‘Fired with a fearless iconoclasm which surpassed the wildest dreams of contemporary free thought’ – The New York Times
Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most influential thinkers of the past 150 years and The Genealogy of Morals (1887) is his most important work on ethics and politics. The book which raises profoundly disquieting issues about the violence of both ethics and interpretation.
Elucidating and expanding on the aphorisms of Beyond Good and Evil and signalling a return to the essay form, Nietzsche considers the development of ideas of ‘good’ and ‘evil’; explores notions of guilt and bad conscience; and discusses ascetic ideals and the purpose of the philosopher.
A polemical contribution to moral and political theory, The Genealogy of Morals offers a critique of moral values and traces the historical evolution of concepts such as guilt, conscience, responsibility, law and justice.
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Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. His attempts to unmask the motives that underlie traditional Western religion, morality, and philosophy deeply affected generations of theologians, philosophers, psychologists, poets, novelists, and playwrights. He thought through the consequences of the triumph of the Enlightenment’s secularism, expressed in his observation that ‘God is dead, ‘ in a way that determined the agenda for many of Europe’s most-celebrated intellectuals after his death. He was an ardent foe of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and power politics. Nietzsche once wrote that some men are born posthumously, and that is certainly true in his case. The history of philosophy, theology, and psychology since the early 20th century is unintelligible without him. Nietzsche’s great influence is due not only to his originality but also to the fact that he was one of the German language’s most-brilliant prose writers.