On the Genealogy of Morality

"I don’t know I would single it out as the masterpiece, but it’s a fascinating book which follows on many of the themes of Beyond Good and Evil . It’s unusual because it’s less aphoristic, but rather three essays. The essays have more structure and extended argumentation than is typical in most of Nietzsche’s works. The book deals with the two absolutely central questions for Nietzsche, namely what’s wrong with our morality and the problem of suffering. It tells an extremely provocative story about each of these and in the third essay it even connects up with Nietzsche’s interest in questions about the nature of truth and why we value truth. In that sense it really is a mature work, bringing together reflections on topics that span the prior decade. Clark and Swensen, I think, have the best English translation of the Genealogy but it’s the only work they translated. If they had ever translated Beyond Good and Evil I might have recommended that. They are more literal than Kaufman, who does take liberties at times with the German. That often has a virtue – you get more of a sense of Nietzsche in Kaufman’s English than anyone else’s English, but sometimes for a philosophically-minded reader it can elide certain important distinctions. Clark is a philosopher, Swensen is a German-language scholar, and so they bring two good skill sets to the translation. Swensen has a good feel for the German and Clark is very sensitive to what is philosophically important in the German and not losing that in translation. The other thing that is very nice about their edition is that it has very detailed notes. The Genealogy is sort of notorious because it has no footnotes. It makes all kinds of historical claims, etymological claims et cetera, but there are no footnotes because that’s not how Nietzsche does things. But in point of fact he had scholarly sources in mind on almost every one of these issues, and Clark and Swensen compiled them. So they supply the underlying scholarly apparatus for the kind of claims Nietzsche is making, which makes this a very useful text. I do think there’s been a significant change and I think there’s a simple explanation for it. Nietzsche’s association with the Nazis didn’t exactly help his reputation. For people like Walter Kaufman, who wrote an influential book about Nietzsche after the war, his Nietzsche is a pleasant, secular liberal. He’s a nice guy who believes in self-development – he’s not a scary Nazi! With Heidegger, we see Nietzsche as a metaphysician with a grand picture of the essence of reality as will to power, and the moral/political side of Nietzsche’s thought gets pushed aside. For the French deconstructionists, Nietzsche’s a guy who tells us that no text has a stable meaning and there’s no truth and so on. All these readings pull us away from Nietzsche’s core evaluative concerns, and I think over the last 20 years those concerns have come back to centre stage. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I think it’s always worth saying that Nietzsche was no Nazi. To start with, he hated Germans. This created a lot of problems for the Nazis. They had to edit the texts quite selectively because he hated German nationalists, he hated anti-semites, he hated militarists. He wouldn’t have fitted in too easily at Nuremberg! On the other hand, it is absolutely true that Nietzsche has quite shocking views about traditional Christian morality. Kaufman whitewashed this 50 years ago, but I think it’s less common to do so now. Nietzsche is deeply illiberal. He does not believe in the equal worth of every person. Nietzsche thinks there are higher human beings. His favourite three examples are Goethe , Beethoven and Nietzsche himself. And that higher human beings, through their creative genius, can actually make life worth living – that Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is enough to justify all the suffering the world includes. Again this is a crude summary but there is this aspect of Nietzsche. At the heart of his critique of morality is that he thinks creative geniuses like Beethoven, had they really taken morality seriously, wouldn’t have been creative geniuses. Because to really take morality seriously is to take your altruistic obligations seriously – to help others, to weigh and consider the interests of others et cetera. You can read any biography of Beethoven and see that that wasn’t how he lived! He was single-mindedly focused on his creative work and that’s what Nietzsche means by severe self-love. Even if you’re not as illiberal as Nietzsche, you might be worried if Nietzsche’s right that certain kinds of traditional moral values are incompatible with the existence of people like Beethoven. That’s the strong psychological claim he makes – that you can’t really be a creative genius like Beethoven and take morality seriously. I think even good old democratic egalitarian liberals could worry a bit about that, if it were true. It’s a very striking and pessimistic challenge, because the liberal post-Enlightenment vision is that we can have our liberal democratic egalitarian ethos and everyone will be able to flourish. Nietzsche thinks there’s a profound tension between the values that traditional morality holds up and the conditions necessary for creative genius. So that challenge is interesting in its own right, even if you wouldn’t want to side with Nietzsche, who’s ready to sacrifice the herd of humanity for the sake of a Goethe or a Beethoven. And then there are all these aspects of Nietzsche that don’t really depend for their importance on his ultimate evaluative judgement. There’s Nietzsche’s picture of the human mind, there’s his attack on traditional philosophy, his attack on free will and moral responsibility. All of these themes are interesting and challenging, and resonate with themes in contemporary philosophy – even if you don’t have the same illiberal affect that Nietzsche has. And of course most readers don’t. That’s why there’s been a lot of whitewashing of Nietzsche in the secondary literature. It’s a bit shocking. It certainly took me a while to come to terms with the fact that this is really what Nietzsche believes, that the illiberal attitudes and the elitism was really central to the way he looked at things. The suffering of mankind at large was not a significant ethical concern in his view, it was largely a matter of indifference – in fact it was to be welcomed because there’s nothing better than a good dose of suffering to get the creative juices flowing. ___________________________ My book Moral Psychology with Nietzsche (Oxford, 2019) explores issues that were either ignored or touched on only briefly in my earlier book Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002; 2nd ed., 2015). These are issues that professional philosophers usually group under the label “moral psychology,” questions about the nature of morality and moral judgment, the structure of human agency, and the like. For example, since Nietzsche denies that value judgments are objective (I set out and defend his arguments for this view), what happens psychologically when we make such judgments? Nietzsche, I argue, should be seen as part of a tradition of moral anti-realists who are also sentimentalists , like Hume and, in the German tradition, Herder—that is, philosophers who think the best explanation of our moral judgments is in terms of our emotional responses to states of affairs in the world, responses that are, themselves, explicable in terms of psychological facts about the judger. I also explore Nietzsche’s views about agency and his skepticism about free will. The book has exegetical aims, certainly, but it is not an exercise in the “history of ideas.” I believe Nietzsche is often correct, for example, in his anti-realism about value, his sentimentalism, his skepticism about the causal efficacy of consciousness, and his skepticism about the post-hoc rationalizations of moral philosophers for their moral beliefs. Much of the book is devoted to arguing philosophically, and on the basis of empirical psychological evidence, for Nietzsche’s views. I range fairly widely over Nietzsche’s mature works, but besides the two crucial books recommended in the earlier interview— Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality —I think two other works are quite important for understanding his moral psychology: Daybreak , his first mature work of 1881, and Twilight of the Idols , one of his last works in 1888. A very good collection of original essays on Nietzsche can be found in the book The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (2013), edited by Ken Gemes and John Richardson: the volume gives readers a nice sense of why this is now a “golden age” for Nietzsche scholarship in the Anglophone world. I especially commend the chapters by Jessica Berry on Nietzsche and the ancient Greeks (readers interested in that topic might also look at her Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition ); Nadeem Hussain on Nietzsche’s metaethical views; and Paul Katsafanas on his philosophical psychology. A very important book on the latter topic ( Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology ) , by an Italian philosopher, Mattia Riccardi, came out from Oxford University Press in 2021. He combines philosophical skill and historical knowledge in elucidating Nietzsche’s views about the drives, affects, and consciousness, among other topics. I have no doubt his book will be a major event in Nietzsche studies."

"I chose this book because sometimes you need to choose a book that blows you away and turns everything upside down. We all remember books we’ve read like that, which give you a completely different perspective on life or issues. This one did that for me. I’m not saying you have to agree with everything in it, but we need books that view human behavior from the opposite end of the telescope. Nietzsche turns Western morality on its head. He’s trying to understand how we ended up with our accepted moralities. He argues that it came out of power struggles. Christian morality is a revolt by the weak against the strong, and it’s driven by a toxic resentment and hatred and envy of the strong. You can’t win by force, so you end up changing the rules of the game so that everything that’s strong becomes evil and everything that’s weak becomes good. One reason this happens, he says, is that when you move to agriculture and live in a stable society, your natural aggression has no outlet. Instead, it turns inward against yourself and becomes guilt and internal self-torture—which he says is turned into a virtue by Christian and other forms of morality. You make a virtue of your own self-torture. Do I believe that? Not really. Is it a complete reassessment of everything you take for granted? Yes, and it’s written in such an incredibly compelling way that it makes you see human behavior completely differently. I think books that go out and make really big, inventive, completely original claims are books that need to be in the discussion. It’s definitely true that internal conflicts can be very energy-sapping for us and can distract us from being more productive and doing things. And I do think that there’s something in the idea that civilization introduces contradictions that are a burden for us. Freud thought that as well. I mention Freud in my book. He thinks that society as a whole is hypocritical, and that’s just the price we pay for suppressing our instincts. So I do think there’s some evidence for what he’s saying. There are also counter-arguments. For example—and maybe this is just something that’s evolved—but we also feel good when we’re altruistic, when we help other people out, we get that warm glow. I don’t see how that fits into Nietzsche’s worldview at all."