Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals

Nietzsche’s influence is so strong on the modern intellectual climate that it is often imperceptible, the very ocean we swim in.

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The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche’s most sustained critique of morality, exhibits such an original approach to value theory that many readers feel lost in the whirlpool of his ideas, and grapple for some solid ground from which to evaluate him. Surely much if not most Nietzsche scholarship has suffered from misunderstandings about his work, due to a reliance on secondary sources, an ignorance of Nietzsche’s primary influences, the difficulty of the works, or a failure to see his innumerable, disparate insights in the context of the rest of his oeuvre.

Although Nietzsche is now hailed by many as the seminal thinker in post-modernist thought, for a long time serious philosophers considered Nietzsche a Nazi forbear, or even a mere sophomoric ranter, and so thorough criticism of Nietzsche remained scarce until after the Second World War[1]. Surely the efforts of Walter Kaufmann[2] and others to de-Nazify Nietzsche’s reputation have had some success, and there has been an inundation of Nietzsche scholarship ever since. It is often overlooked that Nietzsche exerted a decisive influence on many modernist writers–Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, Henry Miller, among many, many others–none of whom took him for racist. In a sense, Nietzsche has been such a successful philosopher, that, much like Christianity’s grip on the society of his day, Nietzsche’s influence is so strong on…