On the Genealogy of Morality

Written from secondary sources (reference works on the book and on Nietzsche’s moral philosophy), not from the text.

A polemic from 1887, in a preface and three essays, that follows on from Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche asks where our moral values came from and what they are worth, and his answer is a history of their origins in place of a defence of them. That is the method and the argument at once: if values have a history, they are not simply given.

The first essay says “good” has two origins. Ruling groups called themselves good and the lowly merely bad; the powerless, out of what he calls ressentiment, turned the valuation over, so that the strong became “evil” and weakness became virtue. The second traces guilt to debt. Conscience grows out of the relation between debtor and creditor, with punishment as repayment, and once people were penned into society the instincts that could not go outward turned inward as bad conscience. The third asks what self-denial means for artists, philosophers and priests, and concludes that it gave suffering a meaning: people would sooner will nothingness than not will at all.

The standing objection is that showing where a value came from does not show what it is worth. The history is also speculative, resting on etymology rather than sources, and scholars still disagree about whether he meant it as real history or as psychology.