The History of Morality

This week, we approach one of the most infamous ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche: the dual-prehistory of the morality we follow today. Throughout his career, Nietzsche had an inkling that the origins of our moral ideas did not follow a clean, neat pattern -- a single course of development from a single origin. Rather, we have inherited moral ideas that come from different and competing values structures. Even within a single heart, Nietzsche writes, these two opposed origins sometimes make war with one another, which is Nietzsche's attempt at explaining one of the reasons why we experience states of dividedness and moral dilemmas. In this episode, we'll compare some of his earlier work towards answering this question, found in Human, All Too Human and Beyond Good & Evil, then proceed to tackle the first essay of Genealogy of Morality, which is his most rigorous and famous attempt at wrestling with this topic.  This episode will further build upon the subject matter in episodes 9 & 10. If you’ve not listened to those episodes, it is highly recommended that you do so before diving in. As we keep going on the podcast, while we may occasionally divert to topics which require no background in Nietzsche’s thought, the ideas will only get more difficult as we keep going, and I will increasingly refer back to material we’ve covered in past episodes.