The Key Message of Nietzsche’s Genealogy
The central claim of this chapter is that On the Genealogy of Morals is primarily aimed at gradually bringing us, Nietzsche’s readers, to a potentially shattering realization that in a deep and fundamental sense we do not know ourselves.2 I argue that Nietzsche’s initial assertion in the preface of the Genealogy that his aim is to expose the historical origins of our morality is intentionally misleading and that Nietzsche employs uncanny displacements and subterfuges in order to disguise his real target. This is exposed only in section 23 of the third essay where the reader is faced with Nietzsche’s central claim that we moderns are in fact the ultimate embodiment of the ascetic ideal. Nietzsche argues that we have mistakenly taken ourselves to have overcome this ideal in the move from a religious to a secular, scientific worldview, when in fact that move only signifies the deepest and most sublime expression of that ideal. This essay aims to expose the methods behind, and reasons for, Nietzsche’s dissimulation about his true aim.3
In the first section of his preface to the Genealogy Nietzsche tells his readers that we are “strangers to ourselves.” This beautiful and uncanny phrase is an echo of the first line of the preface: “We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and for a good reason.” In his typical elliptical fashion, Nietzsche does not tell us what that good reason is. Indeed, the whole theme of our being strangers to ourselves is quickly and quietly dropped. In the second section of the preface Nietzsche brings up what is ostensibly the focus of the Genealogy, the question of the origins of our morality, “that is what this polemic is about” (GM P:2). Certainly the first essay, with its main theme of the triumph of Judeo-Christian slave morality over the Greek/ Roman master morality, seems to bear out the claim that his polemic is about the origins of morality. And, to take us further from the opening claim that we are strangers to ourselves, Nietzsche explicitly emphasizes in the second essay that showing the origins of something tells us little, if anything, about its current purpose and value.4
But if that is so, then, how can Nietzsche’s aim be to show us that we are strangers to ourselves? How can the Genealogy be about who we are, when it is telling us mainly about our ancestors? To see the solution to the problem we must realize that the Genealogy, like so many of Nietzsche’s texts, divides into a manifest and a latent content. Nietzsche cannot afford to be too explicit about that latent content because it is challenging and terrifying, striking at the center of our self-conception. Like a clever psychoanalyst, he knows that a direct approach will merely awaken the patient’s/reader’s defenses and provoke a reflex denial and a refusal to countenance his message. Moreover, Nietzsche believes that mere intellecrual knowledge can often work against deeper forms of realization that are necessary for genuine change. Nietzsche, educated by Schopenhauer, regarded consciousness as being a rather shallow phenomenon, almost to the point of dismissing it as epiphenomenal (cf. GS 11, 333, 354; BGE 32). Prefiguring Freud, he believed that for ideas to be truly effective they must work on us at a level below consciousness. Thus, in the Genealogy, he chooses to approach his aim obliquely. He starts at some distance from us-with our ancestors-and even suggests that his examination of them does not have direct and immediate consequences for us. But, in fact, Nietzsche is talking about us, first indirectly and later directly. He is telling us deeply disturbing and momentous truth about ourselves, though we may not at first recognize that we are the subjects who are being damned in his polemic.
That such indirection is the method of the Genealogy is something Nietzsche explicitly claims in Ecce Homo: “Every time a beginning that is calculated to mislead.... Gradually... very disagreeable truths are heard grumbling in the distance” (EH “GM”). We are for Nietzsche strangers to ourselves for the very good reason that to face who we are is a challenge requiring momentous courage, a challenge that, properly undertaken, should precipitate a shattering struggle. But, as Nietzsche warns us in the first section of the preface of the Genealogy, such challenges provoke strong resistance: “In such matters we are never really ‘with it’: we just don’t have our heart there-or even our ear.” Though, he suggests that when his true message is registered, “we will rub our ears afterwards and ask completely amazed, completely disconcerted, ‘What did we actually experience just now?’ still more: ‘who are we actually?”’ (Nietzsche’s italics). The italics here are significant. The emphasis on “afterwards” is an indication of Nietzsche’s belief that only after his message has slowly snuck through our defenses will we recognize what the Geneology is really about. The emphasis on “are” is an indication that the Genealogy is ultimately about who we are and not, as it might first appear, about who our ancestors where.5
What, then, is the kernel of Nietzsche’s message that might lead us to question who we really are? Basically, the Genealogy teaches that our much prized morality of compassion, in particular, our evaluations of good and evil (essay I), our concept of conscience (essay II), and our commitment to truth (essay III) are all expressions of impotence and sublimated hostility.
In order to get his readers to appreciate this message, Nietzsche engages his readers’ interest and affects by using history as a means for creating a distance between his ostensible subject, the origins of morality, and his real subject, the sickness in our current morality. It is in GM 111:23 that we find ourselves for the first time more directly addressed. Having exposed the psychohistorical roots of our sense of good and evil, and sense of conscience, characterizing these as handymen to the life-denying ascetic ideal, Nietzsche there asks if there is not now a new counterideal in the modern ideal of truth, objectivity, and science.6 Here he is directly engaging his readers who identify themselves as adhering to this modern ideal, which they take as being fundamentally opposed to the religiously motivated ascetic ideal.
Secular readers, inspired by Enlightenment ideals, have little resistance to recognizing that the religious founders of Judaeo-Christian morality were in fact inspired by hatred and envy. They see themselves as being far removed from that religious mentality. This provides the comforting “pathos of distance” that allows the first and second essay to do their work on the reader. But in GM III:23 Nietzsche provides what he hopes will be a moment of self-recognition when he responds to his question about the existence of a counterideal by claiming that the will to truth, the will to objectivity, is not the means by which we have escaped the religious world and its associated ascetic ideal. Rather, it is, in fact, the last and most complete expression of that ideal. This is the moment when we are meant to rub our ears: How is it that we who have thrown off the crutches of superstition and religious obscurantism, who have committed ourselves to embrace the truth at any cost, and thus relinquished the comforting myth of a world to come, can be accused of participating in the ascetic ideal? As Nietzsche himself says, it is our love of truth that has allowed us to realize the falsity behind the ascetic ideal, the hollowness of religious claims (cf. GM III:27). Now he relies on our love of truth to force us to recognize the true meaning of that love. Nietzsche, thinking primarily as a psychologist, is looking at the latent meaning of our commitment to truth. That commitment, he maintains, stems from the same motivation that fuelled commitment to religious ascetic values, namely, fear of life and feelings of impotence.
The religious person attempts to remove himself from the torments of this world, a world that largely resists his desires. He tells himself that what happens in this life is ultimately unimportant; that what matters is what is in his soul, which will determine his real, eternal, life in the world to come. The modern scholar similarly removes himself from life by telling himself that what is of ultimate value is not acting in this world, not what he does, but in understanding the world, in what he knows. Both the religious ascetic and the ascetic scholar believe “the truth will set you free.” Nietzsche has realized that here to be free means to be free of the pull of this world, the tumult of earthly passions and desires. Just as the ascetic ideal demands suppression of the passions, so the scholar’s emphasis on objectivity and truth demands “the emotions cooled” (GM III:25). Where the religious take revenge upon the world by denying that it is of ultimate importance, the scholar revenges himself by saying that passive understanding is of greater value than “mere” action. Furthermore, the scholar takes his possession of knowledge to somehow give him a sort of magical possession of the world. Nietzsche seems to countenance two ways in which knowledge can function as a form of revenge against the world. On the first account the valorization of passive knowledge over action is a way of withdrawing from the active life that a healthy nature demands (cf. D 42 “Origin of the vita comteplativa”). On the second account, through knowledge people attempt to possess the world “as if knowledge of it sufficed to make it their property” (D 285).
The scholarly mind values reasons and reasonable belief and is suspicious of passions and unreasoned desire. But life, at least genuine life, ultimately, is a world of passions and desires. Thus, claims Nietzsche, (the pursuit of) science can act as a means of withdrawal from the world: “Science as a means of self anaesthetisation: are you acquainted with that?” (GM III:24). Nietzsche had in earlier works already claimed that such repression of passions, as exhibited in the scholar, is part of a death drive. In The Gay Science, in a passage that Nietzsche explicitly directs us to in GM III:28, he characterizes the will not to be deceived as something that might be: “a principle hostile to life and destructive—‘Witt to truth’—that can be a hidden will to death” (GS 344). In the same place he tell us, “those who are truthful in the audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history.” These thoughts Nietzsche first fully thematized in his early work the Untimely Meditations. There, in the second essay, On the Use and Disadvantages of History for Life, he characterizes “the scholar, the man of science” as one who “stands aside from life so as to know it unobstructedly” (HL 10). Focusing on the use of history, Nietzsche contrasts his demand that we use history for “life and action” with the scholar’s use of history for the ends of “easy withdrawal from life and action” (HL P). Nietzsche pictures “the historical virtuoso of the present day” as “a passive sounding board” whose tone and message “lulls us and makes us tame spectators” (HL 6). It is the desire to stand aside from life that links the scholar and the priest as practitioners of the ascetic ideal.
In HL Nietzsche uses metaphors of mirroring, castration, and impotence to capture the passivity of the scholar and, in particular, the historian. These metaphors Nietzsche repeats throughout his corpus in order to emphasize the same point. In HL he asks the rhetorical question: “[o]r is it selflessness when the historical man lets himself be blown into an objective mirror?” (HL 8, my translation). In the same essay Nietzsche asserts that the scholar’s ideal of pure objectivity would characterize “a race of eunuchs” (HL 5). In Beyond Good arrd Evil (207) Nietzsche again captures the element of passivity and otherworldliness behind the exorbitant overvaluation of truth and objectivity by referring to “the objective person ... the ideal scholar” as “a mirror: he is accustomed to submitting before whatever wants to be known, without any other pleasure than that found in knowing and ‘mirroring.’” Later, in the same section, he refers to the scholar as a “mirror soul, eternally smoothing itself out.” In the very next section Nietzsche tell us that, “‘objectivity,’ ‘being scientific’ ... is merely dressed up scepticism and paralysis of the will.”
These themes are repeated in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the sections “Of Immaculate Perception” and “Of Scholars.” In the first of these sections Zarathustra characterizes those who seek “pure knowledge” as hypocrites, on the grounds that while they are men of earthly lusts they have “been persuaded to contempt of the earthly.” Again, Nietzsche has recourse to the metaphors of passive mirroring, when he expresses the voice of those seekers of pure knowledge as follows: “For me the highest thing would be to gaze at life without desire.... I desire nothing of things, except that I may lie down before them like a mirror with a hundred eyes.” Nietzsche’s repeated negative references to passive mirroring when characterizing the will to truth and objectivity are a deliberate reference to, and in contrast with, Schopenhauer who favourably spoke of the intellect “abolishing all possibility of suffering” (World as Will and Representation 11:368) when it renounces all interest and becomes “the clear mirror of the world” (World as Will and Representation II:380). It is presumably Nietzsche’s early struggles with Schopenhauer that first alerted him to the possibility that intellectual contemplation can function as a means for attempting escape from this painful world of becoming.7
Zarathustra also repeats the metaphors of impotence and castration when those who seek pure knowledge are told, “[t]ruly you do not love the earth as creators, begetters.... But now your emasculated leering wants to be called ‘contemplation’!” (Z, ibid.) The metaphor of the scholar as mirror is used in the Genealogy. There, in describing modern historiography, which he characterises as being “to a high degree ascetic” and “to a still higher degree nihilistic,” Nietzsche says modern historiography’s “[n]oblest claim is that it is a mirror” (GM 111:26). In the same section there are multiple metaphors of castration and impotence. For instance, Nietzsche, with a side reference to the famous historian Renan, characterizes certain “objective” “armchair” “contemplatives” in terms of their “cowardly contemplativeness, the lecherous eunuchry in the face of history, the making eyes at ascetic ideas, the justice-Tartuffery of impotence!” (GM III:26).
The core of Nietzsche’s objection to both the ascetic idea, in its first religious incarnation and its last incarnation, in the objective scholar’s will to truth, is that they both are a symptom of, and caused by, an “aversion to life” (GM III:28). Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says of scholars, “they want to be mere spectators” (Z:II, “Scholars”). Both religious ascetic and ascetic scholar take, and try to justify, an essentially passive stance toward the world. They are passive because they are weak and scared, but they dress their passivity up as a virtue and a choice.
It might be thought that there is a fundamental difference between the powerlessness of the original Jewish slaves and the situation faced by scholars and other members of Nietzsche’s audience. The latter of course belong to a dominant, successful society. While there are differences, the key point is that that success is now the success of a herd animal who is still vehemently repressing many of his individual desires pursuing an alleged common good.8
One of the reasons Nietzsche so highly values the (pre-Socratic) Greeks is because, while they understood that life is essentially, and inevitably, painful, they still had the strength to affirm it and act decisively, even horribly—think of Medea’s terrible revenge against Jason.9 By contrast, the Christian and modern men, in particular scholars, still are fundamentally obsessed with escaping the pain of this life: “the absence of suffering—this may count as the highest good” for them, hence their valorization of passivity (GM III:17).10 Since all doing inevitably involves (the risk of) pain, they seek to avoid doing, hence their valorization of being over becoming. For Nietzsche, the scholar’s valuing truth, like the religious person’s valuing the world to come, is generally paired with a valorization of being over becoming. Even if the scholar takes truth to be truth about the world of appearance this would not abrogate Nietzsche’s point. Fundamentally, in Nietzsche’s work, the being/becoming dichotomy aligns with the passive/active dichotomy. This explains his rather monotonous emphasis on becoming over being throughout his corpus, which is only broken in GS 370. There he lets on that a valorization of becoming in certain contexts can actually be manifestation of a rejection of life, and a valorization of being can in certain contexts be a manifestation of a healthy creative attitude. This shows that his ultimate concern is with fostering creative activity rather than championing one side or the other of a metaphysical being/becoming distinction.
Nietzsche repeatedly uses the metaphors of mirroring, castration, and impotence to viscerally bring home the degree of passivity in the scholar. He is a philosopher who, more than most, uses metaphor as a marker of significance. The repetition is thus a clear marker of the importance Nietzsche attaches to this theme.
Does Nietzsche unconditionally reject the will to truth? Clearly he sees the modern will to truth as a manifestation of a passive attitude to life and presents himself as the great advocate of life as an expansive Dionysian activity. Still, it would be surprising if this great opponent of the unconditional should unconditionally reject the will to truth. Perhaps then his objection is to the elevation of truth to an end in itself.11 There is something to this but it misses the real focus of Nietzsche’s objection.
When Nietzsche objects to a thing, for example religion or the will to truth, it is important to place that thing in its relevant context. The point here, one often made by Nietzsche himself, is that something that is dangerous, unhealthy in a given context may well be beneficial in another (cf. BGE 30). Nietzsche is always a local rather than a global thinker. He will not simply condemn, for instance, the will to truth, but rather will condemn it within a given context. 12 The point is what ends it serves in a given context. In the context of Christianity and the modern scholarly spirit he sees the will to truth as serving the purpose of slandering life. But this still leaves room for him to recognize that in other contexts, or for given individuals within a specific context, the will to truth can be a manifestation of a robust health. Thus, he clearly does not regard Goethe’s prodigious curiosity and will to truth as a negative phenomenon. And surely in his own case his insight into human nature, though bought at a terrible personal cost, is not something he sees as a negative manifestation of the will to truth. It is a repeated theme in Nietzsche’s corpus that the stronger a being is the more truth it can endure (cf. BGE 39; TI “Maxims” 8; EH P:3).
It would be too facile to simply say that what separates Goethe and Nietzsche’s positive manifestation of the will to truth from the Christian’s or the scholar’s is that they, unlike the later, do not regard truth as an end in itself. Would a scholar who claims that truth is no ultimate end, say a postmodernist of today, be any less a target of Nietzsche’s polemic? And would a creative, Goethe-like, figure who did indeed take truth to be the ultimate value be a fit subject for Nietzsche’s attack? The will to truth, even the will to truth taken as an ultimate end, is not the object of Nietzsche’s attack. Rather it is the will to truth in its now prevalent context of the Christian’s and scholar’s passive and negative orientation toward life that Nietzsche rejects.13 To take the will to truth even in its most extreme case as the principle target of Nietzsche’s attack is to mistake a symptom for a cause.
To understand the nature of Nietzsche’s complaint against the will to truth in the context of its manifestation in modern men of science, and to contrast it with the healthier will to truth exhibited by rare individuals such as Goethe and Nietzsche himself, it is helpful to return to the second of his Untimely Meditations.
A key charge in the Untimely Meditations is that the scholar, the modern man of science, falls “wretchedly apart into inner and outer, content and form” (HL 4). It is for this reason that “our modern culture is not a living thing” (ibid.). According to Nietzsche, in the hands of the typical scholar knowledge is merely a personal, internal affair that does not express itself in outward action. The content of his knowledge does not express itself in outward forms. “Inner” and “content” for Nietzsche refers to man’s internal world of thought; “outer” and “form” refer to the external world of action. Modern man’s unbridled exhortation of the will to truth facilitates his emphasis on inner content to the exclusion of outer forms. Against this splitting Nietzsche recommends that a “higher unity in the nature of the soul of a people must again be created, that the breach between inner and outer must vanish” (ibid.). This unity is exactly the characteristic that Nietzsche so often extols in Goethe and claims to have finally arrived at himself. In them the will to truth does not express itself as a stepping back from the world in order to enter an otherworldly realm of ineffectual contemplation. Rather, it is an active part of their engagement with the world. Nietzsche and Goethe possess active rather than passive knowledge. Indeed Nietzsche’s On the Use and Disadvantage ofHistory for Life, which is his most sustained attack on knowledge as a means to inactivity, begins with the following quotation from Goethe, which he tells us he fully concurs with: “In any case I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity” (HL P). The importance of the notion of unity for a genuine person is a theme that we will return to shortly.
Of course, in GM and elsewhere, Nietzsche’s primary example of the life-denier is the Christian, not the scholar. For him Nietzsche reserves his strongest rhetoric: “this entire fictional world has it roots in hatred of the natural (actuality!).... But that explains everything. Who alone has reason to lie himself out of actuality? He who suffers from it. But to suffer from it means to be an abortive reality” (A 15).
Yet we should recognize here a voice not unrelated to that with which Nietzsche chastises the scholar in the passages quoted above. This talk of abortive reality is of a piece with his rhetorical question in HL concerning the current age of “universal education”: “Are there still human beings, one then asks oneself, or perhaps only thinking-, writing-, and speaking-machines” (HL 5). There are important differences in the way Nietzsche regards the scholar and the Christian. In the latter he sees only forces inimical to life. In the former and his objective sprit he sees much that is useful and for which we should be grateful (cf. BGE 207). After all, it is the scholar, with his will to truth, who helps us see through the fabrications of religion. But for Nietzsche, “[t]he objective man is an instrument ... he is no goal, no conclusion and sunrise” (BGE 207). His essential passivity toward the world means that, “[w]hatever still remains in him of a ‘person’ strikes him as accidental, often arbitrary, still more disturbing; to such an extent he has become a passageway and reflection of strange forms and events even to himself” (ibid.). This enigmatic talk of being a passageway to strange forms and events, of the arbitrary and the accidental, hints at some profound sense of alienation. But what exactly this involves is not thematized in Beyond Good and Evil. To get a better understanding of what is at stake here we do well to return to the Genealogy.
When Nietzsche says in the preface to GM that we are strangers to ourselves, that we are unknown to ourselves, it is tempting to take this estrangement as merely a matter of our lack of self knowledge. But then we must ask the question why exactly this should be taken as a criticism? Surely it cannot be that we are under some obligation to know the full truth about ourselves; that kind of imperative looks suspiciously like a manifestation of the very will to truth that is the object of Nietzsche’s critique in the third essay of the Genealogy. What is more, Nietzsche has often told of the need for self-deception (cf. BGE 2 and 4). Indeed, Nietzsche tells us that ignorance of one’s deeper drives and motivations can often be a healthy phenomenon (cf. EH “Clever” 9). This thought goes hand in hand with his general dismissal of consciousness as a weak, irrelevant, even disruptive, force.
How can Nietzsche extol the virtues of self knowledge yet at other times praise ignorance of the self? Again, part of the answer is to be found in the different ends knowledge and ignorance can serve in different contexts. In the case of Wagner and himself Nietzsche sees ignorance as something that helps a deeper unifying drive finally reach its full active expression.14 In the case of Christians and scholars, their ignorance merely serves to facilitate their passive attitudes and their splintering into weak fragmented personalities. This brings us to the deeper sense in which Nietzsche takes us to be strangers to ourselves. As GM unfolds, beyond our mere ignorance, a deeper estrangement is suggested, namely, that of having parts of ourselves that are split-off. These parts are split-off, not simply in the sense that we have no conscious access to them, but in the sense that we contain within us hidden affects and drives. These are separate movers that are not part of any integrated whole. Taken to the extreme, this notion of being strangers to ourselves actually threatens the notion of a unified self. That is to say, we have strangers within ourselves, so that, in fact, our self is no genuine self. We are nothing more than a jumble of different voices/drives having no overall unity.15 Not wishing to directly threaten his audience with this frightening thought, Nietzsche brings this idea to his readers in various subtle ways throughout the Genealogy.
In GM I, Nietzsche playfully torments his audience with variations on this theme of being subverted from within. For instance, Nietzsche’s claim that Christian morality is nothing but the inheritor of a Jewish slave morality based on ressentiment would for a contemporary German audience strongly hint at the claim that they need not be worried about being “jewified” (verjudet) because, with their current morality, they are already as Jewish as they could be.16 The worry of being “jewified” was one that Germans of the 1880s were keenly aware of. Where a typical (liberal) German audience of Nietzsche’s time sees “The Jew” as a foreign body that somehow needs to be cleansed and brought into the Christian-German world, Nietzsche is telling his audience that they are themselves fundamentally contaminated with Jewishness.17 This is a direct threat to his German audiences’ sense of identify. In nineteenth-century Germany one of the common means for dealing with the problematic question of German identity was by establishing a contrast to those who were clearly not Germans. Jews, in particular, were commonly denominated as the paradigm of the un-German. Nietzsche’s claim that the Germans are already “jewified” brings home to his reader in an uncanny way his theme that they are strangers to themselves. It is presumably his sense of provocative playfulness that leads Nietzsche to even suggest that the Jewish elders actually gathered as a cabal and deliberately repudiated Christ as a means of enticing their enemies to swallow the poison of Christian slave values (cf. GM 1:8).
Having in the first essay tormented his audience with the thought that they are already infected with a Jewish voice, one that they themselves would take to be thoroughly foreign, Nietzsche, in the second essay implicitly raises the question of whether such a thoroughly mixed being can be capable of genuine agency. This he does in a rather subtle way, by introducing a figure, the “sovereign individual” capable of genuine agency, and then implicitly contrasting this strong commanding figure with the weak will-o’-the-wisps of his day.
For Nietzsche, genuine agency, including the right to make promises, is the expression of a being who is a unified whole. The second essay begins with the question : “To breed an animal with the right to make promises—is this not the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? is this not the real problem regarding man?” (GM II:1). The text might easily lead the unwary reader to think this is a task already accomplished, leading the reader into a sense of complacent satisfaction. The sense that Nietzsche is talking of past events is heightened when, having first raised this question of nature’s task, he concentrates on the prehistory of man, and man’s first acquiring of deep memory-memory burnt in by punishment. The task of acquiring memory is one that has been clearly accomplished; it is something that his audience can proudly lay claim to. Nietzsche, after raising his question, immediately refers to the breeding of an animal with the right to make promises as a problem that “has been solved to a large extent.” This furthers the sense that the task is largely behind us. However, when a few pages later Nietzsche introduces “the end of this tremendous process” as the “sovereign individual,” his audience should at least have a suspicion glimmering of whether they themselves are this proud, noble-sounding individual or the “feeble windbags” Nietzsche despises. He describes the sovereign individual in hyperbolic tones clearly not applicable to ordinary individuals. He describes him as one “who has his own protracted will and the right to make promises and in him a proud consciousness, quivering in every muscle, of what has at length been achieved and become flesh in him, a consciousness of his own power and freedom ... [and who] is bound to reserve a kick for the feeble windbags who promise without the right to do so” (GM II:2).
It is typical of Nietzsche’s caginess that it is not at first clear whether the sovereign individual is a creature already achieved or one yet to come. The terms Nietzsche uses to describe the sovereign individual-“proud,” “quivering in every musle,” “aware of his superiority,” “like only to himself,” “bound to honour his peers”-clearly hark back to the descriptions of the masters of the first essay. Since his audience is meant to identify themselves as the inheritors of slave morality, it is clear that they cannot be identified with this sovereign individual, who, unlike them is “autonomous and supermoral,” a “lord of the free will.” The implicit message to his audience is that you are not sufficiently whole to have the right to make promises ; you have no free will, but are merely tossed about willy-nilly by a jumble of competing drives and, hence, you cannot stand surety for what you promise. You can give no guarantee that the ascendant drive at the time of your making a promise will be effective when the time comes to honor that promise.
In GM III:10, Nietzsche again invokes the notion of free will in an unsettling way. There he suggests a contrast between philosophers as they have occurred so far, “world-negating, hostile towards life, not believing in the senses,” with a possible successor who, presumably unlike his predecessors, has sufficient “will of the spirit, freedom of will” (GM III:10). In this passage, like the earlier ones concerning the sovereign individual and free will, Nietzsche leaves the reader in some doubt as to whether he is talking about something already achieved or yet to be achieved. In both these cases Nietzsche creates a kind of uncanny effect on the reader. The uncanny here is operating in Freud’s sense of something that is disturbingly both familiar and unfamiliar.18
Let us first consider the case of the sovereign individual and then return to that of the philosopher.
The sovereign individual is, at first, seemingly familiar to his readers as modern man, the possessor of memory and the right to make promises. But Nietzsche’s text, by characterizing the sovereign individual in terms typically applied to the masters of the first essay, disturbingly suggests a gulf between the sovereign individual and modern man, the inheritor of slave morality. The sense of the uncanny comes not simply through the confusion about who exactly is the sovereign individual, but also by a certain play on temporality. Is Nietzsche talking about who we are in the present or is he talking about some past beings or some envisaged successor?
The same questions of identity and temporaliry produce an uncanny effect when Nietzsche describes philosophers in GM III:10. He begins with “the earliest philosophers” : “to begin with the philosophic spirit always had to use as a mask and cocoon the previously established types of contemplative man ... a religious type.” The reference to the earliest philosophers suggests some distance between modern philosophers of Nietzsche’s era and the subjects of his descriptions. This suggestion is furthered when Nietzsche then says, “the ascetic priest provided until modern times the repulsive caterpillar form in which alone the philosopher could live and creep about” (emphasis mine). Yet when Nietzsche then immediately asks the rhetorical question “Has this really altered?” his reader is left with the uneasy feeling that perhaps the repulsive caterpillar form is not really a thing of the past.
These temporal shifts are important for creating an uncanny sense of dislocation in the Genealogy. What is far away often turns out to be quite close; and what is apparently already with us turns out to be yet to come. A notable example of such dislocation occurs in his characterization of the “counteridealists” in GM 111:24. These he accuses of unknowingly sharing the ascetic ideal they explicitly repudiate since “they still have faith in truth.” Interestingly, among these counteridealists he includes “pale atheists, antichrists, immoralists, nihilists.” These terms can be applied to Nietzsche himself, and, moreover, he himself has done so in various places. The rhetorical effect here is striking; Nietzsche, by his insinuating, conspiratorial tone, suggests that he and his reader have now seen things that others have completely missed, namely, the continued prevalence of the ascetic ideal. By implicitly accusing himself of still being involved with the ascetic ideal he suggests that that accusation equally falls on his reader.
The air of the uncanny hangs over the question of who is the addressee of the Genealogy. In the first line of the preface Nietzsche addresses “we knowers.” In GM III:24, just before the passage quoted above where Nietzsche talks of anti-Christians, immoralists, and the like, he refers again to we knowers but this time puts quotation marks around “knowers,” implicitly calling into question his and his addressees’ status as knowers. And later, in GM III:27, when raising the crucial question of the meaning of the will to truth he talks of touching “on my problem, our problem, my unknown friends (-for as yet I have no friends).” This leaves the reader in the uncanny position of wondering if he can at all consider himself one of Nietzsche’s friends, one of Nietzsche’s intended readers.19
Uncanny effects mark Nietzsche’s claims about the Jews and slaves in the first essay. Jewish slaves would at first seem a rather foreign people, especially for a nineteenth-century German audience, a people who had recently emerged as surprising victors in the Franco-Prussian war. But as the Genealogy progresses the distance between the psychological makeup of the Jewish slaves and modern man seems to progressively shrink so that the unfamiliar merges with the familiar, each taking on the traits of the other. The Jewish slave turns out to have conquered the whole Western world (not just France!), and modern European man turns out to have continued the Jewish slave’s hostility to the real world.
Nietzsche has explicit recourse to the notion of the uncanny in GM when characterizing nihilism as “the uncanniest of monsters” (GM III:14). While that particular passage merely heralds nihilism as a possibility, in his notebooks of the same period he is much more explicit, “Nihilism stands before us: whence comes this most uncanny of all guests?” (KSA 12:2 [127.2]-my translation). His immediate answer, in keeping with the general tenor of the GM, is that it is the will to truth that, having destroyed the metaphysics that underpinned our values, is slowly bringing belated recognition that those values themselves now lack any coherent foundations. Thus we are inevitably being led to a void of values. But why does he call nihilism an uncanny guest and the uncanniest of monsters? Presumably because he realizes that for his audience nihilism is, on first approach, rather distant and unfamiliar, and yet in some deep, perhaps, as yet, unarticulated sense, profoundly close and familiar. It is unfamiliar to his audience because, valuing truth, objectivity, science, education, progress, and other Enlightenment ideals, they would regard themselves as having firm, deeply held values. It is somehow familiar because they would have an inchoate sense that the demand central to the Enlightenment ideal, the demand that all assumptions must face the test of reason, is a test that consistently applied would put those values, indeed, all values, into question.
Nietzsche, like David Hume, realized that if we were to take seriously the Enlightenment ideal of making no assumptions and subjecting every belief, every value, to the test of pure reason, we would in fact be left with a total devastation of all beliefs and values. It is just this devastation that he predicts for Europe’s future—it is for Nietzsche the first step to a full appreciation of the death of God. A fundamental aim of GM is to allow his audience a possible self-awareness that will inevitably hasten such an appreciation. This is not to say that Nietzsche sees nihilism as a goal in itself. However, what he does believe is that Europe must first go through nihilism if it is to reach the possibilities of creating genuinely life-affirming values.20 Thus at the end of GM III:27, where he heralds Christianity’s will to truth finally subjecting itself to scrutiny, he predicts, “that great spectacle in a hundred acts that is reserved for the next two centuries, the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps most hopeful of spectacles.” The theme of the uncanny and uncanny themes proliferate throughout the text of the Genealogy. In no other text of Nietzsche’s are there anywhere near as many occurrences of the term “uncanny” (unheimlich) and its cognates. Indeed Nietzsche himself emphasizes the importance of this notion for appreciating his text. In the first lines of the section in Ecce Homo dealing with the Genealogy Nietzsche characterizes that work as follows: “Regarding expression, intention, and the art of surprise, the three inquiries, which constitute this Geneal ogy, are perhaps uncannier than anything else written so far” (EH “GM”).
The uncanny makes its first appearance in the Genealogy as early as section 5 of the preface. There Nietzsche gives, what maybe now, in retrospect, can be seen as a hint that his announced theme might not be his real theme. In section 4 of the preface he tells us that in Human, All Too Human he had already approached the subject that is, allegedly, central to GM, namely the question of the origins of moraliry. In section 5 he then tells us that even in that work he was really concerned with the value of our morality, rather than “my own or anyone else’s hypothesizing about the origin of morality.” In particular, he tells us that what he saw as “the great danger to humanity” was “the will turning against life, the last sickness gently and melancholically announcing itself I understood the morality of compassion ... as the most uncanny symptom of our now uncanny European culture.”
The concept of the uncanny helps us explain the function of GM as a history that is not really a history.
Consider various uncanny temporal displacements that Nietzsche uses: the ancient Jewish slaves who reappear as modern Christians, even as modern truth-loving atheists; the sovereign individual who appears first as something already achieved, then as a possible man of the future; the modern philosopher who has thrown off the mask of the religious type, but then is perhaps not so distant from this caterpillar form. Such displacements of identity and temporality are evident from the beginnings of the Genealogy. For instance, GM I leaves the reader in some confusion about who exactly are the bearers of master morality referred to in the text. In much of the text, especially the early sections, it seems Nietzsche has the Greeks in mind. His first explicit mention of particular nobility is that of Greek nobility in GM I:5, and his characterization in GM I:10 of the nobles as self-affirming is presented solely with reference to Greek nobility. GM I:11, which stresses the recklessness and life-affirming nature of the nobles, contains references to Pericles, the Athenians, Hesiod, and Homer. Indeed, Romans only get sustained mention in GM I:16, the penultimate section of the first essay. By contrast, the Jewish slaves of ressentiment, who are presumably more connected to the Romans than to the Greeks, are given substantial mention as early as GM 1:7. The early juxtaposition between Jewish slaves and Greek masters is confusing since it was the Romans who conquered, and were eventually conquered by the Jews through their conversion to Christianity. This is captured in Nietzsche’s phrase, “Judea against Rome” (GM III:16); Jewish slave morality directly triumphed over Roman master morality, not Greek master morality. This unheralded, confusing displacement of the reference of “nobles” from Greeks to Romans again creates an uncanny effect on the reader of not having a firm grip of what Nietzsche’s target is.
We earlier noted how Nietzsche baits his audience with the ridiculous suggestion of an actual cabal-like ancient Jewish conspiracy. These and other factors—for instance, the absence of all the scholarly apparatus typical of a historical work (references, footnotes and the like), the sweeping nature of Nietzsche’s various historical narratives, their lack of historical specificity, and the fact that he subtitles his work a polemic-create the unsettling feeling that Nietzsche is, despite his explicit rubric of historical interest, not really telling us about the historical origins of our morality. Furthermore, the idea of Nietzsche being devoted to getting the history right does not sit well with the central themes of the third essay, with its disparagement of the will to truth. Nor does it sit well with his animadversions about history and the scholars’ search for truth in his essay On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life. What he is interested in is certain psychological truths about who we are; he is fundamentally interested in making available to us the true, and he hopes life shattering, meaning of his initial passing comment that we are strangers to ourselves.
Nietzsche’s genealogies use fabulous, historical narratives to show the employment of different uses, meanings, and interrelationships of various concepts over time. Crucially Nietzsche, following Hegel, believes that only by understanding the temporal layering of meanings can we really grasp the current import of our concepts. The potted nature of his actual historical narratives and his various games of temporal displacement serve to let us eventually see that his text is not what it first appears, and claims, to be. It is not in fact a simple historical narrative, but rather a narrative of psychological development and discovery, culminating for the reader in GM III:23. There, after having been exposed to the disgusting nature of the ascetic ideal, the reader is shatteringly brought to see that he himself is the embodiment of that ideal, so that afterward he may “ask completely amazed, completely disconcerted, ‘What did we actually experience just now?’ still more: ‘who are we actually?”’ Nietzsche aims at therapeutic rather than historical knowledge.
This is not to say that Nietzsche does not think that his historical narratives in their broad outline contain a good deal of truth. But the truth he is aiming for is fundamentally the truth about the psychological developments that led to our present state. Nietzsche believes our current psychology is built on and out of the sediments of past psychological developments, and that only by understanding those developments can we understand and perhaps eventually change ourselves.
The point of his historical narratives is ultimately to make us aware of certain psychological types and their possible relations. In doing this he invents historical narratives whose oversimplifications he could not help but be aware of. For instance, the Genealogy’s characterization of the Greeks as simple, “unsymbolical,” “blond beasts” contrasts remarkably with the much richer, more complicated stories he tells about the Greeks in The Birth of Tragedy and other places. The point of this simplification is not to paint an accurate historical picture of the ancient Greeks but to use them as a means of bringing to the fore a certain psychological type.
In Ecce Homo Nietzsche says “[t]hat a psychologist without equal speaks from my writings is perhaps the first insight reached by a good reader” (EH “Books” 5). This is one of Nietzsche’s few self-assessments which I take to be absolutely correct. In reading Nietzsche we should follow the implied advice of looking for psychological, rather than philosophical or historical, insights. The fundamental insight of the Genealogy is that with the change from the religious to the secular worldview we may have changed our beliefs about the nature of this world; we, unlike the religious, accept this as the one and only world, but we have still fundamentally clung to the same hostile attitude toward it. It is because we fail to engage, in a cognitive and deeper sense, with the nature and the level of our resentment that we remain, so profoundly, strangers to ourselves.
We should not simply keep the model of the psychologist in mind when trying to unravel the what of Nietzsche’s text but also in unravelling the how of it. By uncannily invoking the pathos of distance, deliberately confusing the temporal scope of his claims and the identity of his targets, Nietzsche has found an ingenious, subterranean method of getting his highly challenging and subversive message to slowly sink into his readers, without immediately provoking the defenses a more direct approach would surely arouse.
Clark, M. Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Gemes, K. “Post-Modernism’s Use and Abuse of Nietzsche.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (2001): 337–60.
Freud, S. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated by J. Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1955.
Leiter, B. Nietzsche on Morality. London: Routledge, 2002.
Marx, K. “On the Jewish Question.” In Karl Marx: Early Texts. Ed. D. McLellan. Oxford: Blackwell, 1977.
Schopenhauer, A. The World as Will and Representation. 2 vols. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. Indian Hills, CO: Falcon’s Wing Press, 1958.
Wagner, R. “Judaism in Music” In Richard Wagner: Stories and Essays. Ed. C. Osborne. London: Peter Owen, 1973.
This piece has benefited greatly from input from Dario Galasso, Sebastian Gardner, Dylan Jaggard, Chris Janaway, Jonathon Lear, Brian Leiter, Simon May, John Richardson, Aaron Ridley, Mathias Risse, and, especially, Pia Conti-Gemes.
Unless otherwise indicated, for citations of Nietzsche’s works, I utilize Kaufmann and Hollingdale’s GM and WP; Hollingdale’s A, D, HH, HL, TI, and Z; Kaufmann’s BGE, EH, and GS; and Whitside’s BT.
The question of exactly who is Nietzsche’s intended audience for the Genealogy is extremely complex. In the text he sometimes refers to “we knowers” (GM P:1), sometimes to “modern humans, that is, us” (GM II:7). If we take as our model, liberal, secular intellectuals I do not think we will be far off the mark of his “knowers” and “modern humans.” The section “Nietzsche and the Uncanny” further considers the question of who are Nietzsche’s addressees in the Genealogy.
The idea that Nietzsche often intentionally misleads his readers in the Genealogy is presented in Maudemarie Clark’s excellent chapter on the Ascetic Ideal in Clark (1990). Clark also notes the uncanny nature of the Genealogy. This is a fundamental theme of the last two sections of this chapter.
Nietzsche in GS 345 shows an awareness of the genetic fallacy of taking the origins of something as indicating its current value. However D 95, entitled “Historical refutation as the definitive refutation,” shows that he is keenly aware of the polemical value of, and not averse to using, this argument form.
The question of how seriously Nietzsche takes the various historical narratives offered in the Genealogy is dealt with in greater detail in the section “The Uncanniness of Nietzsche’s ‘Historical’ Narratives.”
Where Nietzsche talks of “Wissenschaft” I talk of “science.” However, it is important to recall that for the German speakers “Wissenschaft” does not simply refer to what we call the natural sciences (Naturwissenscbaften) such as physics, chemistry, and biology, but also to the human sciences (Ceisteswissenschaft) such as philology and philosophy. We do better to think of the practitioners of Wissenschaft as scholars rather than scientists.
Chris Janaway alerted me to the connection with Schopenhauer.
This is not to say that Nietzsche was against all repression. Rather much like Freud, he favored sublimation where the repressed desires are allowed to express themselves productively, albeit directed to new ends than those they originally sought. Cf. Gemes (2001).
This is a central theme in The Birth of Tragedy, for example, see BT7–9. In that work, still under the influence of Schopenhauer and Wagner, Nietzsche takes art, in particular tragedy, as providing the Greeks with the means to affirm life despite suffering. As this influence waned art came to play a much less significant part in his account of the life-affirming spirit of the Greeks. Thus in the first essay of the Genealogy, where the Greeks are clearly configured as life affirming, there is no appearance of art as their means of affirmation.
In GM III:13–22 the ostensible subject is the ascetic ideal as personified by the ascetic priest. Here the ascetic priest is characterized as the sick physician to a sick herd. He attempts to combat the “dominant feeling of listlessness ... first, by means that reduce the general feeling of life to its lowest point. If possible no willing at all, not another wish” (GM III:17). However, these sections also contain many references that go well beyond priests, including references to anti-Semites, to Nietzsche’s contemporary, the philosopher Eugen Dühring, to modern European “Wrltsfirnerz.” These references already indicate that Nietzsche’s polemic here against those who advocate passivity as a means of combating and avoiding the pains of life has a much wider target than just the priests. However, as argued above, it is only in section 23 that the full scope of his target comes clearly into view.
Clark (1990), while developing the idea that the philosopher’s love of truth can function to devalue human existence, takes Nietzsche’s fundamental objection to the will to truth as an objection to taking truth as an ultimate end; an objection to “faith in the absolute value of truth” (Clark 1990, 189). Leiter also recognizes Nietzsche’s claim that the very will to truth can be a will to escape this life. However, he refers to this aspect of the asceticism of science as “only a minor theme in Nietzsche’s discussion” (Leiter 2002, 265). Leiter claims the major objections Nietzsche has to the overestimation of truth is that certain truths “can be terrible, a threat to life” (ibid., 267) and that “it supposes falsely, that our knowledge could be ‘presuppositionless”’ (ibid., 268). While there is merit in both these interpretations what they fail to grasp is that Nietzsche fundamentally takes the will to truth as a general symptom of a life-denying mode of relating to the world that he thinks is shared by both religious and modern secular lovers of truth.
This is part of the point of the somewhat digressive sections at GM III:2–5. There Nietzsche deals with the meaning of the ascetic ideal for artists only to conclude that for artists ascetic ideals mean “nothing whatever! ... Or so many things it amounts to nothing whatever.”
While generally Nietzsche discusses the vita contemplativa in the context of its use as a negative life-denying orientation (cf. D 42–43), GS 310 shows that Nietzsche recognizes that the vita contemplativa can in fact be a means to the highest form of creativity. This theme also appears in Nietzsche’s discussion of the meaning of the ascetic ideal for philosophers in GM III:8–9.
In reference to Wagner, see HL 2; and in reference to Nietzsche see EH “Clever” 9.
The Nietzschean theme that modern men are not genuine persons but mere jumbles of drives is one explored extensively in Gemes (2001).
German readers of Nietzsche’s day would have been familiar with the threat of “verju-dung” from Wagner’s notorious Judaism in Music (1973) and, possibly, Marx’s equally appalling, though less well known, On the Jewish Question (1977).
This subversive theme is repeated in the Antichrist were Nietzsche says, “The Christian, that ultima ratio of the lie, is the Jew once more - even thrice more” (A 44).
In his essay The Uncanny, Freud characterizes the uncanny as, “something which is secretly familiar which has undergone repression and then returned from it” (Standard Edition, vol. 7, 245).
This is of a piece with Nietzsche’s repeated suggestion that he has no readers, that some, presumably meaning himself, are born posthumously, implying that their proper readers are yet to be (cf. A P).
Cf. WP 2 for his most succinct statement of the inevitability of nihilism.