Beast to Human

In the On the Genealogy of Mortality, Nietzsche presents ideas that seem to have a difference of opinion with everything we as humans have valued for centuries. The process of questioning morality and values seems to be the most promising area of examination that any person can reveal into. It is only in the understanding of why we hold the values we do that we can have true inner peace and hopefully freedom from the unreasonable chains of society. For years people have posed questions into the meanings of almost everything imaginable. We have seen change and progress and growth in everything such as culture, art, technology, science and so on; but there has been little change in our views on morality and values. So we are faced with the question why has there been such a condition of no movement and domination in our views of morality?

The main questions that are of our concern that Nietzsche presents in this work are, “Under what conditions did man invent the value judgments good and evil?’ and “What value do these value-inventions have?” In the first two essays, “Good and Evil” and “Guilt and Bad Conscious”, Nietzsche tries to give a record or the morals and value judgments man has imposed on himself throughout most of history. The complexities, contradictions, and utter paradoxes that Nietzsche finds in his journey through the genealogy of morals lead us to many unpleasant discoveries about the true nature of human beings and what it means to be human.

There are two lines in which we can attempt to answer the genealogical questions Nietzsche poses in the preface, the first is in social rank and religion as examined in the first essay, and the second way to attempt to answer these questions is in the transformation from beast to man as proposed in the second essay, and it is in this second line of inquiry that this essay will mainly focus on. There can be no doubt that both lines are of the utmost importance when considering the genealogical questions; however, the second line seems to be rooted far deeper in the history of man and it may therefore be a better starting point for giving an examination of the morality and value judgments we have come to be confined in today.

Man’s transformation from beast to human must have started in the days of history long ago when the first organisms crawled out from the sanctity of the vast oceans and ventured out upon the unforgiving land masses, completely devoid of the coverings and shelter of the water that they were once submersed in. Nietzsche reflects upon this burden that these creatures took upon themselves in his second essay. It is remarkable to ponder upon this burden because it is in the initial act of coming ashore that shame and guilt begin to take shape and form. Our exposure to our surroundings gives us no protection from others, and especially from ourselves.

Yet there is no reason for people to be ashamed of anything! How can be we be ashamed of our instincts, how can we be ashamed of ourselves, of mankind, where could this idea of a bad conscious have came from? Since Nietzsche has already argued in the first essay that there is no difference between whom we are and the deeds we do, just like one cannot differentiate between lightning and the flash it produces. What we do is who we are, yet by conforming to the moral standards of the day, whatever they may be, we try to categorize our actions into good and bad to attempt to know ourselves. Is this where previous philosophers and others throughout history have failed? We already