The Nexus Archive
Genealogy · Treatise
On the Genealogy of Morality
by Nietzsche · The Hammer · Modernity, 1844-1900
- Brutal
- 1887
- ~3 hr 45 min read
- 17 chapter guides
- Public domain
Start reading · Read the Nietzsche's Preface guide free
Before the text
Editor's Prelude
A Polemic About Where Morals Come From
Nietzsche wants to unsettle the feeling that words such as good, evil, guilt and conscience name timeless facts. His sharper question is who created these values, under what pressures, and what kinds of life they have strengthened or restrained. A judgment can feel natural even when it carries a long history of conflict.
Published in 1887, the book develops questions Nietzsche had pursued for years. In the Preface he recalls a childhood essay that blamed God for evil. His later inquiry turns toward people, their language and the conditions in which they judge. The title’s genealogy means a tracing of origins and changes. Its subtitle, a polemic, announces an argument aimed at opponents. Three sustained essays give his questions room to unfold beyond a single aphorism.
The writing moves between close distinctions, startling images and staged conversations. Nietzsche makes a familiar promise or a feeling of guilt into a problem with an unexpected past. At stake is what our values encourage us to become, and whether habits we praise can also narrow the possibilities of human life.
The opening pages
First Essay: Values Enter History
1.
Those English psychologists, who up to the present are the only philosophers who are to be thanked for any endeavour to get as far as a history of the origin of morality—these men, I say, offer us in their own personalities no paltry problem;—they even have, if I am to be quite frank about it, in their capacity of living riddles, an advantage over their books—they themselves are interesting! These English psychologists—what do they really mean? We always find them voluntarily or involuntarily at the same task of pushing to the front the partie honteuse of our inner world, and looking for the efficient, governing, and decisive principle in that precise quarter where the intellectual self-respect of the race would be the most reluctant to find it (for example, in the vis inertiæ of habit, or in forgetfulness, or in a blind and fortuitous mechanism and association of ideas, or in some factor that is purely passive, reflex, molecular, or fundamentally stupid)—what is the real motive power which always impels these psychologists in precisely this direction? Is it an instinct for human disparagement somewhat sinister, vulgar, and malignant, or perhaps incomprehensible even to itself? or perhaps a touch of pessimistic jealousy, the mistrust of disillusioned idealists who have become gloomy, poisoned, and bitter? or a petty subconscious enmity and rancour against Christianity (and Plato), that has conceivably never crossed the threshold of consciousness? or just a vicious taste for those elements of life which are bizarre, painfully paradoxical, mystical, and illogical? or, as a final alternative, a dash of each of these motives—a little vulgarity, a little gloominess, a little anti-Christianity, a little craving for the necessary piquancy?
But I am told that it is simply a case of old frigid and tedious frogs crawling and hopping around men and inside men, as if they were as thoroughly at home there, as they would be in a swamp.
I am opposed to this statement, nay, I do not believe it; and if, in the impossibility of knowledge, one is permitted to wish, so do I wish from my heart that just the converse metaphor should apply, and that these analysts with their psychological microscopes should be, at bottom, brave, proud, and magnanimous animals who know how to bridle both their hearts and their smarts, and have specifically trained themselves to sacrifice what is desirable to what is true, any truth in fact, even the simple, bitter, ugly, repulsive, unchristian, and immoral truths—for there are truths of that description.
Chapter guides · 17
Nietzsche's Preface
Nietzsche Sets The Test
Nietzsche asks where moral values came from and whether they strengthen or weaken human life.
Tracing and judging values
A genealogy traces how something began and changed. Nietzsche wants more than an account of morality’s origins. He also asks what our judgments do to the people who live by them.
The Preface’s path
Nietzsche recalls his childhood questions about evil and the later growth of his ideas. He challenges Paul Rée’s explanation of morality and Schopenhauer’s praise of pity and self-denial. Historical evidence must help test values that people usually take for granted. He closes by comparing the slow work of understanding a text to a cow’s rumination, its repeated chewing.
First Essay: Values Enter History
Good Becomes A Rank Word
Nietzsche argues that good first named ruling groups and the qualities they prized.
Rank becomes a value
Nietzsche disputes the view that people first called actions good because those actions helped them. In his account, nobles began by naming themselves good and distinguished themselves from common people.
The argument through words
Nietzsche first questions the motives and method of the English psychologists. He rejects their account of usefulness, habit and forgetting. Herbert Spencer’s alternative, which equates good with useful, is more coherent, he says, but also wrong. He then uses word origins to connect moral language with social rank. His examples draw on German, Greek and Latin. He closes with a proposed link between German gut, meaning good, and the name of the Goths.
First Essay: Priest and Warrior
Priest And Warrior Diverge
Nietzsche describes priestly morality as a reversal of warrior values.
First Essay: Ressentiment and the Noble
Ressentiment Creates Its Enemy
Nietzsche contrasts values made from confidence with values made from lasting resentment.
First Essay: Rival Ideals
The Contest Is Not Over
Nietzsche treats the rivalry between moral systems as an unfinished struggle over values.
Second Essay: The Animal That Can Promise
A Memory Is Burned In
Nietzsche traces the ability to promise to a long and often violent training of memory.
Second Essay: Punishment and Memory
Pain Becomes An Accounting Tool
Nietzsche argues that a powerful community can afford to forgive offenses.
Second Essay: Law, Purpose, and Power
Purpose Is Not Origin
A practice’s present purpose does not explain its origin.
Second Essay: Bad Conscience Turns Inward
Instinct Turns Against Itself
Nietzsche proposes that blocked outward instincts become an inner force of self-cruelty.
Second Essay: Guilt Before God
Debt Expands Toward God
Religious debt can become an unpayable judgment against human life itself.
Third Essay: Artist, Philosopher, Ideal
The Ideal Changes With Its User
Nietzsche argues that an artist’s use of self-denial depends on convictions borrowed from elsewhere.
Third Essay: The Philosopher's Conditions
The Philosopher Needs A Mask
Self-denial can protect a philosopher’s work and independence.
Third Essay: Life Against Life
A Contradiction That Preserves Life
Nietzsche treats the ascetic ideal as a way for struggling life to preserve itself.
Third Essay: The Priest and the Sick
The Physician Also Wounds
The priest controls resentment by turning the sufferer’s blame inward.
Third Essay: Remedies for Suffering
Relief Is Not A Cure
Nietzsche argues that religious guilt can intensify emotion while worsening the sufferer’s condition.
Third Essay: Belief Beneath Knowledge
Science Is Not The Opposite
Nietzsche asks whether devotion to truth still carries the faith of the ascetic ideal.
Third Essay: The Will Behind Truth
The Will Survives In Nothingness
Nietzsche argues that the ascetic ideal preserved the will by giving suffering a meaning.
Questions readers ask
- How long does it take to read On the Genealogy of Morality?
- About 3 hr 45 min in total.
- How difficult is On the Genealogy of Morality?
- Brutal. A mid-length treatise; about 4 hours of reading.
- Which translation is this?
- The Horace B. Samuel translation from the German, first published in 1887. The text follows The Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Volume Eight (1913).
- Can I read On the Genealogy of Morality for free?
- On the Genealogy of Morality is part of Nexus Premium, so reading it needs an account and a Premium subscription. The opening above and two chapter guides on this page are free to read.
- How many chapter guides are there?
- 17 chapter guides, written by the Nexus editors. Two open in full here; the rest show their opening line.
About Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche became a professor of classical philology at twenty-four, then left academic life because of severe illness. He wrote as an independent and increasingly isolated critic of morality, religion, and modern culture before suffering a mental collapse in 1889.
“What values survive after their foundations collapse?”
Nietzsche makes modernity explain where its values come from and whether they can survive without God.
Source text: public domain. Chapter guides: original Nexus writing. On the Genealogy of Morality is part of The Nexus Archive, guided Quests through the great works.