report: january 2010: on genealogy

Genealogy -- English or free-spirited

Nietzsche did not invent the method of genealogy in the study of morality. In the opening line of the first essay of the Genealogy of Morals he credits "English Psychologists" with "the first attempts so far to write a history of the emergence of morality" -- before launching into a full-blown, if nuanced, attack on these inadequate predecessors. The thought of this essay is that the ways in which Nietzsche distinguishes his practice from this "English Psychology" or "English Genealogy" may give some insight into the meaning of Nietzsche's own genealogical method. The comparison at stake here is relevant not just for exegesis of Nietzsche's writing, or for situating his outlook against the moral theories of his time -- it can also help orient us with regards to contemporary approaches to the evolution of morality.

a German

First off, just who are these English Genealogists? In fact the only name Nietzsche provides is a German one, Paul Ree, his erstwhile friend, and, on some interpretations, romantic rival, and there are good reasons to read these references as straightforward assaults on Ree. The thumbnail sketch Nietzsche gives in GM 1:2 of the English genealogy is a clearly recognisable precis of Ree's argument in The Origin of Moral Feelings (1877). As Christopher Janaway (2008) argues, Ree is implicated in the terminology Nietzsche uses to describe the English vices -- for example, using Ree's "rather ungainly" term ‘unegoistic’ (unegoistische) rather than altruistisch. The titles of the essays in the Genealogy mirror chapter titles of Ree's book. The only actual Englishman referred to, Herbert Spencer, is in fact introduced as providing a counter-theory to the exposition of English thinking.

Yet, though Ree is likely the direct adversary in question, Nietzsche chooses his national epithets with care. Ree's theory, on which Nietzsche closely based his own earlier account of ethical emergence in book two of Human, All Too Human (though he neglects to remind us of that in the Genealogy), is indeed recognisable as an offshoot of a tradition of mainly English (or British) theorising about ethics. Maudemarie Clark and Alan Swensen (1998 p129) note "it has been suggested that this phrase ['English psychologists'] refers to the British philosophers of the utilitarian–associationist school, perhaps especially Hume, Hartley, Hutcheson, Bentham and Mill." Though maybe there are two "schools" involved: Ree's (and Nietzsche's) accounts are also very much informed by the application of Darwin's evolutionary theory to the emergence of morality. Darwin had embarked on his own such "genealogies" in the Descent of Man, although even before its publication the "Neo-Darwinists" had already begun their own sociological extrapolations of the ideas in The Origin of Species. By Nietzsche's time, Spencer had become the most influential of these thinkers -- and, argues John Richardson (2004), Nietzsche's reception of Darwin was largely mediated through a "careful" reading of Spencer.

and a Scotsman

Ree's genealogy incorporates both these "English" lines -- there is the central notion of moral goodness as deriving from utility, drawn out with a specifically evolutionary story. Here is Nietzsche's summary in GM1:2: "'Originally' -- they decree -- 'unegoistic acts were praised and called good by their recipients, in other words, by the people to whom they were useful; later, everyone forgot the origin of praise and because such acts had always been habitually praised as good, people began to experience them as good -- as if they were good as such.'"

In fact this description fits pretty neatly Hume's account of the origin of "artificial virtues" in book three of the Treatise of Human Nature, which maybe deserves the title of grandfather of the "English" genealogical line. While Hume identifies a limited realm of "natural" or innate moral virtues founded on sympathy, he historicises -- genealogises -- the extension of moral valuation to a wider range of social "artificial" values, first of which is respect for property, which he takes to underly all justice. Property conventions begin with the recognition of the utility, the mutual self-interest, of respecting one anothers' rights of possession. Morality enters first of all in a basic form in virtue of Hume's observation that everything "which gives uneasiness in human actions, upon the general survey, is called vice." Later, as the convention becomes an established custom, its moral hold grows firmer -- the opinion develops that "a merit or demerit attends justice or injustice". The movement from convenient convention to moral institution for large-scale societies is further helped along the way by, amongst other things, the endeavours of "politicians" using "artifice", and of parents or other educators instilling a sense of "probity and honour".

Hume's account, as Nietzsche's will be, is grounded in a psychology of human drives or motivations. The "passion of self-interest" is just one of these, but a virulent one that presents a particular threat to developing society in which the gains of social organisation build scarce material possessions. Ree tells a very similar story in which a basic "egoistic" drive, if unrestrained by justice, will tear society apart before it can get off the ground. Darwinism allows Ree to build his theory on a countervailing "social instinct" which is "maintained and strengthened by natural selection, that is, by the fact that the animal species whose members were most closely bound together by social instincts displaced other species and so continued alone."

For both Hume and Ree, the genealogy could be seen as involving an account of how these drives play out in a new historical/social environment where humans come together in large groups with the ability to produce and exchange alienable material goods. With drives and environment in place, the story then unfolds pretty much "like clockwork". For Hume, given universal characteristics of human nature, all human beings in the situation at question will be able to recognise their interest in agreeing rules of property and justice.¹

Ree remarks on Hume's theory that it lacks an "explanation" of these universal innate drives -- natural selection fills this gap in his own version. It is less clear in Ree's theory what role, if any, evolution plays in the later unfolding of the process. References to the evolution of "knowledge" and "understanding" suggest that a force of selection might continue working on human societies as well as "animal species", so helping the further development of morality. But, like other evolutionists of his time, Ree does not clearly identify mechanisms of social or cultural evolution, and how they may relate to or differ from biological selection mechanisms.

We can note a few common features in these two "English" genealogies. The work is done by basic drives or motivating forces which are innate and universal to all humans. Universal motivations lead to universal morals -- different environments might cause variations in the detail of groups' moral systems, but both Hume and Ree focus on what seem to be common moral constants for all humans. And there seems to be little room for contingency about the outcome -- could the emerging values have been otherwise? And as well as uniformity across human societies, there is uniformity within -- all members of the group have the same interests. For example, neither Hume nor Ree consider that inequality in the distribution of material possessions might mean very different and conflicting interests for haves and have-nots.

and some frogs

So what does Nietzsche have against "the English?" There are a number of critical references to "English psychology/genealogy" in the preface to the Genealogy (4,7), and the first (1, 2, 3, 17note) and second essays (4, 12²). Nietzsche had already begun this critique of previous "historians of morality" in an important section in The Gay Science (GS345), on "morality as a problem", which condenses a number of his points against Englishness. Here I try to disentangle some of these points:

i) English genealogists display methodological "selflessness" or "impersonality". GS345 opens with a rant, or perhaps lament, on the "lack of personality" of previous Genealogists. These "weakened, thin, extinguished" specimens are unable grasp the problem of morality, because they are unable to have a "personal relationship" with it as a great and distressing problem. "Why is it that I have never yet encountered anybody, not even in books, who approached morality in a personal way and knew morality as a problem, and this problem as his own personal distress, torment, voluptuousness, and passion?" This passage, populated by "frogs", "weaklings" and avowedly "incidental" references to the conduct of "redoubtable females", refers pointedly to Ree ("one particular case"), and resonates with, indeed, a personal and sexual engagement of Nietzsche's own on a number of levels. Similarly, in GMP7, where Ree is named directly, Nietzsche attacks him for not taking "the problems of morality" seriously.

ii) They have unacknowledged moral allegiances. "Usually they themselves are still quite unsuspectingly obedient to one particular morality and, without knowing it, serve that as shield-bearers and followers..." (GS345). This moral allegiance is to the Christian "slave morality" of selflessness. "Their usual mistaken premise is that they affirm some consensus of the nations, at least of tame nations, concerning certain principles of morals, and they infer from this that these principles must be unconditionally binding also for you and me." (Though an alternative relativist position, that necessary differences between moral valuations of different nations means that no morality is binding, is "equally childish".)

iii) They critique stories about moral values, but not the values themselves. "The more refined" genealogists "uncover and criticise the perhaps foolish opinions of a people about their morality" -- "opinions about its origin, religious sanction, the superstition of free will, and things of that sort" -- but still affirm the very same values. Thus, for example, Hume's and Ree's accounts provide new "explanations" of selfless values, but the values themselves are unchanged and uncriticised. "Thus nobody up to now has examined the value of that most famous of all medicines which is called morality; and the first step would be -- for once to question it. Well then, precisely this is our task." In this passage, at least, Nietzsche is very clearly far from commiting a "genetic fallacy" of believing that the worth of a thing is entailed directly by the circumstances of its origin.

iv) They simply identify morality with altruism. GMP4: "altruistic evaluation (which Dr Ree, like all English genealogists, sees as the moral method of valuation as such)".

v) They tell speculative "just so stories", instead of doing careful history. GMP7 castigates -- "English hypothesis-mongering into the blue. It is quite clear which colour is a hundred times more important for a genealogist than blue: namely grey, which is to say, that which can be documented, which can actually be confirmed and has actually existed, in short, the whole, long, hard-to-decipher hieroglyphic script of man's moral past!"

vi) They are mean-spirited, blind to "higher" or "active" forces. In GM1:2, after precising Ree's thesis, Nietzsche notes that it "contains all the typical traits of idiosyncratic English psychologists -- we have 'usefulness', 'forgetting', 'habit', and finally 'error', all as the basis of a respect for values of which the higher man has hitherto been proud ..." The argument here, and in the preceding GM1:1, is dense and twisting, and complicated further by the way that it appears in some places to strike against the last point (v) made in the preface. There Nietzsche called for genealogists to dwell in greyness and adopt a "long, brave, diligent, subterranean seriousness". Now "subterranean" ways are associated with animosity and meanness as the frogs of GS345 reappear -- "people tell me that they are just old, cold, boring frogs crawling round men and hopping into them as if they were in their element, namely a swamp" -- although Nietzsche ends with a "hope" that these genealogists are "actually brave, generous, and proud animals" making great sacrifices to dig out ugly truths. Through all the nuances of Nietzsche's prose, though, GM1:2 arrives at a clear accusation: the preceding genealogists have missed the "real breeding ground" for the concept "good". Whether mean or brave, they are unable to see that moral values appeared first of all in an active creation, an aggressive and spontaneous (cf. GM1:10) assertion of right by "the 'good' themselves" who first "claimed the right to create values and give these values names".

vii) They ignore valuation perspectives. In the note concluding the first essay, Nietzsche emphasises the perspectival nature of valuing. Values are not objective, but "values for", in two senses: for (of) a certain perspective (or agent, drive, or group); and for (towards) a certain end or interest. (These two sense might be brought together if we suppose that the end or interest is that of a drive or agent -- see, e.g., Richardson (2004, chapter 1) for such an account of Nietzschean goal-directed drives.) Thus, in terms of perspectives: "the good of the majority and the good of the minority are conflicting moral standpoints". Or in terms of goals: "something, for example, which obviously had value with regard to the longest possible life-span of a race ... would not have anything like the same value if it was a question of developing a stronger type." The "naievety of the English biologists" is to view a certain perspective -- here, the majoritarian valuation -- as objective, "as higher in value as such". Scientists (which we might take to include biologists) should investigate the perspectives and interests involved in valuations -- "The question: what is this table of values and morals worth? needs to be asked from different angles; in particular, the question 'value for what?' cannot be examined too finely." Their role is to "prepare the way for the future work of the philosopher" who will "solve the problem of values" and decide on the "rank order of values".

viii) They think unhistorically. In GM1:2 the genealogists, despite being the only ones so far to tackle the history of morals, are berated for lack of a "historical spirit" -- "as is now established philosophical practice, they all think in a way which is essentially unhistorical". At least one sense of what Nietzsche means by the unhistorical thinking of these historians becomes clearer in GM2:4. What Nietzsche seems to be arguing is that these genealogists interpret the actions and life possibilities of "primitive" humans without attempting to understand their very different psychology. They project their own values and interpretive stances -- "no more than five spans of their own, merely 'modern' experience" -- back onto the ancestors. Whereas Nietzsche claims that his own reading manages to "measur[e] with the standard of prehistoric times" (GM2:9). This unhistorical thinking could be seen as another failure to account for evaluative perspective. Valuations are made from perspectives which differ not just "spatially" between -- and within -- "societies" and "nations", but also temporally, as human psychologies change over history. (One question is how/why Nietzsche thinks he is able to access these remote and different psychological perspectives. Perhaps there is a suggestion in the parenthetic remark in GM2:9 that this prehistory "by the way, exists at all times and could possibly re-occur" -- the perspective of our ancestors is still available to us in the present.)

ix) They confuse origin and purpose, commiting the "causa fiendi error". In the discussion of the origin and purpose of punishment in GM2:12 Nietzsche alleges that the moral genealogists "highlight some 'purpose' in punishment, for example, revenge or deterrence, then innoccently place the purpose at the start, as causa fiendi of punishment, and -- have finished." They thus miss the point that "the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate ..." As Daniel Dennett (1995) observes, Nietzsche's insight here is "pure Darwin" turned against dodgy "Social Darwinism". Here is Darwin himself (1862): "throughout nature almost every part of each living thing has probably served, in a slightly modified condition, for diverse purposes, and has acted in the living machinery of many ancient and distinct specific forms."

x) They are blind to the will to power. In the same key passage (GM2:12), Nietzsche gives one of his strongest accounts of the notion of the will to power in relation to evolutionary theory. This is a rich and deep subject, but very briefly, Nietzche here appears to widen his target from histories of morality to what he sees as the "modern misarchism (to coin a bad word for a bad thing)" which has become "master of the whole of physiology and biology, to their detriment, naturally, by spiriting away their basic concept, that of actual activity." Nietzsche here appears to be opposing Darwinian theory's acceptance of "absolute randomness" and "the mechanistic senselessness of all events", which he identifies with the notion of evolutionary change as reactive "adaptation" of organisms to external circumstances, with his idea of active change originating in "spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, re-interpreting, re-directing and formative forces" of organisms themselves.³ This notion of active vs. reactive forces in organic processes parallels the discussion of action and reaction in the ethics of masters and slaves, and Nietzsche clearly sees the dominance of reactive or "mechanistic" thinking in science as linked to the hegemony of slavish morality. Again, "selflessness" in ethics is tightly linked to "impersonality" in scientific method.⁴ Denial of will to power is also denial (or ignorance) of the way that change (historical and organic) is driven through conflict, struggles of domination and overpowering.

There are a number of interwoven, supporting (and perhaps, in places, conflicting) themes running through these points. Here I will emphasise one main line. English genealogy begins from an evaluative perspective of its own -- modern "selfless" morality (ii, iii, iv). But its great failing is not to recognise this standpoint as a limited perspective, instead holding it to be objective or true for all humans (vii, viii) -- it sees its own contingent values as values as such. In particular, by projecting these values back into past humans, it blinds itself to the real forces that have driven history. Thinking of its own values as universal, timeless -- thus, equally present at the origin -- it falls into the causa fiendi error (ix), and the telling of "blue sky" just so stories (v). Its lack of perspectival awareness (or "historical spirit") is also implicated in the failure to recognise that history essentially involves conflict between rival or warring interests (societies, drives, etc.) associated with different, and changing, evaluative perspectives.⁵

values and errors

The English genealogists make numerous mistakes, at least some of which (I argue) are related to a fundamental error -- unwittingly taking their own evaluative perspective as objective, universal and timeless. But how exactly does this error damage their genealogy? To understand that we need to think about the criteria on which English genealogy fails, and Nietzsche's new approach can surpass it -- that is, we need to look at the aims of Nietzsche's genealogy.

Skimming a deep discussion, we might separate two issues here. First, Nietzsche wants genealogy to be truthful, illuminating, yield knowledge about the actual history of morality. Unpleasant truths must be uncovered, for which the genealogist needs courage, honesty, and attention to detail. Along the lines of GM1:17n, this truth-seeking role of genealogy could be called its "scientific" role. But Nietzsche's project does not end there -- scientific genealogy is just a preparatory stage for the second "philosophical" task of re-evaluating and ordering values. Perhaps it is best to clearly separate these two tasks -- genealogy is then the name for the preparatory stage alone, providing "raw material" for re-evaluation to work with⁶. But even in this case, we may need to think whether and how re-evaluation imposes certain requirements on how genealogy is done -- and on the type of knowledge, "material", it needs to provide.⁷

Here the question of the "genetic fallacy" looms. As Nietzsche argues in GS345, facts about the history of values do not by themselves imply the "rightness" or otherwise of those values. So how does uncovering the history of morality help us make our own evaluations? To understand the role Nietzsche intends for genealogy we need to look in some more depth at his notion of value. This is another massive topic -- here I'll just outline an interpretation or reconstruction of a Nietzschean account of values which I find interesting, combining some themes from John Richardson and Alexander Nehamas (1994), but without making much effort to argue for it as Nietzsche's own position.

(1) History is about the conflict of forces in power relations. These forces may variously be, or be identified with -- or work through -- human individuals, or other animals, or nations, species, lineages, races, or organs within organisms, or instincts, drives, etc. In general terms, wills.

(2) Wills have goals. There is a basic sense of "intentionality" (or even "teleology") here -- forces are goal-directed -- but these goals need not "rise to consciousness" (GS354) in any way.⁸ (It is important for Nietzsche that these goals are all connected to struggle for power/dominance/mastery -- but in fact that may not be necessary for the story to be outlined here.)

(3) Values (in a first basic sense) are the goals of wills. This is Richardson's reading -- values are the "goods" or goals of a drive or other force (in Richardson's Darwinian interpretation, "the outcomes it was selected to bring about"). This translation fits most comfortably where Nietzsche is talking about human action -- HH32: "all disinclination depends on a valuation, just as does all inclination. Man cannot experience a drive to or away from something without the feeling that he is desiring what is beneficial and avoiding what is harmful ..." I'll leave aside here the question of how we might understand Nietzsche's idea that all organic (and indeed, in some places, physical) processes involve valuation and interpretation. Note here that values, then, as we saw in GM1:17n, are always values for (of) a particular will. (Also, while values are themselves goals, they may also be values for (towards) other goals.)

(4) Human beings can misinterpret their own values. Modern human beings, having developed language and consciousness, and morality, are able to self-reflect on their own goals -- or the goals of the drives, forces, or other wills that cause their actions. Following Nehamas here, we can draw on Nietzsche's thought that "morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena -- more precisely, a misinterpretation"(TI..). In Nehamas' reading, morality is the interpretation of human suffering -- thus, e.g., in GM3 the priest, inventing sin, provides an interpretation of the experience of bad conscience. More generally, if we also understand the masters' invention of "good" as a form of morality (in the broader of Nietzsche's sometimes varying senses), we could say that morality is a form of interpretation of human affects -- not only of suffering, but also of active joy.⁹

Relating this to the remarks above, I'll say that moral values are humans' interpretations (in Nehamas' sense) of the "actual" values that drive our actions. We might here distinguish two kinds of "value": in the first sense, value(a) is the goal of a will, and is causal for human actions and historical processes; value(i) is a human's own conscious interpretation of her value(a). Humans do not, through consciousness, have direct access to these "true" causal values(a) -- we can only access them indirectly through "interpretation" of our affectual experience, and our actions.¹⁰

(5) In fact Nietzsche thinks not just that we can be mistaken about our values, but that this is systematically so. Conscious self-interpretation is not neutral territory, but itself a battleground for competing wills. (A stronger claim is that consciousness is intrinsically directed towards certain kinds of "reactive" interpretations associated with the "herd mentality.¹¹) Nietzsche's task in the Genealogy is to uncover these (historical) forces that have shaped our values(i). At the same time, this enquiry involves unravelling the "true" values(a) of these forces.

For example, in slave morality, slaves espoused values(i) of humility and selflessness; but in truth the values(a) of the slaves, or of the wills (drives, forces) that were causal in their actions, were quite different. The real value(a) involved in the slave revolt in morality was not a moral value but a more basic goal of avoiding -- or otherwise overcoming-- suffering at the hands of the masters.

(6) What then entitles Nietzsche to believe that, doing genealogy, he is able to uncover the true forces and values at play? How can genealogical method(s) provide better interpretations than those usually made by conscious self-interpretation? ...

history for life

Nietzsche may (or may not) be right in his analysis of the true forces and values behind the development of slave morality -- but what bearing does this have on our own modern values? If there were no connection between the values of the slaves and our own, Nietzsche's account would have only academic historical interest, whereas sees genealogy as a necessary part of his own project of critique and revaluation of contemporary values.

Our own values can be connected to those of our genealogical ancestors in a number of ways. We may have (some of) the same underlying values(a) as, for example, the inventors of slave morality -- the same forces may still be at play. We may cover up those values(a) with the same interpreted values(s). Or, more generally, our contemporary values and interpretations may be descendents of those ancestor values, having evolved from them through further compounded processes of struggle, accretion, re-valuation. (And interpretations of values will also come to have causal effects on the formation of new values in new conflicts/relations of forces ... cf. Geuss on the way interpretations re-structure practices) Understanding earlier historical processes and stages in the formation of our own values help uncover why we have the values -- and (mis)interpretations we have -- how they came to be so.

report ends abruptly unfinished ...

Clark, M. and Swenson, A., (1998) trans. and eds., On the Genealogy of Morality, Indianapolis: Hackett

Conway, D. (1994) "Genealogy and Critical Method", in Schacht, ed. Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality Berkeley: University of California Press.

Darwin (1862) On the Origin of Species

Deleuze, G. (1962 / 1986) Nietzsche and Philosophy, London: Continuum

Dennett, D. (1995) Darwin's Dangerous Idea, London: Penguin

Hume, D. (2000) A Treatise of Human Nature, eds. Norton, D.F. and Norton, M.J., Oxford: OUP.

Janaway, C. (2008) Beyond Selflessness,

Lewis, D. (1969) Convention. A Philosophical Study, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Nehamas, A. (1994) "The Genealogy of Genealogy: Interpretation in Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation and in The Genealogy of Morals", in Schacht, ed. Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ree, P. (1877) The Origin of the Moral Sensations in Basic Writings (2003), ed. & trans. Small, R., Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Richardson, J. (2004) Nietzsche's New Darwinism, Oxford: OUP

Skyrms, B. (1996) The Evolution of the Social Contract, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1 Jumping to more recent theorising, Hume's story can be seen as vulnerable to a basic objection -- he has nothing to say to the danger that his nascent property-owners will "free ride" and break property conventions when they can get away with it. In the terms of David Lewis' (1969) analysis of convention, Hume reads the situation as a "coordination game" in which actors have common interests which they only need to coordinate, rather than a "social contract" situation (or collective active problem) in which there are genuine interests in deviating from the rule. Contemporary versions of moral genealogy like those of game theorists Brian Skyrms or Ken Binmore, both self-identified "Humeans", introduce mechanisms of cultural evolution to get over this hurdle.

2Though Nietzsche doesn't use the adjective "English" in the second essay, "genealogists" refers to the same antagonists.

3This close but tense relationship between Nietzsche's will to power doctrine and Darwinian theory is explored in depth in Richardson (2004), particularly chapter 1. For a very different account see also Deleuze (1962), chapter 2.

4Janaway (2008) chapter 2 goes into detail on this.

5

6E.g., in Daniel Conway's (1994) reading, the role of genealogy is to contribute to "critical method".

7This two stage division comes from GM1:17n -- but another question is where "critique" fits in here -- are there in fact three stages: knowledge-uncovering, critique, and re-evaluation? If it's right to separate these out, then which of these stages lie within the remit of "genealogy"?

8Richardson (2004 chap1) gives a Darwinian interpretation in which he expresses the goals of "drives" in terms of mechanisms of natural and/or social selection. Part of his aim there is to provide an account in which Nietzsche can "naturalise" human action without in fact "anthropomorphising" non-human processes. Richardson's Darwinian alternative seems interesting to me, but I'm not sure it's necessary to get Nietzsche away from humanising organic forces -- for now I'll just assume that some mechanism, Darwinian or otherwise, is available to make Nietzschean intentionality of wills respectable, at the very least, as a framework for understanding historical if not all "organic" or even physical processes.

9Nehamas here seems not to investigate Nietzsche's affirmations that all willing, not just moral evaluation, involves some form of interpretation ... but I'll skip over that too for now.

10E.g., WP524: "In summa: that which becomes conscious is involved in causal relations which are entirely witheld from us ..."

11For this reading cf. Richardson (2004) pp92-4; Deleuze 2.1.