Beyond Good and Evil · Chapter
On the Nature of Ignobleness and Shared Experience explained
The chapter explores the concept of 'ignobleness' as arising from the commonality of shared experiences and language.
What happens
The chapter explores the concept of 'ignobleness' as arising from the commonality of shared experiences and language. It argues that mutual understanding is based on similar internal experiences, which are forged by living under similar conditions. This leads to the formation of nations and social cohesion. The text posits that the 'easy communicability of need' favors the average and ordinary, promoting a 'gregarious' evolution toward the 'ignoble,' while the refined and unique are isolated and endangered.
Themes in this chapter
Critique of Modernity
The chapter critiques the modern tendency toward the average, the ordinary, and the 'gregarious' as a force that promotes 'ignobleness' and threatens the refined and unique.
Nobility and Order of Rank
Implies a hierarchy where the 'more select, more refined, more unique' stand opposed to the 'similar, ordinary, average, gregarious' masses, whose values betray a different 'structure of soul.'
Characters to notice
- The Narrator
Analyzes the linguistic and psychological foundations of commonality and ignobleness, critiquing Schopenhauer's concept.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
Mentioned dismissively as the source of the 'genius of the species' idea, which the narrator contrasts with his own explanation for caution in relationships.
Key passages
“Words are vocal symbols for ideas; ideas, however, are more or less definite mental symbols for frequently returning and concurring sensations, for groups of sensations.”
Language is built on shared, recurring sensory experiences.
Establishes the empirical and psychological basis of communication.
“The greater the danger, the greater is the need of agreeing quickly and readily about what is necessary; not to misunderstand one another in danger—that is what cannot at all be dispensed with in intercourse.”
Shared danger necessitates and accelerates the development of efficient, common understanding.
Links social cohesion and survival to communicative efficiency.
“The easy communicability of need, which implies ultimately the undergoing only of average and common experiences, must have been the most potent of all the forces which have hitherto operated upon mankind.”
The ability to easily communicate common needs has been the dominant force in human history.
Identifies a central, leveling force in human social evolution.
“The more similar, the more ordinary people, have always had and are still having the advantage; the more select, more refined, more unique, and difficultly comprehensible, are liable to stand alone; they succumb to accidents in their isolation, and seldom propagate themselves.”
Ordinary people thrive through commonality, while the exceptional are isolated and vulnerable.
States the existential risk faced by higher, unique types in a society built on averages.
“One must appeal to immense opposing forces, in order to thwart this natural, all-too-natural progressus in simile, the evolution of man to the similar, the ordinary, the average, the gregarious—to the ignoble—!”
Only powerful counter-forces can stop humanity's natural descent into sameness, mediocrity, herd mentality—into baseness.
A concluding, urgent call for resistance against the trend toward ignoble uniformity.