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...entertain dispassionate detachment we do biological specimens or mathematical equations. No, according to Nietzsche, our commitment to a moral frame of reference penetrates to the depths of our soul. We are invested in the value of values, the moral significance of morality, and, as we are participants in a culture profoundly shaped by Christian ideals of self-denial and self-sacrifice, what we think about these ideals entails a judgment about ourselves. To inquire into the origin and value of morality is to peer into the hidden recesses of our ambitions and fears, our longings and loathings--to know ourselves.
Here, then, at the very beginning of Nietzsche's work, we encounter the eccentric, even paradoxical trajectory of his polemical ambition: a strange and perplexing arch of rhetoric and logic that causes many commentators to misread the Genealogy of Morals--and the entire modern critical project.
Nietzsche knows very well the deepest concern of his freethinking readers: If I hand over my mind, my life, and my soul to God, how then can I retain my uniquely valuable individuality? What is so remarkable, however, is that Nietzsche does not give a conventionally modern, reassuring answer. Over the course of his rhetorically vertiginous analysis of the sources of morality, he slowly reshapes the expectations of his readers and guides them toward a deeper question, perhaps the deepest existential question of them all: Is it possible to have a distinct individuality, a soul to which I might be loyal, if I do not finally say with Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, "Not my will but thine"?
Nietzsche's tract was clearly intended as a brief against Christianity. The Christian ethic of "pity, self-abnegation, self-sacrifice," he insists again and again, deforms and destroys the human spirit. Under the spell of self-denial, we view natural exuberance and its impulse toward positive achievement as evil desires to be cut out of our souls by the harsh demands of righteousness. In the place of a noble strength, Nietzsche claims, the existential logic of Christianity encourages weakness, sickness, and ugliness. This unnatural moral system, which has bewitched Western culture for so long, leads to the spiritual exhaustion and despair he labels "nihilism."
Nevertheless, he seems to offer hope to those who share his desire to move out from beneath the shadow of the cross. We need not think ourselves helpless before the dehumanizing forms of our inherited Christian morality. We can attain an intellectual self-mastery through "a critique of moral values," and in so doing "the value of values themselves" can "be called into question." This requires "a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances" under which Christian morality and its stir-sacrificing imperatives came to dominance--the genealogical project.
It all seems quite familiar. We are to "think critically." Yet-and here we find ourselves suddenly and violently thrown out of our conventional stances as objective inquirers--in his prefatory remarks, Nietzsche immediately suggests that our commonplace assumptions about critical inquiry are complacent and self-serving. He accuses his readers of naive illusions. Getting to the bottom of the moral impulse will not be a simple matter of clear thinking, something one can reserve for the lecture hall. Instead, Nietzsche warns that his inquiry traverses "quite novel questions" that will take him to a distant and hidden land. Questioning the value of values, especially the value of self-denying moral and religious commitments, is an all-involving, dangerous project.
As Nietzsche warns his readers, we are to go with him across the high mountain ranges of genealogical inquiry only if we are willing to endure pain and suffering. To think fearlessly about the value of values, we must deny our weak impulse to live amid the platitudes of our age. We need to discipline ourselves and renounce comfortable conclusions, not the least of which is the easy belief that critique will liberate rather than limit, the reassuring assumption that seeing the truth about the human condition brings us to the open plains of a new moment in human history rather than thrusting us back even more deeply into our inherited past.
Nietzsche is so convinced that his readers will lack the power of self-denial necessary to follow his analysis that he digresses to defend himself. Any troubles readers might have understanding the Genealogy of Morals, claims Nietzsche, are simply signs of weakness: We will not follow his logic to the end because we recoil from the pain that the conclusions inflict on our cherished self-images as modern men and women. Only an...
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