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Where do our ideas of good and evil come from? In three essays, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that they have a history. Noble, powerful people once called…
Where do our ideas of good and evil come from? In three essays, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that they have a history. Noble, powerful people once called themselves 'good' and the weak 'bad'; then, he claims, the resentful weak overturned these values in a 'slave revolt in morality', calling meekness good and strength evil. He goes on to trace guilt and bad conscience to ancient relations of debt and cruelty, and asks why ideals of self-denial have had such power over human beings.
Context and significance
Published in 1887 as a sequel to Beyond Good and Evil, it is the most systematic of Nietzsche's books and one of the most influential works of modern philosophy, though its ideas were later grossly distorted. This translation comes from the first complete English edition of his works, edited by Oscar Levy. See Nietzsche's life.
About the author
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the son of a Lutheran pastor, was appointed professor of classical philology at Basel at only twenty-four. His friendship with the composer Richard Wagner shaped his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, and its bitter end shaped much of what followed. Ill health forced him to resign in 1879, and he spent ten restless years in Swiss and Italian lodgings, writing book after book.
In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and his later works he questioned morality, religion and truth itself. He collapsed in Turin in 1889 and never recovered; his sister later bent his work toward nationalist causes he had despised. Few philosophers have been so influential, or so often misread.