Saturday, June 22, 2013

Morality of Custom and Individuality

According to #9 of Daybreak, Master Morality and Slave Morality are two perspectives on one and the same Morality of Custom.  Furthermore, clearly distinguished from both, later in the passage, is the "morality of self-control and temperance", which can be classified as what might be called the 'Morality of Individual Self-Cultivation'. In contrast, #19 of Beyond Good and Evil conflates the Master Morality of Custom and the Morality of Individual Self-Cultivation, while #2 of the second essay of the Genealogy of Morals subsumes the latter as a special case of the Morality of Custom.  Now, underlying these shifting accounts is a deeper problem than an explanation for an apparent lack of consistency.  For, a Morality of Custom has no capacity to recognize Individuality, so Nietzsche's derivation of any individualistic Morality, as each of the accounts entails, is groundless in all the cases.  The difficulty is illustrated in current American Morality of Custom, in which the 'Individual' is based merely on the concept of the 'Consumer'. 

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