Friedrich Nietzsche · Philosophy
Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals - his radical claim that our morality of ‘good and evil’ arose from a ‘slave revolt,’ the resentment of the weak against the strong, inverting an older ‘noble’ morality.
Nietzsche undertook a radical and unsettling project: the genealogy of morals - the investigation of the historical and psychological origins of our moral values, asking where our morality came from and what its origins reveal about it. Instead of assuming that our moral values (good and evil, the virtues we esteem) are simply true, given, or self-evident, Nietzsche asked: where did these values come from? What are their historical and psychological origins? And what do these origins reveal about the values themselves? This genealogical investigation - tracing the origins of our values rather than assuming their truth - led Nietzsche to a radical and unsettling conclusion: that our morality of ‘good and evil’ arose from a ‘slave revolt’ in morality, the resentment of the weak against the strong, which inverted an older ‘noble’ morality. The genealogy of morals - investigating the origins of our values and what they reveal - is one of Nietzsche’s most radical and influential projects, casting a suspicious and unsettling light on the origins and nature of our moral values.
Nietzsche’s most provocative claim is that our familiar morality of ‘good and evil’ arose from a ‘slave revolt’ in morality - a revolt of the weak against the strong, in which the resentment (ressentiment) of the weak became creative and inverted the noble values. The weak and oppressed, unable to act against the strong who dominated them, turned their resentment inward and made it ‘creative’ - creating new values that inverted the noble morality: condemning the qualities of the strong (strength, pride, power) as ‘evil,’ and exalting the qualities of the weak (humility, meekness, obedience, self-denial) as ‘good.’ This ‘slave revolt in morality’ - the inversion of the noble values by the resentment of the weak - created the morality of ‘good and evil’ that condemns the strong and exalts the weak. And Nietzsche identified this slave morality especially with the Judeo-Christian moral tradition - which, he provocatively argued, represented the triumph of the slave revolt, the values of the weak and resentful (humility, meekness, pity, the condemnation of pride and strength) triumphing over and inverting the noble morality of the strong. Our morality of good and evil, Nietzsche claimed, is the triumph of the slave revolt - the values of resentment, inverting the noble morality.
Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals pioneered what later came to be called the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ - the method of suspicious unmasking, which looks beneath the surface of our beliefs, values, and ideals to expose their hidden, often unflattering, origins, motives, and functions. Instead of taking our values at face value (as simply true, noble, self-evident), the hermeneutics of suspicion asks: what are the hidden origins, motives, and functions of these values? What interests do they serve? What do they conceal? And it unmasks our values, exposing their hidden, often unflattering, origins and functions - as Nietzsche unmasked morality as the product of resentment and the disguised will to power. This method of suspicious unmasking - looking beneath the surface to expose the hidden origins, motives, and functions of our beliefs and values - became one of the most influential methods in modern thought. Nietzsche is grouped with Marx (who unmasked ideas as ideology serving class interests) and Freud (who unmasked conscious beliefs as the disguised expression of unconscious drives) as the great ‘masters of suspicion’ - who taught us to be suspicious of the surface of our beliefs and values, and to look beneath for their hidden origins, motives, and functions. This hermeneutics of suspicion - the suspicious unmasking of the hidden dimensions of our beliefs and values - is one of Nietzsche’s most influential legacies, transforming the modern approach to beliefs, values, and ideals.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Nietzsche traced our morality to a ‘slave revolt’ - the resentment of the weak inverting the noble values of the strong. Explain master morality, slave morality, and the genealogy of morals, in your own words.
Leads to Michel Foucault.
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