“We Remain of Necessity Stranger to Ourselves”: The Key Message of Nietzsche’s Geneology (original) (raw)

The central claim of this piece is that Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals is primarily aimed at gradually bringing his readers to a potentially shattering realization that in a deep and fundamental sense they do not know themselves. It is argued that Nietzsche’s initial assertion in the preface of the Genealogy that his aim is to expose the historical origins of our morality is intentionally misleading and that Nietzsche employs uncanny displacements and subterfuges to in order to disguise his real target. This is exposed only in section 23 of the third essay where the reader is faced with Nietzsche’s central claim that we moderns are in fact the ultimate embodiment of the ascetic ideal. Nietzsche argues that we have mistakenly taken ourselves to have overcome this ideal in the move from a religious to a secular, scientific, world view, when, in fact, that move only signifies the deepest and most sublime expression of that ideal. This essay aims to expose the methods behind, and reasons for, Nietzsche’s dissimulation about his true aim.