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Notes
All quotations from the Genealogy and from Nietzsche’s other writings will be in the translations of Walter Kaufmann and will be identified by giving, in parentheses located in my text, the sub-division of the book and section-number assigned by Nietzsche rather than by page numbers from any particular edition. This I think has become by how the customary method of Nietzsche citation. The Kaufmann translation can be found in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 2000). The following abbreviations of Nietzsche’s work will be used:
BGE = Beyond Good and Evil
GM = The Genealogy of Morals
TI = Twilight of the Idols
An emphatic statement of this idea is a chapter of Part II of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “On the Thousand and One Goals”.
We should notice a qualification here. Nietzsche lets us know that he is well aware of the dangers of what is sometimes called “the genetic fallacy,” in fact he insists on it. The original cause of a thing and its current significance, he assures us, are quite different: Indeed, they “lie worlds apart” (GM II:12). The issue of how one is to conduct Nietzschean genealogy without committing this fallacy is one I hope mainly to avoid. Suffice it to say that I do not think that in the discussion that follows here either he or I will commit this mistake.
See Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1982) sect. 9 and Passim.
Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (New York: Random House, 1992).
Systems, passim, but esp. p. 214.
Systems, pp. 33–34.
Here I am going beyond Jacob's analysis.
Here I am moving well beyond the analysis of Jacobs, who does not discuss modes of self-valuation.
See Systems, Ch. 3.
Philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand has much to say on this problem, most famously in Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957). As is well known, she was a defender of trader morality who was influenced by Nietzsche early in her career (though she later became a blistering critic of his views). Her strategy, in defending trader morality, was to criticize and reject the ideals represented by the saint and to press the ideal of the trader as far as possible into the mold of the hero, denying as much as possible the quotidian character of the commercial ideal. The characters in her novels are geniuses and courageous fighters, not everyday people at all. To this extent – but no further! – hers could be called a Nietzschean defense of trader morality. How well this works as a defense is a question I will not be able to discuss further here. Suffice it to say that it is a strategy that has both strengths and weaknesses.
See Jacobs, Systems, p. 35.
Jacobs takes some pains in attempting to explain the guardian's curious aversion to trade in Systems, pp. 67–60.
“The nobility never had anything but disdain for these upstarts come from no one knew where, and whose insolent good fortune they could not bear. … [T]he prejudice that it was degrading to engage in business remained deep-seated in the heart of the feudal caste up to the time of the French Revolution.” Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, trans. Frank D. Halsey (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1925), p. 123. See also, Ch. 3, passim.
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Hunt, L.H. Beyond Master and Slave: Developing a Third Paradigm. J Value Inquiry 49, 353–367 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-015-9493-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-015-9493-x