I'll offer another take, from what I think was my first AAQC over at the old motte, a further interpretation of Master/Slave Morality, the Perks of Being a Wallflower theory, the Jocks vs the Emo Kids, from my review of the Abercrombie and Fitch documentary White Hot from Netflix. I'm going to quote the old comment, then expand on it in the context of SA's essay here.
How do you read an interview headlined "youth, sex and casual superiority” with quotes like "In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids. Candidly, we go after the cool kids. A lot of people don't belong [in our clothes], and they can't belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.” And not think of Nietzche. How do you look at the displays of beefcake male nudes and hear Bruce Weber talk about restoring the aesthetic glory of Classical Greece, and not think of Friedrich’s modern interpreter BAP? A&F’s aesthetic was to sell the image of the Blonde Beast, in the literal and philosophical senses. They sold the fantasy of youth, strength, vigor, and total lack of self-reflection; a total spontaneity of desire and the satisfaction of that desire through action. Their marketing tried to use Nietzche’s idea of the natural tendency of the healthy and beautiful and vigorous to self-determine what is cool, by creating an artificial Aristocracy of models and images, then hiring cool local kids as representatives, which then co-opted the locals. And how do you watch the haters without thinking “pure ressentiment all the way down.” The grand narrative is of an upper class which set its own standards, and a lower class which sought to eliminate the right of the upper class to set its own values if it excluded the lower class.
...
Overall, it was a fascinating piece, especially the coverage of the aesthetic of beauty and sex that they built. The core question for me is this: Was the feeling that people got from buying and wearing the clothing worth the costs, both economic and moral, that we paid for them? By creating the brand and the feeling, A&F provided value. One talking head on the doc, who would later be a plaintiff suing A&F for discrimination, said she had one A&F shirt which she wore as often as she could to every party. Clearly that had some value for her, and it was created by the very brand-building discrimination she herself would later decry. Is that value redeeming, or is it bad in and of itself, a false happiness that must of necessity lead to more suffering than it is worth?
Not that I'd expect Scott to think about Abercrombie and Fitch a lot, but I think this provides a frame that is a lot more understandable to a modern American or American-adjacent: rather than Master/Slave morality, think of it as Preppy Jock vs Emo Kid conceptions of what is cool. Like ol' Freddy Nietzche we are dealing in archetypes not actualities, these are myths which, like all myths, deal in an imagined past not in our own present.
The archetypal Preppy Jock likes things that he likes, that his friends like, and thinks those things are cool because he and his friends like them. Sports are cool, he's good at them and his friends are good at them, and if some other person is good at them then that person must be cool too. Being rich is cool, having money lets you do cool things. Hooking up with pretty girls is cool. He, and his friends, and the pretty girls he wants to hook up with, all wear A&F, so A&F must be cool. Wanting to be strong and beautiful and admired and have a pretty partner are basic human traits, these desires are inherently humanistic.
The archetypal Emo Kid isn't good at sports, isn't rich, and can't get the pretty girls to make out with him. So he creates his own version of cool where every aspect of the Preppy Jock system is inverted. Sportsball is stupid, jocks are dumb, they'll be working for us nerds some day!. Rich kids are arrogant and cruel, and because they have everything handed to them they don't really build character or know the real world. He obviously lusts after the pretty girls too, but they aren't into him, and the entire corpus of Emo love songs is largely built around the fantasy that he, the Nice Guy, would be a better partner than the Jock who actually gets her; hooking up with pretty girls is lame, having deep unfulfilled longing for them which is finally sanctified when consummated in a mega-deep way that the dumb Jocks and Players will never get, the Pretty Girl will finally realize that she really wanted the Emo Kid all along. The Preppy Jocks wear A&F, so A&F is for lame, arrogant, idiots, who pay for overpriced T Shirts. His values are built on negating the values of his bullies.
This example illustrates how it interacts with the classic Barber Pole of fashion to produce some of the contradictions re:Christianity that different commenters have noted. Master morality is what masters like, and it is possible to change what they like, which will then become master morality. A&F was able to get hot teenagers in their clothing, other hot teenagers realized it was the hot teenager thing to do, and without overly self examining purchased A&F. There's nothing inherent to being a jock about wearing loose or tight (or now loose again) jeans from a certain mall brand, but they naturally become part of the story. ((Though I will argue that for aesthetic reasons all WASPy people with decently athletic bodies look best in trad ivy fashions))
Christianity was a religion of slaves, until it became the religion of the masters. At that point, Christianity became master morality. There is a Marxian Base/Superstructure aspect to it. To return to our high school, there is more master morality in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes than in the Wiccan Club, even if the members of the Wiccan Club can successfully offer a lecture about Master Vs Slave Morality in Nietzche and the FCA kids can't.
Which is the final contradiction: talking constantly about Master Morality is often a form of Slave Morality. It is the effort to negate the values of your bullies, to claim that your own values are higher and finer and better than those that oppress you. This goes back to Nietzsche himself, of course. But also stays true in the ACX comment section: the incomparable Walt Bismarck, annoyed at being derided as cruel and weird, proceeded to prove how cruel and weird he was, with his yass-ified AI avatar just being so ridiculous that I can never take anyone who would do that seriously. The kind of people that talk about Master Morality are using the concept as a Slave Morality, as a cope to deal with how downtrodden they actually are. They aren't natural Achilles types, reveling in their own dominance. They are sad losers, talking about the grand conspiracy against them, about how if it weren't for the "Longhouse Ethics" of the world they coulda been a contenda.
“Civil religion” is a surprising place for social justice to end up. Gay pride started at Stonewall as a giant fuck-you to civil society. Homeless people, addicts, and sex workers told the police where they could shove their respectable values.
But there was another major world religion that started with beggars, lepers, and prostitutes, wasn’t there? One that told the Pharisees where to shove their respectable values. One whose founder got in trouble with the cops of his time. One that told its followers to leave their families, quit their jobs, give away all their possessions, and welcome execution at the hands of the secular authorities.
The new faith burst into a world dominated by the religio Romana, the civil religion par excellence. Emperor Augustus had just finished moral reforms promoting all the best values: chastity, family, tradition, patriotism, martial valor. Lavishly dressed procurators and proconsuls were building beautiful marble temples across the known world, spreading the rites with all the pomp and dignity befitting history’s greatest empire.
The problem was, nobody really believed religio Romana anymore. Everyone believed it was important to have all the best values, like chastity and military valor and so on. But nobody took Jupiter very seriously, or thought the Emperor was legitimate in some kind of sacred way.
When the new religion of beggars and lepers encountered the old religion of emperors and philosophers, the latter crumbled. But as Christianity expanded to the upper classes, it started looking, well, upper-class. It started promoting all the best values. Chastity, family, tradition, patriotism, martial valor. You knew the Pope was a good Christian because he lived in a giant palace and wore a golden tiara. Nobody ever came out and said Jesus was wrong to love prostitutes, but Pope Sixtus V did pass a law instituting the death penalty for prostitution, in Jesus’ name. Nobody ever came out and said Jesus was wrong to preach peace, but they did fight an awful lot of holy wars.
I haven't really seen what you describe in the last paragraph. Where I've seen Nietzsche discussed, master morality is usually seen with some sympathy. Personally, I feel like aspects of slave morality as Nietzsche describes it were acting as deep unconscious forces in my psychology that I am very glad to have made conscious to more easily push back against where they are unproductive, and I feel like conversations like these help with that. To manage emotions it helps to be able to identify them, and reading your post I actually felt the ressentiment reading about the jocks, I noticed it, and I let it go. That is not something I used to be able to do so easily.
I think the issue with the jocks and nerds view is by definition you are dealing with youth coming into the world with whatever background they happened to have, and little of their own choices has had an effect on where they are. The question is what happens for the rest of the adult lives of the slave morality kids? Are they doomed, or can they change their outlook? Can someone think themselves into being a master moralist or onto some kind of middle road? I tend to think we have some kind of agency and can alter the course of our lives in some way. Elon Musk takes ketamine for depression, he probably grew up immersed in slave morality and forged some kind of master morality for himself, but still has parts from his childhood that hate himself. That's the kind of complexity that is happening for most people who aren't totally immersed on one side or the other.
I haven't really seen what you describe in the last paragraph. Where I've seen Nietzsche discussed, master morality is usually seen with some sympathy.
Because you're reading it from the guys doing it. I say it goes back to Nietzsche because Nietzsche himself was, well, not a powerful vital warrior aristocrat. I love his work and and what he contributed to the western tradition, but he was a loser. When you read a Nietzschean, and he's not a big powerful dominant successful warrior, there's an element of a kind of jealous undermining of one's real enemies with one's imaginary friends. "Hey, look, you might act like you're better than me, and you might be taller and richer and better looking and have a hotter girl and a bigger bench press, but you ain't shit, because you don't have the real perfect pure master morality you're still a SLAVE maaaaan." There's a lot of that in the more white-identitarian corners of the online right.
I think the issue with the jocks and nerds view is by definition you are dealing with youth coming into the world with whatever background they happened to have, and little of their own choices has had an effect on where they are.
Well we're dealing with myth, not history, but to engage with extending the metaphor...
The question is what happens for the rest of the adult lives of the slave morality kids? Are they doomed, or can they change their outlook? Can someone think themselves into being a master moralist or onto some kind of middle road?
Yes. People do this all the time. It might even be called "maturity" or "growing up." Learning to love the things you love without worrying about others. A lot of it has to do with finding one's space, one's social grouping where one is mature or even dominant at least on occasion. Nerdy hobbies often provide this: the same guy who is a loser at school or work might be a great guild leader in WoW or whatever. So do social organizations: you might be the bottom tier loser at work, but at the Elks lodge everyone knows your name.
I like your framing of it, in real life we all contain both genuine human desire and emotion and ressentiment. In my mind, Elon is both engaging in things he loves for the sake of things he loves, and he is desperate to gain approval from or undermine the values systems of those who hate him. He builds a crazy, insane vanity project like the Cybertruck. But then he's fighting petty internet feuds on Twitter.
Personally, the way I apply this in my everyday life is simple and libertarian: let people enjoy things. People having fun doesn't imply that I must have a take on it. People resenting other people having fun is bad.
I see what you're saying, the far right areas where he is discussed are pretty unknown to me. I wouldn't necessarily characterize Nietzsche as a loser, though. If he hadn't succumbed to sickness as young as he did, he would've been celebrated in his own lifetime and his long, prolific, but isolated journey would have payed off.
I think the loser attitude is putting too much stock in the American high school analysis because the things Nietzsche accomplished aren't valued there, and he would be seen as lesser for basically having a problem with women, something obviously Jay-Z would never have an issue with. But to an adult in the room, hopefully they'd see that Nietzsche's influence and power far exceeds Jay-Z's, along with the metaphorical jocks, to the world's benefit or profound harm depending on which of his disciples you are looking at.
I just think there has to be room for the "sigma male" in the analysis of things, where the truly powerful don't necessarily match the vital youth imagery, a lot of times they are weirdos taking big risks to even the odds in their favor, and if it doesn't pan out in their lifetimes, I'd hope they don't get necessarily lumped in with slave morality unless they were actually expressed ressentiment and were preoccupied with being part of the mob/morality police etc. (which I do think you can still argue Nietzsche was doing himself to a degree, at least with the former)
Don't get me wrong, I've read Nietzsche, I love Nietzsche, but we have to admit that by any standard of Master Morality, Nietzsche was lacking. He never conquered in his lifetime. His tangible achievements more or less crowned at becoming the youngest professor of philology, from which he then lived off disability the rest of his life. Was a lot of this the result of bad luck and disease? Yes, undoubtedly. But equally undoubtedly, the lot of many of the weak, those most Nietzscheans are so willing to throw away as the "superfluous men" from Zarathustra, are the result of bad luck, disease, etc. I don't think I'm being unfair when I call him a loser, he lost.
This is where I think the complication of Master Morality comes in. To defend Nietzsche's life on Nietzsche's own terms, one must reject all tangible evidence of success in favor of talking about forms of success that are totally interior to the individual, that involve a small circle of the also-weak, or that post-date his present day in such a way that they are unknown to his contemporaries. His later reputation, and later published writings, might allow us to judge Nietzsche, but to his contemporaries he was who he was, they had no knowledge that he would be famous in the future. Rejection of all real tangible symbols and signs of worldly success, and the people who hold them, as evil; in favor of a mystical, interior definition of virtue that will pay off after one's death, which is the real definition of the Good. It tracks perfectly to the Christianity that Nietzsche decries as Slave Morality, as the ressentiment of the loser against the beautiful and the strong.
Now, one way to square this circle is to say that Freddy was self aware, that he knew what he was saying, and we're meant to read his work with a certain degree of irony. We're meant to see and to know that the man telling us to honor strength had none, that the man telling us to be suspicious of those who reject the value determinations of the great and the powerful is telling us this while in the act of rejecting the value determinations of the great and the powerful! We're not meant to wholesale adopt the positions he argues so vehemently, but to consider and synthesize them into our worldview. This is my preferred view.
Another is to attempt to categorize Masters in such a way that there is a carve-out for the writer. Masters are the brave and powerful Achilles, plus little ol' me. This strikes me as a kind of mystical cope, exactly the kind of thing that Slave Morality is made out of, a transvaluation of values by which earthly success becomes a sign of future damnation. Just as the Christian peasant says: being rich is bad because the rich are greedy and spoiled and sinful, he ain't making it through the eye of that needle! The Nietzschean loser says: being successful is bad, because it means you're conforming to the Longhouse Ethics and not striking out on your own, I may be a loser today but in the future I'll be remembered and the winners will not.
P.S.: I'll admit to not knowing the term Sigma male? Could you define it for me?
I think the contradictions only arise if you ignore the good things Nietzsche says about slave morality (I’ll have to go digging for quotes but basically it made man "interesting", added depth to his soul and made him more cunning).
Nietzsche spends a lot of time praising master morality because it is the side which needs to be rehabilitated, but the Nietzchean project isn’t about going back to the Vikings. The higher type of aristocratic development he is aiming for is only possible in the man of mixed slave/master heritage, and it’s as much about creative ability and aesthetic sense as anything else – Shakespeare, Goethe and Da Vinci are mentioned as higher men alongside the military geniuses.
I agree! part of it is a rhetorical or philosophical test for the reader! You're meant to read the text and think about the guy talking to you, and examine his extremely persuasive arguments, and say, hey wait let's apply this brilliant analytical framing to his own statements! And that second level of analysis is what frees the reader, takes the reader to the level of someone who can examine the world, rather than one who just accepts what he is told!
I think one should pair Nietzsche with Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground in philosophical study.
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Notes -
I'll offer another take, from what I think was my first AAQC over at the old motte, a further interpretation of Master/Slave Morality, the Perks of Being a Wallflower theory, the Jocks vs the Emo Kids, from my review of the Abercrombie and Fitch documentary White Hot from Netflix. I'm going to quote the old comment, then expand on it in the context of SA's essay here.
...
Not that I'd expect Scott to think about Abercrombie and Fitch a lot, but I think this provides a frame that is a lot more understandable to a modern American or American-adjacent: rather than Master/Slave morality, think of it as Preppy Jock vs Emo Kid conceptions of what is cool. Like ol' Freddy Nietzche we are dealing in archetypes not actualities, these are myths which, like all myths, deal in an imagined past not in our own present.
The archetypal Preppy Jock likes things that he likes, that his friends like, and thinks those things are cool because he and his friends like them. Sports are cool, he's good at them and his friends are good at them, and if some other person is good at them then that person must be cool too. Being rich is cool, having money lets you do cool things. Hooking up with pretty girls is cool. He, and his friends, and the pretty girls he wants to hook up with, all wear A&F, so A&F must be cool. Wanting to be strong and beautiful and admired and have a pretty partner are basic human traits, these desires are inherently humanistic.
The archetypal Emo Kid isn't good at sports, isn't rich, and can't get the pretty girls to make out with him. So he creates his own version of cool where every aspect of the Preppy Jock system is inverted. Sportsball is stupid, jocks are dumb, they'll be working for us nerds some day!. Rich kids are arrogant and cruel, and because they have everything handed to them they don't really build character or know the real world. He obviously lusts after the pretty girls too, but they aren't into him, and the entire corpus of Emo love songs is largely built around the fantasy that he, the Nice Guy, would be a better partner than the Jock who actually gets her; hooking up with pretty girls is lame, having deep unfulfilled longing for them which is finally sanctified when consummated in a mega-deep way that the dumb Jocks and Players will never get, the Pretty Girl will finally realize that she really wanted the Emo Kid all along. The Preppy Jocks wear A&F, so A&F is for lame, arrogant, idiots, who pay for overpriced T Shirts. His values are built on negating the values of his bullies.
This example illustrates how it interacts with the classic Barber Pole of fashion to produce some of the contradictions re:Christianity that different commenters have noted. Master morality is what masters like, and it is possible to change what they like, which will then become master morality. A&F was able to get hot teenagers in their clothing, other hot teenagers realized it was the hot teenager thing to do, and without overly self examining purchased A&F. There's nothing inherent to being a jock about wearing loose or tight (or now loose again) jeans from a certain mall brand, but they naturally become part of the story. ((Though I will argue that for aesthetic reasons all WASPy people with decently athletic bodies look best in trad ivy fashions))
Christianity was a religion of slaves, until it became the religion of the masters. At that point, Christianity became master morality. There is a Marxian Base/Superstructure aspect to it. To return to our high school, there is more master morality in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes than in the Wiccan Club, even if the members of the Wiccan Club can successfully offer a lecture about Master Vs Slave Morality in Nietzche and the FCA kids can't.
Which is the final contradiction: talking constantly about Master Morality is often a form of Slave Morality. It is the effort to negate the values of your bullies, to claim that your own values are higher and finer and better than those that oppress you. This goes back to Nietzsche himself, of course. But also stays true in the ACX comment section: the incomparable Walt Bismarck, annoyed at being derided as cruel and weird, proceeded to prove how cruel and weird he was, with his yass-ified AI avatar just being so ridiculous that I can never take anyone who would do that seriously. The kind of people that talk about Master Morality are using the concept as a Slave Morality, as a cope to deal with how downtrodden they actually are. They aren't natural Achilles types, reveling in their own dominance. They are sad losers, talking about the grand conspiracy against them, about how if it weren't for the "Longhouse Ethics" of the world they coulda been a contenda.
Touching on another of Scott's posts I've mentioned several times on here.
Good pick!
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I haven't really seen what you describe in the last paragraph. Where I've seen Nietzsche discussed, master morality is usually seen with some sympathy. Personally, I feel like aspects of slave morality as Nietzsche describes it were acting as deep unconscious forces in my psychology that I am very glad to have made conscious to more easily push back against where they are unproductive, and I feel like conversations like these help with that. To manage emotions it helps to be able to identify them, and reading your post I actually felt the ressentiment reading about the jocks, I noticed it, and I let it go. That is not something I used to be able to do so easily.
I think the issue with the jocks and nerds view is by definition you are dealing with youth coming into the world with whatever background they happened to have, and little of their own choices has had an effect on where they are. The question is what happens for the rest of the adult lives of the slave morality kids? Are they doomed, or can they change their outlook? Can someone think themselves into being a master moralist or onto some kind of middle road? I tend to think we have some kind of agency and can alter the course of our lives in some way. Elon Musk takes ketamine for depression, he probably grew up immersed in slave morality and forged some kind of master morality for himself, but still has parts from his childhood that hate himself. That's the kind of complexity that is happening for most people who aren't totally immersed on one side or the other.
Because you're reading it from the guys doing it. I say it goes back to Nietzsche because Nietzsche himself was, well, not a powerful vital warrior aristocrat. I love his work and and what he contributed to the western tradition, but he was a loser. When you read a Nietzschean, and he's not a big powerful dominant successful warrior, there's an element of a kind of jealous undermining of one's real enemies with one's imaginary friends. "Hey, look, you might act like you're better than me, and you might be taller and richer and better looking and have a hotter girl and a bigger bench press, but you ain't shit, because you don't have the real perfect pure master morality you're still a SLAVE maaaaan." There's a lot of that in the more white-identitarian corners of the online right.
Well we're dealing with myth, not history, but to engage with extending the metaphor...
Yes. People do this all the time. It might even be called "maturity" or "growing up." Learning to love the things you love without worrying about others. A lot of it has to do with finding one's space, one's social grouping where one is mature or even dominant at least on occasion. Nerdy hobbies often provide this: the same guy who is a loser at school or work might be a great guild leader in WoW or whatever. So do social organizations: you might be the bottom tier loser at work, but at the Elks lodge everyone knows your name.
I like your framing of it, in real life we all contain both genuine human desire and emotion and ressentiment. In my mind, Elon is both engaging in things he loves for the sake of things he loves, and he is desperate to gain approval from or undermine the values systems of those who hate him. He builds a crazy, insane vanity project like the Cybertruck. But then he's fighting petty internet feuds on Twitter.
Personally, the way I apply this in my everyday life is simple and libertarian: let people enjoy things. People having fun doesn't imply that I must have a take on it. People resenting other people having fun is bad.
I see what you're saying, the far right areas where he is discussed are pretty unknown to me. I wouldn't necessarily characterize Nietzsche as a loser, though. If he hadn't succumbed to sickness as young as he did, he would've been celebrated in his own lifetime and his long, prolific, but isolated journey would have payed off.
I think the loser attitude is putting too much stock in the American high school analysis because the things Nietzsche accomplished aren't valued there, and he would be seen as lesser for basically having a problem with women, something obviously Jay-Z would never have an issue with. But to an adult in the room, hopefully they'd see that Nietzsche's influence and power far exceeds Jay-Z's, along with the metaphorical jocks, to the world's benefit or profound harm depending on which of his disciples you are looking at.
I just think there has to be room for the "sigma male" in the analysis of things, where the truly powerful don't necessarily match the vital youth imagery, a lot of times they are weirdos taking big risks to even the odds in their favor, and if it doesn't pan out in their lifetimes, I'd hope they don't get necessarily lumped in with slave morality unless they were actually expressed ressentiment and were preoccupied with being part of the mob/morality police etc. (which I do think you can still argue Nietzsche was doing himself to a degree, at least with the former)
Don't get me wrong, I've read Nietzsche, I love Nietzsche, but we have to admit that by any standard of Master Morality, Nietzsche was lacking. He never conquered in his lifetime. His tangible achievements more or less crowned at becoming the youngest professor of philology, from which he then lived off disability the rest of his life. Was a lot of this the result of bad luck and disease? Yes, undoubtedly. But equally undoubtedly, the lot of many of the weak, those most Nietzscheans are so willing to throw away as the "superfluous men" from Zarathustra, are the result of bad luck, disease, etc. I don't think I'm being unfair when I call him a loser, he lost.
This is where I think the complication of Master Morality comes in. To defend Nietzsche's life on Nietzsche's own terms, one must reject all tangible evidence of success in favor of talking about forms of success that are totally interior to the individual, that involve a small circle of the also-weak, or that post-date his present day in such a way that they are unknown to his contemporaries. His later reputation, and later published writings, might allow us to judge Nietzsche, but to his contemporaries he was who he was, they had no knowledge that he would be famous in the future. Rejection of all real tangible symbols and signs of worldly success, and the people who hold them, as evil; in favor of a mystical, interior definition of virtue that will pay off after one's death, which is the real definition of the Good. It tracks perfectly to the Christianity that Nietzsche decries as Slave Morality, as the ressentiment of the loser against the beautiful and the strong.
Now, one way to square this circle is to say that Freddy was self aware, that he knew what he was saying, and we're meant to read his work with a certain degree of irony. We're meant to see and to know that the man telling us to honor strength had none, that the man telling us to be suspicious of those who reject the value determinations of the great and the powerful is telling us this while in the act of rejecting the value determinations of the great and the powerful! We're not meant to wholesale adopt the positions he argues so vehemently, but to consider and synthesize them into our worldview. This is my preferred view.
Another is to attempt to categorize Masters in such a way that there is a carve-out for the writer. Masters are the brave and powerful Achilles, plus little ol' me. This strikes me as a kind of mystical cope, exactly the kind of thing that Slave Morality is made out of, a transvaluation of values by which earthly success becomes a sign of future damnation. Just as the Christian peasant says: being rich is bad because the rich are greedy and spoiled and sinful, he ain't making it through the eye of that needle! The Nietzschean loser says: being successful is bad, because it means you're conforming to the Longhouse Ethics and not striking out on your own, I may be a loser today but in the future I'll be remembered and the winners will not.
P.S.: I'll admit to not knowing the term Sigma male? Could you define it for me?
I think the contradictions only arise if you ignore the good things Nietzsche says about slave morality (I’ll have to go digging for quotes but basically it made man "interesting", added depth to his soul and made him more cunning).
Nietzsche spends a lot of time praising master morality because it is the side which needs to be rehabilitated, but the Nietzchean project isn’t about going back to the Vikings. The higher type of aristocratic development he is aiming for is only possible in the man of mixed slave/master heritage, and it’s as much about creative ability and aesthetic sense as anything else – Shakespeare, Goethe and Da Vinci are mentioned as higher men alongside the military geniuses.
I agree! part of it is a rhetorical or philosophical test for the reader! You're meant to read the text and think about the guy talking to you, and examine his extremely persuasive arguments, and say, hey wait let's apply this brilliant analytical framing to his own statements! And that second level of analysis is what frees the reader, takes the reader to the level of someone who can examine the world, rather than one who just accepts what he is told!
I think one should pair Nietzsche with Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground in philosophical study.
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