According to Nietzsche, “slaves” and their “reign” do not in the least subvert or abolish the topography of mastery. They claim only that mastery should be deserved, that one has to be “qualified” to be a master (or that one has to “work hard” in order finally to become a master).
Even God should earn the right to be called God: He seems to be more and more incompetent at performing His job, and men have “reasonable grounds” for doubting that He is equal to His task.
This, for Nietzsche, is “slave morality” at its purest: we want a God/ Master, but a competent one! We want a Master, but a Master who will be dependent upon us, a Master whom we can approve of, and eventually replace with another one. In other words, we want mastery without the Master.
Just as, according to Nietzsche, Christianity perpetuates itself without God, mastery comes to perpetuate itself without masters. It perpetuates itself through knowledge that poses as objective, as absolutely foreign to the “irrational” and tautological dimension of mastery (“it is so, because I say it is so”). But this is still a form of mastery (“the new tyranny of knowledge”), and a very powerful one at that.
The Shortest Shadow Alenca Zupancic
