The Genealogy of Morals
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~59,600 words · 283 passages
Cite this work
- APANietzsche. (n.d.). The Genealogy of Morals. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/the-genealogy-of-morals
- MLANietzsche. The Genealogy of Morals. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/the-genealogy-of-morals.
- ChicagoNietzsche. The Genealogy of Morals. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/the-genealogy-of-morals.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887): three essays on where good, guilt and the ascetic ideal really come from.
Context and history
His most systematic book and the most influential on later philosophy: Foucault took the whole genealogical method from it. The central thesis — that 'good' meant 'noble' before it meant 'unselfish', and that the change is the work of ressentiment — is arguable, but the way of asking changed everything. English translation from the complete edition edited by Oscar Levy (1909-1913), the one in the public domain. It is over a century old and it shows. The original is GERMAN and citation should follow the original, but of this work only the translation is here.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Schopenhauer, to whom that book, with all its passion and inherent contradiction (for that book also was a polemic), turned for present help as though he were still alive. The issue was, strangely enough, the value of the "un-egoistic" instincts, the instincts of pity, self-denial, and self-sacrifice which Schopenhauer had so persistently painted in golden colours, deified and etherealised, that eventually they appeared to him, as it were, high and dry, as "intrinsic values in themselves," on the strength of which he uttered both to Life and to himself his own negation. But against _these very_ instincts there voiced itself in my soul a more and more fundamental mistrust, a scepticism that dug ever deeper and deeper: and in this very instinct I saw the _great_ danger of mankind, its most sublime temptation and seduction--seduction to what? to nothingness?--in these very instincts I saw the beginning of the end, stability, the exhaustion that gazes backwards, the will turning _against_ Life, the last illness announcing itself with its own mincing melancholy: I realised that the morality of pity which spread wider and wider, and whose grip infected even philosophers with its disease, was the most sinister symptom of our modern European civilisation; I realised that it was the route along which that civilisation slid on its way to--a new Buddhism?--a European Buddhism?--_Nihilism_? This exaggerated estimation in which modern philosophers have held pity, is quite a new phenomenon: up to that time philosophers were absolutely unanimous as to the worthlessness of pity. I need only mention Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and Kant--four minds as mutually different as is possible, but united on one point; their contempt of pity. 6.…