Paul Rée

Works

• 1875Psychological Observations

  Rée’s first book (1875), a collection of aphorisms on human motives, two years before The Origin of Moral Feelings.

• 1877The Origin of Moral Feelings

  Derives moral feelings from habit and utility and explains altruism in evolutionary terms after Darwin; Nietzsche names it in the preface of the Genealogy of Morals as the impulse for his own inquiry, which rejects its conclusions.

Position

Rée is on the map for the book that gave Nietzsche the first impulse for the Genealogy of Morals. In The Origin of Moral Feelings he derives moral feelings from habit and utility and explains altruism in evolutionary terms, building on Darwin’s account of morality. Working with Rée in Sorrento in 1876–77 shaped Human, All Too Human. In the preface to the Genealogy Nietzsche names Rée’s book as the occasion of his own inquiry but says that he rejected nearly every inference of it and contests its derivation of morality from altruistic valuation.

Life & context

Paul Rée was born on 21 November 1849 in Bartelshagen in Pomerania. He studied philosophy and law in Leipzig and by 1875 had qualified for a doctorate at Halle with a dissertation on the noble in Aristotle’s Ethics. His first book, Psychological Observations, appeared in 1875. In 1876–77 he worked with Friedrich Nietzsche in Sorrento, where both were guests of Malwida von Meysenbug, and in 1877 he published The Origin of Moral Feelings. After the friendship broke down in the autumn of 1882 over Lou Salomé, with whom he then lived in Berlin, he became a practising physician. He died on 28 October 1901 near Celerina in Switzerland.