Nietzsche, Plato and Aristotle on Priests and Moneymakers

Introduction

Priding himself on having lived on his “own credit” (EH, Preface 1),^[1] Nietzsche has, admittedly, been selective when it came to acknowledging the full extent of what he owed “to the ancients” (TI, Ancients 1).^[2] This might be a consequence of Nietzsche’s long-held characterization of his philosophy in terms of the “fight against Plato and Aristotle” (Nachlass 1884, 26[387], KSA 11.253).^[3] Yet, in agreement with Nietzsche’s own logic, to every credit a corresponding debit can be found. In this respect, Nietzsche’s engagement with both Plato and Aristotle continues to provide a rich terrain for mining this debit. On reflection, Nietzsche might agree that his own approach to appraising any phenomena on the total cost basis – i. e., “without subtraction, exception or selection” (Nachlass 1888, 16[32], KSA 13.492), would merit such approach. After all, one of Nietzsche’s contentions was that he remained someone “who always paid his debts” (Nietzsche to Franz Overbeck, January 4, 1889, no. 1249, KSB 8.575).

Nietzsche’s insistence on a “precise interpretation of Aristotle and Plato” echoes throughout his œuvre and was already reflected in a series of lectures delivered during his brief academic career.^[4] The four lecture cycles on Plato, in particular, encircle the publication of Unzeitmässe Betrachtungen (1873–76) and Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (1878–80) – two of the works, which contain Nietzsche’s most extensive critique of commercial culture, the money-economy and the pervasive influence of the moneymakers. In subsequent years, Nietzsche’s critical engagement with Plato continued increasingly through The Republic, regarded by Nietzsche as his “more fundamental text,”^[5] as well as The Laws.^[6] A number of Nietzsche scholars further suggest that Plato makes his, perhaps, most forceful reappearance in one of the final works to be completed by Nietzsche: Der Antichrist (1888) – the first and only essay of the envisaged project for the revaluation of all values.^[7] In the same text, Nietzsche acknowledges a debt to Aristotle, one of “the great methodologists” (Nachlass 1887, 9[61], KSA 12.368), for the critical insights into the psychology of Christian valuations, which become of methodological significance for his analysis (see A 7–13). In this context, strong affinity has been noted between Nietzsche’s, Plato’s and Aristotle’s views on politics,^[8] ethics^[9] and the ideal configuration of society.^[10]

One feature, however, that remained outside the brackets of these earlier perspectives on Nietzsche’s political leanings, was the uncanny intertwining of the political and economic dynamics, the fusing of which is capable of underwriting, as well as undermining any particular socioeconomic arrangement in a manner eloquently captured by William Connolly in Christianity and Capitalism (2008).^[11] This connection forms an important vector of Nietzsche’s critique of commercial and industrial cultures and merits exploring in some detail. Although subsequent Nietzsche scholarship acknowledges the formative influences of Plato’s and Aristotle’s insights on politics and economics, attempts to trace and examine these have largely focused on his published works.^[12] Nietzsche’s early essays and unpublished notebooks, contained in the Nachlass, help to shine additional critical light on the philological, textual and conceptual affinities with Plato’s and Aristotle’s thinking which resonate across the different periods of Nietzsche’s work.^[13] These, in line with Gary Shapiro’s assertion, may yet reveal Nietzsche as “shouldering enormous debt” to the two great minds of the Greek antiquity.^[14]

This article seeks to highlight some striking structural parallels between Nietzsche’s appraisal of the money economy as “contemptible” (UM III, SE 4) and the critical insights of Plato and, to some extent Aristotle, on the subjects of moneymaking and politics. Plato and Aristotle emphasize the role of moneymakers in the context of the transition from oligarchy toward democracy and the latter’s eventual demise at the hands of tyranny.^[15] A closer look at their respective arguments reveals a number of similarities to Nietzsche’s thinking on the causal strings and mechanisms which facilitated the slave revolt in morality as well as precipitating Judeo-Christianity’s eventual descent into the “atomistic chaos” of secular modernity (UM III, SE 4). The central question this paper explores is whether Plato’s and Aristotle’s thinking on kyklos (the cycle of governments) with a particular focus on the precarious role of moneymaking and moneymakers – deriving from their respective views on the structure of the human soul – may have provided conceptual terms of reference for Nietzsche’s subsequent inquiry into the “slaves” revolt in morality (GM I 7), explored most extensively in Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886), Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887), as well as in Der Antichrist.^[16]

To advance the argument, this article builds on the insights articulated most prominently by Derek Hillard,^[17] Peter Sedgwick^[18] and Nigel Dodd,^[19] who referenced Nietzsche’s focus on the interchangeability between the domains of “material debts and moral guilt.”^[20] It ponders whether the “language of material debts” could yield a coherent meaning when applied to Nietzsche’s commentary “on the emergence of civilisation and the meaning of culture”^[21] in the manner similar to how “the language of moral conscience” can be said to “replace that of material debts”?^[22] In other words, could Nietzsche’s assertion that “the banker immediately thinks of ‘business’ for the same reasons that the Christian [thinks] of ‘sin’” (TI, Errors 5) underscore vital similarities in the underlying structures and patterns of thought, which reveal continuity of concepts and value propositions between these two domains, conventionally construed as unconnected?

Debt and Morality: A Prelude

In Nietzsche’s Money (2012), Dodd argued that one of Nietzsche’s critical insights was to grasp the frequently intractable interchangeability between the “moral economy of debt” and “the moral economy of guilt,” in which midst guilt may readily manifest itself in the shape of “financial debt.”^[23] A corollary of this argument is that the ubiquitous, yet unquantifiable and often intangible, power of the moneymakers lies hid in plain sight – i. e., similar to morality that “lies just beneath money’s surface.”^[24] Nietzsche himself contended that one inevitably “digs up morality when one digs up boundary-stones” (HH II, WS 285) and yet, at the same time, he insisted that “the moral conceptual world” has sprung from the fertile soil of “material” debts (GM II 4–6). The contradiction – characteristic of any “chicken and egg” dilemma and, in Nietzsche’s view, an apparent one – is, nonetheless, instructive as it exposes the extent of interdependence between the moral values and those that underwrite the “economic, political and scientific” components of any social construction (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[8], KSA 12.292).

In HH II, WS 285, looking to reconcile property with justice and virtue whilst sparring with Plato, Nietzsche sounded a warning about the dangers implicit in “the accumulation of great wealth,” particularly through “the trade in money,” as well as about the great threat posed to society by the moneymakers. Nietzsche’s prescription for preventing “the sudden or unearned acquisition of riches” echoed Plato’s concern that the “honoring of wealth is incompatible with a sober and temperate citizenship” (R:555[c]) and his insistence on placing strict “limits on the increase or decrease of property” (L:850[a]).^[25] Nietzsche’s allusion to Plato helps to reveal the latter’s own intuition concerning the relatedness between debt and morality (R:331[a–b]). Exploring the connection between wealth, property and virtue, in a manner resembling Nietzsche’s passage referenced above (HH II, WS 285), Plato ventured an original formulation of the proposition that would become pivotal in the context of Nietzsche’s critique of debt, as well as of the “contemptible money economy,” which grew on its foundation. Plato cautioned against “remaining in debt to a god for some sacrifice, or to a man for money,” in order to secure safe passage between the worlds (R:331[b]). Arguably, if the concept of debt did not exhibit propensity to unify different domains of concern (e. g., sacrifice to the gods vs. money to men), as well as representing the cosmological continuity, wherein gods and men might meet after death, why would, or should, one care about the debts not discharged before passing through the threshold?

Although Nietzsche criticized “Plato’s utopian tune” on the grounds of its “defective knowledge of man” which did not inquire after “a history of the moral sensations,” it is less clear whether Plato did not, nonetheless, inadvertently furnish Nietzsche with an inkling of “an insight into the origin of the good and useful qualities of the human soul” (HH II, WS 285). In a note from 1888, Nietzsche alludes to Plato’s “priestly intentions” with respect to the “management of the people” (Nachlass 1888, 15[42], KSA 13.433). Whether this proved of relevance to Nietzsche’s subsequent examination of the irreducible dichotomy of money as debt, and of debt’s becoming a moral feeling, is explored in the discussion that follows. The intuitive thread, however, that connects the reflections of all three thinkers on the subject of debt and morality is that these phenomena share the unique propensity of a medium of valuation that is compresently infinite (e. g., the quantity of money or the infinity of God) and binary (one is either “good” or “evil”), simultaneously singular and universal – i. e., capable of rank-ordering in accordance with a particular schemata (cognitive structures), deciphering which becomes, for Nietzsche, of critical significance (D 204).^[26]

Nietzsche on the Reciprocity of Morality and Economy

The world of his time, which Nietzsche chastises in his early works, is the world organized and run at the behest of the moneymaker.^[27] Nietzsche’s critique of the “spirit of commerce” (Nachlass 1881, 11[246], KSA 9.535, 11[272], KSA 9.545) as the harbinger of “industrial culture” (GS 40), made manifest in the pervasive spread of the “contemptible money-economy” (UM III, SE 4), chaperoned by “the massive spread of liberal optimism” (CV 3) and the “cross-border tide of democratization” (HH II, WS 292) – precedes his conceptualization and critique of this same world as having grown out of the slave revolt in morality and representing the consummation of that revolt.

It is as though the development of Nietzsche’s critique over the years has followed the trajectory articulated assiduously in Zur Genealogie der Moral, where he traverses “from the very material concept of ‘debts’” to scrutinizing the main “moral concept of ‘guilt’” (GM II 4).^[28] The object of Nietzsche’s critique, however, does not change as the subject matter of it grows more diverse and becomes increasingly nuanced. Guided by the notion that “closer observation” helps to “discover the dovetailing where the new building grows out of the old” (HH II, WS 198; see BGE 289), Nietzsche is on the lookout for the patterns and “certain features” that “recurred regularly together and were closely associated” (BGE 260). In this respect, it is important to appreciate that the world epitomizing the triumph of the slave revolt in morality in all spheres of modern life is exactly the same world as is referenced above – i. e., the world powered and controlled by the “brutal greed for money” (UM IV, WB 4). As such, the inference Nietzsche draws in relation to the moneymaker as the disproportionate beneficiary of modernity could hardly be stronger, or more central to his critique of the latter: the moneymaker has risen to the pinnacle of human existence, having “learnt to misuse politics as an instrument of the stock exchange, and state and society as an apparatus for their own enrichment” (CV 3; UM III, SE 4). And yet, slave morality shields the moneymaker in a way as to “make others forget him or something about him” (BGE 187). In consequence, in order to understand the moneymaker, Nietzsche journeys through “the hidden land of morality” (GM, Preface 7), where he would encounter the moneymaker’s earlier reincarnation and the moral doppelganger – the ascetic priest.

When Nietzsche’s discussion develops seemingly away from the secular moneymaker, a central target of critique in his early works, toward the ascetic priest – the change of analytical lens he employs does not signify a fundamental shift in the focus of his investigation. Rather, he is looking for greater depth in terms of penetrating into a particular physiological profile, which the ascetic priest and the moneymaker both represent. Particularly in Zur Genealogie der Moral, Nietzsche seizes upon the polymorphous nature of the reactive pathos, which appears “regularly and universally […] in almost every age,” thrives everywhere and does not belong to “any race” or “social class” (GM III 11). His concern, traceable throughout his writings, is with re-domiciling of this reactive pathos:

These worm-eaten physiological casualties are all men of ressentiment, a whole, vibrating realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in its eruptions against the happy, and likewise in masquerades of revenge and pretexts for revenge: when will they actually achieve their ultimate, finest, most sublime triumph of revenge? (GM III 14)

Scrutinizing the “men of ressentiment” through the physiological and psychological lenses allows Nietzsche to intuit a connection between the ascetic priest and the moneymaker, both of whom are the agents of ressentiment. Nietzsche tells us that ressentiment is a tell-tale sign of a particular physiology and of a corresponding disposition of the power-will, which – in lieu of own inability to either live an affirmative life, or to reconcile itself to the possibility that others might – seeks dominion over life itself (GM I 10–1; GM III 11–5).^[29] Nietzsche’s undertaking becomes to uncover “the original root-concept” (HH II, WS 33) that underwrites the “sameness of character and value concepts” shared by the ascetic priest and the moneymaker (Nachlass 1887, 9[173], KSA 12.438). This, in turn, would help to explain how the “money aristocracy,” which Nietzsche considers to be “a dangerous characteristic of the contemporary political scene” (CV 3), grows out of and supplants the “priestly aristocracies,” which were equally dangerous, not least on account of their “methods of valuations” (GM I 6–7).

Nietzsche maintains that the domains of material debts and moral (or, political) concepts^[30] exhibit a certain continuity of “the springs of action” that underpin modern society: “the means employed by the lust for power have changed, but the same volcano continues to glow […] what one formerly did ‘for the sake of God’ one now does for the sake of money” (D 204; my emphasis) in the manner reduplicating that which once enabled a particular conception of God to develop from the breeding ground of material debts (GM II 6).^[31] Not only does Nietzsche designate the worlds of money and Judeo-Christian morality as sharing in the cultural DNA, he highlights similarities in their modes of propagation: both seem to spread without much regard for artificial borders of any kind.^[32] Furthermore, Nietzsche asserts a paradigmatic symmetry between democracy, as a secular off-spring of Judeo-Christianity,^[33] and money-making, on the one hand, and of Judeo-Christianity and guilt, on the other. Just as the ascetic priest needs the milieu of Judeo-Christian morality to cultivate and maintain his powerbase, the money-maker requires the political backdrop of democracy in order to advance his interests.^[34]

Developing this line of thought, Nietzsche argues that under the auspices of industrial culture, the pendulum of history has swung back: religion and morality have nurtured the moneymaker to the point where – confidently riding the rising “tide of democratization” – he no longer needs to rely on “religious dogmas” (UM III, SE 7). As Hammond aptly surmises, “in the contemporary world […] the buildings that reach into the heavens are no longer temples and cathedrals – they are, rather, bank towers […] all of which house money […] not God.”^[35] The moneymaker makes effective use of “such flippant concepts as ‘progress,’ ‘universal education,’ ‘national,’ ‘modern state’ and ‘cultural struggle’ – all of which have long since become ‘the common terms’” (UM III, SE 7) utilized to conceal “the existence of the universal sickness” behind the thin veneer of “artificial merriment” (UM III, SE 4).^[36] Nietzsche’s intuition is that under the malleable cover of “artificial merriment,” the ascetic priest and the moneymaker may conceal the same underlying “decline in strength” and “physiological exhaustion” (BT, Attempt 4), which could be increasing “in depth and breadth at a terrific speed” (GM III 21).

In this context, Nietzsche’s genealogical undertaking is dual-aspected. By tracing secular modernity back to the point where the “former positings” and “differences of values” (BGE 211 and 186) would become discernible, he also wishes to anticipate “the track along which this wheel had yet to roll” (HH II, VM 106).^[37] In order to make sense of the gripping “turmoil of secularization” (UM III, SE 4) without getting trapped in the actuality of “the world wrapped in rags” (UM III, SE 7) – i. e., only interested in the “sole task in defending and excusing the present” (UM IV, WB 6) – he undertakes genealogical scrutiny of its values, as affording greater expository range. The manner of Nietzsche’s connecting the moneymaker’s world of debt with the priest’s domain of the slave morality exhibits striking structural parallels to Plato and Aristotle.

Plato and Aristotle on Debt

Not unlike in Nietzsche’s case, no extensive discussion on money and debt, concentrated in a particular text, is to be found in either Plato, or Aristotle. The far-reaching conceptual propositions on the subject, however, interspersed throughout their respective corpora, resonate with Nietzsche’s reflections on the same issues, and particularly so within the context of the slave revolt in morality. One key theme, which emerges from the deliberations by both thinkers of the Greek antiquity, is debt’s uncanny propensity to escape the constraints of the strictly auxiliary use in the economic domain and to arch over into the realm of morality and politics, where it becomes an instrument of power, a standard of value and the means of moulding subjectivity.

From Plato’s Republic emerges the narrative of debt as a multifaceted socio-cultural as well as an economic phenomenon.^[38] His dialogues connect debt with the origins of justice as consisting in “truth telling” and “repayment of debts” (R:331[c]–332[c–d]; 333[c]). Plato’s reflections are couched in the “pre-existently Christian” terminology of “good and evil” (TI, Ancients 2). Plato held that “good is a debt a just man owes to his friends and evil is the debt he owes to his enemies” (R:332[b]).^[39] In this context, Shapiro notes that Plato’s concern over debt’s peculiar temporality would become pertinent for Nietzsche. Plato’s polemic pointed to the tension between the repayment of debts versus the latter’s propensity to become “internalised and made infinite,”^[40] including as a thread connecting generations (R:330[b]; 331[b]): “I wish that I were able to make and you to receive the repayment of the debt in full and not merely as now the interest on the loan. But for the present you must accept my description of the child of the Good as interest. But take care I don’t inadvertently cheat you by paying in bad money” (R:506[e]–507[a]).^[41]

Both Plato and Aristotle highlighted “interest” – “an offspring of the loan” – as an area of significant concern. Sedlacek reminds us that the strong ancient tradition of “condemning interest […] came from the pen of Aristotle,” who problematized interest “not only from a moral standpoint, but also for metaphysical reasons.”^[42] Although Aristotle did not object to debt as such, he was squarely against lending becoming “the business of getting wealth” (P:1258[a–b]; NE:1130[b]). Together with Plato (L:744[a]), he considered the gain that came “from money itself” to run contrary to money’s original purpose and, as such, to be “the most contrary to nature” (P:1258[b–c]; my emphasis).^[43] In The Republic, as well as later in Laws, Plato too made clear his opposition to private lending at interest of any kind: “no purchase or sale should be made on credit” (L:915[d–e]).^[44] The underlying concern was the risk of money-lending becoming the “foundation of false finance”^[45] which, intertwined with politics and the state, would multiply and amplify “the evils that would grow up there,” instead of minimizing, or curing them (R:556[a–b]).^[46] This, Plato and Aristotle told us, occurs in the liminal space where democracy, assisted and accelerated by the money-lenders, supersedes the decaying oligarchy: the fateful transition which, in Nietzsche’s reckoning, inaugurates the liberal worldview in the “muddy waters” of the jeopardous “moral interregnum.”^[47]

Connecting the Dots

A critical point, which links Nietzsche’s critique of the slave revolt in morality to Plato’s and Aristotle’s deliberations on the connation between moneymaking and democracy is the notion of excess: its origins, forms, spread and containment. Nietzsche famously noted that “the mother of excess [Ausschweifung] is not joy but joylessness” or, in other words, excess is a product of deficit, rather than of abundance (HH II, VM 77).^[48] Plato and, subsequently Aristotle, highlighted an intricate connection between “excess and greed” (R:562[c]) as well as pointing out the dangers of “loving money to excess” (P:1263[b])^[49]: “For since their gratification lies in excess, they seek the craft that produces the excess needed for gratification […]. These people make [all the virtues] into forms of wealth acquisition in the belief that acquiring wealth is the end, and that everything ought to promote the end” (P:1258[a]).

Plato argued that on transition from oligarchy to democracy (or vice-versa, in Aristotle’s case; see P:1301[b]), the “same malady of excess” (R:563[e]) – associated with the lower spheres of the soul (R:435[a–c]) – endured, albeit in a different hypostasis (R:563[e]–564[a]).^[50] The metempsychosis of excess was made manifest in the transformation of the oligarchic “insatiate lust for wealth and the neglect of everything else for the sake of moneymaking” (R:556[c]; 562[b]) into democracy’s “a thirst for liberty” (R:562[c–d]).^[51] Plato also noted that in a democratic setting excess would likely become “more widely diffused” and, as it spread to the lower strata of society, excess would likely produce more calamitous consequences which, combined, may end up enslaving and undermining democracy (R:563[e]–564[a]).^[52]

Framing Plato’s discussion on the origins of democracy was also his insistence that in order to assemble an appropriate understanding of a social phenomenon (e. g., democracy), it was critical to “consider the origin of the type” (R:558[c], 559[a]; my emphasis), to which Nietzsche would add that this was critical, not least because of the expedient tendency to “forget the original purpose” of venerable traditions (e. g., liberalism and democracy), which “grow more venerable the farther away its origin lies.”^[53] In this context, Plato’s conjecture extended further than establishing a clear connection between the rise of democracy and the ascent to greater prominence of the moneymakers (R:559[d]).^[54] His discourse hypothesized that the latter development was not the result of the unassisted (i. e., as though natural) spread of the money trade alone. He argued that in order to spread, moneymaking had to rely on a profound inversion of meanings and values that privileged the moneymaking pursuits and ennobled the moneymakers. In order to prove effective and durable, this inversion of values had to reach the multitude on the scale heretofore unprecedented (R:562[c]). In other words, it had to “in secret intercourse engender a multitude” (R:560[b]) or, as Nietzsche put it in Der griechische Staat (1871), it had to “appeal to the egoism of the masses, or their representatives” (CV 3).^[55] Plato and Aristotle contended that the drive for democratization did not commence with the discernment of the universal properties of freedom and equality which were intrinsic to human nature.^[56] Plato, in particular, linked the beginning of oligarchy’s transformation into democracy with the seductive pleasures of easy money purveyed by the moneymakers (R:559[d–e]).

As though following Plato’s lead, Nietzsche contends that the banner of “freedom,” waived on behalf of the “oppressed masses” in revolt (CV 3), usually conceals “the most terrible and thorough desire of man, his drive for power” (Nachlass 1885/86, 1[33], KSA 12.18). Instrumental in advancing such power-seeking agendas, which can only prevail in the “war of cunning (of the ‘spirit’) rather than of force” (GM III 15), is the requirement for a certain uniformity of character and of valuations, or, in other words – for equality (Nachlass 1887, 10[77], KSA 12.499; my emphasis): “To aim for equal rights and ultimately equal needs, an almost inevitable consequence of our kind of civilization of commerce and the equal value of votes in politics” (Nachlass 1887, 11[157], KSA 12.545; my emphasis).

Plato referred to it as “assigning a kind of equality indiscriminately to equals and unequals alike” (R:558[c]) which, in his assessment, likens democracy to shopping for a constitution in the marketplace (R:557[d]). Aristotle, in turn, saw democracy – a “deviant” form of constitution (P:1241[b]) – as occurring precisely in the “masterless households,” where everyone is put “on an equal footing” and “has liberty” (NE:1161[a]).^[57] Nietzsche adds that “common morality is enforced only because it can procure a specific benefit” (Nachlass 1887, 9[170], KSA 12.436). This assertion leads to questioning whether “freedom” and “equality” truly go hand in hand of their own accord and, if they do not, who might stand to benefit (cui bono?) from advancing an agenda, in consequence of which such propensities of human character that are considered expedient for its advancement become designated as universal, rather than vice versa (HH I 447):

Equality of people: what stands hidden behind the growing tendency to posit people as equal simply because they are people? “Interestedness” in respect to common morality (the trick: making the great desires avarice and lust for power into patrons of virtue). How far all kinds of businessmen and the avaricious, all those who have to grant and request credit, need to insist on sameness of character and sameness of value concepts: world trade and exchange of all kinds enforces and, as it were, buys itself virtue (Nachlass 1887, 9[173], KSA 12.438; my emphasis).

Expanding on Plato and Aristotle, Nietzsche conjectures that democracy’s emancipatory pathos appeared to have originated, at least to some degree, from the moneymakers’ yearning to be free to pursue their trade on equal footing with everyone else, i. e., to no longer be discriminated against, including being “not held in honor and kept out of office” (see R:564[e]; cf.551[a]). Alluding to Plato’s tripartite soul, Nietzsche notes that in “former times one looked down with honest nobility on people who dealt in money as a business, even though one had need of them; one admitted to oneself that every society had to have intestines” (UM IV, WB 6). He also adds that the moneymaker, akin to other agents of ressentiment, is a strategic thinker: “he knows all about keeping quiet, not forgetting, waiting, temporarily humbling and abasing himself” (GM I 10). On the whole, Nietzsche concurs with Plato’s and Aristotle’s argument by stipulating that the “demand for equal rights” is intricately connected with an “emanation of greed” (HH I 451) as “an almost inevitable consequence of civilization of commerce” (Nachlass 1887, 11[157], KSA 12.545) whilst “the theory of freedom of will is an invention of the ruling classes” (HH II, WS 9) – i. e., as the necessary means for achieving moneymakers’ political objectives – rather than the result of an epiphany that discerned “an original moment of free choice.”^[58]

The Moneymakers’ Democratic Revolt (in Morality)

Plato’s kyklos, in particular, traces the ascent of the moneymaker through the succession of different forms of government from the aristocracy, where the moneymaker is null, to timocracy, where he is held in contempt, to oligarchy, where he comes to prominence and, finally, to democracy, where he rules. This ascending trajectory has to do with gaining social status and forging political influence by transforming money from the humble means of exchange (in aristocracy) into the supreme value that rules over every aspect of human life and activity (in democracy). To fulfill their political ambition, the moneymakers require two things. Most importantly, the “principle of appetite and avarice” (R:553[c]) has to be installed as the prevailing “criterion of good” (R:555[c]). Secondly, in contrast to most other trades and artisans, the moneymakers know their trade to have harmful effects on individuals and societies when pursued without restraint – i. e., to excess and with “impunity.”^[59] Echoing Plato’s view that the moneymakers’ desire is to be able to “make money less shamelessly” (R:555[b]), Aristotle tells us that the freedom moneymakers desire above all is to be able to “increase their money without limit” (P:1257b).^[60] As such, the freedom they yearn for is of a particular – negative – kind: it is freedom from responsibility.^[61] These two facets of the moneymakers’ undertaking are discussed in turn.

Fortuitously for the moneymakers, the principle of “acquisitive appetites” (R:572[c]) appeals to the broadest multitude in whose midst the moneymakers may be forced to seek shelter, but with which they do not identify (Nachlass 1888, 14[182], KSA 13.365). Fortuitously – since the moneymakers’ rise to prominence depends on the multitude both in terms of overpowering the existing social order and in terms of ensuring the longevity of the one that shall succeed it. As Nietzsche surmises, “in the great world of money […] the poor and the industrious” get taken advantage of at least twice (HH II, WS 25). In both instances, the multitude is conceived of purely as the means. Firstly, and more immediately: as an instrument for exacting revenge against the old ways through “the use of revolutionary ideas” (CV 3) by the moneymakers, who incite dissent – i. e., when “only getting rid seems the goal” (Nachlass 1887, 9[145], KSA 12.419).^[62] Secondly, and over the longer-term horizon: as the material for building the new society, where all shall be “slaves and equal in slavery” (Nachlass 1887, 11[341], KSA 13.148), albeit with the critical difference of no longer being able to detect “the weight of the chains” (HH II, WS 10). Subsequent to the moneymakers’ peaceful revolution, these new subjects – the “smallest indivisible basic constituents” of the new society – should never again be capable of staging anything more dangerous than “the atomistic revolution” (UM III, SE 4). In order to become fit for the purposes intended for it, the multitude needed to be reconfigured into the “amiable and creditable payers and borrowers” (Nachlass 1881, 11[73], KSA 9.469).

Plato argued that such a grandiose undertaking would be inconceivable absent a pervasive inversion – revaluation – of values such that the pursuit of material well-being would become the normative and aspirational tenet of society (see R:562[a–c]; 564[e]).^[63] Reflecting on the “manifold forms” of human appetites and desires – grouped together under Epithymia (or Eros) – Plato was inclined to the view that their common denominator and “strongest element” was neither hunger, nor thirst, nor sex (R:439[e]–440[e]). Instead, Plato highlighted “the money-loving part” and singled out money as “the chief instrument for the gratification of desires” (R:580[d]–581[a]).^[64] Money-making is the appetite that “exceeds all others,” proves “harmful to the body” and a hindrance to the “cultivation of the soul” (R:559[b–c]). Plato’s tripartite soul, composed of logos, thumos and eros, denotes, first and foremost, a rigid psychic aptitudinal hierarchy and “rank-ordering” of temperament.^[65] Neither thumos nor logos are accessible to the desiring part of the soul, except through an abstract representation (R:434[b]).^[66] The same three elements – the moneymakers, the helpers and the counselors – are projected as the three building blocks of the structure of the city (R:440[e]–441[a]). Plato warned against the mixing and substitution of these aptitudes if the polity were to remain just, stable and prosperous. Any “interference with one another’s business” would represent “the greatest injury” resulting in the eventual “ruin of a state” (R:34[a–c]).^[67] The ascent of the moneymaker from eros toward logos is one of the hallmarks of such jeopardous descending trajectory. In agreement with the proposition that the real power of money crystallizes in the mind, Nietzsche maintained that in order to establish itself, it needed to be able to mould subjectivity in a manner commensurate with its purposes (GM III 15).^[68] For the latter to become possible, it was necessary to “dissolve the monarchical instincts of the people” (CV 3) to the point where “the natural concepts of cause and effect” could be “turned upside down once and for all” (A 25), so that money (formerly the means) could become the end.

Plato and Aristotle maintained that in order to “penetrate into private homes and finally enter into the very animals” (R:562[e]), “the principle of appetite and avarice” needed to be privileged above the “proper studies, honorable pursuits and true discourses” (R:560[b]). Nietzsche concurs that such an intricate “transformation,” by means of which “the most covetous regions” of society would become “the ruling power in the soul of […] humanity” (UM IV, WB 6), can only succeed by being sublime – i. e., by patiently imprinting “in the minutest and subtlest detail […] in every will and every faculty” (D 175), for: “if a change is to be as profound as it can be, the means to it must be given in the smallest doses but unremittingly over long periods of time” (D 534). In this manner, an eventual and self-reinforcing circle would be created, which the subject would enter reconciling himself to “being fooled and yet without power to not be fooled” (Nachlass 1886/87, 5[71], KSA 12.213). This development runs in parallel with the moneymakers’ social elevation (R:564[d]) or, to paraphrase Nietzsche, with the rise of the emboldened creditor, who could stop helping, because now he could demand (A 25).^[69]

Plato contended that this exercise could only commence by targeting a particular vulnerability of one’s soul: it had to seize upon the “internal strife in the man with himself” (R:560[a–b]).^[70] In this respect, Nietzsche’s examination of the origins of the ascetic ideal also takes him in the direction of an internal rupture, indicative of a “deep, physiological depression” (GM III 17).^[71] Plato and Aristotle insisted that the young and impressionable souls – “empty and unoccupied by studies” (R:560[b]) – would be particularly susceptible to the seductive discourses of the “fierce and cunning creatures, who know how to purvey pleasures of every kind and variety” (R:559[d]) or, as Nietzsche put it, who have taken to feeding “the whole pack of wild hounds in man” (GM III 20). Such youths, having had the “taste of the honey” would risk surrendering the “citadel of the soul” (R:559[d]–560[b]) to the sway of “the false and braggart words and opinions,” which privilege and promote the “thrifty element” of the soul (R:572[c]). Plato maintained that that “the principle of appetite and avarice,” if installed as “the great king of the soul,” could corrupt “the rational and high-spirited principles” by allowing “to calculate and consider nothing but the ways of making more money […] and to admire and honor nothing but riches and rich men, and to take pride in nothing but the possession of wealth and whatever contributes to that” (R:553[c–d]; 572[c]).^[72] In other words, as Nietzsche would have it, the “sameness of value concepts” having been thus established would pave the way for contriving the “sameness of character” (Nachlass 1887, 9[173], KSA 12.438).

The process of moulding the money-venerating subjectivity continues until the moneymakers have successfully “emptied and purged” (R:560[e]) it of everything “virtuous and happy” (R:576[d])^[73] – in Nietzsche’s words, until the subjectivity is created, which would remain “eternally hungry” and dissatisfied “no matter how much it devours” (BT 23) and, in this way, “obligated to a society, nailed to a place and incorporated into a state” (HH II, VM 317).^[74] When this ignoble end is achieved, the moneymakers, driven by “a fierce secret lust for gold and silver” (R:548[a]) can enduringly “shut the gates” of the communal soul to any other competing influences (R:560[d]). The “braggart discourses,” which “prevail in the conflict” of ideas, could then inaugurate a fundamental inversion of meaning and values, which Plato calls “re-naming”:

[N]aming reverence and awe “folly” thrust it forth, a dishonored fugitive. And temperance they call “want of manhood” and banish it with contumely, and they teach that moderation and orderly expenditure are “rusticity” and “illiberality,” and […] in celebration of their praises they euphemistically denominate insolence “good breeding,” license “liberty,” prodigality, magnificence, and shamelessness – “manly spirit” (R:560[d–e]).

Nietzsche would concur, that the “slandering and re-baptizing” of old values is a necessary element of any lasting inversion (Nachlass 1887, 9[173], KSA 12.438).

Of Democratic Men and Slaves

The long-term consequences of this process, according to Plato, were twofold in terms of the impact, respectively, on the ruling classes and on the multitude. In relation to the latter, it was to transform individuals, into the “willing slaves and men of naught” (R:562[d]). Plato compared the subjects constituted through meaning and value inversions to the “Lotus-eaters,”^[75] who no longer needed to live in disguise.^[76] Having tasted “of the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus” (i. e., material comforts) to the sound of the “beautifully seductive and tranquillizing utterances” about the “dignity of man” and the “dignity of labor” (BT 18), contented Lotus-eaters forgot their purpose and lost sight “of their homeward way.”^[77] For these reasons, Plato regarded the “properly designated democratic man” – a “devotee of equality” (R:562[a]) – as someone for whom “there is no order or compulsion in his existence, but he calls this life of his the life pleasure and freedom and happiness and he cleaves to it to the end” (R:561[d]).^[78] Nietzsche would concur that pursuit of the “well-being of man” as a goal only succeeds in “making man […] contemptible” (BGE 225), for “you can’t want less from people than if you just want their money” (Nachlass 1882, 3[1], KSA 10.54).

The “democratic subject,” as described by Plato, undertakes a transformative journey, which resembles the one described by Nietzsche in the context of the slave revolt in morality. Both, Plato’s “democratic man” and Nietzsche’s “slave” travel the circumference of consciousness – “the most impoverished and error-prone organ” (GM II 16; see BGE 32) – that, akin to “an inner voice,” measures “the value of the action with regard to the intention and conformity of this intention with the ‘law’” (Nachlass 1888, 15[42], KSA 13.433). This is a critical consideration for Nietzsche, who identifies morality as the cauldron where the compound of ancient ethics – binding together agency, action and value – becomes broken up and re-wired with a new logic. Morality shifts the focus away from the consequences of one’s action, as the source of its value, to the origin of action by positing a frame of reference which is external to individual agency and derives from a set of abstract notions capable of judging any action and all actors alike. This “inversion of the value-positing eye” (GM I 10) optically lifts the burden of personal responsibility from the shoulders of the actor only to replace it with the crushing weight of the “vision and standards” by which all actors must now abide. In this manner a fundamental “reversal of perspective” becomes possible when – in a “miracle act without prehistory” – the illusions of “equality” and “freedom of will” are bestowed upon the unsuspecting but eager humankind as the universal gifts (BGE 32, Nachlass 1879, 42[62], KSA 8.606).^[79]

Initially, by conjuring up a “hostile external world, upon whose otherness it is logically dependent,”^[80] this false consciousness, which “morality enters as a law – along with the entire group of related values and states” (Nachlass 1888, 14[105], KSA 13.282) – leads Plato’s democratic men and Nietzsche’s slaves as though away from the origin of their psychological strife (GM III 15).^[81] However, akin to the force of gravity, psychological vulnerability, preyed upon by Plato’s moneymaker and by Nietzsche’s priest, keeps both steadfastly on the trajectory, which – notwithstanding, how “long and winding” a road it may turn out to be^[82] – inevitably guides the subjects back to the inception point: i. e., to themselves. As Conway aptly surmises: “in order to prevent the slaves from lashing out against their perceived enemies, the ascetic priests effectively relocate this ‘hostile external world’ internal to the slave’s consciousness.”^[83]

Expressed slightly differently, the path of slave morality, having commenced with the emancipatory pathos,^[84] delivers the subject “back” to the starting point. The latter becomes the point of passive acceptance of the self-constructed and self-imposed psychological cage of one’s inability to correspond to the exacting demands of the aspirational valuations (GM III 20). In his absence, its “iron bars” – “crowned with garlands” (R:560[e]) and decorated with the “value judgments,” designed to soothe the internal strife within the subject so as to help internalizing this sugar-coated “new-old” reality – “have become more useful than freedom” (GM III 14–5; Nachlass 1888, 15[73], KSA 13.453).^[85] This, Nietzsche would subsequently argue, is “a sign” that the slave morality, as a “mode of living […] has become master” (Nachlass 1888, 14[105], KSA 13.282). “Stuck in a cage, imprisoned among all sorts of terrible concepts” (TI, Improvers 2), the subject – “sick, miserable and malevolent against himself” – resignedly shuts the door of the “iron cage of errors” on himself and throws away the key: the “great escape” from oneself fails to materialize (Nachlass 1888, 15[72], KSA 13.453).^[86] Alas, as Zarathustra warned, “even a prison” of slave morality would “seem like bliss” to the “restless people,” who can “enjoy their new security” in its inescapable nets (Z IV, The Shadow).^[87]

Revolutionaries and Instigators

Every revolution requires revolutionaries and revolutionizers, or instigators. Revolution’s immediate success may depend on the former. The fruits of this success as well as its longevity, Nietzsche tells us, is a different matter altogether. This, he explains, is the reason why it is possible to lose sight of a “revolt which has two thousand years of history behind it” precisely on account of its comprehensive and enduring success (GM I 7). Revolutionaries come and go. The revolutionizing ethos persists, carefully choosing, nurturing and shielding its agents in different epochs. These actors – the accomplished crafters of “health sapping” values, the patient tamers of powerful sentiments and the wielders of compelling narratives^[88] – prefer to remain invisible in plain sight. The ascetic priest achieves this through the mastery of the “moral concept ‘guilt’ [Schuld]” and the moneymaker – through “the very material concept of ‘debts’ [Schulden]” (GM II 4).

From some of his earlier Nachlass notes to some of the last, Nietzsche likens this reliance of democratic politics on the increasingly inflated assurances to the effects of “narcotics,”^[89] “stimulants” (Nachlass 1888, 15[37], KSA 13.429) and “intoxication” (GS 86), as symptomatic of the “craving for ever stronger and more frequent stimulation” the weaker the democratic agent becomes (TI, Errors 2).^[90] Nietzsche argues that to function, “democracy has to keep enhancing weakness of the will” of the electorate (Nachlass 1885, 35[9], KSA 11.512) by progressively raising the stakes from “making free” to “granting equal rights” and to “expecting privileges” (Nachlass 1887, 10[66], KSA 12.495; 10[77], KSA 12.499), because it is the sine qua non of democratic governance that “whoever wants to retain power flatters the mob […] must have the mob on its side” (Nachlass 1888, 14[182], KSA 13.365).^[91] “The demagogic character and the intention to appeal to the masses is at present common to all political parties: on account of this intention they are all compelled to transform their principles into great al fresco stupidities painted on the wall” (HH I 438; my emphasis).^[92]

“Narcotics,” however, have to be paid for, and this is where “the sirens who in the market place sing of the future” can begin making significant inroads into the social fabric of society (GS 377), carefully reconstituted through “impersonal enslavement” (D 206), and to assert themselves “in all political questions – [where] questions of power are at stake” (Nachlass 1887, 9[121], KSA 12.406). Neither Plato’s “moneymaker,” nor Nietzsche’s “priest” is, to use a biblical allegory, a fisherman. Properly understood, they are both “fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19). In order to propagate his respective “method of valuation” (GM III 11), each has to cast their respective nets – of debt and of slave morality – far, deep and wide, so as to catch “a great number of fish” (Luke 5:4–6), i. e., “the oppressed, the lowly, the great masses of slaves and semi-slaves” (Nachlass 1887, 10[77], KSA 12.499) or, as Plato had it, to “assemble together […] the most numerous and powerful class in a democracy” (R:565[a]; see 555[e]).

In this respect, Plato’s moneymakers can be seen as a close physiological prototype of Nietzsche’s ascetic priest. They are the ascetic type – a well-organized minority of “the most orderly and thrifty natures” (R:546[e]) – capable of “forcibly restraining” their own “evil desires dwelling within” (R:554[a–d]), so that they can incite them in the multitude, which is incapable of either mastering or moderating these “lower desires” (R:552[a]–553[a]). In making this distinction, Plato zones in on a particular reactive element within the appetitive part of the soul – a psychological hybrid in the form of “a double man” (R:554[d]) – endowed with the traits of logos and thumos but one who, having installed “the principle of appetite and avarice” as the king of his soul (R:53 [c]), remains driven by the drone-like appetites and thirsts for revenge (R:554[d]).^[93] The moneymaker understands well the psychological vulnerability of the multitude (he suffers from the same malady) and harnesses the power of the “unruly desires” in the cauldron of moneymaking in order to work both ends of the social spectrum. The moneymaker will not fight himself for the lack of courage and moral passion.^[94] Instead, he uses his influence and power to exploit the multitude, who may “approve of him” (R:554[a–b]) and to manipulate and corrupt those above him, who are in debt to him (R:553[d]; 555[d–e]).^[95] As the first representative of the “capitalistic class” (R:564[e]), the moneymaker is designated by Plato as an allegorical “pasture” for the stingless drones and for the rulers alike in both of whom, akin to a mercenary, he ruthlessly inserts the “sting of his money”^[96] – i. e., debt – in order to earn interest and to augment his power (R:555[e]).^[97]

When Nietzsche comes to cast his ascetic priest – the instigator of the slaves’ revolt – he too has in mind a small, well-organized minority of strategic thinkers and plotters (GM I 10 and GM III 14–5), who are “sick themselves” and “close relatives of the sick” (GM III 15) on account of which they embody “the incarnate wish for being otherwise, being elsewhere” (GM III 13–4). Akin to the moneymaker described above, the ascetic priest is no warrior but, as “the worm of revenge,” he will make his impact felt by continually spinning the “web of the most wicked conspiracy” from the “soil of self-contempt” (GM III 14). Yet, at the same time, the ascetic priest strives for purity in relation to himself, he becomes an expert at “self-discipline” (GM I 6–7) – “strong and more master of himself” (GM III 15) – who elevates himself above the multitude by mastering the art of interpreting suffering of all kinds (GM III 15). Like the moneymaker, who has to inject poison into his victims first in order to become indispensable – the ascetic priest has to “wound first so that he can be the doctor” and to keep poisoning the wound as he treats it and in order to continue treating it. Not unlike the moneymaker, the ascetic priest works hard to prevent “anarchy and the ever-present threat of the inner disintegration of the herd” and even when he detonates his “explosive material” he is careful not to blow up “either the herd or the shepherd” but to engender a “change in direction” or, as Plato had it, to orchestrate a “change of seasons” (R:563[a]–564[a]).

Removing the Veil

The aforementioned line of reasoning leads both Plato and Nietzsche to the next conjecture, namely that to facilitate the inversion of values, the moneymakers would be bound to “use their power always in one direction” – they support everything liberal (Nachlass 1888, 14[182], KSA 13.365).^[98] Plato contended that by “initiating” (not necessarily directly) “magnificent and costly rites” (R:560[e]), the moneymakers welcomed “home from exile insolence and anarchy and prodigality and shamelessness.” Their objective was the “liberation and release of […] unnecessary and harmful desires,” so that the enchanted multitude would engage in “expending money and toil and time […] on unnecessary pleasures” (R:561[a]).

Plato, Aristotle and Nietzsche register a sense of unease and agitatedness, which accompanies the ascent of the moneymakers along the ladder of power (Z I, New Idol). Plato argued that having legitimized “the principle of appetite and avarice” (R:553[c]), the money-makers grew “far fiercer” in democracy precisely because the latter gave them the political license they previously lacked (see R:564[d–e]).^[99] Aristotle noted that democracies tended to become more extreme following the enfranchisement of the money-lenders and the wage-earners – “the least honorable and least natural” of the social classes.^[100] Nietzsche identifies something surreptitious about the manner in which the moneymakers, much as they may support the widest dissemination of the “liberal-optimistic world view” (CV 3), at the same time appear to have some reason “to disguise themselves behind form” (UM III, SE 6), as though they “cannot acknowledge their creative acts as products of a self-destructive expression of ressentiment.”^[101] The impression is created that not the full story is being told, as though the moneymakers’ adherence to the liberal views was a “hoax concealing lowliness” (Nachlass 1880, 6[341], KSA 9.283)^[102]: “these days saw the appearance of sources of energy by which the mills of the modern world were driven more powerfully than they otherwise would have been. And energy comes first, and only then, and a long way after, truth – isn’t that true, my dear contemporaries?” (HH II, VM 226)

The moneymakers, akin to “a thief working away at his money-chest, while knowing full well that the chest is empty” (HH I 209), would never admit to it (BGE 262) for reasons of being equally “ashamed of its origins” and “terrified of its consequences.”^[103] In Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Nietzsche argues that money and riches “only appear quite different from what their wretched origin would lead one to expect because they are able to mask themselves” (HH II, VM 310; my emphasis). This begs the question of what the moneymakers would wish to hide, if they could? Plato and Aristotle stipulated that, in contrast to other artisans, the moneymakers knew their trade to have harmful effects when pursued without restraint (R:561[a]; P:1257[a–b]):

These moneymakers with down-bent heads, pretending not even to see […] but inserting the sting of their money into any of the remainder who do not resist, and harvesting from them in interest as it were a manifold progeny of the parent sum, foster the drone and pauper element in the state. And they are not willing to quench the evil as it bursts into flame. (R:555[e]–556[a]; my emphasis)^[104]

In consequence, the freedom the moneymakers sought was more than just the freedom to practice their craft openly along with everyone else. The freedom they required above all else was the freedom that would absolve them of responsibility for the harmful effects of their trade, i. e., freedom to act with impunity (R:554[c–d]),^[105] in consequence of which they would conceal the harm for as long as possible, including beyond the point of repair (D 453), and at any price, including the risk of their own demise. In the Zur Genealogie der Moral, exploring the self-contradictoriness of “ascetic life,” Nietzsche described it in terms of an infinite striving of “an unfulfilled instinct and power-will” that wished to become “master, not over something in life, but over life itself,” even if it meant destroying life in the process, as the only means of extinguishing the hunger (GM III 11).^[106]

The unwillingness, or inability (or both) of Plato’s moneymaker and of Nietzsche’s priest to stop, suggests that the system of the “moral world order” (A 26), over which they preside, is designed as the “end-to-end control” system. Nietzsche discusses this in two of his final works – Götzen-Dämmerung and Der Antichrist. He hypothesizes that the priest inaugurates such a “state of affairs” where he “determines the value of things” in accordance with whether they “profited the overlordship of the priests” (A 26). Equally, the priest specifies the means by which such a state of affairs is to be maintained, down “to the large and small taxes.” In this system of coordinates, “the concept of God becomes a tool in the hands of the priestly agitators,” who make themselves “indispensible everywhere” (A 25–6). “Consequence: a kind of cause-positing predominates more and more, concentrates itself into the system and finally emerges dominant, that is, other causes and explanations are simply excluded. The banker immediately thinks of ‘business,’ the Christian of ‘sin’” (TI, Errors 5).

This represents the consummation of the slave revolt in morality – applicable to the priest as much as it is to the moneymaker – and from such a closed system, there is “absolutely no escape, no backway, or bypath into the real world” (D 117).^[107] Both, Plato’s moneymaker and Nietzsche’s priest inaugurate an ideology, which recognizes no role for money (debt), or for God, except to benefit specific constituencies, i. e., themselves. What Plato’s and Nietzsche’s respective arguments suggest, however, is that any such ideology, once dominant, inevitably becomes short-sighted.^[108] By neglecting (or worse – concealing) its origins (either in relation to money, or God), and by juxtaposing its own normativity as superior to that of “the great economy of the whole” (EH, Destiny 4), neither the “Christian” (Nachlass 1869, 1[8], KSA 7.13), nor the “liberal-optimistic worldview” (Nachlass 1871, 10[1], KSA 7.333), allows its proponents to see either how the excesses of moneymaking may disrupt the “great economy of the preservation of the species” (GS 1) and undermine the social fabric of society (R:566[a–d]), or how the overgrowth of guilt may result in the death of God.^[109] This is a consequence of the ideology of the moneymaker and of the priest being inflationary in its nature and modus operandi: lacking authenticity, it constantly needs to have more of itself, to expand, to grow its sphere of influence, to produce itself in excess and to produce an excess of itself, including to the point where such spiral of growth would undermine its own vitality.^[110]

Nietzsche further reaching observation, which echoes Plato’s citation above in relation to the moneymakers (R:555[e]–556[a]), is that the priest, who “lives on sins” and depends on people being in sin because the sins are his “real handles of power” (A 26), would not stop even if the price he had to pay in order to maintain his power was to “conserve what degenerates” (EH, D 2). The following consideration, which connects Plato’s moneymaker to Nietzsche’s moneymaker via Nietzsche’s priest is important in this context. The priest is the representative of God, whilst the moneymaker, for the reasons discussed above, cannot rule directly in the name of some higher authority. He needs a representative, and so requires for the priest to be “secularized” – i. e., to undergo a metempsychosis into the widely diffused plethora of “all those who have reason to disguise themselves behind form” (UM III, SE 6). These actors become the “comedians of the Christian moral ideal,” enabling “the new type of trade” in modernity (GM III 26). In this respect, the moneymakers’ aims are served by those professions and institutions, which can be utilized as the conduits of greed dressed up as the “profitable truths” – e. g., the state and the political parties, the sciences, the educators, the entertainers and other “explainers and compliers of indices” (UM III, SE 6). Elsewhere, Nietzsche contends that, notwithstanding that “money is power,” and “no one wants to hide it under a bushel,”^[111] the moneymakers – whilst fully cognizant of “just how much power is in their hand” (Nachlass 1888, 14[182], KSA 13.365) – remain reticent “to lay it on the table” and, consequently, they seek “a representative which can be laid on the table” (D 203).^[112] Through the medium of democratic politics, Nietzsche contends, the moneymakers acquire suitable representation, which no longer embodies rank-ordering, or independent expertise. By enabling the moneymakers, the democratic leaders become dependent on them in order to keep afloat the lofty enterprise of the politics of overpromise, which is based on the speculative premises of liberty and equality.^[113]

This may hold a key to answering the question posed at the outset concerning the prime beneficiaries of the notions of liberty and equality being posited as universal. Furthermore, the same constituency may stand to benefit disproportionately from the death of God, which allows Nietzsche – in a vaguely Hamletian manner – to argue that precisely as the throne of power is vacated by religion, it becomes claimed by the moneymaker, albeit through a representative or two (UM III, SE 4).^[114]

Facing the Music

A corollary of democracy’s intertwining with moneymaking – recognized by Plato, Aristotle and Nietzsche alike – is the inevitable degeneration of political leadership. Plato suggested it was inevitable that the democratic political setting would eventually yield “bad cupbearers for its leaders” who, “intoxicated by drinking too deep of that unmixed wine,” would force “the spirit of liberty” to “go to all lengths,” i. e., toward self-destruction and eventual transformation into tyranny (R:562[d–e]), as “any excess is wont to bring about a corresponding reaction to the opposite in the seasons” (R:563[a]–564[a]).^[115] Both Plato and Aristotle expressed particular concern with the “rulers, who owe their offices to their wealth” (R:555[c]). Lacking in moderation, these “occupants of the offices,” who are “lovers of money and engaged in money-making” (P:1316[a–b]), are neither capable of fiscal prudence, nor of supplying aspirational values to the members of the polis (P:1263[b]).^[116] Instead, they encourage excess and “wasting of substance,” whilst “their object is, by lending money, to become still richer” and to augment their power (R:555[c–e]). Deterioration in the standard of the “cupbearers” of democracy (R:553[c–d]) has the effect of lowering the overall quality of the polis and of its individual members. This weakening of the social fabric inaugurates the self-reinforcing dynamic of political decline, creating “rulers who resemble subjects and subjects, who are like rulers” (R:562[e]).^[117] The latter only amplifies the power of the moneymakers and emboldens the would-be tyrants. This leads Plato to conclude that “the probable outcome of too much freedom is only too much slavery in the individual and the state” (R:564[a]).

The manner of democracy’s eventual disintegration into tyranny, as outlined by Plato and Aristotle, bears resemblance to the trajectory of Christianity’s decomposition into the “turmoil of secularization,” which follows the death of God.^[118] As Nietzsche tells us in the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, just as “the waters of religion ebb away,” society gets “swept along by a hugely contemptible money economy” which, by indulging the “self-seeking drives of the soul,” enables “the money-makers and the military despots” not only to rise to the top but to establish their authority in quite an extraordinary manner, i. e., by “holding sway over almost everything on earth” (UM III, SE 4).^[119] One further overlooked aspect, which links Nietzsche’s argument with that of Plato and Aristotle, is that it is not democracy in of itself that degenerates into tyranny.^[120] Rather, Nietzsche tells us, this happens when the “involuntary arrangement” between democracy and the money economy, based on promoting “slavery in the subtlest sense,” breaks down and, having failed to produce a worthy antithesis to the “to the leveling and mediocritization of man” (BGE 242),^[121] the “dishonest lie of the ‘moral world order’” (GM III 19; A 26), stemming from its steadfast refusal to see “how reality is constituted fundamentally,” becomes exposed as its sole foundation (EH, Destiny 4).^[122] This is why Nietzsche would ultimately concur with Plato and Aristotle that: “Material prosperity, the comfort that satisfies the senses, is now desired, and all the world wants it above all else. Consequently, it will meet a spiritual slavery that never before existed” (Nachlass 1881, 11[294], KSA 9.554).

The “conditions of existence,” which embody and reflect these values, make it neigh impossible for the great individuals to emerge and to make a difference,^[123] whilst “those who climb to the top of society today are physiologically condemned” (Nachlass 1888, 25[1], KSA 13.637).^[124] In this respect, Nietzsche notes that “the degeneration of the rulers has created the greatest madness in history” (Nachlass 1884, 25[344], KSA 11.240), which has paved the way for the proliferation of meaningless and wasteful slavery in all social classes and every sphere of life.^[125] This, Nietzsche argues, demonstrates that slave-morality is not only a potent economic force (Nachlass 1885/86, 2[182], KSA 12.157), but that it is also “the greatest danger” (GM I 12) as it all but confirms each of us, moderns, as “the last men, and the slaves” (EH, Destiny 5). Viewed in this manner, liberalism (of the moneymaker) and democracy (of the masses) are not simply the secular offspring of Christianity. They become, for Nietzsche, the cornerstones of the secular slave morality, which insists “it is part of its development that its origin should be forgotten” (Nachlass 1888, 14[105], KSA 13.282).

Concluding Remarks

A number of palpable similarities can be shown to exist between Nietzsche’s ascetic priests and Plato’s, as well as Aristotle’s, moneymakers, all of whom reinforce the same reactive “moral world order,” albeit by different means. Plato’s, Aristotle’s and Nietzsche’s manner of reflecting on these phenomena also exhibits compelling structural parallels. This is particularly the case in relation to the mechanics of the slave revolt in morality and the moneymakers’ ascent in democracy, orchestrated through the pervasive revaluation of values, which empowers the greedy power thirst of the priest and of the moneymaker, and relies on a thorough psychological rewiring of the physiologically incomplete multitude, as well as causing erosion in the quality of the leaders. The priest and the moneymaker use similar modalities of incorporation and moulding of subjectivity, i. e., they employ similar mechanisms for (a) maintaining their power (GM III 15) and (b) concealing its harmful effects (GM I 6). In this manner, Plato’s, Aristotle’s and Nietzsche’s respective discourses shine an uncomfortable, yet pertinent, critical light on the origins of liberty and equality as well as on the entanglement of democracy with moneymaking which may end up producing “the fiercest extremes of servitude” from “the height of liberty” (R:562[a]).