slave morality
Article
slave morality is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between November 17, 2023 and August 08, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “connection between Christianity → slave morality → modern harm-focused and victim-focused morality”; “Nietzsche’s concept of “slave morality” (he writes) is just a dysphemism for the usual morality”; “completely poisoned by slave morality that he worships mediocrity”. It most often appears alongside Christianity, Friedrich Nietzsche, God.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: November 17, 2023
- Last seen: August 08, 2024
Appears In
- Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
- Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
- Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
Related Pages
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- Christianity (3 shared issues)
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- Friedrich Nietzsche (3 shared issues)
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- God (3 shared issues)
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- Richard Hanania (3 shared issues)
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- 4chan (2 shared issues)
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- Achilles (2 shared issues)
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- Agamemnon (2 shared issues)
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- Andrew Tate (2 shared issues)
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- Ayn Rand (2 shared issues)
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- Bentham’s Bulldog (2 shared issues)
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- Bugatti (2 shared issues)
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- effective altruism (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
He mentions one semi-credible attempt to stop the divine Word: Friedrich Nietzsche’s project to brand Christianity as “slave morality”. Girard admires Nietzsche for correctly identifying the core of Christianity as a previously unprecedented form of morality that supported victims and the oppressed (as opposed to pagan “master morality”, which supported the powerful and popular). He rejects Nietzsche’s theory that the Christian impulse comes from petty resentment by dumb weak poor people against their betters - Girard believes it comes from the genuinely true fact that victims are being unfairly victimized and we should help them. But he thinks otherwise Nietzsche was pretty prescient.
So, since the Nazis are bad, we should stick with slave morality, and view the increasing concern with victims as good, right? Girard is uncomfortable with this conclusion. He’s a conservative Christian, so he has to be against wokeness. But he identifies wokeness as increasing fidelity to the Christian imperative to care for victims. So he has to support something like “increasing concern with helping victims was good until about 1950, and then went too far and became bad”. This is a totally coherent philosophy that might very well be true. It’s just sort of awkward, and less elegant than his other claims, and he never really says it outright. A hostile reader would naturally accuse him of being a naive conservative: social progress was good right up until the point where it produced the society I grew up in, and then after that, it became bad.
I appreciate ISSFLL for reminding me of the connection between Christianity → slave morality → modern harm-focused and victim-focused morality, and for painting this as a grand arc of history. But aside from that, I don’t feel like it comes out with a particularly coherent viewpoint, or any extra insight on our current social order.
Blogger “Bentham’s Bulldog” recently wrote Shut Up About Slave Morality.
Inline links: Shut Up About Slave Morality
Nietzsche’s concept of “slave morality” (he writes) is just a dysphemism for the usual morality where you’re not bad and cruel. Right-wing edgelords use “rejection of slave morality” as a justification for badness and cruelty:
When people object to slave morality, they are just objecting to morality. They are objecting to the notion that you should care about others and doing the right thing, even when doing so doesn’t materially benefit you. Now, one can consistently object to those things, but it doesn’t make them any sort of Nostradamus. It makes them morally deficient, and also generally philosophically confused.
I. Comments About Master And Slave Morality II. Comments By People Named In The Post III. Comments Making Specific Points About One Of The Thinkers In The Post IV. Other Comments
I. Comments About Master And Slave Morality II. Comments By People Named In The Post III. Comments Making Specific Points About One Of The Thinkers In The Post IV. Other Comments I. Comments About Master And Slave Morality naraburns writes:
Inline links: writes
The political status of the word "slave" in English (and especially in American English) tends to obfuscate what Nietzsche meant by master and slave morality, but the distinction is on its surface relatively simple.