Talk:Master-slave morality
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If anyone knows the citations for the last sentence, which tells us that Nietzsche considered Cartesian proofs for God as only possible from the perspective of a Master morality, could they please place them in the text. 81.78.93.55 22:37, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
Although an excellent beginning, this article in its totality is rather misleading in terms of the direction/purpose Nietzsche had for developing this historical framework of value creation. This is better flushed out in Beyond Good and Evil. Simply, Master Morality is that of "might makes right", as we see with most animals in the world. It's a very direct application of genetic evolution. From this were born the Slave Morality of social animals, including humans. This describes the development of cultural evolution in response to the "tooth and nail" of genetic evolution. Nietzsche goes out of his way to describe how this is a significant improvement over Master Morality (while he will later criticize Slave Morality in its modern sense). As the article does say, Slave Morality (cultural evolution) brought about an intellectual cleverness and creativity. But, Nietzsche describes how the restraint of wearing Slave Morality too long makes humans as organisms weak and atrophied as well. Slave Morality is providing ever diminishing returns, and Nietzsche gleans "on the distant horizon" of human evolution the need to cast off and move Beyond ("overcoming") Slave Morality just as humans needed to overcome Master Morality. Again, Nietzsche reminds his readers that we do not wish to return to a Master Morality, and that there are much more creative/artistic means of Will to Power outside the context of Master Morality (the "Evil" within the context of Slave Morality) and Slave Morality (the "Good" within the context of Slave Morality) -- hence, Beyond Good and Evil. In modern parlance, the overcoming individual (Ubermensch) must create a new table of values beyond both genetic evolution ("what's natural is what's good") and cultural evolution ("what's popular is what's good") to a realm of individual evolution ("I choose to express myself"). 71.162.255.58 06:53, 19 August 2006 (UTC)