ABSTRACT
Nietzsche's mature writings, and the Genealogy in particular, aim to release the reader from the 'illness' allegedly manifest in adhering to moral evaluations of a Christian or post-Christian nature. Art can reveal truths even if it also lies with a good conscience. So Nietzsche can proceed in a manner akin to that of an artist without losing his claim to put forward truths about the origins of our values. A new direction was of course evident in Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy, which is intended to be somewhat artistic in style and is preoccupied with art ancient and modern (and which was accordingly vilified by the academic establishment). But it was through the sequence of works Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science that Nietzsche developed his mature style. Nietzsche moved towards a rhetoric of imaginative provocation of the affects, and that certain aspects of this mode of writing flow naturally from his descriptive moral psychology.
