Nietzsche's Origin of Morality

Nietzsche commences with a narrative of how the meanings of the expressions good and bad was originated. In the beginning, there were two types of individuals: 'the superior, the high-minded, the powerful, and the noble' and 'the plebeian, low-minded, and low people'. The former had an absolute power over the latter, the former group felt powerful and superior which was proved by the reality that they really were superior and they were dominating. Nietzsche called these feelings of the superiority over the inferiors as the pathos of distance. He thought that it is due to the pathos of distance that the bad and good initially gained their meaning. That is, the good were linked with the noble, privileged and superior, whilst the bad were linked with the low, common, and plebeian.

Nevertheless, lower class descendents started to hate the feeling of powerlessness. Their loathing towards the superior group led to a radical transvaluation of their values. Than the bad and good reversed in the meanings in a way that good was then used for the powerless, poor, low and common people whist the bad was used for the powerful, rich, privileged and superior people. As a result to these changes the common and poor people began to be known as the pious and the rich and noble began to be known as impious. It was the start of the new opposed system of moral which Nietzsche called as the slave morality. The powerless group wanted to look good in the changing scenario, they established a morality called the slave morality for themselves, in which they were the 'good' whist the powerful were the 'bad'. Slave morality doesn't look for rectifying its grievance through avenging by action, like the class of noble would do, but by assembling a vengeance which ...