Nietzsche Was Not a Genealogist

In the recent Genealogies of Modernity roundtable, Deep in History: On Christian Genealogical Thinking, Thomas Pfau wondered whether all narrative accounts of the past are now considered genealogy. Though each of the four panelists invoked genealogy in at least as many senses, all seemed to agree that the genealogical method preoccupies the historical humanities (disciplines such as literary history, church history, and “history proper”). 

Michel Foucault

What, then, is genealogy? In discussions such as this, “genealogy” has become a shorthand for a habit of critical history that “entails going behind the institution and trying to discover . . . what we can broadly call a technology of power.” Those are the words of Michel Foucault, who has become the father of genealogy, following in the footsteps of his father, Friedrich Nietzsche. Whether or not all history is now genealogy, it might seem from conversations such as this that all genealogy has its roots in Nietzsche and Foucault. However, this shorthand (genealogy = Nietzsche and Foucault) obscures several varieties of genealogical thinking. In order to recognize the diversity of genealogical approaches, it helps to explicate the analogies to kinship genealogy that have been developed in various disciplines, including the biological sciences, in order to analyze lineages of continuity and change over time.*

One of the primary motivations of the Genealogies of Modernity project is to recognize and articulate these other varieties of genealogy. In this two-part essay, I want to clear some ground for that inquiry by reconstructing how we ought to think about Nietzsche and Foucault, genealogy and history. In this first part, I argue that Nietzsche was not a genealogist. On the contrary, Nietzsche considered himself an opponent of genealogy.*

How can this be, when Foucault derives his genealogical method from Nietzsche, in his classic essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”? How can this be, when major books on Nietzsche devote chapters to explicating Nietzsche’s genealogical method—when, indeed, the philosopher Alexander Nehamas has declared that for Nietzsche “genealogy simply is history, correctly practiced”? A full answer to these questions would require excurses on Foucault’s development and Anglo-American Nietzsche scholarship. For now, I will present the exegetical evidence that Nietzsche did not consider himself to be doing genealogy. 

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche never discusses genealogy as a method outside of his scornful dismissal of Paul Rée and other “genealogists of morality” in the early sections of On the Genealogy of Morality. He describes the impetus for the book as a confrontation between his own ideas about the “origin” (Ursprung) of morality and the “backwards and perverse genealogical hypotheses” of Rée, Arthur Schopenhauer, and evolutionary moralists such as Herbert Spencer. Nietzsche counterposes his own project as proper history. Contrary to Foucault’s account of genealogy, which exposes all origin stories as contingent and illusory, Nietzsche frequently characterizes his enterprise as the discovery of the true (singular) origin of intellectual and cultural phenomena. Genealogy, in his disparaging account, gets it wrong. 

Nietzsche used the language of genealogy for two reasons. First, he objected to accounts of the origins of morality that took biological evolution as their model. In the middle of the nineteenth century “genealogy” was associated with evolutionary theory; indeed, Charles Darwin preferred to speak of “genealogy” rather than “evolution.” In his critique of writers who proposed an evolutionary model of morality, in the preface to On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche refers to them as “genealogists of morality” (Moralgeneologen). In an earlier text, Nietzsche calls them ape-genealogists (Affengeneologen).

The second reason Nietzsche used the language of genealogy was to separate his own historical method from the Moralgeneologen. Before he wrote On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche had undertaken the same critique of the Moralgeneologen in The Gay Science, but without using the language of genealogy. There he got tangled up in the language of “history” and “historian.” Nobody, he observes, has undertaken a “critique of moral valuations” and certainly not the “psychologists and historians (Historiker). . . . These historians of morality (Moral-Historikern) (particularly, the Englishmen) do not amount to much[.]” Nietzsche declares that he himself will “explore the history of origins (Entstehungsgeschichte) of these feelings and valuations,” but not for the sake of antiquarian history. Rather, he will buckle down to the historical details because his goal is a critique of values and their development. He will practice “history for life,” as he calls it in Untimely Meditations. His rivals do not take history seriously enough; they lack “the historical spirit” (historische Geist). Nietzsche claims for himself the mantle of historian, but then has to share the terminology (both Geschichte and Historie) with his rivals. 

So what should Nietzsche call his rivals, if they are not proper historians? Near the beginning of the “First Essay” of On the Genealogy of Morality, he reclaims and vindicates the term “historian” for himself, while calling his rivals “genealogists of morals.” 

But what about the title of the book, which would seem to name Nietzsche’s enterprise “genealogy”? Indeed, Nietzsche often referred to “my Genealogy of Morality.” This might be the stumbling block that has pitched many an interpreter down the slippery slope of Foucauldian genealogy. But whenever Nietzsche uses the possessive, he is always referring to the title of the book. And the full title, it should be noted, is Zur Genealogie der Moral, where the preposition indicates that it is a work about the genealogy of morality. Upon opening the book, the reader will soon learn to hear that term facetiously. In fact, “genealogy” made it into the title only coincidentally. Nietzsche thought of the book as an “expansion and elaboration” of Beyond Good and Evil; this relationship was declared on the verso of the title page of the first edition. In retrospect, Nietzsche speculated that his publisher should have titled the book Beyond Good and Evil: Appendix: Three Essays.

Besides references to the book, Nietzsche rarely invokes “genealogy” or related terms, and when he does so in his published works, it is nearly always with derision towards the “English” genealogists of moral psychology. In his unpublished notes, he seems to have this school of thought in mind when he jots this single line in 1884: “The many false ‘contrasts’ (in the transformation of the emotions, their genealogy, and so on.)” Elsewhere in the notebooks he uses the term literally. In 1871 he notes that Plato characterizes ancient priest-philosophers as knowledgeable of genealogies. In 1887 he imagines Eve at the apex (Spitze) of the Bible’s genealogical stemma, its family tree. He uses the term in an intellectual-historical sense just once, when considering “my own philosophical genealogy,” which he presents “in connection with the antiteleological—i.e., Spinozist movement of our time.” Besides these four instances, Nietzsche always speaks of genealogy in connection with his rival historians of morality. 

Foucault and Nietzsche

It is a historical irony, then, that Foucault would adopt Nietzsche’s term of opprobrium for his own method. From 1971 onward, Foucault transvalued Nietzsche’s genealogy. His misreading goes far deeper than diction. It leads to the biological analogy that underlies genealogical method across the humanities—whether “genealogy” names Foucauldian problematization or more traditional historiography. In the second part of this essay, I will explore the evolutionary and genetic underpinnings of genealogical method and how this helps us better understand how Foucault construes genealogy.

Ryan McDermott is the Director of the Genealogies of Modernity Project, associate professor of medieval literature and culture in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and founder and faculty director of Beatrice Institute.

*These paragraphs were revised by the author to clarify his meaning and intent.