I recently had an idea after ruminating on Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals", which I actually read a long time ago and do not have a copy of anymore, so forgive me if my memory is faulty. None of my peers are interested in or familiar with this material, so I thought I would solicit feedback here, since I feel that my idea is perhaps on the right track, and I presume you are more likely than anyone to be familiar with discussions that involve critical analysis of broad questions.
Nietzsche's writing is erratic and I often feel that he is grasping at formalized theories without ever stating them explicitly. In Genealogy, he suggests that the semantic distinctions between good and bad/good and evil are relatively recent. He suggests that originally the only descriptors were words like "Strong", "beautiful", "stupid", "poor", etc., and that the desirability or undesirability of these descriptors was "presupposed"- there was no need to say, "It's good to be strong", you just knew that you wanted to be strong, but making an association between what you want and another word (good) wasn't necessary.
Nietzsche suggests that the good/bad distinction was a Jewish invention designed to distract the user from the obvious desirability or undesirability of a certain quality: a slave cannot call himself wealthy or educated, but he can call himself good, because good is merely an abstraction. If I recall correctly, Nietzsche suggests that this process of using an abstraction to reverse the mental stress of associating oneself with (presumed) negative qualities is exemplified by Jesus in Matthew chapter 5:
…Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4 Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
5 Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
7 Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
8 Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
9 Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
10 Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Where blessed is the abstraction that allows one to "feel better" about one's less-than-desirable circumstances.
I am not sure that the binary good/bad or good/evil distinction was a Jewish invention, but it seems likely that there was a specific juncture at which they were invented. After all, the original users of language seem much more likely to have created neologisms that capture experiences in a consistent manner. We can consistently experience someone's physical strength, but for a primitive person to say of a strong person, "He is good" seems unlikely, since that would require an additional semantic association between strength and so-called goodness.
At another point in the book, I recall Nietzsche discussing the way in which subject-verb distinctions are "redundant". He seems to be suggesting that common-noun subjects result from the natural tendency of languages to "prefer" lexical economy (not sure if those are the correct words. What I mean is, to minimize the amount of effort involved in representing sufficiently common experiences by creating a neologism), but that they result in a technically-erroneous metaphysical perspective: that the subject "exists". For example, "lightning strikes" implies that there is something that is doing the striking, when in fact the action or experience of the striking is all there "is" (sorry if that sentence is awkward, I tried). Common noun subjects are thus "superimposed" linguistic "economizers" (is that a word?) of common events. I seem to recall this brief discussion as seeming contextually tangential and lacking a conclusive purpose, but a thesis has come to me from seemingly nowhere which I interpret as being a synthesis of the two ideas that I have summarized.
I struggle to come up with a formal thesis statement, but this is my attempt to relate the general idea. According to this wikipedia article, the Sanskrit grammarian Śākaṭāyana proposed in 500 BC that "verbs represent ontologically prior categories, and that all nouns are etymologically derived from actions." To me this makes sense because it is hard to conceive of a useful language that has nouns but not verbs. So, first there were words like "Come", "Leave", "Sex", "Hunt". I propose that the first subjects were proper nouns used as a means of directing the action of a verb to a specific individual in a group (in a group of people "Prometheus + leave"). Then common nouns were created to facilitate communication about common experiences. For example, to a primitive culture, the Sun is very important because its actions dictate very important considerations like when it is dark, when it is warm, and when food grows, so a name- just like the other names, which to this point are used to make references to people- is created to facilitate discussion about it ("Sun + leave" means something about the Sun going down, depending on the context).
First I want to suggest the possibility that this grouping of a name and an action with an environmentally signficant phenomenon resulted in the most primitive forms of what is now called polytheism. Verbs were originally coupled with proper nouns as a form of giving commands, but these new nouns that correspond to environmentally significant phenomena cannot be commanded to do anything, they can only be supplicated. The most primitive forms of polytheism thus reflected primitive peoples' attempt to supplicate desirable environmental conditions. Furthermore, I will suggest the possibility that the level of importance of a particular deity (which is a concept they did not have, Aten was the Sun to the egyptians, not the "Sun god") corresponds to the role it plays in facilitating survival and prosperity for a particular society.
At some point in the development of language, names began to appear which correspond to more abstract kinds of experience; for example, war or intoxication. I want to suggest the possibility that more recent versions of polytheism resulted from the same process that previously deified more concrete experiences when that process came into interaction with these new abstract names. The result is something like Greek mythology, in which you have Ares and Dionysus.
Eventually- for whatever reason- some society created the common name that corresponds to the English word Good- like Nietzsche says. At this juncture, habituation to the supplication of beings who cannot be commanded necessitated the introduction of a deity corresponding to the new name, Good. I propose that this is the origin of monotheistic belief structures. Perhaps this move was desirable because of the increasingly apparent futility of supplicating names that correspond to concrete experiences. Good, on the other hand, is a concept so abstract that the futility of supplicating it is much easier to ignore or explain away . Good allows us to have hope where previously we only suffered:
10 [Good] are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
This last piece is the part I am most unsure about. Can anyone else with a better working knowledge of Nietzsche or of linguistic anthropology, or simply better critical reasoning abilities, give me feedback on this thought? Have I gone too far? Are there considerations I am ignoring? Thank you in advance for taking the time to read and respond to my admittedly long-winded post.
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