 The Genealogy’s Third Treatise explores the intensification of such self-punishment via the idealization of asceticism. Ascetic self-denial is a curious phenomenon. (Indeed, on certain psychological assumptions, like descriptive psychological egoism or ordinary hedonism, it seems incomprehensible.) But it is nevertheless strikingly widespread in the history of religious practice. The Genealogy misses no chance to criticize religious versions of asceticism, but its target is broader—including, specifically, the more rational form asceticism takes in Schopenhauer’s ethics. What unifies the different versions is their extension of the valorization of self-discipline in the interest of virtue (which Nietzsche himself would advocate) into a thoroughgoing form of self-condemnation, in which self-discipline is turned against the agent herself and comes to express the person’s commitment to her own fundamental worthlessness. (One obvious route to such a value system, though far from the only one, is for the moralist to identify a set of drives and desires that people are bound to have—perhaps rooted in their human or animal nature—and to condemn those as evil; anti-sensualist forms of asceticism follow this path.)