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On the Genealogy of Morality. Excerpts
- by [[Friedrich Nietzsche]]
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Preface:
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1:
- We are unknown to ourselves
- Humans are concerned with knowledge, how about experience?
- we remain strange to ourselves out of necessity, we are not knowers when it comes to ourselves
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2:
- This polemic is about the descent of our moral prejudices
- the same polemic occupied Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human
- because these ideas have not faded but grown, Nietzsche is sure that they are stemming from a fundamental will to knowledge which excedes him. This is correct, because philosophers must not stand out individually in their quest for knowledge
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3:
- origin of terms good and evil, a curiosity that stems from skepticism
- first hypothesis: the origin is God
- but later the author ceased to search the origin of evil beyond the world
- he then focused on the value judgments good and evil, and how was it that man came up with them, and what do they mean for humanity
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4:
- genealogy of hypotheses: The Origin of the Moral Sensations by Dr. Paul RΓ©e, "refuted" by Nietzsche in Human…
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5:
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Value of morality: necessary confrontation with Schopenhauer
- values of unegoistic, compassion, self-denial, self-sacrifice held by Schopenhauer, mistrusted by Nietzsche
- here Nietzsche sees the danger to mankind
- a predilection for compassion in philosophers is something new, belonging to modern philosophers, until now, philosophers have deemed compassion worthless
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6:
- because of this modern emergence, a critique of moral values is also needed, the value of those values must be examined
- how did these values grow, develop and change? the value of these values has been taken for grantes
- Nietzsche wonders if placing the higher value on good has hindered humanity in some way we are unaware of
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7:
- focus on a history of morality
- the problem of morality must be first taken seriously so that it can eventually be taken humorously
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first essay:
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I
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- the highest caste is the clerical caste: psychological and political superiority are taken as equal
- pure and impure are taken too seriously
- Nietzsche considers this dominancy unhealthy: customs
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- the priestly method split off from the chilvaric-aristocratic method and develop further into its opposite
- priests are the most evil enemies: powerlessness
- the Jews have been the ones to harm the noble, mighty, rulers, the most
- the slaves’ revolt in morality begins with the Jews, and it was victorious
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- from this revenge, a love grew out: Jesus, perfect and dangerous bait
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- with this, the morality of the common people has triumphed
- role of Church?
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- slaves’ revolt in morality originates when ressentiment turns creative and gives birth to values
- noble morality grows out of affirmation of itself, but slave morality is the negation of everything that is outside. This means no creativity.
- Change of focus from inside to outside is a feature of ressentiment. Ressentiment is a reaction to the outside
- so does the man of ressentiment conceive the evil enemy, as a figure of which he is the counterpart
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II
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11
- instead, a noble man conceives the idea of good by himself, and only then creates a notion of bad
- the bad conceived by the noble and the evil conceived by the man of ressentiment are very different from each other
- evil according to ressentiment is the good person from the nobility, re-interpreted through the filter of ressentiment
- 12
- the destinty of Europe seems in danger because we have lost fear of man, and with it our love and respect for him
- It seems that things will continue to declin
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16
- the battle between good and bad and good and evil has been going on for thousands of years, and there are places in which this battle is still going
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Rome versus Judea: Rome, strong and noble, Judea, ressentiment and popular morality
- of these models, Rome has been defeated
- Judea: Church - Reformation - Restoration of the Church - French revolution and its annihilation of the last political nobility in Europe
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17
- need for an exchange between philosophy, phisiology and medicine
- values must be reassessed, starting from a physiological standpoint. The rank order of values must be decided taking these other standpoints into account.
- second essay
- 9
- community and its members have a relationship akin to that between the creditor and the debtor
- if you do not comply with the obligations that living in a community entails, you will be in debt and will be made to make up for it.
- the law breaker is deprived of the benefits of living in a community and also reminded of how important the benefits are
- punishment in this sense is a copy of the behavior towards a hated defeated enemy
- 10
- when a community grows in power the actions of a wrongdoer are no longer so destabilizing wo there is no need to punish them harshly, instead, they are shielded
- a compromise is sought: mercy
- 11
- recent attempts to seek the origin of justice in ressentiment (anarchists / anti-Semites)
- attempts to sanctify revenge with justice / legitimization of emotional reactions through revenge
- Nietzsche criticizes that other emotions that he calls "active"(such as lust for mastery or greed) are not considered so generously by these points of view
- in his view, justice represents not ressentiment, a reaction, but the battle against that kind of sentiment
- however, the setting up of a legal system starts the values of "just" and "unjust", which are not found "as such" in life, since life functions in a destructive and violent manner
- states of legality are exceptional states that seek to restrict the true will to life
- 12
- origin and purpose of punishment
- these matters should be considered separately
- punishment has not been evolved for punishing
- the development of something is not a progress towards a goal, instead a succession of processes of subjugation exacted on the thing
- progress can be measured according to how much had to be sacrificed for it
- the essence of life, its will to power, is often overlooked
Rendering context...