Introduction

Nietzsche is quite clear that at least one central purpose of On the Genealogy of Morality is to help us assess the value of the values, the value judgments, of morality:

Later in the same preface he writes:

One kind of assessment being made is relatively clear. We are to assess the values of morality instrumentally: do they promote human flourishing? What is less clear is precisely what is meant by human flourishing. Obviously it has something to do with power and splendor but without further elaboration one would worry that the circle of concepts might be too tight for comfort. Flourishing also seems to be connected to something called “life” where life is being conceived of as something that can be stronger or weaker, degenerating or growing, confident or in distress. Consider the focus in GM, Preface, 3, on the values of morality as symptoms of the condition of life. Again, it is not obvious what to make of this.

But perhaps the most fundamental puzzle is that these apparent values of flourishing, power, or splendor are themselves never critiqued or questioned. Why would precisely the genealogy of these very values not be an obvious, and crucial, task to take up? It is not as though Nietzsche promises to carry out this task elsewhere, and it does not look as though any such critique or genealogy is carried out in GM itself. How could someone with Nietzsche’s endless suspicions, with his fine sense for psychological blind spots, with his intense self-reflective curiosity, not have taken up precisely the question of where these values come from, what their origin is? After all we are talking of someone who wrote:

Indeed, the very phrase, repeated in various forms by Nietzsche, “the value of these ‘values’,” cries out for the repeated application of the question.