IB Philosophy 10.5.7 Connections to the Core Theme and Optional Themes Key Definitions

Nietzsche's term for the systematic valuation of self-denial, suffering, and the renunciation of earthly life, expressed in religious, philosophical, and moral traditions that treat the body and its drives as obstacles to higher truth or goodness. He argues in the Third Essay of the Genealogy that the ascetic ideal paradoxically represents the will to power in disguise: the ascetic still imposes meaning on suffering and exercises control over existence, but does so by denying life rather than affirming it.

The genealogical method is Nietzsche's approach to understanding moral concepts by tracing their historical and psychological origins rather than evaluating them as timeless truths, asking how a value emerged, what human needs it serves, and whose interests it advances.

a French term Nietzsche uses to describe a specific psychological condition of suppressed resentment, envy, and hostility toward those perceived as stronger or more powerful. In his genealogy, ressentiment is the emotional origin of slave morality: the weak invert the values of the strong, redefining their own weakness as virtue and the strength of others as evil.

Nietzsche's revaluation of values (German: Umwerthung aller Werthe) is the project of critically reassessing every inherited moral assumption rather than accepting them on faith. It does not propose a new fixed moral code but calls for a new relationship to value creation, one that becomes urgent once genealogical analysis has exposed that dominant moral systems grew from ressentiment and the ascetic ideal rather than from genuine life-affirmation.

Nietzsche's concept of the will to truth identifies the unconditional drive to seek objective truth as itself a value choice grounded in asceticism rather than a neutral rational impulse, challenging us to ask whether this commitment might be a disguised form of life-denial.