Who Was Nietzsche's Genealogist

Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals is deservedly part of the ethical canon, but it is also enormously and insistently absent-minded. I'm going to first present, as a textual puzzle, a handful of forgetful moments in the first two Essays of the Genealogy. To address the puzzle, I will take up a familiar idea, that the Genealogy is both a subversive account of ethics and of what it is to be an intellectual. I will describe a strategy for reading the text that makes these out to be differently and more closely connected than they are usually taken to be. That will allow me to address a persistent worry in the secondary literature, by explaining how the Genealogy’s criticism of morality can be something other than an instance of the genetic fallacy, yet also not lapse into one or another form of moralism. On the way, I will suggest that Nietzsche's text requires us to modify one of the standard constraints on interpreting philosophical writing. First, the puzzle. You may recall that Nietzsche commences the argument of the Genealogy of Morals by criticizing another account of the origin of morality, attributed to ‘‘English psychologists’’: ‘‘‘[o]riginally... one approved unegoistic actions and called them good from the point of view of those to whom they were done, that is to say, those to whom they were useful; later one forgot how this approval originated and... felt them to be... good in themselves'’’ (1:2).1 Nietzsche objects that this account ‘‘suffers from an inherent psychological absurdity... how is this forgetting possible? ... this utility has... been an everyday experience at all times... consequently, instead of fading from consciousness, instead of becoming easily forgotten, it must have been impressed on the consciousness more and more clearly’’ (1:3). Forgetting, Nietzsche is telling us, is harder than the British Empiricists and their intellectual descendants think.2 Now you may also recall Nietzsche's account of the origin of (what he calls) slave morality: very briefly, that the priestly classes of the ancient world invented an evaluative system for the downtrodden, according to which what their masters considered virtues (think of the virtues of Homeric heros) are evil, and the postures the slaves have no choice but to adopt (servility, submissiveness, willingness to tolerate abuse, and so on) are made out to be virtues—specifically, Christian virtues. The new evaluative structure was supplemented by a fantasied afterlife, in which the slaves were to be rewarded, and their enemies punished. This account presents two related problems. The first, noticed by Rüdiger Bittner, is that the slaves compensate themselves for their suffering by inventing hell. But if the slaves have invented their revenge, they must know it's imaginary; so how can they find it satisfying? The account only makes sense if the slaves have forgotten.3 The second, noticed by Brian Leiter and others, is that of explaining how the masters could have been taken in by slave morality. One way or another, the masters have to forget an awful lot that's perfectly obvious to them: that they've never seen hell or any reason to believe in it, that the slaves or priests who are telling them about it are (they think) dishonest and untrustworthy, and that it's obviously some kind of revenge fantasy.4 Apparently, in the short space between criticizing the ‘‘English psychologists’’ and presenting his own alternative, Nietzsche has forgotten how hard forgetting is supposed to be. Nietzsche rubs it in by later referring back to the discussion of his predecessors: ‘‘To say it again—or haven't I said it yet? [i.e., I've already forgotten]—they are worthless’’ (2:4). And why worthless? Because they've forgotten the history of morality. The Genealogy’s second Essay starts out by announcing that ‘‘forgetfulness... is... an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression,’’ and that Nietzsche is going to describe how ‘‘one create[d] a memory for the human animal’’ (2:1, 3). But that description is itself incoherent. Humans are supposed to acquire a memory by being painfully trained into it. But if you don't have a memory, you can't be trained: it doesn't matter how painful it was if, next time around, you don't remember the pain.5 That is, by the time he gets to the second Essay, Nietzsche has forgotten his criticisms of the ‘‘English psychologists’’; and by the time he gets to his explanation of memory, he's forgotten what it was that needed to be explained. Perhaps the most interesting phenomemon in this neighborhood is that while readers, as we've seen, occasionally notice the local problems, they almost never keep track of the commitments Nietzsche assumes in addressing them—that is, keep track of them long enough to notice the pattern of inconsistencies. I can confirm this anecdotally: I have taught the Genealogy a number of times, occasionally to classes of over a hundred students; there have been some very bright people in these classes, and they've been quite willing to point out difficulties in Nietzsche's view. I've never had someone raise their hand and ask, apropos the trail of breadcrumbs I've just pointed out, ‘‘But didn't Nietzsche say, just a few pages back, that... ?’’ Moreover, the record is not merely anecdotal; none of the professional Nietzsche scholars seem to have noticed that Nietzsche is dangling before his readers a series of inconsistencies having to do with memory and forgetting. Nietzsche has not only forgotten; he has managed to make his readers forget, too.6 What are we to make of this? These are not by any means the only inconsistencies and sudden swerves with which the Genealogy presents us. Just for instance, in the very first phrase of the book, its author tells us that ‘‘we are unknown to ourselves,’’ and immediately follows the first-person plural pronouncement with a bit of intellectual autobiography that purports to exhibit considerable self-knowledge. Or again for instance, the Preface emphasizes the importance of ‘‘what is documented, what can actually be confirmed and has actually existed, in short the entire long heiroglyphic record, so hard to decipher, of the moral past of mankind’’ (P:7), and thus leads a first-time reader to expect carefully substantiated historical scholarship—as opposed to the Just So story which Nietzsche has attributed to English psychologists and dismissed.7 As frequent readers know, what follows is not historical scholarship at all, but another Just So story. Nietzsche even provides us with a version of the Liar Paradox: an interlocutor's query, as to just what Nietzsche thinks he is doing, receives the response that erecting an ideal requires misunderstanding and slandering reality, and sanctifying lies (2:24); since Nietzsche is clearly on the way to new ideals himself (and the point of his remark is that his new ideals will involve destroying older ones), this is tantamount to applying those descriptions to the Genealogy itself. That there are a great many such tensions and inconsistencies in Nietzsche's text will turn out to be a claim to which I am committed, and I will remark on some of those we encounter in the course of the coming argument; I am choosing to focus on the puzzle with which I began because the topic around which it is centered makes the contradictions unmistakably pointed: this is an author standing up, waving a large, brightly colored flag, and practically shouting to the skies, ‘‘I am contradicting myself!’’ Analytically trained philosophers will nonetheless object at this point that attributing contradictions to a philosophical text is uncharitable, and should be allowed only as a very last resort. (The reading isn't ‘noticed’ because it's a bad reading.) Surely we have not yet run out of resources for construing Nietzsche as consistent, and isn't becoming adept at reading Nietzsche a matter of learning to find thoughtful organization in what looks to his popular audience like exuberant chaos? So, before settling on this reading, I must construct and reject all possible alternative readings that purport to do away with the alleged inconsistencies. Instead of doing this, I will shortly discuss the application of the Principle of Charity itself, and later on, I will consider a Nietzschean strategy for short-circuiting the objection. But before I do that, I want to take up the more textual question, of what the relation between the form and the content of the Genealogy is supposed to be. The third Essay of the Genealogy purports to explain the ascetic ideal, and its most refined and extreme form, the scientific—wissenschaftlich, scholarly or academic—aspiration to truth. I do not think it is an accident or coincidence that the Genealogy is the only one of Nietzsche's mature works that looks, more or less, like traditional academic writing. (But only more or less: it is a series of three essays—Abhandlungen, better rendered as ‘‘treatises’’8—but the tone is off, and it is full of odd parenthetical digressions, eruptions of emotion, segues from topic to topic managed by ellipses, and the like.9) The Genealogy has a subtitle: it is a Streitschrift, a polemic, that is, a literary production akin to the popular books written on, for instance, the different sides of the nineteenth-century materialism debate (Streit).10 That is, it announces itself as a product of the class of persons introduced by the very first sentence of the book's Preface. ‘‘We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge’’—‘knowers’ would be a less awkward translation, and ‘intelligentsia’ or ‘knowledge workers’ might be reasonable renderings in more recent idiom—‘‘and with good reason.’’11 This announcement, at the very outset of the book, tells us that Nietzsche's agenda has to do with understanding the ‘‘knowers,’’ and it identifies the narrator of the volume as one of the intellectuals or knowledge workers: ‘‘we men of knowledge,’’ it says. To be sure, the agenda of the Genealogy is also to provide a critique of moral values (P:6), and somehow these two agendas must be connected, or turn out to be the same thing. But without yet seeing how that is the case, we can adopt as our working assumption the idea that the Genealogy is meant to exhibit the workings of a ‘‘man of knowledge.’’ I am thus agreeing with Alexander Nehamas that a productive way to approach Nietzsche's later writings is to ask who the authorial personae they project are supposed to be.12 But I differ with Nehamas on two further pertinent points. The first of these is his position that all of Nietzsche's texts jointly project a single postulated author; this is why I am adducing only passages from the Genealogy. (I will touch on my reasons for demurring towards the end of sec. 4.) The second is his insistence that the authorial persona is, in a nontrivial sense, a unified and coherent character. Nehamas has a body of theory meant to back up these views, and this is not the place to mount a full-fledged argument against it. But the reading of the Genealogy which I am advancing is meant as a first move in such a counterargument.13 If the narrative voice of the Genealogy is pointedly absent-minded, and if the Genealogy is intended to put on display the mind of, perhaps a scholar, perhaps an intellectual, then we need to ask why ‘‘men of knowledge’’ are as forgetful as all that. There are (at least) two ways of using the resources of the Nietzsche corpus to answer this question, but because I want to allow this particular text to direct the interpretation, I'm going to stick to the one that can be made out using only what the Genealogy provides.14 Suppose you have come to value what Nietzsche calls ‘‘intellectual cleanliness’’ (3:24), and it is very important to you to understand yourself to be consistent. There are, if you think about it, two ways to achieve that self-understanding. One is actually to be consistent. But this is difficult. For one thing, it requires a lot of what we might today imagine as processor time: in order to adjust your intellectual assertions and commitments when they conflict, you have to keep track of them, and check them against each other, one by one, and in combinations; all in all, it requires you to spend limited intellectual resources on searching out and correcting obvious and unobvious inconsistencies. More importantly, from Nietzsche's perspective, it involves regimenting one's internal emotional life. Nietzsche represents the person as composed of drives, and drives express themselves not merely as urges to the more visible bodily actions, but as opinion and utterance (and, a point we will get back to in a moment, evaluation). Resentment will exhibit itself not only as an urge to kick its object, but in a lower opinion of its object, as when an artist develops dismissive responses toward hostile reviewers (and perhaps adopts a new set of standards on which he does well, and the reviewers and competitors do badly). If conflicting (or anyway different) drives express themselves in conflicting opinions, then to make your theoretical views consistent, one of your drives will have to take control of the others. Overcoming this difficulty requires strength (Nietzsche's metaphor, which I am leaving undischarged), and so we can call this consistency through strength. The other way to achieve consistency as far as you are concerned, that is, to achieve the appearance of consistency, is simply to lose track of your commitments: to forget what you said earlier. This is in some ways much easier than the first option, especially if forgetting, as Nietzsche suggests in the second Essay, comes naturally. And we can now see why it does. If (certain) opinions are tied to particular drives, then when one drive surges forward with its opinion, it is also pushing competing drives (along with their associated opinions) into the as Nietzsche apropos the ascetic not of the of human consciousness is we need to another and of the mind as something like a or a to your drives and what in Nietzsche's view comes to the same thing, of one drive to the forgetting as a this consistency through Now which to the appearance of consistency consistency as far as one is can we expect the professional knowledge to to the of knowledge is the of the ascetic ideal, and the ascetic ideal from the of a it a and on the same as the ascetic a of the into the of The ascetic ideal can be for as a form of to with and in one of the Nietzsche is Moreover, is as two of in forgetting when you to forget that you don't your and a is an of that a in So we should expect intellectuals to be quite adept at forgetting, and we should not be if, by and large, the form of consistency by the ‘‘men of knowledge’’ is consistency the appearance of consistency by forgetting what one said earlier. To be sure, the appearance of consistency is not by having But recall that Nietzsche's readers by and also to notice the pattern of inconsistencies having to do with forgetting. is that that the of in the text are Nietzsche us what the or scholarly is not as and as the has it. so doing, he is also those of us who notice what is going on how we in consistency through past our own If Nietzsche's inconsistencies are not that is because his readers are by one Nietzsche's drives are put on display in his think of that odd when he announces that taken as of and that, for his own no that the suffering of all the to the for is with one painful of a single was a at the and class have long been and was becoming an emotional the Nietzsche was Or consider one of the many moments at which the author to be doing what he to be the point in the text the in values is as by The in which that description is is itself would be a good of the tone of that very And of course the or one of them, of the Genealogy is a of But just the of authorial and description could be to make the reader how far he can take the text at Nietzsche swerves into the of that has been on against into with what the have against was a at the which is to say that it was to and a Nietzsche is pushing his he his drives, they in his readers, their drives to the drives the opinions associated with them, and so the opinions associated with That is, his can be to forget because they emotional As Nietzsche us in the second Essay, the a of or to drive the into the out of the even the most the to my reading that from the Principle of are when they are and the Principle of Charity requires one not to contradictions to a text that is at all now in a position to explain why that response is a and to do we need to ask a that has almost out of our philosophical be philosophers are trained to and the if you ask almost any professional for a get but not an But we should not the we were taught in merely by The Principle of Charity was into our literary in the as an for one text in The with a of and so the was by knowledge that the of could not and could not That is, the of the Principle was by a of the text that made it its I have just that we have in of us a text to exhibit a particular at That we know from the historical account Nietzsche is us, is one for whom consistency should be and the of consistency almost That is, the very of that the Principle of Charity view about the of the text to which it is to be in this case, not applying the For a text to exhibit the of a to should be to exhibit and we should not it against the of such a text that they are I do not to suggest that the reading of the Genealogy which I have been is or of course there is much more going on, most the ethical that has the of, by of because the theory is to us by what I have been is intended as an and because the theory makes up the of that the the of out Nietzsche's theoretical and so further our understanding of the author I that Nietzsche us in something on the order of a Liar and what we have looks to be a and more on the body of theory with which we are why we should understand the narrator to be and to the Principle of but the theory is to us by that very and if he is as as all that, how much of it can we I do not want to to the of there is a reading to be or if the Genealogy is, on the in order to (The would not be for is to between For our it that, the theoretical is in we have enough to make the Principle of Charity no more than for the text in of us. on, I put to one the of how an that with a worry about the of could be a critique of morality. That should by now be more could a that a to remember what it is be a critique of If the argument is as as that, why should we take its it this question, I also to explain how Nietzsche's critique of morality can into of two On the one Nietzsche's have been that the with morality has to with the people who invented it and who but in that case, why is it not just an or genetic On the other his worry about what we can call that is, the critique on the very moral that it is can the worry with two for explaining the of his Suppose it is that the with morality is that its or are isn't the of that the criticism is one to a moral Suppose it is that the with morality is that the is in a course of isn't a with and merely a of some and not the Nietzsche to have (The don't worry themselves about such Nietzsche they to do with And there is a related of which we will want to keep Nietzsche that morality is why the of morality be to just such a that drives, according to the express themselves not only in and opinion, but in of I that your of the people you on a Nietzsche has to a system of an the system of that we call morality. Nietzsche a very important part of the of morality to the priestly classes, and the the third Essay of the Genealogy to us, are the of intellectuals and their is just the and form of the ascetic ideal by the priestly class we see how of moral and intellectual standards are and we should expect the evaluative of the to have been no less than the of ‘‘men of This point to the origin of morality without a genetic fallacy, that is, without the value of the with the value of the the origin of morality how its of production its on the There is all the in the world between a dismissive of an as itself a of his views, and a argument from that to the or of views he comes up who the Genealogy is ‘‘we men of knowledge.’’ If you are a product of the of historical Nietzsche has been you about intellectual you see how the system of moral values is to you have all the answer you need to the in Nietzsche's What value do the value good and Nietzschean critique of the value of values will not forget values it is as a If Nietzsche meant to address his criticisms of morality not just to a class of if his by the or of his and if the critique in the Genealogy to and on values that are by then we should expect Nietzsche's mature writings to project different authorial of to different The Genealogy of Morals is a very critique of and that is because it is, at the same an of the intellectuals to take up the very and form of the argument as I have it. that the of the argument is that the of our moral and intellectual values have been to a product that up to standards such as internal consistency and that intellectuals such as the about of this and that you have reason to reject our moral and intellectual why doesn't Nietzsche just say why with the argument that our moral and intellectual values must almost be not just the way that and his had for the they that they And even if some intellectuals (and their priestly are as as I am the author makes himself out to how can he be so that his own readers I do not think I can the I am about to make as closely to the text as I have the argument up to this the answer I am about to is a way of up our and for that I have already to Nietzsche's that morality the same for and the that we should not expect to the same philosophical for have to the Genealogy us who it is written as it out, not just any of but those who will to a particular of Nietzsche was quite that there is only so much you can do with philosophical If he has his intellectual on the order of argument will his readers will be all to forget the itself, or and of the or the of an Nietzsche would have been very that inconsistencies can be are very good at this, because trained in so when you to on inconsistencies in their system of you not but and of you may have the that Nietzsche is to I what I've been are pointed contradictions in Nietzsche's you find yourself around for that would make them out to be not inconsistencies If I am Nietzsche to this and the way he to think he can do that is to the reader you are set up, and when you notice what has been going on, your sudden of your own of intellectual is supposed to you up That is, in order to make his Nietzsche is to an emotional Nietzsche's is as an to its audience into a and But if my is on we should not take Nietzsche to be readers of the Genealogy from the of of If the Genealogy works as I have been the audience for whom the is in the first place written must be just those who are to into the those who at the to notice the pattern of who do and who are enough to in the point that is being made about If you are an intellectual who is not to these for instance, if you approach Nietzsche from what he as an then Nietzsche has written a different for The For related we not to take Nietzsche to be himself from those Nietzsche has to himself out to be (and to those is for instance, he himself the at his audience with its Nietzsche must out of his way not to the emotional This particular are supposed to be around If he were just to his readers into over their own but himself the way that academic do in control of their own and in he would be all to So Nietzsche presents himself as in order to a kind of and this is a further reason for his of the first-person plural in that which I will one last time: ‘‘We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge.’’

Argument (complex analysis · Art · Criticism · Epistemology · Fallacy · Literature · Morality · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy

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