on the genealogy of morals · nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche's Genealogy of 1887, three essays on the origins of morality, traces good and evil to the resentment of the weak against the strong, bad conscience to instincts turned inward, and the ascetic ideal to a will to nothingness. It is his most sustained argument and the source of much of the twentieth century's suspicion of moral language.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, edited by Walter Kaufmann, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1989). Read in Junior Spring at Torrey Honors: On the Genealogy of Morals, the Preface and the three essays.