Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals" (Volume 5) (Philosophical Traditions)

Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals" (Volume 5) (Philosophical Traditions)

Written at the height of the philosopher's intellectual powers, Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals has become one of the key texts of recent Western philosophy. Its essayistic style affords a unique opportunity to observe many of Nietzsche's persisting concerns coming together in an illuminating constellation. A profound influence on psychoanalysis, antihistoricism, and poststructuralism and an abiding challenge to ethical theory, Nietzsche's book addresses many of the major philosophical problems and possibilities of modernity. In this unique collection focusing on the Genealogy , twenty-five notable philosophers offer diverse discussions of the book's central themes and concepts. They explore such notions as ressentiment , asceticism, "slave" and "master" moralities, and what Nietzsche calls "genealogy" and its relation to other forms of inquiry in his work. The book presents a cross section of contemporary Nietzsche scholarship and philosophical investigation that is certain to interest philosophers, intellectual and cultural historians, and anyone concerned with one of the master thinkers of the modern age. "[These] polished and penetrating essays by leading Nietzsche scholars provide a thorough analysis and critique of Nietzsche's most standard academic work. Each of the central themes of this daring and complex uncovering of the morality that has dominated Western thought and psychology for almost 2,000 years is insightfully discussed in this illuminating and often critical series of essays. . . . An outstanding array of perspectives highly recommended to Nietzscheans and others."--Choice Richard Schacht is Professor of Philosophy and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His most recent books are Nietzsche: Selections (1993) and Making Sense of Nietzsche (1994). Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals By Richard Lawrence Schacht, editor University of California Press Copyright © 1994 Richard Lawrence Schacht, editor All right reserved. ISBN: 0520083180 One Nietzsche's Immoralism Philippa Foot In writing about Nietzsche's immoralism I am going to ask a simple question about him, something that is difficult to do: it is hard to hold onto anything simple in the face of this determined joker, who loved masks and hidden things, and whose protean style is sometimes of the most lapidary aphoristic simplicity but often lush and rhetorical. It has been said that Thus Spoke Zarathustra should be read as an opera, and it is surely a great shame that we never had a rendition by Anna Russell of those wild journeys between mountain, marketplace, and cave. Nietzsche thought he could discredit morality; and I want to ask, "Was he right?" I think the question should be asked. It is always respectful to ask of a great philosopher whether what he says is true, and hardly respectful not to ask it. Why do so many contemporary moral philosophers, particularly of the Anglo-American analytic school, ignore Nietzsche's attack on morality and just go on as if this extraordinary event in the history of thought had never occurred? It is true, of course, that it is hard for those of us who belong to the plain-speaking school of analytic philosophers to grapple with his work. We are used to ferreting out entailments, and lines of argument, and building up a theory from individual passages. And I do not think that one can work on Nietzsche quite like that. The unity of his writings—which is most remarkable in spite of their amazing richness and many superficial contradictions—comes from his attitudes, from his daring, his readiness to query everything, and from his special nose for vanity, for pretense, for timid evasion, and for that drive to domination which he finally supposed to be the principle of all life. One must take account of Nietzsche's attitudes; of the contempt he felt for modern European man, for the "newspaper-reading" public (BGE 263),1 for democracy, for nationalism, for Bismarck and all things German (save for Goethe, "the exception among Germans" [GS 103]). And account too, of course, of his vituperative attitude to Christianity, which he saw as the religion of pity and weakness but also, at times, as the beneficially tyrannical source of spiritualization in man (BGE 188). One has to remember that Nietzsche was one who wanted to be an affirmer , not a caviler, who repeatedly praised lightness of spirit, and wrote much about dancing and laughter. When he put forward his strange theory of the eternal recurrence of all things—round and round again—this was most significantly a rejection of gloomy nihilism and a way of saying "yes" even to his own physically painful, and painfully lonely, life. All this, and much more, is needed to interpret Nietzsche. But what, then, can he have to offer to the descendants of Frege and Russell, of G. E. Moore and Wittgenst