Selflessness The Struggle with Schopenhauer
The issue for me was the value ofmorality—and over this I had to struggle almost solely with my great teacher Schopenhauer [...] In particular the issue was the value of the unegoistic, of the instincts of compassion, self-denial, self-sacrifice, precisely the instincts that Schopenhauer had gilded, deified, and made otherworldly until finally they alone were left for him as the 'values in themselves', on the basis of which he said 'no' to life, also to himself.
Nietzsche here writes in the past tense because he is describing the underlying motive ('the passion and the secret contradiction') of his earlier book Human, All Too Human. But how much is the aftermath of that struggle visible in the Genealogy and how much is the struggle still being fought? Schopenhauer makes an appearance in the Third Treatise of the Genealogy as a psychological case study, the paradigmatic philosophical exponent of the ascetic ideal whose advocacy of asceticism is driven by a powerful will to escape his own sexual desires (GM III. 6), and later in the same treatise his theory of an extreme objectivity attained in will-less experience is set up to be superseded by Nietzsche's perspectivism.1 Schopenhauer has no explicit presence in the other two treatises on 'good and evil' and 'guilt and bad conscience', but if we pause to examine Schopenhauer's own treatment of these ethical topics in On the Basis of Morality and the Fourth Book of The World as Will and Representation, we may stand to deepen our understanding of the equation of morality
1 GM III. 12: the 'pure will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge'—on which, see Chs. 11 and 12 below.
with the 'unegoistic' or selflessness that defines Nietzsche's central target throughout the Genealogy.2
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