Nietzsche

This paper is taken from a collection of three papers called "On the Genealogy of Morality." Nietzsche is looking for a better way to understand where morality comes from--what it's history is. Genealogy is a method he uses. Ideas, concepts, and linguistic forms have evolved over time. The method of genealogy starts with the present--and looks backwards, to try to find an understanding of how we arrived at the present usage. Nietzsche deeply opposes the notion that our morality serves a simple purpose for us or that it serves the interest, simply and concretely, of one particular class. He finds these ways of thinking too simple, too "just-so", and not sufficiently attuned to the role of randomness in the evolution of human affairs (here, he's being a better reader of Darwin than Marx was, one could argue. Marx was wrong to think Darwin was telling a story of progress--rather, Darwin was telling a story of random chance and accidents without meaning leading to new forms of being).

Nietzsche's academic training was in a field called "philology." This field doesn't exist anymore, but it's best understood as a combination of philosophy and linguistics. In other words, his training is to look at the history of important words and their use.

One of Neitzsche's main points is that morality has non-moral origins. This point is made especially clear in sections 4 and 5 (909-910). When he so arrogantly says "If this book is incomprehensible to anyone and jars on his ears, teh fault, it seems to me, is not necessarily mine" (906), this is part of the reason why--we've fallen into the bad habit of internalizing moral theory--thinking of it as something real, natural, and a noble thing to have. One way Nietzsche often came to describe his own project was to think "beyond morality." This doesn't mean he's a amoralist, and that morality is just for suckers, and you should do what you can to get ahead, or anything like that (in fact, he would probably diagnose that mindset as a good example of a consequence of a particularly nasty form of moral reasoning. What he's interested in is the way meanings of concepts have shifted to give us moral rules to understand why our moral reasoning and thinking has the specific content it does. You could even do a Millian reading of this project--if moral reasoning is just the unintended consequences of terms like clean and unclean, it is in effect a form of dead dogma, and it's roots must be exposed, examined, etc.

If there is one point you need to get from this essay, it's this: Nietzsche discusses two forms of morality:

Good vs Bad
Good vs Evil

His take on the first is neutral to somewhat positive--his take on the second is decidedly negative. The first is the product of noble reasoning; the second is a product of slave or servant-based moral thinking. So, like Marx, he thinks your position in society shapes your moral reasoning. Unlike Marx, he finds a great deal more to admire in the moral system of the powerful than that of the weak. Your most important task as you read all this is to figure out why. And along the way--how do each of these forms of moral reasoning work? How do they differ? Why is good vs evil reasoning particularly dangerous? How does the story of the Lambs and the birds of prey (sec. 13) help us understand this distinction?

In several aphorisms (notably, 10 and 14) Nietzsche discusses resentiment, which is just French for resentment. It's generally left untranslated because Nietzsche gave it a very specific usage and meaning in this text. In context, what do you take it to mean for Nietzsche?

Nietzsche's advice at the end of the preface is good. These aphorisms are best understood through rumination. Stop, think, read again. It's your only hope :)