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Not Your Grandfather’s Genealogy: How to Read GM III

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Notes

  1. Christopher Janaway, “Nietzsche’s illustration of the Art of Exegesis,” European Journal of Philosophy 5:3 (1997): 252–268; John Wilcox, “What Aphorism Does Nietzsche Explicate in Genealogy of Morals, Essay III?,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 35:4 (1997): 593–610.

  2. “Unconcerned, mocking, violent—thus wisdom wants us: she is a woman and always loves only a warrior” (Z I: “On Reading and Writing”).

  3. Janaway, op. cit., p. 253; Daniel Conway, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008), p. 149.

  4. For admissions of difficulty, see Lawrence Hatab, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 115 and 125; for instances of fault-finding, see Aaron Ridley, Nietzsche’s Conscience (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 49, 63, 99, and Brian Leiter, Nietzsche On Morality (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 267 and 283.

  5. Conway, op. cit., p. 100; David Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007), p. 113.

  6. Leiter, Chapter Eight, and Hatab, Chapter Five, stick closer to Nietzsche’s text, and their interpretations (and also those of Conway and Owen) deal with much that I leave untouched here. Like Janaway and Wilcox, in the articles cited above, I aim here to lay out some structural ground rules for further work on GM III.

  7. In “Sensuality and its Discontents: Philosophers, Priests and Ascetic Ideals in the Genealogy of Morals,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 44.2 (2013) I remarked that “[l]ike GM as a whole GM III tightly weaves together historical analysis and polemical animadversion” (323). In the present paper, I expand on this point, showing in greater detail how the Genealogy as a whole, and its individual essays, interweave analytic and evaluative concerns. Insofar as my earlier statement gives no impression of the degree to which GM III differs from GM I and II in just this respect, it now seems to me to stand in need of the amplification and qualification provided by this paper.

  8. This phrase may have a hint of redundancy about it, but I can think of no better form of words. The point is that there are two contrasts involved here: one between explaining and judging; the other between tracing something back to its roots and assessing its present value.

  9. As Raymond Geuss points out the tracing of a pedigree is an example of non-philosophical genealogy in a vindicating mode. See “Nietzsche and Genealogy”, in his Morality, Culture and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 3. The characteristic point of establishing a pedigree, whether for a noble family or a thoroughbred horse, is to validate the specimen in question (foal or baby) by reference to the longevity and purity of its blood line. On the general idea of vindicating genealogies, see Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), Chapter Two. For an understanding of the relation of causation to justification that provides philosophical genealogy with its epistemological underpinnings, see Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry: A Pragmatist Reconstruction of Epistemology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009/1993), Chapter Four.

  10. Oxford English Dictionary Online (www.oed.com).

  11. Translation altered. À propos the connection between the age of an institution or practice and its value, it is worth remarking that, as Nietzsche sees it, the phenomenon he undertakes to vindicate in The Birth of Tragedy had a glorious, but relatively short life; from somewhat before the birth of Aeschylus in 525 BCE to the death of Sophocles in 405 BCE.

  12. In German folklore, a kobold is a familial spirit, “haunting houses and rendering services to the inmates, but often of a tricky disposition” (OED).

  13. Translation altered.

  14. In his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant gives voice to the denigration of sensual passion in full generality, and with what might charitably be called heartfelt poignancy: “…[I]nclinations [desires rooted in sensation] … are so far from having an absolute value … that the universal wish of every rational being must be, rather, to be wholly free from them.” See Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Press, 1993/1785), p. 35; Prussian Academy Edition VI 428.

  15. Translation altered. To my knowledge no such series of prize essays ever came to be. But the question Nietzsche proposed as an example of what he had in mind—“What light does linguistics, and especially the study of etymology, throw on the developmental history of moral concepts?” (GM I:17)—has been taken up to good effect. R. G. Collingwood provides a delightful example of the perils of studying the history of ethics without attention to the ways in which moral concepts are shaped by language and culture. Remarking on the practice of discussing ancient Greek views on “the state” (polis) or “the moral ought” (dei) conducted without worrying about whether the Greek words in question can be smoothly translated by their standard equivalents in modern languages, he says the following: “It was like having a nightmare about a man who had got it into his head that trieres was the Greek for “steamer”, and when it was pointed out to him that descriptions of triremes in Greek writers were at any rate not very good descriptions of steamers, replied triumphantly, ‘That is just what I say. These Greek philosophers … were terribly muddle-headed, and their theory of steamers is all wrong’.” See R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978/1939), p. 64.

  16. According to the OED, the term “altruism” entered English as a translation of “altruisme”, “said to have been used by Auguste Comte or his followers since the 1830s”. That the ancient world was not worried by conflicts between altruism and egoism is shown by its lack of awareness of what, to modern philosophers, is an obvious defect of the characteristic ancient philosophical aspiration of showing people that the best, most fulfilling way of life for them is a life of justice and virtue. By altruistic standards, justifying morality by reference to enlightened self-interest is egoistic, and insofar wrongheaded or worse; the point of morality (at least a crucial dimension of it) is to pay due respect to the interests of others. For a critique of Aristotle’s ethics on the grounds that the sort of person it identifies as a model of virtue is a repulsive narcissist, see Thomas Hurka, “Aristotle on Virtue: Wrong, Wrong, and Wrong,” in Julia Peters (ed.), Aristotelian Ethics in Contemporary Perspective (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 9–26.

  17. It is worth noting that the sort of altruism Thomas Nagel aims to vindicate in his The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970)—namely, a “mere […] willingness to act in consideration of the interests of other persons without the need of ulterior motives” (pp. 78, 79)—is something distinctly weaker than what I have in mind here. The phenomenon Nagel is interested in could well be exhibited by Nietzschean nobles and Homeric heroes with respect to peers, even if they saw no reason to act in consideration of the interests of anyone else. This is why I have labelled the target of GM I the morality of egalitarian altruism; a morality that takes respect for the needs of others to be morally insufficient if it extends only to a preferred set of others.

  18. Translation altered. For useful information on who these English psychologists are, see Clark and Swensen’s edition of GM (On the Genealogy of Morality [Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Press, 1998], end note 9: 1, p. 129). In the first instance, Nietzsche probably has in mind thinkers who are associationist in their psychology and utilitarian in their ethics: Hume, Hartley, Hutcheson, Bentham, and Mill for example. Clark and Swensen suggest further that he may be referring to “his own ‘ancestors’” in the form of ideas he had put forward in Human, All Too Human and Daybreak.

  19. Translation altered.

  20. In my view, both these invocations include an element of self-reference, but I will not insist on that here. That Zarathustra can at least arguably be regarded as an alter-ego for Nietzsche seems to me hard to deny; and in “‘A Promise Made is a Debt Unpaid’: Nietzsche on the Morality of Commitment and the Commitments of Morality,” in Ken Gemes and John Richardson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook to Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), I present the evidence for thinking that when Nietzsche speaks in praise of the sovereign individual he is, amongst other things, speaking in praise of himself.

  21. The interlude from §§ 11–15 contains a critique of Eugen Dühring’s views on the relationship between justice and revenge (§11), and an independent genealogy of punishment (§§12–15).

  22. In German the word Schuld is (now) ambiguous between “debt” and “guilt”. To make Nietzsche’s point in English, we would use the word “ought”, which, as the OED tells us, was originally the past tense of the verb “owe”.

  23. Cf. D 13, Towards the re-education of the human race: “Men of application and goodwill assist in this one work: to take the concept of punishment which has overrun the whole world and root it out! There exists no more noxious weed”; and D 202, For the Promotion of Health, on “our detestable criminal codes, with their shopkeeper’s scales and the desire to counterbalance guilt with punishment”.

  24. Translation altered.

  25. “At this point”, the phrase that introduces this sentence (in German “an dieser Stelle”) is also used to begin GM I:12; it seems to function as a formula for redoubling and refocussing the reader’s attention.

  26. Translation altered.

  27. To adapt the title of a book by T. M. Scanlon.

  28. “When would [men of ressentiment] achieve the ultimate, subtlest, most sublime triumph of revenge? Undoubtedly if they succeeded in poisoning the consciences of the fortunate with their own misery, so that one day they began to be ashamed of their happiness and said to themselves: ‘it’s a scandal to be happy, there is too much misery’” (GM III:14).

  29. As we shall see below, Nietzsche raises the question of the power of the ascetic ideal explicitly in GM III:23.

  30. This is the phrase I excised from the passage from EH above.

  31. This term doesn’t smoothly go into a single English word: “intellectual-spirituality”, or “spiritual-intellectuality”, get the gist well enough.

  32. From class notes sent to the author.

  33. Silas Weir-Mitchell (1829–1914) was an American physician and writer whose influential “rest cure” was based on work with soldiers from the American Civil War suffering from nerve damage. Conceived as a strategy for overcoming “neurasthenia and hysteria”, it was based on the principle that these nervous conditions were exacerbated by stressful environments.

  34. Commentators on the Genealogy have expressed frustration with Nietzsche’s account of priests. Aaron Ridley thinks it evident that “Nietzsche … finds it difficult to keep the priest in his place”, since he seems to be “a noble whose mode of evaluation is the ‘opposite’ of the knights and who is yet no slave” (in Ridley, op. cit., p. 49); and Henry Staten writes that Nietzsche is both “drawn” by the ascetic will of the ascetic priest, and “repelled” by it (in Henry Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice [Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1990], p. 60). This line of criticism loses force when the distinction between priests as such and ascetic priests in particular, and the correspondingly different aims of Nietzsche’s discussion of priests in GM I and of the ascetic priest in GM III, are properly appreciated. In GM I, the power of the priest is measured in sociological terms; in GM III the power of the ascetic priest is measured in psychological and intellectual terms. Sociologically speaking, priests have status, which accounts for their being a species of noble; intellectually, the ascetic priest furthers the ends of the slave revolt in morality in his own distinctive way.

  35. Note the way Nietzsche subtly connects the English psychologists, who are interesting as human riddles despite the worthlessness of their books, with priests, who help make human beings into interesting animals, at a tremendous psychic and intellectual cost.

  36. I agree here with Janaway, op. cit., p. 257 and disagree with Wilcox, op. cit., p. 606, who maintains that Nietzsche “leav[es] out a separate discussion of scholars”.

  37. Janaway, Wilcox, and Hatab (following Christa Acampora) all claim to find discussions of women and saints in GM III. While women are mentioned in passing in GM III:14, I find it very far-fetched to think that Nietzsche’s treatment of the meaning of ascetic ideals for them, or for saints, is anywhere near on a par with his treatment of the meaning of such ideals for artists, philosopher, priests, and scholars. But I won’t have time to argue this point in detail here.

  38. The crucial elements in the plot of Parsifal needed to understand Nietzsche’s points here seem to me to be these: that it was because Amfortas, the leader of the Knights of the Grail, “yielded to the beguilements of the enchantress Kundry” (Percy Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955], p. 767) that he later suffered a wound which sets everything in motion; and that the opera’s happy ending is brought about by the “guileless” Parsifal’s ability to resist Kundry’s attempts to seduce him.

  39. In what follows I shall be deliberately “flexible” about differences in meaning between “sensuality” and “sexuality”. To restrict myself to “sexuality” would be unacceptably narrow; to restrict myself to “sensuality” would miss the role of sexuality as a kind of cynosure of sensual activity and enjoyment.

  40. Wagner “drafted a scenario … of a drama on the subject of Luther’s marriage” in August of 1869, and returned to it “at a significant point in the writing of Parsifal.” See Curt von Westernhagen, Wagner: A Biography, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 403.

  41. Defined by the OED as “the fact or quality of merely willing wishing, or desiring, without any effort or advance towards action or realization”.

  42. In the opinion of Curt von Westernhagen, this ‘doctrinaire’ view of Nietzsche’s reveals his “inability to understand [Wagner’s] multitudinous soul”—which prompts me to say explicitly that in the present context, the justice of Nietzsche’s interpretation of Wagner here is neither here nor there; I aim in this paper, not to defend Nietzsche but to explain him. See Westernhagen, op. cit., p. 542.

  43. This is the one occurrence of the noun phrase “ascetic ideal” with an indefinite article, referred to above. Kaufmann, normally reliable, mistranslates “einem asketischem Ideal” as “the ascetic ideal” (as if Nietzsche had written “dem asketischem Ideal”, a form of words that occurs just eight lines down the page from the remark in question).

  44. “One should recall”, Nietzsche remarks, “how enthusiastically Wagner at one time followed in the footsteps of the philosopher Feuerbach: Feuerbach’s cry of ‘healthy sensuality’ … sounded … to Wagner … like a cry of redemption” (GM III:3).

  45. This idea is given unparalleled expression in the philosophy of Schopenhauer, according to which restless desire is the essence of being itself!

  46. Cf. Schopenhauer: “If we compare life to a circular path of red-hot coals having a few cool places, … then the man entangled in delusion is comforted by the cool place on which he is just now standing, or which he sees near him…. But the man who … recognizes the true nature of things-in-themselves steps off the path altogether. The World as Will and Representation I, trans. E.F. J. Payne, (New York: Dover Books, 1969/1818), §68.

  47. “If one has grasped … that it cannot be the task of the healthy to nurse the sick and make them well, then one has also grasped one further necessity—the necessity of doctors and nurses who are themselves sick; and now we understand the meaning of the ascetic priest and grasp it with both hands” (GM III:15).

  48. In Plato’s Phaedo, Cebes is prompted to ask Socrates why “those for whom it is better to die are wrong to help themselves”, and is offered in reply an explanation “put in the language of the mysteries”, to the effect that “we men are in a kind of prison” from which we must not “free [ourselves] or run away” (in Plato, Five Dialogues, trans. G. M. A. Grube [Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Press, 2002], p. 99/Stephanus 62a-b).

  49. See Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Philippe Sellier (Paris: Pocket, 2003/1670), pp. 80–84.

  50. Denis Diderot (Oeuvres Philosophiques [Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1990/1746], p. 68) observed that an Imam could reason in just the way Pascal does. If Pascal’s goal in the wager argument is to warrant Roman Catholic Christian faith in particular, this is a serious objection to the cogency of his reasoning. But the perspective Nietzsche opens up in GM III suggests a pluralistic version of Pascal’s argument that makes Diderot’s point irrelevant. On this reading of Pascal, the aim is to show that belief in some version or other of the ascetic ideal is rationally mandated, not to support one particular version over all others.

  51. See note 29 above.

  52. “The ascetic priest must be deemed the predestined savior, shepherd, and advocate of the sick herd: only thus can we understand his immense historical task” (GM III:15).

  53. The German “Wissenschaft” is significantly broader than the English “science”. In modern English, it is now routine to distinguish “science” from “scholarship”. But in German there is no such contrast; it’s all Wissenschaft.

  54. “Solomon’s Proverbs, I think, have omitted to say that as the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendoes.” George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Gregory Maertz (Peterborough ON: Broadview Press, 2004), Ch. 31.

  55. W.K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” in T. Madigan (ed.), The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays (Amherst, MA: Prometheus), pp. 70–96, p. 77.

  56. For a detailed rebuttal of the thesis that belief that is epistemically unjustified is eo ipso morally criticizable, see Susan Haack, “‘The Ethics of Belief’ Reconsidered,” in Lewis Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of Roderick Chishom (Chicago/LaSalle: The Open Court, 1997), pp. 129–144.

  57. Clifford, op. cit., p. 77.

  58. An earlier version of this paper was presented under the title “The Trail of the Ascetic Serpent: Towards an Exposition of GM III” at Guelph University’s conference on Nietzsche and Virtue in October 2013. I’m grateful to the organizers of that conference, especially John Hacker-Wright and Dan Harris, for the occasion, which was a model of a fruitful intellectual exchange among scholars approaching similar things from different directions. Susan Haack read many versions of the present paper up to the bitter end, and is responsible for a host of improvements; and I would also like to thank David Dick, Adrian Currie, Noa Latham, and, especially, Jessica Berry for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

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Correspondence to Mark Migotti.

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I have employed parenthetical citations of Nietzsche’s works using the following abbreviations. I have often altered the translations, and have indicated this in footnotes when the difference between my translation and the published translation is especially significant. References to the Genealogy of Morals are by essay number in Roman numerals and section number in Arabic numerals, with “P” designating the preface to the book.

BGE Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann, (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).

D Daybreak, eds. M. Clark and B. Leiter, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

EH Ecce Homo, ed. and trans. W. Kaufmann, (New York: Vintage Books, 1969).

GM On The Genealogy of Morals, ed. W. Kaufmann, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1969).

HH Human, All Too Human, trans. M. Faber with S. Lehman (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).

Z Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).

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Migotti, M. Not Your Grandfather’s Genealogy: How to Read GM III. J Value Inquiry 49, 329–351 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-015-9492-y

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