Nietzsche's New Morality as Reaction to the Old

Nietzsche's New Morality as Reaction to the Old

The purpose of Friedrich Nietzsche's On The Genealogy of Morals (1887) is to answer the following questions, which he clearly lays out in the preface: "under what conditions did man devise these value judgments good and evil? And what value do they themselves possess? Have they hitherto hindered or furthered human prosperity? Are they a sign of distress, of impoverishment, of the degeneration of life? Or is there revealed in them, on the contrary, a plenitude, force, and will of life, its courage, certainty, future?" (17). These questions come about from Nietzsche's rejection of the Darwinian-Spencerian-utilitarian explanation of morality, characterized by his portrayal of the "English psychologist, " and serve as a framework in which he constructs the arguments in his book.

The three essays that make up On The Genealogy of Morals each deal with a certain stage of cultural development of morality. In order to establish chronology, the second section should precede the first, as noted by Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 1995) . Essay I deals with the origins of "good" and "bad" as pertaining to the master and slave moralities. Essay II delves into the origin of guilt and bad conscience, while Essay III offers a discussion of the "ascetic ideal." I will concern myself only with the second phase of morality (Essay I), as it encompasses important aspects of the other two, but I will later give a brief discussion of Essays II and III in light of the explanation of the very origin of morality that Nietzsche is out to disprove.

On The Genealogy of Morals, Essay I refers to the second stage of human morality—the emergence of the concepts of "Good" and "Evil" as categories o...

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... all means to sustain itself and to fight for its existence; it indicates a partial physiological obstruction and exhaustion…. life wrestles in it and through it with death and against death; the ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of life" (120). This is Nietzsche's "ascetic ideal"—the will to power of the weak as a preserving force, rather than an augmenting force (will to power of the strong).

Nietzsche views morality, like everything else, as a multiplicity: "morality as consequence, as symptom, as mask, as tartufferie, as illness, as misunderstanding; but also morality as cause, as remedy, as stimulant, as restrain, as poison" (20). It is all these things in the three essays, but it is clearly not altruistic.

Works Cited

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On The Genealogy of Morals. Walter Kaufmann, ed. and trans.

New York: Vintage Book, 1989.