The purpose of this research is to examine Nietzsche's summary in his intellectual biography Ecce Homo of the principal themes of the first two essays in his Genealogy of Morals. The plan of the research will be to set forth that summary and the intellectual context in which Nietzsche's views emerge, and then to discuss the implications of his emphasis.
Nietzsche's assessment of the import of the first two essays in his Genealogy of Morals follows:
The result of the first inquiry is the birth of Christianity: the birth of Christianity out of the spirit of ressentiment, not, as people may believe, out of the "spirit"--a countermovement by its very nature, the great rebellion against the domination of noble values.
The second inquiry offers the psychology of the conscience, which is not as people may believe "the voice of God in man": it is the instinct of cruelty that turns back after it can no longer discharge itself externally. Cruelty is here exposed the for the first time as one of the most ancient and basic substrata of culture that simply cannot be imagined away [312].
Nietzsche appears to be engaged in nothing so much as reaffirming a deeply held conviction about the reasons for the fundamental, and fundamentally skewed and insupportable, condition of what was for him modern human society. The culprit, of course, is Christianity, and as the argument unfolds in GM it becomes clear that Christianity in conjunction with bourgeois values and the Enlightenment philosophical tradition, is the monstrous form that the culprit has assumed. His declaration in the first line of his introduction that his subject is "the provenance of our moral prejudices" (150) is a clue to the fact that he seeks to characterize what is generally thought of as morality as something rather different: i.e., pathological, inappropriately judgmental. The source of the attitude, not the morality, is Nietzsche's concern, and his judgment is that it is ...