I find the Master v Slave morality discussion not very useful. Which one did the Spartans adhere to? They were selfless and self-subjugating, they did not seek personal glory, they fasted and disciplined themselves, they did not pursue personal riches, and they worked exclusively for the collective Good of Sparta. Amongst themselves they adhered to slave morality, but as a group towards others they adhered to master morality. Why did the Spartans, which the Greco-Roman world esteemed, teach their master soldiers how to be slaves? Because humans are cooperative creatures. If you train humans to be hyper-cooperate then they will dominate other groups. It didn’t matter how many fierce, Superman-y fighters the Celts had; the Romans with their intense training of obedience and selfless cooperation destroyed them.
If you have a group and you are trying to set a standard, there are actually serious problems with making the standard “being the best”. It leads to people being the best at all costs, such as in ways that harm the group; it leads to potentially extreme waste for showboating (Bezos’ yacht); it is not useful for 99% of people who need positive reinforcement yet aren’t the best; it is psychologically damaging to those who fail, depending on the stakes. The proper balance IMO is the sophisticated Christian balance: doing your best to glorify God and glorifying God in the best of others. This means positive reinforcement for all, but no cutthroat competition to be the best SBF or Elizabeth Holmes.
The recreations of the Spartans consisted of feasting, hunting, and making war: their every-day life was too hard. On the whole, however, their state is merely a caricature of the polis; a corruption of Hellas. The breeding of the complete Spartan—but what was there great about him that his breeding should have required such a brutal state!
Nietzsche on the question of obedience:
A man who wills - gives orders to something in himself which obeys or which he thinks obeys. But now observe what is the strangest thing about willing - about this multifaceted thing for which the people have only a single word: insofar as we are in a given case the one ordering and the one obeying both at the same time and as the one obeying, we know the feelings of compulsion, of pushing and pressing, resistance and movement, which habitually start right after the act of will[...]
Nietzsche is a complex and difficult theorist. A general rule for these discussions could go something like: "In cases where the discussion isn't based on an egregious misreading of Nietzsche, an answer to the objection is almost certainly already in Nietzsche." As No_one suggests, it's probably best to think of this as a discussion of a couple pop-Nietzschean terms, and how they've come to be used in ordinary language, rather than a philosophical analysis.
Nietzsche’s evasion isn’t convincing and Sparta continues to be a stumbling block for his philosophy. It was the ideal of a strong and militant people in the ancient world, including those whom Nietzsche idolized. Nietzsche saying the Spartans were too hard (lol) and essentially calling them fake (lmao) makes me lower my opinion of him even more, which I didn’t think was possible. Does he like the Supermen or not? Well, there they are, the fiercest fighters who enslaved others, with a slave morality among themselves.
Nietzsche does not uncritically endorse master morality, or military conquest as an end in itself. Neither a state entirely devoted to master morality, or to military conquest, would be Nietzschean states (to the extent that such a thing is a coherent concept, like with Plato's Republic). The Superman is not just the biggest, baddest Bronze Age warlord - there are higher worlds to conquer.
The next aphorism after the Sparta one:
The political defeat of Greece is the greatest failure of culture; for it has given rise to the atrocious theory that culture cannot be pursued unless one is at the same time armed to the teeth. The rise of Christianity was the second greatest failure: brute force on the one hand, and a dull intellect on the other, won a complete victory over the aristocratic genius among the nations. To be a Philhellenist now means to be a foe of brute force and stupid intellects. Sparta was the ruin of Athens in so far as she compelled Athens to turn her entire attention to politics and to act as a federal combination.
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Notes -
I find the Master v Slave morality discussion not very useful. Which one did the Spartans adhere to? They were selfless and self-subjugating, they did not seek personal glory, they fasted and disciplined themselves, they did not pursue personal riches, and they worked exclusively for the collective Good of Sparta. Amongst themselves they adhered to slave morality, but as a group towards others they adhered to master morality. Why did the Spartans, which the Greco-Roman world esteemed, teach their master soldiers how to be slaves? Because humans are cooperative creatures. If you train humans to be hyper-cooperate then they will dominate other groups. It didn’t matter how many fierce, Superman-y fighters the Celts had; the Romans with their intense training of obedience and selfless cooperation destroyed them.
If you have a group and you are trying to set a standard, there are actually serious problems with making the standard “being the best”. It leads to people being the best at all costs, such as in ways that harm the group; it leads to potentially extreme waste for showboating (Bezos’ yacht); it is not useful for 99% of people who need positive reinforcement yet aren’t the best; it is psychologically damaging to those who fail, depending on the stakes. The proper balance IMO is the sophisticated Christian balance: doing your best to glorify God and glorifying God in the best of others. This means positive reinforcement for all, but no cutthroat competition to be the best SBF or Elizabeth Holmes.
Nietzsche on Sparta:
Nietzsche on the question of obedience:
Nietzsche is a complex and difficult theorist. A general rule for these discussions could go something like: "In cases where the discussion isn't based on an egregious misreading of Nietzsche, an answer to the objection is almost certainly already in Nietzsche." As No_one suggests, it's probably best to think of this as a discussion of a couple pop-Nietzschean terms, and how they've come to be used in ordinary language, rather than a philosophical analysis.
Nietzsche’s evasion isn’t convincing and Sparta continues to be a stumbling block for his philosophy. It was the ideal of a strong and militant people in the ancient world, including those whom Nietzsche idolized. Nietzsche saying the Spartans were too hard (lol) and essentially calling them fake (lmao) makes me lower my opinion of him even more, which I didn’t think was possible. Does he like the Supermen or not? Well, there they are, the fiercest fighters who enslaved others, with a slave morality among themselves.
Nietzsche does not uncritically endorse master morality, or military conquest as an end in itself. Neither a state entirely devoted to master morality, or to military conquest, would be Nietzschean states (to the extent that such a thing is a coherent concept, like with Plato's Republic). The Superman is not just the biggest, baddest Bronze Age warlord - there are higher worlds to conquer.
The next aphorism after the Sparta one:
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