A Summary and My Annotations on "The Genealogy of Morals" By Frederich Nietzsche

I just want to make it clear here that I am not supporting this philosophy in any way, but rather am just seeking to understand what Nietzsche said, especially because it seems that so many people want to try to rehabilitate him for different purposes and end up changing his philosophy around to make it more palatable. For example, in this work you can clearly see that he was a proto-Nazi. 

A very brief note here ... Nietzsche begins with the assumption that God has been disproven and that evolution of man as animal is true. It is from this point that he then reinterprets all of history. So the argument really lies with his assumptions, for which he himself offers no proof. 

A Summary 

If you start with the premise that everything evolved and there is no God or spirit world … then you have to find psychological reasons for religion and morality and so on. So he is asking why the values of traditional morality have value. It's a meta question, and he wants to look at a new account of morality through atheistic-evolution as the taken for granted starting point. 

So man existed as an animal with animal instincts and was happy and free … that blonde Aryan beast to rape, pillage and destroy whatever he wanted and didn’t think twice about it. There was only "good" or "bad" in a bodily sense. Those bodily dominant were called "good" and those weak were called "bad" etymologically. This was the noble aristocratic master morality. 

But “civilization” and “trade” come about which introduce consciousness to man. This creates a fear of a meaningless life and meaningless suffering. This creates a need to assign abstract value, and debt, to things in life and to adhere to a code of living in common. Man unfortunately has memory and makes promises which he remembers. 

And so the physically weak, led by priests, begin a process by which man cannot express his base urges and must internalize them or be punished. This was a transvaluation of society and spiritual good and evil were invented. This is slave morality. 

Punishment and sacrifice are the tool of imprinting on man a new ethic which he must obey. 

This taming leads to a perverted interior life in which man thinks the enemy is his animal urges and must subdue them or face the birth of a "bad conscience." Guilt, sin, corruption, damnation ... all these lead to a "nausea". But at least this gives him a temporary meaning to endure suffering. 

He realizes he can never overcome these urges and is forever guilty and therefore begins to project beings of pure spirituality, God, who will take away his punishment. 

These altruistic qualities reach a pinnacle of Christ and self sacrificial love, whereby man’s animal nature is crushed. This is the ascetic ideal to which he must strive. What is worst in the animalistic sense is lauded as virtue. 

The priests have won the power game and the masses are horrible mentally sick and ill. And so for those who are aware of the power struggle amongst the weaklings they use their grudges to crush the powerful men of old. The average man who isn't aware though only finds some happiness in his own instinct for punishment, but perverted because he is only tormenting himself. This is really a longing for his only animalistic self again which takes the form of asceticism. 

Stemming from this birth of consciousness and ascetism is philosophy and abstract reason which seeks to objectivize the world, but which Kant showed cannot be done. 

Science shows that Christianity is no longer tenable as a fake bulwark against sufferings. Therefore Europe is falling into nihilism. The only sentiment left is "pity" on others, on the lowly and the path toward Christianity's end in nihilism, to show its true nothingness. This is the only nihilism. 

Therefore there needs to be a man of old to return and flip the values again, return man back to his primitive animal state and to do away with all man’s interior life which is really his bondage he doesn’t know he has. Who is brave enough?

Nietzsche is not a nihilist in the sense of removing all value, but a nihilist in the sense of removing all value that is not animalistic, all abstract reasoning (even heterodox philosophy), science, metaphysics, and consciousness. All depends on the concept of truth and so to support them is to support "the ascetic ideal". Even European atheism is too focused on "knowing" or "not knowing" God exists. So in this next era, will to truth itself is called into question, and all of these with it for the will to power instead. 

"This is that hundred act play that is reserved for the next two centuries of Europe, the most terrible, the most mysterious, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all plays."