The Genealogy of Morals
Three essays trace how ideas of good and evil developed through conflict and changing social values. One essay links guilt to debt, drawing on an old connection between the German words.
182 pages 3h 32m reading time
- One of the most widely read and debated works of modern moral philosophy, and often seen as the clearest entry into Nietzsche's thought.
- Argues that the morality of meekness and humility began as a "slave revolt" by the weak, who turned their resentment of the strong into a new idea of what counts as good.
- Argues that the ideal of self-denial (living for poverty, chastity, and suffering) gave people a meaning for their pain, because, in Nietzsche's words, people would rather will nothingness than not will at all.
- Made "ressentiment" (a buried, bitter grudge that shapes a person's values) a standard term in philosophy, psychology, and social science.
- Its method of tracing where values came from, instead of treating them as timeless, shaped later thinkers such as Michel Foucault, who named his own historical approach "genealogy" after it.
Written in three weeks
Nietzsche wrote the whole book in a burst of about three weeks, in summer 1887 in the Swiss Alps.
An answer to a friend
The preface attacks the moral theories of Paul Rée, a former close friend who had written about morality's origins.
Meant to explain another book
A note in the first edition says it was written to support and clarify his earlier book, Beyond Good and Evil.
Paid for by the author
Few people bought his books then, so Nietzsche paid to have this one printed himself.
Twisted by later readers
After his death, Nazi writers misused phrases like "blond beast," though Nietzsche openly mocked antisemites.
Translated from German by Horace B. Samuel