Reading Nietzsche

Themes · Revaluation

Genealogy as Method

Cluster Revaluation Writing period 1878–1888 First encounter 6 readings

If a value has a history, what follows — and what does not follow — about whether it should still command us?

Genealogy is the historical and psychological investigation of how a value, a concept, or an institution came to be, and of what its present form conceals about that coming-to-be. The method has a polemical edge: showing that morality has a history, and a contingent and sometimes ugly one, removes the appearance of timeless self-evidence. But removing an appearance is not the same as refuting a claim, and Nietzsche's own best statements of the method are careful about the difference.

Two confusions are worth naming at the start. The first is the genetic fallacy: the inference from a value's disreputable origin to its present falsity or worthlessness. Daybreak §44 states the problem directly, and the site treats Nietzsche as raising the question of a value rather than settling it by tracing where it came from. The second is the assumption that genealogy uncovers a hidden real meaning. It does not. It treats values as historical objects that have served particular psychological and social functions, and asks whether those functions still hold and at what cost.

This page is about the method. For a complete reading of the book in which it is most fully deployed, follow the twelve-lesson course on On the Genealogy of Morals, covering the Preface and all three essays in order.

Essential first encounter

Six short assignments, read in order. The sequence moves from the announcement of a historical philosophy, through the caution that keeps it from becoming debunking, to a programme, a demand, one worked example, and the call for a comparative science. The three essays of the Genealogy are deliberately not assigned here as a single block; the opening of Essay I stands as the worked example, and the rest is available through the work survey and the book course.

  1. Core

    Human, All Too Human Volume I, §§1–2

    Historical philosophy announced

    Zimmern: Chemistry of Ideas and Sensations; Inherited Faults of Philosophers.

    Question: What does Nietzsche think philosophers get wrong when they reason about human beings without history?

    Why it belongs: The opening two sections set the programme: a chemistry of moral, religious and aesthetic conceptions, and a diagnosis of philosophy's habit of treating the recent European person as a fixed type. The claim is that concepts have emerged and can be understood through their emergence. Note that §1 raises the possibility that the results of such a chemistry might be uncomfortable, which already ties the method to an evaluative stake.

    Read alongside: Human, All Too Human — Volume I, Preface (1886); Daybreak §44.

    Online edition: §§1–2 (trans. Helen Zimmern) · Preferred edition.

  2. Core

    Daybreak §44

    Origin and significance are not the same

    Kennedy: Origin and Meaning.

    Question: If knowing where a practice came from does not tell us what it now means, what is the historical inquiry for?

    Why it belongs: This is the caution that separates genealogy from debunking, stated by Nietzsche himself before the mature method exists. Tracing an origin does not by itself establish present significance, because a practice can acquire new functions and shed old ones. Assigned second on purpose: a reader who takes this seriously will not read the later worked examples as automatic refutations, which is the most common misreading of the Genealogy.

    Read alongside: On the Genealogy of Morals — Preface §§5–6; Daybreak §95.

    Online edition: §44 (trans. J. M. Kennedy) · Preferred edition.

  3. Core

    The Gay Science §7

    What a genealogical programme would actually contain

    Kaufmann: Something for the industrious. Common: Something for the Laborious.

    Question: Nietzsche lists histories nobody has written. What kind of evidence would each of them require?

    Why it belongs: The section names a research programme rather than a polemic: histories of love, of avarice, of conscience, of pity, of cruelty, and of the division of the day and the consequences of work and festival. It is the most concrete statement in the published work of what genealogical inquiry would consist in, and it makes the method look like collaborative scholarship rather than private unmasking. It is also a useful check on the later books: very little of this programme was carried out.

    Read alongside: The Gay Science §345; Beyond Good and Evil §186.

    Online edition: §7 (trans. Thomas Common) · Preferred edition.

  4. Core

    On the Genealogy of Morals Preface §§5–6

    The value of the values themselves

    Question: What would count as evidence for or against the value of a morality, as opposed to evidence about its history?

    Why it belongs: The methodological centrepiece of the late work. Nietzsche moves from the question of the origin of moral judgments to the demand that the value of these values be called into question, and insists that this requires knowledge of the conditions under which they grew. The two sections together show the method's structure: history is the instrument, evaluation is the aim, and the second does not follow automatically from the first. Read them against Daybreak §44 and the relation between the two becomes the page's central problem.

    Read alongside: Daybreak §44; On the Genealogy of Morals — Preface §§7–8.

    Online edition: Preface §§5–6 (trans. Horace B. Samuel; the Preface is numbered separately from the essays) · Preferred edition.

  5. Core

    On the Genealogy of Morals Essay I, §§1–3

    The method shown at work on a small target

    Question: Nietzsche objects that his opponents' history is unhistorical. What would a better history have to do differently?

    Why it belongs: One worked example, kept short, rather than the whole book. In these opening sections Nietzsche takes the English psychologists' account of the origin of "good" — utility, forgotten and then felt as unconditional — and objects that it is psychologically and historically implausible. The passage shows the moves that constitute the method: an existing explanation is identified, its assumptions are located, and a counter-explanation is proposed that is supposed to fit the evidence better. Whether his counter-explanation does fit is exactly what the rest of the essay has to earn.

    Read alongside: On the Genealogy of Morals — Preface §§7–8; Master and slave morality.

    Online edition: Essay I §§1–3 (trans. Horace B. Samuel) · Preferred edition.

  6. Core

    Beyond Good and Evil §186

    A science of morals that does not yet exist

    Question: What is the difference between justifying a morality and collecting the material for a comparative study of moralities?

    Why it belongs: The opening section of Part V argues that what has been called the science of morals has really been an attempt to give a foundation to one morality, and that the preparatory work of description, comparison and classification has not been done. It names the method's project as comparative rather than legislative. The polemic against Schopenhauer here is sharp, and Nietzsche's charge that moral philosophers lacked historical sense is itself a historical claim open to examination.

    Read alongside: The Gay Science §7; Beyond Good and Evil §32.

    Online edition: Part V (trans. Helen Zimmern; use Find for the section number) · Preferred edition.

Fuller route: tests and complications

Continue with these five investigations after the first encounter. Each assignment below opens its explanation and reading links in the work survey. Read the assignments within a group in order; the question above them explains what the comparison is meant to test.

1. Does tracing an origin discredit a value?

The method's most common misuse and Nietzsche's own defences against it. Ask in each case whether an explanation is being offered, or a verdict.

  1. Daybreak — §44
    Origin and significance held apart.
  2. Human, All Too Human — §39
    How moral responsibility gets constructed.
  3. Human, All Too Human — §99
    Separating an act from the evaluation of it.
  4. Human, All Too Human — §107
    What a thoroughgoing naturalism would cost moral judgment.

2. What does a genealogy actually explain?

The middle works practise the method patiently, before it becomes polemical. Watch what kind of claim each passage is making.

  1. Daybreak — §95
    Historical refutation as the definitive refutation.
  2. Daybreak — §103
    A moral feeling examined as a composite.
  3. Daybreak — §202
    Moral categories applied to what medicine had begun to reclassify.
  4. The Gay Science — §345
    Morality itself made the problem.

3. The method applied to itself

Genealogy is not exempt from genealogy. These passages ask what the genealogist's own commitment to truth is a form of.

  1. Beyond Good and Evil — §6
    Philosophy read as the confession of its author.
  2. On the Genealogy of Morals — Essay III §12
    Objectivity redefined as more eyes, not none.
  3. On the Genealogy of Morals — Essay III §§24–28
    The will to truth as the latest form of the ascetic ideal.
  4. Beyond Good and Evil — §227
    Honesty as the virtue that must question itself.

4. Worked examples at speed

The 1888 books apply the method rapidly to large targets. Read them for technique, and note where rhetoric outruns evidence.

  1. Twilight of the Idols — The Problem of Socrates
    A founding figure read as a symptom.
  2. Twilight of the Idols — The Four Great Errors
    The conceptual apparatus of moral judgment itself.
  3. Twilight of the Idols — The 'Improvers' of Mankind
    Comparative anthropology, with a historical claim that needs checking.
  4. The Antichrist — §57
    Christian moral law set beside the Law of Manu.

5. Periodization and the long task

The method implies a history with stages and a programme that outlives any one book. What would completing it require?

  1. Beyond Good and Evil — §32
    Pre-moral, moral, and extra-moral periods.
  2. Beyond Good and Evil — §187
    Moralities read as means rather than as arguments.
  3. Beyond Good and Evil — §188
    What long constraint is said to have produced.
  4. Beyond Good and Evil — §230
    Translating the human being back into nature.

Keep these distinctions in view

Origin and present function
Daybreak §44 states it and the Genealogy relies on it: a practice can be taken over, reinterpreted and put to new use, so its beginning does not fix its meaning. A genealogy that ignores this has become the genetic fallacy it was meant to avoid.
Raising a question and settling it
The Preface demands that the value of moral values be called into question. Calling into question is an opening move. Where the late books move straight from history to verdict, the move is worth marking rather than adopting.
Historical claim and psychological claim
Many passages make both at once: something happened, and it happened because of a particular kind of motive. These need separate evidence. Nietzsche's psychological readings are often more developed than the historical narratives they rest on.
Nietzsche's polemic and independent history
Claims about priestly castes, about the Law of Manu, or about the actual practices of ancient peoples are Nietzsche's assertions. Some rest on the scholarship available to him, some on sources now regarded as unreliable. Nietzsche's Manu material, for example, came through Louis Jacolliot's 1876 popular treatment, which he described as a French translation but which is not a reliable text of the Law of Manu. Read such claims as his and check them elsewhere.
Description and endorsement
Showing what a morality does for the type of person who holds it is not approval of that type or that morality. The method is equally capable of describing what Nietzsche admires and what he detests.
The method and its results
One can accept that values have histories worth investigating without accepting the particular genealogy of "good and evil" that Essay I proposes. This page is about the first; master and slave morality is about the second.
Practising the method and dramatizing its consequences
Zarathustra is absent from this page's survey on purpose. It stages what follows once values are seen as made rather than found, but it does not conduct historical or psychological investigation, and folding it in would blur the distinction the page exists to keep.
Published method and notebook methodology
The most quotable methodological formulations — including the line about facts and interpretations — are notebook entries in a posthumous compilation. Their published counterparts exist and say something more careful.

A note on Foucault

Foucault's "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" (1971) is an influential modern essay on the method, and Foucault's own historical work is partly modelled on it. He sharpens some features — the role of contingency, the discontinuity of historical formations, the refusal of a single origin — at the cost of softening others, in particular Nietzsche's continuing interest in evaluating, and not only describing, what a genealogy turns up. Worth reading; not the only available framing, and not a substitute for the passages above. Readers who come to Nietzsche through Foucault should check the emphasis on discontinuity against Genealogy Preface §§5–6, where the point of the history is explicitly to make an evaluative question askable.

Explore by work

Thirty-six assignments across seven published works and one early unpublished essay, including the six starting readings. Core identifies that first encounter; development adds a mechanism or setting; complication tests an apparent answer; extension follows a related question. The survey follows publication chronology and marks the retrospective prefaces of 1886 as later additions. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is deliberately omitted; see the last of the key distinctions for why.

The early essays1 reading assignment

An early, unpublished piece in which Nietzsche performs the operation before he has a name for it. Its status matters: he did not publish it, and it should not be treated as a statement of a settled position from 1873.

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Human, All Too Human6 reading assignments

The 1878 book in which moral concepts are first systematically treated as historical products. The opening sections carry the programme; the rest is the workshop. The 1886 preface was added eight years later and is marked as retrospective.

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Daybreak6 reading assignments

The 1881 book is the most patient practice of the method in the corpus: moral judgments read symptomatically, without the polemical compression of the late work. The 1886 preface is a later addition and is marked as such.

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The Gay Science3 reading assignments

The 1882 book states the research programme and, in the 1887 Book V, sharpens it into the question of morality as such. Book V is a later addition and is marked as such.

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Beyond Good and Evil7 reading assignments

Part V, "Natural History of Morals" (§§186–203), is the method's home in this book; the hermeneutical principle that licenses symptomatic reading is stated much earlier, in Part I. The free Zimmern edition has no per-section anchors, so the links open the relevant part; use Find for the section number. Zimmern's part titles differ from Kaufmann's in Parts III, IV and VIII.

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On the Genealogy of Morals7 reading assignments

The 1887 book is where the method reaches its mature form and turns on itself. This survey takes the methodological frame — the Preface, the opening of Essay I, the note appended to Essay I, and the epistemological sections of Essay III — rather than the substantive genealogies, which belong to master and slave morality and the psychology of morality. The Preface and each essay are numbered separately in every edition. For a complete reading of all three essays in order, use the twelve-lesson course.

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Twilight of the Idols4 reading assignments

The 1888 book is a portfolio of demonstrations: short chapters each applying the method to a different target. Section numbers restart in each chapter, and Ludovici's chapter titles differ from Kaufmann's; the free edition's contents list also omits two chapters that are present in the text. See the edition guidance.

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The Antichrist2 reading assignments

The method at full polemical intensity on its largest target. The substantive argument belongs to the critique of Christianity; what is taken here is the technique. The free Mencken text omits portions of §§29, 35 and 38 and the separate Law Against Christianity; see the edition guidance.

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Notebook material

The notebooks of the late 1880s contain concentrated methodological remarks, gathered by the compilation's editors mainly into Book Three. Four entries are given here, each identified individually rather than as a range. No short starting route is offered: the relevant material is a scattering of working notes about procedure rather than a developed notebook treatment of the method, and presenting seven entries in sequence would imply an organization the notes do not have.

Drafts and outlines for the projected Revaluation of All Values are sometimes cited as evidence of what the method was finally for. They show intentions, not a completed project, and the plans changed repeatedly. For the original notebook arrangement and manuscript references rather than the compilation's editorial numbering, consult Nietzsche Source's critical edition.

Related extensions: what might follow?

Choose these after the central questions, according to the direction your reading takes. They return to assignments already explained in the survey.

Connections

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