- The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- Nietzsche and the Family
- Nietzsche and Women
- Nietzsche’s Illness
- Nietzsche and the Greeks
- Nietzsche and Romanticism: Goethe, Hölderlin, and Wagner
- Nietzsche the Kantian?
- Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s “Great Teacher” and “Antipode”
- Influence on Analytic Philosophy
- The Themes of Affirmation and Illusion in <i>the Birth of Tragedy</i> and Beyond
- ‘Holding on to the Sublime’: On Nietzsche’s Early ‘Unfashionable’ Project
- The Gay Science
- Zarathustra: ‘that Malicious Dionysian’
- Beyond Good and Evil
- Nietzsche’s <i>Genealogy</i>
- Nietzsche’s <i>Antichrist</i>
- Beholding Nietzsche: Ecce Homo, Fate, and Freedom
- Nietzsche’s Metaethical Stance
- Nietzsche and the Arts of Life
- Nietzsche on Autonomy
- The Overman
- Order of Rank
- ‘A Promise Made is a Debt Unpaid’: Nietzsche on the Morality of Commitment and the Commitments of Morality
- Will to Power: Does it Lead to the “Coldest of all Cold Monsters”?
- Life’s Perspectives
- Nietzsche’s Naturalism Reconsidered
- Nietzsche’s Philosophical Aestheticism
- Being, Becoming, and Time in Nietzsche
- Eternal Recurrence
- Nietzsche’s Metaphysical Sketches: Causality and will To Power
- The Psychology of Christian Morality: Will to Power as Will to Nothingness
- Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology
- Nietzsche On Life’s Ends
- Subject Index
- Name Index
Abstract and Keywords
This article examines various readings of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (GM). It treats key issues regarding each of the book’s three essays. The first essay presents slave morality as arising out of ressentiment against masters; Nietzsche thinks that this resentful attitude or affect becomes ingrained and is inherited in later generations. The second essay centers on the phenomenon of “bad conscience.” Nietzsche treats this not just critically, but also as enabling the “artist’s cruelty” which makes possible a new kind of human enhancement. The third essay is about the “ascetic idea,” a “will to transcend” certain essential features of life—such as appearance, change, even willing—from which life suffers. Although Nietzsche finds this ascetic ideal present in the “unconditional will to truth,” this by no means implies that Nietzsche abandons truth as an aim. These three stories should be viewed as “conjectures” and as examples of the kind of thinking needed to understand morality and values.
Keywords: Genealogy of Morality, morals, Friedrich Nietzsche, slave morality, bad conscience
Richard Schacht: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (Emeritus)
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- The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- Nietzsche and the Family
- Nietzsche and Women
- Nietzsche’s Illness
- Nietzsche and the Greeks
- Nietzsche and Romanticism: Goethe, Hölderlin, and Wagner
- Nietzsche the Kantian?
- Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s “Great Teacher” and “Antipode”
- Influence on Analytic Philosophy
- The Themes of Affirmation and Illusion in <i>the Birth of Tragedy</i> and Beyond
- ‘Holding on to the Sublime’: On Nietzsche’s Early ‘Unfashionable’ Project
- The Gay Science
- Zarathustra: ‘that Malicious Dionysian’
- Beyond Good and Evil
- Nietzsche’s <i>Genealogy</i>
- Nietzsche’s <i>Antichrist</i>
- Beholding Nietzsche: Ecce Homo, Fate, and Freedom
- Nietzsche’s Metaethical Stance
- Nietzsche and the Arts of Life
- Nietzsche on Autonomy
- The Overman
- Order of Rank
- ‘A Promise Made is a Debt Unpaid’: Nietzsche on the Morality of Commitment and the Commitments of Morality
- Will to Power: Does it Lead to the “Coldest of all Cold Monsters”?
- Life’s Perspectives
- Nietzsche’s Naturalism Reconsidered
- Nietzsche’s Philosophical Aestheticism
- Being, Becoming, and Time in Nietzsche
- Eternal Recurrence
- Nietzsche’s Metaphysical Sketches: Causality and will To Power
- The Psychology of Christian Morality: Will to Power as Will to Nothingness
- Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology
- Nietzsche On Life’s Ends
- Subject Index
- Name Index