On the Genealogy of Morality. Excerpts

• by [[Friedrich Nietzsche]]
• Preface:
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 4:
    • genealogy of hypotheses: The Origin of the Moral Sensations by Dr. Paul Rée, "refuted" by Nietzsche in Human…
• 5:
  • 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
  • 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
  • 7:
    • focus on a history of morality
    • the problem of morality must be first taken seriously so that it can eventually be taken humorously
  • first essay:
    • I
      • • 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
      • • 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
      • • from this revenge, a love grew out: Jesus, perfect and dangerous bait
      • • with this, the morality of the common people has triumphed
        • role of Church?
      • • 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
    • II
      • 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
    • 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
      • 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
      • 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