The moral rhetoric of the lambs

Humility, and what that name refers to, and what moral authority the humble may claim, all come up together in section 13 of GM^,s first essay. It is an unforgettable passage that pivots the essay in a new direction, as the 13th section does in each of the book's 3 essays.

The first essay's section 13 begins with a fable, building to a “moral” that diagnoses errors about free will. Lambs deplore the way that a bird of prey is wont to swoop down and eat them. They call the bird evil, inferring from its evil nature that whatever is as little as possible a bird of prey and as much like its opposite as possible must be good. It follows that lambs are good! Fair enough, Nietzsche remarks, but understand that the bird might answer that it loves tasty little lambs.³⁴

He almost sounds sympathetic.You should not expect the intended dinner to welcome the sound of the dinner bell.The joke in the fable is that the lambs can say anything they like and it won't affect the bird.The genre of fable lets all animals speak, and here they speak grammati­cal German, yet the two sides aren't talking to each other.The bird does not pick up the lambs' extension of the concept “good”; birds grasp many things but not metaphors.The literal early bird that gets the worm wants that worm to be a wriggling invertebrate, and the fable's bird — restrained in its language, even modest — contents itself with calling one of the little lambs good when it is soft and fatty, as opposed to when it's thoughtful and meek.

Only as a joke would you say that the bird has adopted the lambs' valuation, as it would only be joking to think that a lifetime criminal who is fond of good sushi has begun reforming, and might thereby get on the track to more goodness.

A children's movie might give the fable a happy ending, with a hawk that learns to bleat and chew grass and line up with the sheep to be shorn, and with the farmer's understated praise (clippers in hand),“That'll do, Hawk.” In the exchange that Nietzsche reports, the bird of prey couldn't understand such a thing. Its talk contains no imagination, let alone figures of speech.

Clearly this bird plays the role of kurios. “What is kurios is what has executive power or the power to compel,” C. D. C. Reeve writes explaining Aristotle's use of the word in Physics, “so that a general is kurios over his army.” Thus, when Aristotle identifies the kurios meaning of a word, he means its chief sense.³⁵ The lords are not the fancy talkers; for deep souls, seek a slave.³⁶

Compared to the good in a bird's “good lamb,” the goodness that the sheep claim for them­selves is a euphemizing metaphor. The powerless pledge not to rape or attack, nor to retaliate after being attacked. In plain words all this amounts to is the prudential avoidance of any act beyond the powerless person's capacity.

Thrasymachus correctly heard something false in the humility that Socrates affected, and Aristotle was right to find something inexplicable or mystifying in self-underestimation — only not (says Nietzsche supplying what they missed) for the reason that humility misrepresents facts or that it deceives the lordly types. No one has concocted a conspiracy.The language of humility, operating as metaphors operate, has its origins in a true statement but translates that truth into a new lexicon.The powerless pledge not to exert the power they lack.Thus they misdescribe as a virtue what had only ever been a fact, as if an oyster took itself to be sitting still out of prudence and patience rather than because it lacked limbs. As Nietzsche writes in Daybreak:

The same drive evolves into the painful feeling of cowardice under the impress of the reproach custom has imposed upon this drive: or into the pleasant feeling of humility if it happens that a custom such as the Christian has taken it to its heart and called it good.³⁷

Morality’s descriptions permit facts to generate self-approval.

Some virtues have to know themselves as virtues to deserve that name, and a humility that differs from the factually humble state must be one. But in this case we get a self-description both true and false.

As he does in every section 13 in GM, Nietzsche urges his reader to mistrust language.³⁸ In I.13 the fault lies with the subject-predicate structure of sentences, because that structure tempts us to read natural action as conscious choice. This “moral of the story” that Nietzsche has to offer is explaining what the lambs got wrong about their behavior and the bird’s.³⁹ Because we describe lightning with the sentence “Lightning flashes,” we mistakenly deduce that a thing named lightning had already been there, and then came in and worked its flashing work. It’s a harmless way of thinking about the weather, but when thinking about human action the habit of mind has insidious effects. The facts that aggressors dominate and predators prey — that the strong exhibit strength — emerge from the prism of language refracted into a subject of a certain kind and the action, distinct from that subject, that the subject happens to perform and so might also choose to refrain from doing. Nietzsche says there is no such complex to be analyzed. Being strong means quite simply working that strength, typically by overpowering anyone weaker. Dominators dominate; which is to say, domination takes place.

The story goes that the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser heard B. F. Skinner argue for behaviorism and asked him,“Are you telling me it’s wrong to anthropomorphize people?”’ What Skinner said back we can only guess. But if Morganbesser had come to Nietzsche with that question he may well have answered, “What you want to do is not anthropomorphize, it’s spir­itualize. And yes, all wrong.”

Everyday language about choice does describe selections among available possibilities. I took the bus to work because of the rain, not because I am essentially a bus-rider.

With the same transfer of choice-vocabulary out of its accustomed place into new territory, one speaks of character and disposition as if they too were objects of choice for all subjects. As the forces that produced a long-necked ruminant are metaphorically transformed into that animal’s yearning and forethought, the impotence of the weak and enslaved finds poetical new names if we conceive it as chosen, becoming prudence, meekness, and humility.

Euphemistic metaphors now represent the weak to themselves as virtuous, and not merely virtuous for being weak but virtuous inasmuch as weak. “Lies are turning weakness into an accomplishment.. timid baseness is being turned into ‘humility,’”⁴⁰ deflecting the mean fact into language of excellence and effort.

Later in GM Nietzsche asks “What do they really want?” and answers himself:“to represent justice, love, wisdom, superiority,” to exemplify those traits. “The will of the sick to appear superior in any way...where can it not be found, this will to power of precisely the weakest!”⁴¹ Though newly and perversely reconfigured, the motive at work is the same force that drives everyone: the impulse toward domination and mastery. Neither good nor bad but present eve­rywhere, will to power is a principle of life that always takes positive impulse form. Nietzsche counts it as his achievement to have unveiled positive life force in a domain in which even he had been tempted to find only reactive or negative energy.⁴²

The self-assertion that exists among “the sick” takes involuted form.They are in fact unwor­thy and they declare themselves unworthy, and so far what they say in that declaration is true, except that it's presented as an expensive purchase when it cost them nothing. Thanks to the metaphorical choices they credit themselves with, the sheep can literally make a virtue of neces­sity. In fabulous language: the animal can now call itself a sheep in sheep's clothing, as if it had elected to be sheepish.

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