New APPS

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

This is the second installment of my series of posts with different sections of the paper on conceptual genealogy that I am working on. Part I is here; a tentative abstract of 2 years ago, detailing the motivation for the project, is here. 

I now present some of the basics of Nietzschean genealogy which will then be central for my general project. The goal here is thus not to offer a thorough account of Nietzsche's thought on the matter, obviously (a lifelong project!), but it should still be an accurate presentation of some aspects of it. If that is not the case, please do let me know! (I rely mostly on Geuss' and Leiter's interpretations.) Feedback in general is more than welcome.

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The mundane, commonsensical sense of genealogy is typically related to the idea of vindication, i.e. of validation of one’s authority through the narrative of one’s origins. This is particularly conspicuous in historical disputes for political power within the traditional monarchic model: a contestant has a claim to the throne if she can prove to be a descendent of the right people, namely previous monarchical power-holders. In such cases, a genealogy is what Geuss (1994, 274) describes as ‘tracing a pedigree’, a practice as old as (Western?) civilization itself. The key idea is the idea of transmission of value: a person with noble ancestry inherits this status from her ancestors.

But a genealogy may also have more neutral implications: perhaps a person’s ancestors are not particularly distinguished or noble, but she may still wish to know where she ‘comes from’. In the limit case, a genealogy may also be of the shameful kind, e.g. if what transpires from genealogical analysis is that a person’s ancestors had dubious social standing (e.g. convicted thieves). In theory, none of it should matter for a person’s individual worth, and yet in practice we tend to attach a great deal of importance to a person’s ancestry (e.g. the mythical status of the Mayflower pilgrims and their descendants in the United States).

In this sense, a genealogy is a narrative with no gaps: a person’s genealogy is a detailed account of her ancestry, which specifies every relevant parent-offspring step in the chain. (Naturally, it will have to stop at some point back in the past, usually at the person who is then viewed as the founder of the dynasty in question, even though this person obviously had parents as well.) Typically, a genealogy may focus on the transmission of a family’s surname through generations, thus indicating continuity and transmission (of positive value in particular, e.g. nobility).[2] At the same time, a genealogy will always contain an element of change as well, if nothing else because parents and offspring are by definition different individuals. In effect, the interplay between continuity and change is one of the fundamental aspects of the concept of genealogy for the present purposes.

But naturally, this is not a study of genealogies of people: instead, we are interested in genealogies of (philosophical) concepts and values, and thus in their development through time. The idea that thought itself is a historical beast rather than immutable and a-temporal can be traced back (at least) to the German historicist tradition, which emerged in the 18^th century (Beiser 2011). Nietzsche’s genealogical approach falls squarely within this tradition, even if his own interpretation of historicism in terms of genealogy is arguably quite unique to him.

For the present purposes, it will prove instructive to compare Nietzsche’s historicism to that of Hegel,[3] who famously said:

As far as the individual is concerned, each individual is in any case a child of his time, thus, philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts. (Hegel 1820/1991, 21)

This implies that different times/contexts will give rise to different instantiations of philosophical concepts; thus, philosophical concepts themselves will change over time, following more global changes of contexts. However, Hegel’s conception of history in general, and of the history of concepts in particular, is teleological: things could not have taken a different turn, as temporal developments follow an inevitable path. And so, from this perspective, historical analysis tracing the different steps in the evolution of a concept and their mutual relations – a conceptual genealogy – will not have the effect of decreasing the value of the concept in question to us: when there are no other options, there is nothing to compare it against. And so, if anything, Hegel’s genealogy of thought (if we can call it such) is of the vindicatory kind, reinforcing its authority rather than undermining it (Srinivasan draft, 2).

Despite the dominant historicist background in 19^th century Germany, Nietzsche is usually seen as the inaugurator of a new approach, namely what can be described as the subversive variant of genealogical projects.[4] In his On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), he famously offers a genealogy of Christian morality that is meant to expose its ‘shameful’ origins. Rather than comprising eternal, immutable moral precepts, Christian morality is in fact the product of contingent historical developments, more specifically a conjunction of a number of diverse lines of events (Geuss 1994, 276). Specifically, Christian morality arises from the resentment of slaves directed against their masters, having thus distinctively bloody, cruel origins (while currently presenting itself as pure and magnanimous).

Besides the idea of a confluence of multiple lines of development, another crucial characteristic of Nietzsche’s concept of genealogy for the present purposes is the idea of a superposition of layers through processes of re-interpretation of previously existing practices, giving rise to new practices which nevertheless retain traces of their previous instantiations. The first significant step in this succession of reinterpretations is the influential conception of Christianity developed by Saint Paul, which represents however a drastic departure from the way of life exemplified by Jesus himself.[5]

Paul’s ‘interpretation’ represents so drastic and crude a misinterpretation of Jesus’ way of life that even at a distance of 2000 years we can see that wherever the Pauline reading gets the upper hand […] it transforms ‘Christianity’ […] into what is the exact reverse of anything Jesus himself would have practiced. (Geuss 1994, 280)

However, such processes of re-interpretation never manage to quash entirely traces of the original practices:

Nietzsche thinks that such attempts to take over/reinterpret an existing set of practices or way of life will not in general be so fully successful that nothing of the original form of life remains, hence the continuing tension in post-Pauline Christianity between forms of acting, feeling, judging which still somehow eventually derive from aboriginal Christianity and Paul’s theological dogmas. (Geuss 1994, 281)

Central to Nietzsche’s genealogy of Christianity is the idea of constant power struggles between different ‘wills’, attempting to impose their own interpretations and meanings on the practices in question. But even when a particular new meaning manages to impose itself, the old meaning(s) will remain present, albeit in modified, residual form, in the resulting complex. Later on, we will see that this is very much what happens in the historical development of philosophical concepts: they undergo modifications, but the superimposed layers of meaning retain traces of their previous stages and instantiations even when acquiring a new meaning. 

And so, Nietzschean genealogy is characterized by the crucial interplay between continuity and change; indeed, how can we say that a genealogy is a genealogy of X if there is nothing permanent at all in the phenomenon in question through time? As Leiter puts it, how do we fix the object? He continues:

Genealogy, then, presupposes that its object has a stable or essential[6] character – its Brauch – that permits us to individuate it intelligibly over time. What the genealogist denies is that this stable element is to be located in the object’s purpose or value or meaning (its Sinn); it is precisely that feature which is discontinuous from point of origin to present-day embodiment.[7] (Leiter 2015, 136)

Thus, change and continuity are crucial in a genealogy. In summary, the components of the Nietzschean conception of genealogy that are particularly relevant for our present purposes are: a particular historicist conception of concepts and values; the emphasis on the contingency of the underlying historical developments (i.e. contingentist historicism, different from Hegel’s teleological historicism), usually involving multiple lines of influence; the superimposition of layers of meaning, resulting in both change (the new meaning) and continuity (traces of the old meanings still present, and continuity in the phenomenon as such).[8] In contrast, Nietzsche’s focus on ‘shameful genealogy’ is best kept apart for the present purposes; it will be argued later on that conceptual genealogy of philosophical concepts can be either vindicatory or subversive – and perhaps even largely neutral, i.e. expository.