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Contemporary Philosophy

Nietzsche and the Critique of Morality

Friedrich Nietzsche's genealogical unmasking of conventional morality and his vision of self-overcoming beyond good and evil.

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  1. Nietzsche's Critique of Platonism and Christian Morality. Nietzsche traces Platonism and Christianity to a shared, life-denying flight from the world of the senses.
  2. The Genealogy of Morals: Master and Slave Morality. On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) traces good/evil back to a slave revolt of resentment against master morality.
  3. The Death of God and the Problem of Nihilism. Nietzsche's 'God is dead' names the collapse of Christian metaphysical authority and the nihilism it exposes.
  4. The Will to Power as Nietzsche's Central Concept. Will to power names, for Nietzsche, a fundamental drive toward growth, mastery, and self-overcoming.
  5. Eternal Recurrence and the Affirmation of Life. Eternal recurrence asks whether one could will one's entire life, unchanged, to repeat infinitely.
  6. The Übermensch and the Revaluation of All Values. The Übermensch names Zarathustra's ideal of self-created, life-affirming values beyond inherited morality.
  7. Nietzsche's Perspectivism and Critique of Objective Truth. Perspectivism holds that all knowledge is interpretation from a particular evaluative standpoint, not a view from nowhere.
  8. Nietzsche's Reception and Misreadings in the Twentieth Century. Nietzsche was posthumously distorted by Nazi appropriation before being reclaimed by rigorous postwar scholarship.

This module continues after "Marx and the Critique of Political Economy" in the syllabus. If you haven't reviewed it yet, it may help set the context.

Key points

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1Nietzsche's Critique of Platonism and Christian Morality
2The Death of God and the Problem of Nihilism
3Eternal Recurrence and the Affirmation of Life
4The Übermensch and the Revaluation of All Values
5Nietzsche's Reception and Misreadings in the Twentieth Century

Alternative visual view: a simplified sequence of some of the module's key points, in their order within the syllabus.

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Further reading

Bibliography and cited sources used to create this module.

  • Kaufmann, W. (1950). Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
  • Nehamas, A. (1985). Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Clark, M. (1990). Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Leiter, B. (2002). Nietzsche on Morality. London: Routledge.
  • Colli, G. and Montinari, M. (Eds.) (1967–). Nietzsche: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
  • Foucault, M. (1971). "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (1977 English trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.