The Genealogy of Morals

Nietzsche wrote The Genealogy of Morals in a few weeks in the summer of 1887 and subtitled it A Polemic. He meant it. The book was supposed to clarify his previous one, Beyond Good and Evil, for readers who had missed the point, and it clarifies by going after them.

There are three essays. The first asks where our ideas of good and evil came from, and answers: resentment. In Nietzsche’s story the old aristocratic pair, good and bad, meant roughly strong and weak, until the weak staged what he calls the slave revolt in morality and renamed strength evil and weakness good. The second essay traces guilt to debt, conscience to cruelty turned inward, and punishment to something much older than justice. The third asks why so many priests, philosophers and saints have praised self-denial, and ends on the thought that man would sooner will nothingness than not will at all.

You do not have to agree with any of it to see why it matters. Most moral philosophy asks which values are right. Nietzsche asks where values came from and what they have done to the people who hold them, and that question never went away. Foucault borrowed the word genealogy for his own histories, and anyone who has suspected that a moral argument was really a bid for power is working in Nietzsche’s shop.

The book is also misread more than most, partly because it is so quotable. Read it whole and in order. The essays are short, the argument builds, and a tone that looks like ranting in excerpts is, in context, closer to cross-examination.

Horace B. Samuel’s translation appeared in 1910, in Oscar Levy’s English edition of the complete works. It is brisk and readable. This edition is 182 pages, which Nietzsche would have thought about right for overturning two thousand years of ethics.