On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche

On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo Reviews

• 
  T.J. Beitelman

  Make no mistake: Nietzsche was a nut. Bertrand Russell famously dismissed him as a megalomaniac, and maybe that’s true. People blame the Nazis on him, they say he was a misogynist, and on and on. I don’t really know about all that, one way or another (though the Nazi thing is demonstrably false — Nietzsche consistently rails against all things German, especially what he considered the Germanic tendency toward mindless group-think. He was also vehemently opposed to anti-Semitism. Maybe a Nazi or two misconstrued and/or appropriated his ideas, but it’s very likely he would’ve ended up in Dauchau had he been around).
  
  At any rate, there’s no question the guy cracked up and spent the last few years of his life as a catatonic and drooling shade of himself, being looked after by a sister he hated and mocked when he’d had his wits about him. If that aint a cautionary tale re: the risks of spending your life thinking heady thoughts, what is? (Good thing me and the Anonymous Sister are on good terms…)
  
  Still. Just cuz you’re crazy don’t mean you aint onto something. (Which is pretty much a direct quote from ol’ Freddie himself. You know. In translation.)
  
  On the Genealogy of Morals has stuck in my craw for a few reasons: 1) a madcap, brilliant professor-type introduced me to it. He was great because he was the type of madcap, brilliant professor who could work the alchemical magic of turning an inscrutable text into a sacred one but — and I witnessed this — you put him in a grocery store and tell him to find the vanilla extract and he quickly comes to his wit’s end. Something about that strikes me as being exactly the way it should be; 2) it’s about the roots of asceticism and how asceticism is and always will be rooted in hedonism, how Yes! and No! do their necessary little dance. (This is a dance I must admit I know at least a little too well.); 3) Also: how there’s a difference between Yes! vs. No! and Right vs. Wrong. Not just a difference but a sequence: Yes! comes first. Then comes No! Then come the qualifiers.
  
  This is the important thing, though: Nietzsche is, first and foremost, an artist. A poet, in fact. (“Nut” / “Poet;” “Tomato” / “Tomahto.”) His background as a philologist is not a tangent to who and what he was. You can’t expect science or fact or consistency from him. He is interested in bigger things than just that. His language is beautiful and his metaphorical leaps are exhilarating. That’s where his Truth resides.
  
  The good thing about Nietzsche is you can pick him up, open to any page, and read a few sentences to chew on for several hours, days, or years. You don’t even have to understand him. Just be with him as if he was your crazy uncle.
  
  Everyone needs a crazy uncle.
  
  In fact, Nietzsche might say that everyone needs to be a crazy uncle. Or at any rate this: if you’re a crazy uncle, aint no use pretending otherwise.
  
  Du sollst werden, der du bist: You must become what you are.
• 
  Warren Fournier

  Let's try an exercise. It may be a controversial one, but after all, I am talking about Nietzsche here. In this review, I will attempt an exegesis, through the lens of two relevant sociopolitical issues, of an English translation by editor and Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufman of two of Nietzsche's greatest works: "The Genealogy of Morals" and the autobiographical "Ecce Homo." Hopefully in doing so, I can demonstrate how influential his psychology and philosophy can be on issues of today.
  
  We will begin with an easy one: "addiction and recovery." Nietzsche himself shunned the drinking of alcohol, considered smoking a horrible habit, and didn't even like coffee. Nietzsche seemed to have an innate understanding of what it means to be sober, because in these two books, Nietzsche has much to say about the concept of "ressentiment." The English word is resentment. According to 12-step philosophy, resentment is the root of addictive behaviors and the antithesis of wellness. Resentment will lead you to relapse. AA and NA try to tackle the problem of resentment in the individual. Nietzsche, in his exploration of the origins of the human concepts of good and evil, is more interested in the global and cultural effects of resentment, which he calls "slave morality." Resentment actually creates values, but it does so by negatively judging what is "outside," focusing on what others are doing rather than on critically examining one's own goals for personal improvement. A person who has resentments has the need to direct one's view outward instead of onto oneself. This is why recovery coaches and addiction professionals are so keen to look out for resentment in the people they are trying to help. If someone in treatment for substance use is too busy complaining about the food in the hospital, or that they are not allowed to smoke while in rehab, or that their multiple arrests and drug-related charges are because the police are picking on them unjustly, or that the rules of their structured monitoring programs are unfair, this person is not practicing sobriety, and therefore, will not remain abstinent for long. Nietzsche calls this "slave" morality, because "ressentiment" requires a hostile external environment, a victim mentality, in which to rage against perceived injustice and immorality in "the other."
  
  Let's move on to a political movement dominating the news, YouTube channels, and dinner tables of today: "identity politics." Identity politics certainly has the power to create moral judgments, and does. But even the term "identity politics" is fraught with antipodal moral values, depending on who you are talking to. For folks on the conservative side, it is a term that indicates mediocrity on the part of lawmakers and influencers who judge people as good or bad based on outward appearances such as skin-color or gender and not on a person's individual accomplishments, experience, and competence. The term "identity politics" has therefore been weaponized as being something "bad," and has so quickly gotten entrenched as meaning "bad" that folks on the progressive side do not like to even hear it. But the idea behind "identity politics" was supposed to be "good," a righting of centuries of systemic discrimination, to create a more equitable world of representation of all human identities across all spheres. Guiding principles of equity derived from identity politics is an inversion of values believed to be once held by a dominantly white society, and thus is held as "good" because of a "ressentiment" felt by the "weak" towards the "powerful."
  
  Today, we hear daily examples of diversity and inclusion strategies born from this "ressentiment." Anne Boleyn should be portrayed by a black actor and Doctor Who should be played by a woman, because "it's about time." There should be more Hispanic and black airline pilots. There should be less Asians and whites enrolled in our most elite universities. There should be a female president or a transgendered governor. These ideas of equity are considered moral because they are the antithesis of what was expected by the traditional "nobility" of the powerful white patriarchy. However, they are considered as noble by the people that adhere to them as much as they are considered as malevolent, racist, and sexist by the people who oppose them. So which side on the issue of identity politics represents the "good"?
  
  Nietzsche might suggest both and neither, or that history will eventually tell--when we only remember the end result of the victor and forget the voice of the losing side. But for now, which ideas are good and which are bad are based on the concept of the "other" which itself is based on "ressentiment." Each side identifies themselves as having the moral authority completely inasmuch as they separate and contrast themselves from the other. But the more one side looks upon the sphere that they despise from a distance, the more they have trouble SEEING the other side. And over time, blindness to the other side allows for confabulation and even a willful distortion and falsification of the other side. In essence, those on the opposing side become effigies. One could argue that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were demonstrating this phenomenon when Clinton referred to "the deplorables," and Trump spoke of "shitholes." When we listen to the news these days, we aren't listening to reporting, we are listening to combatants of opposing cults who see the other side as "less than". So when it comes to the debate on identity politics, the moral authority on the left can only respond to opposition with such charges as racist, sexist, homophobe, conspiracy theorist, right-winger, white supremacist, fascist, and Nazi, because in their view they are surrounded by a hateful and bigoted world of orange men, deranged serial killer cops, Russian bots, and Alex Joneses. The moral authority on the right is only able to respond to opposition by name-calling with such terms as snowflake, soy-boy, simp, cuckhold, China apologist, socialist, communist, leftist--they too are surrounded by an evil world of Orwellian social engineering manipulated by supervillains like George Soros, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Disney. Each side holding the moral high-ground has their "blond beast," a Nietzschean archetype first mentioned in "The Genealogy," and though based upon the perceived physical attributes of those with aristocratic power of Celtic, Gaulic, and Germanic myth, the "blond beast" does not have to be blond, but can be African, Arabic, Asian, or otherwise--as long as the "beast" represents who has power of the oppressed, the enslaved.
  
  "Ressentiment" is the French Revolution, where a group of elites were able to capitalize on the envy and anger of the downtrodden proletariat by whipping them into a frenzied mob capable of taking down the power of kings. These same elites, not knowing what on earth to do after they successfully took down the monarchy, themselves became the "blond beast" of the masses, and so suffered the same fate as the Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. But to the founders of the United States, the French Revolution was certainly a force for "good," setting the stage for America's own revolution against their "blond beast," the English Crown. And now with contemporary identity politics, THOSE revolutionaries are the new "blond beasts," as statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and even Abraham Lincoln are toppled with self-righteous and furious anger.
  
  So you see, when applying Nietzschean concepts to contemporary debates, one can really understand how it could be argued that Nietzsche held a very pessimistic view of the genealogy of morals--a never-ending cycle of resentment no matter who has power--with no solution offered by his crazed mind that recognized no morality, that was anti-Christian, and that believed everything was permissible. But not so fast, says editor Walter Kaufman, who believes Nietzsche is one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted writers in history. Nietzsche's sister contributed much to this misunderstanding, as she took on executorship of his works and infused them with her own nationalist and Nazi sympathies, even though Nietzsche himself refused to ever become "reichsdeutsch" and was a fervent enemy of antisemitism. Nietzsche's reputation was further sullied by the two World Wars, as he was a Prussian intellectual of much repute--an easily visible target to denounce in anti-German propaganda. Kaufman's thoughts on Nietzsche and his legacy are worth reading, and you can find good examples of such in his separate introductions to "The Genealogy" and "Ecce Homo" here in this volume.
  
  I do think many of Nietzsche's views on human group-think and psychology as noted in these two books are spot-on and observable throughout history and today. In fact, after reading this volume, I can understand how his work inspired the likes of Freud. And I do see hints of a solution to our world woes in these pages. For many readers throughout history, these two Nietzschean masterpieces have provided enough healthy caution and skepticism that has liberated folks across the world, helping them find peace by transgressing political parties and organized religion, right vs. left thinking, and the need to dominate and subdue others with a singular point of view. This is not to say that Nietzsche would demand of his readers to renounce their faith or their political affiliation or their nationality, but to see "beyond good and evil," to look away from the pornography of victimhood, to be mindful of unhealthy thinking, to embrace the will to life, and most of all to truly practice sobriety.
  
  It is truly ironic that the second book in this volume, "Ecce Homo," means "Behold the man." "Behold me!" Nietzsche says through this title of his final book, "Behold this body! This is who I am." What is ironic was that the book wasn't published until after Nietzsche's collapse, when what may have been a critical stroke left the great man a shell of himself, this energetic mind that encouraged us to affirm life, to find joy in worldliness, in unabashedly experiencing life through sober eyes. And that leads to my final thoughts:
  
  Many readers think they already know Nietzsche. Some view him as a deranged nut who gradually completely lost his mind. Some see him as a nihilist, an anarchist, an anti-feminist, an anti-Christian. He is still believed by some to be an influence on the ideas of Nazi Germany. And others simply adore him, finding in his work a genius who looked through the the human façade and delivered a message that everyone should hear. But I encourage every reader to revisit this collection by Kaufmann carefully and rediscover two of the great wonders of world literature. To do so would be a great service to the great philosopher, for as he passionately cried in his preface to "Ecce Homo":
  
  "Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else."
• 
  Jacob

  This book made me sputtering mad when I read it in college. In retrospect, I'm just grateful that it was easy to read.
  
  Also, did you know that there's a brand of bread called Ecce Panis? Thus Baked Zarathustra! Try it with Hummus, All Too Hummus and The Dill to Power. The latter tends to rankle purists, though.
• 
  Joshua Nomen-Mutatio

  Here Nietzsche returns to the form of the essay after several complete works largely composed aphoristically. The second essay in the polemic On the Geneology of Morals is excellent and my personal favorite of the three essays that comprise this work. He discusses the historical tossings and turnings that have led to weird inversions of moral standards throughout the ages. The ways in which many eggs are often broken to make various omelettes and how the omelettes often turn out much differently than intended. Social psychology at its most fearless and polemicized.
  
  Ecce Homo (tr. "Behold the man!" in reference to Pontius Pilate's presentation of Jesus to the blood thirsty crowd) is interesting as well. Nietzsche gives several short "reviews" of each of his own books written up until that time, some are a bit forgettable, some a bit more interesting. For a good example of official self-critique see his essay ("Attempt at Self-Criticism") about his first book The Birth of Tragedy which can be found in the intro to some copies of the same book.
  
  The rest of this Beholding of the Man consists of four short chapters entitled "Why I Am So Wise", "Why I Am So Clever", "Why I Write Such Good Books", and "Why I Am a Destiny". These are probably best read as something written on the brink of insanity and steeped in deliberate irony and sarcasm--but not completely. I'll just admit that I had a hard time taking much of it all that seriously. For several pages Nietzsche goes on about his ideas concerning nutrition. He also equates drinking alcohol with subscribing to Christianity. It's a bit of a laugh riot from some angles but one that includes a series of doubtful and perplexed moments about from where or why the laughter comes.
• 
  Kirstian

  One of the few books that absolutely changed my life, and filled in as something not unlike a spiritual guide (between a time-gap following my denouncing formal religion, then not knowing how to proceed with philosophy as a "spiritual endeavor," which is how many "Eastern" philosophers define spirituality, by the way...)...
  
  Although any of Nietzsche's works might fit this bill (most would recommend Zarathustra), for some reason--probably due to my innate interest in the etymological significance of words as they relate to and/or have the capacity to transcend the sphere of mere labels into the territory of what Marx (via David Harvey's reading of him) might describe as their "fetish" character*; that is, Nietzsche's presentation offers insight into one way in which words get reified, or "essentialized." For this reason, it is one of his most important works (On Truth and Lie in the Extramoral Sense" essay would be the other); even though it isn't his most enjoyable read; perhaps for the same reason; e.g., it's fundamentally intellectual nature.
  
  
  *Despite this analogy, to my knowledge, this work of Nietzsche's draws no overt connection with Marx.
• 
  GD

  A dude thinking harder than any dude before him ever thought, this book will make you break your head open on the floor.
• 
  Mr.

  Nietzsche's complex sequel to Beyond Good and Evil is a remarkable achievement of philosophy, philology, and history. It laid the groundwork for such 20th century thinkers as Foucault and Deleuze, though they would never reach Nietzsche's complexity and moral sophistication. In the preface to the book, Nietzsche proposes the project of investigating the origins of morality on the grounds that human beings are unknown to themselves. He is ultimately concerned with the development of moral prejudices, and the value of morality itself. He criticizes mankind in its acceptance of moral principles, and writes: "we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must first be called in question-and for that there is needed a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances in which they grew, under which they evolved and changed" (456).
  Nietzsche begins the essay (Good and Evil, Good and Bad), with a philological examination of the words and roots of the words related to good and evil, and a delimitation of their evolution. He makes a connection between the creations of words and places them within the historical context of rulers and nobility. Linguistically, Nietzsche has discovered that the `good' is linked with nobility. He writes: "everywhere `noble,' `aristocratic' in the social sense, is the basic concept from which `good' in the sense of `with aristocratic soul,' `noble,'" (464). Alternatively, words associated with the `bad' invariably were linked with the `plain,' `simple,' and `low.' In this way, morality as a human construction is an extension of power, wealth, and civilization. The origin of evil is intertwined with priestly aristocracies.
  Nietzsche moves into a discussion of a shift in the history of morality, in which the morality of the priestly aristocracy is superceded by Jewish morality. For Nietzsche, the Jews inverted the morality of nobility and established a system which places value on the lower order of mankind. He indicates that the Jews believed "the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God" (470). Nietzsche describes this turn as `the slave revolt' of morality. He describes the triumph of Judeo-Christian morality over the previous system of values, and indicates that this turn is a triumph for the herd instinct, and for ressentiment. He writes: "The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge" (472). Noble morality develops as an affirmation of itself, while slave morality always says No to what is external to it. For Nietzsche, the need to constantly turn outward to an external `other' and place judgment on it is the essence of ressentiment.
  In the proceeding section of the treatise, Nietzsche discusses civilization's taming of man the animal. Here he writes: "Supposing that what is at any rate believed to be the `truth' really is true, and the meaning of all culture is the reduction of the beast of prey `man' to a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal, then one would undoubtedly have to regard all those instincts of reaction and ressentiment through whose aid the noble races and their ideal were finally confounded and overthrown as the actual instruments of culture" (478). Nietzsche insists that Europe's taming of man is a tremendous danger, for we are made to be weary of our own being. For Nietzsche, this weariness and fear of man has compelled us to lose our love for him, to turn our backs on our instincts, to reject affirmation.
• 
  Kenna Day

  Nietzsche is like a long lost friend to me. I read Zarathustra in high school and I remember connecting so deeply to his dissatisfaction with religion. Granted, I grew out of my flaming violent antitheism. But Nietzsche takes me back.
  
  My favorite part regards slave morality in essay 1 of On the Genealogy of Morals. He talks about the structure of noble morality, in which strength and power and wealth-all aspects of nobility-are "good." And all else is bad. Slave morality is simply a reaction to that noble morality. Slaves (anyone not in power) perceive a hostile environment and, as self protection, determine that which is not themselves (the nobles) must be evil. Nietzsche cites the Hebrew revolt as example. By determining enslavement as good, slaves decide their weakness is a true strength. (The meek shall inherit the earth.)
  
  And there you have it: my view of the power of religious brainwashing.
  
  Note: the binary flipping of "good and bad" and "good and evil" feels like a Derrida deconstruction, doesn't it?
• 
  Lucio Constantine has spent all hours on homework.

  On the Genealogy of Morals is about master morality versus slave morality, bad conscious and guilt and Ressentiment.
  
  Ecce Homo is a autobiography and overview of Nietzsche’s works told in a humorous and witty style that Christopher Hitchens couldn’t beat, it is also at the same time insightful. At the end of the book Nietzsche wants us to say YES to life;
  “It would be permissible to consider the second contradiction the more decisive one, since I take the overestimation of goodness and benevolence on a large scale for a consequence of decadence, for a symptom of weakness, irreconcilable with an ascending Yes-saying life: negating and destroying are conditions of saying yes.” (Nietzsche 328)
  
  I enjoyed each of the collected works, the translation is a great and although I could’ve save Ecce Homo as my last Nietzsche read I just had to read both.
  ___________
  There is a passage at the end of On the Genealogy of Morals that means a lot to me:
  
  "Apart from the ascetic ideal, man, the human animal, had no meaning so far. his existence on earth contained no goal; "why man at all?"- was a question without an answer; the will for man and earth was lacking; behind every great human destiny there sounded as a refrain a yet greater "in vain!" This is precisely what the ascetic ideal means: that something was lacking, that man was surrounded by a fearful void- he did not know how to justify, to account for, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meaning. He also suffered otherwise, he was in the main a sickly animal: but his problem was not suffering itself, but that there was no answer to the crying question, "why do I suffer?" (Nietzsche 162)
  This passage speaks a lot to me because to me there is no answer to the endless void of questioning that comes with "why do I suffer?" maybe it is the same for everyone, I tend to think that my problems are solitary and not universal, but then again maybe everyone thinks the same way about themselves as how I view my problem; that I am alone in my suffering.
• 
  Wiom biom

  Second essay: Guilt, Bad Conscience, and Related Matters
  
  I won't try to summarise a thesis for the essay because quite frankly there are quite a few ideas put across and I probably did not understand everything.
  
  Some noteworthy points:
  
  1. We should not venture to understand the origin of something (its causa fiendi) by its current purpose
  "The 'purpose in law,' however, is the very last idea we should use in the history of the emergence of law. It is much rather the case that for all forms of history there is no more important principle that the one which we reach with such difficulty but which we also really should reach, namely that what causes a particular thing to arise and the final utility of that thing, its actual use and arrangement in a system of purposes, are separate absolutely, that something existing, which has somehow come to its present state, will again and again be interpreted by the higher powers over it from a new perspective, appropriated in a new way, reorganized for and redirected to new uses, that all events in the organic world involve overpowering, acquiring mastery and that, in turn, all overpowering and acquiring mastery involve a re-interpretation, a readjustment, in which the 'sense' and 'purpose' up to then must necessarily be obscured or entirely erased."
  - which reminded me of Rousseau's writing in the Origins of Inequality with regard to the emergence of the State, the state of society, the state of nature; perhaps the Lockean Social Contract theory makes the most sense for us today but that's probably insufficient in explaining the very origin of the state
  
  2. His repudiation of the social contract
  "I used the word 'State'—it is self-evident who is meant by that term—some pack of blond predatory animals, a race of conquerors and masters, which, organized for war and with the power to organize, without thinking about it, sets its terrifying paws on a subordinate population which may perhaps be vast in numbers but is still without any shape, is still wandering about. That's surely the way the "State" begins on earth. I believe that that fantasy has been done away with which sees the beginning of the state in some "contract." The man who can command, who is naturally a "master," who comes forward with violence in his actions and gestures—what has a man like that to do with making contracts! We cannot negotiate with such beings. They come like fate, without cause, reason, consideration, or pretext. They are present as lightning is present, too fearsome, too sudden, too convincing, too 'different' even to become hated. Their work is the instinctive creation of forms, the imposition of forms. They are the most involuntary and unconscious artists in existence. Where they appear something new is soon present, a living power structure, something in which the parts and functions are demarcated and coordinated, in which there is, in general, no place for anything which does not first derive its "meaning" from its relationship to the totality."
  
  3. That punishment further alienates criminals from societal norms
  "In general, punishment makes people hard and cold. It concentrates. It sharpens the feeling of estrangement and strengthens powers of resistance. If it comes about that punishment shatters a man's energy and brings on a wretched prostration and self-abasement, such a consequence is surely even less pleasant than the ordinary results of punishment—characteristically a dry and gloomy seriousness."
  
  4. The origin of religions/gods
  "If we think this crude logic through to its conclusion, then the ancestors of the most powerful tribes must, because of the fantasy of increasing fear, finally have grown into something immense and have been pushed into the darkness of a divine mystery, something beyond the powers of imagination, so the ancestor is necessarily transfigured into a god. Here perhaps lies even the origin of the gods, thus an origin out of fear!"
  "...that stroke of genius of Christianity—God's sacrifice of himself for the guilt of human beings, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can redeem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem—the creditor sacrifices himself for the debtor, out of love (can people believe that?), out of love for his debtor!"
  "In this way, the [Greek] gods then served to justify men to a certain extent, even in bad things. They served as the origin of evil—at that time the gods took upon themselves, not punishment, but, what is nobler, the guilt."
  
  5. The repression of human nature has resulted in what we call "bad conscience"
  "We modern men, we are the inheritors of the vivisection of the conscience and the self-inflicted animal torture of the past millennia. That's what we have had the most practice doing, that is perhaps our artistry—in any case it is something we have refined to spoil our taste. For too long man has looked at his natural inclinations with an 'evil eye,' so that finally in him they have become twinned with 'bad conscience.'"
• 
  Aung Sett Kyaw Min

  Nietzsche is truly a psychologist of the first rank. In this treatise, he ingeniously transforms the 'what' of morality into the 'who' of morality. Who are perpetrators of the value of value itself? And what can be said about their physiological condition? As always, Nietzsche's language of physiology
  is a joy to read and digest...
  
  (1)
  
  'Good' was a self-descriptive valuation of warriors who were possessed of healthy, vigorous and physical constitution, and an active capacity to forgive and forget the violence that was inflicted on them. They held no resentiment against their enemies, unable to take them seriously. The 'good' are self-centred, positing themselves as 'good' in advance. But they do not regard their enemies as bad or evil, only that they are not-good.
  
  On the other hand, a different kind of valuation is secreted by the enemies of the warrior class- the priestly, ascetic class. Physically sick, pale and morbid, their first creative deed is to posit the other class as 'bad' and 'evil' and only secondarily define themselves as 'good'. The best examplar of this valuation secreted by the downtrodden and the sick is the Christian religion, with Christ as the figure of the ascetic priest who administers this valuation as a palliative to the suffering masses.
  
  "Rome" against "Judea"; in Nietzsche's view, there is an ongoing conflict between the warrior class and the priestly. While the struggle is yet to be conclusively decided, it is abundantly clear that the Judean valuation has presently triumphed. That is, the priestly class has installed its value of values as the dominant valuation. After all, we have become very tame through the instruments of culture. But not all hope is lost.
  
  (2)
  
  'Justice' is essentially active, and functions to rein in the morbid excesses of the 'reactive' pathos, sublimating the resentiment of the reactive man from its object to the community as a whole. However it is futile to speak of justice "in itself" or injustice "in itself", since even the partial limitation of the will to power imposed by the institution of law goes against the will to power (justice is a means to acquiring greater power)
  
  Simply grasping the purpose of a concept or an institution does not suffice as an explanation as to its genesis; punishment for example is a concatenation of a whole host of uses and utilities and whose original purpose is buried under layers and layers of historical sedimentation. The sequence of procedures associated with 'punishment' therefore always already precedes our intentional conferral of meaning or purpose to it.
  
  What is the origin of bad conscience? Bad conscience is 'animal soul is turned on itself'. The formation of society curtailed the instincts of men who previously acted freely on their drives. Unable to discharge these instincts outwards, men began to project them inwards into a regime of self infliction and self mortalization. "Hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction-all this turned against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of the "bad conscience", concludes Nietzsche. Bad conscience is responsible for the Abrahamic conception of God, which in Nietzsche's opinion, amounts to man's self-laceration instead of his self valorization as in the case of the tribal gods. Is there a way out of 'bad conscience'? A redeemer with a vitalistic (life affirming) and immanent (oriented to the actual world) eye to morality must be on the distant horizon...
  
  (3)
  
  Is ascetic ideal necessarily a denial and repudiation of sensuality? In the case of a philosopher, the ascetic ideal amounts to "an optimum condition for the highest and boldest spirituality". However, it is unfortunate that the philosopher type has hitherto only able to survive by taking the posture and the appearance of the priestly type-world denying, hostile to life, suspicious of the senses, freed from sensuality, etc. In the end Nietzshe asks us rhetorically if the conditions of the current world are conducive to the emergence of the free spirit from the philosopher-priest caterpiller.
  
  The ascetic mode of valuation is truly 'monstrous' in so far as it subordinates all other valuations under it. It condemns the actual world to the effect to holding up the 'beyond' or the 'ideal' world as the beacon of truth. The ascetic priest offers a palliative to suffering through the neutralization of our affects and senses to the point of absolute indifference, and the sublimation of our consciousness to mechanical repetition in works and rituals. The ascetic priest neutralizes suffering by rendering it meaningful.
  
  But if the ascetic ideal is a will and an ideal nonetheless, then what is its possible counter-will or counter ideal? It is not scientific conscience, because it does not believe in itself sufficiently and above all still invests itself in a will to [disinterested] truth without offering a justification of this will, a will which it shares with the ascetic ideal. In the end, Nietzsche gestures towards the notion that the will to truth must overcome itself and in a stroke of self conciousness present itself the following question- "why the will to truth?" Man would rather will nothingness than not will at all...
• 
  Taylor

  Far more mature than his furious work in 'Beyond Good and Evil', and really something to behold if you are willing to looking past the book's primary misgivings that arrive in the form of archaic thought. He rambles off the deep end in his meditations on the dangers of mixing not only race, but class in the next inevitably more mingled generations. These sentiments, however dated and faintly racist they may be, shouldn't take away from his general interest, that of the mechanisms of constraint imposed on the modern subject by virtue of their virtues. Nietzsche cleanly breaks down some notable differences between current and ancient religions, casting, at the time, new light on the realities of life under the cloud of morals, the ideas and structuring ability within the concepts of right and wrong. He is not calling for the abolishment of ethics or condoning murder, except once in a terrible but hypothetical sort of pre-fascist statement. What he is pointing out are the lengths to which modern morals and in particular modern religion, their loudspeaker, whip, and key, rule our thoughts and so our actions.
  
  Nietzsche is one of those thinkers who has been so digested that he may seem to be stating the obvious, but his status among the first to make these statements should be reason enough to read the book and touch a bit of the foundation on which so much modern thought has been set. I was raised quasi-religiously with an overactive thought process. It's a bad combination, answers don't suffice and it's said that thought should stand on faith. It leaves you (left me) feeling messed with, and Nietzsche's helped.
• 
  Jill

  Interesting. While I don't agree with most of what Nietzsche posits, I appreciate the read to hear his perspective. Marx speaks with a greater darkness than Nietzsche, so the crazy hammering of the soul when evil is taught wasn't present for me here. I completely disagree with his ideas about the "ascetic priest," they sound closer to Korihor's philosophy (and what a sad end he came to - hmmm, very similar to Nietzsche's), because they're all recycled stories from the same author, the devil. Oh wait, but there is no devil, right? THere is no good or evil, we're just told that so we're more tame, easier to control...funny, but anyone who ever goes down the path of carnal indulgence never finds happiness.
  
  His theory on the man of ressentiment is also interesting, although completely backwards. Nietzsche claims those who live life in peace and espouse Christian behavior are really weak and tell themselves they are stronger than those oppressing them because of their virtues, that one day they'll be greater than all of them, this couched in the beatitudes. He even addresses his sister who petitions him to see how difficult it is to keep the passions in control and allow the spirit to dominate the flesh, telling her how difficult it is to be alone, think these "new" thoughts and go forward in it without any support. THIS, of course, is far more difficult. Interesting ideas.
• 
  Woke

  Of all Nietzsche's texts, the Genealogy is the most useful for students of theory and captures Nietzsche at his most systemic--interrogating the concepts of master and salve morality, ressentiment, asceticism, debt, schadenfreude, etc.,-- a contrast to the polemical aphorisms that contain only segments of a larger conceptual framework to be found in BGE and the Antichrist.
  
  To fully appreciate Ecco Homo, as with TSZ, it should be read last, because it's essentially a commentary on his own oeuvre as he was on the brink of delirium.
• 
  Erin

  Amazing! This guy really knows what he is talking about.
• 
  Jacquie Des Rosiers

  Reading the classiquesss! Read this one for a philosophy course and I am glad I got to peak into Nietzsche's mind. Definitely some questionable and controversial opinions/notions, but nevertheless a thought-provoking piece of history. This book is about the roots of human morals. What does it mean to be good (for which he refers to the ascetic priest)? Why do people act in bad faith? He explores the depths of history, especially religion and slavery, and tries to understand human nature and the separation we have created between good and bad.
• 
  Kevin K

  This review only applies to On the Genealogy of Morals in this volume. Echoing Nick's review, I must say this book is far superior to
  Beyond Good and Evil. Here we have a tightly-focused Nietzsche in peak form, planting seeds that have grown into whole bodies of thought. Most obvious is Nietzsche's foreshadowing of Freud. Apparently Freud attributed to Nietzsche "more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live"; Freud's biographer and acquaintance, Ernest Jones, even claimed that Freud avoided reading Nietzsche due to worries about the similarity of their ideas. It was an innocent era before the 19th century, blissfully unaware of the subconscious mind. Morality was taken at face value, and there was no cold-eyed probing of its underlying/subconscious motives. Nietzsche was one of the first and most acute philosophers to expose the machinations hidden under the smooth facade. Previously my impression was that Nietzsche pioneered this style of thought, but I've learned through recent reading that Marx was earlier. The two are like bookends. Marx claims that bourgeois morality is just a cynical false-front that the bourgeoisie and upper classes use to brainwash the masses; Nietzsche, meanwhile, claims that slave morality is just a cynical false-front that the rabble use to brainwash the aristocracy and elites. I'm inclined to think they're both right! Another notable offshoot of the Genealogy of Morals is Michel Foucault's classic
  Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
  
  Today, evolution and sociobiology are fashionable topics, and there must be a dozen books out describing how morals are a product of the evolutionary process. A good example is
  The Evolution of Morality by the philosopher Richard Joyce. Joyce's book is interesting but flawed for a couple of reasons. First, in order to show morality is a product of evolution, he has to make claims about events that happened millions of years ago, and there simply aren't any pertinent facts or evidence from that time. He ends up with a "just so story," as
  Stephen J. Gould famously put it. Joyce's fairy tales about what characteristics helped animals to survive a million years ago may be plausible, or even true, but we simply don't know what happened back then, so fairy tales they remain. The theory is closer in impulse to historical novel writing than to a genuine empirical science like biology.
  
  The most important reason that sociobiological moral theories fail, however, is that human morality simply isn't innate or programmed in by evolution. Emotions are biological, but morality proper is a cultural phenomenon which has gone through almost kaleidoscopic transformations over the course of history. That's Nietzsche's revolutionary insight. It's true that humans have emotional responses of empathy toward others; but it's also true that humans take pleasure in inflicting pain on others (and themselves), as Nietzsche points out. Has empathy been hard-wired into us by evolution? Very unlikely considering that the Romans tortured and murdered people as public entertainment for centuries, and no one batted an eye. It was completely normal, upstanding, moral behavior at that time.
  
  My conclusion is that Nietzsche was right on target, and today's sociobiologists are following a red herring. There's some, but not much, moral knowledge on the path they're following. The better path is the one Nietzsche opened up here: in-depth research into the historical evolution of morality as culture. Hopefully the promise of Nietzsche's work can be fulfilled in the Internet era. There's probably never been better conditions for ferreting out the strange moral histories of the world's tribes, civilizations and peoples.
• 
  Althea Lazzaro

  From the section "Why I am so Wise":
  
  "What is it, fundamentally, that allows us to recognize who has turned out well? That well-turned-out person pleases our senses, that he is carved from wood that is hard, delicate, and at the same time smells good. He has a taste only for what is good for him; his pleasure, his delight cease where the measure of what is good for him is transgressed. He guesses what remedies avail against what is harmful; he exploits bad accidents to his advantage; what does not kill him makes him stronger. instinctively, he collects from everything he sees, hears, lives through, his sum: he is a principle of selection, he discards much. He is always in his own company, whether he associates with books, human beings, or landscapes: he honors by choosing, by admitting, by trusting. He reacts slowly to all kinds of stimuli, with that slowness which long caution and deliberate pride have bred in him: he examines the stimulus that approaches him, he is far from meeting it halfway. He believes neither in 'misfortune' nor in 'guilt': he comes to terms with himself, with others; he knows how to forget--he is strong enough; hence everything must turn out for his best.
  "Well then, I am the opposite of a decadent, for I have just described myself."
  
  
• 
  Alexandre Couto de Andrade

  NIetzsche does not know what he is talking about.
• 
  Lucas

  All too untimely!
• 
  cam lee

  worst experience of my life
• 
  Nurul Suhadah

  Saya habis membaca “buku kecil ide besar” ini setelah mula membaca sejak pagi tadi di dalam komuter menuju ke parlimen.
  
  Ironinya, saya menghabiskan bacaan ini ketika berada dalam sidang Dewan Negara. Jujurnya, hanya jasad saya disitu, tetapi jiwa dan pemikiran saya telah jauh terbang melangkaui abad dan tempat yang tak terjangkau.
  
  Ajaibnya, saya membaca Nietzsche yang tak pernah saya baca sebelum ini. “Thus Spoke Zarathusta” membawa saya kepada buku ini, “Ecce Homo” dalam bahasa asalnya.
  
  Lebih menggila, saya membaca buku ini dalam versi terjemahan Bahasa Melayu, atau lebih tepat Bahasa Indonesia.
  
  Saya kira saya semakin biasa membaca buku-buku bergenre sebegini dalam versi terjemahan. Otak saya semakin terlatih dengan istilah-istilah ‘falsafah’ yang dialih bahasa. Namun, perlu jujur saya akui, masih banyak yang saya teraba-raba mencari sebuah makna.
  
  Tetapi buku ‘autobiografi’ sebegini, jika boleh dikatakan sebagai autobiografi yang ditulis pada tahun 1883 akan menjadi antara buku yang akan ‘melekat’ lama di fikiran dan jiwa saya. Perasaannya berat. Amat sedih, hiba, sayu, keliru, tercerah, bermakna. Segala rasa yang bercampur baur dengan pekat.
  
  Nietzcshe telah berjaya memperkenalkan secebis dirinya kepada saya, walaupun dalam keadaan dia bertanya kepada diri dan kemudian menjawab sendiri persoalan-persoalan itu. Benarlah kata dia, “aku tidak membaca, aku dibaca”. Dia memuji dirinya dengan tajuk-tajuk yang begitu ketara seperti “Mengapa Aku Begitu Pandai”, “Mengapa Aku Menulis Buku-Buku Yang Begitu Bagus” tetapi dalam masa yang sama dalam banyak sekali ungkapannya mengkritik tajam dirinya sendiri.
  
  Saya kira, saya jatuh cinta dengan banyak sekali aforisme-aforisme Nietzsche, kalimat-kalimat pendek yang nampak langsung tak terhubung. Malah, inilah antara gaya Nietzsche yang berbeza berbanding filsuf lain. Seorang yang sangat anti-sistem, untuk membaca Nietzsche seseorang perlu melepaskan diri dari rasional tradisi dan cuba untuk memahami semangat pemberontakan seorang Nietzsche yang hidupnya diuji dengan kesakitan yang sangat kuat.
  
  Ada yang mengatakan membaca Nietzsche sangat berbahaya, kerana inilah filsuf yang melaungkan “Tuhan telah mati”. Tetapi saya jumpa banyak sekali sisi yang menjadikan saya sangat insaf dan syukur, menjumpai dan merasai Tuhan ada di sisi.
  
  Buku yang akan saya ingati sepertimana saya membaca “Al Munqiz Minal Dhalal” Al-Ghazali, yang masih kekal menjadi buku terbaik autobiografi yang saya pernah baca.
  
  Tidur malam ini nampaknya akan bertemankan Nietzsche, sang pembunuh Tuhan yang mencintai takdirnya.
  
  #surimembaca
• 
  Sharad Pandian

  There isn't a proper defense of Nietzsche necessary or possible that isn't his work itself, but there are two reasons I love his work, aptly captured in two of his aphorisms included in this text (more applicable to the Genealogy admittedly):
  
  

  Philosophers' error - The philosopher supposes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the structure; but posterity finds its value in the stone which he used for building, and which is used many more times after that for building-better. Thus it finds the value in the fact that the structure can be destroyed and nevertheless retains value as building material. (176)

  
  Indeed, you can find anticipated here Freud's psychic undercurrents; Foucault's work on the production of new forms of consciousness in
  The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction and in
  Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison; and David Graeber's tracing of the connection of guilt to monetary debt in
  Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
  
  And second:
  
  

  Value 0f honest books - Honest books make the reader honest, at least by luring into the open his hatred and aversion which his sly prudence otherwise knows how to conceal best. But against a book one lets oneself go, even if one is very reserved toward people. (175)
• 
  Shawn

  "I find it difficult to write a review of a philosophical work; difficult because it is initially put upon the reviewer to agree or disagree with an idea, but one must first summarize--and by doing that, one has already levied judgment." -me

  I wrote that passage on the back page of my copy of this text. The page number I referenced before writing this thought is page 326, which contains the quote from Ecce Homo (1900): "I have a terrible fear that one day I will be pronounced holy: you will guess why I publish this book before; it shall prevent people from doing mischief with me" (emphasis original). Walter Kaufmann, the translator, notes that Ecce Homo was not published until 1908, eight years after Friedrich Nietzsche's death; eight years after Peter Gast proclaimed at the funeral of his friend: "Holy be thy name to all coming generations" (326). I find this first quote significant for many reasons, and it is the one I will deal with during the entirety of this review.
  
  First, it is important to note what I am reading. This text is one of Nietzsche's final works. In fact, as the note states, it was published posthumously--not the classical way of familiarizing oneself with a great philosopher, of this I am aware. My interest with Nietzsche began long ago through references by
  Michel Foucault,
  Jacques Derrida, and
  Jasbir Puar, but the first actual text of his that I encountered was:
  A Nietzsche Reader. This text is organized thematically, and is a good primer for Nietzsche's writing. That being noted, I began this text with the later Ecce Homo, not the earlier On The Genealogy of Morals. The former text contains Nietzsche's personal account of his own writing; from The Birth of Tragedy (1872) to The Case of Wagner (1888), and with everything else in between. But I was not reading it for that textual investigation; I was reading it because of the "Why I Am" essays.
  
  You may have heard of them ("Why I Am So Wise," "Why I Am So Clever," etc.), or maybe you passed them in the bookstore and thought "What a pompous ass this Nietzsche fellow is!" I guess so. But I read them because I thought myself clever as well. Actually, I had made this same statement to two people on New Year's Day 2013; namely, "I am so wise," spoken with earnest pride. Then the seed was planted, and I went to the local used bookstore the next day to purchase this text after having seen it there over one month prior.
  
  I think one ought to approach Nietzsche in this manner: with a positive interest and happy conjectures, seeking gainful contemplation. Without that, one may happen upon an unhappy and lonely man writing manifestos for the Third Reich; but if that is the case, then one has read foolishly and done grave mischief to Nietzsche. This is a quite specific mischief, and it is settled throughout Ecce Homo. If anything, one should take away from this text Nietzsche's disgust for the Germans, his absolute abhorrence of nationalism, and his utmost desire to be understood. I shall lift another quotation circa 1900: "let the Germans commit one more immortal blunder in relation to me that will stand in all eternity" (Ecce Homo 324). Wie Stören...
  
  But I digress.
  
  For me, reading Nietzsche isn't about a grand idea or accumulating argumentative munitions against religion or morality, but about approaching art and life with a new and refreshing understanding. I cannot imagine attempting to decipher exactly what point or lesson or utilitarian application the reader was supposed to infer from Nietzsche's master/slave morality detailed in On The Genealogy of Morals, but I can apply his thesis on
  ressentiment to the integration of the tragic figure into popular culture, starting with Arthur Miller's essay on his own
  Death of a Salesman (1949), entitled "
  Tragedy and The Common Man" (written the same year). [Essay forthcoming]. It seems to me that Nietzsche is a referential adviser; not a person to whom one should read, digest and discard; nor an author whom one should carry in ones back pocket; but, rather, an author one should consider from time to time, if only to contemplate our world from a different angle.
  
  Many will advise not to approach Nietzsche lightly, but to consider him gravely and with steadfast measure. I disagree entirely. Approach Nietzsche when you are up, not down; when you have found happiness, not when you seek it; when you are ready to say YES to life, not when you feel it at its heaviest burden. Nietzsche is someone to be taken lightly; without weightlessness one cannot ascend to, and descend from, the great heights he offers, one cannot comprehend his Zarathustra, and one cannot read him free of mischief. So, with this in mind, you are sure to find answers in the divine human that is yourself, before you find them in the Nietzsche whom so many so desperately and despondently seek.
• 
  dangosaffron

  i love you nietzsche
• 
  Richard Lopez Salgado

  On the Geneology of Morals is the most important work by Nietzsche you will ever read.
• 
  Tyler V.

  There are two major works included in this volume. I read both twice. The first read was for comprehension. The second for fluidity of ideation and memorization. I think I have a decent understanding of both works, or at least as good of an understanding as anyone can achieve with the enigma that is Friedrich Nietzsche. Because there are two works here, I will review them each separately. However, my final 4/5 star rating is an amalgamation of my overall experience and take away. Translator and educator Walter Kaufmann successfully creates a volume that is greater than the sum of its parts here: the combination of On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo is a radical learning experience that every reader, not just philosophy students, should try. Nietzsche makes philosophy fun and even when I completely disagree with him I am never bored. He helps me shape my own world of thought, even when it chafes against his.
  
  On the Genealogy of Morals
  I have heard a lot of people say about this work that it is Nietzsche at his most coherent and sober, that he has a clear purpose in mind. I disagree. I found this work much more challenging than Ecce Homo or Beyond Good & Evil. Although I will admit it is straightforward and direct in its goal. The work is broken up into three essays.
  
  The first is about Good and Bad vs. Good and Evil, or more commonly Master Morality vs. Slave Morality. While Nietzsche doesn't necessarily agree with the brutality of Master Morality he does dislike this reasoning less than he dislikes Slave Morality. He abhors pity, Christianity, guilt, resentment, anti-natural states of piety, etc. In this essay he comes to the conclusion that Judea (Christianity and Slave Morality) has beaten Rome (Master Morality, Dionysus, saying yes to our natural bodies and urges, sex, artistry, passion, pain), but not for good. Rome isn't out for the count. He is holding out hope for a return to "tragedy" as he calls it. He also comes to the radical conclusion that science, scholarship, and atheism are not the defeat of Christianity. They are merely the next form of it, closer to the real core of the issue. Instead of worshipping a God, they worship truth! They see truth as beyond criticism. When philosophers and scholars posit, they do so with a blind assumption that truth is the ultimate value. Nietzsche isn't necessarily saying that truth is bad, but rather that we should examine its value with a keener eye than philosophers of the past have. This is profound and like nothing that ever came before it.
  
  The second is about guilt and the "bad conscience." Why do human beings beat themselves up for past transgressions? Why do they beat themselves up for urges and states they cannot help? Why do we take all of the natural things inside ourselves (sex, lust, will to power, aggression, etc.) and bottle them up in favor of becoming more like the Christian God? Nietzsche attempts to tackle these questions with this essay. He concludes that the bad conscience stems from not being able to exorcise our cruelty. Man is naturally cruel, he argues. When he had to leave his wild jungle and wilderness to come into civilized society, he was no longer able to be cruel, especially once Christendom and Slave Morality took over. So, instead of being cruel to others as is natural, he turns the cruelty inward to himself. Thus the sickness of guilt. Nietzsche argues these states are not natural and actually harmful to the advancement of the human race. However, he does not argue that we should return to the jungle or base cruelty. He admits that civilized society made us more spiritual and was a necessary step for us.
  
  The third and final essay deals with the meaning of ascetic ideals. When he uses the term 'ascetic,' he doesn't necessarily mean our modern asceticism, like avoiding unhealthy food and exercising daily. He means ascetic in the Christian sense: chastity, poverty, humility, etc. He argues that the meaning of asceticism is going to be different and nuanced for an artist, a saint, a scholar, and a priest but that all of these types share one common distinction. Asceticism gives meaning to our suffering. Human beings accept suffering. We don't believe it could ever truly end. Even with modern comforts, we are all still depressed and anxious. In fact, many of us would not want suffering to stop because it makes us better. Nietzsche argues that we do, however, need a meaning for our suffering. We can't suffer for nothing. The Greeks gave meaning to their suffering by adding spectators: the tragic gods like Apollo and Dionysus. In Nietzsche's time though, we "will to nothing," i.e. decline the human race by trying to make ourselves like the Christian God. We denigrate and avoid our natural state, hence asceticism, in order to give our suffering a purpose and "higher" meaning. Nietzsche posits that there has not been a more damaging event to our overall wellbeing than this. Christian asceticism has ruined both art and health, he says.
  
  Overall, even when I disagreed with the conclusions, I found these essays to be a brilliant beam of light. They enlightened me in a world-historical context. I feel like I actually learned something here. It's rare to read a book in which the ideas presented are radically novel or unique to the reader. Often, rather, an author presents an idea you already know but writes it well enough to make you believe it is new. It is the same gift with new wrappings. Nietzsche offers an entirely new gift with The Genealogy, and nothing like it was seen on Earth before or after. Whether that is a good or bad thing is up to you and your perspective. 4/5
  
  Ecce Homo
  This work is a sort of hybrid. In one sense it is Nietzsche's autobiography. Nietzsche on Nietzsche. Instead of merely telling the story of his life, though, he tells the story of his mind through a recap of all his books. In another sense it is an essay expounding on an idea Nietzsche developed and refined late in his career, that of amor fati (love of fate). He explains it better and more succinctly than I ever could: “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it." By that he means saying yes to life, even to all of its trappings and suffering.
  
  The entirety of Ecce Homo is an exercise in amor fati. Nietzsche suffered much in his life: near blindness, migraines, stomach issues, social alienation (the fault is mostly his own on that one), solitude, and not to mention seeing all of his friends become privy to fascist nationalism. Despite all of this and despite himself he still deeply loves life, he says yes to it, and would not change a single iota of his experience. This is a profound idea. I think it is a healthy philosophy to adopt.
  
  The work has some flaws. It spends too much time quoting Thus Spoke Zarathustra. When Ecce Homo was written, no one had read that work. So, Nietzsche tends to over-explain it here and a good 10% of the work is mere regurgitation of Zarathustra.
  
  Another flaw is that he spends far too much of the painfully small page-count denouncing Germany. While I have no problem reading a master philosopher and radical thinker tear down nationalism and racism, Nietzsche goes a bit too far in places. Even his own friends aren't excepted from his arrows of spite. I don't mind his arguments, but they rub me as contradictory to the man's previous philosophy (coincidentally presented in The Genealogy above) of overcoming resentment.
  
  It seems to me these caustic comments about Germany are full of resentment for a group of people never gave him enough attention. He mentions near the end of the book that none of his friends ever understood his work nor defended him from his German detractors. "I tell every one of my friends to his face that he has never considered it worthwhile to study any of my writings...[The Case of Wagner, Section 4, pg. 324 in the volume I am reviewing]" There are many throwaway quotes with a similar tone of resentment. Despite him mentioning this in a casual way, for repeat and astute readers such as myself, this is telling. His bile for Germany stems from the fact that they ignored his genius and left him defenseless. Nietzsche considered himself Polish and never identified with the German culture of the Reich. For this he is deeply brave.
  
  At the beginning of the work Nietzsche mentions that he is writing this autobiographer so that he will not be misunderstood or tampered with after he is gone ("Some are born posthumously" comes to mind). He knew he would achieve popularity and true admiration after his death, so he wished to set the record straight with Ecce Homo before that happened. Unfortunately, after a mental collapse, his sister took over his estate and tampered with the writings to make the works agreeable to her Nazi tendencies. She avoided publishing Ecce Homo until almost twenty years later, in 1908. She needed the autobiography to help write prefaces for the other works. It made her seem more insightful to Nietzsche's true character. So his deepest fear of misunderstanding and slander became true. He was posthumously tied with the nationale nervosó anti-Semitist values he so violently attacked and hated.
  
  Despite all of this, Nietzsche still finds a way to sing life's praises. He rarely ends a passage on a bad note. Rather, he preaches forgetting (not forgiving) one's enemies and one's mistakes. Learn from them! But never dwell on them. Perhaps thank an enemy rather than seek petty revenge, for you most likely learned something or gained strength.
  
  Amor fati teaches a noble strength of heart, a will to yes-saying, a will to the vigor of life! Nihilism is one of the deepest and most disgusting things that can happen to a person. This book is its anti-toxin par excellence. Despite its flaws, despite its troubling publishing history, despite its bile and resentment for everything German, and despite its too-oft repetition of Zarathustra it is a one-of-a-kind autobiography from one of the best writers and thinkers in history. It could be profound and life-altering for anyone! It certainly was for me. 4/5
• 
  Brandon Sitch

  I’m not exactly sure how to categorize this book. It isn’t strictly a philosophical text, if you come to this after reading Kant, or Moore, or Hegel, you won’t recognize this as philosophy—and I tend to think that is more a criticism of modern philosophy than of Nietzsche—but the Genealogy is full of wisdom, originality, and beautiful writing. It also isn’t an ethical work, at least not in the usual sense, but rather a combination of a metaethical and historic approach. Nietzsche’s objective for this work was summarized within the text: “Let us articulate this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must first be called in question—and for that there is needed a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances in which they grew, under which they evolved and changed”.
  The book is split in to three essays titled: “Good and Evil,” “Good and Bad”; “Guilt,” “Bad Conscience,” and the Like; and What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals? But before one starts to analyze what the book is, it is important to understand what it is not. It is not filled with pro-German, anti-Semitic rhetoric and is not the how-to guide for cold-blooded murderers (Leopold and Loeb immediately come to mind), but it is also understandable that these misinterpretations have occurred. He does, at times, write negatively about ‘the Jews’ in such a way which makes it clear that it is more of an attack on Judaism than Jews (it’s also worth adding that he antagonizes almost everyone), but the sharpest criticisms are against anti-Semites. One problem with writing such powerful sentences is that those sentences tend to be lifted out of context as if they were meant to stand alone. This lets the reader take out of Nietzsche whatever message he or she wants and these incorrect interpretations reflects more on the reader than the writer.
  In the first essay, the important distinction between “Good and Evil” and “Good and Bad” is explored. He argues that at first there was only a noble and aristocratic notion of what it was meant to be good, including traits such as strength, power, and beauty. From this conception of the good arises the notion of the bad. The bad is taken to denote merely the absence of the good, the bad is not a moral judgment placed upon those without the qualities of the good, but rather a way to explain that those people lack these aristocratic/Homeric virtues. Being bad doesn’t mean that one is contemptible, but rather that they are insignificant. Further evidence is provided for this through etymology, the German words for bad and plain (schlecht and schlicht) are hypothesized by Nietzsche to come from the same root word, which would be evidence for his claim that they originally were synonymous. Then how, and why, did this sense of good and bad change? For Nietzsche, the answer is Judaism (though it is a charge that can be equally levied against Christianity) with what amounts to a slave revolt of morality. With Judaism an inversion of the concept of “good” occurred, such that all that was weak was to be heralded as good, and—what was worse and more pernicious—everything with which strength and nobility had been associated was now condemned as “evil”. The Jews who created this inversion were motivated by their ressentiment, which is suffering and pain derived from the good fortune of those who are powerful and admirable (the opposite of schadenfreude). He believes there was a clash between the two conceptions “Good and Evil” vs “Good and Bad” and that “Good and Evil” came to dominate western thought for millennia.
  The second essay involves two main points: what is the nature of the creditor-debtor relationship, and what are the trade-offs and conditions through which we can from societies. Both of which are important to the essay, but for the sake of brevity I will only cover the former. The creditor-debtor relationship should only be formed between two strong individuals, as they are the only one’s who are to some extent in control of their lives and can influence the outcomes. If you are too weak to control what happens in your life, how can you possibly predict the future enough to enter into a long-term agreement? This is not, however, to say that these contracts between strong individuals will always be upheld. When the debtor fails to repay what he owes, the creditor is allowed, perhaps obligated, to physically punish the debtor. The reasons for punishing them do not involve any reasons with which we are today familiar. It isn’t that what the debtor has done is shameful or sinful, or that this is to deter the debtor from entering into future agreements which he or she won’t be able to pay off, but rather the reason is simply since the creditor cannot get what they are owed, they will instead be repaid in the pleasure of punishing and dominating their debtor: “a recompense in the form of a kind of pleasure—the pleasure of being allowed to vent his power freely upon one who is powerless, the voluptuous pleasure “de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire,” the enjoyment of violation”. This notion is completely foreign to what the Western societies think of punishment and the repayment of debts, and Nietzsche’s version seems both more and less cruel than the way in which we currently treat punishment. While on its face the idea of dominating someone for the pleasure derived from that as an act of repayment seems sadistic, it is viewed as simply an economic exchange. There is no judgment placed upon the debtor, he or she isn’t evil, or sinful, or shameful, rather they just failed to meet the terms of their agreed upon terms of repayment and therefore can use this as a method of repayment.
  The third essay, which meanders quite a bit, explains what ascetic values are and why they exist. Ascetic values are the opposite of the ancient good. They include poverty, humility, abstinence, and any other “values” which are weakness cloaked as virtue. These arise because the human will would “rather will nothingness than not will”, which is to say those who are powerless still have the will to power, but cannot achieve what is traditionally thought of as powerful, so they change the target of their will to what is powerless. This allows even the weakest of individuals to maintain what Nietzsche sees as essential for humans, the act of willing. These people who can will nothing but nothingness, find solace through the ascetic priest. The ascetic priest, himself a “sick” individual, acts as a doctor, although not in the traditional sense. He doesn’t cure, but rather masks the symptoms of the sick herd—the sick inevitably form a herd, “for one should not overlook this fact: the strong are as naturally inclined to separate as the weak are to congregate”—and only furthers the life turned against itself values which can already be found among the masses. Nietzsche, quite clearly, believes that religion isn’t an appropriate resolve the issues of these ascetic values, but he also doesn’t believe that science does either. Science seems to equally embrace nihilism and takes truth to be its deity instead of a God. Scientists tend to think that they have removed their chains, but for Nietzsche they have simply found a different master. The scientist and the priest are both dispassionate and controlled by either nature or God, respectively, and for Nietzsche both options are unpalatable and are to be done away with.
  
  
  
  If you enjoyed On the Genealogy of Morals I would recommend the writings and essays of Arthur Schopenhauer (exudes the same self-confidence that Nietzsche does and writes in a similar aphoristic style at times), The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson (if you enjoyed the prosaic, social critique without the diving into definitions and analytics) and Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault (if it was the unique metalevel analysis of the topic you found interesting). The first two writers were both important influences on Nietzsche and Foucault was influenced by Nietzsche.