• The Problem of Style
• The Project of the Genealogy
• The Value of Our Morality
• Genealogy
• Genealogy and Value
• Christian Morality

The Problem of Style

One of the features of Nietzsche’s work that attracts some readers and repels others is Nietzsche’s style. In one sense it is wrong to speak of Nietzsche’s style because over the course of his literary output he used a vast variety of different styles. What is remarkable, however, is that one can always clearly discern Nietzsche’s distinctive voice in whatever he writes no matter the specific style he happens to deploy. Nietzsche is perhaps the most literary of philosophers and it is worth commenting on his style because many of his philosophical doctrines are encoded in the literary character of his text. Indeed the argument of the Genealogy ultimately depends on features of its literary style. This is an important issue that we will return to. But for now, let me underscore a couple of important points. It is a commonplace observation that an author writes so as to be understood. But Nietzsche also observes that just as importantly that there is a sense in which an author writes so as to not be understood. Furthermore, this willfull fostering of misunderstanding is one of the important functions of literary style. Nietzsche discusses this “antimony of style” in the following passage from the Gay Science:

On the question of being understandable.—One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely to be misunderstood. It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it impossible to understand: perhaps that was part of the author’s intention—he did not want to be understood just by “anybody”. All the nobler spirits and tastes select their audience when they wish to communicate; and choosing that, one at the same times erects barriers against the “others”. All the most subtle laws of style have their origin at this point: they at the same time keep away, create a distance, forbid “entrance”, understanding as said above—while they open the ears of those whose ears are related to ours.

Style thus has a radically inegalitarian function. Literary style enforces the distinction between those capable of hearing Nietzsche’s message and those who are incapable. Nietzsche does not write so as to be understood just by anyone—his text requires that his reader have certain literary and philosophical skills and indeed the accompanying virtues required to have these skills.

Just by way of preview, let me mention just one connection between Nietzsche’s philosophical doctrine’s and his literary style. One of the lesson’s of the first essay of the Genealogy is that novel values arise from a pre-established hierarchy or rank ordering. The sense of power accompanying such a rank order gives rise to values. Nietzsche describes this sense of power involved in the enforcing of a hierarchy “the pathos of distance”. One of Nietzsche’s fundamental ethical doctrine’s is that moral values are only established given the prior establishment of some kind of hierarchy. Notice that there is a connection between what I described as the antimony of style and the pathos of distance. The antimony of style is just the observation that authors write not only to be understood but also to be misunderstood. That is to say, one of the functions of style is to insure that the text is only understood by his intended audience. Given this discriminatory function of style, the text itself creates a hierarchy or rank ordering which is a prerequisite for the creation of novel values. This observation is crucial in evaluating Nietzsche’s overall argument of the Genealogy.

Nietzsche makes a couple of remarks in the preface of the Genealogy that bears on the question of its being understandable. In particular, he mentions two prerequisites for a proper understanding of the book.

First, he presupposes an understanding of his previous works, themselves no easy matter to decipher.

Second, he presupposes the capacity to read aphorisms. One obstacle to understanding Nietzsche’s text is analogous to the difficulties one encounters in reading aphorisms. Nietzsche makes the following observation:

An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been “deciphered” when it is simply been read; rather, one has then to begin its exegesis, for which is required the art of exegesis.

It is not sufficient, then, to simply read the text; if it is to be understood, one must interpret. An aphorism is a brief maxim that encodes indefinitely many truths in virtue of its figurative language. In order to decipher the wealth of ideas encoded in a maxim or aphorism one must be able to interpret these figurative tropes. Similarly, the brevity of Nietzsche’s expression in the Genealogy belies the wealth of thought that it encodes. Like an aphorism, Nietzsche’s writing must be carefully interpreted. It too requires the reader to be in possession of the art of exegesis. Nietzsche is skeptical on this score, for he believes that the art of exegesis is now largely list on modern man, for in order to interpret an aphorism, and indeed Nietzsche’s text, one must ruminate upon it. Indeed Nietzsche believes that it is a symptom of our present moral debility that the art of reading is now largely lost. But then again, this is simply a manifestation of the antimony of style. Nietzsche does not want to be understood by just anybody, only by those who perhaps still possess (or at least can acquire) the art of exegesis. The third essay of the book is itself an example of the kind of commentary or exegesis that Nietzsche has in mind. It is an extended commentary on a single aphorism taken from an earlier work of Nietzsche’s. That a single line could disgorge so rich a content is some indication of the care and reflection that Nietzsche demands of his readers.

I am inclined to sympathize with Nietzsche’s pessimism concerning the art of exegesis. Not many are the kind of readers that Nietzsche demands. It is worth emphasizing this obstacle to understanding the Genealogy if only to underscore the need to read with care. It is not sufficient that one has simply read the book once through. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of Nietzsche’s writing and its literary character. Ultimately, the argument of the book depends upon it.

The Project of the Genealogy

Two questions are central to the project of the Genealogy:

1. What is the value of (our) moral values?
2. What are the conditions and circumstances that give rise to these values?

These questions are not unrelated. Nietzsche believes that in order to determine the value of our values we must first determine the conditions and circumstances that give rise to them. Exactly how these issues are related is a large and difficult question that turns out to be intimately connected with the style of the Genealogy. But before we discuss, in a preliminary fashion, the connection between these two questions, let’s first get clearer on their content.

The Value of Our Morality

We are accustomed to taking our moral valuations at face value. Most of us never hesitate in assuming that good has more value than evil. While we often dispute and dispute vigorously which people, actions, and states of affairs are in fact morally valuable, we never question whether these values are themselves valuable. We do not question the value of our moral values. It is this unobvious question that the Genealogy of Morals is dedicated. Nietzsche’s project is to determine the value of our morality. The central question of the Genealogy is thus:

• What is the value of (our) morality?

So accustomed are we to assuming that the good, as we conceive of it, is itself obviously valuable, that it can be difficult even to grasp the sense of Nietzsche’s question. That we deem something good, doesn’t that simply mean that it is valuable? Isn’t the good, after all, good? If so, isn’t Nietzsche’s question simply unintelligible and obviously so?

We can begin to make sense of Nietzsche’s question by reflecting on an important moral insight of Aristotle’s. Aristotle believed that there was an important connection between conforming our actions to the dictates of morality and what he described as eudaemanaia. Eudaemanaia is difficult to define, but we can understand it as meaning, roughly, human flourishing or living a life worth living. Aristotle’s insight is that living a morally worthy life is, at the very least, a precondition of human flourishing. If we are to live a life worth living we must conform ourselves to the dictates of morality:

• The Aristotelian insight: Conforming our actions to the dictates of morality ought to promote human flourishing.

If the Aristotelian insight is correct, then we can understand the value of our moral values as consisting in the promotion of human flourishing.

So the first point that must be made if we are to make sense of the question at the heart of the Genealogy is that the value of our values consist precisely in the degree to which they promote human flourishing or, as Nietzsche puts it, “the growth of the plant ‘man’”. The second point that must be made, if we are to understand Nietzsche’s question, is that Nietzsche denies that there is a single unifed phenomenon, morality, which it would make sense to be universally in favor or opposed to. Nietzsche denies that terms like “morality” refer everywhere and always to items with the same defining characteristics. There isn’t any set of defining properties that all and only instances of morality must exhibit. Nietzsche’s view is rather like that which Wittgenstein was to develop fifty or sixty years hence: morality encompasses a wide variety of different things that are best connected one to another by “family resemblances”. There is no essence of morality; rather there are difference constellations of practices, beliefs, and institutions that have very different origins, internal structures, motivations, and social functions. Each constellation, however, has sufficient similarity to some other constellation to allow the same word “morality” to be used of all of them. There is no single respect in which all moralities resemble one another. Rather they display a pattern of resemblance like that exhibited among members of a family. Family members are visually similar to one another but not in all in the same respect. The son may have his mother’s eyes and his father’s brow, a brow shared, perhaps, by the brother, whose own eyes are more akin to his father’s, but whose chin more resemblance bears to the mother’s. Yet despite there being no one set of common features common to all the members of the family, there is sufficient similarity in various different respects for them to be immediately recognized as being precisely that, a family. Similarly the different practices sufficiently resemble one another in different respects for them to count as moralities. What counts as “sufficient” similarity is antecedently indeterminate—there are no antecedently specificable limits as to what counts as sufficient resemblance to make the term “morality” correctly applicable. Nietzsche sometimes puts this point by saying that there is no clear and sharp distinction between literal and metaphorical usage or between the proper or extended sense of a term.

There are indefinitely many different kinds of (possible and actual) things that could be called “morality” without impropriety. Despite the variability of what has been called “morality”, in 19th century Europe “morality” had come to be used most commonly to designate one particular form of morality, important parts of which were ultimately derived from Christianity. Specifically, Christian morality had predominated in the recent past (until the beginning of the 19th century) and may have just recently (the middle of the 19th century) begun to be displaced by other forms of morality. Nevertheless, Christian morality was still dominant in the sense that it governed widespread areas of life, had a quasi-official standing and more importantly defined the terms in which people thought and spoke of morality.

Given Nietzsche’s historical context and given the flexibility of his terminology, it is not odd for him to follow widespread usage and use “morality” to designate the specifically Christian (or immediately post-Christian) morality of 19th century middle class Central Europeans. In reading Nietzsche, it is thus very important to try to determine in each particular case whether he is using “morality” in the narrow sense to mean 19th century Christian morality or in a more general sense.

So there are a variety of different practices that each count as morality despite there sharing no unique set of defining characteristics. It is thus legitimate to ask the value of each of these particular moralities in the sense of asking whether and to what degree they promote human prosperity. If a particular morality were to promote human flourishing, it would be positively valuable to the degree to which it does so. If however, some morality were to systematically interfere with a life worth living, then it would lack any positive value and indeed be negatively valuable to the degree to which it interferes with human flourishing.

We are now in a position to make sense of the question that Nietzsche poses. Perhaps it makes no sense to ask whether the good itself is valuable, but it does make sense to ask whether the good as conceived by 19th century Central Europeans is valuable in the sense of promoting human flourishing. For after all, it is possible that 19th century Christian morality is badly misconceived with the disastrous result that we moderns have forestalled our happiness and well-being. It is not a foregone conclusion that engaging in some particular, historically conditioned morality will promote human flourishing. It is thus intelligible that it should be an open question whether our actual moral valuations are themselves valuable—whether the good as presently conceived promotes human flourishing. Nietzsche is not so much questioning the value of the good in itself; rather, he is questioning the value of the good as conceived by 19th Century Christian moral practice.

The project of the Genealogy is thus explicitly critical in character. We must not assume the value of our values—this is something that must be determined by genealogical inquiry:

One has taken the value of these “values” as given, as factual, as beyond all question; one has hitherto never doubted or hesitated in the slightest degree in supposing “the good man” to be of greater value than “the evil man”, of greater value in the sense of furthering the advancement and prosperity of man in general (the future of man included). But what if the reverse were true? What if a symptom of regression were inherent in the “good”, likewise a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic, through which the present was possibly living at the expense of the future? Perhaps more comfortably, less dangerously, at the same time in a meaner style, more basely?—So that precisely morality would be to blame if the highest power and splendor actually possible to the type man was never in fact obtained? So that precisely morality was the danger of all dangers?

In critically evaluating our moral values one must leave it open at the outset whether or not and to what degree such values are themselves positively or negatively valuable. As a matter of fact, the conclusion of Nietzsche’s inquiry is that despite the positive effects of the ascetic morality of Christianity, it is a positive hindrance to human prosperity and vitality, that it is a kind of nihilism or European Buddhism—a will to nothingness. In thus opposing nineteenth century Christian morality, Nietzsche sometimes describes himself as an immoralist. While describing himself as an immoralist, this claim must be rightly understood. Nietzsche is not rejecting the claims of morality per se, only the claims of a historically conditioned, moral practice that he believes hinders human prosperity. He is an immoralist only from the perspective of a moral practice that he rejects as being fundamentally opposed to life.

While talk of a morality being positively or negatively valuable to the degree to which it helps or hinders human flourishing certainly helps in making sense of Nietzsche’s questioning the value of our values, the metaphor of “flourishing” is perhaps to imprecise for us to attach a precise content of talk of “the value of our values”. How valuable our morality is will, after all, depend on the degree to which it promotes human prosperity. And if we have no precise idea what human prosperity is, we will have no precise idea how valuable our morality is. It is also clear that different people in different historical circumstances have held a variety of different conceptions of the good life. So how are we to understand the operative metaphor of human flourishing?

Nietzsche has an idiosyncratic conception of human flourishing. Nietzsche identifies human flourishing with great concentrations and consciousness of what he calls the will to power. Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power is easily misinterpreted and such misinterpretation is one of the sources of the view that he is a proto-Nazi and prophet of the Third Reich. So let’s take some time to clarify in a preliminary fashion what he meant by “will to power”. Both of the key concepts of this phrase, “will” and “power”, are used by Nietzsche in a rather expansive sense.

Let’s begin with the concept of will. Nietzsche’s usage of “will” is rather elastic. He uses it to designate not only subpersonal drives and forces, but applies the concept as well to persons and institutions. An individual psychology will typically comprise a number of different drives or impulses not necessarily consistent with one another. Each of these Nietzsche designates as a will. Not only does Nietzsche speak of subpersonal forces as wills but he also speaks of the will of individuals. Thus, for example, he discusses at length Paul’s priestly will being manifest in the moralizing interpretation he foists on the life of the historical Jesus. Not only are subpersonal forces and individuals designated as wills, but Nietzsche speaks as well of the will of institutions. Thus, for example, we can speak without impropriety of the will of the German nation, of UCL, and so on.

As to the concept of power, this too is used by Nietzsche in a rather expansive sense. Nietzsche’s concept of power does not have a precise biological content. One might be tempted to interpret talk of the power of a species as designating the ability of a species to survive. This is not, however, how Nietzsche uses the term. Nietzsche explicitly acknowledges that one can sacrifice one’s life in the interest of furthering one’s will to power. Indeed, this is, Nietzsche maintains, the case with the historical Jesus. Jesus’ acceptance of his crucifixion is interpreted as the highest manifestation of the will governing his radically non-moralizing way of life. Given that one can consistently sacrifice one’s physical well-being to promote one’s will to power, it is clear that talk of power has no biological content. Nor does it necessarily have political significance. While it is true that some individual’s who Nietzsche praises as being the loci of high concentrations of the will to power have enjoyed great political power (notably Napoleon), others that Nietzsche praises have not. Thus Nietzsche claims that the author of Faust, Goethe, displayed a remarkable degree and consciousness of the will to power. Goethe, however, had no political power to speak of in the Weimar Republic nor any political ambitions. So talk of power neither has a determinate biological or political content. What then did Nietzsche mean by it? One can only get a feel for Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power by paying careful attention to the use to which he puts it. The historical exemplars of the will to power that Nietzsche explicitly mentions are a diverse lot, and the only thing they have in common is that they are in some sense worthy of our admiration. part of the problem in stating precisely what human flourishing consists is that Nietzsche denies that there is a unique way for individuals to flourish. Indeed, it is a mark or symptom of great strength of will that an individual will devise novel ways of living and novel values to accompany it. There is no one thing in which the good life consists but every way of flourishing will involve the manifestation of great strength of will.

To return to the question, a morality then is positively valuable to the extent to which it confers or helps to confer greater concentrations and consciousness of the will to power. It is the degree to which morality promotes human growth and vitality which is the standard by which it is critically evaluated.

Genealogy

How is a critique of values to be undertaken? What are the methods appropriate to it? How can we assess whether a particular morality promotes or hinders human prosperity? Nietzsche’s insight, if it is one, is that in order to assess the value of morality we must have knowledge of the conditions and circumstances under which such moral valuations were devised:

What are the conditions and circumstances under which our moral valuations were devised?

Nietzsche maintains that in order to determine the value of our values we must first undertake the history of our moral practice.

There are a number of features of Nietzsche’s historical approach that are worth emphasizing. First, undertaking a historiography of nineteenth century Christian morality is a means of achieving the requisite critical distance towards such moral valuations. If one were to conduct such an inquiry more or less a priori—“gazing around haphazardly in the blue” as Nietzsche puts it—there is a danger in mistaking contingent, historically conditioned features of our morality with essential features of anything that deserves the name. Second without appealling to historical and philological evidence there is a danger of advancing questionable assumptions as historical truths. Thus according to Nietzsche:

… it must be obvious which color is a hundred times more vital for a genealogist of morals than blue: namely gray, that is, what is documented, what can actually be confirmed and has actually existed, in short the entire long hieroglyphic record, so hard to decipher, of the moral past of mankind!

Third, there is an important constraint on an adequate inquiry into the origins of morality. Nietzsche resolutely insists that a history of morality be thoroughly naturalistic. As Hume emphasized, naturalism in philosophy can be understood in a variety of ways, but Nietzsche is a naturalist in one of the historically most important senses of the term. In this sense, naturalism is most fundamentally opposed to belief in the supernatural—deities, spirits, astral projections and the like. In determining the origins of moral practice, Nietzsche insists that we eschew any attributions of supernatural origin.

It is important to emphasize that genealogical inquiry is not a novel form of historiography. Some commentators, especially Michel Foucault, have spoke of Nietzsche’s genealogical method as if it were a new method of historical inquiry. This is a mistake. Nietzsche explicitly speaks of genealogical predecessors, in particular, what he refers to as the “English psychologists”. If by his own lights the English psychologists were undertaking a genealogical inquiry into the moral history of mankind then he cannot take himself to be instituting a novel form of historiography. Rather, As Alexander Nehemas has observed, genealogy just is history properly conducted.

Raymond Guess has usefully contrasted Nietzsche’s genealogical method of inquiry with the practice of tracing a pedigree. This latter practice is at least as old as Western literature itself. Consider the following example of a pedigree from Book II of the Iliad:

Powerful Agamemnon

Stood up holding the scepter Hephaistos

Had wrought him carefully.

Hephaistos gave it to Zeus the king,

Son of Kronos

And Zeus in turn gave it to the courier Argeiphontes,

And lord Hermes gave it to Pelops,

Driver of horses,

And Pelops gave it to Atreus, the shepherd

Of the people.

Atreus dying left it to Thyestes

Of the rich flocks

And Thyestes left it in turn to Agamemnon

To carry

And to be lord over many islands

And over all of Argos.

Leaning upon this scepter he spoke …

This early example exhibits the main characteristics of what Guess calls a pedigree. The general point of tracing a pedigree of to legitimize or at the very least positively valorize some person, institution, of thing. In the present examole, that Agamemnon has inherited the ancestral scepter lends authority to his words and justifies his position as lord of Argos and the “many islands”. The authority that the scepter provides Agamemnon is generally accepted by the other characters of the Iliad. Even those critical of Agamemnon recognize the authority that the scepter endows him—thus Diomedes’ bitter remark that although Zeus gave Agamemnon the scepter “he did not give you a heart, and of all the power this is the greatest”.

Homer’s pedigree of the scepter traces Agamemnon’s possession of it back through a series of unbroken steps to a singular origin. For a pedigree to work, that is, for it to legitimize or positively valorize some item, the origin must be the source of the positive value, and each of the steps of the transmission must be value preserving if not value enhancing. In this particular example, it is important that the scepter can be traced back to Hephaistos and Zeus—the former guarantees the quality of the workmanship and the latter guarantees the associated claim of political authority. Moreover, in order for each step of the transmission of the scepter to be value preserving, such that the owner of the scepter is invested with the requisite authority, it must proceed by voluntary donation. Thus Achilleus would fail to gain Agamemnon’s position of lord of Argos and the “many islands” simply by wresting the scepter from him.

This kind of pedigree, then, has five main characteristics:

1. The function of a pedigree is to legitimize or positively valorize some item
2. The pedigree begins from some singular origin
3. The singular origin is the source of the value of that item
4. The pedigree traces an unbroken line of transmission from the origin to the target item
5. The steps of the transmission preserve or enhance the value in question

Nietzsche’s use of genealogy differs from tracing a pedigree in all five respects. Nietzsche certainly doesn’t undertake a genealogy of nineteenth century Christian moral practice with the intent of legitimizing or positively valorizing it. Indeed providing such a genealogy is the basis of its criticism. So whatever the proper function of genealogy turns out to be, it clearly differs from the function of a pedigree. Thus Nietzsche’s genealogy differs from the practice of tracing a pedigree on the very first point.

With respect to the second point, a genealogy won’t characteristically discover a singular origin for the object under investigation. Thus, as Nietzsche argues, Christian morality does not originate with the activity of a single person (the historical Jesus) or group of people (the disciples). Indeed one of the main points of the Genealogy of Morals is that Christian morality is the product of a number of diverse lines of development. It is the result of, for example, the ressentiment of slaves directed at their masters, a psychological connection between having debts and suffering pain that gets established in commercial transactions, a need to turn one’s aggression against oneself as the result of urbanization, the ambition of the priestly caste to exercise dominion over others, and so on. Thus Nietzsche’s genealogical inquiry discovers, not a singular origin for Christian morality, but rather a number of distinct sources.

Furthermore, with respect to the third point, the further back a genealogical inquiry is pursued the less likely we shall discover something that we positively value. Thus Nietzsche claims that the origin of the concepts of “guilt”, “conscience”, and “duty” is “like the beginnings of everything great on earth, soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time”. Part of the point of this observation is to resist the sentimental assumption that things that we now value have origins that we would also value. Nietzsche believe that this assumption has distorted the results of traditional historiography and is itself a symptom of moral debility. The important point is that whatever value a thing now possesses the source of such value need not reside in its origin.

With respect to the fourth point, genealogical inquiry won’t uncover a linearly ordered sequence of events that underlie the object of investigation. To see this, compare the graphic representations of the pedigree of Agamemnon’s scepter with Nietzsche’s genealogy of Christian morality. Whereas the pedigree of Agamemnon’s scepter is linear, Nietzsche’s genealogy of Christian morality has an elaborate branching structure.

Finally with respect to the fifth point, the historical events uncovered by genealogical inquiry do not preserve or transmit some antecedent value so much as they create or institute it. The decisive events that give rise to Christian morality, for example, do not transmit the values instituted at its origin; rather these events themselves institute such values.

Genealogy and Value

Now that we have gotten somewhat clearer on the two central questions of the Genealogy, let us consider their interconnection. What is the relationship between the value of our values and the historical circumstances that gave rise to them. How can genealogical inquiry provide us with the resources to determine the value of our morality? A complete answer to this question will not be unavailable until we discuss the third essay of the Genealogy. But for now, let’s consider what this relation could not be.

Nietzsche, in insisting that the history of our morality is relevant to determining its value, comes perilously close to committing what is known as the genetic fallacy. The genetic fallacy is the conflation of the value of something with the value of its origin. Just because something has some value it does not follow that it came about on account of the value it now possesses.

• The Genetic Fallacy: the conflation of the origin of a thing with its present value.

It would seem then that there is no direct inference from the conditions that give rise to a thing to the value it now possesses or vice versa. How then is genealogical inquiry at all relevant to determining the value of our morality? Isn’t Nietzsche’s project simply confused at the outset—an ill advised enterprise initiated by a non-rigorous thinker?

We should caution against such a hasty dismissal of Nietzsche’s project. Nietzsche himself is under no illusion as to the genetic fallacy. Nietzsche explicitly identifies such a fallacy in his book Daybreak where he writes:

more insight we possess into an origin the less significance does the origin appear…

Not only does he explicitly recognize the genetic fallacy, but he criticizes previous genealogists for committing just this fallacy. In particular he objects to the kind of genealogy of morality provided by English psychologists precisely because it conflates the origin of our morality with its value: Originally—so they decree—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, simply because unegoistic actions were always habitually praised as good, one also felt them to be good—as if they were good in themselves.

Nietzsche maintains that it is a psychological absurdity that the original utility of unegoistic actions has been forgotten: this utility has rather been an everyday experience at all times, therefore something that has been underlined again and again: consequently instead of fading from consciousness, instead of being merely forgotten, it must have been impressed on the consciousness more and more clearly. Not only is this account psychologically suspect, but it is historically suspect as well. The English psychologists infer from the present utility of valuing unegoistic actions to such valuations arising because of their utility. Indeed, Nietzsche maintains that the opposite is true. Originally the concept good did not designate unegoistic actions. It is only because the English psychologists did not pay careful enough attention to the historical record that they were seduced by the genetic fallacy.

Nietzsche thus not only recognizes the existence of the genetic fallacy but also recommends the rigorous application of historical methods as a preventative. It would thus be uncharitable in the extreme to simply accuse him of making just this mistake. Rather, the fact of his explicit recognition of the genetic fallacy forces us to consider whether the argument of the Genealogy is more subtle than this. And indeed I believe it is.

What then is the connection between the genealogy of morality and the determination of its value? Perhaps the connection is this: a careful historiography of morality will reveal whether and to what extent Christian morality has hindered or promoted human growth and vitality so far. The fact that Christian morality has so far hindered or promoted human flourishing surely provides us some good evidence as to whether it presently hinders or promotes “the growth of the plant ‘man’” To be sure the historical record provides some evidence but such evidence is far from conclusive. Just because some value or system of values has hitherto hindered or promoted human flourishing it does not follow that these values will presently hinder or promote human growth and vitality. Under a given set of contingent, historical circumstances a morality may promote human flourishing and under another set of circumstances it may prove to be a positive hindrance, and vice versa. Nietzsche denies moral values are universal in the sense of themselves being valuable for everyone and everywhere and at all times. As such, he cannot in good conscience maintain that the fact that Christian morality has heretofore hindered or promoted human flourishing is conclusive evidence that it will continue to do so.

So what then is the argument of the Genealogy? How is the genealogical record of morality relevant to determining its value? As I said before, a complete answer to this question must wait until we have discussed Nietzsche’s account of the significance of ascetic ideals in the third essay of the book. But let me make a few comments as to its oblique character. One useful way to think about Nietzsche’s case is that it is a kind of demonstration. “Demonstration” is ambiguous but both of its senses is relevant to the character of Nietzsche’s case. In one sense of demonstration, if one has demonstrated some proposition one has established it with the requisite rational authority. Thus we sometimes speak of mathematical proof as a demonstration. In another sense of the word, a demonstration, unlike an argument in propositional form, is explicitly nonpropositional. In this sense, to demonstrate something is to display or show it rather than describing it. Thus we can speak of a golf pro as demonstrating the proper swing after explicitly describing it. Nietzsche’s case is a demonstration in something like both these senses. It is supposed to have the rational authority of explicitly recognized forms of argument and yet it is displayed or shown in the style of the text rather than being explicitly argued for in propositional form. Once again, the crucial link is in the third essay so I will simply leave you with these tantalizing remarks until then. However, I hope this underscores the importance of paying careful attention to Nietzsche’s style.

Christian Morality

Before we begin discussing Nietzsche’s critique of morality, we should first get a clearer conception of the Christian morality that he opposes. Nietzsche maintains that European morality derived from Christianity is structured by six characteristic theses: This morality claims of itself that it is unconditional in the obligation it imposes.

1. It claims to be universal—it applies equally to all human beings at all times and places.
2. It claims that only free human actions have moral value.
3. It claims that the moral worth of a free action depends on the quality of the human choice that leads the agent to perform it.
4. It claims that human beings and their actions are to be evaluated (positively) as “good” or (negatively) as “evil” depending on the kind of human choice involved.
5. It claims that we are responsible for our choices and should feel guilt or remorse for evil choices.

As will emerge, Nietzsche will taken exception with 19th century Christian morality on all of these points.

Like many other religions, Christianity has a bipartite structure: a set of antecedently existing practices, modes of behavior, perceptions, and feelings, which at a certain time are given an interpretation which imposes on them a meaning that they did not have before. Thus in the specific case of Christianity Nietzsche distinguishes a way of life a practice which is specifically associate with the historical Jesus because he is thought to have instantiated it to a particularly high degree and in a particularly striking way, but which is in principle livable almost anywhere and anytime, a form of life, of instinctive practice, not a form of belief, which consists on the unconditional forgiveness of enemies, a failure to resist evil, abstention from use of force or the moral condemnation of others from a particular interpretation put on that way of life (as instantiated by Jesus), that is, a set of propositions that eventually become the content of Christian faith and belief.

This interpretation is more or less invented by Paul and contains various dogmatic propositions about the existence of God, the immortality of the human soul, human sinfulness and the need for redemption. Though Paul did succeed in getting his reading of the meaning of Jesus accepted his dogmas did not fit very comfortably with the original form of practice Jesus instantiated. To be more exact, 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—and it has in general had the upper hand for most of the period in question—it transforms Christianity (as we can now call the amalgam of Jesus way of life and Paul’s interpretation of it) into what is the exact reverse of anything that the historical Jesus would have praticed. An essentially a political, pacifist, non-moralizing form of existence is transformed into a Church a hierarchically organized public institution—just the thing Jesus preached against.

Paul’s interpretation of Jesus’s life (which forms the core of Christian theology) is wrong in two ways. First of all it is a misunderstanding of Jesus’s way of life. For Paul, Jesus’ life and death essentially has to do with sin and redemption, but the message of Jesus’ life really is that there is no sin and that the very concept of guilt has been abolished. Second Paul’s propositional beliefs taken by themselves (and not necessarily as an interpretation of the life of Jesus) are false. For Nietzsche the whole notion of sin is in its origin a priestly misinterpretation of certain physiological states of debility and suffering and the concept of guilt in the full blown Christian sense depends on the false assumption that humans have freedom of the will and can thus decide to exercise or refrain from exercising the various powers they have.

Paul’s hijacking of the form of life as embodied by Jesus is one episode in what Nietzsche calls the genuine history of Christianity, but it shows in particular clarity the bipartite structure (of “form of life ” on the one hand and “interpretation ” on the other) which was mentioned earlier. It is important to see that Paul’s successful attempt to take over the Christian form of life by reinterpreting it is only one of a number of such episodes. Each such attempt can be described as at the same time a new interpretation of Christianity as it exists at the given time and as an attempt to take over or get mastery of that existing form of Christianity. Each historically successive interpretation gives the existing Christian way of life a new meaning.

Although Nietzsche at one point says that Paul annuls original Christianity this doesn’t mean that Paul wishes to abolish wholesale the practices that constitute this primordial form of Christianity. Rather he wants to impress on them a stamp of a certain meaning, give them a certain direction. Nietzsche thinks that such attempts to take over/reinterpret an existing set of practices or way of life will not in general be so 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. Equally once Paul’s reading of Christian practice has given these practices a certain meaning, the historically next reinterpretation will in turn find the Pauline meanings already embedded in the form of life it confronts and will be unlikely in giving a new interpretation of that form of life to abolish the Pauline concepts and interpretations altogether. Historically, then, successive layers of such meanings will be deposited. There will be some gradual change in the actual practices and form of life—Pauline Christianity will begin to develop a Church organization which primordial Christianity lacked, but even the dominant interpretation won’t have been able utterly to eradicate the meanings that have previously accumulated, that have been impressed upon Christianity by previous wills.

The history of Christianity, then, is a history of successive attempts on the part of a variety of different wills to take control of and reinterpret a complex of habits, feelings, ways of perceiving and acting, thereby imposing on this complex a meaning. Although the meaning imposed at any time by successful will may in some sense be superseded by a later meaning imposed by a later will, the original meaning will in general not go out of existence altogether but will remain embedded in at least a modified form in the complex we call Christianity. Part of the reason for this is that once a certain will has been able to impose its meaning on Christianity, it acquires a certain power of resistance to any further attempts on the part of other wills to impose their meaning on the Christian complex. Once Pauline theology has penetrated Christian practice, modified it, given it a certain direction and a particular kind of coherence etc. any non-Pauline will which tries to impose a new interpretation on Christianity (as thus constituted) won’t encounter, as it were, just a tabula rasa, but a set of actively structured forces, practices, etc. which will be capable of active resistance to attempts to turn them into other directions, impose new functionson them, etc. So each episode of reinterpretation will be a struggle between a will impinging from without bent on mastery attempting to impose of a new meaning and a complex way of life which will resist at least by inertia and evasion and probably by more active measures as well.

Christianity at any given point of time will be a synthesis of the various different meanings imposed on it in the past and which have succeeded in remaining embedded in Christian feeling, forms of action and belief, etc. There will be nothing necessary nor even particularly coherent about such a synthesis—what meanings it will contain and how they will be relate to one another will just be the result of history, and this history will be contingent in a number of different ways. It will be contingent which wills will encounter and try to master and interpret Christianity at what times and under what circumstances, and it will be contingent how much force, energy, and success they will have in imposing their meaning. The history of Christianity will, as Nietzsche writes in the section 13 of the second essay of the Genealogy, crystallize itself into a kind of unity which is difficult to dissolve, difficult to analyze, and, it must be emphasized, utterly undefinable.

One can’t give a definition of Christianity if one means by that an account of a purported or essential meaning (or purpose or function) which is invariably characteristic of Christianity. Nietzsche claims that only that which has no history is definable because anything that has a history will partake like Christianity in the continuing struggle between wills attempting to impose their meaning or purpose on the item in question, a struggle with constantly shifting outcomes. Instead of a definition, one must try to give a historical analysis of the contingent synthesis of meanings Christianity, for instance, represents. This process of disentangling the separate strands will take the form of a historical account. The reason for this seems to be that at an earlier stage the synthesis of meanings presents itself in such a way as to be more easily dissolved. The individual elements are more distinct.

The appropriate historical account is a genealogy. Starting from the present state of say Christianity or whatever else is the object of genealogical inquiry the genealogy works backwards in time, recounting the episodes of struggle between different wills, each trying to impose its interpretation or meaning on the practice that existed at that time, and thereby disentangling the separate strands of meaning that have come together in a contingent unity in the present. Each such episode is, as it were, the branching node of a genealogical tree—the kind of tree represented by the diagram I gave you last time. The diagram was intentionally just a sketch of Nietzsche’s account, leaving out many details in order to exhibit more clearly the overall structure. At various points the branches simply end but those endpoints are not absolute origins. The genealogy peters out there either because there is not more information available or because further elaboration of the genealogy at that point would lead too far afield, but in principle if the information were available and there was reason to continue, one could carry the genealogy back beyond the points at which Nietzsche in facts stops.

This is true in particular for the end-point I designated Jesus’ radically non-moralizing from of life. I said earlier that religions for Nietzsche generally have a bipartite structure: a particular way of living on the one hand and an interpretation of it on the other. In this case, there is Jesus’ way of life and Paul’s interpretation of it, and only both together constitute what we call Christianity. One might think that having thus recognized the difference between Jesus and Paul we could now strip back the Pauline interpretation and we could get back to something that was not interpretation but the way of life in itself, a final stopping point, and absolute origin. That one can get back to the thing itself, unvarnished and uninterpreted is an illusion. Unless one believes in miracles, Jesus’ practice itself has historical antecedents that could be genealogically analyzed. In addition Jesus’ way of life, although it is not constituted by explicit belief in a set of propositions of the kind Paul asserts, can be itself seen as a kind of interpretation. For Nietzsche, I am interpreting a situation by reacting to it in a certain way. If I recoil from it, I am interpreting it as repulsive; if I draw near it I am interpreting it to be attractive; if I pass by without reacting to it at all, I am treating the situation as irrelevant or insignificant. This is, presumably, one of the things that Nietzsche means when he claims that life itself is a process of evaluating and giving preferences. So Jesus’ form of life, although not characterized by explicit theological beliefs of the Pauline kind, will have the same two part structure: it will ultimately show itself as arising from an episode in which certain will with a certain interpretation of things tries to take over a preexisting form of life (although this interpretation now won’t, as in the later Pauline case, be essentially a question of affirming or believing propositions, but of acting, feeling, and perceiving in a certain way). I can’t tell you what Nietzsche thinks this antecedently existing mode of living (which Jesus took over and reinterpreted) was, because he doesn’t say, but in the Genealogy Nietzsche claims that Jesus’ good news of universal love was not the reverse of Jewish hatred but grew out of it as its crowning achievement. It would be mistake I think, to interpret this as meaning that Jesus’ love was not really love but rather really hate. It would also be a mistake to identify this transformation of hate into universal love in the person of Jesus with what Nietzsche calls the slave revolt in morality, the transformation of the valuations based on the contrast good/bad into a valuation based on the contrast good/evil. Paul is a central figure in the slave revolt which lies in the main line of development of modern western morality; Jesus on the other hand was for Nietzsche only very marginally associated with the genesis of our morality. Both arise out of the deepest and most sublime hatred that ever was on earth, but each transforms this hatred in a completely different direction: Paul into a form of guilt ridden, moralizing asceticism, and Jesus by becoming virtually a “free spirit” a man incapable of negating or refuting with no conception of sin, guilt or punishment. When Nietzsche sums up his campaign against traditional morality, the formulation he uses is not Dionysos against Jesus but Dionysos against The Crucified. The Crucified being, of course, the name of the Pauline God.

Let me make one more comment on the relationship between determining the value of our morality and undertaking its genealogy. Given Nietzsche’s historicist conception of meaning, that the meaning of an institution or practice is ultimately constituted by the various wills that have sought to master and interpret it, genealogical inquiry is one sense clearly relevant to the project of determining the value of our morality. For the content of our present morality, the synthesis of the various meanings that it has come to embody through its long history, can only be determined by undertaking the kind historical inquiry that Nietzsche recommends. That is, before we can determine the value of our morality we must have a clearer conception of its content, and in order to do that we must first undertake its genealogy. While the content of our morality, as revealed by genealogical analysis, is relevant to determining its value, the degree to which it promotes or hinders human growth and vitality, genealogy still cannot by itself answer the initial question as to its value. So while Nietzsche’s interpretivism, that the meaning of thing is an interpretation imposed on it by a will from without, definitely sheds light on the relevance of genealogy to the question of the value of our morality, it is still unclear whether and how and answer to the genealogical question can be a sufficient basis for determining the value of our moral practice.