What is Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of morality?

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I examine the method behind Nietzsche’s genealogical critique. I do not offer a comprehensive characterization and defense of his execution of this critique, but I sometimes allude to elements of it in order to illustrate its method. I review versions of genealogical critique that consist in challenging the epistemic standing of moral judgments (their justification or their truth) by exposing their historical contingency. I argue that they misconstrue Nietzschean genealogy, which is best conceived as a pragmatic enterprise, which aims at uncovering their function and asking whether they are useful or harmful. I argue that such a pragmatic conception of genealogy accounts for its peculiar combination of history and fiction. I then show how this pragmatic view of moral judgments fulfills Nietzsche’s ambition to develop a compelling naturalistic conception of them and explain the importance he ascribes to a functional critique of them. I conclude by considering two questions this pragmatic conception of genealogy poses for its critical bearing: How can moral judgments best explained in terms of their functional usefulness turn out to be harmful? Since Nietzsche believes that any practice, including morality, has multiple functions, how is a functional critique of morality even possible?

KEYWORDS:

• Genealogy
• critique
• function
• pragmatism
• naturalism
• history

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of Oregon, the University of Amsterdam, and a meeting of Nietzsche in New England at Providence College. I am grateful for the useful comments I received on these occasions. I also benefited from private exchanges with John Richardson.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See, e.g. Doris (2009, 710). Nietzsche’s genealogies would supply higher-order evidence, or evidence about the evidence or arguments on which moral beliefs are based (on this general approach, see Christensen 2010). Some scholars take Nietzsche to apply this approach to the basic intuitions of moral philosophers: see, e.g. Hill (2003, 196) and Owen (2007, 5).

2 Scholars who adopt this approach often take genealogy to be merely a preparation to a critique of moral values, which is executed elsewhere: e.g. see Kail (2011, 230), Janaway (2007, 10), Leiter (2002, 179).

3 On this line of argument, see Leiter (2001), who also discusses its extension to naturalistic moral realism, a theoretical possibility Nietzsche does not seem to have considered. Leiter (2018) takes the persistent disagreement on moral matters among epistemically well-situated agents (i.e. philosophers) to provide further support for the explanation of moral beliefs in terms of contingent social and psychological facts, and therefore for the rejection of objective moral facts. This suggests another possible critical use for the history of morality: to expose persistent moral disagreement (e.g. Prescott-Couch 2015a).

4 I thank an anonymous referee for pressing me to make this clarification.

5 The functional approach to genealogy is gaining adherents: Leiter (2002) offered an early version, but more detailed defenses have recently been proposed, for example, by Queloz (2017) and Srinivasan (2019). Srinivisan argues that, in addition to exegetical grounds, there is an independent philosophical ground to favor this interpretation of Nietzsche, namely, the fact that on close examination, epistemic genealogical criticism is philosophically dubious.

6 In his illuminating discussion of Williams, Queloz (2018) observes that the abstract characterization of generic conditions is not so much fictional narrative as the articulation of a ‘model’ or ‘type situation’.

7 In fact, this approach allows Nietzsche to recognize functional similarities (e.g. the operation of ressentiment) in historical circumstances as diverse as the Roman occupation of Palestine (GM I §§7–8, 16), the decline of the Roman Empire (GS §359), and the Protestant Reformation (GS §358; GM I §16). In contrast to the view defended here, Forster (2011) suggests that historical documentation alone can give evidence of functionality (e.g. the influence of ressentiment).

8 Consider, for example, the role the distinctive grammatical structure of Indo-European languages played in the development of the doctrine of free will (GM I §13).

9 On Nietzsche’s debt to Darwinism and its emphasis on functional explanation, see Richardson (2004).

10 Early on, Nietzsche supposes that ‘moral’ actions and attitudes are initially valued for their ‘utility’, and so motivated by it; they become ‘moral’, strictly speaking, when the actions and attitudes become ‘habitual’ and their initial motive of utility is ‘forgotten’ (IHH II §40). In the Genealogy, however, he explicitly rejects this account (GM I §§2–3). Nevertheless, while he abandons the view that the original emergence of certain moral judgments is motivated by recognition of their utility, he continues to explain their persistence in terms of their actual utility.

11 ‘If there is something new in Nietzsche’s use of genealogy, it is the suggestion that concepts are formed in the same way as other living things’. (Clark 1994, 23)

12 I borrow the concept of purity from Bernard Williams (1985, 194–5): ‘The purity of morality itself represents a value’. Queloz and Cunei (2019) give this Nietzschean idea a Nietzschean name: the ‘ascetic conception of values’.

13 Even though pretense does not aim at the truth, its maintenance might require curbing truthfulness (e.g. GM III §25). On this point, see Gendler (2007).

14 For example, Prescott-Couch argues that the genealogy reveals that morality is a ‘historical particular’ – a ‘temporally extended individual whose persistence over time does not rule out substantial change’, including change in function (2015a, 104) – and so has no unifying function in terms of which it could be assessed. Huddleston (2015) explicitly invokes the fact that morality has had multiple effects over the course of its history to argue that Nietzsche’s critique of it must be understood as other than functional.

15 Prescott-Couch (2015b) suggests another explanation for multiple functionality: morality is an assemblage of heterogeneous elements, each of which with its original function that may persist in and through their incorporation into the moral practice: e.g. the function of regulating commercial exchanges of certain procedures remains detectable in the apparatus of moral guilt, by which they have been appropriated. However, this does not rule out the possibility that these heterogeneous elements have been combined and ‘reinterpreted’ into a cohesively functional whole.

16 Consider the essential role the Puritans’ ‘innerworldly asceticism’ played in the development of capitalism in Weber’s landmark essay (2002). For a detailed review of the multiple effects of morality on culture, see Huddleston (2015). To be sure, the mere fact that a practice sometimes functions as something other than what it was designed to do does not necessarily imply that it has now become its function to do so. But Nietzsche evidently believes that practices can acquire new functions over the course of their history, and he offers no reason to suppose that morality is an exception.