All 4 chapters — preface, then three essays that dismantle the foundations of European morality.
The Genealogy opens with a dense preface in which Nietzsche explains how he came to the problem and hands the reader a method: history, philology, psychology, suspicion. Essay 1 reconstructs the slave revolt in morality. Essay 2 genealogizes guilt and the bad conscience. Essay 3 — the longest — asks what ascetic ideals mean for the artist, the philosopher, the priest, and modern humanity. Each essay is self-contained; all three are one assault on the unexamined inheritance of European morality.
Method, history, and the problem that has followed Nietzsche since boyhood.
Nietzsche explains how the problem of the origin of moral values has followed him since boyhood, rejects the English moral historians' methods, and hands the reader a method of his own: history, philology, psychology, suspicion.
The slave revolt — how "good and bad" became "good and evil."
The central argument of the book: "good" once meant noble and self-affirming; the slave revolt inverted the table, making the strong "evil" and the suffering "good." Nietzsche traces the etymology, names the carriers — Jewish prophecy, Christianity — and asks whether Judaea has permanently defeated Rome.
Guilt as debt — the bad conscience as cruelty turned inward.
Guilt is not a moral given — it is a debt. Nietzsche traces conscience back through archaic punishment to the creditor-debtor relation, then traces the bad conscience back to the enclosure of the human animal in society: cruelty with nowhere to go turns inward.
The ascetic ideal — what it means to will nothingness rather than not will at all.
The longest and strangest essay. Nietzsche asks what ascetic ideals mean for every human type — artist, philosopher, priest, scientist — and answers: a will turned against itself. He closes by admitting that the ascetic ideal still has no rival, not even in science, and that man would rather will nothingness than not will at all.