Nietzsche's Etymology of Noble Morality
Part 1: Words Remember
A brief excursion into Nietzsche's Will-to-Power etymology, courtesy of his unusually essayistic On the Genealogy of Morality (Kaufmann translation).
In this short yet no less potent passage, the linguistic meaning of “good” is dragged rather unceremoniously away from its Protestant-approved moral pedestal and returned to its older, less Sunday-polite and decisively Pagan habitat: the vocabulary of self-determined hierarchy, power, sovereign honour, and self-assertion. Among the noble classes of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome (and likely their Nordic counterparts), the term did not denote virtue in any modern sense, but something far more visceral and immediate. The “good” were simply those who were by virtue of their Being; those who possessed, commanded, and affirmed with an unapologetically Indo-European aplomb (simply imagine the Eurasian spread of the Western Steppe Herders and subsequently insisting upon their ‘Sky-Father’ ontology in lieu of the poor, unsuspecting Anatolians). The rest, by contrast, were an afterthought at best.
Nietzsche’s rebelliousness here lies in showing how these distinctions remain in language long after the existential-ontological conditions of their creators have faded. In other words, words remember; they harbour the residual impressions of geographical and colonial conquest, of self-assigned and self-assured hierarchy, and of a time when the concept of ‘capital-T’ Truthfulness was less a meta-cognitive moral quality, as it is today, than a mark of belonging to a certain kind of host – a man or culture defined by such differentiation.
Part 2: The Morality in Question
First published in 1887 and arguably the most forensically destructive work Nietzsche ever produced, the GOM finds him at his most philologically combative, ransacking the etymological record of European languages for evidence of something most moral philosophy had been studiously declining to notice; i.e., that the concepts of "good" and "bad" did not originate as ethical categories at all, but as aristocratic ones.
The argument is characteristically compressed and characteristically provocative. Nietzsche traces the root meanings of words designating goodness across Greek, Latin, Celtic, Germanic, and Aryan linguistic traditions and finds, with a consistency he clearly regards as damning, that they overwhelmingly resolve into designations of power, nobility, and racial or physical superiority – esthlos, the Greek word for good, meaning fundamentally the real, the actual, the true, with noble truthfulness arriving as a secondary elaboration rather than a primary moral instinct; bonus traced back through duonus to the warrior, the “man of strife”; the Germanic gut linked tentatively to the Goths and through them to a conception of “the godlike”. Goodness, in other words, was not originally something you did. It was something you were by birth, by blood, by the visible, undeniable fact of your superiority over those you, theoretically speaking, view as beneath you.
What makes the passage philosophically potent rather than merely historically interesting is the epistemological implication Nietzsche is building towards, which he will detonate more fully in the sections that follow. If the moral vocabulary we have inherited was coined by the powerful to describe themselves (thus, if "good" is simply what the noble called the noble, and "bad" merely what they called everyone else), then the entire subsequent history of Western ethics, with its elaborate apparatus of foundational, universal obligation and transcendent moral law in the thoroughly Kantian sense, begins to look significantly less like the discovery of objective truth and considerably more like a very successful rebranding exercise. The slave revolt in morality, as Nietzsche will have it, didn't so much as overthrow the Master's values as it had inverted them, then dressing this inversion in the language of the divine and the universal, and convincing everyone concerned that this was an improvement.
The parenthetical aside on democracy, anarchism, and the physiological resurgence of the “pre-Aryan” substrate – idiosyncratically bracketed as though it were a minor digression rather than an incendiary aside, no less – is Nietzsche at his most deliberately disquieting and has, quite understandably, generated more than its fair share of subsequent discomfort. It is worth reading carefully and in context rather than in the excerpted, de-contextualised form in which it tends to circulate within modern academic discourses, since what Nietzsche is doing here is less a racial prescription than a reliably cold-eyed diagnostic. Hence, the observation that history moves in longer biological and cultural cycles than glib political theory tends to account for, and that what presents itself as progressive emancipation might equally be read, from sufficient historical distance, as the reassertion of the suppressed. Whether one finds such an observation bracing or repellent rather depends, as with most of Nietzsche's oeuvre, on one's tolerance for having comfortable assumptions handled without clean tools and salubrious gloves.
Granted, this is not a comfortable line of thought in today's common Western parlance, nor is it meant to be. The terminology Nietzsche adopted in this excerpt may very well be regarded as tasteless or even “problematic” in today’s hyper-policing optics of consciousness. But it does raise a question worth keeping at the back of one’s mind: when we speak of “good” as the utmost virtue, whose voice(s) are we really reverberating?
I may venture to declare that such a simple insight is not merely worth pondering today; it is, in fact, essential for discerning the social, cultural, and political currents of contemporary Western-democratic discourse.
Below is the word-for-word transcription from the video to aid rhythm and reader comprehension. The bold print denotes the parts I skipped over in the recording for the purpose of listener understanding, as reading these asides may have proven needlessly convoluted in the context of those unfamiliar with the text.
The Genealogy of Morality
First Essay, Section 5
[With regard to our problem, which may on good grounds be called a quiet problem and one which fastidiously directs itself to few ears,] it is of no small interest to ascertain that through those words and roots which designate "good" there frequently still shines the most important nuance by virtue of which the noble felt to be men of a higher rank. Granted that, in the majority of cases, they designate themselves simply by their superiority in power ( as 'the powerful," "the masters," "the commanders") or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority, for example, as "the rich," "the possessors" (this is the meaning of arya; and of corresponding words in Iranian and Slavic). But they also do it by a typical character trait: and this is the case that concerns us here, They call themselves, for instance, "'the truthful"; this is so above all of the Greek nobility, whose mouthpiece is the Megarian poet Theognis. The root of the word coined for this, esthlos, signifies one who is, who possesses reality, who is actual, who is true; then, with a subjective turn, the true as the truthful: in this phase of conceptual transformation it becomes a slogan and catchword of the nobility and passes over entirely into the sense of "noble," as distinct from the lying common man, which is what Theognis takes him to be and how he describes him—until finally, after the decline of the nobility, the word is left to designate nobility of soul and becomes as it were ripe and sweet. In the word kakos, as in deilos (the plebeian in contradistinction to the agathos), cowardice is emphasised: this perhaps gives an indication in which direction one should seek the etymological origin of agathos, which is susceptible of several interpretations. The Latin malus (beside which I set melas) may designate the common man as the dark-coloured, above all as the black-haired man, as the pre-Aryan occupant of the soil of Italy who was distinguished most obviously from the blond, that is Aryan, conqueror race by his colour; Gaelic, at any rate, offers us a precisely similar case—fin (for example in the name Fin-Gal), the distinguishing word for nobility, finally for the good, noble, pure, originally meant the blond-headed, in contradistinction to the dark, black-haired aboriginal inhabitants.
The Celts, by the way, were definitely a blond race; it is wrong to associate traces of an essentially dark-haired people which appear on the more careful ethnographical maps of Germany with any sort of Celtic origin or blood-mixture, as Virchow still does: it is rather the pre-Aryan people of Germany who emerge in these places. (The same is true for virtually all Europe: the suppressed race has gradually recovered the upper hand again, in colouring, shortness of skull, perhaps even in the intellectual and social instincts: who can say whether modern democracy, even more modern anarchism and especially that inclination for “commune,” for the most primitive form of society, which is now shared by all the socialists of Europe, does not signify in the main a tremendous counterattack—and that the conqueror and master race, the Aryan, is not succumbing physiologically, too?
I believe I may venture to interpret the Latin bonus as "the warrior," provided I am right in tracing bonus back to an earlier duonus (compare bellum = duellum = duen-lum, which seems to me to contain duonus). Therefore bonus as the man of strife, of dissention (duo), as the man of war: one sees what constituted the "goodness" of a man in ancient Rome. Our German gut [good] even: does it not signify "the godlike," the man of "godlike race"? And is it not identical with the popular (originally noble) name of the Goths? The grounds for this conjecture cannot be dealt with here—
References:
Transcribed text for Icelation Works Press; Basic Writings, translated by Walter Kaufmann, 1967; reprint by Modern Library Classics, 2000.
Video art: a classical depiction of Ingimund, the 10th century Norse-Gaelic (Fin-Gal) settler of Wirral & West Lancashire, England.
Watch on YouTube
Music track: Torden
Essay and video narration by Jack Dolan