Exploring Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morals

Reviewing Nietzche’s classic book

I’ve been familiar with Nietzsche for many years, but always through other writers. I finally dedicated some time to reading his actual works, and I decided to start with “On the Genealogy of Morals”.

What Nietzsche tries to do in this book is to sketch a critique of moral values. A complete scepticism of current morality and trying to uncover its history. He claims that good and bad were not always how we conceive them. And in the past, good was defined by the nobility. Even synonymous with nobility itself, it meant what is powerful and what is life-asserting. This is mostly in the context of going against the “psychologists” of his time, which tried to view morality in an evolutionary sense based on altruism.

Our modern sense of what good is comes from Christianity, which inverted the value structure (good is now the lower instead of the higher). This happened because the oppressed had no power to overcome their oppression, unless the value structure itself was changed. This is what he famously called the “slave morality”, in opposition to the master morality before Christianity. Thus things like compassion, selflessness, and humility are only products of an intellectual revolution.

None of this was new to me, however, I never knew how he got to this conclusion. He argues this point by tracking the etymology of moral words such as good in European languages. Hence the title, he is trying to dig up the genealogy of morality with his philologist background. I was somewhat disappointed by this, and while it shouldn’t be dismissed, I found that type of evidence rather weak for the amount of influence this idea had.

The second half of the book touches on guilt, bad conscience, and asceticism. For example, we may think of guilt as our inner recognition of our moral failing. But of course, Nietzsche doesn’t easily buy the validity of that moral framework to begin with. He argues that guilt is associated with punishment. We suffer guilt not because we really wanted to do otherwise, but rather it is a feeling that the behavior we indulged is frowned upon. It is ultimately based on fear, we just can’t see it because it has been re-conceptualized for our modern constructed values.

And similarly, the punishment of bad behavior is not an act of justice but an expression of anger. These two are intrinsically connected. He traces the concept of guilt (Schuld) from the concept of debt (Schulden). The punisher is being “rewarded” with the pleasure of punishment for his loss, clearing the “debt”.

You can also see hits of other ideas he explored elsewhere, such as the ubermensch and will to power. None of them are very articulated, but they are mentioned several times implicitly. And perhaps the biggest seed of all is the groundwork for both existential and post-modern thought.

I liked the last part of the book the most. It dives a lot into truth, science, and how these related to man’s existential desire of a theological direction and solution. It explores a lot of the best arguments and concepts post-modernism has to offer while also exposing the blind faith that science was gaining in his time.

There are many ideas that are worth pursuing and lots of key insights that are mindblowing given Nietzsche’s era. Despite that, I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I predicted. In part based on his main thesis regarding morality which I don’t necessarily agree with, but in part also because of his writing. I picked this book to start out mostly because I read it was the clearest and with a connected narrative throughout the work.

Despite this, it was still full of aphorisms and quasi-poetic sentences were sometimes hard to decipher. It doesn’t taint the entire work, and a lot of it is not hard to read, but it happened often enough to be a bit annoying as I was reading it. It didn’t leave the best impression of Nietzsche’s primary work, although I’m willing to give it another try with Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

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Thanks for reading!