On the Genealogy of Morality

Like a chameleon, it takes the color of whatever is around it.

What does that mean? Nietzsche explores the ascetic ideal in the third essay of his masterpiece, The Genealogy of Morals.

And the entire essay, the whole third part of the book, is dedicated to the singular question, what is the meaning of ascetic ideals? By way of arriving at an answer, Nietzsche explores the myriad ways the aesthetic ideal takes shape in different domains of human culture.

Art, religion, philosophy and science.

Their nature, this festal joy, shines in the cruel glances of ascetics and anti-natural fanatics.

This sentiment will later become the backbone of Freud's seminal work, Civilization and its Discontents.

But it's really Nietzsche who made this point first, right here in Beyond Good and Evil, and he fleshed it out in more detail in the Genealogy of Morals.

The religious neurosis is a sickness in that it demands the stultification of one's own nature, the suppression of human instinct.

The ascetic ideal is one of Nietzsche's most important concepts and, paradoxically, one of the least explored.

The entire final third of the genealogy of morals is dedicated to it.

But, in short, the ascetic ideal is that which promotes a movement away from the world, a negation of the material.

And, in Nietzsche's view, that means a negation of life itself.

And of course, monks live in relative poverty, they don't chase wealth or material possessions.

This mode of being, where everything reminiscent of the flesh and blood material reality that we inhabit is banished or curbed, is the consequence of an adherence to the ascetic ideal.

Nietzsche's argument in the genealogy of morals is that this instinct for the immaterial, the ascetic ideal, is the result of a psychological process that mankind has subjected itself to.

It's not the result of an honest and clear-headed search for God, religion, or the spiritual.

Clearly, something, somewhere, has gone terribly wrong.

In The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche sketches out the history of our morality.

This seminal work tells the tale of two moralities, one opposed to the other, slave morality versus master morality.

The master morality is the morality of the aristocrat, the warrior type.

The book is subtitled A Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future for a Reason.

You can also watch our series on the genealogy of morals if you're interested in a more in-depth look at the history of morality and the hinterwelt.

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And we also find a piece of the puzzle to unmask another difficult part of Nietzsche's philosophy, his crusade against truth.

As he writes in the Genealogy of Morals, From the minute that the belief in the God of the aesthetic ideal is repudiated, when we recognize Platonism is false, there exists a new problem, the problem of the value of truth.

The will for truth needed a critique that thus defined by these words our own task.

The value of truth is tentatively to be called in question.

Is this what I'm doing right? Is what I am thinking correct? Does a lion ask himself these questions? Did the Athenians, before besieging the Melians, ask themselves these questions? Were they concerned with right and wrong, or did they act beyond good and evil? Well, the correct terminology here would be before good and evil.

In the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche discusses the pre-moral stage of mankind, when the first proto-morality, so to speak, was formulated.

This is not morality as we know the word today, where good is almost synonymous with altruistic or self-sacrificing.

No, this is the first good, the original good, the good of the master who takes the liberty to create his own values.

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In Ecehomo, Nietzsche's autobiography, where he talks about every book he wrote before, he says that in Daybreak, Nietzsche begins his assault on morality.

An assault that would culminate in the radical language of Twilight of the Idols and the Antichrist, and which would be deepened and explicated to the fullest extent in the genealogy of morals.

This assault on morality is a long, arduous work.

Nietzsche has to dig deep for this purpose.