Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (Philosophical Traditions)

Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (Philosophical Traditions)

Language: English

Pages: 504

ISBN: 0520083180

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Written at the height of the philosopher's intellectual powers, Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals has become one of the key texts of recent Western philosophy. Its essayistic style affords a unique opportunity to observe many of Nietzsche's persisting concerns coming together in an illuminating constellation. A profound influence on psychoanalysis, antihistoricism, and poststructuralism and an abiding challenge to ethical theory, Nietzsche's book addresses many of the major philosophical problems and possibilities of modernity.

In this unique collection focusing on the Genealogy, twenty-five notable philosophers offer diverse discussions of the book's central themes and concepts. They explore such notions as ressentiment, asceticism, "slave" and "master" moralities, and what Nietzsche calls "genealogy" and its relation to other forms of inquiry in his work. The book presents a cross section of contemporary Nietzsche scholarship and philosophical investigation that is certain to interest philosophers, intellectual and cultural historians, and anyone concerned with one of the master thinkers of the modern age.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

interpretation of these beliefs that is more reasonable than the moralist's own interpre― 263 ― tation and that explains both why the beliefs were believed at one time, and why they are no longer believed. So interpretations are defeasible, although not because particular beliefs can be shown to be false in isolation from any interpretation. Interpretations can be shown to be superior to other interpretations if they explain features of these interpretations that could be perceived as problems

precision the interpretive difficulty presented by the Received View (section II); second, to sketch an alternative interpretation of the passages often thought to support it (section III); and third and most important, to present an extended analysis of the "perspectivism" metaphor as it figures in GM III:12, as the key to Nietzsche's actual epistemological position (section IV). Before turning to these tasks, I should put two interpretive scruples on the table. First, I proceed on the

human beings who are sunk in nature, afflicted by desires, senses, animality. Nietzsche claims, in effect, that one of the major factors behind the transformation of pagan gods who are merely human beings writ large and more powerful into a purely spiritual God was the need for a weapon against the self—a standard of good we could never live up to, and in relation to which we could enjoy judging, condemning, and chastising ourselves and others. The debt we owe to this nonnatural God is one that

not respond with the pain of pity, when looking at the suffering of another, unless one judges that the possibilities displayed there are also possibilities for oneself. [12] If, like Antinoos, one thinks that one is (as a king) a breed apart, and invulnerable to the ills that the beggar's lot displays, then one will not feel anything at all when looking at the beggar. And insofar as one does feel pain at the suffering of others, it is a pain that is closely linked to an acknowledgment of one's

incentive to the redistribution of socially distributable goods. In fact, just the contrary. For if the only truly free person is the one to whom external conditions don't matter, then it really doesn't matter whether one is a slave in circumstances, so long as one is free within; it doesn't matter whether one is poor or rich in circumstances, so long as one's moral will is whole. (And Stoics typically deny that economic circumstances are necessary for the development of moral virtue.) It is no

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