- Length
- 208 pagesClark and Swensen, On the Genealogy of Morality, Hackett, 1998
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
On the Genealogy of Morals
The book that asked what our morality is made of and answered that it was assembled out of resentment, cruelty and the need to make suffering mean something. It is the most accessible thing Nietzsche wrote and the hardest to be comfortable with.
- Date
- 1887
- Author
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Region
- Sils-Maria and Nice
- Language
- German
- 1897 English, William Haussmann First English version; unreliable Consensus
- 1967 English, Walter Kaufmann Long the standard; in copyright Attested
- 1998 English, Clark and Swensen With notes; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Genealogical — History of a concept used as a critique of it
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 69 years
Sold almost nothing in Nietzsche's working life, was edited and misrepresented by his sister after his collapse, and is now among the most read philosophical books in the world.
What the book says
Three essays asking not whether our moral values are true but where they came from and what they have done to us. The first argues that good originally meant noble - the self-affirmation of the strong, who called themselves good and everything else bad almost as an afterthought - and that a second valuation was created out of resentment by those in no position to act. Unable to discharge their hostility, they invented an inner life and a value scheme in which the strong are evil and the powerless are good; and this reversal, which Nietzsche calls the slave revolt in morality, is the origin of the values we now regard as self-evident. The second essay asks how an animal capable of promising was bred, and answers with punishment, cruelty and memory burned in; when aggression can no longer discharge outward it turns inward, which is how conscience and guilt appear. The third asks what ascetic ideals mean and gives the book's darkest answer: they persist because they gave suffering a meaning, and a human being would rather will nothingness than not will at all. Science, he adds, is the latest form of the same ideal.
What it argues
That values have histories, and that knowing the history changes what you can think about the value. Nietzsche's method is to ask who benefited from a valuation and under what conditions it could have arisen - which is not the genetic fallacy he is often accused of, because he is not arguing that the origin makes the value false. He is arguing that values we experience as obvious and universal were made, by identifiable people, for reasons that had nothing to do with what they now claim, and that this ought to be disturbing. The third essay is the most radical: the ascetic ideal has dominated because it is the only large-scale answer anyone has given to the meaninglessness of suffering, and dismantling it without a replacement leaves a problem rather than a liberation.
What it answered
Schopenhauer on pity, and the English moral psychologists - Rée and the utilitarians - who had tried to explain morality's origins by the usefulness of altruistic acts. Nietzsche's objection to them is historical: usefulness cannot be the origin, because the people who first called something good were not thinking about the recipients at all. Behind both stands the larger target, a Christian moral scheme he takes to be losing its foundation while keeping its authority, so that Europe is left with commandments and no commander.
How it argues
By history, philology and psychology together, in the most controlled prose he ever wrote. The etymological arguments - what good and bad, guilt and debt, meant before they meant what they mean - do heavy work and are not all sound, but the method is what carried: take a value, find the conditions under which it could have been produced, and ask what kind of person needed it. Each essay is a sustained argument rather than a set of aphorisms, which is unusual for him and is why this book is the standard place to start.
The moment
Nietzsche had resigned his Basel chair at thirty-four for ill health and spent a decade moving between boarding houses in Switzerland and Italy, in constant pain, half blind, writing in short bursts. He paid for his own printing and his books sold in dozens. Fifteen months after this one he collapsed in Turin, and spent his last eleven years incapacitated, in the care of his mother and then his sister, who edited his papers and put his name to a politics he had attacked.
How it travelled
Through a forgery and out the other side. Nietzsche's sister took control of the papers, founded an archive, assembled unpublished notes into a book he never wrote, and cultivated a German nationalist and antisemitic reading of a writer who had broken with Wagner partly over antisemitism and had written contemptuously of German nationalism. That version was official in Germany until 1945. The rehabilitation was largely French and American: Kaufmann's translations and study from 1950, and then Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida, who took the genealogical method as a model. Genealogy is now a standard form of philosophical argument, used by people with no other interest in Nietzsche.
The strongest objection
That the history is not history. Nietzsche gives no sources, cites no evidence, and constructs an account of prehistoric nobles and their resentful inferiors that no historian would defend; the etymologies that carry much of the first essay are contested and several are wrong. If the argument depends on the story being true, it fails. His defenders answer that the genealogy is a hypothesis about possibility rather than a chronicle - that its function is to show our values could have arisen this way, which is enough to disturb the sense that they are self-evident. That is a real defence and it costs something: a merely possible history explains less than the book's tone claims for it.
Why read it
Because it is the best door into Nietzsche and one of the few philosophical books that is genuinely gripping. The preface and the first essay can be read in an evening. Use a modern translation with notes; the early English versions are bad, and the German wordplay that carries the argument needs glossing.
- First printed
- 1887
- First in English
- 1897
- Digitised
- Yes
One of the few of his books with a conventional structure, which Nietzsche notes in the preface. The unpublished notebooks assembled after his death as The Will to Power are not a book by him and should not be used to interpret this one.
Kaufmann's and Hollingdale's mid-century English versions are in copyright, as are Clark-Swensen and Diethe. The older public-domain translations are unreliable.
Where it stands
Live and central. The Genealogy is a set text in moral philosophy, its method underlies a large body of work in political theory and the history of ideas, and the specific questions it raises about the origins of moral emotions have been taken up in moral psychology and even in empirical research.
On quoting this book
The German is public domain, but the early English versions are unreliable and every accurate translation is in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How literally the historical narrative is meant is the central interpretive question and determines how damaging the empirical objections are. Whether Nietzsche has a positive ethics to put in place of what he dismantles, and whether the notion of a revaluation of values is coherent, is argued in every generation. The relation between this book and the unpublished notebooks is a permanent trap, since The Will to Power is his sister's construction and not a work. And how far his critics' association of him with the politics that later claimed him can be laid at his door, as opposed to hers, is settled among scholars and still confused in public discussion.