Preface

The preface opens with what may be the most disarming sentence in all of Nietzsche: "We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers — and for good reason. We have never searched for ourselves." The paradox is precise. Those whose profession is knowledge — philosophers, scholars, genealogists — have by that very profession learned to attend to everything except the structure of their own valuations. They return home from themselves empty-handed. This is the first move of the genealogical method: suspicion turned on the examiner before it is turned on the examined.

Nietzsche then traces the autobiography of his problem. Since boyhood — he gives the age as thirteen — the question of the origin of good and evil has never left him. He first answered it in the way children do: God made the values. Then he gave a more sophisticated but still wrong answer: the unegoistic, the self-denying, deserves the name "good." Then he began to read the English moral historians — Herbert Spencer, Paul Rée, the utilitarians — who attempted a naturalistic history of morality grounded in usefulness and habit. He credits them with having taken the question seriously. He rejects their answers as historically shallow and psychologically naive. They located the origin of "good" in the approval of those who benefit from good acts. Nietzsche replies: the judgment "good" did not originate among those to whom good was done.

The preface closes by handing the reader a method and a warning. The method is what Nietzsche calls the historical sense applied to moral questions: not logic, not intuition, but genealogy — the patient tracing of concepts through the actual human contexts, the particular interests, the physiological types that produced them. The warning is that this kind of reading is hard. It requires preparation that the Genealogy assumes rather than provides — specifically, a prior reading of Beyond Good and Evil. "This writing is obscure to anyone who has not first read me carefully," Nietzsche writes. He does not apologize for this. He assumes the reader he wants.