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On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. By way of clarification and supplement to my last book Beyond Good and Evil (Oxford World's Classics)

Description

On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) is a book about interpretation and the history of ethics which raises profoundly disquieting issues about the violence of both. This is the most sustained of Nietzsche's later works and offers one of the fullest expressions of his characteristic concerns. The introduction places his ideas within the cultural context of his own time and stresses the relevance of his work for a contemporary audience.

Reviews

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-05-23
Summary: "Great translation of a great book."

The translation is very good in this book and it has enough remarks from the translator to not be overwhelming but still give you the information you need to understand some of the things Nietzsche references from his time. The paper and binding are a good quality. The way I read tends to wear down bindings, but this one had no trouble.

The content itself is great. Genealogy of Morals is extremely insightful into the human psyche and explains very well where a lot of our morality stems from. What's even more interesting, in my opinion, is that he talks at length about what the psychology of this morality causes in society.

Ecce Homo is great on another level. It's rare to see a great thinker make great note of his faults. He talks about his thought process for each book he wrote. While this may not seem greatly informative I think this books main purpose it to encourage people to not deify him the way we tend to do with long dead figures.

Nietzsche is a great writer, but if this is your first book of his I would strongly recommend reading it in entirety before agreeing or disagreeing with it. He likes to speak in extremes. I find this a great approach when it comes to understanding his entire book, but it's easy to get the wrong idea if you only read part of it. For instance, he's call the Jews some of the most harmful forces in human history and then many pages later (and with some of these things even books later) he will say that despite that their general mentality is essential to our survival and that any form of antisemitism is horrifically misguided. In general it's best not to quote Nietzsche, rather paraphrasing tends to be more accurate. He writes so that you have to actually read his work, not just read the wiki on him.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-05-21
Summary: "A noble blond beast"

In his characteristic raging style and with a sometimes obscene vocabulary, Friedrich Nietzsche shouts (`Am I understood?') his vision on the origin of morals (good, bad and evil), of guilt and bad conscience and on the value of ascetic ideals.

The origin of morals
The antithesis good-bad was established by `noble' rulers who seized the right to create their own values. They called their egoistic actions good, which means `of first rank'. Who were these masters? At the bottom all these noble races were `blond beasts of prey in search of spoil, living the voluptuousness of victory and cruelty.'
It was only when the aristocratic value judgments declined that the slaves (other names: the herd, the plebeians, the low, the mob, cellar rodents, insects, the oppressed, the downtrodden, the worm-eaten) could impose their own morality of unegoism, pity, self-sacrifice and self-abnegation on mankind.
The moral revolt of the slaves began when their ressentiment became creative. This ressentiment is an imaginary revenge, a brain-sickness, by those who are denied true action. The egoistic `good' of the rulers became `evil'.
However, the slave morality is an illness based on the phantasmagoria of anticipated bliss, the `Last Judgment'. It is anti-life and a danger for the species `man'.

Guilt, Bad Conscience
Guilt has its origin in `debts', in the contractual relations between creditor and debtor, in which the latter pledged that if he should fail to repay, he would substitute his debt by something else that he possessed (body, limbs, wife, freedom).
The origin of bad conscience comes from the internalization of instincts which couldn't discharge themselves. All those instincts of the wild, free, prowling man (cruelty, destruction) turned against man himself, because the political organization (the State) protected itself against these old instincts of freedom.
Real masters don't know what guilt is. One day, the man of the future, the Antichrist, will come, as a sovereign individual, liberated from the slave morality. He will call his dominating instincts his conscience.

Ascetic ideals
The three slogans of the ascetic ideal are poverty, humility and chastity.
But, an ascetic planet is a nook of disgruntled, arrogant creatures filled with a profound disgust of themselves, of the earth, of all life.
Ascetic life is a self-contradiction. It is an attempt to employ force to block the wells of force, beauty and joy. Its pleasure is sought in decay, pain, ugliness, voluntary deprivation, self-mortification, self-flagellation.
The allies of the ascetics are the scientists (`these trumpeters of reality are bad musicians'), with their belief that truth cannot be criticized (?) and with their aim to dissuade man from his former respect for himself.
What we need is the freedom of `Nothing is true, everything is permitted.'

Evaluation
The powerful, the beasts of prey use(d) religion and its slave morality as a means to keep their power and wealth intact. The many accepted it, until in some countries general free elections (democratic rule) put the power base of the beasts in danger. The beasts had a new problem to face: how to control democracy.
Nietzsche's anti-democratic, anti-scientific, barbaric, full spectrum egoistic rule is unacceptable and indefendable in our `enlightened` world.
However, his shout to mankind to wake up and to live a real `human' life, free from a slave morality, is still highly needed and even more than ever before.

These brutal, raw, blasphemous essays didn't loose one ounce of their invective and polemic power. A real catharsis.
A must read for all Nietzsche fans, but with the necessary caution.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-02-06
Summary: "The Genealogy of Nietzsche"

"The Genealogy of Morals" is one of the more straightforward and easily-comprehensible of Nietzsche's philosophical works. It is a sustained focus on a single topic - the origins of morality - and is comprised of three related essays which explore morality and the nature of "ressentiment," or "suppressed resentment." According to Nietzsche, "ressentiment" is the fundamental motive force, the "will to power," of the religious (specifically the Christian)temperament and character, and results in moral and spiritual corruption: hence Nietzsche's claim that Christianity is the greatest of all evils because it fosters, nurtures, and embodies "ressentiment." Although Nietzsche's diatribes against the Christian religion sometimes get tedious, his psychological analysis of the origins of morality is insightful and intriguing.

The companion piece in this edition, "Ecce Homo," is one of the most entertaining and fascinating autobiographies ever written. Nietzsche recounts events, people, and places that were important to him personally and significant for the development of his philosophy; he offers summaries and "humble" appraisals of his philosophical works (appraisals which are as provocative as they are "humble"); and he claims to have destroyed Christianity and invented psychology -- and while these claims sound exaggerated, they're true from a Nietzschean perspective. With Nietzsche's own commentary on the meaning and significance of his books, "Ecce Homo" is a wonderful introduction to his philosophy and a literary experience.

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Rating: 3 / 5
Date: 2010-02-02
Summary: "Kaufmann is standard translation, but others are better"

I should note up front that my review refers to the Vintage edition--the review and the rating pertain to Kaufmann's translation only, not to Nietzsche's text. Nietzsche's work is a classic and should be read by anyone with an interest in philosophy or related fields. That point, I think, goes without saying. What does need to be said is which translation you should choose to read it in. Kaufmann's is, pretty much, the standard translation. And, for the most part, his translation is true to Nietzsche's German. But it suffers in one important way, and that is how it conflates Hegel's idealism and Nietzsche's thought through the use of a Hegelian, idealist vocabulary. To be sure, Nietzsche draws on Hegel a lot, but Kaufmann's translation misleads the reader into thinking that there are more similarities than there actually are. It also makes this translation unbearably difficult to read.

The second problem I have with this particular edition is that Kaufmann's notes are so shallow, and not really helpful at all. A perfect example is on the first page of the first essay, where Nietzsche abandons his native German for a moment and refers to the English Psychologists pushing the "partie honteuse" of our inner world into view. Kaufmann leaves the phrase untranslated, as he ought, and lets a note do the work of translating it. His note says simply, "shame." In my view, it may be as if he had just omitted the note altogether, because this tells me almost nothing about what Nietzsche means, and doesn't even attempt to get at his metaphor. If one were to turn to Clark and Swenson's translation, put out by Hackett (On the Genealogy of Morality), however, one would learn that the phrase means "shameful part" and when pluralized it is equivalent to the English phrase "private parts." This is a helpful note which explains Nietzsche's metaphor and the connotations he's aiming for.

I'll give this edition three stars because I have to compare it to others, such as Clark and Swenson's, above, or Douglas Smith's translation in the Oxford World Classics edition (On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. By way of clarification and supplement to my last book Beyond Good and Evil (Oxford World's Classics)). In many ways Smith most avoids the "Hegel-ization" of Nietzsche (although it is possible to overdo it, and Smith might be guilty). But in my estimation, Clark and Swenson's is the best, deserving five stars, and Smith's is a close second, perhaps deserving four and a half, or four and three-quarters, not least because Clark and Swenson's notes are better. (Smith's would get five stars if I reviewed it.) Kaufmann's is so far behind these that I cannot justify giving it more than three stars. For a more formulaic, objective approach, you can subtract one star from the translation for at times confusing Nietzsche's thought, and doing so in a confusing way, and subtract one from the edition in general for having mediocre notes. Then you also end up with my three-star rating.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2009-10-01
Summary: "The courage to attain "will to power""

I read On the Genealogy of Morals for a graduate seminar on ethics, and in particular his writings regarding the virtue of courage. I found Walter Kaufmann's translation the best of several I looked at. Often regarded in philosophical circles as the first "postmodern" philosopher, Nietzsche is very critical to all of modernity's philosophical attempts to create a scientific or rationally based approach to ethics. Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals is in part a refutation of Kant's ethical theory, arguing that Kantian ethics as well as other modern ethical theories were more interested in defining ethical values and not concerned with questioning their usefulness or whether they were derived from what Nietzsche believed were irrational psychological forces feeding people's illusions. Another purpose of the Genealogy is to examine the history of how morals were created in Western culture. Nietzsche's extensive philological studies of ancient Greek literature led him to argue that there needed to be a historical and psychological approach to understanding how ethical values came into existence. Thus, one of Nietzsche's goals in his Genealogy is to provide a critique of ethical values, such as courage, and to examine, "...the conditions and circumstances in which they grew, under which they evolved and changed." (456, GM I, 6). Another important aspect of Nietzsche's Genealogy is found in Nietzsche's ethical notions finding common ground with Aristotelian virtue ethics. Only Aristotelian virtue ethics can fit well with Nietzsche's moral ethics. Thus, I find that an interesting outcome of Nietzsche's examination of Greek culture leads him down a path back to the first evolutionary stage of the virtue of courage in particular, and to the classical Greek inception of virtue ethics in general. Nietzsche enthusiastically followed this path and reintroduced the world to the critical need for the classical Greek interpretation of the virtue of courage to help shape the "postmodern" world.

Nietzsche recognized in ancient Greek poetry that heroes are not content with just living, but are compelled to perform courageous acts even at the peril of their own lives. In fact, for Greek heroes, gaining fame and glory at the expense of often suffering a courageous death seemed to be their raison d'être. Nietzsche recognizes this phenomenon in Greek poetry, which alerts him to the notion that the ancient and classical Greek citizens accepted the idea that part of the nature of life was that it could be tragic, dark, and foreboding; however, the Greeks who were noble of character did not despair. This notion was readily accepted by Aristotle but not by Plato, who thought that Greek tragedy taught the citizenry the wrong lessons about life. They knew that to be virtuous was to engage in a constant agon or [contest] to overcome the pitfalls of life. This literary fact causes Nietzsche to understand that like the ancient Greeks, the best of contemporary society, such as philosophers and artists whom he calls the "masters," have to rely on their virtues, such as courage, to constantly struggle to overcome life's limits. Nietzsche's observation of Greek culture leads him to define a theory of master and slave morality, which lays the foundation for his notion of returning to the classical Greek virtue of courage.

Nietzsche understands master morality as the ideals of virtuous characteristics epitomized by the best of Greek aristocracy. On the other hand, slave morality according to Nietzsche, grew out of the Judeo-Christian ethic supporting love and justice over power. Master morality acknowledges "good" and "bad" in the world; while slave morality acknowledges "good" and "evil." Nietzsche recognized the masters as "active" people, and whatever helps them achieve greatness is good. Thus, Nietzsche defines the good and bad characteristics in master morality in the following way. Character traits such as courage, conquest, aggression, and command that engender the feelings of power in people are deemed `good,' while traits of weaker people such as cowardice, passivity, humility, and dependence are deemed `bad.' Furthermore, Nietzsche argues that within the master and slave morality what is good can only be good for the master, because the slave morality is essentially based on a number of opposing ideals from the master morality. Therefore, an important argument for Nietzsche is, that according to slave morality, anything that opposes, destroys, or conquers is evil and should be eliminated from human relations. Nietzsche argues that slave morality espouses humility, selflessness, and kindness as ruling traits for all people as a condition of self-perseverance against master morality. These are all character traits central to Judeo-Christian morality, and are diametrically opposed to the aggressive character traits of the master morality, which were central to the power of the Roman Empire when Christianity was conceived. Against the backdrop of master and slave morality, Nietzsche examines the classical Greek cardinal virtues, and he specifically looks into the virtue of courage, which is so central to master morality.

When Nietzsche contemplates the future of virtues, he laments the lack of courage displayed by people in modern society. Nietzsche sounds a clarion call for artists to once again courageously take their place as masters of society. Nietzsche sees courage as something which is good for the people who have it, in that it enables them to win contests which they would lose without it. In addition, Nietzsche recognizes that in order for people to act courageously, they also need to overcome their emotions of fear. "But there is something in me that I call courage; that has so far slain my every discouragement." Once again, Nietzsche is using Aristotle's virtue ethic model of practical reasoning to show that a person with noble intentions, or in Nietzsche's parlance, a master can will themselves to overcome their fears. After examining Nietzsche's extensive writings on the history of ethics, I find that his description of courage fits well within the classical Greek model of the virtue of courage.

Nietzsche's philosophical project pertaining to the virtue of courage is centered on the idea that those who were the masters in Greek society actually desired to face and conquer dangerous situations. In essence, Nietzsche demilitarized the Greek emphasis on battlefield courage and applied it to the people he thought could be the masters of society of his time and into the future--artists and philosophers. The power Nietzsche yearns for is the power of creative activity. Creativity is the "will to power" that this much maligned philosopher was truly advocating.