Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings

Introduction

Although it has come to be prized by many commentators as one of his most important texts, Nietzsche conceived On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) as a ‘small polemical pamphlet’ that might help him sell more copies of his earlier writings. It clearly merits, though, the level of attention it receives and can justifiably be regarded as one of the key texts of European intellectual modernity. For shock value no other modern text on the human condition rivals it. Nietzsche himself was well aware of the character of the book. There are moments in the text where he reveals his own sense of alarm at what he is discovering about human origins and development, especially the perverse nature of the human animal, the being he calls ‘the sick animal’ (GM III, 14): ‘There is so much in man that is horrifying! … The world has been a madhouse for too long!’ (GM II, 22). Indeed, in Ecce Homo Nietzsche discloses that an ‘art of surprise’ guides each of the three essays that make up the book and admits that they merit being taken as among the ‘uncanniest’ things ever scripted.

Nietzsche intended On the Genealogy of Morality as a ‘supplement’ and ‘clarification’ to his previous book, Beyond Good and Evil. That book, which has the sub-title ‘Prelude to a philosophy of the future’, is said by Nietzsche to be ‘in all essentials’ a critique of modernity that includes within its range of attack modern science, modern art and modern politics. Where the vision of the previous text, Thus Spoke Zarathustra was that of distant things, the vision of Beyond Good and Evil is focused sharply on the modern age, on ‘what is around us’. However, Nietzsche holds the two projects and tasks to be intimately related: ‘In every aspect of the book’, he writes in Ecce Homo, ‘above all in its form, one will discover the same wilful turning away from the instincts out of which a Zarathustra becomes possible’. In a letter to his former Basel colleague Jacob Burckhardt dated 22 September 1886, Nietzsche stresses that Beyond Good and Evil says the same things as Zarathustra ‘only in a way that is different – very different’.