II - On the Genealogy of Morality
Summary
Introduction
Nietzsche does not claim to be the first philosopher to attempt a genealogy of morals; he does, however, claim to be the first to take up this task properly, that is with due consideration to the intrinsic requirements of this mode of enquiry. Thus, commenting on Paul Rée's The Origin of Moral Sensations, Nietzsche writes:
There for the first time I clearly encountered an inverted and perverted kind of genealogical hypothesis, the genuinely English kind, and found myself drawn to it – as opposites attract one another. … It is possible that I have never read anything which I rejected so thoroughly, proposition by proposition, conclusion by conclusion, as this book: but without the least ill humour and impatience.
(GM Preface §4)This claim is, to put it mildly, rather self-serving in the light of Nietzsche's earlier endorsement of much of Rée's argument; however, it is true that Nietzsche has come to reject the “English” kind of genealogical argument. As he put this point in Book V of The Gay Science:
These historians of morality (particularly, the Englishmen) do not amount to much: usually they themselves unsuspectingly stand under the command of a particular morality and, without knowing it, serve as its shield-bearers and followers, for example, by sharing that popular superstition of Christian Europe which people keep repeating so naively to this day, that what is characteristic of morality is selflessness, self-denial, self-sacrifice, or sympathy and compassion.[…]
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- Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality , pp. 61 - 66Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2007
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