Geneaology of Morals
Major work on ethics, by one of the most influential thinkers of the last two centuries, deals with master/slave morality and modern man's current moral practices; the evolution of man's feelings of guilt and bad conscience; and how ascetic ideals help maintain human life under certain conditions.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
6mentions
5people
2019–2024years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Kinda weird to make stuff up like that. Maybe you're confusing him with Toulouse-Lautrec, known for moral strength rather than moral intellect?
Nietzsche's The Geneaology of Morals is arguably the most important treatise on christian morality in the previous century, possibly that millenium.
- My favorite, and what I still think is the best Benjamin essay, is On the Concept of History[0], but that one is a bit tough as a first essay, perhaps a better starting place (and where most people start with him) is Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction[1]. There's a pretty big gap between those two essays, not intellectually but theoretically, as in it will take you a while, probably, before you understand how they're related.
In general, if you want an actual "start" to studying any modern philosophy, you've got to go with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (go with the NK Smith or Guyer-Woods translations, though I prefer the former). Then you can start reading forward, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, then, of course, Marx's Capital, vol 1. Then from there, I think you would do well to read Nietzsche's Geneaology of Morals and/or Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and after that really you should read Freud, at the very least the Interpretation of Dreams, and Heidegger, either the Origin of the Work of Art or The Question Concerning Technology. And from there, you can basically just read whatever you want and you'll understand it.
My only further advice is to study all those texts first, before trying anything else, otherwise you'll end up like the people in this comments section.
[0]https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html [1]https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
- Reading Nietzsche is like breathing in cold mountain air. Some people can handle the cold, others can't. He's not for everyone, as he makes it intentionally clear.
He was a stark individualist that put into question a lot of the building blocks of liberal democracy, such as the notion that all men are equal. I don't agree with all of what he puts forth but he is without a doubt one of the most dynamic and influential thinkers of the 19th century and still relevant to read even today.
If you're interested in reading him, start with Twilight of the Idols and Beyond Good and Evil. If you like those two then you can delve into some of his other work such as the Antichrist, On the Geneaology of Morals, Human, All Too Human, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra
- Contemporary anthropology is...not very good. Latour's critiques are still quite strong and very difficult to overcome; perhaps anthropology as a field is fundamentally flawed.
I haven't read Diamond, but I could understand, if you're a liberal academic and you see a text, almost like Nietzsche's Geneaology of Morals, that just says that the strong always conquer the weak because of totally contingent conditions, it will seem horrifying because, as a liberal, you genuinely believe in personal agency and social justice and all that fun stuff. But go back and actually read Marx, go and read all your favorite Frankfurt school thinkers: they will say, the conditions that we have been placed in are a real illusion of nature: even if the so-called nature of things is a construction, it is one where the reality of it is undeniable for us. Therefore, the goal of critique, even in that Marxian, Kantian sense, is to raise consciousness to shatter that real illusion precisely by illuminating this so-called "natural" process.
For Marx, revolution is a natural result of the development of Capitalism, but Capitalism also dissolved history, and temporality, so the naturality of revolution must be immanent in every moment of its development: its like Walter Benjamin said, we must bring about a real catastrophe, as opposed to the constant "accidents" of human suffering under the system that come about with almost mechanical regularity.
In any case, I don't remember Marx ever being either an academic, or particularly hard to read in most cases, even if a thorough familiarity with German Idealism is a great help to understanding him more deeply. Even Foucault was technically an academic, but only because he helped organize a nearly successful revolutionary movement that managed to extract the concession of an entire university (Paris VIII) out of the government which he then ran, and is still being run by his students and colleagues to this day.
- i don't understand the bipolar nature of hn.
"don't be afraid to be intellectually honest and say what needs to be said - we're not afraid of hurting people's feelings for the greater good and we're proud of it"
and at the same time
"be careful you don't say anything that could in the slightest be misinterpreted as impugning someone's character"
i feel like i'm taking crazy pills? this is exactly the kind of thing that Nietzsche talked about in geneaology of morals: people in this "community" claim to be above petty politics and egalitarian but as soon as anyone points out anything that even remotely contradicts that image they get silenced or shouted down (e.g. bringing up race or gender politics and their role in the entrepreneur mythology).
it's completely within the scope of productive discourse to point out to someone that they're being irrational because no discourse can proceed until a rational framework is established. case in point: a rational discussion of the merits of django cannot begin from "i'm prejudiced against them because they made questionable PR choices".
honestly there are so few useful discussions on hn. the tech posts are either PR for yc companies or another js vdom framework and the culture posts are all mostly rehashings of the same neoliberal arguments for capital and culture etc. the few people that try to inject any heterogeneity of thought get vilified.
- >If you're interested in reading him, start with Twilight of the Idols and Beyond Good and Evil. If you like those two then you can delve into some of his other work such as the Antichrist, On the Geneaology of Morals, Human, All Too Human, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra
What edition should I read? So I stayed true to the early thinkers that interpreted him (to not be fooled by thinkers like Steven Pinker who trash him).
Off topic: for a moment I considered learning German just to really understand this man.
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