A Macat Analysis of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality
On the Genealogy of Morality was written in 1887, when Friedrich Nietzsche was at the height of his powers as a philosopher and master of German prose writing. Here he criticizes the idea that there is just one conception of moral goodness, dissecting the contemporary practice of morality and looking at it from a historical viewpoint. Rather than following a metaphysical or religious approach, Nietzsche adopts a naturalistic framework, which is grounded in history and natural science, to understand our concepts of good and evil in the Christianized Western world. He traces the origins of the human conscience back to primitive creditor-debtor relationships. Nietzsche ultimately hoped that his “philosophers of the future” would put forward new ideas for reshaping morality to allow human beings to flourish.
Nietzsche shows the creative, artistic spirit he hoped these new thinkers would adopt. Sartre’s existentialism, Freud’s psychoanalysis, and Foucault’s genealogical histories were all built on the philosophical and methodological ground laid by Nietzsche’s work in general, and On the Genealogy of Morality in particular.
