Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) often asks a different question from “Is this moral value true?” He asks where did this value come from, what kind of life produced it, and what does it do to the people who live by it? This historical/psychological mode is his genealogical critique.

Big idea: Values have histories. Treating inherited morality as timeless can hide the psychological and social forces that created it.

The “death of God” is not a triumphant one-line proof of atheism. It is a cultural diagnosis: European moral and intellectual life had increasingly undermined the Christian-metaphysical framework that supplied ultimate authority, while continuing to rely on many of its inherited values. The resulting danger is nihilism — loss of convincing grounds for value and meaning.

Nietzsche contrasts forms of morality, famously master and slave morality, to explore how power, resentment (ressentiment), strength, vulnerability, and social reversal shape moral vocabularies. These are provocative genealogical models, not neutral anthropology.

His Übermensch is often mangled into a racial or comic-book “superman.” In context it is connected to overcoming inherited values and creating/affirming new forms of life, not a Nazi racial ideal. Nietzsche himself died before Nazism; later appropriation was aided by selective editing and political use of his work.