dangerously destructive. His tone of presentation is extraordinarily intense, as if he--nay the entire world--has an immediate and compelling stake in the outcome of conflict over the issues he raises. Thus his meditation on morals can be seen, indirectly, not only as a philosophical statement but also as social criticism.
Nietzsche connects the problem of the genealogy of morals to the problem of evil endemic to Christian thought: If God is almighty and good and holy, how then is there evil in the world? His first impulse was to lay evil at the foot of God (151), but because that solution solves nothing in the scheme of human experience, he reformulated the problem thus: "Under what conditions did man construct the value judgments good and evil?" (151). Throughout, Nietzsche hypothesizes a human provenance for the whole of human experience, which includes views of ethics and morality, with a view toward identifying and evaluating that provenance.
Nietzsche identifies Christianity as the touchstone of prevailing morality and ethics, marked by "compassion, self-denial, and self-sacrifice, which Schopenhauer above all others had consistently gilded, glorified, 'transcendentalized' until he came to see them as absolute values allowing him to deny life an even himself" (153-4). Nietzsche locates Christian moral value in the well-being of the Other, including the less powerful, with the individual's own satisfactory experience of selflessness, manifest in the approval on the part of the g
...