Nietzsche's Genealogy

So we see that from the very beginning Nietzsche frames the Genealogy of Morals in the light of his worries concerning the self-awareness of those supposed to be the “learned ones”. In this, genealogy’s positive aspect emerges, as we can appreciate how Nietzsche’s work is driven by the desire of presenting these men of knowledge with their lack of self-awareness, as well as with the tool to overcome it. In this respect, my understanding is that the “beehives of our knowledge” are an image and criticism of what Nietzsche thought was the education of the “men of knowledge of his days” - that is, one built on notions mindlessly amassed in the same way bees do with pollen. This attitude, causes the learned ones to be aware of everything save for …show more content…
Against the men of knowledge who are ignorant of themselves, the philosopher-physician-genealogist envisioned by Nietzsche is a lover - someone for whom philosophy is not primarily a body of knowledge, but a kind of eros, a transformative attitude, a militancy born out of love and devotion for truth . Accordingly, as Richard Schacht remarks, when we address Nietzsche on morality, we better ought to remember how ‘his attempted “overcoming of morality”[…] is more its Aufhebung than its abolition’ . In the present terms, this means that the effect of atopia caused by genealogy does not have the goal to allow one to move outside morality – which would absurdely means moving out of all life-spheres and therefore human existence itself-, but rather to overcome one morality in favour of a better one – that is, one that allows for a better, more integrated form of …show more content…
In this sense, it is proper to consider the goal of Nietzsche's philosophy as Socratic, insofar as it aims to foster '[…] self-examination and self-"undergoing", to "know thyself", to cultivate the virtues and, ultimately, to "become who you are"' . However, we know from the discussion in the previous chapter that every spiritual exercise has the goal of letting us out of a form of life marked by a lack of wisdom, toward one marked by a fullness of it – that condition which ancient philosophers labelled as being a “sage”. We have already touched this point somehow. The question we now have to deal with is how Nietzsche exactly understands these two conditions. To this we turn now in the next