Nietzsche’s Genealogy as EnlightenmentLecture Two

Dr. Peter KailSt. Peter’s College, Oxford

The Preface of the Genealogy

• Two questions• ‘Under what conditions did man invent those

value judgments good and evil’• ‘And what value do [those judgments]

themselves have? Have the inhibited or furthered human flourishing until now?’ (GM Preface 3)

The Preface of the Genealogy

• Nietzsche offers brief autobiographical remarks about his thoughts concerning the ‘origins of moral prejudices’(GM 2-3)

• Earlier non-natural accounts see morality as something ‘behind the word’

• Nietzsche’s own Human, All too Human• A question about the ‘invention’ of ‘good and

evil’

‘Morality’

• A question: What is the ‘morality’ that Nietzsche supposedly explains?

• Note Nietzsche recognizes different kinds of morality

• Both historically and culturally

‘Morality’ II

• ‘Morality itself…was thought to be “given”…[but moralists] poorly informed about peoples, ages and histories completely missed out on the genuine problems…that emerge from a comparison of many different moralities’ (BGE 186)

‘Morality’ III

• Morality in a narrow and wider sense• Wide sense - any recognizable pattern

of the evaluation of kinds of human being, characters, actions etc. Nietzsche recognizes many moralities in this sense

• Narrow sense is the morality of ‘good and evil’ (Gut and Böse)

‘Morality’ IV

• ‘Christian morality’ and Nietzsche’s atheist forebears

• Two categories of distinction• A characteristic view of human agency• A certain core of ascetic values

Morality and Agency

• ‘Libertarian’ freewill. Human beings capable of undetermined and spontaneous choice.

• Morality is centrally concerned with responsibility connected with choice and motive for which the notions of punishment and reward are appropriate.

• Human motives as sufficiently transparent to merit reward and punishment

Morality and Values

• A set of values centered on ‘selflessness’ or asceticism

• Three Great Words: Poverty, Humility and Chastity (GM III 8)

• Generic: involves negative valuation of:• Material goods (charity, frugality, generosity)• Pride and self-interest (altruism, self-sacrifice,

modesty)• Bodily gratification (Fasting, sobriety, rejection of

gluttony, anti-sexual desire)• Interlock to form an ideal that structures modern

Western life

Genealogy and Method

• At a general level of abstraction, Nietzsche offers conjectural explanations of the emergence of morality by appeal to a generic psychology placed in a particular environment

• The ‘English psychologists as naturalists• Not ‘cold tedious frogs’ but ‘explorers and

microscopists of the soul… brave, magnanimous and proud animals’ (GM I 1)

Genealogy and Method II

• The ‘English’ account of the origins of morality (Preface 4)

• English?? Paul Rée and the History of Moral Sensations, and Nietzsche’s own Human All Too Human

• English as a style of genealogy that exhibits certain kinds of fault. They are “are no good” (GM, II, 4), “don’t amount to much” (GS, 345), and are “back-to-front and perverse” (GM, Preface, 4) but still a search for origins

Foucault

• Foucault claimed genealogy “opposes itself to the search for ‘origins”’ (2001: 342).

• But Herkunft as “pedigree” or “provenance”, “stock” opposed to Entstehung as ‘emergence’

• Nietzsche clearly not tracing a pedigree but is nevertheless explicitly asking questions about ‘origins’ in the second sense

English Genealogies

• Insufficiently historical (e.g. Preface 4)• Insufficient suspicious (GS 354)• They mistakenly think that the present

function of some moral phenomenon is what explains its origin (GM II 12)

‘Real History’

• The ‘colour’ of genealogy• The ‘grey’ of what ‘can be documented,

which can be actually confirmed and has actually existed” (GM, Preface, 6) opposed to the ‘staring into the blue’ of English speculation

• Foucault ‘grey, meticulous, and patiently documentary’ (2001: 341)

‘Real History’ II

• However, Nietzsche’s GM is far from being grey!

• It is historically informed by its contrasts but its largely psychological and explanatory

• NB many genuine British psychologists not as historically naïve as is suggested here

Suspicion

• English genealogies take the moralities they seek to explain to be correct and this distorts and biases their accounts

• They ‘unsuspectingly stand under the command of a particular morality, and without knowing it, serve as its shield-bearers and followers…’ (GS, 345)

Origin and Purpose

• Nietzsche distinguishes between the Sinn(meaning) and Brauch (practice) of human behaviours

• Brauch is the behavioural practice Sinn the interpretation of the function it serves.

• Practices are subject to different and changeable senses (e.g. punishment as rehabilitation)

• Present Sinn need not be explanatory of the practice

First Treatise ‘Good and Evil’, ‘Good and Bad’

• Two Contrasts• ‘Gut and Schlecht’ = Good and bad;

noble, privileged versus base, low or common

• ‘Gut and Böse’ = Good and evil; selfless, caring, versus selfish, ill intentions, linked with freedom

• The second evaluative orientation emerges as a reaction against the first.

‘Masters and Slave’

• Described as the emergence of ‘Slave’ morality from ‘Master’ morality but various senses (BGE 260)

• Historical: Homeric heroes, roman generals, Samurai knights, as opposed to mass of poor

• Traits: Well-born; healthy; powerful; confident; independent; opposed to ill; sickly; deformed; low born;

• Psychological; ‘masters’ and ‘slaves’ as expressive of drives

• Moralities

Master Morality

• Gut and evaluation• Gut understood in terms of the traits of the masters -

nobility, aristocratic, power, control, wealth, health, and independence

• No reliant on comparison with the majority• Schlecht as the contrast - unhealthy, weak, impotent - a

negation of the good = the slave• Notice this view of values depends not on intention or

desert (luck, or being ‘well-born’)• Evidence for this - etymological and historical

Slave Morality

• Gut and böse = good and evil• A negation of aristocratic values and a positive

interpretation of slave’s character traits• ‘Weakness is being lied into something

meritorious’• Patience, altruism, love of fellow man, anxious

lowliness as ‘humility’, inability to revenge forgiveness, love of one’s enemies - common theme here is incapacity to act as masters

• Similar practices given a new meaning• Böse unlike schlecht is linked to intention and the

capacity to have done otherwise (GM I 13)

Ressentiment & Nietzsche’s Explanation

• The postulation of a pre-moral psychological stance

• Slave-types suffer ressentiment. An unpleasant reactive attitude occasioned by incapacity to surmount obstacles to command of environment

• Its object - the masters• Ressentiment and ‘imaginary revenge’ - a

strategy for coping with deep discomfort• The reinterpretation of ‘order of rank’

Imaginary Revenge

• The imaginary revenge - a strategy of coping with ressentiment

• The evaluative downgrading of the object of ressentiment as psychological relieving

• A reinterpretation or sublimation of ressentiment as a moral response

Functions of Genealogy

• ‘There are absolutely no moral phenomena - only a moral interpretation of the phenomena’ (BGE 108)

• Moral ‘intuitions’ reflect only our present concepts, rather than reflecting timeless moral facts

Functions of Genealogy

• But the ‘shameful origins’ explanatory account does not by itself show morality to be rejected

• No genetic fallacy (BGE 2)• But not justified by its origins (we are not

detectors of morality that is ‘there anyway’)• Exposes such concepts as contingent and

brings ‘a feeling of diminution in value of the thing that originated thus and prepares the way for critical mood and attitude toward it’ (WP 254)