Genealogy of Morals

by Friedrich Nietzsche

Overview

This version of the Genealogy of Morals is an historic early edition.

On the Genealogy of Morality, or On the Genealogy of Morals (German: Zur Genealogie der Moral), subtitled "A Polemic" (Eine Streitschrift), is a book by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composed and first published in 1887 with the intention of expanding and following through on certain new doctrines sketched out in his previous book Beyond Good and Evil. The most straightforward of Nietzsche's books and the least aphoristic in form and style, it is considered by some Nietzsche scholars to be a work of sustained brilliance and power, and Nietzsche's masterpiece.

It consists of a preface and three interrelated Abhandlungen ("treatises" or "essays"), which trace episodes in the evolution of moral concepts with a view to undermining "moral prejudices", and specifically the morality of Christianity and Judaism.

Nietzsche's treatises outline his thoughts "on the origin of our moral prejudices", thoughts a long time in the making and already given brief and imperfect expression in his Human, All Too Human (1878). Nietzsche attributes the desire to publish his "hypotheses" on the origins of morality to reading his friend Paul Rée's book The Origin of the Moral Sensations (1877) and finding the "genealogical hypotheses" offered there unsatisfactory.

Nietzsche has come to believe that "a critique of moral values" is in order, that "the value of these values themselves must be called into question". To this end he finds it necessary to provide an actual history of morality, rather than a hypothetical account in the style of Rée, whom Nietzsche refers to as an "English psychologist".

Product Details

BN ID:	2940015108774
Publisher:	Balefire Publishing
Publication date:	09/02/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	11 MB
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About the Author

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) was a German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism.

Nietzsche's key ideas include the death of God, the Übermensch, the eternal recurrence, the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy, perspectivism and the will to power. Central to his philosophy is the idea of "life-affirmation", which involves questioning of all doctrines that drain life's expansive energies, however socially prevalent and radical those views might be. His influence remains substantial within philosophy, notably in existentialism, post-modernism and post-structuralism, as well as outside it. His radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth has been the focus of extensive commentary, especially in the continental tradition. Nietzsche has been called one of the masters of the "school of suspicion", alongside Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.

Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. In 1869, at the age of 24 he was appointed to the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel (the youngest individual to have held this position), but resigned in the summer of 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life. In 1889 he suffered a collapse and a complete loss of his mental faculties. The breakdown has been ascribed to atypical general paralysis attributed to tertiary syphilis, but this diagnosis has since come into question. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897, then under the care of his sister until his death in 1900.

His sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, acted as curator and editor of Nietzsche's manuscripts during his illness. She was married to a prominent German nationalist and antisemite, Bernhard Förster and she reworked some of Nietzsche's unpublished writings to fit her husband's ideology, often in ways contrary to Nietzsche's actual opinions which were strongly and explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism (see Nietzsche's criticism of anti-Semitism and nationalism).