It started with two classes of people: the masters and the slaves. The masters—the vitality-filled, strong, and noble—dominated the slaves, forcing them to satisfy their desires. Meanwhile, the slaves—the weak, disgruntled, and sickly—were too powerless to fight back. However, the powerlessness of the weak would not last for long. As time ed, the masters grew, and the domination intensified, something began festering: ressentiment.
“Ressentiment” here is used deliberately; it does not just mean resentment. Ressentiment is inextricably tied to memory and is, by its nature, a slow and poisonous process. The slave’s cleverness birthed it: it is an inability to forget, an ability the unreflective masters have, which creates a dissonance.
But to understand the rise of ressentiment, we must look at their morals. On one hand, we have slave morality, a reactionary one built on their inability. Since they could not get revenge, be prideful, or project assertiveness, they glorified forgiveness, revelled in humility, and promoted meekness. They manifested this through God. “We are like this by choice!” they say. “We do this in the name of justice, goodness, and God!”
On the other hand, we have a proactive morality: a master morality. It arises from strength, vitality, and a yes-saying to life. It comes about spontaneously, without deep reflection. After this sudden affirmation, they began defining all that is good as themselves and anything less as undesirable and bad.
With this background, the rise of their ressentiment makes sense: it comes from both an inability to be like the masters and the pain they cause. The slaves, however, are not entirely powerless: unlike the masters, they are intelligent and reflective. They leverage this creativity and manifest it through ressentiment, beginning the “Slave Revolt.”
The slave revolt, in spite of the weakness, was a powerful act of creative subversion. In a sense, even irable. They subverted the values of the strong in the ‘Transvaluation of All Values’—what they once whispered, they now screamed at the masters. And the masters lost.
However, the slave revolt was not done without assistance from stronger wills. The masters’ “will to power” far exceeded those of many slaves, so the slaves turned to the strongest amongst them for direction: the ascetic priest. They come to him, looking to blame anyone or anything. “Blame yourselves!” he commands. “Your wills, your instincts, your desires—blame those evils!” And this inward hate got projected outwards onto the masters.
What followed was a cure and a potential blessing: memory. It was poisoned by the slaves, and after emerged what we call “bad conscience,” precisely what festers guilt, exterminates forgetfulness, and induces self-contempt. The tragedy lies in the fact that it did not need to be poisonous; it was a potential blessing after all. It could be used affirmatively, like bearing responsibility. It was not all hopeless; it could be overcome. Rather than associating pride, selfishness, and strength with bad conscience, you must associate the life-denying values of humility, selflessness, and meekness.
The ascetic priest, however, is better than what he later creates: the nihilistic, hedonistic last man. As a consequence of the life-denying values, the last man arises whenever the values begin weakening their grasp: when God dies, so does the effect the slave revolt had. Here, the ascetic priest becomes better by comparison: without God, most of mankind regresses to nihilism, and that is worse than life-denial itself; it is a denial of everything.
But there is a way to move beyond them both, nihilism and slave morality, and it is through a man greater than both the slaves and masters. The masters are strong, yet unreflective. Meanwhile, the slaves are weak, yet smart: they both have what the other lacks. So when the dust settles and meaning collapses, the greater man arises from the rubble: Der Übermensch.
Der Übermensch has the vitality and strength of masters but also the cleverness and creativity of the slaves.
1: THE CAMEL: He begins by gazing upon the values of the past and bears them on his back, like a camel. He enjoys the pain of this labour, even asking for more. But after he bears it all, it must go somewhere:
2: THE LION: Like a lion, he mauls them apart, spitting on 2000 years of history. This lion is an independent beast but also an unthinking one, so it reverts to an irreverent innocence:
3: THE CHILD: Playfully, joyfully, and creatively—he constructs his own values while questioning those of the past. He is forgetful, but never fully: he re affirmatively, but never resentfully.
And after such a type of man arrives, meaning will be restored.
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