Nietzsche intensifies his attack on conventional morality in his next two books, Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). In both works he rehearses his influential distinction between master (or noble) morality and slave morality. Whereas the master morality takes its shape and direction from an originating act of self-affirmation, by means of which the master deems “good” everything about and pertaining to him, the slave morality originates in the slave's designation of his tormentors as “evil.” Only as an afterthought, and in contrast to his “evil” oppressors, does the slave deem himself “good.” According to Nietzsche, the master morality celebrates passion, commitment, struggle, and immediacy, whereas the slave morality honours the virtues of suffering, deprivation, passivity, and psychological cunning.
In both books, Nietzsche advances the controversial thesis that contemporary European (or Christian) morality is in fact descended from a slave morality. Although freed from the material conditions of slavery, modern people have become habituated to serve as their own slave masters. Burdened by guilt and wearied by relentless self-surveillance, moderns impose upon themselves the defining values of slavery. Nietzsche further conjectures that protracted adherence to a descendant version of the slave morality may have crippled moderns beyond repair, such that a renaissance of nobility may no longer be possible.
In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche extends his critique of conventional morality to include the scholarly practice of science (Wissenschaft). Here he investigates the role of science in the reign of the ascetic ideal, hoping to expose contemporary practitioners of science as unwittingly honouring the values of declining life - even as they increasingly turn their research to matters related to health, evolution, leisure, and longevity. The problem with the contemporary practice of science, he explains, lies in its failure thus far to determine the actual value of truth; the scientific enterprise thus remains stubbornly unscientific with respect to itself. He consequently asserts that the otherwise unimpeachable “will to truth” masks a more basic expression of faith in truth. It is in this sense that science serves the ascetic ideal, for it proceeds under the unquestioned assumption that possession of the truth will redeem humankind, which implies that humankind stands in need of redemption. Although science continues to sponsor exciting discoveries, its dependence on the ascetic ideal implicates all such discoveries in the ongoing assault on our beleaguered affects. This assault in turn hastens the advent of the “will to nothingness,” (Kaufmann, 1968, p35) or nihilism “death of god” (ibid), which Nietzsche identifies as the will never to will again.
Nietzsche said little about emerging technologies, despite availing himself of railways, typewriters, experimental drugs, postal systems, and other innovations of the late nineteenth century. He was deeply suspicious, however, of the rise of technology in general, which he regarded as symptomatic of advancing cultural decay. He was particularly critical of the technologies marshalled in support of European imperial expansion. He regarded the aspiration to empire as an organized distraction from the crisis of European culture. In his view, the pursuit of imperial possessions would not solve the problem of European decadence but simply export it across the globe.
Nietzsche's productive philosophical career ended in 1888. At the beginning of the next year he suffered a nervous breakdown. After a brief stay in a Jena sanatorium, he was placed in the care of his mother, who relocated him to her home in Naumburg. Following his death in Weimar on August 25, his sister continued her appropriation of his philosophical teachings, eventually steering them into convergence with the ideology that soon would inform National Socialism. That Nietzsche would have repudiated any such alliance did not deter Elisabeth from presenting her brother's ideas as providing the philosophical inspiration for Hitler's Reich.