'Reason, seriousness, mastery over the emotions, the whole murky affair which go
es by the name of thought, all the privileges and showpieces of man: what a high
price has been paid for them! How much blood and horror is at the bottom of all
"good things!"' On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) is a book about the history o
f ethics and about interpretation. Nietzsche rewrites the former as a history of
cruelty, exposing the central values of the Judaeo-Christian and liberal tradit
ions - compassion, equality, justice - as the product of a brutal process of con
ditioning designed to domesticate the animal vitality of earlier cultures. The r
esult is a book which raises profoundly disquieting issues about the violence of
both ethics and interpretation.
