On the Genealogy of Morals

Friedrich Nietzsche
2013

Highlights

• under what conditions did man invent for himself those judgements of value, Good and Evil? And what intrinsic value do they possess in themselves? Have they up to the present advanced human welfare, or rather have they harmed our race? Are they a symptom of distress, impoverishment and degeneration of life?
  —On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche


• The value of these ‘values’ was taken for granted as a simple fact, and as indisputable. No one has, up to the present, expressed the slightest doubt or hesitation in judging the ‘good man’ to be of a higher value than the ‘evil man’, of a higher value with regard specifically to human progress, welfare and prosperity in general (not to mention the future). But! What if we suppose the reverse were the truth?
  —On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche


• The gross ineptitude of their genealogy of morals is immediately apparent when they have to explain the origin and development of the concept and judgement ‘Good’. According to their decree, ‘selfless acts were originally lauded and called good by their beneficiaries – those to whom they were useful;6 subsequently this fact was forgotten, and selfless acts, which had for so long been habitually praised as good, came also to be felt as good – as though they were intrinsically good’.
  —On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche


• the origin of the concept ‘Good’ was mistakenly identified, and thus sought in vain, for the judgement ‘Good’ did not originate among those to whom goodness was shown! Rather it has been the ‘good men’ themselves, that is, the noble, the powerful, those of high degree, the high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good, and that their actions were good, that is to say of the first order, as opposed to all the low, the low-minded, the vulgar and the plebeian. It was from this pathos of distance7 that they first claimed the right to create values for their own benefit, and to coin the names of such values; what did they have to do with utility?
  —On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche


• The pathos of nobility and distance, as I have said, the continuing and dominating collective instinct, and feeling of superiority of a higher race, a master race, in comparison to a subservient race – this is the origin of the opposition of ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’.
  —On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche


• The knightly-aristocratic values rest upon a powerful physical development, a richness and even superabundance of health, together with what is necessary for maintaining life, on war, adventure, the chase, the dance, the tourney – on everything, in fact, which involves strong, free and joyous action. The priestly-aristocratic judgement is – we have seen – based on other grounds; it is bad enough for this class when it comes to war! Yet the priests are, as is known, the worst enemies – why? Because they are the least powerful. This weakness causes their hatred to grow into something which is monstrous and sinister, something which is most devious and venomous.
  —On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche


• Let us submit to the facts; that the people have triumphed – or “the slaves”, or “the masses”, or “the herd”, or whatever name you care to give them – if this has happened because of the Jews, so be it! In that case no nation ever had a greater mission in the world’s history. The “masters” have been done away with, and with them their aristocratic morality has vanished; the morality of the low classes has triumphed.
  —On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche


• The slaves’ revolt in morality begins when resentment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values – a resentment experienced by those who, deprived as they are of the proper outlet of action, are forced to obtain their satisfaction in imaginary acts of vengeance. While all aristocratic morality springs from a triumphant affirmation of its own demands, the slave morality says ‘no’ ab initio44 to what is ‘outside itself’, ‘different from itself’ and ‘not itself’; and this ‘no’ is its creative act. This about-face in the perspective of judgement – this irresistible gravitation to the objective instead of back to the subjective – is typical of resentment; an external and objective world, to employ physiological terminology, is vital to slave-morality; it requires objective stimuli to be capable of action at all – its action is fundamentally a reaction.
  —On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche


• The contrary is the case when we come to the aristocrat’s system of values; it acts and grows spontaneously, it merely seeks its antithesis in order to utter a more grateful and exultant ‘yes’ to its own self – its negative concept, ‘low’, ‘vulgar’, ‘bad’, is merely a pale image formed afterwards compared with its positive and fundamental concept (saturated as it is with life and passion), ‘we the noble, we the good, we the beautiful, we the happy’.
  —On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche


• The ‘well-born’ simply felt themselves to be the ‘happy’; they did not have to manufacture their happiness artificially by contemplating their enemies, or convince themselves of their happiness by lying to themselves (as all men of resentment are prone to do); and similarly, complete men as they were, full of energy and of course, therefore, active, they were too wise to dissociate happiness from action – activity is in their minds an essential part of happiness (that is the etymology of εὖ πϱάττειν)55 – all in sharp contrast to the ‘happiness’ of the weak and the oppressed, with their festering venom and malignity, among whom happiness manifests itself essentially as a narcotic, an anaesthetic, peace and quiet, a ‘Sabbath’, tranquillity of the mind and relaxation of the body – in short, a purely passive phenomenon.
  —On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche


• His [the man of resentment] soul squints; his mind loves dark corners, secret passages and hidden doors, everything covert appeals to him as his world, his security, his comfort; he is a past master of silence, of not forgetting, of patience, of assuming a mode of self-deprecation and humility for a while. A race of such resentful men will eventually prove more cunning than any aristocratic race; they will respect cunning to a much greater degree, namely as something most vital to existence, whereas cunning among aristocratic men is apt to be redolent of luxury and refinement;
  —On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche


• the aristocratic man, who conceives the basic concept ‘Good’ first, spontaneously, and from that he then creates a concept of ‘Bad’!
  —On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche


• First came the age of heroes and demigods, as that world still remained in the memories of the aristocratic families, who claimed them as their own ancestors; secondly came the Bronze Age, as that corresponding age appeared to the descendants of the oppressed, dispossessed, abused, abducted and enslaved; an age of bronze, as I have said, that was hard, cold, terrible, without feelings and without conscience, crushing everything and splattering everything with blood.
  —On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche