On the Genealogy of Morals A Polemical Tract

Friedrich Nietzsche - On the Genealogy of Morals - A Polemical Tract. On the Genealogy of Morality, or On the Genealogy of Morals (German: Zur Genealogie der Moral), subtitled "A Polemic" (Eine Streitschrift), is a book by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composed and first published in 1887 with the intention of expanding and following through on certain new doctrines sketched out in his previous book Beyond Good and Evil. The book is considered by some Nietzsche scholars to be a work of sustained brilliance and power as well as his masterpiece. It consists of a preface and three interrelated Abhandlungen ("treatises" or "essays"), which trace episodes in the evolution of moral concepts with a view to undermining "moral prejudices", and specifically the morality of Christianity and Judaism. Nietzsche's treatises outline his thoughts "on the origin of our moral prejudices", thoughts a long time in the making and already given brief and imperfect expression in his Human, All Too Human (1878). Nietzsche attributes the desire to publish his "hypotheses" on the origins of morality to reading his friend Paul Ree's book The Origin of the Moral Sensations (1877) and finding the "genealogical hypotheses" offered there unsatisfactory. Nietzsche has come to believe that "a critique of moral values" is in order, that "the value of these values themselves must be called into question". To this end he finds it necessary to provide an actual history of morality, rather than a hypothetical account in the style of Ree, whom Nietzsche refers to as an "English psychologist" (using the word "English" to designate a certain intellectual temperament rather than a nationality).