The Nature of Political Theory

238 The Nature of Political Theory

of detailed self-examination of how the self is formed historically. The genealogy of
morals is indeed at the same time the genealogy of the modern self, via customary
moralities. Genealogy thus has the effect of subverting the deep assumptions of both
morality and selfhood. It also provides an arbitrary chart of the formation of the self
and the way it both constructs and disciplines itself. Genealogy also shows how we
become our own prison wardens. We entrap ourselves in moral webs of our own
making and feel guilt, twinges of conscience, and anxiety. Each morality has its own
core of technicians and rule-structures who administer the processes—thus psycho-
therapists, priests, confessions, and the like. Even the idea of an ‘interior self’ is a
perspective created, not discovered. Self-discovery of this interior self is another more
refined form of self-entrapment.
Nietzsche’s idea that morality and the self (as mentioned earlier) are the creation
of power, leads to a more positive conception of the future of morality. However, it is
important to realize that Nietzsche’s concept of power is not that of an overt physical
force. There is no Hobbesian sovereign forcing actions on us through legal penalties.
It is a more psychological process of immense subtlety. The crucial point is that
morality can either be taken inauthentically, or it can be understood genealogically
for what it actually is. To understand it for what it isisto realize that morality is
neither a true nor false idea. These are inappropriate adjectives. Morality is rather
a manifestation of the will to power. It is a created and self-sustainedperspective
or convention. It has no meaning above or beyond that perspective. It is neither
universal, reasonable, teleologically appropriate, nor natural to us. To adopt morality
as ifit had some kind of inner or outer purpose is to treat it inauthentically. It is to
allow one’s self to be ‘vivisected’ through notions such as conscience or guilt. It is to
adopt the slave or herd position. The inauthentic slave mind (typical of Christianity
or liberalism to Nietzsche) sees morals as external imperatives or rules validated by a
god, reason, the inner self, or society. However, to grasp morality as the product of
a will to power—an individual or group imposing their will upon the chaotic flux of
the world through some custom or convention—is to move (usually via some form
of genealogical scrutiny) beyond the realm of morality. When one grasps the source
of morals as being the will to power, one has already begun to overcome one’s self or
the perception formed of oneself as a moral being. Nietzsche quite explicitly calls this
‘self-overcoming’. It is also a realization of one’s own ‘will to power’, and at the same
time is a revaluation of all values.
This grasp of the constitutive aesthetic character of the self as a will to power means
that the individual subject no longer abides by ‘others’ moralities’. Slave morality no
longer has any hold. The subject has gone beyond good and evil in the usual sense.
Individuals can now ‘be themselves’. This is the essence of Nietzsche’s call to ‘live
dangerously’. It is an affirmation of life as one’s own creation. One has overcome
oneself. This again is the core of Nietzsche’s concept of the overman (übermensch)
and an important aspect of his doctrine of aristocratic radicalism.^6 It is essentially a
psychological thesis concerned with rising above the external and internal restrictions
placed upon us by traditional metaphysics, religion, and morality and grasping the
practical and ontological core of perspectivism. This is the noble human agent who