Nietzsche and The Constitution
March 3, 2005
In comprehending Friedrich Nietzsche’s “The Geanealogy of Morals,” I took an historical view on the content he presents. It is through this view that Nietzsche’s ideas of morals and the origin and use of morals begin to look similar to the workings of a written constitution. The questions concerning the written constitution, which have caused much of the uproar in European history, are ‘Who is right?’ and ‘How is that viewpoint going to be written down?’ The ‘Who is right?’ in most cases, turns out to be the ones in power. They are the ones who decide how life will be governed. They are the ones who write down what will be considered good and what will be considered evil. They are the ones who decide how those aspects of life, thought of as good and evil, will be carried out. Nietzsche asks, under what conditions did man invent for himself those judgments of good and evil and what intrinsic value do they possess in themselves? Both Nietzsche and a historical view of political turmoil in the construction of a constitution lead to the point that the origins of good came from people of power, and in turn, the ones who were not in power, decided to take a stance against the view of the powerful on good and to create a completely different meaning of good based on a direct opposition to the ones in power. Nietzsche said that language itself is the expression of the power of the masters. Language dictates humanity’s mindset on morals. The constitution dictates humanity’s mindset on morals. Humans become trained to view themselves through a viewpoint formulated from a distant place and a distant time, and this viewpoint creates the motivation in humans to obey the morals stated as good and to stay away from the ones stated as bad. The motivation is created most evidently through the fear of punishment for doing bad and likewise because of praise for doing good.
Nietzsche said that certain ideas have got to be made fixed with the object of hypnotizing the whole nervous and intellectual system through these fixed ideas. Ideas become fixed by forgetting. This means people forget the origin of an idea, but continue to see and use the idea. By continuing to use an idea, the idea will transform the human’s psyche, ideology, and, as Nietzsche says, the nervous system. The idea becomes a part of the human and the human’s society. It can then transform and change just as anything changes over time. Eventually, the idea can become a completely different idea on the surface because it evolves along side human society, but still retains the value of the idea unconsciously. People get lost in the idea and forget the meaning. The metaphor, or the word, takes the place of the meaning of the idea and its origin.
A written constitution acts in a similar way. During the creation of most, if not all, written constitutions, there was a great deal of political and physical violence in society regarding tensions on who had the right to dictate how people live their life? The right to run a group of people stems back further than the constitution, but for this analysis, the constitution will signify a starting point to a new type of ruling. The right to have input on the creation of a constitution is equally as significant as the written constitution itself. Wars, in a certain sense, were fought between people of a single nation. People in power during the creation process had the most power to add their input. People of lesser power did not have as much opportunity to add their input, yet everyone is included in the end product of the constitution. A direct opposition between powers develops from this. Actually, as in the French Revolution, a number of oppositions were created from the many different statuses of power. Everyone had their ideas on how their lives should be controlled. Everyone had their ideas as to what is good and what is bad. Once the decision is made on who gets to add their input, although historically this happens over many years and continues to happen even after the document is finalized, the actual writing can begin. At the beginning of the writing, there exists a difference in what is considered good and what is considered bad, and the people in power proclaim their own view as good. Consideration for the people who are not the writers of the document is a factor in the writers’ input, but even those ideas, or inklings, are a representation. The writers can only imagine what people feel and think. Their view will always be biased based on their own ideology. As history reveals, consideration for the opposition was not much of an influence to the creators because self-interest and obtaining self-interest had more bearing than pleasing the people with no say.
Under the conditions that people in power created the constitution and their ideas of good and bad became written in the constitution as a way of life, the withstanding of the constitution becomes a valuation on how future generations view morals. As long as the constitution remains, the constitution’s guidelines will dictate how people view the world. Those guidelines will sink into the psyche and the nervous system of the society they guide. A society will learn to live according to a constitution’s guidelines and they will become the constitution’s guidelines. That is to say that when a child is born into a life ruled by a constitution, the child will adapt to the environment the rules create. What someone does not know cannot possibly have an affect on their psychology. Over time, the opposition’s view on morals will fade because nothing is standing them up. The written word lasts longer than the word passed on orally. As the oppositional view on morals fades, the written view grows. Over time, the writing becomes all that is left of the views. The origin gets lost in the world of history and all that is left is the world the constitution has created.
I would like to make it clear that the oppositional view on good and evil, the ones that did not become a part of the constitution, still exist. These views faded and were drowned out by the constitution, but they still exist. Just as the constitution changes and evolves with society, the oppositional views on morals evolve with society, and their origin also becomes forgotten, so what is left is a sense of rebellion in society. This sense of rebellion creates the drive to challenge the written view, saying something is not right here. Each view takes a stance against the other, and not a stance based on whether one view is actually better than the other.
Perhaps, the creators of the constitution’s views on morals, the views of the people who fought and won, are the best possible view to follow. Through a positivist mode of thinking, the morals of a society based on a constitution are the best morals for humanity because they have developed the furthest. Through a Darwinian mode of thought, these morals are the best because they have evolved into the most powerful and strongest set of morals. Finally, through a Nietzscheian mode of thought, the constitution’s morals are the best because people just don’t know otherwise. People are fools to themselves. Morals don’t even exist. They are figments of the imagination created to give humans a clue as to who they are and what they are doing on this planet.
