Genealogy of Morals

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 philosophi

. . .
hen a priestly class inserts spirituality authority in the human community; Nietzsche calls "priestly aristocracies" as "unwholesome" because of their contemplative and "brooding" rather than creative and active approach to life (165-6). According to Nietzsche, "the priestly system of valuations can branch off from the aristocratic and develop into its opposite" (166). Reflective instead of active, contemplative instead of truly rational, priestly societies come to hate the more active (more authentically noble) human experience. The greatest haters (and priestly class) in human history are the Jews, whom Nietzsche says with frightening consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value equations good/noble/powerful/beauti-ful/happy/favored-of the-gods and maintain, with the furious hatred of the underprivileged and impotent, that "only the poor, the powerless, are good; only the suffering, sick, and ugly, truly blessed. But you noble and mighty ones of the earth will be, to all eternity, the evil, the cruel, the avaricious, the endless, and thus the cursed and damned!" (167-8). Nietzsche's original canon of justice operated according to objective rules of fair play and good will "among men(!) of roughly equal power [and] their
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
According Nietzsche's, Throughout Nietzsche, Christianity God's, Genealogy Morals, Jews Nietzsche, GM Christianity, Greeks Jews, According Nietzsche, Christian God, human experience, Greeks Christianity, genealogy morals, human society, essays genealogy morals, priestly class, essays genealogy, birth christianity, nietzsche's view, people believe, countermovement nature, noble mighty,
Approximate Word count = 1791
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

More Essays on Genealogy of Morals