Key Quotes and Notes I Made on "Good and Evil," "Good and Bad" by Nietzsche
“All due respect therefore to the good spirits who may reign within these historians of morality! But unfortunately it is certain that they lack the historical spirit” - (for discussion- What does Nietzsche mean by a “historical spirit”?)
Nietzsche criticizes English Psychologists for trying to find the origin of the term “good” in human errors like the habit of an outsider observer non-egoism when it is a term that must originate in a positive instinct since it well means good.
Nietzsche posits that the good has its origin in the noble class’s affirmation of their own values to the point they were the one who positively took the proactive action of naming things in the first place. Egoism and non-egoism for Nietzsche comes from a later un-masterly perspective.
Nietzsche tracks the etymology of words like good and true from various languages to their association with the noble caste and the bad with what he calls the rabble or heard caste in one section.
Nietzsche believes that the superiority expressed initially in merely physical terms becomes a desire for a supernatural spiritual superiority with a capacity for evil that makes humans superior and interesting to other animals…
“Human history would be a far too stupid matter without the spirit it has acquired on the part of the impotent”
Nietzsche says cough Jewish people cough with their priestly morality inverted the morality of nobles of celebrating power and happiness, and instead lionized a God which called these values evil and the opposite good.
Nietzsche sees Christianity as the culmination and universalization of Jewish anti-noble values of hatred.
Nietzsche identifies the source of slave morality is ressentiment which is a reactive form of morality that instead of asserting oneself as good and seeing the bad in others as a light incidental byproduct, identifies an exterior other as evil and then raises one self one above the declared evil other as good.
“Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant Yes-saying to oneself slave morality from the start says No to an "outside," to a "different," to a "non-self": and this No is its creative deed. This reversal of the value-positing gaze-this necessary direction to the outside instead of back onto oneself-belongs to the very essence of ressentiment: in order to arise, slave morality always first needs an opposing and external world; physiologically speaking it needs external stimuli in order to act at all-its action is reaction from the ground up. The reverse is the case with the noble manner of valuation: it acts and grows spontaneously, it only seeks its opposite in order to say Yes to itself more gratefully, more jubilantly- its negative concept "low," "base" and "bad" is only a late-born, pale and contrasting image compared with its positive basic concept, saturated through and through with life and passion: "We noble ones, we good, beautiful, happy ones!””
“Not being able to take seriously for any length of time one's enemies, one's accidents, even one's misdeeds-that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of plastic, reconstructive, healing and even forgetting inducing power (a good example of this in the modern world is Mirabeau, who had no memory for insults and churlish deeds committed against him and was not able to forgive only because he-forgot). Such a human being simply shakes off with a single shrug all manner of worms that dig deeply into others; here alone real " love of one's enemies" is also possible-assuming that it is possible at all on earth. How much respect for his enemies has a noble man! -and such respect is already a bridge to love . . . For he demands his enemy as his distinction, indeed he tolerates no other enemy than the one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor! Now conversely imagine "the enemy" as the man of ressentiment conceives of him-and precisely here is his deed, his creation: he has conceived of "the evil enemy," "the evil one," and this in fact as a basic concept out of which he then thinks up a "good one" as an afterimage and counterpart-himself!”
Nietzsche contrasts the savage old barbarian blonde beast with sickly mediocre modern man and declares we should also be scared of the nihilism of the latter.
“To demand of strength that it not express itself as strength, that it not be a will to overwhelm, a will to topple, a will to become master, a thirst for enemies and obstacles and triumphs, is just as absurd as demanding of weakness, that it express itself as strength. A quantum of force is just such a quantum of drive, of will, of effect- moreover it is nothing but this very driving, willing, effecting, and it can only appear otherwise under the seduction of language (and the basic errors of reason petrified in it), which understands and misunderstands all effecting as conditioned by something that effects, by a "subject." For instance, just as ordinary people separate lightning from its flashing and take the latter as its doing, as the ef f ect of a subject that is called lightning, so too popular morality separates strength from the expressions of strength, as if behind the strong one there were an indifferent substratum free to express strength or not to. But there is no such substratum; there is no "being" behind the doing, ef f ect ing, becoming; the "doer" is merely tacked on as a fiction to the doing- the doing is everything.”
Nietzsche takes freewill as a fiction created by the weak to condemn the strong by saying there was some power in the strong that was in them that made them so they could have acted different and therefore was acting maliciously in its harming of the weak and the weakness of the weak because of their free will was actually a virtuous choice because they could have acted differently as well, as the strong could have acted weak and visa versa. Nietzsche calls this separating something from what it can do.
Nietzsche cites a passage from Thomas Aquinas where he declares the reward for those in heaven will be to watch sinners burn in Hell to prove Christianity is a religion of resentment and hate.