The Genealogy of Morals [Paperback]

 

 

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This particular piece of Nietzsche's writing is a marvelous work - it is interesting and lively, much as Nietzsche's own writing and tendency toward the dramatic was noted by his contemporaries.

Nietzsche's father was a Lutheran minister, but he died five years after Nietzsche's birth in 1844. Nietzsche was raised by his mother, grandmother and aunts; later in his life, his sister would become executor of his estate (after Nietzsche had become incapable of managing his own affairs) and reshape his philosophy and writings in her own idea - this becomes a running motif in later anthologies of Nietzsche; editors can quote and clip to fit their own agendas. In some ways, that is true of the text here, but in much less inappropriate ways than others, particularly Nietzsche's first editor, his sister.

Nietzsche was a star pupil from his earliest days at university in Bonn and Leipzig. His formal study was in classical philology, but his attentions turned in various directions quickly during his writing and professional life - he had an intense interest in drama and the arts, with Wagner's music and Greek drama in principal interest. His first book was devoted to these topics - 'The Birth of Tragedy'. It was not highly regarded at the time, but has since become much more appreciated as an anticipation of later developments in philosophy and aesthetics.

Nietzsche's life after this period was a very choppy one - he left the university, claiming illness, and while this developed later to be a true situation, at the time is was probably academic politics and difficulties fitting in with the establishment he was trying to break. He had a formal falling-out with Wagner, even writing later a piece entitled ' Nietzsche contra Wagner', finished just a few week prior to his going insane.

In another edition, Walter Kaufmann states that Nietzsche's real career took off after his active life was over; under his sister's direction, many of the writings Nietzsche had managed to do and not get published, or which were published but forgotten, really took off in major directions. While his major works of Zarathustra, Ecce Homo, Will to Power and Genealogy of Morals were in various editions of disrepair (indeed, the Will to Power was never more complete than a series of notes), Nietzsche had a knack for language that made him very quotable, and his influence continued to grow well into the first half of the twentieth century, influencing art, philosophy, history, and politics in dramatic ways, if not always the ways in which Nietzsche envisioned.

For example, Nietzsche was not particularly impressed with the 'typical' German anti-semitism, which later erupted into the Nazi movement. He considered it rather bourgeois, and while he undoubted had his own issues with Jews (Nietzsche had issues with almost everyone, particularly any group, Christians included, who had a religious connection), the Nazi use of Nietzsche's work owes more to Nietzsche's sister's influence than anyone else.

'The Genealogy of Morals' is perhaps the closest in form to English-speaking philosophical discourse. This is a discussion that involves philosophy, psychology and linguistic theory, looking at morality in three different essays. The first essay explores the idea of good and evil as good and bad; Nietzsche develops the idea of master and slave morality - the slave resists the ideas of the master, and thus values things that are less likely to gain power - Nietzsche sees Christianity as an example of slave morality.

The second essay looks at the issues of conscience and guilt, and how these spawned the invention of gods. The third essay concludes the work with a look at ascetic ideas, how these relate to aesthetic ideas, and where in Nietzsche's opinion the great philosophers of the past have gone wrong.

In his book Ecce Homo (first published posthumously), Nietzsche analyses his own work piece by piece, as well as gives an overall assessment of his life. Nietzsche's insights into his own writings in hindsight is fascinating to behold. His own idea of 'The Genealogy of Morals' can be found in this piece as follows:

'Regarding expression, intention, and the art of suprise, the three inquiries which constitute this Genealogy are perhaps uncannier than anything else written so far. Dionysus is, as is known, also the god of darkness.'

Nietzsce is not easy reading, and this work is not the best for casual reading or the first-time reader of Nietzsche. However, for those who have already made some headway into understanding him, this is a good volume.

Nietzsche, like no other philosopher that I have read, has changed the way that I see the world. This is a book to read if you want to learn something about yourself. Nietzsche may have gone insane and had delusions that he was God, but he revolutionised modern thought. There is a special place in hell for German philosophers, but it's a place that's worth visiting.

On the Genealogy of Morals was published by Nietzsche in 1887.

He uses his genealogical method to uncover and analyze the dramatic differences between a Good vs. Bad morality originating among Masters, and a Good vs. Evil morality originating among Slaves.

Though the terminology used by the two groups may be similar, the origins, meanings and consequences couldn't be further apart.

Nietzsche writes that "the judgement 'good' did not originate among those to whom goodness was shown. Rather, it was 'the good' themselves, that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded who felt and established themselves and their actions as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all the low, low-minded, common and plebeian. It was out of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for values... that is the origin of the antithesis 'good' and 'bad'."

The Masters defined themselves as 'good' as the result of "a powerful physicality, a flourishing, abundant, even overflowing health."

The Slaves, or more specifically the "representatives" of the Slaves, the Jewish and Christian priests, "dared to invert the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God), saying 'the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed and damned!". Thus began "the Slave revolt in morality: that revolt which has a history of two thousand years and which we no longer see - because it has been victorious."

But how exactly did the Slaves' Good vs. Evil morality triumph?

Nietzsche suggests that "the slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values."

"While every noble morality develops from a triumphant Affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is "outside", what is "different", what is "not itself". In order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; its action is fundamentally reaction."

"The reverse is the case with the noble mode of valuation: it acts and grows spontaneously... Its negative concept 'low', 'common', 'bad' is only a subsequently-invented pale, contrasting image in relation to its positive basic concept - filled with life and passion through and through - we noble ones, we good, beautiful, happy ones!"

Whereas the Masters only affirm their Differences, the Slaves are hostile to everything that is different from themselves, interpreting Differences as Opposition.

"While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself, a race of men of ressentiment is bound to become eventually cleverer than any noble race." Thus, paradoxically, the Slaves and their pitiful values of the weak end up prevailing over the noble values of the Masters.

Nietzsche pursues his genealogical investigation, asking "What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?"

"We must count the ascetic priest as the predestined savior, shepherd, and advocate of the sick herd. Dominion over the suffering is his kingdom. If one wanted to express the value of the priestly existence in the briefest formula it would be: the priest alters the direction of ressentiment."

"For every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering, more exactly, an agent; still more specifically, a guilty agent... "I suffer: someone must be to blame for it" thus thinks every sickly sheep. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest, tells him: "Quite so, my sheep! Someone must be to blame for it, but you yourself are this someone..." resulting in "the tyranny of such paralogical concepts as "guilt", "sin", "sinfulness", "depravity", "damnation."

"For two millennia now we have been condemned to the sight of this new type of invalid, "the sinner", always fixed on the same object (on "guilt" as the sole cause of suffering); everywhere the bad conscience, everywhere the past regurgitated, the fact distorted, the "jaundiced eye" for all action; everywhere the will to misunderstand suffering made the content of life, the reinterpretation of suffering as feelings of guilt, fear and punishment; everywhere dumb torment, extreme fear, the cry for "redemption".

"I know of hardly anything else that has had so destructive an effect upon the health and strength of Europeans as this ascetic ideal; one may without any exaggeration call it the true calamity in the history of European health."

Though the ascetic ideal originated among religion and priests, it spread its poison among science and scientists:
"Science's relation to the ascetic ideal is by no means essentially antagonistic. It opposes and fights not the ideal itself, but only its exteriors, its guise and masquerade... This pair, science and the ascetic ideal, both rest on the same foundation: on the same over-estimation of Truth (more exactly: on the same belief that Truth is inestimable and cannot be criticized)."

"Art, in which precisely the lie is sanctified and the will to deception has a good conscience, is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science: this was instinctively sensed by Plato, the greatest enemy of art Europe has yet produced."

"Plato versus Homer, that is the complete, the genuine antagonism - there the sincerest advocate of the "Beyond," the great slanderer of Life; here the instinctive deifier, the golden nature."

"Physiologically, too, science rests on the same foundation as the ascetic ideal: a certain impoverishment of Life, dialectics in place of instinct..."

Nietzsche predicts that "As the will to Truth gains self-consciousness - there can be no doubt of that - morality will gradually perish. This is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe: the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles."

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