On the Genealogy of Morality
by Friedrich Nietzsche, introduction and notes by Maudemarie Clark & Alan Swensen
Recommendations from our site
“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.” Read more...
“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...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.” Read more...
