On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) (2nd Edition)
Friedrich Nietzsche
Language: English
Pages: 300
ISBN: 2:00266496
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most influential thinkers of the past 150 years and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) is his most important work on ethics and politics. A polemical contribution to moral and political theory, it offers a critique of moral values and traces the historical evolution of concepts such as guilt, conscience, responsibility, law and justice. This is a revised and updated edition of one of the most successful volumes to appear in Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Keith Ansell-Pearson has modified his introduction to Nietzsche’s classic text, and Carol Diethe has incorporated a number of changes to the translation itself, reflecting the considerable advances in our understanding of Nietzsche in the twelve years since this edition first appeared. In this new guise, the Cambridge Texts edition of Nietzsche’s Genealogy should continue to enjoy widespread adoption, at both undergraduate and graduate level.
“The clarity of the ... translation and the supporting apparatus (chronology, further reading, biographical synopses, and index) make this an excellent edition for student use, as indeed it is intended. ... what makes [it] particularly useful is the inclusion of material from other works by Nietzsche to which the Genealogy refers, such as Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, Beyond Good and Evil, and The Gay Science, as well as ... the early texts, ‘The Greek State’ and ‘Homer's Contest’.” —British Journal for the History of Philosophy
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nothing more than the unleashing of so-called ambition. Here, selfishness is feared as ‘evil as such’ – except by the Jesuits, who think like the ancients in this and probably, for that reason, may be the most effective educators of our times. They seem to believe that selfishness, i.e. the individual, is simply the most powerful agens, obtaining its character of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ essentially from the aims towards which it strives. But for the ancients, the aim of agonistic education was the
accompanied by the notion of a past event which turned out contrary to expectation.’ Eth iii, Propos. xviii Schol. i ii. For millennia, wrongdoers overtaken by punishment have felt no different than Spinoza with regard to their ‘offence’: ‘something has gone unexpectedly wrong here’, not ‘I ought not to have done that’ –, they submitted to punishment as you submit to illness or misfortune or death, with that brave, unrebellious fatalism that still gives the Russians, for example, an advantage
he does not deny ‘existence’ by doing so, but rather affirms his existence and only his existence, and possibly does this to the point where he is not far from making the outrageous wish: pereat mundus, fiat philosophia, fiat philosophus, fiam!…76 8 As you see, they are hardly unbribed witnesses and judges of the value of ascetic ideals, these philosophers! They are thinking of themselves, – they don’t care about ‘the saint’! At the same time, they are thinking of what, to them, is absolutely
our problem: what does the ascetic ideal mean? – only now does it become ‘serious’: after all, we are face to face with the actual representative of seriousness. ‘What is the meaning of all seriousness?’ – this even more fundamental question is perhaps on our lips already: a question for physiologists, as is proper, but one we shall skirt round for the moment. The ascetic priest not only rests his faith in that ideal, but his will, his power, his interest as well. His right to exist stands and
in the Kantian concept of ‘the intelligible character of things’,89 something of this lewd ascetic conflict [Zwiespältigkeit] still lingers, which likes to set reason against reason: ‘intelligible character’ means, in Kant, a sort of quality of things about which all that the intellect can comprehend is that it is, for the intellect – completely incomprehensible.) – Finally, as knowers, let us not be ungrateful towards such resolute reversals of familiar perspectives and valuations with which the