Humility as mass domestication

The other grandiose anti-Socratic character in Plato is Callicles, in the Gorgias, who gripes about morality in language reminiscent of Nietzsche's. Callicles is an aristocratic type like Thrasymachus and similarly impatient with Socrates.Where Thrasymachus scoffed at Socrates' interrogative method, Callicles withdraws from their conversation, so that Socrates has to pose his questions to himself and answer them alone.

But Callicles really sounds Nietzschean when he goes on a tear against morality. When E. R. Dodds prepared a Greek edition of the Gorgias in 1959, he added an appendix outlining the obvious parallels. Sixty years ago, Nietzsche's works were less widely known among Anglophone readers, but even so these parallels stood out. Life's heroes (Callicles argues) find themselves shackled by morality, until a man comes along who possesses “enough of a nature” to free him­self from “our writings and tricks and incantations and laws, all of which are against nature,”²⁶ as if human society had magical forces available to it powerful enough to outdo nature's order.²⁷

Exceptional humans aside, morality succeeds in its efforts at humbling heroes.And this is the meaning of humility: law's uncanny victory over nature. It looks like humiliation. The dictum that humility is a virtue (and that virtue must be humility) turns the man who's big enough to fill the natural world into a citizen content with occupying his social niche. Now humility is not only false but widespread, standing everywhere as a sign of falsehood.

Several beyond-the-law figures turn up in GM reminiscent of Callicles' hero naturally strong enough to escape convention. We have the man who has earned the right to make a promise; the oppressors who create new states, heedless of nonsense about “social contract”; the “beasts of prey” who relax with rape and arson, never feeling a moment's remorse.²⁸ The complaint that a tyrannizing social order keeps such types from acting in accord with their natures seems to have traveled straight from the Gorgias through Crime and Punishment, whose Raskolnikov has written an article that voices the same complaint.²⁹ Even without going back to Plato, Nietzsche could have inherited the Calliclean theory through Dostoevsky.

Humility understood as an oppressed condition, therefore a sign of how slave morality has conquered natures nobler than its own, would account for the disparaging language that Nietzsche saves for this erstwhile virtue. And GM does acknowledge the motives that people have for suppressing the nobler natures. Contemplating “sickly” and “weak” human specimens of the present from whom the powerful type needs to be protected, Nietzsche speaks of “the conspiracy of those who suffer against those who are successful and victorious.” Those enfee­bled conspirators slander the healthy. “How much sugared, slimy, humble humility [demuthige Ergebung] swims in their eyes!”³⁰

The first essay of the book has already announced itself as revealing how the “slave revolt in morality” began.³¹ Assuming the slaves are shrewd enough, their revolt succeeds, and their humility becomes the law of the land.

As close as Nietzsche's frustration comes to Callicles', reading nomos as Callicles and Raskolnikov do misses something about Nietzsche's lament over modern morality. Those two follow the social-contract argument in discovering the imprisoning effects of convention eve­rywhere.

Nietzsche would have had good reason to correct the reading of him that makes humility the effect of social organization as such, and so a feature of all morality.That reading plays into the hands of the modern morality that Nietzsche resists, and resists specifically for its claim to represent the only possible moral values. Nietzsche sees something that he suspects modern civilization of having forgotten. Another option existed once, the morality of the masters, still a code and principle and value even if no longer (or not yet) available. The way of the masters is a morality, not amorality. Callicles' heartlessness is in the right place, but his complaint about nomos and petty virtue undoes the basis that Nietzsche offers for criticizing those virtues, namely that these examples fail as virtues rather than because all virtue fails. The petty virtues fail, that is, by comparison with the traits of those long-ago fine people that deserved the name of vir­tue. Human society as such does not have to make humility a virtue, for look at the marvelous societies that never did so.

Callicles differs from Thrasymachus and Aristotle in smelling conspiracy and power behind the forces for humility. This is also the point at which Nietzsche parts ways with Callicles, despite his own comments about the triumph of slave morality.³³ Callicles announces the conspiracy of the weak in order to alert the strong and shield them; Nietzsche expects the participants in the slave revolt to be the ones wounded by his analysis, and he presents his analysis with them as his audience, for the purpose of wounding them.They conspired, if you want to put it that way, without having told themselves about the plan.

Regarding humility, Nietzsche would say what neither Callicles nor Raskolnikov would dream of saying, that the really puzzling aspect of humility derives not from humble people's shrewd and sly secretiveness about their motives, but the opposite: that they have rendered themselves unintelligible to themselves; that they are repeating rumors about their inward states until they believe the rumors might be on to something; that they cling to a self-interpretation as if it were a fact, and then imagine that non-fact to demonstrate their moral superiority.They call on themselves to esteem themselves as less than they are worth, thereby somehow simulta­neously dishonoring themselves and honoring their effort at undervaluing themselves.

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