On the Genealogy of Morals

⚖The case for it

Nietzsche narrates the victory of slave morality with far more confidence than his evidence can carry, and the scholarly apparatus is mostly there to make a settled conclusion look earned. Concede it. The psychology survives anyway: the injured, unable to strike back, convert weakness into virtue and grievance into moral law, then call the arrangement justice. That mechanism holds whether or not the priests and their enemies ever kept to the schedule he invents for them, and it is what makes the three essays hard to unread. You start seeing it in the news, in your friends, and, less comfortably, in yourself.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Nietzsche's 'history' of morals is conjecture in philology's robes: no dates, no documents, etymologies pressed into the service of a verdict reached in advance. The first essay's Rome-against-Judea framing has fed readers he would have despised, and the blond beast hands them their vocabulary. Read it for the diagnosis of ressentiment; just don't mistake the genealogy for history.

— the honest librarian