With the
transvaluation of values,
Friedrich Nietzsche demonstrates how all
morality is
partisan: how any
logic of the
cosmos arises upon the basis of
myth, and how that myth serves to control the
will. In Part II of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche addresses
ressentiment, the
font of
mythos.
Ressentiment is "the spirit of revenge": the drive that festers in the weak who seek vengeance against the strong and noble. Ressentiment is what leads priests and wise men to create values that negate life. This leads to "bad conscience" and the reversal, or inversion, of noble values. "The slave revolt in morals begins by rancour turning creative and giving birth to values--the rancour of beings who, deprived of the direct outlet of action, compensate by an imaginary vengeance." (Genealogy of Morals, 1.10). While noble morality celebrates self-affirmation, slave morality "begins by saying no to an "outside," an "other," a non-self, and that no is a creative act" (Genealogy of Morals 1.10). Decadence and fear of the past leads the creative will to fall sick with revenge. The will's ill will is directed originally, but only originally, against the "it was" that it cannot control, powerless against that which has been done, against accident that has become necessity. Its very nature is thwarted by the sheer givenness and pastness of the past, of which it is not just the spectator, but the "angry spectator" who sees the past as in glass coffins unreachable by the will. Askesis drives the will to legislate values that it itself will undermine.
Ressentiment is the will to power as revenge: revenge for driving the creative will mad in its prison of time. 'The will cannot stop willing, even if this means its negation: it would rather will nothingness than not will' (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 233).
Slave ethics, while "low", are not "base". Rather, in keeping with Nietzsche's respect for his enemies, the triumph of slave ethics represents an intellectual feat; it took a strong will to engender the transvaluation of noble values. The creation of a wrong-headed value system is still, after all, a creation of sorts. "Man would sooner have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose" (Genealogy of Morals, III.28). In the chapter of Zarathustra titled "On Self-Overcoming" we can see this will in action; here Zarathustra reveals that the priest's redemption and the philosopher's "will to truth" are one and the same, the will to power.
A will to the thinkability of all things: this I call your will. You want to make all things thinkable, for you doubt with well-founded suspicion that it is already thinkable.... That is your whole will, you who are wisest: a will to power--when you speak of good and evil too, and of valuations.
(Thus Spoke Zarathustra p. 225)
In his lectures Zarathustra / Nietzsche uses the dragon as the symbol for the denial of the "I will", exemplified best by the authoritarianism of priests and moralisers such as Kant and Spinoza, who dress up moral beliefs, intuitions and desires in rational argument. Like the idea of redemption, the "will to truth" is a devaluation of the transitory and deceptive world of nature. If, as Kant maintains, God and the soul cannot be known, as they are outside of sensory experience, then the "spirit" is severed from what can be known, just as Kant severs us from our animal nature; just as priests seek redemption through denial of our passions. "With your values and words of good and evil you do violence when you value; and this is your hidden love and the splendor and trembling and overflowing of your soul" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra p. 228). Pious or passive self-overcoming mugs our true nature: slavishness leads us to rationalize our misfortune and repress our natural instincts.
The will to transcend slave morality requires going "beyond good and evil". Recognizing that the world is alterable begins the negation of the negation. "Verily, I say unto you, good and evil that are not transitory, do not exist" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 228). Zarathustra, a victory-lover, must turn into a lion and destroy this fallacy, by taking upon himself the creation of a new will to power over all humans: this is what the overman (superman; ubermensch) represents. The challenge in this is the idea of the eternal recurrence: that overcoming is a continuous process. We must overcome again and again. Life says to Zarathustra: "I am that which much always overcome itself" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 227). This riddle, like nature, is so simple it cannot be understood at face value. We can only understand what we do in reaction to Life. Having crept into the heart of life, Zarathustra can creep into the heart of the highest form of life, the wisest, and see the force and violence of the legislation of values by these "value assessors". Life is malleable to the highest spirit, that of the overman. One needs only assert this truth to negate the negation of self-overcoming.
I led you away from these fables when I taught you, "The will is a creator." All 'it was' is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident-- until the creative will says to it, 'But thus I will it; thus I shall will it” (Z 253).
All other truths lead to reverence, whether in the worship of a Christian God or toward a reverence of "justice" and "equality" as seen in modern democratic movements. To Nietzsche, reverence is decadence, and the Last Man's feeble attempts to escape the clutches of godly morality is to revere the morass of nihilism.