Corpus · On the Genealogy of Morals

Does Renunciation Mean the Same Thing to Everyone?

On the Genealogy of Morals — Essential Reading Path · Reading 8 of 12

Read: Essay III: epigraph and §§1–6. Begin with the short epigraph after the Third Essay heading, then read §§1–6. Stop before §7.
Allow: About 90–115 minutes, including the assigned text, this guide, rereading, and a short written response. You can divide the lesson across two sittings.

Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. Free alternative: Essay III: epigraph and §§1–6 (Horace B. Samuel).

Roman numerals identify the essay; section numbers restart in each essay, and the Preface is numbered separately. If highlighting fails, locate the stated essay and section. See the edition guide for translation terms and the separate editorial material. The explanations below are this site’s commentary.

Before you read

Two people give up an activity they enjoy. One wants uninterrupted time for a demanding project. The other believes that enjoying the activity makes them spiritually corrupt. Their conduct may look similar from outside, while its purpose and meaning differ.

Add a third person who performs the same renunciation because an admired teacher recommends it. Now the question concerns borrowed authority as well as personal purpose. What would we need to know before judging what the sacrifice means?

Reading 7 followed the Second Essay's account of bad conscience, guilt, and the difficult prospect of redirecting self-directed cruelty. The Third Essay asks what ascetic ideals mean. Its opening refuses to assign the same meaning to every practice of renunciation.

The main question: What changes when we ask whose renunciation this is, what it enables, and what authority it serves?

Three things to notice

1. The list before the investigation. In III §1, identify the different people for whom ascetic ideals have different meanings. Notice both the explanatory distinctions and the contempt within the classifications.
2. The artist and the authority behind him. Follow the movement from Wagner's treatment of chastity to the problem of identifying an artist with a work, then to Schopenhauer's philosophy.
3. Different experiences of beauty. In III §6, distinguish Kant's definition, Stendhal's alternative, and Schopenhauer's experience of relief. Which claims concern an effect of beauty, and which claim to define it?

A way to read the passages

A combative epigraph

The essay opens with an epigraph attributed to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Wisdom is personified as a woman who desires a warrior. Its bold, mocking character frames inquiry as a confrontation rather than reverent acceptance. Third Essay, epigraph

The image also makes gender part of the frame: a feminine wisdom is approached through an ideal of masculine combativeness. We need not turn that metaphor into a rule about either women or successful readers. It gives the essay a provocative tone; it does not decide the arguments before they begin.

One ideal, several meanings

III §1 immediately distributes ascetic ideals across different kinds of people. Artists may borrow them ambiguously; philosophers and scholars find conditions for intellectual work; priests find faith and authority. What appears to be one doctrine can do different work in different lives. III §1

The list includes much harsher classifications. Nietzsche reduces women's asceticism to an added means of sexual fascination. He describes much of humanity as failed and complaining, using renunciation to claim superiority to the world and manage persistent distress. His saints seek withdrawal, a final ambition for glory, or peace in nothingness.

These are Nietzsche's polemical characterizations, not neutral descriptions of women, suffering people, or religious lives. Their sweeping dismissiveness needs examination alongside the methodological insight that practices acquire different functions. Explaining a type requires evidence; inventing a degrading name does not supply it.

Here an ascetic ideal involves giving restraint, deprivation, or renunciation a guiding significance. The outward practice does not tell us whether it serves productive concentration, opposition to embodied life, social authority, or another end.

The section then proposes a common problem beneath this variety: human willing needs a goal. Even a goal directed toward nothingness can give the will something to pursue. The significance of that claim will unfold through the essay. At this stage it is a demanding proposal, not the demonstrated result of the opening list.

Chastity and sensuality need not be enemies

III §2 takes Wagner as a particular case. Nietzsche asks why the composer's late praise of chastity took an ascetic direction. His question concerns a change in what chastity signifies, rather than the mere fact that an artist represents it favorably. III §2

He recalls Wagner's projected work about Luther's wedding and imagines a treatment that could praise chastity and sensuality together. The discussion is partly counterfactual: Nietzsche is considering an artistic possibility, not describing a finished opera with that title.

A faithful erotic attachment, in his account, can make bodily desire and sexual restraint compatible. Even where desires conflict, the conflict need not become a condemnation of existence. It can contribute to the richness of a life.

His polemical alternative is someone who worships purity as the negation of what they hate in themselves. The same ideal now organizes self-rejection. Nietzsche's insulting depiction makes the judgment vivid but does not establish a psychological diagnosis of every person who values chastity.

Our opening example helps identify the difference. Forgoing an activity for the sake of something valued does not have the same meaning as treating the capacity for enjoyment as a stain. We would still need to discover which account fits a particular person.

Is Parsifal devotion, parody, or a farewell?

III §3 asks whether Wagner's Parsifal is to be taken seriously. Nietzsche imagines an alternative in which a great tragedian ends by laughing at himself and the ascetic seriousness his work depicts. Such a parody could express artistic freedom. III §3

He explicitly presents this as something he wishes were true. The imagined interpretation is therefore not his settled account of Wagner's intention. His actual suspicion is a late turn against flesh, intellect, and the affirmative commitments he associates with Wagner's earlier work.

Nietzsche connects that suspicion with Wagner's earlier attachment to Feuerbach's praise of sensuality and with statements in the composer's later writings. He treats the change as extending beyond a character's behavior onstage into the artist's public teaching.

Keep the distinction between a question, a wished-for reading, and an accusation. A dramatic work can stage renunciation without simply instructing its audience to renounce. To establish Wagner's commitment, Nietzsche needs more than the existence of a chaste character.

The passage is also personally invested. Nietzsche speaks of a lost artistic possibility and a disappointing farewell. His disappointment is part of the argument's energy; it cannot by itself settle what the work means.

An artist is not the character he creates

III §4 makes that caution explicit. Nietzsche argues that the creator and the work should be separated. The artist is a condition of the work's emergence, but studying that origin and experiencing the work aesthetically are different activities. III §4

His examples are simple: creating Achilles does not make Homer Achilles; creating Faust does not make Goethe Faust. The capacity to imagine and represent a form of life is different from living it. Psychological proximity can tempt both audience and artist to confuse the two.

Nietzsche then suggests that an artist may grow dissatisfied with the separation and want to become the reality previously represented. Applied to Wagner, this becomes a possible explanation of the wish to act as a religious or metaphysical authority.

This is an interpretive proposal, not direct access to Wagner's inner life. Nietzsche also makes sweeping claims about the artist's distance from reality. We can use his distinction without accepting every generalization attached to it.

The result complicates his own polemic. He asks us not to identify maker and work even while interpreting the artist's late commitments. We should assess the represented world, the public statements, and the proposed motives separately before connecting them.

What Schopenhauer gives the musician

III §5 returns to the artist's dependence on an established authority. Nietzsche claims that artists commonly need a supporting morality, religion, philosophy, or patron. Their adopted valuations can therefore lead us toward an authority behind the artist. III §5

The claim that artists never stand independently is an extreme generalization. Its usefulness here lies in the specific relationship Nietzsche proposes: Schopenhauer's philosophy gave Wagner support for an ascetic turn and raised the standing of music.

Nietzsche contrasts Wagner's earlier understanding of music as serving drama with a later understanding of music as directly expressing will. Under that interpretation, music does more than represent appearances alongside other arts. It receives an exceptional relation to the supposed inner character of reality.

This change raises the musician's authority too. The composer can begin to speak as an oracle of what lies beneath ordinary experience. Nietzsche's comic image of a telephone from another world exposes the distance between making music and claiming metaphysical access.

The explanation identifies a possible attraction of Schopenhauer's view. A theory that makes one's art uniquely revealing also changes one's imagined importance. That attraction does not show the theory is false, but it gives us a reason to distinguish its rewards from its justification.

The investigation now moves to a harder case. If Schopenhauer supplies support for Wagner, what draws this comparatively independent philosopher toward the ascetic ideal? The authority behind the artist must become a subject of inquiry in his own right.

Whose experience enters a definition of beauty?

III §6 begins with Nietzsche's objection to the spectator's privileged position in philosophical aesthetics. He thinks philosophers have neglected the creator's experience while also failing to examine the particular spectator whose responses their definitions assume. III §6

In his account of Kant, beauty is associated with impersonal and universal pleasure without interest. Here interest concerns desire and personal stake; its absence does not simply mean that an artwork is boring. Samuel's older wording can obscure that distinction.

Nietzsche contrasts this with Stendhal's description of beauty as a promise of happiness. Beauty might awaken desire and expectation instead of suspending them. The contrast gives him a way to question whether one spectator's response has been made the measure of aesthetic experience.

He also invokes desire before statues and the figure of Pygmalion. These examples challenge a picture of aesthetic spectatorship sealed off from erotic feeling. They do not, without further argument, refute every distinction Kant draws between kinds of pleasure.

We are reading Nietzsche's contentious presentation of these positions, rather than a neutral summary of each thinker's complete aesthetics. His question is nevertheless precise: what experiences have entered the definition, and which have been excluded?

An interest in escaping interest

Schopenhauer's case adds a twist. Nietzsche presents aesthetic contemplation as relief from the torment of willing, especially sexual desire. Schopenhauer's praise of the state is intensely personal: a temporary release from pressure becomes an experience of extraordinary value.

Nietzsche attends to the tone and imagery of that praise, including rest from ceaseless labor and release from torment. He then asks whether a whole philosophical account has generalized from a particular kind of relief.

Even if contemplation has precisely that effect for Schopenhauer, would it establish the nature of beauty? Stendhal's different response suggests another possibility: beauty can heighten a desire for life rather than quiet it.

The final challenge is that Schopenhauer has a powerful interest in becoming free from the distress of interest. The relief that seems to suspend personal desire matters to him for a personal reason. Nietzsche makes that tension into a first clue about the philosopher's attraction to ascetic ideals.

Neither the psychological reconstruction nor the physiological comparisons constitute established findings about sexuality or artistic experience. The section proposes motives and competing effects that would need examination. It does not give us one account that automatically explains every encounter with beauty.

Pause here: Think of an artwork that calms you and one that increases your desire to act or experience something. Does the difference support two effects of art, two kinds of viewer, or something else? State what your examples cannot establish.

A difficulty to keep in view

Does discovering what an ideal does for someone tell us whether the ideal is justified?

The opening investigations concern several different relationships. A practice may support intellectual work; a theory may increase an artist's authority; an aesthetic experience may relieve distress. None of these functions alone settles the truth of a doctrine or the value of every action performed under it.

But the function can matter to a claim of authority. If an account presents itself as wholly impersonal while quietly making one person's relief its standard, the proposed explanation exposes something the account needs to address.

That is different from declaring every personally useful belief false. A reason can arise through an experience and still withstand scrutiny. We need to ask whether the experience supports the conclusion's reach.

Nietzsche must meet the same demand. His generalizations about women and artists, his contrast between healthy and failed people, and his reconstruction of Schopenhauer's desires cannot be accepted simply because they fit his polemic.

Keep three questions beside each case: What is given up? What does giving it up enable? What reasons justify the ideal attached to the practice? Answering the second can change the third without completing it.

Check your understanding

Try answering before opening each suggested response.

What should I write in my notes?

Write 200–300 words comparing two meanings of renunciation. Use one case from III §§1–5 and the account of aesthetic relief in §6.

1. Identify what is restrained or relinquished in each case. Distinguish the practice from the ideal used to explain it.
2. Explain what the renunciation might enable, relieve, or authorize. Mark Nietzsche's proposed motive as an interpretation where appropriate.
3. Identify the evidence needed to connect the person's experience with the larger claim being made.
4. Apply the artist–work distinction or the distinction between an effect and a definition of beauty.
5. Conclude with one reason to retain, revise, or question the ideal, while recognizing what its personal usefulness leaves unsettled.

A successful response compares functions without assuming that all sacrifice means hostility to life. It also gives reasons for its judgment instead of letting a psychological suspicion do all the work.

Continue the reading

Reading 9: Can Knowledge Escape Its Own Perspective? →

Next we read III §§7–12. Nietzsche asks how ascetic arrangements can support a philosopher's flourishing, how philosophy developed within an ascetic disguise, and how objectivity could work without an entirely disinterested knower.

Carry this question forward: If a perspective has interests and a history, what would make it a better or worse way of knowing? The answer will require more than exposing the origin of someone else's convictions.

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