Part 5 — The Natural History of Morals

Part 5 opens with an observation that is almost a provocation: moral feeling in Europe is subtle, refined, and sensitive; the science of morals that claims to describe and ground it is crude, initial, and coarse-fingered. Moral philosophy is still moralizing — it starts from an assumed moral framework and argues within it — when it should be doing natural history: tracing moralities to their origins, asking what needs they served, what types they expressed, what they cost. Section 187 does this to Kant: the categorical imperative, the moral law valid for all rational beings, is less a discovery of reason than an expression of what Kant needed — a morality that could command absolutely and universally.

Section 199 is the one that produces the Genealogy's argument about conscience. Obedience and law are so long practised in a herd that a conscience develops for them: what was originally external constraint becomes internal second nature, and what is second nature gets called morality. The herd animal has bred into itself the feeling that its herd-necessities are moral obligations. This is not dishonesty; it is a kind of self-deception that has become structural. Nietzsche is not contemptuous of the herd; he is precise about what it is.

Section 202 is the most politically pointed: the democratic movement of modern Europe is "the heir to Christianity." Both are expressions of the same slave morality — the same leveling, the same suspicion of the exceptional, the same flight from rank. The democratic man believes, as fervently as the Christian, that all men are equal before God (or before the law), and that superiority is suspect. Nietzsche does not argue that democracy should be abolished. He argues that its moral assumptions are continuous with Christian assumptions, and that someone who has rejected Christianity without noticing this continuity has not gone as far as he thinks.