On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche

First published:Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887 (English translation, 1896)

Type of work: Philosophy

The Work:

Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, published late in his career, demonstrates the philosopher’s academic roots in nineteenth century classical philology. Divided into three interrelated essays subdivided by sections, the work is a relatively compact but provocative examination of morality and ethics. Subtitled “A Polemic” in certain editions, the work undertakes a radical break with previous examinations of moral philosophy. Both for its style and its argument, many contemporary philosophers judge On the Genealogy of Morals to be among Nietzsche’s most important works. Many notable modern English translations exist, and scholars generally regard the 1968 German-language version of On the Genealogy of Morals by Italian editors Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari to be the standard German edition of the work.

On the Genealogy of Morals inaugurates Nietzsche’s genealogical critique (which is about something other than tracing family histories). The philosophical method of genealogy, for Nietzsche, problematizes fundamental assumptions about morality and moral theories through a careful differentiation between origin and purpose. In other words, morality is viewed not as an unassailable, static set of facts or as an ideal realm of transcendental essences. Instead, the meaning and value of morality emerge from a sequence of shifting contexts that reveal and obscure a long, complicated chain of nonlinear historical developments and blurred psychological states. For Nietzsche, the most prominent “facts” about morality are its contingency and its hidden though recognizable development.

As a prejudice, morality is itself an interpretation of life, making it uniquely suited to genealogical interpretation. In other words, previous thinking on morality stopped at a crude empirical level or, conversely, posited supernatural authorization. According to Nietzsche, both these approaches distort and oversimplify a cultural hieroglyph. Through a moral genealogy, Nietzsche proposes to go behind these putative sources of moral valuation to get at something more fundamental and entirely human. Though not consistently expressed in On the Genealogy of Morals, clues in support of this critique can be found in etymology and in a kind of conjectural sociology of value formation, an approach partly based on allegorized history. Nietzsche seeks to describe and highlight the types of agency that create morality. He also wants to show how agency is constituted so that it manufactures guilt and enforces punishment.

Nietzsche’s preface is typical of his prose. By turns conversational and aggressive, challenging and witty, he suggests that this book is the culmination of a train of thought that began in his youth and that appears in all of his writings up to this point. The value of morality, and in particular the value of pity and the creative power of ressentiment (a negative, reactionary mode of moral interpretation rooted in suffering and malice), came to occupy his thoughts as he considered previous theories on this subject. Apart from the seductive, expressionist quality of Nietzsche’s style, his philosophical argument becomes especially interesting when he suggests that victorious “herd” moralities may constitute a grave danger to the very conditions that make morality a positive, adaptive mechanism for enhancing human flourishing.

The first essay contrasts the linguistic origins of the binary terms “good and evil” and “good and bad.” Rejecting utilitarianism and its corollary, “unegoistic” acts, as taking priority in the formation of morality, Nietzsche asserts that these binary oppositions are primordial and originally conceived by ruling elites (nobles) to distinguish between and among themselves and an undifferentiated mass of people unlike themselves. A digression on word origins indicates the emergence of warrior and priestly (caste) systems of moral valuation that were momentarily aligned but eventually clashed over the value and meaning of conflict and suffering. For Nietzsche, the fundamental cause of this rift had to do with whether emphasis (and value) should be put on physiological vitality or deepening spirituality, with spirituality considered a reactive negative state, arising from ressentiment and weakness. Nietzsche maintains that this conflict is cross-cultural and timeless, and he cites several examples to support his contention. If noble morality is spontaneous, direct, open, and self-affirming, then herd morality, according to Nietzsche, is reactive, indirect, calculating, and vengeful.

It is worth noting, too, how polemical strategies are deployed in this essay. Nietzsche begins with a speculative hypothesis, then moves to linguistic analysis coupled with selective historical illustrations, and concludes with a catalog of existential states. In section fifteen of the first essay, he uses a striking quotation from Christian apologist and polemicist Tertullian (second and third centuries) about the suffering of sinners in the afterlife to epitomize the spirit of ressentiment.

The second essay, on guilt and bad conscience, opens with a discussion of memory and promise-making and the contrasting roles they play in the “sovereign individual” and as codified in legal obligations. Once again, through antithesis, Nietzsche heightens the tension and ambiguity inherent in genealogical critique. Memory has implications for moral accountability, because for Nietzsche the concept of justice originates in the particular kind of promise built into the debtor-creditor contract. This is taken to be a primordial formative experience for the development of human beings. In this account, when a contract is breached (forgotten), the creditor uses the law to indulge in cruelty and revenge with a clear conscience, recalling a now transposed characteristic of noble morality. An improbable but related claim in On the Genealogy of Morals is that cruelty and suffering internalized human nature and thereby gave new depth and meaning to life. Nietzsche cites as proof the odd notion that that ancient Greek epic, with all its violence and suffering, was a festival play for the gods. The second essay returns at this point to the view that law and just retribution are designed to regulate outbreaks of ressentiment and vengeance.

In the concluding sections of the second essay Nietzsche develops his ideas on punishment and bad conscience as signs or events in the play of forces that have shaped human nature and culture over millennia. In section twenty, he links monotheism and empire and states that modern atheism as an outgrowth of monotheism signifies liberation from the psychic guilt incurred by being perpetually in “debt” to the gods (or God), recalling his previous discussion on justice in this essay.

In the third and concluding essay, on ascetic ideals, Nietzsche finds rancor at the origin of certain aesthetic theories and particularly in the figure of the ascetic priest. The prose here is phantasmagoric, as Nietzsche plunges through psychology, autobiographical snippets, and religious history to trace the mostly negative impact of ascetic values in different cultural spheres, including modern science and historiography. Nietzsche highlights the priestly exploitation of guilt and the subsequent formation of the sinner as a mutually reinforcing feedback loop. The polemic against ascetic ideals becomes strident as Nietzsche blames it for ruining taste (by rejecting classical literature) and health (through self-torment leading to depression and suicide). In sum, the ascetic ideal assumes terrifying power as it becomes the necessary antidote to an impoverished, intolerable reality that has been produced by the near total triumph of the ascetic ideal itself. Art, says Nietzsche, is the only power capable of resisting and overcoming ascetic ideals; his striking formulation for this conflict is “Plato versus Homer.” The ascetic ideal ultimately triumphed, he says, because it gave meaning and justification to suffering and alleviated rancor.

As a conjectural examination of morality and political philosophy Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals has few equals. Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, about whom he was ambivalent, certainly comes to mind in terms of his seductive stylistic power and psychological acumen. However, for intellectual depth, dramatic appeal, and rhetorical brilliance, only Plato among philosophers offers a comparable treatment of psychology, morality, power, and state formation.

Bibliography

Acampora, Christa Davis, ed. Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morals”: Critical Essays. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Similar to Richard Schacht’s book, this collection of contemporary essays examining On the Genealogy of Morals has sections on the idea of genealogy, analyses of specific passages, critiques of the genealogical method, and a section on politics and community.

Conway, Daniel. Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morals”: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2008. By offering a section-by-section textual commentary with a student apparatus, including section summaries, this book is suitable for classroom use. Shows how On the Genealogy of Morals construes morality as constitutive of agency.

Deleuze, Giles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. 1962. Reprint. New York: Continuum, 2006. A classic, sophisticated conceptual analysis of force and power in Nietzsche’s ontology and in the book On the Genealogy of Morals. Argues that Nietzsche’s signal philosophical insight was to conceive of values and morality as expressive of primordial existential states.

Hatab, Lawrence J. Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morality”: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. A synthetic, section-by-section analysis of the work placed in the larger context of Nietzsche’s other writings and his overall political philosophy.

Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. 4th ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974. The publication of the first edition of this book in 1950 transformed Nietzsche’s reception in the English-speaking world through a careful examination of his life and the development of his philosophy. Places Nietzsche’s thought in the mainstream of Western philosophy and in the tradition of perennial philosophical problems.

Ridley, Aaron. Nietzsche’s Conscience: Six Character Studies from the “Genealogy.” Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. Persuasive study of the notional figures in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Slave, Priest, Philosopher, Artist, Scientist, and Noble. Indicates what these abstractions reveal about value and the transformative power of the will to affirm and creatively utilize suffering. Claims the genealogy to be the most important work of moral philosophy since that of Immanuel Kant.

Schacht, Richard, ed. Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morals.” Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. A collection of essays by philosophers examining On the Genealogy of Morals and immoralism as well as analytical philosophy, stoicism, and a variety of other topics. An indispensable collection.