Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements and a note on the text
- A note on the revised edition
- Introduction: on Nietzsche's critique of morality
- Chronology
- Further reading
- Biographical synopses
- On the Genealogy of Morality
- Supplementary material to On the Genealogy of Morality
- ‘The Greek State’
- ‘Homer's Contest’
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
- Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought
Supplementary material to On the Genealogy of Morality
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements and a note on the text
- A note on the revised edition
- Introduction: on Nietzsche's critique of morality
- Chronology
- Further reading
- Biographical synopses
- On the Genealogy of Morality
- Supplementary material to On the Genealogy of Morality
- ‘The Greek State’
- ‘Homer's Contest’
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
- Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought
Summary
The following section includes full translation of all the material which Nietzsche either refers to or partly cites from in the Genealogy of Morality.
Human, All Too Human
Volume 1, Section 45
Twofold prehistory of good and evil. – The concept good and evil has a two-fold prehistory: firstly in the soul of the ruling tribes and castes. He who has the power to requite, good with good, evil with evil, and also actually practises requital – is, that is to say, grateful and revengeful – is called good; he who is powerless and cannot requite counts as bad. As a good man one belongs to the ‘good’, a community which has a sense of belonging together because all the individuals in it are combined with one another through the capacity for requital. As a bad man one belongs to the ‘bad’, to a swarm of subject, powerless people who have no sense of belonging together. The good are a caste, the bad a mass like grains of sand. Good and bad is for a long time the same thing as noble and base, master and slave. On the other hand, one does not regard the enemy as evil: he can requite. In Homer the Trojan and the Greek are both good. It is not he who does us harm but he who is contemptible who counts as bad.
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- Information
- Nietzsche: 'On the Genealogy of Morality' and Other Writings , pp. 121 - 163Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006