained part of Nietzsche’s philosophy and prominently
situated in his philosophical works. Nietzsche talks about morality as antinature, he
thinks that how morality is repressive ‘relative’ to what we might concern as the
unbridled manifestation of wants and needs and appetites. In his famous publica-
tions of Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887),
Nietzsche argues intensively and effectively about morality, his thought undoubt-
edly has a pronounced relativistic tendencies. Moral values are not universal and
absolute, but are therefore conditional constructions of particular group at particular
times with particular goals. Nietzsche speaks in the “interpretation” or “perspective”
regarding morality or values in particular. According to Nietzsche, no one kind of
morality is correct and neither is incorrect nor unacceptable for everyone; it should
be noted that Nietzsche considers that each is correct for one type of person and
incorrect for others. This makes it possible for Nietzsche to take a more important
level on moral relativism.

Keywords  Nietzsche · Moral relativism · Histories · Punishment · Power

Introduction

The present work is aimed to analyze the concept of ‘moral relativism’ through
the work of the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
(1844–1900). It is a widely accepted view that Nietzsche has provided a revolu-
tionary and innovative formation to theories such as perspectivism, relativism,

* Avothung Ezung
[email protected]
1
Department of Philosophy, North-Eastern Hill University, Umshing Mawkynroh, Shillong,
Meghalaya 793022, India

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skepticism, historicism, and nihilism, which signify the peculiarities and absurd-
ity of moral values. Nietzsche had so many doubts about truth, reason, objec-
tive values, and so much about the idiosyncrasies and irrationality of morals.
Moral theorists have conventionally tried to articulate a fundamental normative
standard, regard their own conclusions as rational and other ideals as irrational.
Nietzsche argues that values are not perpetual, must be comprehended by the per-
sons who hold them, cannot be reinforced by facts or sound arguments, or are
formed rather than revealed.
One of the stepping issues in Nietzsche’s analysis is how to determine the specific
scope of his moral criticism. This issue remains due to the mystifying characteristics
of Nietzsche’s interpretation which contained two following interesting remarks: On
the one side, Nietzsche is a mere opponent of every moral standards; on the other
hand, Nietzsche is just a critique of some sort of morality, that is, “Christian” values.
However, neither of the statements justify the valid statement (Leiter, 2002, p. 74).
Yet, Nietzsche’s animosity against morality seems to endorse some features of moral
relativism. Nietzsche inevitably recognizes some actions to be worthy of admiration
and some to be worthy of scornful. The problem of the present study is to determine
the extent to what Nietzsche’s moral relativism ideas actually are. On what grounds
Nietzsche was relativistic towards morality and what kinds of realities he wanted
to assess the relevancy of the standards involved? Are these assessments merely
interpretations of his moral biases, or can we distinguish such a justification within
his thinking? Was Nietzsche a moral relativist? Or how does Nietzsche’s critique of
morality reflect to the arguments of relativism?
In this paper, I shall first examine Nietzsche’s ‘histories’ of morality developed
in his subsequent philosophical work. To discuss the ideas of moral relativism natu-
rally begins with the basis that moral standards are based on social settings, his-
torical events, cultural contexts etc., are different from one culture to another; that
decisions of rightness and wrongness, good and bad, moral judgements etc. In other
words, moral relativism rejects any fixed absolute morality. Secondly, I claim that
Nietzsche is a relativist, as shown by his theory of punishment, in particular the sec-
ond and third essays of his On the Genealogy of Morality (1889), whereby Nietzsche
explores the nature of punishment and even its connection to morality. According to
Nietzsche, morality seeks to clarify and create meaning to the structure of punish-
ment, but it does so subsequently; it means morality begins to emerge in reaction to
the development of punishment. Moral ideas are reconfigured only when the organi-
zation of punishment has been amended as a means of expressing the improvements
that have taken place within the process. A third explanation draws on Nietzsche’s
ideas about the relationship between power and morality. I attempted to explain how
and in what sense the genealogical reasoning about power are factors of a critique of
morality and also how they could be elements of critiques of certain cultural founda-
tions. Finally, I will try to conclude that Nietzsche’s distinctive approaches to moral-
ity are explicitly intended to determine and to display the significance of ethics and
the rank order of values entirely depend on the relativity of moral standards in soci-
ety, individuals, periods, and locations. In turn, this paper helps us to understand
how moral values become ‘relative’ to their particular consequences by observing
their historical backgrounds.

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Moral Relativism and Nietzsche’s Histories of Morality

‘Moral Relativism’1 is undoubtedly one of the most prominent topics and most con-
troversial issues among all relativisms. In its strict sense, moral relativism argues
that moral decisions, judgments of right and wrong, good and bad, fair and unfair,
etc., are rooted in specific historical periods, or social contexts, and that their asso-
ciation and institution is constrained and ‘relative’ to their particular situation. That
is, moral relativism rejects that there is a universal value or absolute truth in the con-
text of morality. Moral relativism is grounded on a number of connected sources of
evidences and supported claims:

1. Empirical facts aim to make us realize the large extent to which moral beliefs
vary greatly. Groups of diverse communities and institutions make their choices
in accordance with normative goals and standards, which not only differ widely
but can often clash with each other. Moral attitudes and choices rely heavily on
their community, social, or emotional background.
2. The judgments between conflicting moral views of the global community is not
objective or universal. All seeks to discover so-called ‘truth’, whether it is fun-
damentalist or philosophical systems, have been unsuccessful. Furthermore, this
failure is not due to our lack of knowledge; instead, it is evidence that moral
principles differ from empirical facts. Moral pluralism would not require relativ-
ism if there were really a reliable way towards the invention of moral truths or
the formation of a universal grounds for dispute resolution between inconsistent
normative judgements. Moral relativists even argue that any reasoning making
process will necessarily have deeply placed normative, historical, and cultural
beliefs entrenched in it. Rationale and reasoning are interpretative expressions
itself, in fact, limited by historical, and cultural effects, and thus unable of con-
tributing to a series of objective and generally acceptable moral assessments.
3. Moral relativism, directly or indirectly, implies that diversified moral judgments
are incomparable or incommensurable. Incommensurability in ethics states that
when two principles such as standards, reasons, or values are incomparable when
they are unable to share a similar standard of dimension and cannot be compared
to one another in some manner.

We can thus make a distinction between three types of models in favor of moral
relativism:

1. Descriptive moral relativism: Moral standards differ immensely over time from
society to society and at the same time from individual to individual within the

1
  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of the word ‘relativism’ can be attributed to
J. Grote’s Exploratio Philosophica (1865): “The notion of the mask over the face of nature is…what I
have called ‘relativism’. If ‘the face of nature’ is reality, then the mask over it, which is what theory gives
us, is so much deception, and that is what relativism really comes to.” (See Grote 1865:I.xi:229).

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same community that has emerged under different historical situations, or social
settlements in which they have been formed.
2. Normative moral relativism: Everything that is ethically good or bad can and
should be determined only in the framework and in relative to the cultural and
social standards of different cultures, and given that both societal values and
moral standards seem to differ widely, relativism follows.
3. Meta-ethical relativism: The idea that there are no objective, eternal, or universal
value judgments in the context of morality. It is often opposed to moral realism
and absolutism. Its arguments go further than rejecting the truth of the ethical
concepts of cognitivist and objectivist. It also based on facts formed by descrip-
tive relativism and the findings of normative relativism to argue that nothing can
be said about morality beyond the local demands about what is right and wrong,
good and bad.2

Nietzsche begins his philosophy as a rebellion against the submissive ethos of his
day and he realizes that morality governed and regulated by the weak as an instru-
ment of power. Nietzsche’s remarks on morality have a strong relativistic core.
In the second section of Human, All Too Human, On the History of Moral Feel-
ings, Nietzsche challenges the Christian idea of good and evil, as it was theorized
by  Arthur Schopenhauer.3 Nietzsche resists: “The hierarchy of the good…is not
fixed and identical at all times. If someone prefers revenge to justice, he is moral
by the standard of an earlier culture, yet by the standard of the present culture he is
immoral” (HH II: 45). What one member perceived good was blamed by another as
evil, for it ultimately failed and meaningless. At a later point, what was once viewed
as evil was deemed good, because it proved successful and useful. Moral laws are
consequently relative to history, culture, and social group they are meant to serve.
For Nietzsche, all traditional moral standards advocated by philosophers and reli-
gious groups are fascinating, there are hidden grounds on which they are demanded

2
  For example, John W. Cook has the following features of meta-ethical relativism: “Because no action
can rightly be thought of as (or said to be) wrong in and of itself, that is, absolutely wrong, a moral
principle cannot be properly formulated in an entirely general way…rather, a moral principle is properly
formulated only when a ‘relativizing clause’ is attached to it, so that you would have something like
‘For Americans headhunting is wrong’ or ‘Americans are morally obligated to do such and such’.” (Cook
1999, p. 14).
3
  Schopenhauer first rejects Kant for accepting modes of idea as his philosophical point of departure,
rather than beginning in the world of perception. In the perceptual world of perception, Kant modifies the
foundation of his philosophy by missing the dilemma of “all that is empirically apprehended”, with the
phrase “it is given.” Kant doesn’t really enquire how this occurs, if either with or without understanding,
but with a leap crosses over to abstract reasoning, not so much to having thought in overall, while at the
same time to such modes of thought.” (1966a, p. 476) Kant still attaches to Cartesian rationalism as its
undisputed destination, while for Schopenhauer here shows the deepening of the of 19th century histori-
cal context by flipping his focus to the enquiry of origins. According to Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, in turn,
lacks the sense of origins, evolution and development that describes the historical sense in his Human,
All Too Human. The distinction here is reflected in Nietzsche’s emphasis about what he considers to be
the Schopenhauer’s disproportionate disdain of then-current denigration of evolution. For Nietzsche, eve-
rything continues to evolve, and from this point of view it seems that Schopenhauer, who had emerged
historical with Kant, consists mainly of categories, is completely unconscious of the historical evolution.

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as the so-called absolute truth or universal certitude. Nietzsche rebukes past moral
theorist: “A Philosopher is quite peculiar with what they reflect as morality and “in
particular his [the philosopher] morals bear decided and decisive witness to who he
is—which means, in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand with
respect to each other” (BGE, 6). Philosophers try to look for universal and objec-
tive moral tenets is based on false impression, for “What philosophers called ‘the
rational ground of morality’ and sought to furnish was, viewed in the proper light,
only a scholarly form of faith in the prevailing morality, a new way of expressing
it, and thus itself a fact within a certain morality” (BGE, 186). In Human, All Too
Human, Nietzsche accuse traditional philosophers for their ignorance of historical
sense: “A lack of historical sense is the congenital defect of all philosophers…. They
will not understand that man has evolved, that the faculty of knowledge has also
evolved, while some of them even permit themselves to spin the whole world from
out of this faculty of knowledge…. But everything has evolved; there are no eternal
facts, nor are there any absolute truths. Thus historical philosophizing is necessary
henceforth, and the virtue of modesty as well.”4 (HH I: 2).
Nietzsche explains morality by scrutinizing the moral history of a specific society
or culture, presenting how the social attitudes evolved over time. Nietzsche provides
us a “genealogy” of morals about history. To describe genealogy is to locate the his-
torical origins, and Nietzsche points out in the introduction of On the Genealogy of
Morals that his aim is to inquire the historical roots of our moral beliefs. Morality is
not an eternal outcome of a priori reason; it is a cultural construct that evolves over
time with the historical growth of human communities. Nietzsche investigates the
roots of human society back to two classes of morality which is known as ‘master
morality’ and ‘slave morality’. The crucial set of moral principles for master moral-
ity is the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’; for slave morality, it is the difference
between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Nietzsche’s genealogy is then developed as an exposition
of how master morality are destroyed by the slave morality. Nietzsche argues that
the distinctive feature of the ‘good’/’bad’ dichotomy is that the positive term ‘good’
indicates the primary weightiness. The value it represents is the strong noble class
affirmation of self. Nietzsche states that “The two opposing values good and bad;
good and evil, have been engaged in a fearful struggle on earth for thousands of
years”. “Good” means “strong”, having noble virtues, such as bravery, toughness,
physical and mental power, and proudness. ‘Bad’ are those who are weak, petty, and
vulnerability, who are completely lacking of noble virtues. They are not condemned
for just being bad, and they are intrinsically poor.
Master morality recognizes his self as the main measure of values, and subse-
quently this individual develops its own values based on his self-affirmation. In this
respect, Nietzsche asserts that: “The noble type of person feels that he determines

4
  In an essay entitled Schopenhauerian Moral Awareness as a Source of Nietzschean Nonmorality, Rob-
ert Wicks identifies Nietzsche’s move “beyond good and evil” as an elaboration upon the Schopenhaue-
rian ethics of eternal justice under the veil of the 19th century tendency towards self-conceptions that
were “more historically developmental, more temporarily sequential, more individual context-sensitive,
and less focused upon timeless and unchanging universal concepts, as had been the prevailing style of the
preceding Enlightenment period”.

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value, he does not need anyone’s approval, he judges that ‘what is harmful to me
is harmful in itself,’ he knows that he is the one who gives honour to things in the
first place, he creates values. He honours everything he sees in himself: this sort of
morality is self-glorifying” (BGE, 260). Therefore, the formation of values is crea-
tively achieved by the ‘noble individual’, and his creation of values affirms existence
to which he assigns his personal essence. From this point of view, Nietzsche argues
that master morality does not strive at delivering moral truths, nor does its values
pertain to the truthful nature of social life and attitudes. Instead, master morality
expresses a subjective view of certain dynamics and by this subjective definition
petrifies the unique creation of self. For Nietzsche, the supremacy of selfish deeds
lies at the core of the system of valuing master morality, as the self often recognizes
its personal values in the estimation of morals. In other words, in master morality
the definition of good and bad are determined over the personal interest of the indi-
vidual, and it has a binding nature only for the self who can affirm existence by such
valuations. “Rather it was “the good” themselves, that is to say, the noble, power-
ful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their
actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-
minded, common and plebeian. It was out of this pathos of distance that they first
seized the right to create values and to coin names for these values: what had they to
do with utility!” (GM, I: 2).
On the other side, slave morality are formulated by Platonic morality, followed
by Judeo-Christian, and Kantian universalizability. Nietzsche describes slave moral-
ity as any morality formed by the powerless in vengeance against the powerful and
noble, so that the values of the powerful and noble are viewed as evil. It does not
enable the strong inclination of human life to exercise oneself. Nietzsche rejects
that such qualities as compassion, kindness, and selflessness are universal values.
According to Nietzsche, “slave morality is the Judeo-Christian morality pure and
simple. So that it should say no to everything on earth that represents the ascend-
ing tendency of life, to that which has turned out well, to power, to beauty, to self-
affirmation.” Nietzsche’s main dismissal of the Judeo-Christian morals system is
centered on the distinction of good and evil. Nietzsche argues that the valuation of
the good in this system is based on altruistic tendencies. Good deeds are only identi-
fied in the lack of the individual personal interest, and the disinterestedness of the
individual is encouraged as the inherent traits of the good. Thus, good actions are
projected to correspond whose features serve ‘the commonness’ in social life.
For Nietzsche, ‘resentment’ is the core source of the ideals of good and evil,
encouraging slave ideology to ignore something greater than what it promotes uni-
versal principles. Slave morality therefore rejects all unique moral value to justify
“the veracity” of good and evil, and successively ‘the ressentiment’ of slave moral-
ity seeks the grounds to judge any acceptance of the distinct values as a violation to
its moral laws. In slave morality, the sense of resentment encapsulates the related
etiquettes of the past by retaining the external responsible for what was done against
on its own. Its claim to unfair treatment forms the grounds for transmitting addi-
tional moral standards. Nietzsche defines this specific features of slave morality in
these words: “The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes
creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the

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true reaction that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge.
While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave
morality from the outset says No to what is “outside,” what is “different,” what is
“not itself”; and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing
eye—this need to direct one’s view outward instead of back to oneself—is of the
essence of ressentiment; in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile
external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at
all—its action is fundamentally reaction” (GM, I: 10).
Nietzsche takes his first obstinate steps in the evolution of morals with Human,
All Too Human. In this work, the pessimistic and optimistic tone of The Birth of
Tragedy has been turned into a new positivistic attitude, an understanding that
human life and moral values are not embedded in a distant metaphysical reality but
are instead historically prepared: How, then, do moral judgements begin to emerge?
Nietzsche’s reply is that they are the outcomes of this historical condition itself. In
the book written in 1886 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche famously proclaims
that there are no moral phenomena in and of themselves, only moral interpretations
of those phenomena. What we call “morality” is actually a process of interpretations
of physiological phenomena: “Morality is an illusion. Like that of all organisms, our
action is determined not by the impotent promptings of our intellect or the chimeri-
cal imperatives of moral injunctions, but by the complex interaction of our instincts
and drives.” Consciousness, Nietzsche claims in Daybreak, is a mere epiphenome-
non, “a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but
full text” (D, II: 120)—an inelegant mirror that hazily depicts the primeval organic
functions of the human body. Moral judgments are just such mirage, mere “images
and fantasies based on a physiological process unknown to us” (D, 12). Or, as he
later puts it in an image to which he often returns: morality is nothing but an “inad-
equate kind of sign language [...] by means of which certain physiological facts of
the body would like to communicate themselves.” (Moore, 2004, p. 65).
According to American philosopher Daniel Dennett, Nietzsche thought that
morality has evolved from the pre-moral world of human history, because of the
advantages it conveyed to the species. Dennett argues that, for Nietzsche, the desire
for morality has formed in the sense of exchange.5 In Section 32 of Beyond Good
and Evil, Nietzsche classified the three historical stages of the development of
morality: the pre-moral era, the moral period, and the extra-moral age.

5
 Dennett considers Nietzsche the ‘second great sociobiologist’, after Hobbes (Dennett, 1995, p.
461). His explanation for this assertion is that the ethics of Nietzsche are naturalistic: rather than just,
for instance, founding ethics in a metaphysical realm as Kant had done, Nietzsche thinks that morality
transformed out of nature because of the advantages it brought to the species. According to Dennett,
Nietzsche attempted to envision a pre-moral environment of people’s lives, as Hobbes does, however, he
split his account of the origin of morality into two stages. In the second essay of On the Genealogy of
Morals (1887), Nietzsche explores the first phase. He asks ‘… to breed an animal with the right to make
promises … is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? Is it not the real
problem regarding man?’ (1967, Second Essay, sec 1, p. S7).

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1. ‘Pre-moral’: During the first phase of human pre-history, the worth of an action
was exclusively dependent on its consequences. Motives were deemed meaning-
less.
2. Moral period: (a). In this period, morality takes place as the beginnings of an
action became meaningful. One had to look ‘inwards ‘in order to be a morally
good person. (b). However, then a terrible error still occurred here today: the
“origin” and value of an action was equated with the aim of the person, that is,
what that individual decided intentionally.
3. ‘Extra-moral’: (a). The next phase will recognize the value of an action, not by
the trivial and deceptive aim of the individual, but by the non-intentional (e.g. a
“unintentional” consequence or how the action is carried out) which we will be
able to determine to what carried about action that did not belong to the intention.
(b). Philosophers will ultimately move beyond good and evil and will create new
values.

For Nietzsche, the history of morality is remarkably the history of the moraliza-
tion of a preexisting moral system. In other words, it is the narrative of the trans-
formation from the “pre-moral era of humanity” to a “period which, in the weaker
sense, can be called moral.” Humans were bound by laws in the pre-moral frame-
work preceded by a complex intellectual mechanisms of roles, rights, and respon-
sibilities. In Twilight of the Idols (1889), Nietzsche often speaks of morality as
against towards nature, he thinks that morality is conservative ‘relative’ to what we
may consider as the unbridled manifestation of impulses, desires, and inclinations.
Nietzsche’s critical attitude against morality thus gave birth to the idea of moral rel-
ativism: “that there are no moral facts whatever. Moral judgment has this in com-
mon with religious judgments that each believes in a reality which does not exist.
Morality, which is only an interpretation, or better a misinterpretation of certain
phenomena… belongs to a stage of ignorance at which the concept of reality, of any
distinction between imaginary and real, is lacking. Morality is merely sign-language
merely symptomatology: one must already know what it is about to derive profit
from it” (TI, 1). Nietzsche attempts to point out that the strength of morality is not
a product of its religious or pre-divine stems, and that crediting a deity with our
value system is but a fable, the attribution of a fictitious abstract source of what, in
strictly naturalistic words, can be clarified, both genetically and functionally. Morali-
ties emerge as natural phenomena in reaction to the desire to stabilize groups, to
assure their preservation, and to assist control the forces and desires that may disrupt
or break the cohesion of the community without any oversight or sublimation.

Punishment and Morality

Nietzsche begins the second treatise in the Genealogy with a dictum mostly about
forgetfulness and memory on which his ideas of punishment rely solely. He argues
that the conclusion of natural evolution is “man”—an animal who can commit him-
self by making promises (GM: 57). This is how man evolves the faculty of mem-
ory—by constantly wanting his promise to be recalled in his mind, rather than being

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forgotten. Forgetting is a natural process of coercion, and therefore an effective

force rather than something passively happening to one. Forgetting is essential for
the animal to remain in “robust health”, but this repressive function is intentionally
overcome for a commitment to be remembered. A modern defense of punishment is
that the offender ‘deserves’ punishment because he ‘intentionally’ executed a wrong
action. As Nietzsche claims, however, after the punishment moral concepts came
into being such as “deserved/not deserve” and “intentional / unintentional”.6
When this primal instinct of vicious does unbridled? For Nietzsche, it is unbri-
dled in an instance of anger, that is, when the punished has angered the punisher by
refusing to uphold obligations. However, this angry response is not simply a random
outburst of emotion-the anger is somewhat “held in check and modified by the idea
that every injury has its equivalent and can actually be paid back” (GM: 4). That
is, the punisher is cautious that punishment can be used as a sort of reward and
makes strategic use of it, demanding as much as is considered important for appro-
priate emotional recompense. The prehistoric understanding of justice was relied on
the concept that “everything has its price; all things can be paid for” (GM: 8). For
Nietzsche, the thoughts of early historic life were governed by trade-related things
like ‘pay’ and ‘payback’. One of the more basic types of partnership was a con-
tractual one—that between the lender (someone who loaned belongings to another)
and the borrower (the person who lent from the borrower and promised to return
the lent item). If the borrower unable to succeed his promise provokes the impulses
of cruelty and the lender dictates that the borrower be punished as ‘compensation’.
This compensation operates because the borrower allows pain to be imposed by the
lender, and thus enabling the lender to have his means. Even the society was per-
ceived as a lender due to the benefits it delivered, such as prevention to the commu-
nity members who were its borrowers. Thus, the person was obligated to follow the
laws of the group.
The history of punishment can be best fully grasped if one goes back to the
earliest period before the scheduled modern moral processes, when criminal and
crime were not divided. What is the connection between moral processes of think-
ing and punishment, when punishment arises irrespective of the ethical judgments
transformed about it? For Nietzsche, morality seeks to explain and make use of the
scheme of punishment and only a posteriori, i.e., morality arises in reaction to the
system of punishment. In other words, moral concepts are customized as a means
of understanding the progress that has been made within the system only when
the establishment of punishment has been altered. Prior to Nietzsche, moral theo-
rist sought to understand several other moral beliefs as the underlying purpose of
the punitive system, and the beginnings of punishment are immoral. Nietzsche thus
attacks of moral genealogists: “they are coward and worthless” (GM: 25). Traditional

6
  I would suggest that one should not comprehend Nietzsche’s explanations on the ‘origin’ of moral-
ity and punishment as somewhat ‘objective’ in the traditional context. In Ecce Homo, He contends that
in order to realize one’s beliefs, these are the subjective aspects of one’s life, like “nutrition, place, and
climate” (Nietzsche, 1989a, p. 256) that are truly meaningful, not higher, so-called universal notions of
‘truth’. Such ideas are molded by these ‘material’ facts, and do not exist without them.

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philosophers believed that there was an intelligible ultimate source in the punish-
ment system. Indeed, this system did not formed with a deliberate “higher aim”, but
merely stated the impulse of cruelty and did not assist to achieve any moral purpose.
Morality, then, is just an interpretation of the form of punishment. Re-interpret-
ing a thing is subjugating and transforming it according to one’s intended means
of interpreting it and thus controlling it. Therefore, morality often tends to reflect
the collective’s desires in making the meaning, and the prevalent morality reflects
the community’s desires in controlling the system of punishment. As long as the
moral history develops, one becomes ruler by designing new meanings to substi-
tute and demolish earlier interpretation. Such new interpretations are designated by
a tendency to conceal their real origins by portraying themselves as universal moral
truths, while the original master morality does not require this tendency. Such new
interpretations are always ‘slave’ interpretations, created by repressed groups to aid
them in overcoming the original master groups. These kind of new definitions are
always presented as ’slave’ interpretations, formed by resentful groups to assist to
surmount the original master groups. Hence, what distinguishes master and slave
conceptions of morality and punishment is that master moralities actively embrace
the fact that they are an imposition of the masters’ personal beliefs onto others,
while slave moralities cover up this fact. Therefore, the difference between master
and slave understandings of morality and punishment is that master morality accept
the reality effectively that they are an infringement of the personal feelings of mas-
ters upon others, whereas slave morals conceal this reality.
Thus, punishment can be viewed as including two facets—the punitive act itself
which appears relatively constant across history, and the intention attributed to this
act that is the moral meanings that differ according to the interpreting community.
Since the definitions of the punitive action has altered so greatly, there have been
numerous interpretations formed in many different cultural situations. Such defi-
nitions do not replace one another entirely, but instead develop upon each other.
Traditional concepts of punishment are a combination of many different interpreta-
tions and have “not one meaning but a whole synthesis of ‘meanings’” (GM: 80).
Therefore, punishment has become multifaceted and indescribable. Any attempt
to describe punishment is necessarily relative to the community trying to interpret
it and reflects their goals. The same goes with attempts to describe exactly when
someone deserves to be punished, i.e., when someone is deemed ’bad’, thus, all
moral concepts are merely relative.

Power and Morality

In what ways does Genealogy of Morals represent the power? It is necessary to

recall oneself what the key focus of each of the three sections is, respectively, and
how Nietzsche’s genealogical explanations about the source of our moral values,
and connected moral concepts such as ‘bad conscience’ and of ‘ascetic ideal’ are
associated to speculations about the governing of power in these courses. The core
of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals consists of three archetypal features of power,
and that the methodical central of genealogical discourses are histories of specific

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forces and powers. More significantly, Nietzsche has mentioned a moral valuation
as incited by the will to power. ‘Power’ in these three models refers to rather diverse
phenomena and they are associated to the ‘feeling of power’ in various ways:
In the first part, it is the true and felt the power of the strong or ‘nobles’ or ‘mas-
ters’ over the slaves which is described as the major feature in the original scene of
the beginning of moral values including the theoretical alteration from the dichot-
omy ‘good/bad’ to the contrast ‘good/evil’. A “twofold early history of ‘Good’ and
‘Evil’” in terms of the different standards of the strong and the weak. The differ-
ence between the powerful and the powerless is a sociocultural thing–not a race-
based or natural one–and it is stated that being oppressed, considered the average of
being impotent, can bring people to resentment and hate everyone. The consequence
is that powerful and the powerless are purely ‘relative’ notions, and the powerful
and the powerless agree in desiring more power. Nietzsche’s assessment of morality
denies any kind of universal and absolute truth of moral standards that are endorsed
in the Platonic-Christian system of morals and Kantian universalizability. In his Will
to Power, Nietzsche formed a relativistic tendency while attacking Christianity by
injecting the doctrines of universal norms for the common good, according to which
“the morality of little people has been made the measure of all things: this is the
most horrible kind of degeneration that our culture has hitherto exhibited. And this
kind of ideal is still hanging over our heads... in the form of ‘God’!! (WP: 200).
The second part illustrates the power of the ‘priests’ drilled over their herd and
also over the spirits of the ‘masters’. The genealogical analysis of the ‘slave rebel-
lion in morality’ demonstrates that a modern, subtler mechanism of influence or
power emerges out of intellectual complexity and emotive technique. The “priests”
Nietzsche states in the Third Essay are, at least in the first instance, presumably
some amalgamation of New Testament characters like Paul and Peter of the first
century AD (the New Testament is the object of the polemic in GM III: 22), as well
as the early “Church Fathers” of the second and third centuries AD (cf. GM III:
22), figures like Tertullian (whose rancorous tirade about the punishments that will
befall the Roman oppressors is quoted at length in GM I: 15)0.10 For these early
Christian evangelists, their “right to exist stands and falls with [the ascetic] ideal”
(GM III: 11), i.e., it is indispensable to accomplishing the “favorable conditions in
which fully to release [their] power and achieve [their] extreme feeling of power”
(GM III: 7). But if, in the first case, ascetic priests are individual historical thespians
in the final periods of the Roman Empire, Nietzsche is quite obvious that the “type”
of the ascetic priest takes place throughout history: “he does not belong to any race
in particular, he thrives everywhere; he comes from every social class” (GM III:
11). After all, the “monstrous method of valuation” features of ascetic priests “is
not inscribed in human history as an exception and curiosity: it is one of the most
wide-spread and long-lived facts there are” (GM III: 11). What all ascetic priests
share is (a) promoters and educators of the ascetic ideal, and (b) the ascetic ideal is
the predetermined for accomplishing their “maximum feeling of power.” Nietzsche
shows us that through this ideal, the priest “place[s] himself at [the] head [of the
‘herd,’ i.e., the majority of mortals] as their shepherd” (GM III: 13), that the ascetic
ideal is his “best instrument of power” (GM III: 1). The ascetic priest by his preach-
ing of the ideal rises to power, he becomes the “shepherd” of the “herd,” the leader,

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in effect, of the “majority of mortals” (GM III: 1), he is responsible for making
“the earth... the ascetic planet par excellence” (GM III: 11). Precisely in his Will to
Power, Nietzsche strongly criticizes the priest by claiming that: “Priest are actors
who play the role of something superhuman which must be made manifest, be it ide-
als, or gods and saviours; they have an instinct for this sort of thing and have made
it their vocation; in order to make all this as credible as possible in assimilating
themselves to their role; above all, their actor’s cunning must obtain for themselves a
good conscience, by the aid of which alone can they be truly convincing. The priest
wants to establish that he is to be regarded as the highest type of man... that he is the
strongest ‘power’ in the community. Everything which is good, in the social order,
in nature or in tradition, can be traced back to the wisdom of the priests. This moral-
ity originates with priests. In this way a conception of good and evil is created which
appears entirely detached from the natural notions ‘useful’, ‘harmful, ‘life-promot-
ing’, and ‘life-diminishing’.” (WP: 139–140).
In the last part, a much more transcendental and neutral style of power, mainly the
power of the ‘ascetic ideal’ to tie and guide the self-understanding of subjects and
overseeing their self-identifications in a fateful way and to subsequently give them
a deceptive but active ‘feeling of power’. It is power firmly established, or allowed
to invest forms or thoughts in contexts of culture. This type of ‘power’ impacts
and constructs the experience and awareness of individuals and assigns them to
such behavioral patterns and feelings. Nietzsche finds three types of ascetic On the
Genealogy of Morals’ in the Third Essay such as artists, philosophers/scholars, and
priests. For Nietzsche, the artist’s asceticism may imply nothing or too much. For
the philosopher, asceticism is a feeling of self-gratification rather than of feeling of
self-denial—for the greater part of human history, according to Nietzsche, philoso-
phy has been viewed as being immoral, this means philosophers must hide them-
selves as ascetic priests in order to advance the preservation of the gods they were
chosen to assist or epitomize it. This led directly to the third type of ascetic repre-
sented in Nietzsche’s Third Essay, the priest, who promotes the ascetic ideal rather
than willing to accept it for the sake of something else, this ideal is not only his
belief but also his will, power, and inclination, the manner the priest cherishes his
asceticism is reactionary and authoritarian, because it is reactive, the priest decries
all sensualism.
We find the gravest consultant of the ascetic ideal in the ascetic priest. He per-
ceives life as “a wrong road on which one must finally walk back to the point where
it begins, or as a mistake that is put right by deeds” (GM, III: 11). The priest sees
life with all its sensory desires and obstacles must be opposed and morphed against
instinct. The ultimate outcome is the ascetic life. In this view, the ascetic life is not
a primary aim, but a route away from the real world towards something better and
safer. Ascetic ideals instantaneously arise all over the world, each time and in every
society. In ascetic ideals then there must be something attractive that must be so
universal. The ascetic life appears to be inconsistent: it is willingness to restrain, life
has turned against itself. It is a manifestation of the will to power that seeks not to
conquer an aspect of life but to dominate life itself. After recognizing the valuation
of ascetic ideals among philosophers, Nietzsche continues to explain that philosophy
is raised and relies on ascetic ideals. All substantial changes in the world have been

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achieved through brutality and resentment. The critical and introspective attitude of
philosophy was contrary to traditional morality and must have been mistrusted. The
correct method to nullify this mistrust was to give rise to fear, and in this regard,
Nietzsche finds the ancient Brahmins as crucial. Through life-torture and asceticism,
not only rendered others fear and reverence them but also even they brought them-
selves to fear and reverence. Precisely, Nietzsche says, philosophers were unable to
protest, and so wanted to portray themselves with a different mask. Since then for
most philosophers, this mask has been that of the ascetic priest. Nietzsche says that
this has been the case in this world: the philosopher has not yet had sufficient free-
dom of will to break the false image of the ascetic priests.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Nietzsche presents On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for

Life, a reflection on the “value of history: ‘with a comment from the writer Goethe
which he approves as his own: “In any case, I hate everything that merely instructs
me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity”. In the beginning,
Nietzsche points out that knowledge must be understood in the context of moral-
ity or how one should live, and that morality has a knowable shape. History, how-
ever, should realize not suffice life but instead encourage a certain form of life, the
“higher life” and the “higher unity”. As Nietzsche’s analysis of the value of history
unravels, he extremely stipulates the form and content of the higher life, showing
that it is indissolubly attached to philosophy understood as serving the truth and
the art displayed at the core of human greatness. By “historical sense” he means the
ability to understand the past free from modern bias and presumptions.
Nietzsche embraced genealogy to disparage the notion that the dimension of
human life whose past is being analyzed in different historical contexts, providing
an account of what morality is and structuring our quest for symbolic and functional
unity within a diverse moral praxis. Nietzsche assesses morality in aspects of its
promotion or blockage, its affirmation or disruption of human greatness. His unique
sense of history contradicts the historicist treatise that the basis of morality are arti-
facts that are deeply intertwined to a contingent climate and time: Nietzsche con-
tends that human excellence or the order of rank that defines what is good and bad
must have look throughout history. Nietzsche himself underlines that to create a new
ideal one must breaks down ancient ideals first; what his account of the history of
morality in the genealogy shows is that by attempting to make use of higher ideals,
he breaks down the antique ideals. Nietzsche’s innovation of the correct practice of
history is not only empirical; he even proposes recommendations for the appropriate
use of history in Germany during his days.
In Truth and Truthfulness, Bernard Williams claims that historical reflection is
needed to understand how individuals can “make sense” of such values that they
consider to be non-instrumentally important. Bernard Williams himself found the
philosophical tactic in Truth and Truthfulness as an appropriation of Nietzsche’s his-
torical method. In Truth and Truthfulness, history is crucial to the analysis of what
aspects of relevant factors may motivate agents when they arise what they call the

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“virtues of truth,” incline that direct one to develop and embrace true beliefs. His-
torical awareness is indispensable to grasp how those agents make sense of these
values and for considering what reason those agents have to represent them. On the
other hand, On the Genealogy of Morality, history is used to address the typical
question of what it is. Historical inquiry should replace the quest for an “interpreta-
tion” of morality.
With his approach of master–slave morality, Nietzsche attempted to provide an
awareness of the clashes between communities. He thinks that the master–slave
morality has created controversy all across history. His criticisms against tradi-
tional values were intended to determine the formation of a superman who would
take over the role of God and exercise the master of morality in true form. Master
morality initiates with the “noble man,” with an impulsive form of the good. Master
morality is the complete acceptance that oneself is the determiner of all moral truth.
Nietzsche condemns the “slave rebellion in morality,” which deemed the powerful,
aggressive, and expressive to be bad, whereas regarded the weak to be good. This
morality of the “herd” suggests that we should suppress our darkest impulses in the
pursuit of “happiness.” For others, perhaps this is true, but Nietzsche disdains mor-
alizers concisely because they generalize things that depend largely on the person.
Most of us have always followed than instructed, but simply because the majority
of us are suitable for submission, we should not conclude that this is a general prin-
ciple that everyone should follow. Today, those who command are almost ashamed
of it, and dare only do so if they do it in the name of God, the law, or the people.
Nietzsche indicates that our moral values are majorly motivated by fear. In a group
that is secure from existential threats, any vigorous members of the community arise
to be seen as a threat. Our morality, then, opposes everything that is energetic, favor-
ing the security of a repressed, mediocre mass. This "herd" morality then declares
it as the only moral truth (other morals are “morally wrong”) and as the protector
of the mediocrity. He urges for the emergence for a species of “new philosophers”
and to show the way out of this desire for peace and mediocrity. He anticipated we
would invent new values, or the superior human in our final stages.
It can be probable to say that Nietzsche is a moral relativist. This creates a huge
difference to an evaluation of Nietzsche’s ideas -how ‘real’ does he regard his ideas
as to be? At first, there is an aspect of moral relativism, since all moral frameworks
are restricted to responses to modifications in the punishment system, and are not
transcendentally real, as they often pretend to be. For Nietzsche, any system of
moral beliefs is merely a misled interpretation of the true origin of punishment (the
inclination for cruelty toward the borrower who broke a promise, which is an expres-
sion of the will to power). Consequently, moral concepts pretending absolute reality
are subjective interpretations which disguise themselves as perpetually justifiable.
There are strong connections between Nietzsche’s perspectivism and relativism.
A perception or assertion can be valid, acceptable or even true from one standpoint,
but not from another, and since we cannot rank or even compare perspectives, rela-
tivism ensues. As Richard Rorty points out:
“As long as he is busy relativizing and historicizing his predecessors, Nietzsche
is happy to redescribe them as webs of relations to historical events, social condi-
tions, their own predecessors, and so on. At these moments he is faithful to his own

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conviction that the self is not a substance, and that we should drop the whole idea
of ‘substance’ or something that cannot be perspectivalized because it has a real
essence, a privileged perspective on itself. But at other moments…he is interested
in finding a perspective from which to look back on the perspectives he inherited, in
order to see a beautiful pattern.” (Baghramian, 2004, p. 61).
We cannot talk about a perspective without having it related to the person or
group whose viewpoint it is. Perspectives do not have a sui generis existence, they
are always dependent on the subject matter of the experience. We usually address
multiple views on the same object, according to Nietzsche, there cannot be any
concrete meaning of ‘same object’. Moreover, there can be no one’s viewpoint, no
true viewpoints, no prospects that rule at any point in history, and Nietzsche does
not provide for the integration of multiple perspectives. In this way that Nietzsche’s
perspectivism becomes equivalent to relativism. Although we cannot adhere to any
truths or standards regardless of their relationship with the perspectives that we
have, we can do more than just claim on the validity about our own perspective and
seek to impose it on others. The crucial point to note is that all explanations and
all statements of moral understanding are generally created from a specific point
of view or a ‘relative’ viewpoint and thus cannot be depictions of what is actually
there. ‘There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing’. Our insights
as well as our explanation of the world are merely perspectival and hence partial
in three different ways. We can only perceive the world, both psychologically and
figuratively, from a different perspective and our insights and formations are colored
by our ideals and aspirations. Furthermore, they are advised by our specific histori-
cal and social conditions. To fail to capture this, to believe that all theoretical and
philosophical frameworks can be anything other than projective or relativity pictures
of reality, is to fall into the trap of dogmatism, and ironically a certain kind of mis-
guided nihilism, or belief in nothingness.

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