On the Genealogy of Morality

On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic (Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift, 1887) is Friedrich Nietzsche‘s most sustained and most rigorous work: three treatises, each an essay of a few dozen pages, that ask where our moral concepts — good and evil, guilt and bad conscience, asceticism and the will to truth — came from, and what their origin reveals about their value. Written in a few weeks in the summer of 1887 at Sils-Maria and Venice as a “clarification” of Beyond Good and Evil (1886), it is the book that gave the word “genealogy” to philosophy, that introduced the idea of ressentiment into modern thought, and that made the opposition of master morality and slave morality a commonplace. Nietzsche’s method is to treat morality, not as a timeless truth, but as a historical product of power, suffering and psychological need; his conclusion is that the morality of “good and evil” — the moral world of Christianity and of its secular descendants — is a vast, spiritually ingenious revenge of the weak against the strong; and that we have never yet asked the question of its value. Michel Foucault’s genealogies of punishment and sexuality, and much of twentieth-century critical theory, descend from it. See also Master and Slave Morality.

Preface and method

“We are unknown to ourselves”

The book opens with a famous sentence: “We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge — and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves — how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?” The Preface then states the problem. Nietzsche has long been preoccupied by the origin of our prejudices about good and evil. At first he searched, like his friend Paul Rée (whose The Origin of the Moral Sensations, 1877, he is criticising), for their origin in utility — altruistic acts being called “good” because they benefit others — but the English psychologists, he says, are “dull and gloomy”, seeking the origin of morality in the “obvious”, in forgetfulness and habit. What is needed is a historical investigation, “grey, painstaking” documentary history of moral values. Above all, he proposes a new demand: “We need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must first be called in question — and for that there is needed a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances in which they grew, under which they evolved and changed.”

Genealogy

“Genealogy” in Nietzsche’s sense is not a search for a pure origin, but an analysis of the descent (Herkunft) and emergence (Entstehung) of a thing through the contingent struggles of power. It also distinguishes the origin of a thing (why it arose) from its purpose (what it is used for): “the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility… are worlds apart”; the history of a thing is a “continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations”, imposed by whatever power gains mastery over it (II.12). Genealogy does not by itself refute a value: but it destroys any pretension that values are eternal, “natural” or God-given.

First Treatise: “Good and Evil”, “Good and Bad”

The two origins of “good”

The first essay asks where the concept of “good” came from. The English moralists say that “good” originally meant “useful”, and that altruistic acts were praised by their beneficiaries and later forgotten as the source of praise. Nietzsche says this is absurd: the word “good” was never made by the beneficiaries of unegoistic acts. It was the nobles — “the good themselves, that is to say the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded” — who felt and established themselves and their actions as good, i.e. of the first rank, in contrast to everything low, common and plebeian. “It was out of this pathos of distance that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for values.”

Etymology supports him: in many languages, “good” derives from “noble”, “aristocratic”, “of high rank” — Greek esthlos, “true”, “real”; Latin bonus perhaps from duonus, “warrior”; German gut from “Goth”; and “bad” (schlecht) is related to schlicht, “simple”, “common”. The nobles called themselves “the truthful”; the “bad” were the common people.

Master and slave morality

Alongside, a second kind of morality arose, among the priestly caste. Nietzsche contrasts the knightly-aristocratic mode of valuation, with its “powerful physicality, a rich, burgeoning, even overflowing health, together with that which preserves it: war, adventure, hunting, dancing, war games” — with the priestly mode, which is “from the outset impotent”. The priests, for whom purity and impurity are central, are the “most evil enemies” (the word hatred has a long history among them), because they are the most impotent. “Out of impotence their hatred grows into something monstrous and uncanny.” The Jews, “that priestly people, who finally was able to exact satisfaction from its enemies and conquerors only through a radical revaluation of their enemies’ values, that is, through an act of the most spiritual revenge”, reversed the aristocratic equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of the gods), and declared:

“Only those who suffer are good; only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly are also the only pious ones, the only ones blessed by God, for them alone is blessedness — whereas you, the noble and powerful, you are in all eternity the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiate, the godless; you will also be eternally wretched, cursed, and damned!”

This was the slave revolt in morality, which began with the Jews and, with Christianity, “triumphed” over Rome: “Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome — there has hitherto been no greater event than this struggle.” The Renaissance was the last time Rome seemed to win; the Reformation, and then the French Revolution, restored Judea.

Ressentiment

The source of the slave revolt is ressentiment — a French word Nietzsche borrows to name the festering, repressed, imaginary revenge of those who are denied the real deed. “The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge.” While the noble man’s morality “grows out of a triumphant affirmation of itself”, slave morality “from the outset says No to what is ‘outside’, what is ‘different’, what is ‘not itself’; and this No is its creative deed”. Where the noble says “I am good” and then derives “bad”, the slave says “you are evil”, and then, as an afterthought, “so I am good”. The slave’s “good” is thus a negative invention: the “evil” enemy is its precondition. The slave cannot forget; he broods, remembers, poisons himself.

The lambs and the birds of prey

He illustrates with a famous parable: lambs resent great birds of prey. “It offers no ground for reproach that they carry off little lambs. And if the lambs whisper to each other, ‘these birds of prey are evil, and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb — would he not be good?’, there is no reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal, except perhaps that the birds of prey might view it a little mockingly.” It is absurd to demand of strength that it not express itself as strength — that is, to demand that the strong be weak. “A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, activity… only the seduction of language… which understands and misunderstands all action as conditioned by an agent, by a ‘subject’, can make it appear otherwise.” There is no “being” behind the doing: “the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed — the deed is everything.” The idea of a free “subject” who could choose to be strong or weak is a fiction that lets the weak interpret their weakness as a merit, as a voluntary achievement.

The treatise ends with the Roman and Judean opposition and the vision of “the last man” in Europe, and with the hope of a “new” nobility; its last section points forward to the spectre of a “revaluation”.

Second Treatise: “Guilt”, “Bad Conscience”, and the Like

The breeding of an animal that is allowed to promise

The second essay asks about guilt (Schuld) and bad conscience. “To breed an animal with the prerogative to make promises — is this not precisely the paradoxical task which nature has set itself in regard to man?” For that, man must be made calculable, regular, necessary, with a memory — not a passive inability to get rid of an impression, but an active will not to forget. “How can one create a memory for the human animal? … ‘Something must be burned in so that it stays in the memory: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory.’” Hence cruelty, torture, punishments, sacrifices, mutilations — the “mnemotechnics” of early societies. The “sovereign individual” — “the man with his own, independent, protracted will, who has the right to make a promise” — is the “ripest fruit” of this long process, free and responsible. It is a surprising portrait: the conscience of the sovereign individual is a mastery over himself.

Debt and guilt

“Guilt” (Schuld) has its origin in the very material concept of debt (Schulden): the creditor–debtor relationship is “the oldest and most primitive personal relationship”. Punishment began, not as retribution for a free act, but as the equivalent of a debt — the creditor is entitled to “the pleasure of cruelty”: “to see someone suffer does one good, to make someone suffer even more so — this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle.” Punishment is a festival (Fest), a cruel pleasure; and the idea that punishment has a single “purpose” (deterrence, improvement, retribution) is a later overlay — the meaning of punishment is fluid, a “synthesis of meanings”. This is the point at which Nietzsche states his principle that things have no fixed purpose: “whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed and redirected by some power superior to it.”

The origin of bad conscience

Bad conscience emerged when human beings, shut up in the walls of society and peace, found their instincts of cruelty, aggression and freedom — which had once been discharged outwards — turned inwards. “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward — this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his ‘soul’.” The hunter, the warrior, the conqueror was domesticated into an animal that “rubbed itself raw against the bars of its cage” and was “driven to tear itself, to persecute itself, to gnaw at itself”. Bad conscience is “the serious illness that man was bound to contract under the stress of the most radical change he ever experienced”. The first state, Nietzsche says, was founded by “some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race”, who with “terrible fist” imposed form on the populace: “it is not in them that the ‘bad conscience’ grew”.

The religious use of guilt

The final turn is the use that priests made of this inwardness. The sense of debt toward ancestors — who had become gods — grew with the power of the clan until the ancestors were transfigured into ever greater gods. The ancestors’ debt, impossible to repay, culminated in the Christian God, the “maximum god”, with the “maximum feeling of guilt on earth”. And then came Christianity’s “stroke of genius”: God sacrificed himself for man’s debt, the creditor paid the debtor — “out of love” (can one believe that?) — so that guilt became, at last, an unpayable, eternal debt, and sin. “Man, suffering from himself, from a morbid disposition… needed to find reasons for his suffering, and he found them in guilt.”

Nietzsche ends with a hope: that guilt, now that God is gone, can be turned again — that the bad conscience can be wedded to “the unnatural inclinations”, “all those aspirations to the beyond, to the senses-contradicting, instinct-contradicting, nature-contradicting, animal-contradicting” — and thus lose its antagonism to the “natural” values and to life. For this, a “great health” and a “man of the future” will be needed, one who will redeem us “from the ideal held up hitherto… from the nothingness… from the great disgust, from the will to nothingness, from nihilism” — “this Antichrist and anti-nihilist; this victor over God and nothingness — he must come one day.” Then: “But what am I saying? Enough! Enough! At this point only one thing is fitting, silence; otherwise I shall be encroaching on something that is reserved for a younger, stronger, more future man than I.”

Third Treatise: “What Is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?”

The third essay, the longest, takes as its epigraph a line from Zarathustra and asks why asceticism — the ideal of poverty, chastity and humility — has had such power over human beings, as it appears in artists (Wagner), philosophers (Schopenhauer, Kant), priests, scholars and scientists.

The various meanings

For artists, the ascetic ideal means little or nothing — or too many things. For philosophers, it signifies an optimum condition for the highest and boldest spirituality: they have long displayed “a certain sensible disposition for the ascetic virtues — poverty, humility, chastity” — not because they love them, but because they provide the freedom from the claims of ordinary life — the “favourable conditions of the highest and boldest spirituality”. The “philosopher” first presented himself in the form of the “contemplative man” — as a “priest, wizard, soothsayer”, only in disguise.

But what does the ascetic ideal mean for the ascetic priest? It is “a trick for the preservation of life”. The priest is the “savior, shepherd and advocate of the sick herd” — the sick, who are the “greatest danger to the healthy”, because the strong are the ones whom the weak are tempted to poison with their ressentiment. The priest changes the direction of the ressentiment: “‘I suffer: someone must be to blame for it’ — thus thinks every sickly sheep. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest, tells him: ‘Quite so, my sheep! someone must be to blame for it: but you yourself are this someone, you alone are to blame for it — you alone are to blame for yourself!’” The effect is guilt: suffering is given a meaning — it is a punishment, a trial — and the priest relieves it by narcotising it, by “orgies of feeling”, by mechanical activity, by “petty pleasures” (love of one’s neighbour), and by the herd-feeling.

The ascetic ideal as will to power

Nietzsche’s deepest claim: the ascetic ideal “springs from the protective and healing instincts of a degenerating life”, and is a will to power, albeit a perverse, self-contradictory one: “this ascetic ideal, this will to nothingness, [is] a will! … man would rather will nothingness than not will.” That sentence, the last of the book, is one of Nietzsche’s most famous: “except for the ascetic ideal, man, the human animal, had no meaning so far. His existence on earth contained no goal; ‘why man at all?’ was a question without an answer; the will for man and earth was lacking; behind every great human destiny there sounded as a refrain a yet greater ‘in vain!’… Man would rather will nothingness than not will.”

Science and the will to truth

The most radical stage is the criticism of science. One might think that science is the antithesis of the ascetic ideal. Not so: science is “the latest and noblest form of the ascetic ideal” — it believes in the same thing, the value of truth. “The unconditional will to truth” is faith in a metaphysical value. “Even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine.” The honest conclusion is that we must question truth itself: “the will to truth requires a critique — let us thereby define our own task — the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question.” The modern scientific scholar, who is neither a free spirit nor an atheist but the “last idealist”, has not yet freed himself of faith.

Historiography and the way out

The treatise attacks “modern historiography” (Renan, Carlyle), which pretends to be objective, as the most refined form of nihilism: “this clever spirit who has become a mirror, a thing that reflects”. The only genuine counter-force to the ascetic ideal is not science but “the laughter of a being who has recovered his health” — art, “in which precisely the lie is sanctified and the will to deception has a good conscience”, is more opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science.

Themes

Morality as history

Nietzsche’s most lasting insight is that moral concepts have a history, which is a history of power, violence, resentment and ingenuity. This “genealogical” method — pursued by Max Scheler (Ressentiment, 1912), Max Weber, Freud (who admitted he avoided Nietzsche so as not to be influenced), Michel Foucault (Nietzsche, Genealogy, History; Discipline and Punish), and many others — opened the door to the critical study of how norms, institutions and subjectivities are formed.

Value of values

Genealogy doesn’t refute a morality by exposing its origins (that would be the genetic fallacy); but it removes the aura of necessity. Nietzsche’s real question is: what is the value of the morality of pity, self-denial and altruism — “the morality of unselfing” — to life? Does it promote or inhibit human flourishing? He suspects that it has been “the danger of dangers” — the principle of decline.

Ressentiment and psychology

The book is one of the earliest and sharpest works of depth psychology: the unconscious revenge, the internalised cruelty, the transformation of suffering into guilt, the pleasure in self-torture. Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (the internalisation of aggression as the superego) is a distant echo.

Perspectivism

Against the belief in an “objective” view from nowhere, Nietzsche urges perspectivism: “There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’, be” (III.12).

Interpretation and criticism

Readers disagree about Nietzsche’s attitude. Is he simply celebrating the “blond beast” and condemning compassion? Most careful interpreters (Kaufmann, Nehamas, Leiter) argue that he is ambivalent: slave morality is a great achievement — it made human beings “interesting”, gave them depth, made them “an animal with a soul”. “Man became interesting only thanks to the ascetic priests” (I.6). His target is not the weak but a morality that claims universality and condemns strength. Critics have charged him with anti-Semitism (though he attacked anti-Semites furiously and praised the Jews of the Old Testament); with historical fantasy (his “blond beast” is more myth than history); with a circularity in valuing life while undermining all values; and with a moral perspective that cannot be sustained once universal values are removed. Others — from Jean-Paul Sartre to Judith Butler — have found in it resources for a critique of power.

The Genealogy in conversation

Three ideas are worth carrying. On morality: the good begins as the noble’s self-praise, and “evil” as the slave’s revenge — “I am good” versus “you are evil”. On punishment: guilt is first a debt, and cruelty a festival. On meaning: “man would rather will nothingness than not will.”