On the Genealogy of Morality — Selections
Nietzsche was a German philologist-turned-philosopher who spent his career attacking Christianity, conventional morality, and what he saw as the self-deception at the heart of Western culture. His challenge to theodicy is not the standard one: he does not argue that evil is incompatible with a good God. He argues instead that the very categories of “good” and “evil” are themselves suspect. On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) traces those categories to their origins in power, resentment, and the psychology of the weak. If the moral framework underlying theodicy is itself a construction, the entire project of theodicy rests on sand. Nietzsche went insane in 1889 and spent the last eleven years of his life unable to write.