Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Genealogy of Morals
    The Genealogy of Morals
    The Genealogy of Morals
    Ebook190 pages3 hours

    The Genealogy of Morals

    By Friedrich Nietzsche

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    "Fired with a fearless iconoclasm which surpassed the wildest dreams of contemporary free thought" - The New York Times

    Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most influential thinkers of the past 150 years and The Genealogy of Morals (1887) is his most important work on ethics and politics. The book which raises profo

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHaus Editions
    Release dateDec 1, 2023
    ISBN9781922491671
    Author

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15. Oktober 1844 in Röcken -25. August 1900) war ein deutscher klassischer Sprachwissenschaftler und Philosoph. Am bekanntesten (und berüchtigtsten) sind seine Kritiken an Moral und Religion. Sein Werk wurde und wird häufig fehlinterpretiert und missbraucht. Er wird in regelmäßigen Abständen von Wissenschaft und Popkultur wiederentdeckt und als Enfant terrible einer oberflächlichen Zitatenkultur geschätzt: „Wenn du zum Weibe gehst, vergiss die Peitsche nicht!“

    Read more from Friedrich Nietzsche

    Related to The Genealogy of Morals

    Titles in the series (3)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Philosophy For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      'Churchill' Takes Reader Through Stages Of Churchill's Life In Brightly Engaging Fashion

      Nov 22, 2018

      The book is a thematic continuation of author Andrew Roberts' bestselling one-volume 2014 work 'Napoleon: A Life.'

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 4, 2018

      I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. —Fred Allen I have always wondered, in reading travels, at the childish joy travellers felt at meeting people they knew, and their sense of loneliness when they did not, in

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Billie Jean’s Story Off Court

      Sep 10, 2021

      Billie Jean’s Story Off Court
      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Paris, My Way

      Nov 15, 2021

      Paris, My Way
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      American Classics

      Jul 4, 2024

      American Classics
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Age of Outrage

      Dec 17, 2017

      The Age of Outrage
      17 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Full Skirts

      Sep 6, 2024

      Full Skirts
      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      1 Laid-back Luxury

      Dec 8, 2022

      1 Laid-back Luxury
      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Retro Revival

      Feb 22, 2023

      Retro Revival
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Felix by Proxy

      Mar 15, 2022

      We’d arranged to meet under the High Line,Outside the Whitney; I was running down fromThis photo shoot in Chelsea so I hadMy clothes stuffed into a hiking backpackAnd I was naked except for stilettos.Felix was coming from choir practice.He was tall,

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Flood The World With Beauty

      Nov 1, 2019

      A big literary conference is probably not the best place for a poet dealing with a mental breakdown. But there I was at AWP, skittishly perusing tables at the book fair, under the garish lights of the Minneapolis Convention Center. For two years, par

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      THE LIFE OF the Suga Show

      Feb 1, 2023

      THE LIFE OF the Suga Show
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      'The Chosen Wars' Tells How Judaism Redefined Itself In America

      Aug 21, 2018

      Today’s Jewish community continues to be divided over issues related to assimilation and secularization.

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A New Golden Age

      Oct 5, 2022

      A New Golden Age
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Distribution Options for Indie Authors

      Feb 15, 2021

      The decision to self-publish a book means taking on all the responsibilities of a publisher. This puts the author in charge of not only the writing, but the distribution, marketing, and promotion as well. Amazon is the leading vendor for book sales i

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Dark Side of Awe

      Jan 29, 2024

      The Dark Side of Awe
      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      On Writing Poems Facing Into The Broken World

      Mar 1, 2020

      Kaveh Akbar and Jane Hirshfield have been in a running e-mail conversation since January 2016, when Akbar first contacted Hirshfield about doing an interview in his Divedapper series, before his first, widely acclaimed book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Al

      16 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Spiritual Materialist

      Mar 30, 2023

      The Spiritual Materialist
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Symposium on Anxiety

      Sep 1, 2020

      A Symposium on Anxiety
      25 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Thinking Makes It So: Ward Farnsworth Reframes the Stoics with Wit and Insight

      Aug 30, 2018

      Seneca’s suicide, at the order of the emperor Nero, presents a macabre scene. Previously adviser to the fickle, impetuous, paranoid, thin-skinned emperor, Seneca was erroneously implicated in an assassination plot and was ordered to take his own life

      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      ‘What Seek Ye?’

      Jul 31, 2020

      ‘What Seek Ye?’
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Holding Hands With A Chimp

      Dec 13, 2018

      Revelation comes in different forms for different people. A biblical verse. A flash of recognition in a lover’s eyes. A Nietzschean proverb. A classical sonata. A child’s embrace. Any moment of profundity, really, where time stops and the divine reve

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      An Interview With Bianca Stone

      May 1, 2023

      An Interview With Bianca Stone
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Pained Intuition and a Palpable Longing: Katie Ford on Theology, Poetry, and the Unknowable

      Sep 13, 2018

      If You Have to Go, the new collection of poems by Katie Ford, is a book that conjures powers of possession. I feel that way about all of her books: Her poems bring me to a mystical plane somewhere between language and life. I’m left shaken. Her willi

      17 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Genealogy of Morals

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Nietzsche

      1.png

      Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. His attempts to unmask the motives that underlie traditional Western religion, morality, and philosophy deeply affected generations of theologians, philosophers, psychologists, poets, novelists, and playwrights. He thought through the consequences of the triumph of the Enlightenment’s secularism, expressed in his observation that God is dead, in a way that determined the agenda for many of Europe’s most-­celebrated intellectuals after his death. He was an ardent foe of nationalism, anti-­Semitism, and power politics.

      Nietzsche once wrote that some men are born posthumously, and that is certainly true in his case. The history of philosophy, theology, and psychology since the early 20th century is unintelligible without him. Nietzsche’s great influence is due not only to his originality but also to the fact that he was one of the German language’s most-­brilliant prose writers.

      Published by Haus Editions, 2023

      Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm [1844–1900]

      isbn

      : 978-1-922491-63-3 (paperback)

      isbn

      : 978-1-922491-67-1 (ebook)

      Haus Editions is an imprint of Tempo Haus

      Book design and typesetting by Tempo Haus

      © Tempo Haus, 2023

      Contents

      Preface

      The Genealogy of Morals

      A Polemic

      First Essay

      Good and Evil, Good and Bad

      Second Essay

      Guilt, Bad Conscience, and the Like

      Third Essay

      What Is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?

      Preface

      1

      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 collection of aphorisms entitled Human, All Too Human, a Book for Free Minds, the writing of which was begun in Sorrento, during a winter which allowed me to gaze over the broad and dangerous territory through which my mind had up to that time wandered. This took place in the winter of 1876–77; the thoughts themselves are older. They were in their substance already the same thoughts which I take up again in the following treatises:—we hope that they have derived benefit from the long interval, that they have grown riper, clearer, stronger, more complete. The fact, however, that I still cling to them even now, that in the meanwhile they have always held faster by each other, have, in fact, grown out of their original shape and into each other, all this strengthens in my mind the joyous confidence that they must have been originally neither separate disconnected capricious nor sporadic phenomena, but have sprung from a common root, from a fundamental fiat of knowledge, whose empire reached to the soul’s depth, and that ever grew more definite in its voice, and more definite in its demands. That is the only state of affairs that is proper in the case of a philosopher.

      We have no right to be "disconnected; we must neither err disconnectedly nor strike the truth disconnectedly." Rather with the necessity with which a tree bears its fruit, so do our thoughts, our values, our Yes’s and No’s and If’s and Whether’s, grow connected and interrelated, mutual witnesses of one will, one health, one kingdom, one sun—as to whether they are to your taste, these fruits of ours?—But what matters that to the trees? What matters that to us, us the philosophers?

      3

      Owing to a scrupulosity peculiar to myself, which I confess reluctantly—it concerns indeed morality—a scrupulosity, which manifests itself in my life at such an early period, with so much spontaneity, with so chronic a persistence and so keen an opposition to environment, epoch, precedent, and ancestry that I should have been almost entitled to style it my "a priori"—my curiosity and my suspicion felt themselves betimes bound to halt at the question, of what in point of actual fact was the origin of our Good and of our Evil. Indeed, at the boyish age of thirteen the problem of the origin of Evil already haunted me: at an age when games and God divide one’s heart, I devoted to that problem my first childish attempt at the literary game, my first philosophic essay—and as regards my infantile solution of the problem, well, I gave quite properly the honour to God, and made him the father of evil. Did my own "a priori demand that precise solution from me? that new, immoral, or at least amoral a priori and that categorical imperative" which was its voice (but oh! how hostile to the Kantian article, and how pregnant with problems!), to which since then I have given more and more attention, and indeed what is more than attention. Fortunately I soon learned to separate theological from moral prejudices, and I gave up looking for a supernatural origin of evil. A certain amount of historical and philological education, to say nothing of an innate faculty of psychological discrimination par excellence succeeded in transforming almost immediately my original problem into the following one:—Under what conditions did Man invent for himself those judgments of values, Good and Evil? And what intrinsic value do they possess in themselves? Have they up to the present hindered or advanced human well-­being? Are they a symptom of the distress, impoverishment, and degeneration of Human Life? Or, conversely, is it in them that is manifested the fullness, the strength, and the will of Life, its courage, its self-­confidence, its future? On this point I found and hazarded in my mind the most diverse answers, I established distinctions in periods, peoples, and castes, I became a specialist in my problem, and from my answers grew new questions, new investigations, new conjectures, new probabilities; until at last I had a land of my own and a soil of my own, a whole secret world growing and flowering, like hidden gardens of whose existence no one could have an inkling—oh, how happy are we, we finders of knowledge, provided that we know how to keep silent sufficiently long.

      4

      My first impulse to publish some of my hypotheses concerning the origin of morality I owe to a clear, well-­written, and even precocious little book, in which a perverse and vicious kind of moral philosophy (your real English kind) was definitely presented to me for the first time; and this attracted me—with that magnetic attraction, inherent in that which is diametrically opposed and antithetical to one’s own ideas. The title of the book was The Origin of the Moral Emotions; its author, Dr. Paul Rée; the year of its appearance, 1877. I may almost say that I have never read anything in which every single dogma and conclusion has called forth from me so emphatic a negation as did that book; albeit a negation tainted by either pique or intolerance. I referred accordingly both in season and out of season in the previous works, at which I was then working, to the arguments of that book, not to refute them—for what have I got to do with mere refutations but substituting, as is natural to a positive mind, for an improbable theory one which is more probable, and occasionally no doubt for one philosophic error another. In that early period I gave, as I have said, the first public expression to those theories of origin to which these essays are devoted, but with a clumsiness which I was the last to conceal from myself, for I was as yet cramped, being still without a special language for these special subjects, still frequently liable to relapse and to vacillation. To go into details, compare what I say in Human, All Too Human, part I, about the parallel early history of Good and Evil, Aph. 45 (namely, their origin from the castes of the aristocrats and the slaves); similarly, Aph. 136 et seq., concerning the birth and value of ascetic morality; similarly, Aphs. 96, 99, vol. II, Aph. 89, concerning the Morality of Custom, that far older and more original kind of morality which is toto coelo different from the altruistic ethics (in which Dr. Rée, like all the English moral philosophers, sees the ethical Thing-­in-­itself); finally, Aph. 92. Similarly, Aph. 26 in Human, All Too Human, part II, and Aph. 112, the Dawn of Day, concerning the origin of Justice as a balance between persons of approximately equal power (equilibrium as the hypothesis of all contract, consequently of all law); similarly, concerning the origin of Punishment, Human, All Too Human, part II, Aphs. 22, 23, in regard to which the deterrent object is neither essential nor original (as Dr. Rée thinks:—rather is it that this object is only imported, under certain definite conditions, and always as something extra and additional).

      5

      In reality I had set my heart at that time on something much more important than the nature of the theories of myself or others concerning the origin of morality (or, more precisely, the real function from my view of these theories was to point an end to which they were one among many means). The issue for me was the value of morality, and on that subject I had to place myself in a state of abstraction, in which I was almost alone with my great teacher 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 unegoistic 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

      This problem of the value of pity and of the pity-­morality (I am an opponent of the modern infamous emasculation of our emotions) seems at the first blush a mere isolated problem, a note of interrogation for itself; he, however, who once halts at this problem, and learns how to put questions, will experience what I experienced:—a new and immense vista unfolds itself before him, a sense of potentiality seizes him like a vertigo, every species of doubt, mistrust, and fear springs up, the belief in morality, nay, in all morality, totters—finally a new demand voices itself. Let us speak out this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values is for the first time to be called into question—and for this purpose a knowledge is necessary of the conditions and circumstances out of which these values grew, and under which they experienced their evolution and their distortion (morality as a result, as a symptom, as a mask, as Tartuffism, as disease, as a misunderstanding; but also morality as a cause, as a remedy, as a stimulant, as a fetter, as a drug), especially as such a knowledge has neither existed up to the present time nor is even now generally desired. The value of these values was taken for granted as an indisputable fact, which was beyond all question. No one has, up to the present, exhibited the faintest doubt or hesitation in judging the good man to be of a higher value than the evil man, of a higher value with regard specifically to human progress, utility, and prosperity generally, not forgetting the future. What? Suppose the converse were the truth! What? Suppose there lurked in the good man a symptom of retrogression, such as a danger, a temptation, a poison, a narcotic, by means of which the present battened on the future! More comfortable and less risky perhaps than its opposite, but also pettier, meaner! So that morality would really be saddled with the guilt, if the maximum potentiality of the power and splendour of the human species were never to be attained? So that really morality would be the danger of dangers?

      7

      Enough, that after this vista had disclosed itself to me, I myself had reason to search for learned, bold, and industrious colleagues (I am doing it even to this very day). It means traversing with new clamorous questions, and at the same time with new eyes, the immense, distant, and completely unexplored land of morality—of a morality which has actually existed and been actually lived! and is this not practically equivalent to first discovering that land? If, in this context, I thought, amongst others, of the aforesaid Dr. Rée, I did so because I had no

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1