But in a later passage from Ecce Homo, Nietzsche explains his choice of the name “Zarathustra” for the protagonist in what he considered his crowning achievement. The first essay of GM appears to identify Greek and Roman occupied Judea as the particular historical-geographical context for this ‘slave revolt’ in values: “with the Jews there begins the slave revolt in morality” ( GM, I: §7 cf. However, there are tensions in Nietzsche’s story about when this morality emerged. It is out of this mechanism of social oppression and hatred that contemporary values-such as pity, equality, humility, justice, and so forth-were born. The sentiments of hatred and a desire for revenge, Nietzsche claims, eventually led to a subtle but profound inversion of the aristocratic values which dominated the social plain. In the first of its three essays, Nietzsche proffers a causal story of the origins this phenomenon in terms of the ressentiment of an enfeebled social class towards their aristocratic oppressors. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals ( GM) embarks upon an ambitious project to account for the roots of, and continued commitment to, the various manifestations of contemporary European morality.
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