Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations and note on translations used in the text
- Introduction
- I The project of re-evaluation and the turn to genealogy
- II On the Genealogy of Morality
- 4 Reading the Genealogy
- 5 The first essay: “‘Good and Evil’, ‘Good and Bad’”
- 6 The second essay: “‘Guilt’, ‘Bad Conscience’, and Related Matters”
- 7 The third essay: “What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?”
- 8 Debating the Genealogy
- Conclusion
- An annotated guide to further reading
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The first essay: “‘Good and Evil’, ‘Good and Bad’”
from II - On the Genealogy of Morality
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations and note on translations used in the text
- Introduction
- I The project of re-evaluation and the turn to genealogy
- II On the Genealogy of Morality
- 4 Reading the Genealogy
- 5 The first essay: “‘Good and Evil’, ‘Good and Bad’”
- 6 The second essay: “‘Guilt’, ‘Bad Conscience’, and Related Matters”
- 7 The third essay: “What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?”
- 8 Debating the Genealogy
- Conclusion
- An annotated guide to further reading
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The first essay, “‘Good and Evil’, ‘Good and Bad’”, focuses on the emergence of the values and conception of agency that compose the idea of the moral person invoked in “morality” through an analysis of the re-evaluation of antique values wrought by the slave revolt in morality. However, it begins with two related methodological criticisms of the “English psychologists, to whom we owe the only attempts so far to develop a history of the genesis of morality” (GM I §1). Nietzsche illustrates this criticism by focusing on an argument from Rée's The Origin of Moral Feeling (1877), which had been endorsed by Nietzsche in The Wanderer and his Shadow (§40), which claimed that originally:
“… unegoistic actions were acclaimed and described as good by those towards who they were directed, thus those to whom they were useful. The origin of this acclaim was later forgotten and unegoistic actions were simply felt to be good, because they were habitually praised as such – as if they were in themselves something good.”
(GM I §2)Nietzsche's objections to this hypothesis are twofold. First, it exhibits the “essentially unhistorical manner” of thinking exhibited by such approaches in that it identifies the origin of morality in terms of its current value or function despite the fact that Darwin has alerted us to the point that there need be no relationship between the current function or value of a phenomenon and its original function or value (GM I §2).
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- Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality , pp. 75 - 90Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2007
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