The Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche

The Genealogy of Morals

By

  • Genre Philosophy
  • Released
  • Size 567.87 kB

Description

First published in German in 1887, The Genealogy of Morals was intended by Nietzsche as a clarification and supplement to his 1882 treatise Beyond Good and Evil. In his last published work, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche described the essays constituting The Genealogy of Morals as “three decisive overtures on the part of a psychologist to a revaluation of all values” and claimed that they were “as regards expression, aspiration, and the art of the unexpected, perhaps the most curious things that have ever been written.”

While this self-assessment is probably an overstatement, The Genealogy of Morals is widely acknowledged to be a unique contribution to philosophy in both content and style. The style is intentionally difficult, contrived by turns to embolden, to repel, and to mislead. “In each case,” he wrote, “the beginning is calculated to mystify; it is cool, scientific, even ironical, intentionally thrust to the fore, intentionally reticent. … At the end, in each case, amid fearful thunderclaps, a new truth shines out between thick clouds.”

In the first essay, Nietzsche introduces the idea of ressentiment, the source and basis (he contends) of the Christian and Jewish religions and the fundamental psychological mechanism of the associated “slave revolt” in morality, an evaluative inversion performed by the oppressed to compensate for, and to enable themselves to endure, their powerlessness and its attendant frustration. Nietzsche contrasts “noble” values, the central opposition of which is that of “good” and “bad” as applied to human beings themselves, with “slavish” values, the central opposition of which is “good” and “evil” as applied to actions. The vaunting of the latter opposition in Christianity represents, according to Nietzsche, “the great insurrection against the dominion of noble values” common to pagan Rome and ancient Greece.

The second essay begins with a discussion of promising and the value of forgetfulness, then traces the origins of guilt and bad conscience to self-directed cruelty, the inward application of a naturally brutal animal instinct that has been prevented from finding outward expression. Nietzsche goes on to supply an analysis of the origin and purpose of punishment in human societies. “Cruelty,” Nietzsche asserts controversially in Ecce Homo, “is here exposed, for the first time, as one of the oldest and most indispensable elements in the foundation of culture.”

“Ascetic ideals,” whose “three great pomp words are poverty, humility, and chastity,” are the subject of the third essay, the longest of the work and perhaps its rhetorical high point. Nietzsche here considers the ascetic ideal as instantiated by artists, scholars, and priests, noting differences between the three groups in the ideal’s expression and effects. He asks why ascetic ideals are so powerful, given that they are, as he believes, generally detrimental to human health and well-being, concluding that the ascetic ideal’s power arose from a historical dearth of competing ideals and that “man will wish Nothingness rather than not wish at all.” Contending with the popular perception that a scientific outlook is in principle opposed to religiosity, the latter being the natural home of ascetic ideals, Nietzsche deduces from his analysis of the “will to truth” that the relation of science to ascetic ideals themselves is not at all antagonistic. In fact, “science represents the progressive force in the inner evolution of that ideal”; even further, “valuation of ascetic ideals inevitably entails valuation of science.” Nietzsche also interestingly implicates himself and his own Genealogy in the preservation of ascetic ideals, identifying the bond between such ideals and philosophy itself as very strong.

The third essay is notable for having been singled out by Nietzsche as an exercise in exposition of an aphorism. Scholars, notably Christopher Janaway, have disputed whether the aphorism on which the essay is supposedly a commentary is the epigraph from his previous work Thus Spake Zarathustra, or instead the first of the essay’s numbered paragraphs.

Nietzsche’s turbulent, haphazardly erudite style has contributed to his mixed reception in philosophy and the broader culture, and to the understanding that he was just as concerned with literary virtuosity as philosophical clarity. Nevertheless, despite the literary complexity of his work, it’s still possible to ask of its content—as Bertrand Russell did in his History of Western Philosophy—“What are we to think of Nietzsche’s doctrines? How far are they true? Are they in any degree useful? Is there in them anything objective, or are they the mere power-fantasies of an invalid?”

“There is no escaping Nietzsche,” wrote H. L. Mencken in 1908. “You may hold him a hissing and a mocking and lift your virtuous skirts as you pass him by, but his roar is in your ears and his blasphemies sink into your mind.” Whether its blasphemous sympathies attract or repel us, and whether its analysis ultimately unsettles or only reinforces our initial ethical presuppositions, the Genealogy of Morals remains an essential work in the history of ideas whose moral and political relevance shows little sign of diminishing.

More Friedrich Nietzsche Books

  • Beyond Good and Evil

    Beyond Good and Evil

    Friedrich Nietzsche & Helen Zimmern

    Philosophy

  • The Gay Science

    The Gay Science

    Friedrich Nietzsche & Walter Kaufmann

    Textbooks

  • Psychology

    Psychology

    Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung & William James

    Psychology

  • Thus Spake Zarathustra

    Thus Spake Zarathustra

    Friedrich Nietzsche & Thomas Common

    Philosophy

  • The Genealogy of Morals

    The Genealogy of Morals

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • The Essential Works of Friedrich Nietzsche

    The Essential Works of Friedrich Nietzsche

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Psychology

  • Más Allá del bien y del Mal

    Más Allá del bien y del Mal

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Fiction & Literature

  • Así Habló Zaratustra

    Así Habló Zaratustra

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • Thus Spoke Zarathustra

    Thus Spoke Zarathustra

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • The Genealogy of Morals

    The Genealogy of Morals

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • Beyond Good and Evil

    Beyond Good and Evil

    Friedrich Nietzsche & Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • El Anticristo

    El Anticristo

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • The Portable Nietzsche

    The Portable Nietzsche

    Friedrich Nietzsche & Walter Kaufmann

    Essays

  • The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche

    The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Classics

  • Beyond Good and Evil

    Beyond Good and Evil

    Friedrich Nietzsche & Jordi Roig

    Philosophy

  • Beyond Good & Evil

    Beyond Good & Evil

    Friedrich Nietzsche & Walter Kaufmann

    Philosophy

  • On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo

    On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo

    Friedrich Nietzsche & Walter Kaufmann

    Philosophy

  • The Birth of Tragedy

    The Birth of Tragedy

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • The Gay Science

    The Gay Science

    Friedrich Nietzsche & Walter Kaufmann

    Philosophy

  • The Will to Power (Volumes I and II)

    The Will to Power (Volumes I and II)

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist

    The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • Beyond Good and Evil

    Beyond Good and Evil

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • The Greatest Classics of All Time

    The Greatest Classics of All Time

    Marcel Proust, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William Shakespeare, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Kahlil Gibran, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, P. B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Von Arnim, D. H. Lawrence, Ann Ward Radcliffe, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, C. S. Lewis, George Weedon Grossmith, H.G. Wells, Wilkie Collins, G. K. Chesterton, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame, George MacDonald, James Matthew Barrie, Mark Twain, Jack London, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Lewis Wallace, L.M. Montgomery, Homer, Plato, Apuleius, Marcus Aurelius, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herman Hesse, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Gaston Leroux, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Voltaire, Charles Baudelaire, Alexandre Dumas, Émile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Miguel de Cervantes, Benito Pérez Galdós, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Dante, Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli, Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Kalidasa, Valmiki, Laozi, Sun Tzu, Confucius, Cao Xueqin, Princess Der Ling, Inazo Nitobe, Kakuzo Okakura & Soseki Natsume

    Literary Criticism

  • Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche

    Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • The Gay Science (The Joyful Wisdom)

    The Gay Science (The Joyful Wisdom)

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • The Ultimate Summer Read Collection

    The Ultimate Summer Read Collection

    Jane Austen, C. S. Lewis, H.G. Wells, Herman Melville, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, William Makepeace Thackeray, P. B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Von Arnim, D. H. Lawrence, Ann Ward Radcliffe, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, George Weedon Grossmith, Willkie Collins, G. K. Chesterton, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame, George MacDonald, James Matthew Barrie, Mark Twain, Jack London, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Kahlil Gibran, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Lewis Wallace, L.M. Montgomery, Homer, Plato, Apuleius, Marcus Aurelius, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herman Hesse, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jules Verne, Marcel Proust, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Gaston Leroux, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Voltaire, Charles Baudelaire, Alexandre Dumas, Émile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Miguel de Cervantes, Benito Pérez Galdós, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Dante, Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli, Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Kalidasa, Valmiki, Laozi, Sun Tzu, Confucius, Cao Xueqin, Princess Der Ling, Inazo Nitobe, Kakuzo Okakura, Soseki Natsume, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Dean Howells, Washington Irving, L. Frank Baum, Theodor Storm, Juan Valera & Rudyard Kipling

    Classics

  • Twilight of the Idols

    Twilight of the Idols

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • Basic Writings of Nietzsche

    Basic Writings of Nietzsche

    Friedrich Nietzsche & Walter Kaufmann

    Philosophy

  • The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)
  • The Will to Power

    The Will to Power

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Literary Fiction

  • Thus Spoke Zarathustra

    Thus Spoke Zarathustra

    Friedrich Nietzsche & R. J. Hollingdale

    Philosophy

  • Beyond Good and Evil (Illustrated + FREE audiobook download link)
  • Cómo Se Filosofa a Martillazos

    Cómo Se Filosofa a Martillazos

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Fiction & Literature

  • The Genealogy of Morals

    The Genealogy of Morals

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • The Gay Science

    The Gay Science

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Psychology

  • Basic Writings of Nietzsche

    Basic Writings of Nietzsche

    Friedrich Nietzsche & Peter Gay

    Philosophy

  • Human, All-Too-Human (Parts I and II)

    Human, All-Too-Human (Parts I and II)

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • Thus Spoke Zarathustra

    Thus Spoke Zarathustra

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • World's Greatest Classics in One Volume

    World's Greatest Classics in One Volume

    Herman Hesse, Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Dante, Henrik Ibsen, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Confucius, William Makepeace Thackeray, P. B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Von Arnim, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, D. H. Lawrence, Ann Ward Radcliffe, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, C. S. Lewis, Weedon Grossmith, H.G. Wells, Wilkie Collins, G. K. Chesterton, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame, George MacDonald, James Matthew Barrie, Mark Twain, Jack London, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Kahlil Gibran, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Lewis Wallace, L.M. Montgomery, Homer, Plato, Apuleius, Marcus Aurelius, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Gaston Leroux, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Voltaire, Charles Baudelaire, Alexandre Dumas, Émile Zola, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Miguel de Cervantes, Benito Pérez Galdós, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli, Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Kalidasa, Valmiki, Laozi, Sun Tzu, Cao Xueqin, Princess Der Ling, Inazo Nitobe, Kakuzo Okakura & Soseki Natsume

    Classics

  • The Will to Power

    The Will to Power

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • The Birth of Tragedy

    The Birth of Tragedy

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • CLASSICS FOR CHRISTMAS

    CLASSICS FOR CHRISTMAS

    William Shakespeare, Louisa May Alcott, Victor Hugo, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Henry David Thoreau, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, Mary Shelley, John Keats, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Von Arnim, D. H. Lawrence, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, C. S. Lewis, George Weedon Grossmith, H.G. Wells, Willkie Collins, G. K. Chesterton, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Robert Louis Stevenson, George MacDonald, James Matthew Barrie, Mark Twain, Jack London, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Walt Whitman, Kahlil Gibran, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Lewis Wallace, L.M. Montgomery, Homer, Plato, Apuleius, Marcus Aurelius, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herman Hesse, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jules Verne, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, Gaston Leroux, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Voltaire, Charles Baudelaire, Alexandre Dumas, Émile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Miguel de Cervantes, Benito Pérez Galdós, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Dante, Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli, Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Kalidasa, Valmiki, Laozi, Sun Tzu, Confucius, Cao Xueqin, Princess Der Ling, Inazo Nitobe, Kakuzo Okakura, Soseki Natsume, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Dean Howells, Washington Irving, L. Frank Baum, Theodor Storm & Rudyard Kipling

    Classics

  • The Masterpieces of World Literature

    The Masterpieces of World Literature

    William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, P. B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Von Arnim, D. H. Lawrence, Ann Ward Radcliffe, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, C. S. Lewis, George Weedon Grossmith, H.G. Wells, Willkie Collins, G. K. Chesterton, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame, George MacDonald, James Matthew Barrie, Mark Twain, Jack London, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Kahlil Gibran, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Lewis Wallace, L.M. Montgomery, Homer, Apuleius, Marcus Aurelius, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Herman Hesse, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jules Verne, Marcel Proust, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Gaston Leroux, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal & Plato

    Literary Criticism

  • Beyond Good and Evil

    Beyond Good and Evil

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • The Greatest Classics Ever Written

    The Greatest Classics Ever Written

    Herman Hesse, Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Dante, Henrik Ibsen, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Confucius, William Makepeace Thackeray, P. B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Von Arnim, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, D. H. Lawrence, Ann Ward Radcliffe, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, C. S. Lewis, Weedon Grossmith, H.G. Wells, Wilkie Collins, G. K. Chesterton, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame, George MacDonald, James Matthew Barrie, Mark Twain, Jack London, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Kahlil Gibran, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Lewis Wallace, L.M. Montgomery, Homer, Plato, Apuleius, Marcus Aurelius, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Gaston Leroux, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Voltaire, Charles Baudelaire, Alexandre Dumas, Émile Zola, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Miguel de Cervantes, Benito Pérez Galdós, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli, Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Kalidasa, Valmiki, Laozi, Sun Tzu, Cao Xueqin, Princess Der Ling, Inazo Nitobe, Kakuzo Okakura & Soseki Natsume

    Classics

  • The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner

    The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • The Antichrist

    The Antichrist

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • .17 Works by 17 Great philosophers, Include:The Republic,The Vision Of Hell, Purgatory, And Paradise,Sun Tzu On The Art Of War,Walden

    .17 Works by 17 Great philosophers, Include:The Republic,The Vision Of Hell, Purgatory, And Paradise,Sun Tzu On The Art Of War,Walden

    Plato, Dante Alighieri, Sun Wu, Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Homer, Confucius, Xenophon, Aristotle, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Adam Smith, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, John Locke, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau & Ronghua Xiang

    Classics

  • Beyond Good and Evil

    Beyond Good and Evil

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Philosophy

  • The Birth of Tragedy

    The Birth of Tragedy

    Friedrich Nietzsche, Michael Tanner & Shaun Whiteside

    Philosophy