Thammasat University students who are interested in philosophy, morality, political theory, literature, Germany, and related subjects may find a newly available book useful.
On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemical Tract is a book by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, written in Sils-Maria, Switzerland.
In this newly translated edition, Nietzsche traces the evolution of moral concepts to confront moral prejudices.
The TU Library collection includes several books by and about Nietzsche.
The philosopher offers a critique of moral values and examines the historical development of such concepts as guilt, conscience, responsibility, law, and justice.
The word genealogy means the study of families, family history, and the tracing of their lineages. It derives from an Ancient Greek term meaning the making of a pedigree.
Nietzsche wrote in a lively and dense literary style.
Here is an example of his arguments in On the Genealogy of Morality:
Man, the bravest of animals, and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far.
- On the Genealogy of Morality
Human history would be nothing but a record of stupidity save for the cunning contributions of the weak.
- On the Genealogy of Morality
Thus, the philosopher dislikes marriage as well as what might persuade him into it? Marriage is a barrier and a disaster along his route to the optimal. What great philosopher up to now has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibtniz, Kant, Schopenhauer?
None of these got married. What`s more, we cannot even imagine them married. A married philosopher belongs in a comedy, that`s my principle.
And Socrates, the exception, the malicious Socrates, it appears, got married ironically to demonstrate this very principle.
Every philosopher would speak as once Buddha spoke when someone told him of the birth his son, “Rahula has been born to me.
A shackle has been forged for me.” (Rahula here means “a little demon”). To every “free spirit” there must come a reflective hour, provided that previously he has had a one without thought, of the sort that came then to Buddha – “Life in a house,” he thought to himself, “is narrow and confined, a polluted place.
Freedom consists of abandoning houses;” “because he thought this way, he left the house.”
- On the Genealogy of Morality
At this point, I can no longer avoid setting out, in an initial, provisional statement, my own hypothesis about the origin of “bad conscience.” It is not easy to get people to attend to it, and it requires them to consider it at length, to guard it, and to sleep on it.
I consider bad conscience the profound illness which human beings had to come down with, under the pressure of the most fundamental of all the changes which they experienced—that change when they finally found themselves locked within the confines of society and peace.
Just like the things water animals must have gone though when they were forced either to become land animals or to die off, so events must have played themselves out with this half-beast so happily adapted to the wilderness, war, wandering around, adventure—suddenly all its instincts were devalued and “disengaged.”
From this point on, these animals were to go on foot and “carry themselves”; whereas previously they had been supported by the water. A terrible heaviness weighed them down. In performing the simplest things they felt ungainly.
In dealing with this new unknown world, they no longer had their old leader, the ruling unconscious drives which guided them safely. These unfortunate creatures were reduced to thinking, inferring, calculating, bringing together cause and effect, reduced to their “consciousness,” their most impoverished and error-prone organ!
I believe that on earth there has never been such a feeling of misery, such a leaden discomfort—while at the same time those old instincts had not all at once stopped imposing their demands! Only it was difficult and seldom possible to do their bidding. For the most part, they had to find new and, as it were, underground satisfactions for them.”
- On the Genealogy of Morality
Read from a distant star the majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps tempt one to conclude that the earth is the ascetic planet par excellence, a nook of discontented, arrogant, and repulsive creatures who could not get rid of a deep displeasure with themselves, with the earth, with all life and who caused themselves as much pain as possible out of pleasure in causing pain:―probably their only pleasure.
- On the Genealogy of Morality
My thoughts on the descent of our moral prejudices – for that is what this polemic is about – were first set out in a sketchy and provisional way in the collection of aphorisms entitled Human, All Too Human. A Book for Free Spirits, which I began to write in Sorrento during a winter that enabled me to pause, like a wanderer pauses, to take in the vast and dangerous land through which my mind had hitherto travelled.
This was in the winter of 1876–7; the thoughts themselves go back further. They were mainly the same thoughts which I shall be taking up again in the present essays – let us hope that the long interval has done them good, that they have become riper, brighter, stronger and more perfect!
The fact that I still stick to them today, and that they themselves in the meantime have stuck together increasingly firmly, even growing into one another and growing into one, makes me all the more blithely confident that from the first, they did not arise in me individually, randomly or sporadically but as stemming from a single root, from a fundamental will to knowledge deep inside me which took control, speaking more and more clearly and making ever clearer demands.
And this is the only thing proper for a philosopher. We have no right to stand out individually: we must not either make mistakes or hit on the truth individually. Instead, our thoughts, values, every ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘if ’ and ‘but’ grow from us with the same inevitability as fruits borne on the tree – all related and referring to one another and a testimonial to one will, one health, one earth, one sun. – Do you like the taste of our fruit? – But of what concern is that to the trees? And of what concern is it to us philosophers? . .
- On the Genealogy of Morality
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)