Nietzsche's Views On Genealogy

By reading the following passages in the light of Foucault’s claims we can understand a crucial aspect of genealogy. This, is how Nietzsche thinks of the elements making up our normative codes as coming to be as it were through a process of organic growth. Moreover, I also believe that these words by Nietzsche justifies Foucault’s choice to employ a “biological” vocabulary to describe Genealogy’s workings. Hence, in Nietzsche’s view different sets of values will correspond and express different forms of life - as well as the condition that allowed for their existence. So, in GM we find Nietzsche claiming that

“We have no right to isolated acts of any kind: we may not make isolated errors or hit upon isolated truths. Rather do our ideas our

In other words, as much as an apple does not resemble an apple-tree, the former bears in some sense the character of the latter insofar as it is what this generates on the ground of its nature. In this sense, if we see an apple we can take this as an evidence of the fact that somewhere there is an apple-tree which gave birth to it. With values and genealogy it works just the same: for instance, as much as pity might not resemble slave-morality and its ressentment, Nietzsche is arguing precisely that we should take the former as being the fruit of the latter. Accordingly, genealogy is a reading of values and moralities as sets of signs bearing references to their conditions of existence, a semiological activity able to tell which sort of impulses orchestrated the birth of a certain normative

In this sense, what we know is that morals can be understood as interpretations insofar as they are a becoming master within the organic world. Crucially, in the preface to GM Nietzsche ascribes his interest in morality to a ‘[…] fundamental will of knowledge […].’ (GM p:2-3) Thus, I believe that it is fair to say that he understands the genealogical process as an expression of his instinctual life. Hence, at least on this point genealogy and morals are analogous phenomena. But if every process in the organic world – this including the manifestations of our instinctual life – is a subduing and a becoming master, this means that genealogy is an interpretation of an interpretation – or, a becoming master of a becoming master. In other words, genealogy is the process through which one can subdue a certain set of values by investigating its Herkunft and Enstehung, thereby giving an interpretation of it on the ground of its pre-moral origins. Furthermore, if all becoming master is an expression of our instinctual life, and this has to be explained in terms of will to power, then genealogy itself is an expression of a certain will to