On the Genealogy of Morals — who's who

The figure on whom the first essay's reconstruction depends. Nietzsche imagines an aristocratic caste that calls itself "good" out of sheer flourishing — strong, fortunate, capable — and names the rest "bad" almost in passing. He cites Greek and Roman examples and the Latin word bonus. The noble is not Nietzsche's ideal: he is psychologically shallow, incapable of the inwardness the slave revolt later produces. He is a historical reference point, the morality that existed before ressentiment got to work.

Not a literal slave class but a psychological-historical type: the human being whose situation does not permit direct discharge of feeling, whose response to suffering is therefore mediated, remembered, internalized. Out of this constitution arises ressentiment, and out of ressentiment the inversion that calls the strong "evil" and the weak "good." Nietzsche is ambivalent: he thinks the slave revolt produced a subtler, more inward soul. But a morality grown from ressentiment is permanently reactive — it needs an enemy to feel itself as "good."

The crucial figure of the book. The priest is the human being whose will to power runs through interpretation rather than action. Cut off from the direct exercise of strength, the priestly caste developed a more dangerous instrument: the capacity to name, to invert, to revalue. He is the engine of the slave revolt in Essay 1, the architect of the guilt economy in Essay 2, and the manager of ascetic suffering in Essay 3. Nietzsche's contempt for the priest is matched by his recognition that the priest is the great creator of values — the role he wants the philosopher to take back.

The specific form of the priestly type that dominates Essay 3. He does not heal the wound of meaningless suffering — he gives the wound a meaning. Tells the sufferer: you suffer because you are guilty, and the cure is more renunciation. Directs the herd's aggression inward, away from any outward target, and so becomes indispensable. Nietzsche calls him the saviour, shepherd, and advocate of the sick herd — and notes the dark genius: he organizes self-negation so successfully that the human animal would rather will nothingness than not will at all.

Never described in detail, but everywhere implied. The philosopher of the future is the figure who could create values without needing the priest's machinery — without inversion, self-cruelty, or negation of life. He would do what the noble could not (think genealogically, with the depth the slave revolt taught humanity) and what the priest will not (affirm without enemies). Nietzsche treats the genealogy itself as preparation for this figure: a clearing of the ground. The book closes with the wager that he is on the way.

The philosopher whose answer to ascetic ideals was to embrace them — to read the will's negation of itself as the highest wisdom. Nietzsche treats Schopenhauer's case as the most honest expression of the ascetic ideal in modern philosophy, and therefore as the position he most needs to overcome. Schopenhauer dominates Essay 3; his aesthetics (via Kant) are examined and rejected in the opening sections. The Genealogy is in part a settling of accounts with the philosopher who most influenced the young Nietzsche.

Named in Essay 2 around the question of bad conscience. Nietzsche notes Spinoza's clear-eyed refusal to treat remorse as anything other than a sad passion — a position he admires and extends. Spinoza is one of the few philosophers Nietzsche mentions with something close to approval, though he goes further than Spinoza would in tracing guilt to its pre-moral origins.