Nietzsche's genealogy: asking what our values are worth

The most disturbing thing about Nietzsche's philosophy is not that he criticises morality. It is that he changes the way we ask questions about it.

In On the Genealogy of Morality the question is no longer simply "What is good?", "What is evil?" or "How should we live?" Nietzsche goes deeper, and asks something a good deal less comfortable:

How much are our values themselves worth?

This is one of the genuine turning points in his thought. The point is not to show that some particular moral rule is true or false. Nietzsche asks instead under what historical, psychological and cultural conditions moral values came into being. He suspends the assumption that what we call good really is good, and looks behind the word at the relations of power, the passions, the fears, the appetites and the human types that produced it.

His method, then, is less the construction of a moral theory than an inquiry into the history and psychology of morality.

The book itself#

Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift appeared in 1887. The subtitle gives the game away: a Streitschrift is a polemic, a fighting document. This is not a serene academic study but a reckoning with the reigning moral ideas of the age.

The book consists of a preface and three connected essays (Abhandlungen). It carries forward and deepens lines opened a year earlier in Beyond Good and Evil (1886).

The three essays run in this order:

1. "Good and Evil", "Good and Bad" — the reversal of values
2. "Guilt", "Bad Conscience" and Related Matters — the birth of punishment and of the inner voice
3. What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean? — the making of sense out of suffering

What is a genealogy?#

Nietzsche's genealogy (Genealogie) is not, in the simple sense, a search for the point at which something first appeared. A genealogy asks through what struggles and transformations the values that now look natural, necessary and even universal to us came to mean what they mean.

In this he makes a radical move in the history of philosophy. Rather than explaining what a concept means today, he asks how it came to mean that.

Take the concept of the good. For the traditional moralist, "good" may be an unchanging moral fact awaiting discovery. Nietzsche asks instead:

Who said "good"? Good for whom? Good for which type of human being? Good under what conditions? And, more pointedly: whom did it serve to call something good?

The philosophical question thus shifts from the content of values to the conditions of their formation. Nietzsche works here less as a historian than as a kind of cultural pathologist, probing not the surface meanings of moral concepts but the forces at work beneath them.

An important distinction#

Showing that a value has a particular historical origin does not prove it false.

That a belief was born of fear does not entail that it is mistaken. Logicians call this the genetic fallacy: the attempt to refute a claim by looking at its source rather than its content.

Nietzsche's method cannot be reduced to that fallacy. His real aim is different:

To show that values which look necessary to us could have been otherwise.

That is precisely where the power of genealogy lies. It does not abolish a value outright; it strips away the halo of inevitability around it.

Was "good" always good?#

At the heart of the first essay lies the distinction between "good and evil" and "good and bad".

In the old aristocratic world of value, Nietzsche argues, "good" did not primarily mean obedience to a moral law. The concept was the name that a strong, vital, self-assured type of human being gave to its own existence.

The point to notice is this: the noble does not first pass judgement on someone else; he affirms himself. To say "I am good" is at the same time to say "my style, my strength, my way of living is valuable".

In the mode of valuation that Nietzsche will later call slave morality, the movement runs the other way. Value is produced not directly out of oneself but by way of an opposite: first the other is declared evil, and then one's own position becomes, by contrast, good.

So the fundamental difference between the two forms of morality is not merely which actions count as good or bad. The real difference is where the act of creating value begins.

One begins from itself. The other begins from its opponent.

Master morality and slave morality#

This famous distinction is often read as a sociological or political classification. But Nietzsche's aim is not simply to say that masters are good and slaves are bad. The distinction is first of all psychological and typological — not a matter of class.

In master morality, valuation works from the inside out rather than the outside in. The noble affirms his own existence; strength, health, courage, pride and creative capacity become the defining marks of the good.

In slave morality the engine of valuation is reaction. And here Nietzsche introduces a concept of the first importance.

Ressentiment: reaction turned into value#

Ressentiment, which Turkish translators render variously as hınç, kin, öç alma duygusu or içerlemişlik — rancour, hatred, vengefulness, a nursed grievance — is not simple anger.

Anger can be discharged directly. Ressentiment is a reaction that cannot become action and so accumulates within.

When someone cannot strike back at what has harmed him, or at what he takes to be stronger than himself, he may begin to reinterpret his own powerlessness inside another system of values. Powerlessness is then renamed humility, submission becomes virtue, and strength becomes wickedness.

What happens here, for Nietzsche, is not a simple moral preference but an inversion of values.

The part played by memory#

Human beings do not merely live; they remember. But remembering can be poisonous as well as liberating. If a past humiliation is continually reproduced, a person may come to live not by the event but by the trace the event has left inside him.

Ressentiment, in this sense, is the past governing the present.

When this psychological structure hardens into a moral view of the world, the mechanism runs something like this:

• "I cannot do this" → "Doing this is wrong in any case"
• "I am not strong" → "Being strong is immoral"

Nietzsche's uncomfortable question arises exactly here. Behind a moral judgement, is there really a love of truth, or the need of a failed strength to justify itself?

He does not, of course, explain every moral judgement by ressentiment. What he wants is that modern man should interrogate the psychological roots of his own values.

The concept's own history#

Ressentiment did not stay with Nietzsche. The German philosopher Max Scheler took it up at length in his 1912 study Ressentiment — but against Nietzsche. On Scheler's account, the Christian morality of love was no product of ressentiment; the real ressentiment was at work in the egalitarian rhetoric of modern bourgeois society.

Nietzsche's sharpest concept, in other words, received its first great criticism from someone who was using that very concept.

"God is dead": not a triumph but a crisis#

The line is often taken for a slogan of atheism. What it points to is a far larger historical transformation.

To say that God is dead is not merely to say that there is no God. The real matter is this: the transcendent ground that gave Western values their sense no longer works as it once did.

Men may have become modern, scientific thinking may have grown stronger, traditional metaphysical beliefs may have been shaken. None of this means that moral values will disappear at the same rate. People can stop believing in God and go on living within the order of value that God established.

The diagnosis sharpens at this point. Modern man may have lost his faith in the source of the old values, yet he still carries their consequences.

The crisis, then, is not in saying that God is dead. The crisis is going on living by God's values without noticing that God has died.

This is why nihilism, in Nietzsche, is not simply believing in nothing. Nihilism is the failure of any power to create new values to arise, at the very moment when the old ones have ceased to be credible.

Why does Nietzsche set himself against morality?#

It would be a serious mistake to read his thought as a philosophy of immorality. Nietzsche does not want to destroy morality; his more basic aim is to strip morality of its standing as an authority beyond question.

For him the sentence "morality says so" is not an explanation but the point at which the inquiry ought to begin:

• What type of human being does this morality produce?
• Which drives does it strengthen, and which does it suppress?
• Does it make people stronger, more creative and more affirming of life, or does it govern them through guilt, fear and self-loathing?

Nietzsche's critique of morality is therefore also a critique of the manufacture of human beings. Morality does not only tell us what to do; it tells us what sort of person to be.

And it is exactly here that he asks: what sort of human being do we wish to produce?

The birth of bad conscience#

The second essay presses the question further. Nietzsche traces the historical links between guilt, debt, punishment and conscience. That the German word Schuld means both debt and guilt is central to the analysis: moral obligation still bears the mark of the relation between creditor and debtor.

As human beings enter a social order they are obliged to curb their drives. Aggression barred from turning outwards does not vanish. It turns inwards.

This inward turn is decisive in the birth of what Nietzsche calls bad conscience. Unable to attack outwards, man begins to punish himself; he sets up a court within.

The accusing voice that speaks inside us is not merely a product of individual psychology; Nietzsche ties it to the history of human socialisation.

Civilisation, on this view, is not simply the story of an escape from barbarism. It is also the history of the taming of the drives and of man's turning against himself. That transformation has made him more conscious and more complex; it has also opened the way to a cruelty directed at himself.

The ascetic ideal: making sense of suffering#

In the third essay the critique reaches its most radical point.

Human beings suffer. But for Nietzsche what is often more unbearable than suffering itself is its meaninglessness.

Give suffering a meaning and it can be borne. This is where the ascetic ideal comes in: pain can be read as the price of sin, as the purification of the soul, as a mark of sacrifice, or as preparation for a higher existence.

Religion, on this account, is not merely an institution that represses. Nietzsche's subtler point is that religion makes man's suffering liveable by giving it a meaning.

The price, however, may be that instead of affirming life as it is, one begins to judge it by the measure of another, transcendent world.

And Nietzsche asks: what becomes of life once we begin to judge it by a criterion outside life?

The most contested part of the third essay concerns science. Modern science, Nietzsche argues, is not the opposite of the ascetic ideal but its latest and most honest form. For science too rests on the belief that truth is worth more than anything else — and that belief has never itself been questioned.

The real target: revaluing our values#

Here the positive side of the project comes into view. Nietzsche does not merely say that the old values are false. His call is this: values must be revalued.

That is not a facile relativism of the sort that says everyone should choose his own truth. In Nietzsche, to create value does not mean to make an arbitrary choice. Creating new values demands that a person take charge of his own life, become strong enough to establish his own measures, and give up assessing life in the shadow of another world.

The concept of the will to power (Wille zur Macht) enters at this point. It is not merely a desire to dominate others; in the broader sense it is the movement by which life exceeds, shapes and creates itself, and continually establishes itself anew.

Nietzsche's ideal human being is therefore not the one who consumes ready-made values but the one who can create them.

What, then, does he put in their place?#

The strongest objection arises just here. One can question the old values. But by what criterion are new ones to be measured? If we interrogate the historical and psychological roots of every moral value, what is left?

A Kantian may press the point hard: the worth of morality is to be sought in principles that reason can render universally valid, independently of historical origin or human psychology. Nietzsche, for his part, suspects that behind such claims to universality there also stands a particular human type and a particular world of values.

Yet a serious problem remains. Where do the criteria used in the critique of values themselves come from? Subject all values to genealogy and Nietzsche's own call to create values is exposed to the same question.

His philosophy, then, leaves no safe harbour outside its own critique. Perhaps that is exactly where its strength lies.

What became of the book#

The reception history of the Genealogy reads like a confirmation of its own thesis: the meaning of a text can change according to who reads it, and with what interest.

Nietzsche lost his sanity in 1889. His unpublished notes passed into the hands of his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Elisabeth moved in a circle close to the German nationalism and antisemitism that Nietzsche himself had violently opposed. She arranged the notes to her own design and published them as The Will to Power; the compilation was not a work he had planned.

The result was one of the twentieth century's great misreadings: for a time Nietzsche was presented as the philosopher of Nazi ideology.

What reversed the picture was the philological work done after the war. The translations and studies of Walter Kaufmann in particular lifted Nietzsche out of that context and made him readable again. Nietzsche scholarship today is built on that correction.

The heirs of genealogy#

The method did not stay with Nietzsche; it became one of the most productive philosophical instruments of the twentieth century.

Gilles Deleuze, in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), refounded the French reading of Nietzsche, placing force and reaction at its centre.

Michel Foucault made the method the backbone of his own work in his 1971 essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History". The question he puts in his books on madness, the prison and sexuality has the same structure as Nietzsche's: how was this distinction, which looks so natural today, actually built?

Bernard Williams, in Truth and Truthfulness (2002), turned genealogy the other way about. Genealogy, he argued, need not always debunk; showing how a value came into being can sometimes vindicate it. Williams calls this a vindicatory genealogy.

In Turkish#

Ahlakın Soykütüğü Üstüne — Bir Kavga Yazısı was brought into Turkish by Ahmet İnam. İnam had also translated Beyond Good and Evil and Paul Feyerabend's Against Method.

There is more than one Turkish translation of the book. The rendering of ressentiment varies from one to the next: some translators say hınç, others prefer to leave the term as it stands. The choice is not a trivial one, since the reach of the concept narrows or widens with the Turkish word chosen.

How to read it#

A few practical notes for anyone coming to the book for the first time:

• Do not skip the preface. Nietzsche explains there what his method is and what it is not.
• Read the essays in order. They are not free-standing pieces; the second builds on the first, the third on the second.
• Read the historical claims as instruments of thought, not as philology. Some of Nietzsche's etymological arguments are not supported by present-day linguistics, but the force of the argument does not depend on those details.
• Do not read "master" and "slave" as classes. They are not social strata but ways of creating value.

What genealogy means now#

This inquiry was carried out some hundred and forty years ago, and it remains alive because modern societies are not less but perhaps more divided over moral values than they were.

People argue continually about what is good, what is bad, what is acceptable. In most such arguments a more basic question is forgotten: why do we find these values valuable?

• When we defend a value, are we really defending it, or the values of the group we belong to?
• Behind a moral indignation, is there a desire for justice, or ressentiment?
• Do we criticise someone because he is genuinely free, or because his freedom threatens our own world of values?

Genealogy teaches us to ask these questions before it teaches us to answer them. Nietzsche's most important legacy is therefore not a particular moral system. It is the art of suspicion he developed in the face of values.

Conclusion: asking what values are worth#

Nietzsche's genealogy is not a simple theory that finds a real origin hidden behind morality and explains everything by it. It is something deeper: it reminds us that the values we take to be self-evidently right have a history.

The words good and evil did not descend from heaven. They were shaped by human hands, by human passions, by struggles and powers and fears and hopes and sufferings.

So in the end the question becomes: what is the past of a value?

But it does not stop there. It asks something harder: what kind of human being does this value create today?

And finally: does this value increase life, or is it another way of fleeing from it?

The real radicalism of Nietzsche's philosophy lies here. He does not merely call on us to reject the values we have; he calls on us to become the investigators of our own values.

For perhaps the most dangerous question in philosophy is not "What is true?"

"Why do we find true what we call true?"

For Nietzsche, philosophy becomes genuinely dangerous exactly where that question begins.