Nietzsche’s Genealogy in Its Relation to History and Philosophy

Abstract

Nietzsche’s sparse remarks on genealogy have left open significant questions as to what it is and where it stands in relation to philology, history, critique, and philosophy. By tracing Nietzsche’s associated conceptions of philology; critical, monumental, and antiquarian history; genesis; and Entstehungsgeschichte; as well as his genealogical practices, I show that, with certain key limitations, Nietzschean genealogy emerges from out of the synthesis of critical, monumental, and antiquarian history for the purposes of life that Nietzsche develops in On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life. The importance of this practice lies in the fact that, at various times, it appears to be a part, a precondition, or even the totality of philosophy.

1. Introduction

The call for papers for this issue of Genealogy asks for work examining the origins of Nietzsche’s ideas and genealogical methods, their similarity or difference with the methods of his contemporaries in history and philology, the accuracy of his genealogies, and the role of genealogy in his philosophy. In this article, I address these questions broadly, focusing on what genealogy is for Nietzsche, while leaving to others substantive treatments of these issues. By contextualizing Nietzsche’s genealogical projects by reference to his related terms and conceptual practices, some of which have gone unexamined to this point, I show that his understanding of genealogy emerges from out of his early accounts of history and philology and that it is continuous with them in broad outline. I argue that if we set aside certain key developments in Nietzsche’s philosophy from the 1870s to the 1880s, Nietzschean genealogy approximates the synthesis of critical, monumental, and antiquarian history that he validates as an aesthetic and philosophical enterprise for the purpose of life in On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life. This form emphasizes the values of lived experience in contrast to the claims to strict objectivity and disinterestedness of the stereotypical philologist. Hence, without claiming that Nietzsche’s philosophy was unchanged from the philological to the genealogical period, I argue that Nietzsche’s stance toward the synthesis of critical, monumental, and antiquarian history is consistent with his developed genealogy, contra Anthony K. Jensen, who argues that Nietzsche’s metahistorical presuppositions shifted from skeptical realism to representational antirealism (Jensen 2013b, p. 198). A key continuity in Nietzsche’s genealogical project and his synthesis of critical, monumental, and antiquarian history is in its philosophical significance. Genealogy and the modes of history each chart a crucial element and perhaps even the ultimate determination of the philosopher. At the same time, the topic of genealogy in Nietzsche involves not only his understanding and application of the concept, but also the principles underlying genealogies of Nietzsche’s own ideas, which have been carried out in fields ranging from philosophy, philology, and literature to anthropology, history, music, and the sciences. I examine why the task of establishing the origin and development of Nietzsche’s concepts is so inviting, what problems it raises, and why it is so crucial to our understanding of his work in particular.1

In this project, rather than relying on some abstract principle for deciding which texts do and do not count within Nietzsche’s proper corpus, I refer to the key texts involved, whether published or unpublished, to notes, revised but unpublished texts, texts not seen through to the final publishing stage, lecture notes, and personal letters, because there is no good reason to exclude the texts relevant to any particular question in Nietzsche scholarship. Nor is there any consistent principle or application of Maudemarie Clark’s priority principle for privileging published over unpublished works.2 Just as she herself refers to unpublished texts (notes) to settle questions she does not find adequately treated in the public texts (Clark 2018, pp. 229–30; 2019), so should we all look to the relevant texts and notes, not merely JGB 36, as she does. While we should certainly take care to recognize that Nietzsche’s stance toward any given writing may not be straightforward, this applies as much to the ones she privileges, Beyond Good and Evil and Genealogy of Morals, with their various voices, strategies, and tactics, as to the ones she passes over, including Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which she considers “too metaphorical and anthropomorphic”, and the so-called Nachlaß, despite its thoroughly permeable boundaries (Clark 1990, p. 212).

On the face of it, genealogy as such seems hardly central to Nietzsche, because it is neither his favorite, nor his most used phrase to describe the conceptual practices that it designates. Although he uses the term at least 36 times, once in 1871, the rest from 1884 to 1889, many of these references are merely to the title of Genealogy of Morals, rather than to the application, description, or justification of a particular concept or discursive practice. Nietzsche says very little directly about the term ‘genealogy.’ Hence, to show that the concept of genealogy plays a major role in his philosophy, we need to go beyond his definition and sparing use of the term to other concepts that to varying degrees get at similar practices of philology and history, such as the study of the birth (Geburt), origin (Ursprung, Genesis, Entstehungsgeschichte), and descent (Herkunft) of concepts, moral and otherwise, for critical purposes of life.3

2. Philology

My project here is to examine Nietzsche’s terminological shifts in the 1870s and 1880s, as he pivoted from philology to different forms of history and genealogy. Hence, I do not examine in detail his early philological writings prior to 1870, which are the basis for Jensen’s argument that Nietzsche shifted his conception of history from his early works on Theognis and Diogenes Laertius to his genealogical practice of the 1880s. However, Jensen’s own claims about Nietzsche’s early skeptical realism, as he calls it, support my assertion of a continuity in the project of recovering the truths of history for the sake of the present. According to Jensen, Nietzsche’s early philological texts urge that we use “careful linguistic analysis and source criticism,” as well as “a certain quantity of supposition and fantasy” (KSB 1, #426, p. 282, cited in Jensen 2013b, p. 199), to skeptically cut through the historical sedimentation of deceptive and misleading interpretations and forgeries and thereby attain to the textual realities (Jensen 2013b, pp. 199–201). Philology’s aim was skeptical realism, “to discover the genuine, real text under the false interpretation by means of analyzing the presented evidence, to remove the false representations of a real and true past” (Jensen 2013b, p. 201). As I will discuss, there is a sense in which Nietzsche’s philology and genealogy share this aim of clearing away false interpretations and historical accretions to get at the texts themselves. However, it is clear in many texts from this period that Nietzsche was skeptical not only about false interpretations of texts, but also about claims to reality as such, as he argues in “On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense” in 1873. Hence, whatever the case was in the 1860s, Nietzsche was certainly no realist by 1873, and thus not a skeptical realist. He was a subjective, representational thinker at the time. Hence, he regarded the world in terms of subjective representations and denied that we had access to anything that went beyond representations. For this reason, we lacked any access to things in themselves. Texts were not things in themselves, but rather historically contested, phenomenal presences shot through with historical sedimentation, interpretation, and perspectives. Truth was a mobile army of metaphors, not a correspondence between thought and thing.4 In the mid-1880s, Nietzsche’s strategies and tactics for undermining metaphysics were considerably more sophisticated. Yet, he still retained much of the skeptical and delimitative content of his 1870s writings, with the exception of representationalism (and subjectivism), which he had still largely held in the early 1870s (Nachlass 1873, 26[11], KSA 7.574–75), but, contra Jensen, abandoned by the mid- to late-1880s (e.g., JGB 15–16, 20, KSA 5.29–30, 35). So, against Jensen’s reading, Nietzsche was neither a realist in the early work, nor a representationalist in the late work. Nevertheless, both in the 1860s texts that Jensen identifies and in Genealogy of Morals, as we shall see in more detail, Nietzsche quite directly asserts that what the genealogist seeks is “the grey, … the documented, the actually fixable, the actually present, in short, the entire long, difficult to be deciphered hieroglyphic script of the human moral-past!” (GM P7, KSA 5.254). Seen in this light, Nietzsche’s project exhibits a basic consistency in claiming to grasp the facts of history without constituting in either case a form of skeptical realism. Indeed, there is a sense in which we might better cast the work of the 1870s as something like the representational antirealism that Jensen ascribes to the 1880s, since it both asserts the necessity of representation and denies the possibility of identifying our concepts with truths about the world. But we could not cast the later work as representational antirealism, as James I. Porter argues (Jensen 2013b, pp. 197–98, Porter 2000), because Nietzsche had by this point dispensed with representationalism by denying the existence of subjects and objects (JGB 16–17, KSA 5.29–31), the old Schopenhauerian terms of representation (Schopenhauer, WWR I, §1; JGB 36, KSA 5.54).5 This point is key to defeating Jensen’s distinction between Nietzsche’s genealogy and philology, because Jensen claims that GM, in contrast to Nietzsche’s early textually objective philology, can refer to “historical phenomena beyond the possibility of objective or realist description … in large part due to the fact that the subjective intrusions that obfuscate the past are the direct result of an above all historical development of those same subjective intrusions” (Jensen 2013b, p. 207). This distinction cannot be sustained. Nietzsche had already rejected the subject-object categories by this time as grammatical fictions. Moreover, we cannot accept Jensen’s claim that his discovery of Heraclitean flux meant that he could no longer accept the stases of history (Jensen 2013b, p. 205), as if constant flux had not already entered into his thinking when he had embraced ceaseless Heraclitean flux in the early 1870s in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Nor should we regard Nietzsche’s work as ‘antirealism,’ for that wrongly implies both that he is not dealing with anything real in our experience and that his alternative merely opposes itself to realism. In the early work, he is speaking of texts, rather than events, and so Jensen’s reference to his critique of historical events as mere fictions and opinions concerning supposed actions and motives does not seem to touch on textual interpretation at all (Jensen 2013b, p. 207, citing Dawn 307, KSA 3.224). Much of Nietzsche’s genealogical work is based not on counterfactuals (what would have happened if things were otherwise), but rather accounts of the origin, development, and driving forces of Western moral schemas, whether conceived as broad biological-historical-natural forces or an internalized will to power, as in GM II.13 or JGB 36. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche far from abandoning conceptions of reality, instead “assume[s] that nothing else is ‘given’ as real [real] other than our world of desires and passions, that we are able to go down or up to no other ‘reality’ [Realität] than just the reality of our drives,” where the world can be understood “not as a deception, an ‘illusion’ [Schein], a ‘representation’ (in the Berkeleyan and Schopenhauerean sense), but rather as of the same rank of reality [Realitäts-Range] as of our affects,” a life of the drives or will to power (JGB 36, KSA 5.54–55). This is no anti-realism; it is an alternative to traditional conceptions of the realism-idealism divide. Thus, in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche dispenses with the very opposition between a ‘true’ and an apparent world, for “with the true world we have done away also with the apparent one” (GD, “How the ‘True World’ finally became a Fable,” KSA 6.80–81). Such a separation of true and apparent world is a symptom of decadence, whether in Christianity or Kant; the artist knows better to value appearance or illusion (Schein) above reality, in that “‘illusion’ means reality [die Realität] once more, only in a selection, strengthening, correction” (GD, Die ‘Vernunft’ in der Philosophie, 6, KSA 6.78–79). Hence, in place of opposition to realism, we might describe his work better by terms such as art, will to power, phenomenalism, experience, useful fiction, or pragmatic necessity.

On the other hand, to oppose Nietzsche’s later work to philology seems obviously right, because he is heavily critical of philology in the course of his transition to philosophy in the 1870s. In 1875, for instance, he disparages philologists as “gossips and triflers,” “dirty pedants,” “cavilers [Wortklauber],” and “philistines” in contrast to the Greeks with their “develop[ment of] the body,” “free manliness,” and “pure view into the world” (1875, 5[59], KSA 8.57). However, that does not tell the full story. Philology, as Nietzsche and his teachers practiced it, or at least as he came to want them to practice it, was essentially a form of genealogy, to the degree that it formulates origin stories of Greek and Western culture for the purposes of present and future life, and thus from the phenomenal perspective of the contemporary. Thus, for instance, in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche derives the origins of philosophy from Thales’s attempt to think the unity of nature beyond appearances, and he derives the several origins of metaphysics and the philosophy of difference from Anaxagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Empedocles, among others. In The Birth of Tragedy, he derives the origins of tragedy from the synthesis of the Apollinian and Dionysian. These origin stories were always motivated by the purposes of life and art. Even in more traditionally philological texts of the 1860s, he was influenced by both Friedrich Ritschl’s sprachliche philology, which concentrated on the correction of ancient texts, and Otto Jahn’s sachliche philology, which extended to the whole context of life within ancient societies through archaeological and other non-textual sources. James Whitman argues persuasively that Nietzsche’s adaptations of these methodologies was guided by the magisterial tradition of philology in which philology is animated by the desire not for a scholarly reconstruction of authentic texts or their sources but for the revelation of an originary form of art that expresses and enacts the purposes of life (Whitman 1986, pp. 459–62). This formulation expresses Nietzsche’s own purposes for philology. Already in early 1866, just after discovering Schopenhauer, he quotes the aphorism in Latin and German, “first live, then philosophize” (to Franziska Nietzsche, 31 January 1866, BVN-1866, 493). Much later, in the 1886 preface to the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche writes of his aim “to see science under the optics of the artist, but art under that of life” (GT, “Attempt at a Self-Critique,” 2, KSA 1.14). This concern is hardly limited to these works. Nietzsche frequently refers to the ultimate purposes of life, art, and value as prior to the objective scholarly enterprise. Thus, from early to late, Nietzsche’s historical-philological study of sources lends primacy to the purposes of life.

3. Critical, Monumental, and Antiquarian History

What Nietzsche was seeking in philology is arguably best encapsulated by the synthesis of ‘critical history’6 with monumental and antiquarian history. Here we must be careful to distinguish the primary term ‘critical history’ from ‘historical-critical’ philology, which has a negative valence in Nietzsche’s early work. While Christian Benne (2005) argues that Nietzsche was influenced early on by historical-critical philology, which emphasizes source determinations, Nietzsche himself notes in 1872–1873 that he wants to move beyond David Strauss’s “historical-critical air” (19[19], KSA 7.422), and he argues that “the so-called historical-critical science has no means at all of coming closer to such foreign things: we need bridges, experiences, lived experiences [Erfahrungen, Erlebnisse]: then we again need human beings who interpret them to us, who express them” (1872–1873, 25[1], KSA 7.566). So, there is something flawed about the historical-critical method that has to do with its disinterested character, its detachment from lived experience. Critical history is supposed to correct for such limitations. In his early philological period, critical history already functions as a correlative, corrective term for philology. In 1867, he writes with reference to his philological projects on Diogenes Laertius and the ancients that “in the background floats a plan for a critical history [kritischen Geschichte] of Gk. literature” (Nietzsche to Carl von Gersdorff, 20 February 1867, BVN-1867, 538). His next use of the term, in an 1873 note, provides an essential clue to the relation of critical history to genealogy in his later work. He christens as critical history a project that prefigures his future genealogy of morals precisely as a propaedeutic for an alternative construction of values. He writes that a fatigue has risen over religion and its signifying symbols in that

[a]ll possibilities of Christian life, the most serious and casual, the most harmless and thoughtless and the most reflective, are tested out; it is time for the invention of something new or one must fall ever again into the old cycle: it is admittedly difficult to come out from the vortex after it has turned us around for a few millennia. The ridicule, the cynicism, the hostility to Christianity is played out; one sees the icy surface in warming weather, the ice is everywhere broken, dirty, dull, dangerous, with puddles of water. … Christianity is very soon becoming ripe for critical history [kritische Historie].

(1873, 31[8], KSA 7.751)

Critical history here names the task of identifying the nature and existence of Christianity within modernity, as we see later in the form of slave morality in Human, All Too Human, Beyond Good and Evil, and the Genealogy of Morals. Importantly, in this early note, critical history, like Nietzsche’s later genealogy, is a necessary propaedeutic to the dangerous project of inventing a new world-system of values. In this sense, critical history, synthesized with monumental and antiquarian history, clears the ground for the value-constituting task of the philosopher, as in Beyond Good and Evil.

Nietzsche begins to contextualize and differentiate these functions in his 1874 text, The Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, the second Untimely Meditation. He sets forth three forms of history, critical, monumental, and antiquarian (HL 2, KSA 1.258), that notably are semi-coordinate to three forms of life, the historical, superhistorical, and unhistorical, respectively. These pairs are only semi-coordinate because Nietzsche, as he recognized, never fully works out his concepts in the text. However, in general, we may say that while each of the three forms of history and life is problematic, taken singly, in combination they are necessary for the purposes of life. To judge the forms of history requires that we judge the forms of life to which they correspond. The unhistorical is the most attractive form of life in Nietzsche’s account. Only gods and animals live unhistorically. The unhistorical animal lives in constant presence, knowing only the moment, forgetting everything, anticipating nothing, and hence, living without past or future, much like the absolutely discrete temporal moments posited in Nietzsche’s 1873 fragment, the Zeitatomenlehre or Time-Atom Theory (1873, 26[12], KSA 7.575–79). This unhistorical existence is impossible for humans. The most we can expect is the active forgetfulness of the mnemotechnics in GM. Though the gods are grouped with animals in the unhistorical, they are less unhistorical than superhistorical, for they stand outside of history and see it as a whole. Monumental history corresponds to the superhistorical, for it similarly grasps the world from outside history, synthesizing all past, present, and future in a single, static moment and thereby neglecting the historical details. In monumental history, “entire great parts of [the past] are forgotten, disrespected, and flow away like a grey, incessant flood and only individual adorned facts raise themselves forth as islands” (HL 2, KSA 1.262). In this sense, neither the unhistorical nor the superhistorical can grasp history proper in its singular detail and flux. The value of antiquarian history, by contrast, is that its “preserving and revering soul” gives a home, worth, and inviolability to “[t]he small, the limited, the friable and superannuated” (HL 3, KSA 1.265), which are ignored and transcended by monumental history. Unlike monumental history, antiquarian history is precise and attentive to the singular presence of the historical entity in its one frozen time. Thus, it preserves, reveres, is loyal, and loves that from which one comes (HL 2); it judges every past as valuable in itself. In thus quietistically binding lower types to a place and culture, antiquarian, like monumental, history may serve the ends of rulers and value creators. But it is unhistorical, in that its focus on the single historical fact or event outside of its historical context or significance kills history’s living spirit and meaning. Antiquarian history negates itself; it treats time as past and dead. Hence, neither monumental nor antiquarian history, neither gods nor animals, neither the superhistorical nor unhistorical can grasp history as such.

Only critical history, arguably the most privileged of the three forms of history, can grasp the historical existence characteristic of human beings. This is not to say that the historical is by any means always preferred. There are also significant drawbacks to it. Like antiquarian history, it can be burdensome in tying us to an unchangeable, dead past, thus presenting us with the problem of affirming a world freighted with irremediable suffering. But even if time is itself an illusion, a representation to which nothing corresponds, as Nietzsche argues in both the 1870s and 1880s, humans cannot live unhistorically, for they are essentially historical, living in phenomenal or representational experience in either discrete experiential moments, as in the Zeitatomenlehre, or a continuum of moments, as in “the Vision and the Riddle” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. To live historically is to judge a period critically by its own immanent value standards, which is to say, for life. It is not to claim neutrality or disinterestedness in judgment like objective history. Objective historians are like eunuchs, to whom “a woman is like any other … woman in itself, the eternally unapproachable.—and thus it is indifferent what it wreaks, if only the history itself remains preserved beautiful … [sic] objective’, namely by such that never could itself make history … history as a neuter … the eternally-objective” (HL 5, KSA 1.284). The objective historian either extinguishes or sublimates historically productive desire in uncritically setting forth woman—truth—as such. In the normal case, history bewitches or enchains, “laming the critical will” (M P3, KSA 3.13).

The task of critical history is to restore the critical will and the values of life abandoned by objective history. Critical history’s purpose is ultimately to judge, to evaluate, to appropriate for its own purposes, and thus, to create values, rather than to stand apart from them. In this sense, critical history already rejects the objective history that Jensen attributes to Nietzsche’s early philology in contradistinction to his genealogy. Critical history judges and evaluates the past and its violence from the perspective of the insatiable life drive, even as it restores the singularities abstracted out by monumental history (HL 3, KSA 1.269). The need for critical history derives from what is missing and suppressed by monumental history, but again in service of life. The human being must have the force, and from time to time apply it, to break and dissolve the past in order to be able to live: this he reaches through the fact that he moves himself before judgment, inquires painfully, and finally judges: but every past is to be judged valuable—for thus it stands now once with human things: they have always been powerful in their human force and weakness (HL 3, KSA 1.269).

Here we see how Nietzsche under the aegis of critical history transforms what he took to be the useless, dead form of philology, meaning something like antiquarian history, into a form of living history that artistically rank-orders and judges past values for the aims of life in the present and future of human beings.7 In this sense, critical history looks very much like genealogy.

But genealogy is not merely critical history, because, among other things, it is only in taking from each of the three forms of history that history first becomes valuable for life.

These are the services that history [Historie] may afford life; every human and every people requires a certain acquaintance of the past according to his aims, forces, and needs, sometimes as monumental, sometimes as antiquarian, sometimes as critical history: but not like a bevy of pure thinkers regarding only life, not as individuals desiring knowing, satisfying through knowing alone, the aim of which is itself the improvement of knowledge [Erkenntniss], but rather always only for the end of life and thus also under the mastery and supreme lead of this end.

(HL 4, KSA 1.271)

To live historically, then, requires that we conceive of it in a variety of ways for a variety of purposes of life with the aid of critical, as well as monumental and antiquarian, history, which is to say, attentive to judgment (critical history), singularity (antiquarian history), greatness, and totality (the monumental and superhistorical), for the purposes of the affirmation of life in and beyond history. Each of these senses of history contributes to what we understand as the genealogical project, with its antiquarian historical particularities, its broad, superhistorical or monumental sweep, its critique of the value of values, and its subsumption of history to the purposes of present life, as in the unhistorical.

For this reason, critical history requires the supplementation of the singularity and greatness of antiquarian and monumental history to attain to the task of Nietzschean genealogy. This task involves preparing the way for a critique of moral values through attention to the origins of our values and constituting new values for life from out of this historical past. As Nietzsche later writes, we must learn to treat “[p]hilosophy [as the] art of life, not [the] art of discovery of truth” (1888, 12[1], KSA 13.197). Therefore, we can accept only the first half of Daniel Breazeale’s claim that “there is a direct link between Nietzsche’s early conception of the task of critical history and his later efforts as a ‘genealogist’ of contemporary values,” namely, that “for Nietzsche, ‘genuine history’ is always ‘critical history’” (Breazeale 2000, 59/59n4). As Breazeale argues, there is a direct link between genealogy and critical history, but for Nietzsche, the full powers of genealogy require the distinct virtues of all three forms of history in The Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, not merely critical history. However, if by history, we understand this synthesis of the three modes of history, and if we withdraw from the comparison several key differences between Nietzsche’s 1870s and 1880s works, to be specified shortly, then we can agree with Christoph Schuringa’s claim that “[s]tructurally, there is no difference between the ‘genealogical’ in GM and the historical account in the relevant sections of A. There is no genealogical ‘method’ that we can identify as being operative in GM but that is absent in A; the approach is the same, whether Nietzsche labels it as genealogy or simply as history” (Schuringa 2014, p. 256). Indeed, Nietzsche’s historical and genealogical projects are overwhelmingly characterized by the synthesis of critical, monumental, and antiquarian history I have described here, an examination of the origin of our values for the purposes of the critique and overcoming of our present order of values. But it is crucial to genealogy that it go beyond critical history alone, so that it may also have both the imperative to unearth the singular detail accurately, like antiquarian history, and the grandiosity and arrogance, the greatness of the task, characteristic of monumental history.

4. Genealogy and the Alleged Fact-Value Split

The success of Nietzsche’s later genealogies requires this synthesis of factual, historical concern, evaluative critique, and normative importance for life, which we have drawn from an analysis of the three modes of monumental, antiquarian, and critical history reflected in the concept of genealogy. It is only by combining these modes of history that Nietzschean genealogy can depart from the dualistic framework of what Allison Merrick calls the dominant interpretative strategy, namely, postulating a transcendent evaluative critique in contradistinction to a merely factual “causal description” of the origins of moral values (Merrick 2016, pp. 228–30). The dominant accounts cannot do justice to Nietzsche’s practices because they assume dichotomies that he rejects. Of course, as we have shown, there is no perfect identity between genealogy and the synthesis of the three forms of history in UDHL. Although some might claim that genealogy brings a phenomenological dimension lacking in the historiography,8 Nietzsche’s earlier work often refers to the phenomenal dimensions of our experience of time and history, while the later work often departs from phenomenology to etymological and anthropological discussions. Nor does genealogy differ from critical history in dispensing with substantial essences within ‘real’ traditions (Jensen 2013a, p. 167), as if Nietzsche had not already described representations of time, space, and epistemology as conventional or representational fictions (e.g., 1873, 26[12], KSA 7.575–79; 1872–1873, 19[140], KSA 8.464). However, genealogy certainly differs in further developing approaches to phenomenology, perspectivism, will to power, and eternal recurrence that were still nascent and incomplete in the earlier work, and in dispensing with the subject-object form of Schopenhauerean representation found in much of Nietzsche’s work of the 1870s. Nevertheless, genealogy is continuous in many ways with the synthesis of the three forms of history.9

What Nietzsche himself posits as genealogy, (proper) philology, and the synthesis of the three forms of history is both descriptive and evaluative, yet also physical, historical, and immanent all at the same time. In this sense, the question of genealogy transcends the merely moral to touch on every element of his philosophical enterprise and its critique of metaphysics. In contrast to Merrick’s characterization of the dominant interpretative strategy, Nietzsche favors non-causal description. He associates causation with explanation (Erklärung), rather than description, and he rejects both explanation and causation, including the four associated Aristotelian types of causal explanation (material, formal, final, and efficient).10 But to say that Nietzschean genealogy is descriptive rather than causal is not to say that it is merely descriptive, for it is simultaneously critical, descriptive, and evaluative.

The failure to recognize Nietzsche’s claims to cross the fact-value divide is one of many key traditional meta-ethical assumptions, including belief in the subject (consciousness), the agent, free will, causality, and intentional control, that scholarship on Nietzschean normativity erroneously ascribes to him. These assumptions create an entire set of pseudo-problems for his work, and thus such debates circle around models inapplicable to his work. As we have seen, the later Nietzsche is a critic of the subject and causality. He is also a critic of agency, free will, and the primacy of consciousness and intentions. Now, Nietzsche scholars remind us that the derivation of values from will to power, as scholars such as Paul Katsafanas have argued (Katsafanas 2013, p. 297),11 seems to commit the naturalistic fallacy by deriving values from facts about the world (Huddleston 2016, p. 440).12 However, this critique assumes a sense of nature in which we can analytically separate between facts and values, or between what is and what ought to be the case. But to say that there is no normative force to factual descriptions of the world, even as directed forces or intentions or drives, as Andrew Huddleston does, is to neglect Nietzsche’s claims to combine the factual and evaluative, to assume the existence of the agents and intentions that he denies, and to beg the question of just what constitutes a value or an objective value, if not a fact that a value exists in the world or that some agent strives intentionally for it, or sets it within a ranked hierarchy for some reasons (Huddleston 2016, pp. 439–41).

Nietzsche questions this analysis in a variety of ways. First, as we have seen, he rejects the view that there is a conscious subject or agent that is the free cause of purposive actions through intentional determinations of its will. The drives or affective forces do not mark the conscious choices of the agent’s free will; rather, the intellect is itself “the blind tool of another drive,” whether rest or fear or shame, so that we can understand the person only in terms of various warring, socio-historical and physio-psychological forces (M 109, KSA 3.96–99; JGB 6, KSA 5.20; JGB 12, KSA 5.27; Franco 2018, p. 61). Second, he denies any natural teleology in which nature is guided by an exterior, evaluative frame. Third, he denies that we can speak of a perspective-independent or objective realm of reality or facts in contradistinction to perspectives and interpretations. As Lemm argues, for Nietzsche, “any science, whether historical or natural, has to give up this ‘objectivity’ and be content with hypothetical interpretations” (Lemm 2007, p. 172). Nietzsche denies a traditional sense of realism about facts and values as connoting their existence in an ideal or mind-independent form. Both facts and values are interpretations, perspectives. Our perspectives always already identify a world picture redolent of particular valences, identifications, and exclusions. We arise historically from within a social world of ubiquitous normative forces, will to power, and cannot extricate ourselves from this structure of rules and commands (Sedgwick 2007, pp. 216–17). We cannot see a value-less world, a purely factual world in itself independent of our particular evaluative perceptions. To identify and select something in nature embodies a particular worldview, a perspective that constitutes facts as such and as valuable to some degree or other in this identification and excludes or neglects other possibilities. Fourth, he describes a perspective in which the world, whether of organic or inorganic nature, is understood in terms of a contest of forces of particular, momentary intensity and direction that unconsciously, non-teleologically inherently hierarchizes, setting up factual rankings of values in the will to power and the drives. It is precisely the historical sense that marks out this rank ordering force of the will to power. Nietzsche describes “the historical sense [as] the capacity to swiftly divine the rank-ordering of valuations according to which a people, a society, a human being has lived” (JGB 224, KSA 5.157). History or genealogy identifies these forces as fact-values, as facts about the world that direct and characterize it in certain ways. The will to power and the forces described as drives are perspectival interpretations, value spheres, that rank order merely by virtue of their enacting a contest of forces. This does not occur on a voluntaristic or conscious level, because, for Nietzsche, the subject and agent, ostensibly free actors, are fictions, and thus we cannot speak of the will to power or any other value-ordering scheme in intentional or teleological terms. Yet, this fact-value schema allows for error, in that we may wrongly identify particular facts and values in the sense of taking them as objective determinations of natural facts and values, overlaying our own inventions on a world in itself for which we could have no evidence or to which we could have no relation. The world in Nietzsche’s perspective is a blind struggle of forces that constitute valuations without aim or telos.

Thus, we can see in Nietzschean genealogy the identification of these fact-values in terms of physical, historical, and psychological hierarchies of power and value such as rule, command, obedience, health, and disease, transgressing the fact-value divide. For instance, Nietzsche speaks of biological and antibiological values in ways that posit nature as simultaneously factual and evaluative. He writes, “[t]he valuation with which the different forms of society [Societät] today are judged is wholly and entirely one with that which assigns a higher worth to peace than war: but this judgment is antibiological; it is itself the spawn [Ausgeburt] of the decadence of life […] Life is a consequence of war, society [Gesellschaft] itself a means to war” (1888, 14[40], KSA 13.238). Rather than setting values apart, in isolation from nature and life, he sets them within nature by taking them as biological or antibiological. It might be assumed that Nietzsche is thereby entering Hegelian or even Leibnizian territory by identifying nature or reality with positive value (‘the real is rational, the rational real’) and excluding all negative or metaphysical values from nature (as ‘the best of all possible worlds’). Indeed, it sounds like he is arguing that only biological values exist in nature and that antibiological values are pure fictions that cannot exist in nature. However, his actual claim is that biological and antibiological values manifest different elements of life. Antibiological values exist in nature as symptoms or forces of decline or decadence, diseased, self-destructive elements of nature, just as biological values manifest nature on the rise. For this reason, Nietzsche entitles this note, “The unconscious effect of decadence on the ideal of science” (1888, 14[40], KSA 13.238). Thus, we might label Nietzschean genealogy as both descriptive and evaluative of value-facts, insofar as it regards them as hierarchizing physical-psychological forces.13

Whether these value-facts are identified as conscious or unconscious, they can be described without invoking occult metaphysical connections to the absolutely concealed or noumenal. To speak of the unconscious for Nietzsche does not imply the nonsensical unearthing of unobservable psychological or proto-psychological categories. In one sense, the unconscious can be observed as that which determines consciousness from below the realm of consciousness. Nietzsche intends this sense of the relation of the conscious to the unconscious or instinctual when he writes that “one must still account the greatest part of conscious thinking under the activities of instinct, and even in the case of philosophical thinking” (JGB 3, KSA 5.17). Consciousness here can be subsumed under instinct or the unconscious, even in the case of philosophy, because consciousness exhibits or manifests instinctual and unconscious forces as its immanent or transcendental conditions. We can describe this level because it is at work in consciousness itself. A second sense in which we can describe the unconscious in factual-evaluative terms without claiming to delve into the depths of a psychological unconscious is where it involves that which formally or invisibly structures conscious thought without primarily involving the proto-psychological.14 Much of what Nietzsche describes as non-conscious in this sense concerns historical structures such as etymology and Indo-European subject-object language structures that can be disclosed to consciousness in reflection but that we can use without making them explicit as such in consciousness (JGB 20, KSA 5.34–35).

But the underlying basis for the claim of Nietzschean genealogy to operate unconsciously at the levels of fact and value, physically, historically, and psychologically, is the will to power. Nietzsche conceives of the will to power as a natural, rank-ordering, and hence, evaluative power at work in all things, organic and inorganic, including history and thought.15 As Janaway argues, the will to power crosses the lines of history and nature in such a way as to problematize any simple reading of Nietzsche as scientific naturalist. The reason is not only that Nietzsche rejects such elements of scientific naturalism as causation, causal explanation, universal natural laws, matter, and what he reads as democratic egalitarianism,16 but also that he refers to forms of historical description irreducible to the perspectives of the natural sciences, including psychology, which is absolutely key “as morphology and developmental doctrine of the will to power, … mistress of the sciences … the path to the fundamental problems” (JGB 23, KSA 5.38–39), but is still only a leading example of a set of new philosophical model sciences that must be complemented by historical ‘sciences’ such as genealogy.17

This crossing of the fact-value distinction in the will to power, with its hierarchical, historical-natural forces, undergirds all of the claims I am making about the crossing of facts and values, conscious and unconscious. Because the hierarchizing forces of the will to power stand behind all things, nothing is exempt. Even “behind all logic and its apparent self-mastery of movement stand estimations of value, spoken clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a determinate type of life” (JGB 3, KSA 5.17). These value estimates are not mental sentiments or beliefs but rather directed, ordering physical forces, which simultaneously constitute the reality of physical desires oriented toward particular ends and the resultant rank orders of values. While our attitudes toward these value estimates vary, they do not themselves stand outside of this order of powers. Rather, our own valuations are themselves constituted by directed, ordering physical forces. “The philosopher is only a type of opportunity and enabling that the drive once comes to speak. … Every closed system of a philosopher proves that one drive is ruler [Regent] in him, that a fixed rank-ordering exists” (1883, 7[62], KSA 10.262-63). Indeed, all sorts of drives to power or mastery stand behind philosophy as such, which is thus, in the best sense, characterized by “which rank order the innermost drives of his nature are posited toward one another” (JGB 6, KSA 5.20). But if thinking is thereby traced back in its determinations to physical drives, the drives should not be regarded as merely physical in a sense exclusive of the historical and psychological, for they implicate complex social histories of concepts encapsulated in the psychological as its evaluative hierarchies of forces. In this sense, Nietzschean genealogies provide physiological, historical, and psychological descriptions that transgress the alleged fact-value divide by virtue of the very structure of the world and experience, as seen through the perspectival lens of Nietzsche’s interpretation of the world as a will to power.18

This explains how Nietzschean genealogy can avoid the dilemmas posited by Peter Sedgwick and Aaron Ridley, according to which we either have non-evaluative description or question-begging external evaluative standards (Merrick 2016, pp. 229–31). As Breazeale puts it, the standards for judging the past can stem neither from the past, nor the present, because judging the past from the past begs the question and confuses the fact-value distinction, while judging the past by reference to the present assumes an external standard; the only appropriate means of judging the past is to create the values of the future in and through the process of judging (Breazeale 2000, pp. 62–63). But for Nietzsche, for the reasons we have seen, there is no naturalistic fallacy in focusing on genealogical description and no need to resort to transcendent or external standards in general. Jensen rightly argues that “the prescriptive force of [GM] depends intrinsically on Nietzsche’s historical description” (Jensen 2013a, p. 158). Critique and description are directly linked; without the integration of critique and description, we would be left with ideological descriptions motivated by the dominant political consciousness of our time, as we shall see in discussing the English genealogists. But the value-facts and standards by which the values are criticized have to come from somewhere. Since they cannot be transcendent, which is to say, external or metaphysical, they must be either futural or genealogically immanent. Nietzschean value critique is genealogically immanent in the sense that it points to the physical, evaluative-facts, which is to say, the physical rank orders of drives insofar as they are dominating, healthy, and self-perpetuating, as in the case of noble morality, or self-destructive, diseased, and self-corrupting, as in the case of decadence and slave morality. Nietzschean critique looks to reality, then, but not a metaphysically absent, concealed, or veiled reality distinguished from appearance.19 Nietzsche writes, “[t]he ‘true world’ and the ‘apparent world’—in German: the lied world and reality [Realität] … [humanity was brought] to the worship of the inverse values to those that had first guaranteed you thriving, the future, the high right to the future” (EH P2, KSA 6.258). Key sources of the critique of values, then, are the linked physical orders of experience and flourishing, in contrast to the self-destruction and otherworldliness of an unseen, metaphysically absent ‘reality.’ In describing these opposing sets of fact-values, critical history exposes and exhibits standards by which we criticize past values, and thus constitutes much of the activity of the genealogists and lionhearted free spirits. As Nietzsche writes, “we have need of a critique of moral values; the value of these values is itself first to be placed into question—and for that is necessary an acquaintance [Kenntniss] with the conditions and circumstances from out of which they have grown, under which they have developed and displaced” (GM P6, KSA 5.253; cf. Merrick 2016, p. 231). Critical history thus situates moral values within the soil, the conditions and circumstances, from which they emerge, as fact-values crossing the alleged gap between the descriptive and evaluative. In this sense, the determination of the sources and conditions of values is a necessary condition for the critique of the worth of a value in “bring[ing] with itself a feeling of lessening in the value of the thing that originated thus and prepar[ing] the way to a critical mood and attitude toward it” (1885, 2[189], KSA 12.160),20 not something that, as Katsafanas says, “has no direct bearing on the question of whether the value should be accepted” (Katsafanas 2013, p. 298). Prinz, then, is correct in claiming that “in Nietzsche’s genealogical style, moral history is both genuinely historical and critical” (Prinz 2016, p. 215). To this degree, Nietzschean genealogy is critical history.21 But if the historical-genealogical conditions of a value bear on its critique, the direction of this identification of fact-values remains futural, for the purpose is to transform our values from out of a clear awareness of what they are and whence they have come. This commanding of values is the task of the future philosopher, and in this sense critical history or genealogy enables the assertion of values without falling into the dilemmas of Sedgwick and Ridley.

Of course, this account depends on our taking Nietzsche’s genealogies at face value, rather than ironically, as Robert Guay urges. On his view, in subtitling the Genealogy of Morals, ‘a polemic’ (Streitschrift), Nietzsche signals that we should take his genealogies neither as real, nor as reports of his own views, but rather as non-committal, as the product of one of the “‘parodists of World-History and the Hanswursts of God’” (Guay 2011, pp. 27, 33, citing BGE 223). This view accords in general outline with the non-literal approach of Nicolas D. More and Drew E. Griffin’s readings of Ecce Homo and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, respectively, as formal satire or parody (what Griffin calls “parotragoedia”).22 Moreover, Nietzsche himself describes his methods in such terms. He writes at length in Beyond Good and Evil and other works of the strategies and tactics he uses to undermine literal and dogmatic interpretations of his work. He speaks of not wanting to be understood by all, of esoteric and exoteric readings, perspectives from above and below (JGB 30, KSA 5.48-49). He suggests not only that to understand him, one must have experienced similar thoughts, but even that language necessarily kills the living spirit of the experiences he attempted to capture in language (JGB 296, KSA 5.239–40). In the later works in particular, he often uses the rhetorical devices of irony, satire, parody, and hyperbole, none of which permits the straightforward, positive identification of his written statements with his personal beliefs. In crossed out notes in black and red that correspond perhaps too obviously with his established attitudes, he asks, “How can one believe only that each time a philosopher has expressed his authent[ic]. [a[nd]. [final] opinions in books—he holds all o[pinions]. with authent[ic]. [eigentl.] o[pinions]. as superficial. We write books in order to conceal [verbergen] what we among ourselves—harbor [bergen]” (KGW IX.2, N VII 2, 11). But even if we ignore this skepticism with regard to the philosophical expression of personal views, Nietzsche’s own explicit identification with perspectivism, his relational determinations of truth and value, and his critiques of objectivism and disinterested metaphysical truth might predispose us to think ironically of his straightforward claims to the value of factual histories. Indeed, he says directly in Ecce Homo that, in Genealogy of Morals, he wrote ironically, always a beginning that leads astray (EH, “Genealogie der Moral”, KSA 6.353).23

Yet, there are very good reasons not to take GM as ironic in substance, for this approach misreads polemic as irony, conflates particular ironic and exaggerated passages within the text that Nietzsche does not directly accept with the substantive claims of the text as a whole, and fails to provide criteria for differentiating the intentionally ironic from the sincerely held views within the polemic. Polemic, as an aggressive argument in favor of a controversial position, is an ancient form dating to the Greeks. Importantly, it has been used most frequently against one form of Christianity for the sake of another. In such uses, the intention is unironic; the polemic is intended to support the argument overtly described. If there is any irony in Nietzsche’s employment of the term ‘polemic’ in the Genealogy of Morals, then it surely lies in the fact that he is employing a typically religious rhetorical form for the purpose of destroying religion, not to oppose the ideas he expresses. The irony lies in Nietzsche’s claim that Christianity constitutes precisely the reverse of its conscious self-image. Of course, that does not mean that he accepts every argument in the form in which it is presented. Polemics are not always intended to be taken literally. Some are ironic attempts to persuade the reader to adopt a position that is the opposite of what is directly expressed. Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” which proposes a cannibalistic solution to poverty, is a good example, shocking the reader into reflecting on the systemic origins of poverty and considering Swift’s own truly modest alternative, which involves the promotion of virtue and domestic industry. To the degree that the Genealogy of Morals is over the top, exaggerated, and hyperbolic at times, it is polemical, and Nietzsche might not accept every claim in the text in the precise form in which it is articulated. But that does not mean that he does not accept the basic argument of the text, which is polemical in the sense of constituting a broad attack on the origins of Christianity and Christian morality. Hence, it is striking that in the same characterization in which he describes Genealogy of Morals as ironic above, he describes “the truth” of the first essay as its psychology of Christianity as ressentiment, its “great resistance to the dominance of noble values,” the psychology of conscience in the second essay as the instinct of cruelty, and the ideal of decadence as the source of the power of the ascetic ideal in the third essay, precisely the obvious substantive readings of the essays (Ecce Homo, “Genealogie der Moral,” KSA 6.353). Hence, the irony of GM does not consist in denying its views.24

A basic criterion for determining which views Nietzsche accepts and which he rejects is whether he holds such views consistently through his works and letters. By this criterion, it is clear that Nietzsche accepts the dominant views that he presents as his own throughout the Genealogy of Morals and later writings. He never disputes them seriously. Indeed, for Nietzsche, polemic is a term to be taken in its etymological sense non-ironically both as an argumentative piece of writing (Streitschrift) and a means of waging war (the literal sense of Streit as strife, the German term for the Greek polemos, war) for his own causes. In this sense, any of his later works might well be subtitled eine Streitschrift, given his often stated and exemplified concern to wage war (against metaphysics) with and through texts. Now, there are certainly examples of polemical exaggeration in GM that intensify or hyperbolize views that he holds, examples such as the blond beast or Christian love as a concealed form of hatred. Moreover, we might legitimately question whether we are to accept each one of Nietzsche’s historical-genealogical claims literally. But the overall picture is something he unambiguously affirms throughout his work, and he is not ironic about the idea that it is a good thing to pursue genealogies or any of the related genealogical projects he describes in other terms.

Indeed, Nietzsche’s intentions for his genealogical project to accurately recover and critique the history of moral values seem quite straightforward. Thus, he criticizes previous genealogical attempts to define the facts and origins of moral values.

Just because moral philosophers recognized moral facts only coarsely in an arbitrary extraction or as chance abbreviation, approximately as morality of their environment, their condition, their church, the spirit of the time, their climate and stretch of earth,--just because it teaches badly in regard to peoples, times, pasts and was itself little eager to learn; it never set its sight on the authentic problems of morality at all:--which all first surface in a comparison of many morals. … What the philosophers named ‘grounding of morality’ and demanded of themselves was, seen in the right light only a learned form of good faith in the dominant morality, a new means of its expression, thus a factual state itself within a determinate morality, yes, even in the final ground a type of denial that this morality was permitted to be grasped as a problem.

(JGB 186, KSA 5.106)

Here Nietzsche, explicitly crossing the fact-value divide in positing claims to the grounds of morality in terms of faith and a factual state of a determinate morality, argues against previous philosophical genealogists for their faith in received moral values, which can be sustained only by failing to compare many values and moral systems critically. The need he expresses for a critique of extant moral values can hardly be read as ironic, given the consistency with which he expresses it throughout his work. In GM, what is particularly significant is that he links the problems of previous genealogies precisely to their failure to critique the present-day values that unconsciously direct their inquiry. For this reason, I disagree with the claim of Matthieu Queloz and Damian Cueni to separate Nietzschean genealogy from critique. Nietzsche argues that the errors of previous genealogies of morality derive from the democratic biases of their current society. “[T]he bungling of [historians’] moral-genealogy comes to light right at the beginning” in positing “the origin [Herkunft] of the concept and judgment ‘good,’” in unegoistic actions customarily praised as good for their utility (GM I.2, KSA 5.258–59); “[t]his seems to me an essential insight in regard to moral-genealogy: that it is first found so light lies in the inhibiting influence that the democratic prejudice exercises within the modern world in respect to all questions of origin [Herkunft]” (GM I.4, KSA 5.262). The critique of modern views is essential to the task, and thus the accuracy, of moral genealogy, because we cannot establish the origins of our moral values without first liberating ourselves from the dominance of our current moral values.

Hence, we should not regard as ironic the task that Nietzsche assigns genealogy, to give “the direction toward the actual history of morality and to caution against such English modes of hypotheses out of the blue …. It lies to hand which color must be a hundred times more important for a moral genealogy than just the blue: namely, the grey, … the documented, the actually fixable, the actually present, in short, the entire long, difficult to be deciphered hieroglyphic script of the human moral-past!” (GM P7, KSA 5.254). As Migotti argues, Nietzsche “is interested in how morality actually did come about,” which is why he criticizes the lack of historical spirit in the ‘English’ genealogists’ morally laden assumptions about how the past ought to have been (Migotti 2016, p. 214). If there is considerable plasticity in how Nietzsche interprets and carries out his own project of deciphering the “hieroglyphic script of the human moral-past,” he consistently asserts something like this view that genealogy is the actual history of morality that can be deciphered as a code from the human moral past. It is for this reason, as well as for its utilitarian construction of history and its progressive, non-egoistic account of human nature (Prinz 2016, p. 183), that he describes Paul Rée’s The Origin of Moral Sentiments as “an inverted and perverse [umgekehrte und perverse] type of genealogical hypotheses” (GM P4, KSA 5.250). Here and elsewhere Nietzsche claims to define history by that gray on gray attention to what can be documented, fixed, the coded script of the moral past, in contradistinction to pure speculation, which he sees in the ‘English’ mode of moral philosophy represented by Rée,25 Herbert Spencer,26 Henry Thomas Buckle,27 and John Stuart Mill,28 above all. According to Nietzsche, this approach contains with it two key, linked moments that historians and philosophers have missed, namely, the proper identification of the descent, origin, or provenance (Herkunft) of moral value and its critical evaluation. Thus, he describes the subject of the polemic, Genealogy of Morals, as his “thoughts on the origin [H e r k u n f t] of our moral prejudices” (GM P2, KSA 5.248). It is not that he thinks that we can remove all prejudices, deny our own interestedness, or transcend perspective in general. The critique and overcoming of such claims is fundamental to his work of the 1880s. Rather, in practicing genealogy, he claims to recover his own alternatively defined, perspectival ‘facts,’ evaluative practices, rank ordered value hierarchies, and hypothetical, physical-historical necessities at the root of moral valuation. Assuming such underlying methodological assumptions, then, we can accept as serious Nietzsche’s oft-stated intention to construct histories of the origins of our moral valuations of the world in ways consistent with his anti-metaphysics.

5. Genesis and Entstehungsgeschichte as Genealogy

This explains why we repeatedly see the same project at work under different rubrics. We have seen this already in philology and critical history. It is also at work under the terms ‘genesis’ and Entstehungsgeschichte, the history of origins, a little-noticed term that captures the meaning of genealogy literally. From the early 1870s to the late 1880s, Nietzsche uses the German term Genesis at least 41 times to signify the origin or source of a concept, most commonly, language (Herder’s subject), but also the origin of the philologist (1875, 5[55], KSA 8.55), the artist (1875, 4[4], KSA 8.40), and the nihilist (1887, 9[123], KSA 12.407). Several examples show the close proximity of questions of genesis to Nietzschean genealogy. The first is from a draft outline or chapter heading of 1885–1886 that reads, “Genesis of valuations, as critique of the same” (2[118], KSA 12.120), which in the abstract describes the twofold project of the Genealogy of Morals. The second reads, “the origin [Herkunft] of these opposites [of appearance or becoming and being or the unconditioned] does not necessarily need to go back to a supernatural source [Quelle] of reason: it suffices to posit against it the true genesis of concepts [“from the practical sphere, the sphere of utility”]” (1887, 8[2], KSA 12.327–28). Entstehung is related closely to Genesis, and Nietzsche uses the terms interchangeably in a passage on the “Genesis der Schuld” or “Entstehung der Schuld,” the genesis or origin of guilt (1876–1877, 23[88], KSA 8.434–35). However, the history of Entstehung or origin is developed at greater length, so I will turn to it now.

Entstehungsgeschichte appears 13 times in Nietzsche’s KSA, in notes as well as GT, MA, JGB, the 1887 fifth section of FW, and GM I-II. Notably, Nietzsche uses the term in the very first section of the first essay of Genealogy of Morals to refer to what one owes to the English psychologists, who have provided “the only attempts up to now, to arrive at a history of the origin of morality” (GM I.1, KSA 5.257). Nietzsche regards these rare attempts as inadequate, but not because an Entstehungsgeschichte is itself lacking something found in genealogy: “I saw nobody who had risked a critique of moral value feelings: and I soon turned my back on the rare attempts to come to a history of the origin [Entstehungsgeschichte] of these feelings (as in the English and German Darwinists)” (1885, 2[161], KSA 12.144). Such histories without critique err both as history and as critique, because they essentially project present values upon the origins of moral valuation. Moral historians “customarily place themselves under the command of a morality and basically do nothing other than its propaganda,” taking the opinions of a people on its morality as critique without recognizing that “the value of a prescription, ‘you ought’, is independent of the opinion of it, just as the value of a medicine is certainly independent from whether I think scientifically or like an old woman about medicine” (1885–1886, 2[163], KSA 12.145). Thus, the proper task of an Entstehungsgeschichte, as a necessary condition for value critique, had yet to be recognized.

The authentic critique of concepts or (as I formerly designated it) an actual ‘history of the origin of thinking’ [Entstehungsgeschichte des Denkens] has not yet been once suspected by most philos[ophers]. One ought to uncover the valuations [W e r t h s c h ä t z u n g e n] and appraise [abschätzen] what lies around logic, for example, ‘the certain is worth more than the uncertain,’ ‘thinking is our highest function’; just as much as optimism in logic, the victory of consciousness in every conclusion, the imperative in judgment, the innocence in faith in the conceivability in the concept.

(1885, 40[27], KSA 11.643)

Because histories of the origin of moral valuations remain caught up in humanitarian self-deceptions, they fail to see their proper, hard historical origins in aristocratic society (JGB 257, KSA 5.205–6), so that they yield “the value of the individual, the ‘eternal soul,’ falsification of physics against the history of origin in general: falsification of history. Falsification of epistemology” (1886, 7[8], KSA 12.293).

Still, we must avoid conflating three different operations here. Nietzsche distinguishes the “history of the origin of these feelings and valuations” from “a critique of the same” and from “the history of ethical systems” (FW 345, KSA 3.578). Hence, we must recognize the enormous difference between “the cause of the existence of a thing and its use, after all, whose factual application and arrangement in a system of ends lie toto caelo apart from one another” (GM II.12, KSA 5.313). Any form or use or sense or end says nothing of its origin, for “all ends, all uses are only signs [A n z e i c h e n] that a will to power has become master over something less powerful and has imprinted upon it from the sense of a function[.] … the entire history of a ‘thing,’ of an organ, a use, can be a continuous chain of signs of ever new interpretations and justifications [Zurechtmachungen]” dependent on chance (GM II.12, KSA 5.314). It is therefore necessary that any proper history of origins distinguish cause from use, criticize the moral values raised by these origins, and recognize in the history of origins a series of symptoms of interpretations defined by chance power dynamics and will to power, destined to be repeated probabilistically an infinite number of times in the eternal recurrence of the same.

Nietzsche exemplifies this form of the history of origins in various texts. The Birth of Tragedy already provides an example of the proper form of the history of origins. Nietzsche writes that “[t]he history of the origin [Entstehungsgeschichte] of Greek tragedy says to us now with an enlightening determinacy how the tragic artwork of the Greeks is actually born from the spirit of music: through which thoughts we for the first time believe the original and so astonishing sense of the Chorus to have been justified” (BT 17, KSA 1.109). In this positive case, Entstehungsgeschichte describes the origins of a cultural phenomenon in such a way as to demonstrate the justification of its sense. Determination of origin can also function to set forth a standard against which it can be measured, and hence, critiqued or validated. What we learn from the Entstehungsgeschichte of thinking is “that what we now call the world is the result of a crowd of errors that arose gradually in the complete development of organic beings, coalesced into one another and now inherited by us as a collected valuation of the entire past” (1876, 23[125], KSA 8.447–48). Here we see the difference between Nietzsche’s adequate and Mill’s inadequate versions of the history of origins. Mill regards present values as the coalesced wisdom of the entire past, establishing what actions best tend to promote the utility or happiness of the greatest number; thus, Mill conservatively promotes the ‘fact’ of the past coalesced in question-begging opinion as the ‘ought’ of the present. “[T]here has been ample time, namely, the whole past duration of the human species,” to calculate and weigh the effects of conduct on general happiness, for “mankind must by this time have acquired positive beliefs as to the effects of some actions on their happiness; and the beliefs which have thus come down are the rules of morality for the multitude, and for the philosopher until he has succeeded in finding better” (Mill 1988, Utilitarianism II, p. 23). By contrast, Nietzsche regards the inherited values and opinions of the past as errors or fantasies29 about the world. Thus, for him, there can be correct and incorrect Entstehungsgeschichten such as the dichotomy between the (wrong) English view that everyone was equal at all times and the proof that “co-existence [Nebeneinanderexistenz] of 2 entirely equal is impossible,” in that it would presuppose an eternally identical history of existence, which itself would presuppose “the universally absolutely equal history of existence [or origin, Entstehungsgeschichte]”; instead, there was “absolute difference and inequality co-existing [im Nebeneinander]” (1881, 11[231], KSA 9.530). Importantly, then, this Entstehungsgeschichte establishes the necessity of aristocratic hierarchies on a physical-cosmological basis in the impossibility of exact equality.

Thus, Nietzsche’s physics of inequality provides a Heraclitean cosmological basis for his genealogies and genealogical critiques. In order to set forth genealogies that hew to these cosmological and, hence, historical hierarchies (since cosmological forces necessarily work in history as well on this account), it is necessary to dispense with the current moral demands of slave morality in conducting genealogy. Slave morality so dominates English genealogies of morality that they deny the natural, aristocratic commanding of values and the will to power at the basis of all societies. Nietzsche’s approach to genealogical critique, then, claims to set forth superior descriptions of the origins of morality precisely by abandoning (contemporary) morality and adhering to natural aristocracies. Thus, the accurate Entstehungsgeschichte simultaneously assumes the necessity of natural inequality, asserts noble values, and uses those values to critique other forms of value, primarily slave morality. Nietzschean genealogy is inherently slanted against slave morality in this way, for Nietzsche sees something noble in the very focus on origin and descent that determines the genealogical project. The properly moral epoch identified “the origin [Herkunft] of action” as decisive with regard to its value, as “the unconscious after-effect of the mastery of aristocratic values and belief in ‘origin’ [Herkunft]” (BGE 32, KSA 5.50–51). This search for the origin of moral values thus locates the very concept of origin or descent within the noble, aristocratic value system. Thus, the genealogical search for origins is itself noble or aristocratic in nature. For Nietzsche, this non-neutrality, this preference for the noble side of the noble-slave opposition excavated in GM, poses no difficulty, since equality is unnatural and thus impossible in and of itself (the physiology of egalitarian thinking manifests a decadent state of nature). Nor is Nietzsche validating the genetic fallacy of the moral epoch, according to which the origin of values determines their purpose or value. Conventional moralities in “Nietzsche’s genealogical account of the ‘causes’ of the history of morals” make precisely this mistake, according to Jensen, in founding their account of good on the way things were (Jensen 2013a, p. 164). Now, T.A. Goudge has described valid genetic explanations as involving causal connections within developmental or evolutionary processes in which the explanandum is the causal result of this evolutionary series (Goudge 1961, p. 42). English histories of morality are invalid by this standard because they fail to identify a truly causal connection. By the same standard, Nietzsche is certainly not offering valid genetic explanations either, but for a different reason, namely, that he denies causality throughout his career, admittedly with occasional slippages. However, he is at times operating within the sphere in which genetic fallacies are often committed, namely, cases of “plausible inference from indirect [or fragmentary] evidence” (Goudge 1961, p. 42). But while his genealogies are often speculative and at times fall into the genetic fallacy of claiming against his own meta-epistemic views that they are the only possible explanation for a phenomenon (e.g., the noble-slave distinction) and even that they have some positive predictive power (Goudge 1961, p. 43), he is careful both in his early and his late work to distinguish between the origin (Ursprung) or birth (Geburt) and the value and purpose of any particular practice.30 As Queloz and Cueni argue, Nietzsche’s determination of the origins of our moral values is not in and of itself a critique of these values (Queloz and Cueni 2019, p. 281). “The question concerning the origin [Herkunft] of our valuations and tables of goods does not by any means coincide with their critique, as is so often believed” (1885–1886, 2[189], KSA 12.160). To show that violence is at the heart of moral oughts is not to show that those moral oughts are wrong in themselves; indeed, Nietzsche argues that we ought to reconceive morality, like everything else, as founded on a will to power, and thus accept the originary violence underlying moral values. But this does not mean that Nietzschean genealogy does not involve critique and even transformation. On the contrary, as we have seen, Nietzsche’s conception of genealogy is defined precisely by the uncovering, critique, and transformation of our moral values. Queloz and Cueni allow only that genealogy naturalistically undermines the assumption that what we regard as evils are not at the root of our present moral goods, without “debunking” these values (Queloz and Cueni 2019, p. 281).

However, genealogy can exercise other critical functions without committing the genetic fallacy in the sense of confusing origins with present values or purposes. First, as Sedgwick argues, genealogy demonstrates that any original purpose can be transformed through re-interpretation, and even turned into its opposite, e.g., truth from error and freedom from constraint (Sedgwick 2007, p. 223). This process simultaneously invalidates the dualistic logic of metaphysics fundamental to morality and the ascetic ideal as such by showing that opposites need not derive from absolutely different origins but may be insidiously related and unified. Second, from the perspective of present values, genealogy serves as immanent critique in exhibiting values that modernity would reject at the root of its own values, so that we cannot conclude from present humanity or its values to past humanity and value (MA I.2, KSA 2.24–25). Third, like Entstehungsgeschichte, genealogy also criticizes present values by articulating the errors in reason and experience baked into them. The first function of genealogical critique demonstrates that opposites can originate from the same unique origin, and thus be uncannily intertwined (JGB 2, KSA 5.16–17; MA I.1, KSA 2.23–24); the very idea of value oppositions fundamental to slave morality is impossible, because opposites flow into each other, like Heraclitus’s mortal immortals and immortal mortals. The second function of genealogical critique demonstrates that the origins of modern values are at odds with English and Christian genealogies and self-conceptions of their values. The third function criticizes present values by applying to them Nietzsche’s view that dominant constructions of the world are fundamentally illusory. Thus, genealogy’s value critiques assume neither that Nietzsche thinks values cannot have violent origins nor that these problems are specific only to particular forms of morality, rather than general points about valuation. Hence, Queloz and Cueni’s rebuttals have no force (Queloz and Cueni 2019, pp. 283, 288). The basic conceit that genealogy is purely descriptive, and therefore dissociated from critique, is inherently flawed, or at least anti-Nietzschean, for Nietzsche believes that our claims to value, like our claims to reality, are interpretative, perspectival claims determined by value hierarchies. Moreover, the dichotomy between critique and description occludes a third power of genealogy, namely, its creative, constructive dimension. In setting forth alternative origins and demonstrating the errors of other genealogies of values, Nietzsche is simultaneously setting forth new values and interpretive value-facts in the description of physical-historical, hierarchizing forces of the will to power within moral valuation. This is no neutral exercise. The dominant perspective from which these critiques are leveled is that of noble, aristocratic values. Thus, in shifting terms from philology to history, genealogy, and the history of origins, Nietzsche continues to assert the value of the determination of origins in a way that privileges aristocratic values both cosmologically (but perspectivally, of course) and methodologically, as inherent to the differential structure of existence as experienced, intrinsic to the question of determining values through descent, and properly determinable only by dispensing with moral assumptions about prehistorical origins of values.

This characterization of genealogical, historical, and philological form and substance applies equally to Nietzsche’s genealogies of himself. The autobiographies and self-reflections recurrent from Nietzsche’s early days to his last writings critically assess the origins and influences on his own values according to the conception that origins matter. However, the views influential on Nietzsche cannot always be identified with his present views, because he often distances himself and even the very possibilities of his own time from his influences. For instance, he is often explicit in his identification with Heraclitus, and he traces to Heraclitus his major doctrines of eternal recurrence, the overman, flux, strife, becoming, and thinking beyond good and evil (EH, “The Birth of Tragedy,” KSA 6.312-13). Yet, he is also at pains at various times to rule out any return to the ancient Greeks: “they cannot be to us what the Romans are. One does not learn from the Greeks—their type [Art] is too alien; it is also too fluid” (GD-Was Ich den Alten verdanke,” 2, KSA 6.155). For this reason, he contrasts the purity and wholeness of Heraclitus and other pre-Platonic philosophers with the mixed moralities of his own time, as if the former were impossible to regain. In addition, his genealogies of his own work often specifically point out differences as well as similarities.

Whenever I think of my philosophical genealogy, I feel myself in connection with the anti-teleological, i.e., Spinozistic movement of our time, yet with the difference that I also hold ‘the end’ [Zweck] and ‘the will’ in us as a deception; just as much with the mechanistic movement (reduction of all moral and aesthetic questions to the physiological, of all physiological to the chemical, of all chemical to the mechanical) yet with the difference that I do not believe in ‘matter’ and hold Boscovich for one of the great turning points, like Copernicus; that I hold all that emerges from the self-mirroring of the spirit as unfruitful and believe in no good research without the leading thread of the body. A philosophy not as dogma, but rather as anticipatory regulator of research.

(1884, 26[432], KSA 11.266)

The key is that any particular philosophical genealogy of Nietzschean concepts should not be taken uncritically and substantively, as if the mere accordance of particular, discrete doctrines, topics, or claims among philosophers indicated a fundamental agreement when there is often a basic difference between Nietzsche’s work and the philosophical dogmas and ontological unities of end, will, matter, and self that he criticizes in many of his philosophical influences. Thus, his agreement with certain critical stances in philosophy can obfuscate his basic re-thinking of the task of philosophy as a regulative mode of criticizing philosophical dogma.

6. Genealogy as Philosophy

What this means is that while the task of philosophy overlaps with genealogy in this critical stance toward dogma, this does not mean that philosophy is only genealogy. Indeed, the task of genealogy may at first seem quite different from philosophy, because the philosopher commands and creates values, whereas the genealogist sets down histories. Yet, it turns out that there is far more affinity between genealogy and philosophy than first appears. In his early writings, Nietzsche often contrasts philosophy with philology, which, as we have seen, bears close resemblance in his work to genealogy, while he tends to associate philosophy with art. The philosopher determines what is necessary, while the artist creates it (1872–1873, 19[23], KSA 7.423). Philosophy thus sets down the limits and goals of what can be done. This is not an action of singulars but a broader program that steps back from the present to bring into view the larger picture of existence as such and to set the bounds of possibility and value from out of the position of greatest need. The philosopher’s world-system is built in the gaps, in the need expressed by the general suffering. This difference between science and philosophy traces back to their origin (Entstehung) (1872–1873, 19[23], KSA 7.423). The philosopher focuses on the problem of existence, recognizes the fundamental need, perceives the general suffering, and builds a world-system in the gaps.

In the 1880s, the philosopher for Nietzsche becomes the commander and hierarchizer of value.

The authentic philosophers are commanders and legislators: they say, ‘thus shall it be!’; they first determine the whither and why of human beings and decree [verfügen] thereby over the preliminary labor of all philosophical laborers, all those who overpower the past,--they grasp with creative hand toward the future, and all that is and was becomes for them thereby a means, a tool, a hammer. Their ‘knowing’ is creating; their creating is a legislation; their will to truth is—will to power.

(JGB 211, KSA 5.145)

In the authentic philosophers, the creation or legislation of values is thus identical with their claims to knowledge, and these claims are always driven by their will to power, understood as that set of hierarchizing physical force-facts that constitutes their system of valuation and command. As creator of values, the philosopher is future-oriented, concerned to define what human beings shall be and to give them an end, rather than to monumentalize the past or define themselves by the present. But this simultaneously involves a critique of the present. Nietzsche writes that “[i]t will ever more appear to me that the philosopher as a necessary human being of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow has found and had to find himself at every time in contradiction with his today: his enemy was at each time the ideal of today … the greatest of their task [is] to be the evil conscience of their time” (JGB 212, KSA 5.145). This future-oriented stance emerges from out of a critique of the past, in that the philosopher, in standing against the values of today that seem so clearly to pervert any understanding of who we are and whence we have come, necessarily draws on the sedimented material of the past unearthed by the philosophical laborers, the genealogists of value. This means that, on this account, the genealogist constitutes a necessary but not sufficient condition of the philosopher in establishing and critiquing past values without directly co-opting the philosopher’s task of creating new values.

The “Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra provides further evidence for this threefold, developmental process. As necessary modes of the emergence of the child, the metamorphoses of the spirit exhibit the values to be overcome (the camel), the importance and limitation of critique (the free-spirited lion), and the necessary contribution of genealogy to the emergence of the philosopher (the child). The lion, which Nietzsche likens to the free spirit, occupies the genealogist’s role of critiquing past values without creating new ones. Because this stage is superseded by the Heraclitean child, it is clearly insufficient to the philosopher. Moreover, as an innocent first beginning, the child would seem to cast off any inheritance from any previous stages. Yet, the child is not only generated from out of the stages of camel and lion, indicating the necessity of these preceding stages, but described in terms that gather within them the preceding stage, as “lionhearted children,” heralded by the appearance of laughing lions. Thus, the child, the philosopher, requires the lion’s free-spirited destruction of the values of the camel. To the extent, then, that the genealogist manifests these particular elements of camel and free-spirited lion, namely, gathering and breaking values, the genealogist is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the child or philosopher.

That the genealogist may not be completely identifiable with the philosopher is expressed in Nietzsche’s discussion of the relationship of the free spirit to the philosopher. He writes that while philosophers “will be free, very free spirits, these philosophers of the future—just as certainly they will not only be free spirits, but something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally other that does not want to be mistaken and confused” for lesser ones (JGB 44, KSA 5.60). Thus, the sense in which we should not identify the philosopher with the free spirit, as a necessary but not sufficient condition for the philosopher, is that the free spirit constitutes only one element of the philosopher. The philosopher is a free spirit, a lion-hearted child, but not merely a free spirit. Similarly, both the philosopher and the free spirit may practice genealogy without genealogy constituting the totality of either philosopher or free spirit. Free spirits do genealogy, but they also reach for the ungraspable, feed on the indigestible, use every tool, inherit and spend, order and collect, embrace learning and forgetting, invent Kantian schemata and tables of categories, conduct implicitly Hegelian phenomenological and historical inquiry, and constitute the sovereign individual (JGB 44, KSA 5.62–63). Thus, the philosopher is also a free spirit and therefore a genealogist at times, but not merely a genealogist or free spirit.

Yet, interestingly, the task of genealogy, as Nietzsche explicitly describes it and tacitly performs it, is very much linked to the philosopher, not just because the history of moral values is a necessary condition for their critique, but also because the task of the genealogist seems and sounds very much like the rank ordering task of the philosopher. The task of identifying the origin of moral values, criticizing those values in such a way as to enable their hierarchical ordering, and identifying the will to power in this history resists present values and essentially defines the values of the future philosopher in the process. Much of Nietzsche’s later work constitutes the values of the philosopher from out of the genealogy and critique of the past. We see this directly where Nietzsche’s genealogies uncover and directly validate the philosophy of the future in figures such as Heraclitus and even Plato. We also see the future philosophy emerge from Nietzsche’s genealogies when he moves beyond detailing the metaphysical self-conceptions of the history of philosophy to articulating the physical, psychological, and historical forms that it embodies. Thus, in many ways the philosophy of the future emerges from out of the genealogy of the past. Nietzsche as a genealogist says that “I found and risked many types of answers, differentiated times, peoples, the degree of rank of individuals, specialized my problem, new questions, research, conjectures, probabilities, came from out of the answers: until I finally had my own land, a soil of my own, an entirely concealed, growing, blooming world, a secret garden, as it were, of which nobody could suspect something” (GM P3, KSA 5.250). Genealogy, then, makes it possible to see and as it were to articulate a new world, the world of the philosopher, and there is substantial reason to identify their roles. But even if we cannot identify Nietzschean genealogy and philosophy, and we must limit genealogy to a part of philosophy that cannot comprehend its entirety or the full range of its possibilities, given his explicit differentiation of the two processes in several key passages, genealogy remains an essential condition of the emergence of philosophy.

7. Conclusions

I have argued that: (1) Nietzsche’s genealogical methods derive from his preferred forms of philology and history; (2) they therefore do not differ significantly from the methods of his contemporaries and key influences; (3) his genealogies and histories constitute forms of what he called critical history, synthesized with antiquarian and monumental history, and the history of origins; (4) even if we can determine criteria for judging such broad claims, they are hardly accurate or precise in a modern sense, but rather more or less channel many of his historical sources; and (5) his genealogies are at the very least a key element of his philosophy, and at times appear even to constitute that philosophy in substance, if not command, of values. Although Nietzsche stresses the accuracy of his genealogies in comparison to the English genealogists, he is not making a positivistic claim about historical accuracy as much as employing a critique of values as the lens through which any historical rank ordering of values becomes possible. In this sense, genealogy plays an essential critical-historical function in his philosophy, establishing and differentiating between a range of hierarchical values and value-systems for the purpose of ultimately legislating and commanding values, the philosopher’s task in Beyond Good and Evil.

The primary question that I have thus far largely set aside concerns the source of his own major ideas, which is the topic of many genealogies of Nietzsche. All philosophers have manifold influences. But there is particular value in determining Nietzsche’s influences, which is to say, in writing genealogies of Nietzsche, because such projects imply the possibility of illuminating, contextualizing, criticizing, and constructing new values from works that appear to emerge fully-fledged from his forehead, as it were, disclaiming their own genealogies and dispensing with elaboration and citation. For this reason, the demarcation of lines of influence in his work holds the prospect of clarifying often inscrutable, decontextualized claims, tracing concealed lines of evidence and argumentation, and thereby clearing a pathway into Nietzsche’s thought. These genealogies of Nietzsche are by no means unproblematic, for they often present clear lines of influence for texts that are complex, tactical, and intentionally multivalent. Moreover, these attempts to contextualize the lone genius within the great body of philosophical and scientific literature, to restore the individual within the herd of his peers, are deeply anti-Nietzschean in satisfying our democratic historical tendencies against the great-man school of history with which he often identifies. Yet, it is Nietzsche himself who argues that ideas should not be understood analytically as isolated, abstract concepts, but rather positioned within the grand organic systems of historical and linguistic lineages, akin to continental flora and fauna. From this direction, we might well locate the absent mediators, as it were, for his orphaned concepts. As Nietzsche says, philosophical concepts are “grown up in relation and kinship to one another so that, as suddenly and arbitrarily as they apparently emerge even in the history of thinking, they yet belong as much to a system as the collective members of the fauna of a continent” (JGB 20, KSA 5.34). To understand conceptual practices, we must understand them in relation to the historical and grammatical kinships with which they have grown. Hence, such genealogies of Nietzsche are themselves a highly Nietzschean enterprise. It is through the construction of conceptual histories that overthrow abstract universals that we come to understand for the first time the overcoming of metaphysics that is his focus.

The problem is that Nietzsche’s sources are over-determined by his multiple and partial influences on any given subject. For example, he locates eternal recurrence in a range of ancient philosophers and religious traditions from Heraclitus and Plato to the Stoics in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as from Egyptian to Indian mythology. Two key sources in the period of The Birth of Tragedy are Georg Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alter Völker, besonders der Griechen (Leipzig/Darmstadt, 1836/43 (C148 a-d in Nietzsche’s library)) and Johann Jacob Bachofen’s Versuch über die Gräbersymbolik der Alten (1859, borrowed from Basel Library, 18 June 1871, with Creuzer’s book, Andler 1958, 1, 419n2 in Yelle, 188). Creuzer’s and Bachofen’s texts contain precursors to Nietzsche’s understandings of eternal recurrence, including the imagery associated with the concept in Zarathustra, as Yelle shows. Yet, even within these two key source texts, there is a variety of accounts of eternal recurrence from which Nietzsche had to choose his developed account. Therefore, we cannot draw a clear and unambiguous genealogy of his understanding of eternal recurrence even if we reduce it to these texts. Moreover, in tracing his understanding to these texts, we have to deal with the fact that there was a lag of approximately ten years between the time he read them and his explicit validation of eternal recurrence in 1881. Indeed, there is even some dispute over what that validation meant and whether it stuck. Citing a draft of JGB, William Parkhurst argues that eternal recurrence in his late period signaled the most nihilistic of all possible religions (Parkhurst 2021, pp. 182–96), while Nietzsche would have seen in Bachofen the identification of eternal return as “the foundation of all ancient religion” (Bachofen, 27, 30, in Yelle 2000, p. 190). Hence, as much as we may trace the influences of one particular Nietzschean concept, we cannot thereby reduce his account to any particular source, because there will still remain questions about why he drew on any particular source, how his views of that concept differed and evolved, and indeed, how we ought to interpret his use of the concept, given his various rhetorical strategies and tactics, his multiple voices and audiences, and his self-deconstructing statements.

The history of the concept of will to power similarly traces back through a long development reflecting a host of partial, conflicting influences. We can recognize the seeds of will to power in Heraclitean war, Schopenhauerian will, Boscovichian force-centers, and perhaps Machiavellian power politics, among other sources. Hints of such a concept already appear in his writings of 1862 and the 1870s, but it is not until the mid-1880s that the concept reaches its mature form. Thus, it is difficult to ground any unitary determination of influence for Nietzschean will to power, given that it emerges piecemeal through multiple influences over time, rather than all at once, as a whole from a single influence. The same may be said for noble and slave morality, amor fati, perspectivism, and flux, concepts Nietzsche attributes to philosophers such as Heraclitus, Democritus, Copernicus, and Lucretius. Given these multiple and shifting possible direct influences, it is unclear how we can univocally determine Nietzsche’s influences along many key lines of inquiry.

Indeed, on virtually any given topic, there is a multiplicity of intermediary influences between Nietzsche and the great philosophers, ranging from the nineteenth-century tradition of German philology to histories of philosophy and science, from which Nietzsche gained or reinforced much of his knowledge of the history of thought second-hand. Key intermediary figures include Jacob Bernays, Éduard Zeller, Friedrich Ueberweg, and Max Heinze in philology; Kuno Fischer and Friedrich Lange in history of philosophy; John Lubbock and Edward Tylor in anthropology; Paul Deussen in Eastern thought; and Diogenes Laertius, Sextus Empiricus, Plato, and Aristotle (all of whom mediated between Nietzsche and the pre-Platonic thinkers) in ancient philosophy. Although we can shed light on numerous problems by examining Nietzsche’s letters, texts, and notes, as well as his readings and textual markings, any clear resolution of these problems must overcome the problems of overdetermination and temporal gaps, in that Nietzsche’s ideas reflect many different influences, both direct and indirect, received over decades, and we do not necessarily have a ready story as to which was more important at which time and for what reason.

In asserting influence, we also need to avoid the basic problem of over-identification that many genealogists of Nietzsche have committed by failing to register both similarities and differences between Nietzsche and his alleged influences. Looking for similarities, scholars tend to advocate for the importance of a figure whose use of language, ideas, or even topics shows some resemblance to Nietzsche, whether coincidental or not, while ignoring differences that may well be equally or more significant. In this way, we may come to think, for instance, that because Nietzsche read Spinoza, Boscovich, Lange, and Schopenhauer, he necessarily got his ideas from them and took over their ideas as a whole. Yet, detailed analysis shows that even at the height of their influence, Nietzsche actually rejected key elements of their philosophies, ranging from self-preservation (Spinoza) and compenetration (Boscovich) to materialism (Lange) and pessimism (Schopenhauer). The converse is also the case. By accepting at face value Nietzsche’s many bold and strident critiques of philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Kant, we often miss how these same philosophers have exercised a major influence on Nietzsche’s work in his adoption or adaptation of their terms, analyses, and value hierarchies. Nietzsche’s loud rejections of Socratic, Platonic, and Kantian metaphysics should not obscure, inter alia, his aim of becoming an artistic Socrates, in the language of The Birth of Tragedy (JGB 14), his reliance on a Platonic model of the philosopher (JGB 42–44), and his deep affinities with Kant, such as his affirmation of horizons, war, and the independence of the elite, as well as the regulative necessity he sees for the Kantian synthetic a priori categories (JGB 12).

The crux, then, is that even if the genealogy of Nietzsche’s ideas cannot determine exactly when and why he arrived at a particular doctrine and how he used it, it will still help us to understand the entailments and complexities of his own ideas as well as how those ideas changed. Critics have argued that genealogy cannot play a role in understanding Nietzsche or the entailments of his ideas, because the origin of an idea cannot determine its present meaning. Nietzsche himself warns us against the genetic fallacy in this sense. But origin stories of ideas are more useful than many have recognized. Despite Nietzsche’s stylistic subtleties, strategies, and tactics, there are many ways to establish his influences, including citations and references in letters, notes, drafts, revisions, and publications, textual comparisons, common affinities of subject, theme, and material, and determinations of borrowing and plagiarism. Such evidence can tell us much about his work and his intentions. It can establish the broader context within which he was developing a passage or an idea, help us to ascertain degrees of influence, elucidate short and incomplete passages, suggest what he wanted to say or what he could have meant, and unveil the works and authors to which he was tacitly referring. Nevertheless, such investigations cannot necessarily determine without further analysis of his literary and philosophical purposes why and to what degree he affirmed or used their work. Indeed, such a complete account of the whys and wherefores of his work would seem to presuppose a metaphysics of free intentionality that he would deny, given his critique of free will and his assertion of the mastery of unconscious drives and will to power. Still, genealogies can illuminate his ideas both in their scope and exclusions. They can also illuminate his rank order of valuation, which he describes as his major philosophical task. In so doing, genealogies of his work can reinforce the argument basic to his own genealogies that the fact-value separation is unsustainable. Nietzsche argues that for epistemologies with claims to objective facts, a metaphysical “type of estimations of value stands in the background of all their logical procedures; from out of their ‘beliefs’ they strive for their ‘knowing,” for something that is christened solemnly at the end as “‘the truth’” (JGB 2, KSA 5.16). The determination of values crosses the nature-value divide. Valuations determine worlds in their nature, how they are known, what truth and reality are, how we see them, and what we ought to do about them. Genealogy is not unidirectional. It entails reciprocal interaction. We examine valuations from a perspective that is then transformed by the process and results of inquiry. Thus, in his genealogies, Nietzsche determines a heuristics of multiplicity in noble morality, according to which there is a spectrum of values and accordingly a multiplicity of possibilities for value. He applies this perspectival multiplicity to how we think about values, including the bivalent oppositions of slave morality, by exposing the distinct value-systems and multiple possible purposes and justifications for punishment. Therefore, our task in determining how Nietzsche sets forth genealogies and how we ought to genealogize Nietzsche requires that we similarly set forth such a perspectival heuristics of multiplicity.