Nietzsche's Summary Of Genealogity

Critical Summary #4 – Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality

Friedrich Nietzsche begins his Second Treatise by exploring the significance of being permitted to promise. He explains that by making promises humans are able to deliberately undertake responsibility. To promise necessitates the ability to have self-assurance of the future. Nietzsche explains that, “in order to have this kind of command over the future in advance, man must have first learned to separate the necessary from the accidental occurrence” (II-1). This self-assurance and confidence indicates that we must be calculable – predictable - and necessary. For people to be predictable, it requires a certain degree of commonality, which Nietzsche regards as “morality

The responsibility of autonomy instills a conscience in man. He asserts that responsibility is a privilege that carries a power over oneself and fate, and the conscience is a dominant instinct (II-2). Nietzsche proceeds by making the claim that autonomous and moral are mutually exclusive. In contrast, Kant believed that autonomy and morality were necessarily linked because he maintained the idea that morality was based on the principle of freedom of will. A sovereign individual with free will must be held accountable for their actions and Kant believed that the morality of an action was to be based on the action’s adherence to the rules. In Section Three, Nietzsche explains that, “only what does not cease to give pain remains in one’s memory” (II-3). He expands on this idea by providing us with the example that when man wanted to create a memory it was never “without blood, torment, and sacrifice” (II-3) and it was these things that rooted in man that pain was the most powerful aid of memories. Nietzsche explains that there are certain “fixed” ideas in society that are supposed to be ingrained and permanent in our memory. These ideas are ascetic

This in itself is a form of conditioning on the human psyche – if something is painful we tend to stop doing it. Pain instills memory in human beings in the same way that it does for animals and children. In Section Four, Nietzsche argues that the concept of guilt has its origins in the concept of debt; and that punishment and retribution developed separately from autonomy or lack thereof. Section Five focuses on the creditor and debtor relationship. If the creditor cannot have the enjoyment of receiving his loan back (whether it is compensation of money, land or other possessions), he should be given the opportunity to harm the debtor. Aristotle believed that you could only punish the autonomous acts of humans. However, Nietzsche believes that the punishment is not to make people better, but rather it is to take pleasure in other people’s pain as a form of compensation for a debt that is owed. In Sections Six and Seven, Nietzsche turns his attention to the festivity of violence and punishment. Nietzsche explains that cruelty was mixed into the joys of everyday life, and that “one could not imagine royal marriages and folk festivals in the