ABSTRACT
Friedrich Nietzsche is the major nineteenth-century source for the ideas which characterize today’s postmodern condition. In particular, the ethical and epistemological relativism of the postmodern world, its scepticism about the possibility of distinguishing truth from falsehood, finds its prototype in Nietzsche’s radically nihilistic thought. In On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche sets out to subvert the most deeply held pieties of the ‘enlightened’ Western world, by speculating about the origins of Judaeo-Christian morality and of rational Greek philosophy. Both these pillars of civilization ultimately rest, according to Nietzsche, on a single foundation:
With arresting cynicism, Nietzsche declares that the entire tradition of Western philosophy can be traced to a self-interested legitimation of hierarchical power-structures. In Chapter 1 we saw how Aristotle deduces the need for the domination of certain people by others from the hierarchy between ideas and matter. Here, Nietzsche contends that the original purpose of the binary opposition between good and bad is to justify and perpetuate the division of society into a privileged group of Greek, aristocratic men, and the excluded ‘others’: women, slaves and barbarians. The dichotomy rationalizes this situation, making it appear natural and reasonable. And yet it also forms the very basis of rational thought, which proceeds by positing such binary opposites and resolving them in syntheses. The whole of Western philosophy is thus originally an ideology, in so far as it is a ruse designed to serve the interests of a particular group of people.
