Ressentiment’s and western civilization in Nietzsche’s philosophy

Abstract

On Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche investigates the origin of moral evaluations in order to denounce the metaphysical conception of the notions of “good” and “evil” prevailing in the West. In his view, the values would be the result of a certain historical origin and some perspectives. It is in this sense Nietzsche identifies the emergence of the pairs of “good and bad” and “good and evil” and the perspectives of the “warrior caste” and the “priestly caste”. Nietzsche also comprehends that this moral antagonism has set forth a millennial battle in the history of humanity, because those divergent perspectives would have set the implementation of values equivalents to a way of being either healthy, either sick. According to the author, the values that prevail in the West would have come from an evaluation guided by a resentment of the priestly caste. It is in this manner that the german thinker understands that the “civilization” would aim to promote a kind of human “dressage” by weakening men’s most affirmative and vital impulses and, in effect, directing them to their most decadent stage.