Abstract
Whenever a reader of Nietzsche confronts the problem of genealogy, it is tempting for her to assume that she is in familiar country. As we read in the Preface to On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic from 1887, the aim of genealogy is to mount ‘a critique of moral values and the value of those values’ by reconstructing ‘an actual history of morality’, the sources for which are to be found in ‘what is documented, what can actually be confirmed and has actually existed, in short the entire long hieroglyphic record, so hard to decipher, of the moral past of mankind’.1 Genealogy tracks large expanses of time, millennia that one can actually count. Here we finally come to grips with agents who are driven by urges that at least approximate to passions and instincts, as opposed to those ghostly agencies of the will to power straining to exert themselves against the background of some metaphysical and barely imaginable flux.2 However unsettling it may prove as a cultural diagnosis, genealogy at least provides the solace of a story with a familiar plot, one easily and intuitively followed: it is the well-worn tale of human decline and hoped-for redemption. Indeed, here the familiar becomes almost banal, a repetition of itself, or as Nietzsche would say, ‘grey’. At the extreme, genealogy is Nietzsche’s least original theory, in ways not much different from Homeric and Hesiodic mythology, the Judaeo-Christian story of the fall, or Marxian anthropology.
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Notes
F. Nietzsche, ‘On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic’, in On The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, translated by W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), Pref. 7 (hereafter GM), references by essay and paragraph (or ‘Pref.’) alone will be to this work.
See J. I. Porter, ‘Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will to Power’, in K. Ansell-Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 548–564.
M. Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, translated by D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–164, 139; cf. ‘The role of genealogy is to record … the history of morals, ideals, and metaphysical concepts, the history of the concept of liberty or of the ascetic life,’ ibid., 152. Similarly, Nehamas notes that genealogy is ‘an effort to take history itself very seriously and to find it where it has least been expected to be. … [Genealogy] tries to show how the way in which [those institutions and practices, like morality] undergo changes as a result of historical development’
(A. Nehamas, Nietzsche, Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 112). According to MacIntyre, genealogy traces ‘the historical genesis of the psychological deformation involved in the morality of the late nineteenth century’
(A. C. MacIntyre, ‘Genealogies and Subversions’, in ibid., Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 33–57, 39).
Cf. F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, translated by W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 345 (hereafter GS).
Cf. F. Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 42 and 44.
F. Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), I, 2 (hereafter UM). The desire for undisturbed ‘complacency’ that motivates historical consciousness is what a year later is called ‘an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate’ (UM II, 3). See
J. I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford, CA: Stanford University 2000).
F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1, 452.
The following remark from Rée’s Preface to Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen [The Origin of Moral Sentiments] (Chemnitz: Schmeitzner, 1877), sets the tone for what follows it: ‘The moral man stands no closer to the intelligible world than the physical man’ (viii). In the sequel, Rée offers demystifying insights into the retroactive derivation of moral concepts, intuitions, and values; into moral freedom (as an illusory construct); the ethics of blame into ascetic hypocrisy; notions of the Beyond; and the belief, which is purely an assuagement, that mankind is not invariably and universally driven by egoistic motives. Moral values, he holds, are mere feelings and unnatural habituations, indeed mere errors and lies; ‘in themselves’ actions and consequences have no intrinsic value, utility, benefit or harm.
See J. I. Porter, ‘Nietzsche et les charmes de la métaphysique: “La logique du sentiment”’, Revue germanique internationale, 11, 1999, 157–172.
A former close friend and companion since their days at Basel, Rée was intellectually in Nietzsche’s debt, so much so that he inscribed a copy of his book, which he gave to Nietzsche, with the following: ‘To the father of this essay, most gratefully from its mother,’ cited after W. Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 50 n. 28. Disowning any affinity to Rée (‘perhaps I have never read anything to which I would have said to myself No, proposition by proposition, conclusion by conclusion’, Pref. 4), Nietzsche is effectively writing against some of his own ideas as they appear in Rée’s genealogy (whether he inspired them or not — presumably he did) and then reaffirming them again, in a different form, in his own genealogy.
Quoted in R. Hayman, Nietzsche, A Critical Life (New York: Oxford University Press 1980), 204.
See J. I. Porter, ‘Unconscious Agency in Nietzsche’, Nietzsche-Studien, 27, 1998, 153–195.
In this case, of a thesis by Dühring. See GM II, 11, III, 14 and 26 contra E. Dühring’s Der Werth des Lebens (1865); and Porter, ‘Unconscious Agency in Nietzsche’, 181 with n. 56 and 184–185 with n. 163 on the uncomfortable similarities between Nietzsche and Dühring — from whom Nietzsche borrowed the terms ‘reactive’, ‘ressentiment’, and ‘übermenschlich’, inter multa alia.
Implicated, in other words, are both regimes of spectacle and regimes of a more insidiously concealed power (surveillance), to phrase this in a Foucauldian idiom that owes much to Nietzsche. See M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House 1977). Only, in Nietzsche these are not opposed as linear, historical developments, as they are in Foucault; rather, each presupposes the other.
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Porter, J.I. (2012). Nietzsche’s Genealogy as Performative Critique. In: de Boer, K., Sonderegger, R. (eds) Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230357006_8
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