How moral values acquire a history › Key Concepts

A method that asks after the origin, development, and function of a concept, practice, or institution, rather than merely whether it is justified. Genealogy treats morality as a historical phenomenon shaped by power, psychology, and social conflict, rather than as a set of timeless truths accessible to reason alone.

Nietzsche contrasts two patterns of moral evaluation. Noble morality begins by calling itself good; bad is its secondary designation for what it considers low or common. Slave morality begins with an enemy it calls evil and defines its own goodness in opposition. In §13, Nietzsche describes the powerless recasting their inability to retaliate as goodness, including being patient and meek. These are his proposed histories of valuation, rather than neutral definitions of moral worth.

A French term Nietzsche uses to name a specific psychological condition: the resentment of the weak toward the strong, which cannot express itself directly and so becomes creative. Ressentiment does not simply hate the powerful; it revalues them, declaring their strength to be evil and its own weakness to be virtue. It is, Nietzsche says, a "slave revolt" in valuation.

Nietzsche's proposed condition in which outwardly constrained instincts turn against the self, making possible new forms of self-punishment and self-formation. He distinguishes this inward turn from its later religious interpretation as sin; the two should not be collapsed into a single event.

An ideal of self-denial whose meanings vary with the people who adopt it. Nietzsche distinguishes artists, philosophers, priests, and others rather than assigning every ascetic practice a single motive. The ascetic priest gives suffering an interpretation that, Nietzsche argues, both preserves sufferers and deepens their self-accusation.