Friedrich Nietzsche - Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings Student Edition

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most influential thinkers of the past 150 years and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) is his most important work on ethics and politics. A polemical contribution to moral and political theory, it offers a critique of moral values and traces the historical evolution of concepts such as guilt, conscience, responsibility, law and justice. This is a revised and updated edition of one of the most successful volumes to appear in Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Keith Ansell-Pearson has modified his introduction to Nietzsches classic text, and Carol Diethe has incorporated a number of changes to the translation itself, reflecting the considerable advances in our understanding of Nietzsche in the twelve years since this edition first appeared. In this new guise, the Cambridge Texts edition of Nietzsches Genealogy should continue to enjoy widespread adoption, at both undergraduate and graduate level.

CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

On the Genealogy of Morality

CAMBRIDGE TEXTS IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT

Series editors

RAYMOND GEUSS

Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge

QUENTIN SKINNER

Professor of the Humanities, Queen Mary, University of London

Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought is now firmly established as the major student textbook series in political theory. It aims to make available to students all the most important texts in the history of western political thought, from ancient Greece to the early twentieth century. All the familiar classic texts will be included, but the series seeks at the same time to enlarge the conventional canon by incorporating an extensive range of less well-known works, many of them never before available in a modern English edition. Wherever possible, texts are published in complete and unabridged form, and translations are specially commissioned for the series. Each volume contains a critical introduction together with chronologies, biographical sketches, a guide to further reading and any necessary glossaries and textual apparatus. When completed, the series will aim to offer an outline of the entire evolution of western political thought.

For a list of titles published in the series, please see end of book.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

On the Genealogy of Morality

EDITED BY

KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON

Department of Philosophy,

University of Warwick

TRANSLATED BY

CAROL DIETHE

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Cambridge University Press

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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, NewYork

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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521871235

In the translations, introduction and editorial matter
Cambridge University Press 1997

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 1997

Revised Student edition first published 2007

8th printing 2013

Printed and bound in the United States of America by Edwards Brothers

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780521871235 Hardback

ISBN 9780521691635 Paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Information regarding prices timetables and other factual information given in this work are correct at the time of first printing but Cambridge University Press does not guarantee the accuracy of such information thereafter.

Acknowledgements and a note on the text

Carol Diethe is responsible for the translation of all the material featured in this book with the exception of the supplementary material taken from the Cambridge University Press editions of Human, All too Human (volumes one and two), pp. 12332 and Daybreak, pp. 13344, and translated by R. J. Hollingdale.

The notes which accompany the text were prepared by Raymond Geuss, who profited from editorial material supplied in the editions of G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin/New York, de Gruyter, 196788) and Peter Putz (Munich, Goldman, 1988).

The essay The Greek State was originally intended by Nietzsche to be a chapter of his first published book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872); together with the essay Homers Contest and three other essays on the topics of truth, the future of education, and Schopenhauer it formed part of the Five prefaces to five unwritten books Nietzsche presented to Cosima Wagner in the Christmas of 1872. The German text of the two essays, newly translated here, can be found in volume I of Nietzsche. Smtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe (Berlin/New York, de Gruyter, 1988), pp. 76478 and pp. 78393.

Nietzsches own italicization and idiosyncratic punctuation have been retained in the text.

A note on the revised edition

This second, revised edition features a new introduction by the editor and a revised and updated guide to further reading. The translation has been extensively modified in an effort to present the reader with a more accurate and reliable text. The editor and translator wish to thank those scholars who brought errors in the original translation to their attention and made suggestions for refining the text, in particular Christa Davis Acampora and Duncan Large. Ultimately, we made our own decisions and sole responsibility for the text remains with us. Keith Ansell-Pearson wishes to thank Richard Fisher of Cambridge University Press for supporting the idea of a second, revised edition of the text, and Christa Davis Acampora, Carol Diethe and Raymond Geuss for looking over versions of the introduction and providing helpful comments. Carol Diethe wishes to thank Jrgen Diethe for his considered comments.

Note by the translator: Anyone who has read Nietzsche in the original will be aware of his polished style, and will have admired his capacity to leap from one idea to another with finesse, to sprinkle foreign words into his text, to emphasize words with italics, or to coin a string of neologisms while rushing headlong through a paragraph until, finally, he reaches the safe landing of a full stop. Humbling though the experience often was, I have tried to keep faith with Nietzsches punctuation and to capture as much of his style as was possible in translation while still holding on to the demands of accuracy. For accuracy in translating Nietzsche is increasingly important. When the first edition came out in 1994, I felt I could render a term like blue-eyed as nave, as in the phrase navely mendacious, which now appears as blue-eyed mendacious in the text (III, 19). Now, however, there are several dictionaries collating Nietzsches terms, and the method adopted in the recently published first volume of de Gruyters