The Metaphors of Genealogyc
Nietzsche strives at turning language out of itself, so to speak, at making it point and return to its origin or source: the reality of life and particularly the body. This double movement or trend accounts for his strategy of an indirect, metaphorical affirmation of the body, in opposition to its denial (e.g., as in Christian morality) and to its direct, intuitive extralinguistic affirmation (which can be no philosophical affirmation, but a mere extradiscursive, activist position or disposition). Why does Nietzsche take this impossible dilemmatic course?
Contrary to most of his great predecessors in philosophy, such as Descartes, Spinoza, or Kant, Nietzsche is extremely sensible of, not to say sensitive to polysemia, to the interpretative profundity, to the rich and creative enigma of reality, and especially of life and existence. In that sense (and this distinguishes him from Kierkegaard’s insistence on the irreducibility of existence to the general concept), Nietzsche’s philosophy is that of a philologist, that is, of someone who tends to consider reality as a text (that is to say not as a thing which can be intuitively or conceptually seen as it is, but as a set of rich, ambiguous, and even mysterious signs that can only be interpreted, deciphered, and construed, almost as an enigma), and who therefore never ceases to read more and more in texts. Reality, for him, means always more (and sometimes less), and otherwise than it seems: in this respect, Prince Hamlet is one of the symbolic names to which Nietzsche appeals. But at the same time, Nietzsche’s philosophy is the philosophy of a “misologist” (to use Plato’s famous phrase in its original and derived sense: opposition to reason and to philology), of someone who tries to let appear the depth and profundity of what exists outside the texts, and thence to relate text and language to their hidden origin, to their repressed alter ego, to their outside, in short: who strives to relate and refer language to its body as its deeply hidden reality.1 Here we can find the sense together with the specific dilemma of genealogy as an effort to manifest, through the language, in the language, that which the language, being as such metaphysical, tends to hide and deny, and to let the body appear or loom out, whereas the body (taken as an origin of meaning, and of course not as the plain physical, material object) manifests itself only by signs.2 This is what Nietzsche has in mind when he says that we ought not to take morality at its face value, “word for word,” for what it expressly says (wörtlich ), and describes it on the contrary as a “Semiotik,” a “Zeichenrede,” a “Symptomatologie” that “reveals the most valuable realities of cultures and inner beings who knew too little about themselves.”3
Here it should be pointed out that, in saying this, Nietzsche cuts himself off from two opposite assertions, from which two types of possible affirmation could have been derived: (1) that language can be or express directly and fully the reality (e.g., of the body): it is only a set of signs (against idealism of language and of philologists, who tend to see language and texts as realities in themselves); and (2) that the body, or ultimately reality, can be intuitively seen, directly looked into, known as it is, without the medium of signs and language (against dogmatic realism).4
In order to illustrate the double and self-contradictory task of genealogy as a kind of philology and physiology, Nietzsche uses three series or sets of very coherent and self-sufficient metaphors:5 (1) reading (philology); (2) hearing; and (3) smelling. They aim at showing how an immaterial set of signs (words, texts, sounds, smells) brings out and betrays the hidden, indirect, or distant presence of a material origin. That is the way in which Nietzsche’s metaphorics of genealogy tend toward what I would call an indirect referential insistence.
Nietzsche presents himself very often as a philologist (from WPh to BGE 22, for instance) and it is as such that he describes himself as a genealogist or, to use another term commonly used by him as an equivalent, as a psychologist and Rattenfanger (TI P; BGE 295). This self-description must be taken literally. It first means that Nietzsche, as a philologist, turns his genealogical object, culture (morality, metaphysics, Christianity, science) into a text, or sees it as a text that he has to read, decipher, construe, and handle critically. Second, the text of decadent culture appears to him in this respect as a defective one, as a text full of absurdities, contradictions, misunderstandings, and wrong construings (Widersinn, Missverständnis), a text that interprets reality falsely or denies it by inventing a host of fictitious notions (falsche Übersetzung, Mangel an Philologie, etc.). Thus Christianity invents (erfindet) beings that do not exist (A 15); translates reality into a false, incorrect, religious language (A 26); is a false interpretation of reality and texts, even of the Bible itself (D 84, A 52). This is not only obvious from the philological terms that Nietzsche uses to discard these interpretations and denials of reality through a false language, but also in his constant use of quotation marks (Gänsefüsschen) whenever he quotes critically or has to make use himself (in another meaning) of any piece of the moral, metaphysical, or religious vocabulary: “soul,” “self,” “spirit,” “God,” “Christian,” “remorse,” “free will,” “sin,” “nature,” “world,” “eternal life,” “Last Judgment,” and so on, and even, what is still more interesting, “truth,” “being,” “cause and effect,” “will,” and so on (see for instance A 15, 16, 52, and everywhere in the posthumous papers and WP). On the contrary, Nietzsche claims that one should distinguish the real text from its interpretations and respect the rules of “philology,” that is, of “honesty” (Rechtschaffenbeit). He therefore presents himself as a good reader and philologist of texts and of reality (as text), and, what is more, as a good translator, not only of reality but of the incorrect moral texts into their right terms (cf. BGE 230 and the very common phrases such as “As I would say,” “in my own language,” “aufDeutsch,” and the like).7 It is along this line that Nietzsche practices or reformulates genealogy as an etymologist (see GM I, and especially his explicit linguistic and etymological question in the final remark at the end of the first Essay) and refers it to interpretation and grand style.
Now it appears that, if Nietzsche’s philology implies a formal aspect as regards his criticism of the “moral” language, it also, and perhaps primarily, has a referential intention, insofar as it tries to display, in the language and the text, precisely that which refers to their physiological origin (style: see BGE 246, 247; EH “Books,” esp. 4; TI “Ancients”) or to their history (etymology, history of language, translation: GM I), that is to say, generally speaking, to their “outside.” Thus it is literally true that “in my writings a psychologist speaks” (EH “Books” 5). In that respect, genealogy should be in the first place a kind of stylistics, according to the following principles of style: “The important thing is life: style ought to live. Style must prove that one believes in one’s thoughts, and not merely thinks his thoughts but feels them” (KSA 10:1[109].1 and 7).
That the style of a text reveals something of the body and instincts appears more clearly from the metaphors that Nietzsche links with philology. Reading, according to Nietzsche, should not be understood as simply understanding thoughts and meanings, but also as hearing the physical and physiological conditions in which a number of sentences are written, articulated, and spoken out (see again BGE 246, 247). In the preface of Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche refers to his philosophy as an auscultation and sounding (Aushorchen), and talks about his “wicked ear” (böses Ohr). I want to stress in the first place that this substitution of the sense of hearing for the sense of sight is perfectly consistent with the image of twilight in the title, which suggests the fading out of Truth and Being as light in the philosophical tradition (Plato’s Cave, the light of the world in the Gospel, Descartes’s description of God at the end of the Third Meditation) and the correlative disparagement of knowledge described as vision (eidos, évidence, theoria, intuition are all terms that relate to the sense of sight and imply light [God] as their cause). What does Nietzsche do instead? Since night has come, his genealogical method cannot rely on the sense of sight, but must have recourse to the sense of hearing.
But what is the result of this new type of method? Provided one “has a second pair of ears,”9 one can guess the nature or the condition of the body that resounds, and “hear that famous hollow sound which betrays something of flatulent bowels” (TI P). In that case, the philologist is therefore an acoustician, a musicologist as well as a physiologist. Whereas most metaphysicians are deaf (TI “Skirmishes” 26), the genealogist, like Nietzsche, is musical, for he perceives what is unheard (Unerhörtes) or almost inaudible for common ears, even “events which creep on with dove feet” (Z; see also GM I:14 and BGE 10), even the meaning of “silent events” and the imperceptible difference between the affirmative “Ja” and the donkey’s submissive “I-A,” between “gerecht” (just) and “gerächt” (avenged) (Z).
This also implies that the philologist-genealogist is a phonologist and physicist: a sound is a sensation produced in the ears by the vibrations of air caused by the movements of a living or inanimate body; it is uttered by a chest, a tongue, a throat, lips, or sent out by any object that is hit or set in movement. Any sound therefore reveals the quality, nature, and physical condition of that which sends it out: what we call its tempo (a frequent word in Nietzsche’s texts) and its ring (Klangfarbe) betrays the physical state of its origin: bronze, wood, steel, stone, and the like; hollow or full, ill or sound, solid or cracked, and so on.
Last, this set of metaphors accounts for the real function of the “philosophizing with the hammer”: the latter is but seldom and secondarily a sledge-hammer or any such instrument used to destroy or break (and sculpt), but a “music” instrument, a Stimmhammer (tuning hammer), compared with a Stimmgabel (tuning-fork), a piano hammer, a medical sounding-hammer (for percussion of the body), or a metallurgic instrument (test hammer or jeweller’s hammer). It should help the genealogist to “oblige to talk out that which precisely wishes to remain quiet” (TI P).10
Through sound, the body as a physical being is affirmed by Nietzsche.
But if we now turn to the set of metaphors of smelling, which Nietzsche frequently uses to describe the method of genealogy, we find that they not only intend to insist on the relation of the symptom to a hidden or distant body (as can be the case for both sound and smell, but remarkably not for sight, which is again instructive), but this time also point out the physiological nature of the living body (Leib as opposed to the general Körper). “Ich höre und rieche es,” I hear and smell it (Z III “On Apostates” 2): hearing and smelling means to guess something of the living body, although it is not exposed to the sight, although it is hidden, distant, obscure, and deep—unconscious. The genealogist, like the psychoanalyst (as Freud explicitly says) should have a fine sense of smell (or nosing out: Witterung): “What fine instruments of observation we have with our senses! The nose, for instance, which no philosopher ever spoke of with respect and gratitude, is even, in the meantime, the most delicate instrument we dispose of: it is able to ascertain infinitesimal differences of movement which the spectroscope itself is not even sensitive to” (TI “Reason” 3).
Just a few examples here: we may call to mind Nietzsche’s insistence on the bad smell of churches and of the New Testament (GM 111:22; TI “Improvers” 3), on the Stubenrauch of Christian life (A 52), on the confined, sickly, and stinking atmosphere of the idealistic “den” (GM 1:14)—and, on the contrary, Nietzsche’s desire and longing for fresh air, windy places (the mistral), pure air of the high icy mountains where ideals are “deep-frozen” (EH P 3 and EH “Books” HH 1).
This valuation of the sense of smell should remind us that genealogy is in the final account anti-idealistic, medical, and “medicynical,” that even in the “pure” would-be disincarnate ideal, we can smell out the carefully hidden traces of a diseased body, or traces simply of blood, breath, bowels, and matter of a living and sensible body.12
The otorhinological, so to speak, genealogy in Nietzsche is thus a derivation from philology to physiology and indicates a referential insistence, an indirect affirmation of the body. Hence the question asked by Nietzsche in Ecce Homo: “Why philologist and not rather medical doctor?”13 takes its real and full meaning. Since the body cannot be a simply somatic, mechanical, physical thing, distinct from the “soul” (psyche), as in the dualistic view, but a “psychosomatic” whole (grosse Vernunft), what is indeed that body that Nietzsche thus affirms indirectly, negatively, when he genealogically points at its transcriptions in the text of ideals?
Unexpectedly, though in fact explicably, Nietzsche gives no positive and conceptual physiological doctrine of the body as a counterpart to his genealogical criticism of idealism and as a foundation for his genealogy leading indirectly to an ontological affirmation. Nietzsche affirms the body, he holds that the body is the reality of ideals: but how is it so, and what is it, what is thus affirmed, which could play the role, either of Being (eidos, substance, hypokeimenon, subject, self, will, God, and so forth), or at least of a transcendental constitutive point of will to power, and thus replace, in Nietzsche’s thought, the dead “God” (whether it were essential or substantial Being or any kind of ego cogito, ich denke, and the like)?
To put it briefly: it looks as if Nietzsche left us at a loss in this respect, for he eventually leads us not to a definition and description of the body, but to the ultimate notion of interpretation, in the sense that (1) the body in the end is an interpretative constellation (naturally as far as meaning and knowledge of “being” is concerned, the body as an “object” to which genealogy refers, as its “Leitfaden”); and (2) interpretation itself is not otherwise described than through metaphors of the body.
I will just sketch here how Nietzsche has recourse to another set of metaphors in order to describe the body (Leib).
What is the body? Since Nietzsche views it as an inseparably psychic and somatic whole, he describes it in terms of drives (Triebe), which unceasingly try to increase their own power and to absorb or digest each other. This first range of digestive metaphors is very common and constant in Nietzsche’s texts, from, namely, Daybreak 109 and 119 down to On the Genealogy of Morals II:114 and the posthumous papers until 1888: Assirreilation, Einverleibung, Ernährung, hineinnehmen, Verdauen, fertig werden, Durchfallen, Appetit, hinunterschlucken (EH “Books”; CW 1). There are hundreds of passages in the texts where Nietzsche describes the mutual relations of the Triebe in the “body” (as Selbst, as a grosse Vernunft) in terms of nutrition, swallowing, digestion, elimination, rejection—a set of metaphors that is extended to the whole kingdom of life and to culture as a struggle for domination between forces. The sense of this is that power tends to reduce plurality and diversity to sameness and unity (assimilation as ad simile reductio).
But how does this assimilation proceed? As before, we can see that another set of metaphors relays the former in order to interpret it (what I call a process of concatenation-transference). We ought to pay attention to this mode of interpretative explanation of the description, since it warns us that Nietzsche is quite conscious of giving no descriptively explanatory definition, but seems to imply that the body can only be described in terms of interpretative metaphors, that is, only interpreted “Auslegung, nicht Erklarung,” interpretation, not explanation.15 In the present case, the relaying set of metaphors is politics, which tends to show how and according to which rules the drives fight, absorb, and reject each other. One of the most typical texts in this respect is to be found in 599 of volume 13 in the Kröner edition (KSA 11: 37[4]), in which Nietzsche compares the conscious self with the stomach and describes the “body” as a plurality of “Bewusstein” (consciousness) to be compared with a political society: a reigning collectivity, an aristocracy, where the conscious selves in turn obey and command, elect a dictator, constitute a regency council, and so on. The “body” is a stomach, which could be in its turn compared with a political collectivity: how is the self to make one will from a plurality of voices, in a body that Nietzsche elsewhere describes as “a herd and shepherd”?
But this metaphorical description needs again to be interpreted. How do the selves choose, elect, command over each other? “Every one of these voluntary actions implies, so to speak, the election of a dictator. But that which offers this choice to our intellect, which has previously simplified, equalized, interpreted (ausgelegt) these experiences, is not that very intellect [ ... ]. This choice [is] a way of abstracting and grouping, a translation (Zurückübersetzung) of a will” (ibid.).16 We have therefore but signs of the body as a kind of text that we see on the conscious level as arranged, simplified, falsified, translated, abbreviated: in short, interpreted. The body “is” a world of signs—or at least we can only see it as such, because commanding is “a way to take possession of facts by signs,” to “abbreviate,” to “master by means of signs” (ibid.). Commanding (and what else do the wills to power inside the body do?) is interpreting: therefore, the body, as will to power, a stomach, a fighting-place “is” that which interprets signs.
Here we find ourselves eventually brought back to our initial philology metaphor. This means first that the body cannot be strictly defined in terms of explanation, of mechanism, or as any sort of substance (and we have seen that Freud has to deal with the same problem when he tries to define and describe the unconscious—a notion very closely akin to Nietzsche’s conception of the body as mostly unconscious and instinctive “great reason”).
In the second place, it should be emphasized that this antisubstantialist description precludes any temptation to biologize Nietzsche, as was often done in early interpretations of his thought.
Now, without entering further into the difficult questions implied by my second remark ([2] above), saying that interpretation is never explicitly defined by Nietzsche, but only “described” again by metaphors (and so, in a circular way, interpreting is like digesting—the famous “ruminating”—like fighting, choosing, simplifying, multiplying, and so on), I would just like to state a few points about the initial question of affirmation.17
(1) Nietzsche affirms indirectly insofar as he reveals the will to power of the body as the hidden principle of the ideals (genealogy) and refuses its denial in idealistic culture (morality, religion, metaphysics).
(2) But, first, what does Nietzsche affirm? Not the body as an assignable and definable essence, or being, but as the central (?), fundamental (?), and anyway plural location of interpretation. No ego cogito-rather a cogitatur, as Nietzsche suggests in a fragment (Kröner, XIV, 7, see WP 484)—no originally synthetic unity of apperception, but a multiple center of interpretation of reality, a reality that, however, cannot be taken hold of and apprehended as a substance, but only through it, and perhaps is partly made up by the body. Nietzsche thus is displacing the affirmation.
Second, how does he affirm? Since the body is, as a multiple center, essentially hidden, distant (hearing and smell), this “great reason,” this interpretative reality cannot be explained but by signs, that is, metaphorically, in a displaced way. In that sense, Nietzsche is a displaced (and displacing) thinker, a thinker of signs, and not of a real “Being” that could be in the end unified, totalized, and equalized. Now, at this point, the question may be asked whether this is not a failure on his part: to which it might be also answered that this kind of failure is the condition sine qua non of his nonmetaphysical affirmation and taking into account of the body and, through it, of a richer affirmation of Being, of the metaphorical power of life than had ever been the case in the rationalist tradition of metaphysicians, “those albinos of concepts,” as he calls them. Or, in other words, Nietzsche’s final lesson might be that thought has to fail, in a certain way, when confronting life and the body (which is also, though differently, Kierkegaard’s and Freud’s lesson, if one takes their mistrust toward philosophy and metaphysics into account).
But Nietzsche’s own original metaphoric way is also instructive as such, philosophically speaking—for he never gives up philosophy. Between the negation of the real body in idealism and the realistic affirmation of Being (Will, Body...)18 leading to an eventually entropic activism, Nietzsche seems to affirm that, for us, what should be affirmed can be neither a substantial Being (to be ultimately known), nor sheer nothingness, but, taking the word in its literal sense, “Se/bstüberwindung,” an overcoming of identity and sameness (selbst), an interpretative meta-phor (transference), a dis-placement (Übertragung) of Being opening on into a world of signs. Nietzsche writes: “‘Truth’ is therefore not something there, that might be found or discovered—but something that must be created and that gives a name to a process, or rather to a will to overcome that has in itself no end—introducing truth as a processus in infirtitum, an active determining—not a becoming-conscious of something that is in itself firm and determined. It is a word for the ‘will to power.”’19 “Truth” (and “Being”) therefore differ from themselves: whereas, in Hegel, Time was that which made Being and Truth unequal to their own substance, I would suggest that, in Nietzsche’s conception, it is the sign, that is, signification, interpretation. Reality, for Nietzsche, is not, it signifies (itself). So, God is dead, but Nietzsche believes in signification: only it is lost and even wasted in the empty space, since God is missing: “There are far more languages than one thinks; and man betrays himself far more often than he would wish to. Everything speaks [Alles redet]! But very few are those who can listen, so that man, as it were, pours his confessions out into the empty space; he lavishes his own ‘truths’ as the sun lavishes its light. Isn’t it a pity that the empty space has no ears?”20 Ambiguity, obscurity, but also richness and infinite plurality of signs therefore replace the stability and transparent unity of Being. Hence: “Interpretation, not explanation. There is no state of things, everything is fluent, incomprehensible, receding. What is most durable in the end: our opinions. To project sense into things (Sinn-hineinlegen)—in most cases a new interpretation thrown over an old one that has become unintelligible, that is itself now only a sign” (KSA 12:2[82]).
Such a kind of “Truth” and of “Being,” as we suspected from the beginning, cannot properly be affirmed, that is to say “solidified,” “made firm,” considered as a “firm” object (ad-firmare), that is, seen, handled, and finally grabbed. To a “text,” to an interpretation, to a world of signs that is continually “in the making,” one can only, as Nietzsche puts it quite precisely and coherently, “say ‘yes”’: “Ja sagen.”
Editor’s Note: Blondel’s references have been modified to follow the style of the volume, and his references to KGW have been converted to KSA.
The same problem occurs in psychoanalysis as an attempt to fill in the gap between the unconscious Trieb (originating in the body, properly the libido in its Latin psychophysiological meaning) and the conscious language of the patient talking out his psychic representations. To put it in a short formula: how should one relate the conscious Liebe to the unconscious libido? Similarly, to use a fashionable phrase (which designates but does not explain), Nietzsche’s genealogy (or “psychology”) originates in a “psychosomatic” philosophy—or how to know something of the Unknown.
As a philosopher, Nietzsche seems to consider that there is nothing to say about the “real” existence of the body in itself, apart from language. It apparently can only be felt or lived, and manifests itself in the blank spaces separating Nietzsche’s aphorisms.
TI “Improvers” 1. Ed.—All the quotations of Nietzsche in English are Blondel’s translation, unless otherwise stated.
I tried to develop this at more length in my These de doctorat: Nietzsche, le corps et la culture, and suggested that this double opposition could be described analogically as a kind of Copernican philological revolution (the body is in itself, but can be only known as speech—Erscheinung), which relates Nietzsche both to Schopenhauer’s realism (will to life as body) and to Kant’s transcendentalism (philologically reinterpreted).
Since I cannot give here a sufficient number of examples, I must insist that this coherence should rest on a number of samples from Nietzsche’s texts, and not only, as is often the case, on the extrapolation from such and such an isolated passage by the unbridled phantasies of the reader himself, or on the misconstruing of German idiomatic phrases into specific and original Nietzschean metaphors. See Richard Roos, “Régles pour une lecture philologique de Nietzsche,” in Nietzsche aujord’ hui? (Paris: Union générale d’édition “10/18,” 1973), vol. II.
For further detail, see my “Les guillemets de Nietzsche,” in Nietzsche aujourd’ hui?
See also: “My task is to translate the apparently emancipated and denatured moral values back into their nature—i.e., into their natural ‘immorality”’ (WP 229; Kaufmann trans.).
I dealt with these themes more at length in my “Götzen aushorchen,” in Perspektiven der Philosophie 7 (1981) (repr. in Nietzsehe Kontrovers, I, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1981 which is mainly a detailed commentary upon the metaphors to be found in the preface of TI See also my translation and commentary of the same book, Crépuscule des idoles (Paris: Hatier, 1983).
“Ohren hinter den Ohren,” or “a third ear,” as Nietzsche writes in BGE 246, and as psychoanalyst Theodor Reik not surprisingly entitled his book: Listening with the Third Ear (New York: Grove Press, 1948).
This conception of the idols is reminiscent of the biblical description of the idols as “dumb.” It has been remarked that Luther’s translation of the Bible insists more particularly upon the acoustic and olfactive images than on the visual ones (L. Febvre). The same applies to Nietzsche, a regular Bible reader.
More about this range of images is in my These de doctoral, Nietzsche, le corps et la culture (Paris: PUF, 1986). [Ed.—Published in English as Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, translated by Sean Hand (Berkeley, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.]
Gaston Bachelard, who beautifully analyzed these metaphors of air in Nietzsche’s works, does not relate them to their genealogical, bodily origin (L‘Air et les Songes [Paris: Librarie José Corti, 1943], chap. V). Nonetheless, he rightly stresses the metaphorical unity of Nietzsche’s thought “as a poet,” in a true antidualistic insight.
EH “Clever” 2. See particularly the details Nietzsche gives in this latter book, chap. 2, about his regime and his numerous “medicynical” remarks: most of them refer to a smelling body: “All prejudices arise from the bowels,” “German spirit arises from disturbed bowels, and the like. Incidentally, he writes there that all places fit for geniuses have a remarkably dry air, and quotes some famous towns: he is right about Jerusalem, not about Paris!
Many of these images are in fact borrowed from Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Supplements to Book I, chap. 14, in fine.
KSA 12: 2[82], 2[78], 2[86]; see also WP 492. This should be compared with the similar problem of the “description” of the unconscious by Freud: we eventually can have nothing more than a metaphorical insight, that is, an interpretation of it (or else, would it be unconscious?). Freud has recourse to the metaphors of hydraulics, of war, of a boiler and, once, of the ... stomach (New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, chap. IV). [Ed.-In Blondel’s second reference (2[78]), the text reads “Ausdeutung, nicht Erklärung.” “Auslegung, nicht Erklärung” also appears in a list of prospective chapter titles at 12:5[50].]
We can find the same interpretative concatenation of metaphors in WP 492 (KSA 11 :40[21]).
Ed.—This essay was originally published in a collection of conference proceedings on “Nietzsche and the Affirmative.”
As for instance in Schopenhauer’s thought.
WP 552, Kaufmann trans. (KSA 12:9[91].65) Notice here the quotation marks!
Kröner Grossoktavausgabe, XIII, 363. Ed.—Cf. KSA 10:18[34].