Resentment, Forgiveness, and evil

Today I'm going to do a little unpacking of a couple of Nietzsche passages from his essay "Good and Evil," "Good and Bad" from the polemic 'On The Genealogy of Morality'. He talks a lot about resentment, using the french term "ressentiment", and I want to get a little more to grips with this concept before we move on to the close reading of the whole essay.

"The beginning of the slaves' revolt in morality occurs when ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of thoe beings who, being denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with imaginary revenge. Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying 'yes' to itself, slave morality says 'no' on principle to everything that is 'outside', 'other', 'non-self': and this 'no' is its creative deed."

(Nietzsche, 1887, First Essay, '10')


"The 'well-born' felt they were 'the happy'; they did not need first of all to construct their happiness artificially by looking at their enemies, or in some cases by talking themselves into it, lying themselves into it (as all men of ressentiment are wont to do); and also, as complete men bursting with strength and therefore necessarily active, they knew they must not separate happiness from action - being active is by necessity counted as part of happiness (this is the etymological derivation of [Greek: gennaios, noble, high-minded]) - all very much the opposite of 'happiness' at the level of the powerless, the oppressed, and those rankled with poisonous and hostile feelings, for whom it manifests itself as essentially a narcotic, an anaesthetic, rest, peace, 'sabbath', relaxation of the mind and stretching of the limbs, in short as something passive." 

(Nietzsche, 1887, First Essay, '10')

Both these quotes are taken from "The Nietzsche Reader", ed. Ansell Pearson & Large (pp. 400-401).




The noble-minded are triumphantly saying yes to themselves.

The slave-minded are harming themselves, rather than saying "yes" to themselves they say "No" to everything that isn't them!


The title of the essay is key: "Good and Evil,"Good and Bad". For the noble minded, the good - bad distinction is like that of skill; good at being alive, or bad at being alive. For the slave-minded, those who are better at being alive than they are become considered "evil", to grant themselves an imaginary status as 'good'!


The noble-minded know when to forgive; when it is appropriate. It is a true power. There is no real discussion of a duality between "good and evil", rather, "good and bad", where "bad" simply means "inappropriate", is already known - it is what grants them their status of nobility. They know themselves as 'the happy', because they know how to behave appropriately in order to attain the greatest results.

The slave-minded resent, because it gives them a sense of power, which is entirely illusory. They need to deny that their social superiors are 'good' in any way, so they attribute a false notion of 'evil' to them; "we suffer, but we are good... they thrive, but they are evil!", thus there is a further necessity of some kind of arbiter of justice, supernatural (God, Karma) or otherwise (revolt). 


For Nietzsche, the noble-minded accept enemies and opponents. In a way, they love their opponents more than their friends, because their opponents challenge them, they allow the game to take place.

Without opposition, there's no challenge, no game, no fun. You can't play chess on your own! Forgiveness, then, is born out of respect for the challenge the opposition presents.

But for the slave-minded, the opponents are oppressors, unconquerable purveyors of unfair / unjustified suffering unto them. The game isn't fun; it's not even a game. To the slave-minded, life is all too serious; they have forgotten how to dance.