Summary Of Nietzsche's 'Geneology Of Morals'

In his Geneology of Morals, Nietzsche presents his view of how morality (and through that, punishment) has developed over the course of history. Retributivists assert that the essential essence of punishment is contained in the fair and equitable deserts it presents the guilty offenders with. To this, Nietzsche claims that this punishment did not come from the thought that the crimes of the guilty must be punished—in fact, he claims that this judgement is a rather late form of human observation and condemnation. Punishment, in Nietzsche’s mind, came about as the will of the masters over the slaves, to enable them to experience and revel in the feeling of condemning someone and being able to abuse someone beneath them. In other words, punishing

However, these values changed after the emergence of Christian ressentiment which flipped the cruelty exhibited by the masters before from something good to something evil; this taught man to be ashamed and to reject his primal instincts (those of the masters) which told him that cruelty and abuse was essential to a happy life. Before this reversal, humans celebrated our cruel instincts: "[W]ithout cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches—and in punishment there is so much that is festival!"( Nietzsche, Genealogy , essay 2, section 6). Nietzsche believed that punishment as it was supposed to be practiced in the days of the masters is no longer how it is actually practiced in modern society. This is because if punishment still represented the sovereign power (as Foucault would put it) of those who punished, we would no longer punish. Originally, punishment came about as the direct expression of the will of the powerful (what Foucault called the “sovereign”). However, in our modern society, a change has taken places and the roles in punishment have been reversed. Being powerful in ancient times was likened to being cruel and happy; being powerful nowadays is the ability to suppress those instincts, to reject cruelty and through that,