Genealogy (philosophy)

Why does the method of "genealogy" matter?

We usually assume that what is good was always good, that prisons always existed to lock up criminals, and that truth was always truth. Genealogy is the method that doubts this "always". Follow, step by step, who made and rewrote a value or an institution, and with what interests, until it took its present shape, and what looked eternal turns out to be a product of history. What is revealed in this way could have been otherwise, and so can be made otherwise in future.

The name comes from the word for a family tree. Just as a genealogist searches old records, the philosophical genealogist searches documents and sources. Yet unlike a family tree that climbs back to a single founder, philosophical genealogy begins by giving up the idea of a clean starting point. The further back one goes, the more the line scatters into branches instead of converging.

For a student of Marxism the method is both strange and familiar. Marx, too, criticised the categories that bourgeois economics presented as eternal natural laws as expressions of particular historical relations of production. Genealogy likewise historicises "the natural", but it does not bind that history into one great line of class struggle or the development of modes of production. That difference lies at the heart of the debate between them.

What did Nietzsche do in On the Genealogy of Morality?

Friedrich Nietzsche used the word genealogy only in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), and there he put it in the title. In the preface he took aim at the English psychologists who were explaining the origin of morality and at his friend Paul Rée's The Origin of the Moral Sensations, charging that they took the prevailing values of good and evil for granted and merely invented a plausible origin for them. Then he made a new demand: "we need a critique of moral values; the value of these values must itself first be called into question." For that one must know the conditions and circumstances under which they grew and shifted.

wir haben eine Kritik der moralischen Werte nötig, der Wert dieser Werte ist selbst erst einmal in Frage zu stellen

Nietzsche insisted that such knowledge rest on records, not imagination. The colour that matters to a genealogist of morals is not the blue of distant gazing but "grey, that is, what is documented, what can actually be established, what actually existed". The book's three essays argue that "good and bad" grew out of the self-affirmation of nobles and "good and evil" out of the resentment of the oppressed; that guilt and bad conscience arose from relations of debt and from punishment; and they analyse what the ascetic ideal has been used for.

nämlich das Graue, will sagen, das Urkundliche, das Wirklich-Feststellbare, das Wirklich-Dagewesene

The core of the method is the discussion of punishment in section 12 of the second essay. Nietzsche criticised earlier genealogists of morals for finding a "purpose" such as revenge or deterrence in punishment and placing it at punishment's beginning. But the cause of a thing's coming into being and the way it is later actually used and placed within a system of purposes "lie worlds apart". What exists is again and again interpreted towards new intentions by a power superior to it, taken over afresh, and transformed to new uses. For Nietzsche all overpowering and mastering was "a reinterpreting, an adjusting". The history of an institution is therefore not the unfolding of a single purpose but a record of rival interpretations written over one another.

daß alles Geschehen in der organischen Welt ein Überwältigen, Herr-werden und daß wiederum alles Überwältigen und Herr-werden ein Neu-Interpretieren, ein Zurechtmachen ist

How did Foucault take up genealogy?

The thinker who revived the method in the late twentieth century was Michel Foucault. In "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History", published in 1971 in a volume honouring his teacher Jean Hyppolite, he reread Nietzsche closely and concluded that genealogy is not the search for a pure origin (Ursprung). A history of origins assumes that a thing's essence was there from the start; genealogy finds beneath it accidents, deviations, struggles and forgotten events. As the English Wikipedia summary puts it, genealogy is neither the search for origins nor the construction of a linear development.

Foucault applied the method to "things we tend to feel are without history". Discipline and Punish (1975) argued that the prison did not become the central form of punishment in the West merely because of reformers' humanitarianism, and traced a new technology of power, "discipline", spread across schools, hospitals and barracks. The History of Sexuality that followed (from 1976) held that sex was not simply repressed but became an object endlessly talked about, classified and managed. Foucault called such work a "history of the present" and put the relation in which knowledge and power produce each other (power/knowledge) at the centre of analysis.

Gilles Deleuze, in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), read Nietzsche's genealogy as a method opposed to Hegelian dialectics: values are judged by the quality of the force that posits them, active or reactive. This reading opened the French reception of Nietzsche as an anti-Hegelian, anti-dialectical thinker, and Foucault's genealogy grew in that climate.

How does Marxism view genealogy?

Genealogy and Marxism both pull dominant ideas down from "the eternal" and place them in history. But Marxism binds that history into an explanatory framework of contradictions between productive forces and relations of production and of class struggle, and accounts for dominant ideas as the ideology of the ruling class. The English Wikipedia sums up that genealogy is opposed to the Marxist way of explaining the whole discourse of an era by a single dominant discourse, ideology. Foucault himself saw power not as something possessed by the state or a class but as relations dispersed throughout society.

Objections from Marxist and critical-theory quarters arose here. Jürgen Habermas, treating Nietzsche and Foucault in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), argued that a genealogy which reduces every claim to truth to an effect of power cannot account for the norms on which its own critique rests: if power is everywhere, in whose name does one resist? At the same time Foucault's analysis of prisons and discipline overlaps heavily with research on the formation of capitalist labour discipline, and Marxist historians have drawn on it freely. Genealogy is thus a critical method that has competed with Marxism while also spurring it on.