The Genealogy of Morals

Sat, 23 Apr 2022 13:23:27 -0400

Hey everybody,
Thank you so much for engaging in such a rewarding conversation about the Communist Manifesto last week. Special shout out to the more quiet and reserved among us for bringing their voices to the discussion even if they didn't particularly feel super comfortable doing so. PhilAnon is for everybody.

We have been talking about how social systems and the thoughts that emerge from them are historical in nature. For example, last week we discussed how for Marx capitalism had a beginning and will have an end. It is by no means the eternal form of humanity's relationship with themselves in their social appropriation of nature. Because it is something social and historical, and not transcendent, ontological or natural, capitalism and its self-understanding are open to question both practically and theoretically. This is the basis of the materialist conception of history, that modes of producing goods and services, are historical and not natural regardless of how asocial, ahistorical and thing-like those modes may appear to the actors that constitute them.

This week we are going to explore a very different historically minded philosopher. Friedrich Nietzsche. For Nietzsche we can trace a historical genesis of our moral systems and criticize them wholesale. Moral values we hold dear and feel to be rather self-evident like kindness, humbleness and mercy are something we in fact inherit from the culture we are contingently born into and are not eternal natural or god given principles that regulate social life in an asocial ahistorical manner. They have a history, a "genealogy" a beginning and therefore a possible ending or overcoming. By tracing the history of morals we can open them up to scrutiny. We can reappraise, reevaluate and transvaluate them.

Mr. Tom