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Friedrich Nietzsche's 'Genealogy Of Morals'

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Words 675
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Karly Nolan
Professor Draz
Philosophy 101
10 November 2016
Nietzsche
Numerous philosophers take a stance on the way we should dissect morals; what is good and bad, what is right and wrong. Friedrich Nietzsche believes that we should take a genealogical approach to study morality, tracing lines of development. We need to incorporate history, philosophy, psychology, and classical philology into the study of morals. Nietzsche had become fascinated by the origin of behavior (ethics) from a young age; “In fact, the problem of the origin of evil pursued me even as a boy of thirteen,” (16). He took his passion and developed his belief in how morality can be understood.
In his preface of The Genealogy of Morals, he outlines that in the analysis of morality we …show more content…
He makes the comparison to enlighten us that as humans we only care about learning some form of knowledge and moving on; a grab-and-go like learning. “There is only one thing we care about from the heart- “bringing something home,” (15). It is a constant cycle we go through of learning and continuing to a new topic. In contrast, towards the end of the preface, Nietzsche gives an analogy that, “… it will be some time before my writings are “readable”- something for which one has almost to be a cow and in any case not a “modern man”: rumination,” (23) to understand his writing. He uses the analogy to alert his readers that it will take much more than a basic, disregarding reading to grasp the concepts he is going to unveil on the genealogy of morals. Nietzsche uses a cow for comparison due to they manner in which a cow eats: rumination. When a cow finishes chewing, it will un-swallow the chewed up food, then return to more thoroughly chew it. This is the method in which a reader of Nietzsche must go about interpreting his work. Read it, then go back and relook at the concepts presented before you attempt to digest or examine the

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