Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morality": An Introduction (review)

Walter Kaufmann initiated a seemingly endless wave of sympathetic interpretations of Nietzsche's philosophy. Lawrence Hatab's Cambridge introduction to On the Genealogy of Morality is another charitable interpretation. However, his book is much more than an introduction to GM. It develops a controversial and important interpretation of Nietzsche's whole philosophy. Hatab claims that Nietzsche articulates a specifically tragic conception of life. One of the most surprising things about this book is just how little space is exclusively devoted to GM. At least half of the Introduction (chaps. 1, 6–8) focuses on Nietzsche's other texts. One suspects that Hatab found it difficult to discover in its pages his tragic, unwittingly democratic Nietzsche. He is surely not alone in this predicament.

Hatab identifies what he dubs Nietzsche's "existential naturalism" as the core of his philosophy (9). He conceives Nietzsche's naturalism as a philosophical formulation of the moral and political perspective dramatized in ancient Greek tragedy. Nietzsche, he claims, followed the ancient tragedians in attempting to "restore legitimacy to the conditions of becoming" (9). We must surely concede that Hatab's tragic Nietzsche captures something important about his early works, especially The Birth of Tragedy. We might wonder, however, what bearing this has on GM, which does not include any significant reference to, let alone celebration of, Greek tragedy.

Hatab's answer is that "the tragic and the possibility of the tragic hovers in the background of the Genealogy" (21). He defends three key claims: Nietzsche implicitly framed GM in terms of this tragic affirmation of life and its limits; he anchored his whole philosophy in this perspective; and his tragic vision is strongly connected to democratic morality and political practice. It goes without saying that Hatab's claims are highly contentious, especially if we consider GM.

Hatab's first claim requires reading GM very much against the grain. At first (second and third) glance GM appears to be a cranky aristocratic diatribe infused with an odd mixture of erotically charged Homeric hero worship and quasi-Darwinian and Lamarckian tropes. In GM Nietzsche conceives democratic values as symptoms of mass physiological degeneration, which can only be overcome by reawakening the noble ideal embodied in the Roman imperium and reincarnated in the grand figure of Napoleon (GM I:16). Nietzsche declares, for example, that "mankind in the mass sacrificed to the prosperity of a single stronger species of man—that would be an advance" (GM II:14); that the rare higher types' "right to exist" is a "thousand times greater" than the "physiologically unfortunate and worm-eaten"; and that the higher types should be segregated from the sick to ensure that they are not victims of "the conspiracy of the suffering against the well-constituted and victorious" (GM III:14). Nietzsche's hope that the highest type might triumph over the physiologically degenerate seems worlds apart from the ancient Greek tragedians' perspective and much closer to a wild Social Darwinist theoretical fantasia.

Hatab's tragic conception of GM largely hinges on his claim that far from expressing a hyper-Darwinian aristocratic elitism, Nietzsche's championing of master morality in fact demonstrates his commitment to "tragic values." Nietzsche, he observes, "draws on early Greek heroic values as an embodiment of master morality" (50). This much is indisputable, but Hatab adds that Homeric fatalism prefigures tragic values.

Hatab's idea is that in the Homeric ethos the fact that human existence is mortal and subject to implacable fate adds to, rather than detracts from, its value. It makes the value of life contingent upon its limits. The drama and beauty of life are tied to its transience, fragility, and riskiness. It is these conditions that make life a dangerous adventure that calls forth the specifically mortal virtues of courage (Achilles) and cunning (Odysseus). In the Homeric framework, mortal lives are far more precious and beautiful than...