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©1997, Richard Hooker
Updated 4-21-97
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friedrich nietzsche |
"We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge--and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves--how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? . . . So we are necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not comprehend ourselves, we have to misunderstand ourselves, for us the law "Each is furthest from himself" applies to all eternity--we are not "men of knowledge" with respect to ourselves."With this fiery statement, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) opens his polemic against Western philosophy and, in particular, the Enlightenment in his Genealogy of Morals , written in 1887. Perhaps no single author has expressed and contained the condition of the modern Western world and its contradictions than Friedrich Nietzsche; at the core of his thought is that everything that pertains to the human is human-made, even though we obscure the human origins of culture, religion, morality, etc. You can see how, even though Nietzsche critiques the Enlightenment, how this way of thinking has its origins in Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers.
Perhaps the object Nietzsche attacks most polemically and constantly are systems of morality and religion. On the Genealogy of Morals sets out to explain the "genealogy," or family tree, of moral systems. Nietzsche's inquiry deals with the origins of moral phenomena. The first essay, which makes up the bulk of your reading, contrasts "good and evil" and "good and bad," and juxtaposes master and slave morality. The second essay considers "guilt" and "bad conscience." The third essay, of which we are reading the conclusion, deals with "ascetic ideals," that is, moral systems that idealize the rejection of the material, bodily, and passionate worlds. It is a slight misreading to believe that Nietzsche thinks of "master" morality as good and "slave" morality as bad, or rejects "ascetic ideals" out of hand. Nietzsche's goal in every sense is to transcend categories of good and bad or good and evil since all systems which traffic in "ideals" are at heart lying about reality. For Nietzsche, like so many other post-Enlightenment thinkers, human liberation will come about when we face the realities of our situation.
What should you know from Nietzsche? You should be able to define Nietzsche's distinction between "good" and "evil" and "good" and "bad." What is master and slave morality? What are the characteristics of each? What is ressentiment? This latter term is perhaps the most important in understanding the modern world and the limits of human possibility in the modern world. What do you see around you that seems to be described by Nietzsche? Does Nietzsche accurately describe the world around you? What in the twentieth century seems to be derived from Nietzschean thought? How? How would you compare the diagnosis of modernity here with ideas from non-Western cultures we have studied? Would those cultures agree or disagree with Nietzsche about morality?
As a last note, you should know from lecture what "existentialism" means and what its main components are. To what extent are we, in our culture and our popular culture, "existentialists"? To what extent is Nietzsche an existentialist?
Your text is taken from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals , translated by Horace B. Samuel (Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1913), pages 24-47, 209-211