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 ...