On the Genealogy of Morality: A New Translation

by Friedrich Nietzsche, David Petault (translator)

How did our moral concepts originate? What purposes do they serve? What power relations do they reflect and maintain?

Friedrich Nietzsche published On the Genealogy of Morality in 1887, pioneering a revolutionary rather than asking what morality is, he traced how moral concepts emerged, what functions they perform, whom they serve. This genealogical approach—revealing concepts' contingency, their connection to power relations, their historical construction—would influence Foucault, critical theory, and entire traditions of suspicious interpretation.

The First Essay presents the explosive "master" and "slave" morality distinction. Nietzsche argues aristocratic morality celebrated strength, vitality, self-affirmation, while slave morality—emerging from the powerless—inverted these values through ressentiment, making weakness virtue and strength sin. Christianity universalized this revaluation, achieving slave morality's triumph. This analysis requires immediate Nietzsche wasn't advocating that the strong should dominate the weak, not endorsing aristocratic privilege. He was analyzing how moral concepts emerged from social configurations and served particular interests.

Yet we must acknowledge the rhetoric frequently sounds like aristocratic celebration and contempt for masses. His treatment of Judaism and Christianity is historically reductive and, despite his explicit anti-antisemitism, provided language that fascists later appropriated catastrophically. Reading Nietzsche honestly means recognizing both analytical power and troubling implications.

The Second Essay examines guilt's origins in material debt, tracing how creditor-debtor relations became internalized as "bad conscience"—aggression turned inward when civilization required suppressing external violence. Christianity exploited this, interpreting natural guilt as sin, making humans infinitely indebted to God.

The Third Essay critiques ascetic ideals across religion, philosophy, and science—all forms of life-denial that devalue earthly existence for "higher" spiritual or intellectual pursuits. Even philosophers' pursuit of truth, Nietzsche suggests, often masks ascetic devaluation of life.

The genealogical method itself proved concepts have histories rather than eternal truth, emerge contingently, serve specific interests. Whether Nietzsche's particular genealogies are historically accurate matters less than the demonstration that taking concepts at face value is philosophically naïve.

Post-war scholarship has reclaimed Nietzsche from Nazi misappropriation, showing the perversity of fascist readings. Contemporary engagement must navigate his genuine philosophical insights alongside his apparent elitism and hostility to democracy. His strength lies in critical diagnosis, not positive prescription—he exposes problems without offering complete alternatives.

Essential provocation rather than take seriously the critical insights while rejecting the elitism, appreciate the methodological innovations while recognizing historical limitations, learn from achievements and failures. Dangerous text—dangerous in how it's been misused, dangerous in what it unleashes. But philosophical inquiry requires some danger; the alternative is comfortable orthodoxy that never questions its foundations.

136 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 19, 2024

About the author

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900, after experiencing pneumonia and multiple strokes.
Nietzsche's work spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favour of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and a related theory of master–slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to both the "death of God" and the profound crisis of nihilism; the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces; and a characterisation of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. He also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and his doctrine of eternal return. In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome cultural and moral mores in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health. His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, music, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew inspiration from Greek tragedy as well as figures such as Zoroaster, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Wagner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
After his death, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth became the curator and editor of his manuscripts. She edited his unpublished writings to fit her German ultranationalist ideology, often contradicting or obfuscating Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Through her published editions, Nietzsche's work became associated with fascism and Nazism. 20th-century scholars such as Walter Kaufmann, R.J. Hollingdale, and Georges Bataille defended Nietzsche against this interpretation, and corrected editions of his writings were soon made available. Nietzsche's thought enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1960s and his ideas have since had a profound impact on 20th- and early 21st-century thinkers across philosophy—especially in schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism—as well as art, literature, music, poetry, politics, and popular culture.