Beyond Good and Evil?

With a sort of absurd hubris there are many things we might dispute. We might dispute that we depend on oxygen but only as long as it takes till our next breath. We might argue that there is no such thing as free will but only until we freely select our next carefully considered point on the matter. We might believe that we don’t live in the element of sex for as long as it takes to notice the next woman walk by. Nietzsche wrote a book called ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ and he suggested that morality was a random and perhaps vindictive Semitic imposition on a clean slate otherwise free from such sullying. This pitches all morality as a kind of what the Post-Modernists call a ‘Construct’ randomly forced on us. Of course, this isn’t the case. We are not empty vessels morally into which codes are poured apparently arbitrarily. The moral sense is an inevitable part of the nature of a self-aware, social creature that springs into life spontaneously in certain situations. A 6 year old in the playground shouting ‘It’s not fair’ when his ball is taken does not do so after consulting a moral manual. He just feels the injustice spontaneously. The moral is ‘discovered’ in us by circumstances just as an English judge ‘discovers’ Common Law in specific cases that have not arisen before. When Moses went up on Mount Sinai he didn’t go to receive a set of arbitrary restrictions, he went to get a codification of the laws people had already felt when their property was stolen, their wives raped or their associates murdered. There would already have been bloody conflicts over precisely such matters. The Law came to judge them fairly and impose punishments and redress. Just as we live in the elements of sex, free will and oxygen we also swim in the element of morality. No sooner has Nietzsche announced that morality is a Semitic imposition than he will be carrying out moral (and just) denunciations of the unattractive quality of ressentiment on the very moral grounds of its cowardice, meanness and spite. We can’t do without morality. We don’t achieve happiness by dispensing with the moral part of our nature and blaming it for our woe but by addressing it and setting it right.