The Genealogy of Morals: Master and Slave Morality

Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality (Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887), subtitled 'A Polemic' and composed of three essays, is his most sustained and systematically argued late work, and it introduces the method of genealogy: rather than asking whether a given morality is objectively true or false, Nietzsche asks about its historical origin and the psychological needs it originally served, on the premise that a value's origin and its present function can be radically discontinuous. The First Essay, 'Good and Evil, Good and Bad,' distinguishes two fundamentally different evaluative schemes. Master morality, which Nietzsche associates with aristocratic warrior classes such as the Homeric Greeks and the Roman nobility, originates in a spontaneous, self-affirming judgment: the nobles call themselves 'good' (gut) simply because they recognize their own strength, vitality, and nobility, and only derivatively call the weak, common, and plebeian 'bad' (schlecht) as an afterthought, a contrast term with no deep resentment attached to it.