On the Genealogy of Morality

Why ask for a "genealogy" of morality?

Moral philosophy usually asks how we ought to act and tries to derive the answer from reason, God or happiness. On the Genealogy of Morality asks a different question: why did people come to believe that certain things are "good", and from whose needs did that belief arise? In section 6 of the preface Nietzsche demands: "we need a critique of moral values; the value of these values must itself first be called into question."

wir haben eine Kritik der moralischen Werthe nöthig, der Werth dieser Werthe ist selbst erst einmal in Frage zu stellen

That requires knowledge of the conditions and circumstances under which morality grew, developed and shifted. Nietzsche criticises his former friend Paul Rée's The Origin of the Moral Sensations (1877) for painting plausible hypotheses in sky blue after reading Darwin, and says that the colour that matters to a genealogist of morals is not blue but "grey, that is, what is documented, what can really be established, what really existed" (preface, section 7).

nämlich das Graue, will sagen, das Urkundliche, das Wirklich-Feststellbare, das Wirklich-Dagewesene

This method of breaking the self-evidence of values by questioning their historical origins was taken up in the twentieth century by Michel Foucault, who formulated "genealogy" as a method of critique. The method itself is treated in the separate entry on genealogy.

How was it written and published?

According to the German Wikipedia, in the summer of 1887 Nietzsche, in a deeply depressed mood, suddenly wrote the three treatises between 10 and 30 July, drawing on earlier notes. He had the book printed at his own expense by C. G. Naumann in Leipzig and read the proofs with his friend Heinrich Köselitz (Peter Gast). It appeared in November 1887 in 600 copies. The back of the first edition's title page stated that it was added "to supplement and clarify" the recently published Beyond Good and Evil, and Nietzsche had it made to look confusingly like that book.

Unlike most of Nietzsche's books, which are collections of aphorisms, this one consists of three long treatises: the first, "'Good and Evil', 'Good and Bad'"; the second, "'Guilt', 'Bad Conscience' and Related Matters"; the third, "What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?" As the subtitle "A Polemic" indicates, it aims squarely at its enemies rather than keeping a scholarly distance.

First treatise: how did the slave revolt happen?

Nietzsche distinguishes two origins of the word "good". The nobles and warriors of antiquity called themselves and their deeds "good" (noble, strong, happy) and called what belonged to the common people simply "bad" (low, common), without reproach. The oppressed, conversely, first brand the strong "evil" and only then call themselves, their opposite, "good". Nietzsche calls this inversion "the slave revolt in morality".

"The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of beings denied the real reaction, that of the deed, who compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge." (First treatise, section 10)

Der Sklavenaufstand in der Moral beginnt damit, dass das Ressentiment selbst schöpferisch wird und Werthe gebiert

Nietzsche names the Jewish priestly caste and its heir Christianity as the leaders of this revolt, and places Rome, the Renaissance and Napoleon in the lineage of aristocratic values. In section 11 he speaks of the beast of prey at the bottom of all noble races, "the blond beast"; the phrase is usually read as evoking a beast of prey such as the lion, but it became the Nietzschean expression most abused by Nazi racial propaganda. The concept of ressentiment and the distinction between master and slave morality are explained in separate entries.

Second treatise: did guilt come from debt?

The second treatise argues that the moral concept of "guilt" (Schuld) arose from the very material concept of "debts" (Schulden); in German the two words share a root. According to Nietzsche, the ancient idea that damage and pain can be equivalent, so that it is just to inflict pain on one who cannot repay, comes from "the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor", which in turn goes back to the basic forms of buying, selling, exchange and trade (second treatise, section 4). In section 8 he writes: "Setting prices, measuring values, devising equivalents, exchanging: this preoccupied man's very first thinking to such a degree."

Preise machen, Werthe abmessen, Äquivalente ausdenken, tauschen

For bad conscience he gives a different account. When man was enclosed within the walls of state and society and could no longer discharge his aggressive instincts outward, they turned inward, against himself. Nietzsche calls this "the internalisation of man" and says that only thus did what is later called the "soul" grow (section 16). In section 11 of the same treatise he attacks Eugen Dühring, who sought the origin of justice in the feeling of revenge, and writes that "Dühring's communist template", by which every will must treat every other will as equal, is a principle hostile to life.

Third treatise: why would man rather will nothingness?

The third treatise examines the ascetic ideal in artists (Wagner's Parsifal), philosophers (Schopenhauer's denial of the will), priests and saints, and finally argues that the unconditional "will to truth" of atheists and scientists is the last form of the ascetic ideal. Along the way Nietzsche criticises the notion of a pure, will-less knowing subject: "There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival 'knowing'." (Section 12)

Es giebt nur ein perspektivisches Sehen, nur ein perspektivisches „Erkennen“

Nietzsche finds the reason for the ascetic ideal's great power in a basic fact of the human will. Man cannot bear suffering without meaning more than suffering itself, and the ascetic ideal gave suffering a meaning. Hence the book's last sentence: "man would rather will nothingness than not will."

lieber will noch der Mensch das Nichts wollen, als nicht wollen…

In section 27 Nietzsche announced that he was preparing a work that would treat the problem more thoroughly under the heading "history of European nihilism", titled "The Will to Power. Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values". He abandoned the plan in 1888; the compilation of his notes that his sister published under that title after his death is treated in the separate entry The Will to Power (compilation).

Who carried it on, and how did Marxists read it?

According to the German Wikipedia the book strongly influenced Sigmund Freud: the idea that conscience arises when aggression turns inward led to Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). It prompted Max Scheler to write Ressentiment in the Construction of Morals (first published 1912). In France in the later twentieth century it became the most discussed of Nietzsche's works. Gilles Deleuze read it in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) through the opposition of active and reactive forces, and Michel Foucault, in his 1971 essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History", formulated genealogy, which distrusts the purity of origins, as a method of historical inquiry and then applied it to the history of punishment in Discipline and Punish (1975).

For Marxists the book reads in two directions. From one side it portrays the labour movement and socialism as the latest edition of the slave revolt born of the rancour of the weak. In section 5 of the first treatise Nietzsche interpreted modern democracy, anarchism and "the tendency toward the 'commune' common to all socialists of Europe" as the counterattack of the conquered against the conquering race. Here lies the ground on which Franz Mehring and György Lukács saw Nietzsche as a philosopher of the ruling class. Curiously, Eugen Dühring, whom Nietzsche attacks repeatedly in this book, is the very man Friedrich Engels had criticised from the opposite direction ten years earlier in Anti-Dühring (1877–1878). Engels attacked Dühring's socialism as an unscientific system appealing to eternal justice and morality; Nietzsche called Dühring an antisemite full of ressentiment and an "apostle of revenge" (third treatise, section 14).

From the other side, the book's method, which treats morality as a product of class and power relations and strips the mask of eternity from values, has something in common with Marx's critique of ideology. The second treatise in particular, which finds the origins of guilt and punishment in exchange and debt, has often been read alongside Marx's analysis of how commodity exchange shapes consciousness. This overlap and difference is why Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Jürgen Habermas in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), examined Nietzsche's genealogy critically. The difference is plain: for Marx domination and exploitation can be overcome historically, while Nietzsche's genealogy holds out no such prospect of emancipation.