This opening chapter introduces Nietzsche's primary aims: genealogy and revaluation of values. Genealogy is the attempt to explain current moral feelings and beliefs by tracing their origins to generic psychological states — typically drives and affects — in past human beings that caused our present attitudes via forms of cultural mediation. The values Nietzsche wishes to call into question centre around forms of selflessness. It is argued that the polemic of the Genealogy attacks not only morality, but his two named opponents in the Preface of the Genealogy, Schopenhauer and Rée, for their construal of morality as selflessness. Genealogy is instrumental towards a revaluation of values, in which positive value would cease to be assigned to being ‘unegoistic’. Both genealogy and revaluation presuppose arousal of affects, and the prevailing conception of philosophy as dispassionate and impersonal is, for Nietzsche, another manifestation of the promotion of selflessness that he finds in morality.
Keywords: genealogy, morality, Rée, revaluation of values, Schopenhauer, selflessness, unegoistic