Letter from the Assistant Editor

Dear Readers,

This issue of JNS brings together four new articles on Nietzsche’ On the of Genealogy of Morals by Dan Conway, Larry Hatab, Chris Janaway, and David Owen. Recently, Conway, Hatab, Janaway, and Owen have each published a new book assessing key philosophical questions and concerns of GM. Janaway’s Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s “Genealogy” was published by Oxford University Press, and Owen’s Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morality” was published by Acumen, both in 2007. Conway’s Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morals”: A Reader’s Guide and Hatab’s Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morality”: An Introduction were published in 2008 by Continuum Books and by Cambridge University Press, respectively.

While Conway, Hatab, Janaway, and Owen share the aim of rethinking GM, as the essays here show, their engagements with the text lead them to engage with, and emphasize, a range of different questions and concerns—though as all authors acknowledge, these differences are highly productive ones. Conway urges us to attend to the rhetorical-dramatic structure of GM, which he reads as an aspect of Nietzsche’s attempt to educate and train his best readers, in order to show how attending to this helps us make greater sense of the intended and accomplished aims of the text. Hatab’s discussion focuses upon the question of the meaning of the ascetic ideal in GM III. Taking as his point of departure the thesis that the central question of GM is whether there can be meaning and value in life following the death of God, Hatab develops four comparatively neglected themes from the text: the relationship between the ascetic ideal and nihilism, the meaning of the “metaphysical value of truth,” the meaning and importance of life affirmation, and Nietzsche’s remark about art in relation to the ascetic ideal.

Janaway’s discussion defends a number of related claims stemming from his conviction that selflessness, and Nietzsche’s attempts to challenge our attachment to the values of selflessness, is the central aspect of the text. Janaway argues for the interpretative significance of contextualizing GM in terms of Nietzsche’s engagements with the thought of Schopenhauer and Rée and develops several arguments concerning key topics such as perspectivism, naturalism and the self, and moral psychology. Owen distinguishes between textualist and contextualist approaches to reading GM and defends his own contextualist approach while counseling the avoidance of dogmatism on this issue. His discussion identifies and explores the question of Nietzsche’s relationship to ancient philosophy, arguing that scholarship of GM would benefit from further consideration of the text’s ancient connections.

Together, these four articles present readers with fresh opportunities to reconsider, and perhaps to revise, the nature and scope of the philosophical questions that might be located at the heart of scholarship of GM. This attests to the need for continued questioning of the contribution that the text can continue to make to different aspects of contemporary philosophical inquiry, including, but not of course limited to, the nature of the self and moral psychology, ethics, the political, art and the nature of the fictional, and indeed methodological questions pertaining to the practice of philosophy.

The essays included in this issue were presented at the 2008 “Nietzsche in New York” (NiNY) workshop, which focused attention upon GM 120 years after its original publication. This also marked the first occasion that a session of NiNY has been held at the New York Public Library, which, as readers will know, holds facsimiles of all of Nietzsche’s papers (except the letters) that are held at the Nietzsche-Archiv in Weimar. JNS is grateful to all NiNY participants; the New York Public Library, particularly Jack Sherefkin; the Offices of the President and the Provost of Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY); Executive Officer John Greenwood and the Philosophy Program at the CUNY Graduate Center; and especially Professor and Chairperson Frank M. Kirkland and the Department of Philosophy at Hunter.