Tyler's Blog Death of Destiny

“On the Genealogy of Morals” by Friedrich Nietzsche

On the Genealogy of Morals is a collection of 3 philosophical essays written by Friedrich Nietzsche. The book is relatively short, and deals primarily with the origin and value of our morals.

On the actual writing, I found the book to be quite dense. Nietzsche uses many "analogies" to express his ideas. Although the overall ideas got through, I was left feeling that I was missing out on more specific ideas that may have been portrayed by these examples. He also references his other works such as Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and The Gay Science many times throughout the essays. I assume that I'm missing out on many ideas here since out of all these books, I've only half-read Beyond Good and Evil.

As for the actual ideas presented in this book, I found that I was able to relate with Nietzsche quite a bit. The idea of morality being completely arbitrary I already hold as a belief, so that was not something new for me. His hypothesis on the origin of morality was something interesting, though. The idea that good initially was an attribute of the strong, of those in a position of power, was definitely an interesting premise. More interesting is the idea that good later became an attribute of the weak, or rather something that empowered the weak. It's not something that would have struck me as a characteristic of good and evil, but it's definitely a plausible and believable concept.

On a random note, I learned something else that Nietzsche and I have in common: an obsession for Richard Wagner. I never knew that Nietzsche was obsessed with Richard Wagner. I too happen to be semi-obsessed (I really want to read/listen to his Der Ring des Nibelungen), though I'm sure his reasons are more concrete than my Project .hack inspired fascination :P

There are three other notes that I found interesting (I definitely need to learn a few hundred new synonyms of this so it isn't such a repetitive word...) that immediately come to mind looking back at the book. First is Nietzsche's seeming to disagree with science, yet using it for some of his arguments. I guess I'm going to have to read his The Gay Science and take a few Philosophy of Science courses at UBC to develop a better sense of science. Second, his view of democracy is something that stuck with me. Nietzsche states that democracy is a method that promotes the opinions of the weak. My lack of political knowledge is probably skewing my opinion of democracy, but rather than promoting the opinions of the weak, I take democracy as the equalization of all opinions. The third is simply another random comparison (connections; woo). Nietzsche said at one point that science is the new religion (or something along those lines), something that I've been saying for years. Apparently my ideas are totally unoriginal. Or I provide additional evidence for that theory that people's minds are interconnected. Or something else (to avoid my unintentional use of an either-or fallacy).

Anyhow, it was an interesting book, although I think I'll definitely have to read it at least one more time to better grasp its contents. I recommend On the Genealogy of Morals to fans of philosophy or to those curious about the concept of morality.