When he said if a tree is going to grow high, its roots have to go deep into “evil” he was not encouraging us to continue with the style of moral reasoning that bifurcates the world into good and evil. In fact, this manner of expression was designed to get us to do exactly the opposite, which was to see that growth is only a possibility if one is planted deeply in manure.
I think this is a difficult point to grasp, especially because we often have had some kind of training to view morality as based on an exclusion principle. We exclude attitudes and behaviors and ideas and so on, on the basis that they are, or would be “immoral”.
But rather than making us more moral, this approach to moral reasoning makes us superficial.
I can try to illustrate how I have experienced this myself. It will be at the risk of offending people’s morality about what should or should not be said, and also their morality as to what it means to be different from others and how one should not seem to big note (aggrandize) oneself by claiming an important difference.
Ok, here goes.
The thing is, ever since I migrated to the industrially advanced world, in the mid-eighties, when I was actually in my mid-teens, I have always found it to be beset with a kind of creepy shallowness. I found, for instance, that the notion of friendship was at best superficial or nonexistent.
“Friends” simply did not wish to get themselves dirty by putting themselves out of their comfort zone to join you where you are. They would say, “Oh, no. That isn’t who I am. I’m not a gym-going sort of a person. I don’t like the way that others look at me in gym attire.”
And so on. Everything was like this. In every respect, there was intolerance for the slightest bit of “dirt” (discomfort) and the roots of these trees (the personalities) were not that deep.
And everything else was like this in the advanced world. When I tried to explain the roots of my African experience, everyone was like, “Oh, no. That is dirty. We cannot touch that.”
It was even impossible to find a psychological therapist who would listen to me, because the minute I narrated something outside of an experience that would occur in the developed world, it was like, “Oh, no. That it too much dirt.” And then I would be either heavily berated for saying things that were outside the range of another person’s experience, or be gently led back to a position of having to relate my unrelatable experiences within a much narrower scope, that made things seem more comprehensible again.
So, fear of dirt — which is a moral emotion — made it so that people could not really be friends with me, in any meaningful way, and could not offer their professional services effectively for counselling.
And I think this is the psychology that Nietzsche was trying to get at when he said that in order to grow high, our roots have to go more deeply into evil.
Certainly he was not counselling us to be even more stupid, for instance to backstab and connive and to be “evil”.
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