Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide (Cambridge Critical Guides)
Language: English
Pages: 356
ISBN: 1107437237
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
On the Genealogy of Morality is Nietzsche's most influential, provocative, and challenging work of ethics. In this volume of newly commissioned essays, fourteen leading philosophers offer fresh insights into many of the work's central questions: How did our dominant values originate and what functions do they really serve? What future does the concept of "evil" have - and can it be revalued? What sorts of virtues and ideals does Nietzsche advocate, and are they necessarily incompatible with aspirations to democracy and a free society? What are the nature, role, and scope of genealogy in his critique of morality - and why doesn't his own evaluative standard receive a genealogical critique? Taken together, this superb collection illuminates what a post-Christian and indeed post-moral life might look like, and asks to what extent Nietzsche's Genealogy manages to move beyond morality.
agent’s character with the character of the agent’s actions. The Judeo-Christian system severs this connection between the agent’s character and the character of the agent’s actions, by treating the agent as something separable from and essentially distinct from its deed. If the subject is a characterless will, free to choose as it deems appropriate, then any action whatsoever can be interpreted as being chosen out of strength. Even the most craven acts, such as giving up at the first sign of
achieving dominance by their set of values, they revalue values, such that their own traits are labeled as good (and hence entitle them to dominance) while the traits of the ruling class are labeled as evil (and hence entail that the current rulers should not rule). 186 paul katsafanas 7. why do these facts constitute an objection to judeo-christian morality? Suppose this is right: Judeo-Christian morality systematically breaks the connection between perceptions of increased power and actual
b e r g r o rt y an d j a m e s sc h mi d t Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals edited by jens timmermann Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason e d i t e d b y a n d r e w s r e a t h a nd j e n s t i m m e r m a n n Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations edited by arif ahmed Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript e di t e d b y r i c k a nt h on y f u r t ak Plato’s Republic e di t e d b y m a rk l. m c p h e r r a n Plato’s Laws e di t e d b y ch r i st op he r b o
conceived as unconditionally valuable (e.g. GM, III, 27). For the masses, as he sees them, it is sought through intense commitment to comfort, predictability, and convenience: the goals of the “last man”; or through the ethos of industrial civilization: hard work, neatness, the search for technical means of making life ever safer, the “positivist” mindset to which the “industrious race of machinists and bridge-builders” (BGE, 14) foreseen by Nietzsche is so competently devoted. Or there is the
developed and changed. (GM, Preface, 6; last emphasis mine) Nietzsche’s suggestion, in the preface and throughout the text of the Genealogy, is that there is a tight link between a correct understanding of the origin of “morality” and a proper appreciation of at least some of the grounds warranting a negative judgment of its value. But, as has often been remarked by critics, prima facie this confidence seems quite misplaced. Even if Nietzsche succeeds in showing that morality owes its original