On the Genealogy of Morals

Overview

A hundred and sixty pages, published in 1887, and the only one of Nietzsche’s late books with an ordinary architecture: a preface and three essays, each stating a question and pursuing it to an answer. He described it as a supplement meant to clarify Beyond Good and Evil, and it is much the best place to begin with him if you want arguments rather than aphorisms.

The word genealogy is doing precise work. Nietzsche is not writing intellectual history for its own sake, and he is certainly not doing it with much regard for evidence. He is claiming that moral concepts are made things with datable origins and traceable motives, and that if you can show what a value was made for, you have said something about its worth that no amount of analysis of the concept will tell you. The preface puts the question directly: under what conditions did people invent these judgements, and what is the value of the values themselves?

The tone is a problem for many readers and should be. It is deliberately offensive, it deals in caricature, and in the first essay it uses a racial and national vocabulary that was later put to horrifying use. Nietzsche himself detested antisemitism and broke with his sister and his publisher over it, and none of that makes the rhetoric less ugly or less available for misuse. Read it with your eyes open.

The argument

First essay: Good and Evil, Good and Bad. English psychologists, Nietzsche says, explain good as what was once found useful and later forgotten to be useful. He rejects this. The word good was coined by the powerful about themselves, to name their own distance from those below, and bad was an afterthought meaning common, plain, low. He argues the point from etymology in several languages, which is the weakest part of the case and the part he likes best.

Then the reversal. The priestly caste, powerless in body and enormously powerful in imagination, produced an inversion: the wretched alone are good, and the noble are evil. This is the slave revolt in morality, and its engine is ressentiment, the resentment of those who cannot discharge a grievance in action and so discharge it in an imaginary revenge. Nietzsche insists on the asymmetry: noble valuation begins by affirming itself and only glances at others; slave valuation begins with a no to an outside and invents its good backwards from that.

The most philosophically interesting section is the fable of the lambs and the birds of prey. The lambs think the birds are evil, and the birds think lambs are delicious and bear them no ill will. The lambs’ error, Nietzsche says, is grammatical: they take the strength and the strong thing to be separate, as if a bird could choose not to seize, whereas there is no being behind the doing. Whether he is right about that is a real question in the philosophy of action, and it is the linchpin of the essay.

Second essay: Guilt, Bad Conscience and the Like. It opens on a different subject entirely, the breeding of an animal with the right to make promises, which requires memory, which requires that forgetting be overcome. And memory of the will, he says, was burned in: only what hurts is remembered, and he catalogues the mutilations by which early societies produced reliable people.

Then the central philological claim. The German word for guilt, Schuld, also means debt, and Nietzsche argues that the moral concept grew out of the commercial one. A creditor who cannot be repaid takes compensation in the pleasure of inflicting suffering on the debtor, and the equivalence of injury and pain is the oldest form of justice. Punishment, he notes, has therefore never produced remorse; it makes people harder and more prudent, not better.

Where does bad conscience come from, then? From the moment people were enclosed in society and their instincts for hostility, cruelty and pursuit could no longer go outward. They turned inward, against their possessor, and that folding-back is the origin of the soul as an inner space and of everything ideal that has been built in it. The state, he adds, was not founded by contract but imposed by some pack of predators, and its founders had no bad conscience at all.

The essay closes by compounding the debt: the debt to ancestors grows into a debt to gods, and Christianity performs the masterstroke of having the creditor sacrifice himself for the debtor, which makes the debt infinite and unrepayable.

Third essay: What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean? The longest and the best. The ideal means different things to different people. For an artist it may mean nothing much. For a philosopher, chastity, poverty and humility are the conditions of the work, a way of clearing space. For the ascetic priest it is something else: he is the doctor of a sick herd, and his genius is interpretive. A sufferer wants a cause, and instinctively looks for someone to blame. The priest redirects that search inward and says: you alone are to blame for yourself. That does not cure the suffering, but it gives it a meaning, and the intolerable thing about suffering was never the pain but its senselessness.

Then the turn that makes the essay famous. Does anything today stand opposed to this ideal? Not science, Nietzsche answers. Science shares the ideal’s faith, the unconditional will to truth, and the honest atheism of his own century is its most recent and most spiritual form, the ideal at last turning on its own last article of faith. The book ends with the sentence that sums up the whole: rather than have no will at all, a human being will will nothingness.

How to read it

Read the preface and then the third essay’s first section, where Nietzsche says he has written an aphorism at the head of the essay and that the essay is its exegesis. It tells you how he expects to be read, which is slowly, as he says, like a cow chewing.

Read the essays in order and in one or two sittings each. They are short, and they are structured, and the argument in each is cumulative in a way his other books are not.

Separate the claims from the history. Nietzsche’s etymologies are partly invented and his anthropology is largely conjecture, and almost nothing in the book would survive a historian’s audit. Ask instead whether the psychological mechanisms he describes, ressentiment, the internalization of aggression, the priestly reinterpretation of suffering, are real, because those are the claims that have had the influence.

Read the second essay next to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, which reproduces the mechanism of bad conscience almost exactly, and the third next to any modern defence of scientific naturalism, which is precisely what Nietzsche says cannot be a rival to the ideal.

The standard misreading is that Nietzsche is telling you to be a master rather than a slave, or that he admires cruelty. He is describing an origin, not issuing a prescription, and he says plainly that the slave revolt made human beings interesting and deep, which is not a thing he says lightly.

Questions it raises

• Does showing where a value came from tell you anything about whether it is true? Nietzsche assumes it does. Is that an error, or a different account of what a value is?
• Is there really no doer behind the deed? If the strong could not act otherwise, what happens to praise and blame on every side?
• Ressentiment is said to be creative. Can a value invented out of weakness still be a good one?
• Nietzsche says punishment never made anyone repent. If that is right, what is punishment for?
• The ascetic ideal won because it gave suffering a meaning. What would a meaning for suffering look like that was not ascetic?
• If science rests on an unexamined faith in truth, what would examining it consist of, and could the examination be scientific?