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The Genealogy of Morals

Friedrich Nietzsche

Horace B. Samuel (1910)

Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), his most systematic work, is a 'polemic' in three essays tracing the historical origins of our moral concepts. Nietzsche argues that 'good and evil' arose from a slave revolt in morality by the resentful weak against the noble strong; that guilt and bad conscience grew from debt and internalized cruelty; and that ascetic ideals express a will to nothingness masquerading as virtue. A landmark of moral psychology, it questions the very value and origin of morality.

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Contents

  1. Preface
  2. Section I
  3. Section II
  4. Section III