Nietzsche's Genealogy Of Morality

Within this essay, I am going to argue that Nietzsche created the Genealogy of Morality as a criticism of his predecessors and how they had been focusing on the wrong questions regarding morality. Furthermore, philosophers such as Plato and Kant were too focused on how morality was used within their time that they incorrectly assumed its origin. Within the 3 essays, Nietzsche explores the concept of Christian morality and how it has in the past taken over as well as its subsequent demise due to the death of God. Nietzsche’s reasoning behind the genealogy is that it explores the psychology of man’s conscience as well as Christianity and how this has influenced us and why, in Nietzsche’s opinion, this needs to change. Nietzsche develops this

This naturalisation of religion means that human psychology is now behind the will which in turn is what grants the individual power within their life. Religion, in Nietzsche’s understanding, was negative for the individual and their life due to it having a problematic impact on their well-being and this, therefore, limits an individual’s potential. This reduction of religion means it needs naturalising to move away from his predecessor’s notions such as seen within Hume, a religious philosopher. Although Nietzsche has moved away from the problems he found in basing our will within religion, there are also some objections to our will being based in psychology. An objection towards our will being based in our psychology could be that some people who have been diagnosed with mental disorders do not have a sound state of mind. Therefore their will may be not being decided by their true desires and thus leading their subsequent morality into the same negative direction as Nietzsche argued religion lead us

Nietzsche undermines these previous works through his genealogical method. The first method Nietzsche uses is naturalism triumphing over transcendence. Transcendence was previously seen within the works of Plato through the Realm of the Forms which gave knowledge through transcendence. Nietzsche argued that instead of relying on the transcendent for knowledge, we need to actually focus on the world around us to understand our world. As previously discussed, this is putting greater emphasis on the human psychology rather than the reasoning used by Plato. When removing the transcendent from Plato, Nietzsche is also removing the transcendent from the modern world and is therefore removing the transcendent God seen within Christianity. This, in turn, means Nietzsche is reaching his aim of removing the Christian moralisation, which he believed has corrupted the civilisation due to the internalisation of cruelty from the master vs slave complex. By putting emphasis on our human psychology, this is similar to the works by Freud who believed that psychology was our main way to understand human interactions and also to greater understand the world around us. Both of these approaches are moving away from the idealist doctrines of Kant and Christianity and is offering a materialist approach to understanding morality. Nietzsche