The Dawn of Day

Published in 1881 and originally translated as The Dawn of Day (now usually rendered Daybreak), this is the book where Nietzsche begins his sustained assault on the moral instincts — not on this or that morality, but on the credibility of moral feeling itself. Across five books of crisp aphorisms he probes the genealogy of guilt, pity, ambition, and self-denial, often in the same paragraph. Nietzsche himself called it the book where his campaign against morality first becomes coherent. Translated by J. M. Kennedy.