Nietzsche admired what he called the "master morality" of the aristocratic class.
But this was a wholly reactionary view. What Nietzsche saw so much beauty in was the crest of the wave just as it was about to break, or perhaps even as it was breaking and returning to the ocean. His despised "slave morality," or Christian morality at the time, was a direct consequence of the overextension and exhaustion of the master morality, a pagan morality which did indeed celebrate the enjoyment of life, and the goodness of the gods, and of strength and power, but which was creating a hell on earth for those left out of the sphere of enjoyment, itself buttressed by the concentration of power.
The weak had no choice but to invert these values. Nietzsche's noble insistence on an embracing of the universe and an enjoyment of life, with its passionate intensity, forced him to sympathize with the oppressors, as he was only experiencing the growing swell of yet another wave, the crest of which was still out of sight for him, which would begin to break in all its sordid glory in the midst of the present age.
There is a strange twist in the ideological fabric, in which the morality of the strong crashes and becomes the morality of the weak, and the morality of the weak gains power until it is again the morality of the strong. This results in a paradoxical situation in which the oppressed secretly bear the values of the strong, and the powerful drape themselves with the mantle of the weak so as to mask the reality of that power.
Nietzsche's view is a peculiarity of the era he was living in. His cultural and spiritual critique, as it relates to our time, was all too prescient. He urged us to embrace life and the cosmos, as opposed to shrinking away from it, and break away from Christian morality, which had become corrupt and riddled with inner contradictions.
Though it has been argued that Nietzsche didn't necessarily favor master morality on an absolute scale, but on a relative one as it related to his time, his ultimate judgement was unavoidably reactionary, as to posit the value-generating self, with its will to power, as an isolated entity, was to completely ignore the consequences of its spontaneous action, and deny the life-field outside of its self-interest, paving the way for the rise of a new master/slave relationship: a capitalist order which drapes itself with claims of equality and democracy, while dominating everything within its reach.
What Nietzsche was experiencing was a curdling of the slave morality,
which proved revolting to his sensibility, but had temporarily solved
the problems of a curdling master morality centuries upon centuries ago.
Perhaps
what we experience today is a curdling of the grim union between a
master and slave morality that was already curdled to begin with.
This evaluation itself takes its shape from the ideological contours of our era. Was it necessary to experience the total failure of an attempt at self value creation - after previous failures of centralized constellations of values - to come to the realization that the good and the bad, the good and the evil, the strong and the weak, all relate to each other and depend on each other in connection?
