The Genealogy of Morals
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~59,600 words · 283 passages
Cite this work
- APANietzsche. (n.d.). The Genealogy of Morals. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/the-genealogy-of-morals
- MLANietzsche. "The Genealogy of Morals." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/the-genealogy-of-morals.
- ChicagoNietzsche. The Genealogy of Morals. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/the-genealogy-of-morals.
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: the catalogue holds two of them, Also sprach Zarathustra and Der Wille zur Macht; for the rest, 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.
We are unknown, we knowers, ourselves to ourselves: this has its own good reason. We have never searched for ourselves--how should it then come to pass, that we should ever _find_ ourselves? Rightly has it been said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." _Our_ treasure is there, where stand the hives of our knowledge. It is to those hives that we are always striving; as born creatures of flight, and as the honey-gatherers of the spirit, we care really in our hearts only for one thing--to bring something "home to the hive!" As far as the rest of life with its so-called "experiences" is concerned, which of us has even sufficient serious interest? or sufficient time? In our dealings with such points of life, we are, I fear, never properly to the point; to be precise, our heart is not there, and certainly not our ear. Rather like one who, delighting in a divine distraction, or sunken in the seas of his own soul, in whose ear the clock has just thundered with all its force its twelve strokes of noon, suddenly wakes up, and asks himself, "What has in point of fact just struck?" so do we at times rub afterwards, as it were, our puzzled ears, and ask in complete astonishment and complete embarrassment, "Through what have we in point of fact just lived?" further, "Who are we in point of fact?" and count, _after they have struck_, as I have explained, all the twelve throbbing beats of the clock of our experience, of our life, of our being--ah!--and count wrong in the endeavour. Of necessity we remain strangers to ourselves, we understand ourselves not, in ourselves we are bound to be mistaken, for of us holds good to all eternity the motto, "Each one is the farthest away from himself"--as far as ourselves are concerned we are not "knowers." 2. My thoughts concerning the _genealogy_ of our moral prejudices--for they constitute the issue in this polemic--have their first, bald, and provisional expression in that col