Work · Life & Existential Philosophy
On the Genealogy of Morality
Master and slave morality, guilt and ascetic ideals.
Introduction
Nietzsche wrote the book in a few weeks in the summer of 1887 and published it as “a polemic” supplementing Beyond Good and Evil. Unlike his collections of aphorisms, it consists of three continuous essays. The first contrasts the aristocratic pair “good and bad” with “good and evil”, born of the ressentiment of the oppressed. The second traces conscience and guilt back to the relationship between creditor and debtor and to the turning inward of instincts. The third asks what ascetic ideals mean for artists, priests, philosophers and scientists, and concludes that humans would rather will nothingness than not will at all. It is often seen as Nietzsche’s most coherent book, and Foucault’s genealogical method drew on it.
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Connections
Builds on
- Beyond Good and Evil1886 · Friedrich Nietzsche
Criticizes
- The World as Will and Representation1819 · Arthur Schopenhauer
Taken up in
- Aristocratic Radicalism1889 · Georg Brandes
- Dialectic of Enlightenment1944 · Theodor W. Adorno
- Nietzsche and Philosophy1962 · Gilles Deleuze
- Discipline and Punish1975 · Michel Foucault
Criticized in
- After Virtue1981 · Alasdair MacIntyre
- The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity1985 · Jürgen Habermas
More works by Friedrich Nietzsche
- 1882The Gay Science
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