Philosophical Genealogy: An Epistemological Reconstruction of Nietzsche and Foucault's Genealogical Method 1433111942, 9781433111945

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Philosophical Genealogy VOLUME I

SERIES V PHILOSOPHY VOL. 208

PETER LANG

New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern Frankfurt y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford

Brian Lightbody

Philosophical Genealogy VOLUME I

An Epistemological Reconstruction of Nietzsche and Foucault’s Genealogical Method

PETER LANG

New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern Frankfurt y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lightbody, Brian. Philosophical genealogy: an epistemological reconstruction of Nietzsche and Foucault’s genealogical method / Brian Lightbody. v. cm. — (American university studies. V, Philosophy; vol. 208) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Genealogy (Philosophy). 2. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. 3. Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984. I. Title. B3318.G45L54 193—dc22 2010041574 ISBN 978-1-4331-0956-0 (vol. 1) ISBN 978-1-4331-0992-8 (vol. 2) ISBN 978-1-4331-1194-5 (2-vol set) ISSN 0739-6392

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

An extract from Brian Lightbody, “Leaving the Island of the Cyclops Practicing an Aural Genealogy within the Surrealist Community of Fellowship” in Disguise, Deception, Trompe-l'oeil: Interdisciplinary Perspectives edited by Leslie Boldt-Irons, Corrado Federici, Ernesto Virgulti (New York: Peter Lang,2009) is reproduced here with permission.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council of Library Resources.

© 2010 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006 www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited. Printed in Germany

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ix vii

PREFACE

1

INTRODUCTION CHAPTER

1:

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY?

Section I: Defining Genealogy—Via Negativa Section II: Defining Genealogy Via Positiva: The Three Axes of Philosophical Genealogy Section III: The Power Axis: Nietzschean Will to Power Section IV: The Three Axes in Nietzsche’s Genealogy Section V: Justifying Genealogy in the Secondary Literature: Philological and Naturalized accounts Section VI: The Ethical Axis Section VII: Genealogy and the Body CHAPTER

2:

THE BODY AS HISTORICAL DOCUMENT

Section I: The Body and Genealogical Inquiry Section II: Genealogy, the Body and the Secondary Literature Section III: The Non-substratum Position: “The Received View” Section IV: Foucault’s Anti-Essentialist Body: Epistemological, Ontological and Ethical Difficulties Section V: The Essential Body and Genealogy Section VI: Truth, Power, Ethics and the Body

7 7 18 25 31

34 43 48 57 57 58 61

68 74 78

contents

vi CHAPTER

3:

PERSPECTIVES ON PERSPECTIVISM

Section I: Nehamasian Perspectivism Section II: Perspectival Perspectivism Section III: Perspectivism Naturalized Section IV: ‘Optical’ Perspectivism CHAPTER

4:

91 91 101 109 118

LEAD LINES OF DESCENT: THE METHODS AND TECHNIQUES OF PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY

Section I: Power in On the Genealogy of Morals Section II: Power in Discipline and Punish Section III: Foucault and Nietzsche’s Genealogies

133 133 162 184

BIBLIOGRAPHY

191

INDEX OF TERMS

199

INDEX OF NAMES

201

VOLUME II

PREFACE INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 5:

POWER AND THE BODY

Section I: Heraclitus on “Becoming.” Section II: Bundles of Power Section III: Body as Bundle and ‘Looping’ Kinds of Things CHAPTER 6:

JUSTIFICATION AND PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY

Section I: Foundationalism, Coherentism and Foundherentism Section II: Foundherentism Defined Section III: Philosophical Genealogy and Foundherentism Section IV: Foundherentism under Attack. Section V: Virtue Foundherentism CHAPTER 7:

‘ENFOLDINGS’ OF TRANSFORMATION

Section I: Perspectivism Resolved Section II: Epistemic Virtue and Genealogical Inquiry Section III: The Affects and Genealogical Inquiry Section IV: Putting It All Together: Power Truth, Ethics, the Body and the Elliptical Self AFTERWORD

PREFACE

Philosophical genealogy investigates the historical origin of values. More perspicaciously put philosophical genealogy studies why certain values have come to have value. This does not mean that genealogy is a sub-species of “value theory.” Though value theory and ethics are often regarded as closely synonymous if not co-extensive terms by many philosophers, it should be made clear at the outset that genealogy’s investigation into the value of values is not limited merely to the ethical realm. There are metaphysical and epistemological values too. The value of these studies must also be evaluated. Indeed even the most primary philosophical concept, namely truth, is a value and has value according to the genealogist. Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers to show the complex and intimate relationship between truth and values. As Nietzsche writes in this regard in the very first section of Beyond Good Evil: “Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance?” 1 If this question is a sensible one and it seems prima facie to be, then an investigation concerning the value of truth itself seems necessitated. But there lies the problem: the investigation into the value of truth will be contingent on the concept of truth itself. After all, the very notion of an investigation seems to entail, conceptually speaking, an accurate, justified, indeed, truthful analysis of the area or object being investigated. However, if genealogy is critical of the value of truth then how, one might query, does an investigation of this suspect valuation begin? It is this very question which is the focus of the present book. In Philosophical Genealogy Volume One, I investigate the epistemic, ontological and ethical problems associated with philosophical genealogy. I begin by explaining the differences between philosophical genealogy and more traditional 1

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: part one section one in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann with an introduction by Peter Gay, (New York: Random House, 2000), 199.

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methods of historical and philosophical investigation. In the next section, I explain, in more positive terms, the three aspects to any genealogical investigation, namely, the truth, power and ethical axes. After demonstrating some of the philosophical problems each of these aspects lead to, I explain the role the body plays in a genealogical investigation. In chapter two, I examine the ontological status of the body in a genealogical inquiry. There seem to be two principal interpretations in this regard: the biological reductionist view and the social constructionist interpretation. I demonstrate that each of these positions is fraught with problems both epistemically, ontologically and ethically. In chapter three I examine the problem of ‘perspectivism’. In the Nietzschean secondary literature, perspectivism is the epistemic doctrine that holds that statements are only perspectivally true; there can be no statements which are true absolutely. It is a position which is both epistemically and ethically fruitful, but one which is also logically problematic. However, since it is one of the defining features of a genealogical method of investigation, it therefore deserves close and careful scrutiny. The genealogist is a perspectivist in the sense that he or she does not examine the emergence of historical events from an objective “view from nowhere.” 2 Such a position is impossible: there must always be a relationship between the epistemic agent and the object claimed to be known. A non-relationship, relationship between subject and object is nonsensical. But the genealogist goes beyond this truism to suggest that our perspectives actively inform the investigation one is undertaking. I examine and critique some of the most important positions in the secondary literature which try to make sense of this claim. Fourth and finally I provide a very close analysis of essay two of On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche as well as the section on ‘the means of correct training’ from Discipline and Punishment by Michel Foucault. My intent for providing these careful readings is to extract the central components of the genealogical method put into practice by two exemplary genealogies and genealogists. In volume two, I articulate a schematic reconstruction of these practices that is both in keeping with the genealogical spirit as well as one that is epistemically coherent and ontologically sound. 2

See Thomas Nagel’s brilliant problematizing of both a purely, objective and, purely, subjective epistemic position in his classic The View from Nowhere, (Oxford University Press, 1986).

INTRODUCTION

Genealogy studies values by examining the historical origin of values. As the term is used today, it refers to the method of historical and philosophical investigation developed by Friedrich Nietzsche and later adopted and modified in the 20th century by Michel Foucault.1 As the name itself implies, genealogy is a distinct method of practicing philosophy that entails examining the historical origins of present day philosophical concepts, ideas and discourses along with the institutions that sprang from them. By tracing the “lines of descent” of a present interpretation to an earlier one, philosophical genealogists effectively demonstrate the long sign-chain of interpretations that were responsible for producing the current idea.2 In this way the genealogist demonstrates the “origin” or perhaps more precisely put the ‘soil’ from which our contemporary concepts, laws and social norms developed and even in what direction such concepts may be headed. However, genealogy is so much more than simply a method for tracing the origin of ideas and institutions. Indeed, if either Nietzsche or Foucault were solely concerned in demonstrating how one idea or institution evolved from an earlier one then neither philosopher would be any different from the 1

By the far the clearest statement of Nietzsche’s tremendous influence on Foucault can be found in Foucault’s last interview entitled the “Return of Morality.” Foucault says: “I can only respond by saying that I am simply Nietzschean, and I try to see, on a number of different points, and to the extent that it is possible, with the aid of Nietzsche’s texts—but also with anti-Nietzschean theses (which are nevertheless Nietzschean!)—what can be done in this or that domain.” See Michel Foucault, Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, Interviews and other Writings, 1977–1984, trans. Alan Sheridan and others, (London: Routledge, 1988.) 250–251. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann with an introduction by Peter Gay, (New York: Random House, 2000) GM III: 12, 489.

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historian. Genealogical investigations, however, delve deeper into the very wellsprings of history than more traditional historical methods. While most historians who would propose to study the history of law or legal institutions would begin by tracing current legal codes to earlier laws, they stop short, according to the genealogist, from discovering the true soil from where these laws sprang. Likewise, those who trace our current academic discourses to older disciplines do not go far enough; they curtail their investigation prematurely. For underneath our so called ‘just’ or ‘fair’ legal codes or ‘rational’ thinking lies the soil from which these ideas had their source, namely, power. All of our contemporary concepts, ideas, institutions, discourses and values were born through the confluence, through the agon (struggle), of competing modes and perspectives of power. Genealogy unmasks the true origin of our current ideas and discourses as nothing more and nothing less than the ideas and institutions that were victorious over their respective rivals. In sum, ‘values,’ whether legal, moral or even rational, can never be valued in and for themselves. Values always presuppose an evaluation. And all things, according to the genealogist, are evaluated in terms of power. Genealogy, therefore, is the diagnostic study of the historical manifestations of power. But just as there is a diagnostic aspect to genealogy there is also a curative aspect. Foucault and Nietzsche stressed that it is only by understanding how such nodes of power were formed, as well as how these said nodes were related to each other, that we may emancipate ourselves from these networks. To this end, Nietzsche called genealogy the path to gay science.3 Foucault also believed genealogy to be a “curative science.” A successful genealogy is capable of challenging and demolishing our traditional beliefs which are often confining, self-undermining and, perhaps most importantly, false.4 Foucault’s genealogical investigations enable us to establish new beliefs and attitudes in order to live more creatively, joyfully and indeed, experimentally than before. In short, the genealogical method as understood by both philosophers, is a technique and personal ‘practice’ of investigating traditional 3

See Nietzsche’s, On the Genealogy of Morals in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, preface, sec. 7, 457: “For cheerfulness—or in my own language gay science—is a reward: the reward of a long, brave, industrious, and subterranean seriousness, of which to be sure not everyone is capable.” 4 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, Edited with an introduction by Donald F. Bouchard, (Cornell University Press: 1977), 156.

introduction

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philosophical conundrums and aporias in order to offer a way out or exit from our all too common disenchantment with modern society. In effect, genealogy provides the modern human being with an opportunity to develop a new ethics of action, belief, thought and desire. However, I contend that contemporary scholars and interpreters of both thinkers have overly concerned themselves with this last aspect of genealogy, namely, the ethical or curative, while neglecting the equally important methodological or diagnostic aspects of genealogical inquiry. For example, while Todd May in his book Between Genealogy and Epistemology lucidly explains the great emancipatory power of genealogical inquiry, May does little to extrapolate on the methodological aspects or procedural steps required in order to go about “doing” genealogy. Unfortunately, the same is true of a number of books and articles in the secondary literature.5 If genealogy is indeed an important and subversive practice capable of teaching us to live a more joyful and wise existence, then surely our first task is to understand what precisely genealogy is. This entails, minimally, that we ask and answer the following questions as best we can: ‘What does genealogy study?’; ‘How does a genealogical inquiry differ from other historical and philosophical modes of investigation?’; ‘Why do Nietzsche and Foucault’s genealogies proceed in the manner they do?’; ‘Is there a schema for doing genealogies?’; ‘What exactly is the relationship between the methodological aspects of genealogy and the curative aspects?’; Finally, ‘Is it possible to improve on Nietzsche and Foucault’s genealogical techniques?’

5

For a sample list of scholars who provide a detailed explanation in terms of the subversive or therapeutic value of genealogy, see Alexander Nehamas’ “The Genealogy of Genealogy: Interpretation in Nietzsche’s Second Untimely Meditations and in On the Genealogy of Morals” in Nietzsche, Genealogy Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. Ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley California: University of California Press, 1994), 269–284. See also Kathleen Marie Higgins’ “On the Genealogy of Morals—Nietzsche’s Gift” also in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, 49–63. Eric Blondel does attempt to provide a more schematic and structural methodology for genealogical inquiry but his work still remains largely incomplete and vague. See his Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy trans. by Sean Hand, (Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, 1991). Finally, James Bernhauer in his Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Towards and Ethics of Thought (New Jersey: Humanities Press, International, 1990) puts forth perhaps the strongest and most detailed argument to support the great’ transformative powers of genealogy.

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Unfortunately, no article or monograph that I am aware of, answers any, let alone, all of these questions in the detail and clarity required.6 A second theme of this book is to tackle some of the epistemic problems scholars have leveled against genealogy in the secondary literature. Jurgen Habermas, Paul Bove, Axel Honneth, and Alasdair MacIntyre to name but a few, argue that genealogy cannot make any positive claims (whether methodological, epistemological, ethical or otherwise), because it equates all values with power and, therefore, cannot be any more valid nor any less valid than any other method of historical and/or philosophical investigation.7 In sum, since genealogy argues that all concepts, ideas and institutions are historical and contingent constructions of power, then this same analysis must apply, ceteris paribus, to the genealogical method itself. Genealogies and even the 6

A number of books and articles have been published on the topic of genealogy very recently. And although many of these do address some of the questions raised above, no single work addresses all of them. Most certainly no single work provides a satisfactory answer to any one of these questions in my view. Below is a sample list: Rudi Visker, Michel Foucault: Genealogy as Critique, trans. Chris Turner, (London: Verso, 1995).; Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, (Princeton University Press, 2002); Tyler Krupp, “Genealogy as Critique.” Journal of the Philosophy of History 2 (3) 315–337, 2008 and Mark Bevir’s “What is Genealogy?”, Journal of the Philosophy of History 2 (3) 263–275, 2008. 7 Jurgen Habermas quite explicitly makes this very claim in his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Fredrick Lawrence, (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1985), 281. Paul Bove, in a similar vein, argues the very same point by claiming that genealogy cannot remain critical of power/knowledge once genealogy becomes part of the academic world. Genealogy would therefore become part and parcel of the current dispositif. See Bove’s article: “The End of Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Power of Disciplines” (1980) in Michel Foucault: Critical Assessments, Ed. Barry Smart, Vol. II (New York: Routledge, 1994) 313–328 (hereafter MCFA). Daniel Conway argues that genealogy can, at best, hold only a relative validity. See his article, “Genealogy and the Critical Method” in Nietzsche Genealogy, Morality, 318–333. Finally, Alasdair MacIntyre argues the same point though in somewhat different fashion. MacIntyre holds that the genealogist can only consistently maintain his or her research program provided that he or she accepts, at some level, the continuity of the self. That is to say, the genealogist cannot merely be a construction of power along with everything else but must to some extent be beyond power. Since the genealogist admits that any concept or idea is really a secondary phenomena (merely a mask for the will to power), then the genealogist must be the one entity which cannot be dissolved to the will to power. See MacIntyre’s “Genealogies and Subversions” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, 284–306.

introduction

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genealogical method itself are incapable of making any truth claims whatsoever because the genealogist admits that all truths are reducible to power formations. I demonstrate that these sorts of arguments—ironically—presuppose that the question: ‘What is genealogy?’ has already been answered, when in fact the question has not even been asked. Without answering what, precisely, genealogy is, one cannot criticize it in any lucid nor detailed manner. I should also point out that my intention in this book is not just to provide an answer to the question: ‘What is philosophical genealogy?’ but indeed is far more ambitious. I demonstrate how all of the sub-questions that stem from this investigation are interrelated to one another with the consequence that all must be asked together and all must be answered together in order to understand, in precise terms, what genealogy is and what it is not. What I offer in the following work therefore is not a mere summary and exposition of On the Genealogy of Morals and Discipline and Punish. Nor is my primary purpose even a critical examination of these works (though I do engage in this). Rather, the principal aim of this book is to provide nothing less than a reconstruction, indeed, one might even say a radical reconstruction of the aims, methods and techniques of genealogy qua genealogy. That is to say, I will attempt to outline the schematics for a successful genealogical inquiry: both what is required (epistemically and ontologically) and how a genealogical investigation gets off the ground. In sum, this work outlines, in explicit detail, the components, interrelationship between these components and goals for a successful, epistemically justified, genealogical investigation. A further caveat is in order before we proceed. Nietzsche and Foucault have been interpreted as post-modern philosophers. Though post-modernism is difficult to define because it eschews all attempts of universal definition, we might begin by claiming that post-modernism is that position which claims that there is no single Truth (with a capital T), but only multiple truths. There is no grand narrative in which everything may be explained, but an infinite number of narratives which are incommensurable with each other. My aim in this book is not to interpret philosophical genealogy along these well trodden paths. These interpretations have been tried and are abject failures. They fail because they are not philosophical. They fail because they are incoherent. What I propose to do is to use the techniques, distinctions and concepts developed in recent analytic philosophy to show that we can have our cake and eat it too. We can provide a rigorous justification of genealogy while preserving its novelty, its profundity, its fecundity. We can preserve the

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genealogists’ call for the transvaluation of all values while also maintaining that some transvaluations are more meritorious than others. We can affirm the perspectivity of truth by showing that a disengaged, objective relationship to truth is an incoherent concept. We can view the body and our lives as works of art, but as artifacts that, at the same time, we may only transform because we understand them as natural entities. The current volume presents the problems and hurdles that must be overcome before reaching the felicitous destination we seek. The second volume presents a reconstruction of the genealogical method that resolves the problems that were unearthed in the present volume.

CHAPTER

ONE

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY?

Section I: Defining Genealogy—Via Negativa Before examining genealogy in any greater detail, I think it would be beneficial to examine more traditional forms of historiography first. Genealogy, after all, did not emerge from an historical vacuum. Both Nietzsche and Foucault developed and used a genealogical method of historical and philosophical investigation because they felt there were problems with the methods that their respective contemporaries employed. In addition, by contrasting genealogy with more established forms of historiography, it is hoped that we may come to a better appreciation of just how very different genealogy is from these other, somewhat, entrenched conceptions of historicizing. I examine two types of historiography in this section: monumental history and whig historianism. Monumental history is a form of historiography that Nietzsche criticizes in his Unfashionable Observations. History, according to the monumental historian, is simply the correct cataloguing of important historical events (such as battles, technological inventions, political declarations and revolutions) which served to change the course of history. What’s more such landmark events are usually initiated by “great men.” Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon River in 49 B.C., for example, is a paradigm case of a ‘monumental’ event in Western History. Caesar’s action is interpreted by the monumental historian to be that singular event which initiated the fall of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire. However, the real purpose of monumental history, as Nietzsche explains, is to ‘use’ history in order to fulfill one’s destiny in the present.1 A monumental style of historicizing reminds the historian and layperson alike, that since 1

See Friedrich Nietzsche’s “The Utility and Liability of History,” in The Unfashionable Observations, Trans. Richard T. Grey (Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 1995), 98.

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significant events carried out by ‘larger than life’ figures were possible in the past, they are therefore possible once more in the future. Such milestone events, along with the great men who enacted them, are remembered as ‘monuments’: testaments to the magnificence of the human spirit. As Nietzsche explains: “But one thing will live on: the signature of their most authentic being, a work, a deed, a rare inspiration, a creation: it will live on because posterity cannot do without it.” 2 To take a monumental view of history is to instill oneself with power in the sense that one is capable of transcending his or her historical era in order to seize hold of one’s true ‘destiny.’ Nietzsche objects to the naiveté of the monumental historians. He objects to their lack of historical sense. The monumental historian views history as a series of great events which seem to be causa sui. He forgets those microscopic, seemingly insignificant causes which allowed the event to appear. But Nietzsche does not condemn monumental history in its entirety. Monumental history allows for an interesting and epistemically fruitful perspective of the psyche of the modern human being. Moreover, it continues to play a prominent role in Nietzsche’s later writings like Ecce Homo and the Anti-Christ. There is much that we can learn from the monumental historian. Nietzsche’s point is that a monumental historicist perspective, if left unchecked, can be very dangerous: Monumental history deceives by means of analogies; with seductive similarities it arouses rashness in those who are courageous and fanaticism in those who are inspired; and if one imagines this history in the hands and heads of talented egotists and wicked fanatics, then empires will be destroyed, princes murdered, wars and revolutions incited, and the number of historical “effects in themselves”—that is, of effects without sufficient causes—further increase.” 3

Looking back on the history of the 20th century we can see just how prescient Nietzsche was. Whig historianism is yet another way to study history. For the whig, the study of history is akin to traveling back in time; the past is a way for us to satisfy our curiosity regarding how, where, and when present ideas originated. Moreover, present ideas, values and institutions are considered to be merely more evolved forms of their past, primitive forebears. The whig only values the past in terms of the present. For example, the whig historian may trace present day concepts like ‘Rationality’ or contemporary political and social institutions like courts of law, to earlier, proto-forms of these same concepts and 2 3

Nietzsche, Unfashionable Observations, 98. Nietzsche, Unfashionable Observations, 100

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institutions in order to establish how such concepts or institutions evolved in the first place.4 The whig historian believes that present human civilization has fulfilled its historical destiny. Thus history is only a record of the trials and tribulations of the struggle of humanity’s maturity and progress. Historian Herbert Butterfield underscores this point in his book The Whig Interpretation of History. He writes: “It is part and parcel of the whig interpretation of history that it studies the past with reference to the present…historical personages can easily be classed into the men who furthered progress and the men who tried to hinder it.” (My Italics)5 Whether “human maturity” or “progress” is construed as the struggle of Absolute Spirit coming to full realization or the realization that a liberal democracy presents the pre-destined form of government that human beings, as a species, were designed to adopt, whig historians are agreed on one thing: that human beings are advancing socially, politically and morally speaking.6 Historical interpretation for the whig necessarily adopts what Foucault refers to as a Cyclopean view: the whig historian, it seems, is the only person who transcends history and therefore views history correctly from his or her mountaintop on high.7 As Butterfield writes, “The whig historian stands on the 4

This emphasis on the present is, of course, the fallacy of presentism and it is arguable that Foucault is also guilty of committing this fallacy. For more on this, see Habermas’ The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Chapter X. Or, alternatively, Jurgen Habermas’ much condensed article: “The Genealogical Writing of History: On Some Aporias in Foucault’s Theory of Power,” Canadian Journal of Social and Political Theory, 10, 1–2: 1–9. 5 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd, 1963), 11. 6 G.W.F. Hegel is usually considered to be the whig historian par excellence. In G.W.F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller and J.N. Findlay, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). Hegel argues that the history of humankind represents a development and evolution of Absolute Spirit or Geist coming to self-realization and knowledge concerning its essential Being. Francis Fukuyama could be considered a contemporary whig historian as his book The End of History and the Last Man, (New York: Free Press, 1992) argues that democracy is the penultimate achievement and telos of the human race. 7 For a more thorough analysis of Foucault’s ‘cyclopean’ criticism of whig historianism, see my book chapter “Leaving the Island of the Cyclops: Practicing an “Aural” Genealogy within the Surrealist Community of Fellowship” in Disguise, Deception, Trompe-l’oeil in

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summit of the 20th century, and organizes his scheme of history from the point of view from his own day.” 8 In sum, the whig assumes that only he or she can see the mysterious inner workings of ‘Reality’ which lie behind that which is seemingly contingent and arbitrary. A genealogist criticizes and rejects both of the fundamental assumptions of each these positions. Regarding the monumental position, the genealogist demonstrates the importance of various micro-practices, discourses, discoveries and ideas that, when combined to form a dispositif (power/knowledge apparatus), have had a tremendous amount of influence on historical events. In On the Genealogy of Morals for example, Nietzsche demonstrates the subtle and seemingly unimportant practices, discourses and correlations between said discourses and practices, which definitively changed the history of the human race. In section 13 of the second essay, for example, Nietzsche explains that to think of torture as a mere ‘punishment’ or to think of ‘punishment’ itself as having a definitive meaning, origin or purpose is to miss the historical genesis or ‘genealogy’ of this complicated concept/practice. Our modern definition of ‘punishment’, according to Nietzsche, is a “very late condition of culture.” 9 That is to say, the means of ‘punishment’ and the meaning of the word ‘punishment’ itself are over-determined: ‘punishment’ is too fluid, too plastic, to have any single meaning. It is impossible to extract with any definitiveness why imprisonment, torture or the execution of persons are now associated as measures, means and methods of ‘punishing.’ Indeed, Nietzsche records no fewer than nine different, “ ‘meanings’ of punishment…how “accidental” “the meaning” of punishment is, and how one and the same procedure can be employed, interpreted and adapted to ends that differ fundamentally.” 10 It is only that which is ahistorical, eternal and absolute—or perhaps even that which is fictitious—that can be adequately defined Nietzsche suggests from these passages of the Genealogy. Truthful (Wirliche) history on the contrary is far more difficult to trace. Nietzsche explains: The previous history of punishment in general, the history of its employment for the most various of purposes, finally crystallizes (krystallisirt) into a kind of unity (Art von

the series Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature vol. 99, ed(s). Leslie Boldt-Irons, Corrado Fererici and Ernesto Virgulti (New York: Peter Lang), 2009, 115–129. 8 Butterfield, 13. 9 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: GM II:13, 516. 10 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals GM II:13. For a full listing of the various forms and possible meanings of the word punishment, examine 516–517 in the Genealogy.

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Einheit) that is hard to disentangle, hard to analyze and, as must be emphasized, totally indefinable. (Today it is impossible to say for certain why people are really punished: all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable [Definirbar ist nur Das, was keine Geschichte hat]) (Nietzsche’s Italics)11

Thus, practices, discourses, actions and events are ultimately impossible to trace to any definite origin or Ursprung in any absolute sense of this word. But this does not worry the genealogist because the genealogist embraces the historicity of that which is historical. A genealogy demonstrates that so called “important” events or ideas are not the sole engines of historical change because there are simply too many intersecting historical events to determine with any certainty the primary cause and, therefore, the primary effect of moral, political and social alteration. Genealogy erases the human face from history and replaces one, understandable narrative of events with difference, with alterity, with Herkunft (stock, decent). The genealogist is also critical of the whig historian. In Discipline and Punish for example, Foucault compellingly demonstrates that there was another side to the Enlightenment. There was a dark underbelly to the ‘Age of Reason’. Some historians, even today, assume that the historical period known as the Enlightenment marked the emancipation of reason from religious dogmas, creeds and unexamined and unjustified beliefs. The scientific revolution coupled with a growing free market economy, paved the way for new studies and philosophies of human nature and correspondingly new political and social organizations. Indeed, the American and French Revolutions graphically and resoundingly demonstrated the efficacious influence that new ideas and new theories could have in all too real social and political terms. The “Age of Enlightenment” then, for the whig, is considered the birthplace for our modern notions of democracy, political rights and of ‘Rationality’ itself. But what Foucault shows, in painstaking detail, is that the same historical period that gave us the ‘sciences’ to manipulate nature and therefore free humanity from its dependency on the earth, also gave us the same tools to manipulate and control our fellow human beings. For just as those sciences that were concerned with understanding and manipulating nature rapidly evolved in the 18th century, so too, Foucault argues, these same sciences applied their desire for ‘Truth’ to humankind. The consequence of “this will to knowledge”, Foucault contends, was the development of the sciences of man 11

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II:13, 516.

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(psychology, sociology, criminology and anthropology). And, just as the hard sciences attempted to understand and to use nature, the human sciences were also designed to understand and use their own object of investigation: man. Foucault writes in this regard: The day would come in the nineteenth century when this ‘man’ discovered in the criminal, would become the target (cible) of penal intervention, the object that it claimed to correct and transform, the domain of a whole series of criminological sciences and strange penitentiary practices….The man that the reformers (reformateurs) set up against the despotism of the scaffold has also become a ‘man-measure’ (homme-mesure): not of things but of power.12

One cannot claim that society is more ‘evolved’ than say three hundred years ago, because there is no ultimate standard one can appeal to and no method by which one could definitively claim that institutions, concepts and ideas in the present will remain constant and permanent in the future.13 In short, Foucault demonstrates that there is no evidence to support the fundamental assumption of the whig which is that humankind is in fact morally progressing. This section is titled genealogy via negativa because it marks an attempt to reveal how concrete genealogies differ from monumental and whig historian approaches to history. From our investigation it is clear that one fundamental difference between these two approaches to historical and philosophical investigations to that of a genealogical approach is that genealogies are necessarily perspectival. In order to comprehend exactly what it means for genealogy to be perspectival and ‘perspectivism’ more generally, let us turn to the most extended treatment of perspectivism to be found in Nietzsche’s corpus, namely, essay III section 12 of On the Genealogy of Morals:

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Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 74. Of course some might disagree with this claim. Charles Taylor in “Foucault on Freedom and Truth” in Foucault a Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) 69–103, claims that Foucault often skews the true value of tradition, family and ‘self’ for his own agenda. If we examined these aspects of contemporary society Taylor evinces, we might be both quite happy and much more thankful for living in our present “carceral regime” as Foucault puts it, rather than living in 18th century France. That being said, this in no way negates the claim that the genealogist is making, which is that we cannot stand outside of history and judge it according to an ahistorical standard. But this is precisely the claim which the whig implicitly makes. 13

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Henceforth my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a “pure, will-less (willenloses), painless (schmerzloses), timeless (zeitloses) knowing subject” (Subjekt der Erkenntniss); let us be on guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason” “absolute spirituality” “knowledge in itself”: these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active (aktiven) and interpreting (interpretirenden) forces (Krafte), through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects (Affekte) we allow to speak about on a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our objectivity (Objektivität) be. (Nietzsche’s Italics)14

I think it is fair to say that this is perhaps the most incisive and fecund passage to be found not only in the Genealogy, but in Nietzsche’s oeuvre as a whole. There seem to be a number of important, yet interrelated points which Nietzsche is making here. This makes it rather difficult to separate out what exactly such points are individually. However, in the final part of this section, I will attempt to draw out the most salient features of genealogy’s inherent perspectivism for further analysis. As Nietzsche shows it is impossible to provide an overall narrative for history as a whole. In other words, one cannot stand outside of history, to take a “view from nowhere” and to believe (erroneously) that history can be read from only one angle; one perspective. Rather, what Nietzsche seeks to emphasize is the radical openness of interpretation with regard to history. We must ‘read’ history from a number of different perspectives,—heights, depths and angles—and then compare, contrast and/or incorporate these different readings of history with those of others. In short, Nietzsche stresses the inevitable historicity of our own humanity—the genealogist acknowledges the ‘situatedness’ of the human being and the impossibility to transcend (in any ultimate sense of this word) one’s own ‘situatedness.’ 15 14

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM III:12, 555. I realize that it seems contradictory for Nietzsche to make such a claim. For to claim that Absolute Truth is false because there is no Absolute Truth is, of course, already to assert one statement to be absolutely true—that there can be no absolute truth. Correspondingly to accept a perspectivist position leads one to either make one or both of the following claims: 1) Perspectivism is true (there is no single, true account of the world there are only a number of perspectives on the world). But to assert that there is no single, true account of the world is to make an assertion about the world. Putting it another way, if perspectivism is accepted as true, then it contradicts itself if applied 15

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Foucault too, it seems, adopts Nietzsche’s perspectivist position. In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” (1971) Foucault argues that effective history (the type of history which genealogy employs), possesses an important property that distinguishes it from other forms of historiography. He affirms: The final trait of effective history is its affirmation of knowledge as perspective. Historians take unusual pains to erase the elements in their work which reveal their grounding in a particular time and place, their preferences in a controversy—the unavoidable obstacles of their passion. Nietzsche’s version of history is explicit in its perspective and acknowledges its system of injustice. Its perception is slanted, being a deliberate appraisal, affirmation, or negation; it reaches the lingering poisoning traces to reveal the best antidote.16

Foucault not only recognizes that history can only be viewed from angles, slants and corners, but that the genealogist must embrace the vested interestedness of his or her very investigations. A genealogist does not seek to understand the prejudices she starts with before undertaking an historical investigation so that they may be removed. Rather, the prejudices of the genealogist always remain and indeed assist in providing focus, content and motivation for the undertaking of a genealogical investigation in the first place. Thus, perspectivism for both Nietzsche and Foucault, or at least so I argue, works in two distinct directions: first, perspectivism is directed towards the past because we must always remember that history does not consist of a single, linear tracing of events. Historical documents are not so much the building blocks of an historical investigation, but are more akin to elaborate woven tapestries: one must unravel the ‘stock’ or ‘descent’ of each thread of the tapesto itself, for the central tenet of perspectivism is that we can never ascertain what the truth is. 2) Perspectivism is not true in any absolute sense but the thesis of perspectivism is just one perspective among many. However, if we accept this proposal, then it does not follow that we should believe perspectivism. That is, genealogy is no more epistemologically justified than any other form of historical or philosophical inquiry as no perspective is privileged above any other. I will instead opt for a third claim: 3) Weak perspectivism, that is, the thesis of perspectivism itself, is absolutely true but most other theories and assertions are only perspectivally true. This condensed summary of perspectivism is, of course, Nietzsche and Foucault’s ‘‘problem of perspectivism’’. I shall discuss this particular problem in more detail in chapter three. 16 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy History,” 156–57. This notion of effective history as an “anti-dote” which Foucault mentions in passing is an important theme in Nietzsche’s Genealogy. I explain this further in section II when I discuss the three axes of genealogical inquiry.

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try in order to see how and why the tapestry became woven. It is possible that there will always be a divergent number of individual threads that do not form a discernible pattern while furthermore, it is also possible that if a discernible pattern does emerge that other patterns are possible. Perspectivism, we might say, reminds us to guard against Neo-Gnosticism—the position which holds that it is possible to discern the inner workings of ‘History’ as they really are. Genealogy acts as a prophylactic of sorts against the dangers associated with this position by demonstrating that there are many different pasts, many different threads and many possible weavings.17 Perspectivism allows us to remain open to the truth such that we recognize there are many different kinds of truth and many different ways of speaking the truth. Secondly, perspectivism is also future oriented: just as there are a number of different pasts, so too, there can be a number of different ‘presents.’ Genealogy exposes what Foucault will call “the limit attitude” to our current modes of thinking, being, doing and saying in order that we may go beyond these so called limits for the sake of future, untold possibilities.18 This notion of ‘pushing past’ our ‘limit attitudes’ can only take place if we acknowledge the many possible perspectives of understanding the past, the present and the future, present. Before I turn my attention to fleshing out genealogy in a more positive fashion, it may be instructive to examine two objections regarding the novelty and profundity of the perspectivist thesis. First, it may be argued that many defenders of other forms of historiography implicitly accept that a perspectivist position is indisputable and yet these same historiographers are not genealogists. Perspectivism is not unique to genealogy.19 17

For more on the dangers of Neo-Gnosticism, see my “Theseus vs. the Minotaur: Finding the Common Thread in the Chomsky- Foucault Debate”, Studies in Social and Political Thought, Issue 8, 2003. 18 The notion of the limit attitude can be found in Foucault’s “What is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader ed. Paul Rabinow, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990). Also see my article “Deep Ethical Pluralism in Late Foucault” in Minerva An Internet Journal of Philosophy, vol. 12, 2008, 102–118. 19 With the popularity of Foucault, both of these positions have been expounded by those who “appear to be tunnellers on the same side of the mountain” to borrow a phrase from fon Elders. Feminists, historians, philosophers and social activists have embraced perspectivism though, for their own purposes and with very different, and sometimes, contradictory methodologies. For a sample listing of these contemporary ‘genealogical’ works, see Susan Lee Bartky’s Femininity and Domination (New York: Routledge, 1990).

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The second problem has to do with the epistemic merit of perspectivism itself. It may be recalled that the objection to the whig and to the monumental historian was that they do not acknowledge the inherent perspectivism of their own respective positions. Both the whig and monumental historian seem to understand, albeit implicitly, that their respective, historical interpretations are already skewed. The whig understands history from the reigning beliefs and ideals of the present and then attempts to trace the development of the present from previously held past beliefs. And, as far as monumental history is concerned, the genealogist, just like the monumental historian, is only interested in studying the past so that he or she may be inspired in the present. So the fallacy of presentism—which consists in interpreting the past through the perspective of the present—is committed implicitly by the whig and monumental historians, but explicitly and intentionally committed by the genealogist. However, one may argue, if the whig and the monumental historians are not justified because they commit the fallacy of presentism, then how can the genealogist be justified in knowingly committing this fallacy when undertaking a genealogical investigation?20 The best way to handle this criticism is to bite down firmly on this bullet and admit that the genealogist views the past from the perspective of present concerns and issues. The past for the genealogist is important because ‘history’ is an invaluable teacher: an investigation regarding the value of morals, according to Nietzsche, must begin with an historical investigation of morality first. Likewise, in order to trace the development of rationality, truth and power, one must understand how our present regimes of truth came about according to Foucault.21 And this is exactly as it should be. The full title of Nietzsche’s genealogical work after all is On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. Genealogy is always controversial, always polemical, because the genealogist seeks to unmask the true origins of those ideas and practices that are of the genealogists’ utmost concern. While that which is of our utmost concern, more often than not, are those pressing social, moral and political problems and questions that we, as subjects, face in the present. Therefore it is only by investigating how our society came to be and we along with it, that we can accept how we have been Alphonso Lingis’ Excess, Eros and Culture (New York: State University of New York Press, 1984). Elizabeth Grosz’ Volatile Bodies (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994). 20 Jurgen Habermas raises the spectre of the fallacy of presentism in the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. 21 I will explain what I mean by a regime of truth in section II below.

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historically conditioned and how we may escape, at least to a certain extent, this conditioning. To borrow a passage from The Gay Science we could say that genealogy allows us to realize that: At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of our lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an “open sea.”—22

So, the genealogist, like other historians and philosophers, is interested in the present because by understanding the present through the past we necessarily learn more about ourselves. Yet, the genealogist does not think that his or her interpretation is or can ever be the last word on the subject. For to be the last word on any subject, is to believe that we can know with absolute certainty the ‘Truth’ of history. But to know this truth is equivalent to standing outside of all history. It is to be ahistorical. Both Nietzsche and Foucault caution against such Egyptianism—the idea of reading history as if it were cold, mummified and unchanging.23 Just as the present is always in flux so too must be the past: the past for the genealogist is only understandable in terms of the present’s values and ideas and therefore new documents emerge as new interests target them. We take that which is active, that in which we have a vested interest and then see both how and why we became so invested. It is again, for this same reason that Foucault claims, on many occasions, that he is not interested in providing an answer to the great questions of history and political science, but is rather interested in writing the history of problematiques.24 That is, Foucault is more concerned with developing tools which would help other investigators ask new questions rather than definitively answering such questions. And finding the right questions to ask, as Nietzsche explains, is crucial for finding alternative roads for investigation.25

22

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sec. 343, 280. This quote comes from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, from the section, “Reason and Philosophy” Nietzsche writes: “There is their (philosophers) lack of historical sense, their hatred of even the idea of becoming, their Egyptianism. They think they are doing a thing honour when they dehistoricize it, sub specie aeterni— when they have made a mummy of it.” From Twilight of the Idols/ The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Harmondsworth U.K.: Penguin Books, 1978), 45. 24 See Foucault’s “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of a Work in Progress,” 343. 25 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Preface, section 7, 457. 23

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In sum, the difference between genealogy and these other forms of historical investigation is that genealogy recognizes and embraces the idea that the genealogists’ interpretation of history always and already displays a vested interest. The genealogist, therefore, is polemical because she is at war: she has a stake in the outcome of the genealogical investigation because the investigation will necessarily change her with respect to her thinking, doing, believing, and saying.26 The skew, the perspective, the angle, the position, the eye, is revered for the genealogist because it is always my skew, my perspective, my position, my eye, my evaluation. The fallacy of presentism is clearly no longer a fallacy as it is impossible to investigate any historical idea, institution, or concept without having a relationship and concern for the idea, institution or object in question.

Section II: Defining Genealogy Via Positiva: The Three Axes of Philosophical Genealogy Thus far, I have defined genealogy primarily in negative terms: though I have mentioned the importance of perspectivism in genealogical inquiry in general, I have done so only to further contrast genealogy with monumental and whig historianism. I now want to focus on what Foucault calls the three axes of genealogical investigation. In an interview with Paul Rabinow in 1983, Foucault defined genealogy in the following manner: So three axes are possible for genealogy. All three were present, albeit in a somewhat confused fashion, in Madness and Civilization. The truth axis was studied in The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things. The Power axis was studied in Discipline and Punish, while the ethical (Foucault also calls this the subject axis) in The History of Sexuality.27

I will now explore each of these axes in turn in this chapter and provide further analysis of each axis in the chapters to follow. I will begin by explaining Foucault’s notion of the truth axis and later show how the truth axis is interdependent on the power axis. In the section to follow, I examine the power axis in detail. Then, I will backtrack, as it were, and demonstrate that all three of these axes are present in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. Finally, I will show that these three axes eventually form an ellipse: the axes fold back 26

This is an allusion to Foucault’s essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of a Work in Progress,” in The Foucault Reader, 352. 27

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on themselves further deepening the “subject” or ethical axis (the genealogist engaged in a genealogical investigation) while simultaneously also revealing new directions for further genealogical inquiry. Examining the truth axis first, genealogy undertakes to study what is believed to be true in a particular historical era; how such beliefs came to be believed and even the structure of what Foucault calls “regimes of truth”: games of power that make certain truths possible and impossible. In short, the truth axis seeks to understand the requisite historical, cultural, social and economic conditions in which certain statements, beliefs and, especially for Foucault, academic disciplines, came to be reflective of, and constitutive for, truth. Before Foucault made his official announcement in ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ that he too, like Nietzsche before him ,would take up the genealogical method of philosophical inquiry, he developed and used a method he coined ‘archaeology’ in order to investigate why and how some statements have come to be regarded as true statements. For example, in The Order of Things, Foucault goes through what he terms the “epistemes” and “historical a prioris’ ” of different eras in history.28 An historical a priori, Foucault notes, is the rule or ‘law’ for discourses in a particular historical age. That is, the historical a priori explains how ‘‘knowledges’’ or academic disciplines are both possible and how they unfold within a given historical era. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault notes that the historical a priori “is not a condition of the validity for judgments, but a condition of reality for statements.” 29 The historical a priori constitutes the “rule” a statement must obey in order for that statement to be part of a discursive formation. In short, the historical a priori constitutes: “the group of rules that characterizes a discursive practice.” 30 Although Foucault’s notion of the historical a priori acts as a transcendental condition for statements in much the same manner as Kant’s categories as found in the Critique of Pure Reason, it is, nevertheless, historical and, thereby, contingent. In the ‘Classical Age’ for example, “(roughly, Europe and especially France from 1650-1800 A.D.),” 31 Foucault notes that the historical a priori is one of representation. The thinkers in the Classical Age, so argues Foucault, 28

See Michel Foucault’s, The Order of Things, An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970). 29 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 127. 30 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 127. 31 Gary Gutting, Foucault: A Very Short Introduction: (Oxford University Press, 2005), 37.

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believed that the mind acted much like a mirror—one’s thoughts and ideas were direct representations of nature. Thus, the a priori for a particular historical period acts much like a boundary or ‘territory’ for thought. It makes thought and discourse possible, but, nonetheless, limits what exactly can be thought within a specific historical era. The historical a priori itself is also shaped by history. When thinkers in the Classical Age started to question the seemingly veridical correspondence between word and object then and only then did such a model of knowledge and of truth break down. This eventually gave rise to disciplines that questioned that which was responsible for acts of cognition, namely, ‘man.’ This questioning of the conditions of the knower of knowledge, as it were, led to the Modern Age and gave rise to the sciences of Life (biology) Labor (economics) and Language (Philology).32 In addition and simultaneously, all three of these discourses studied ‘man’ as an object of knowledge. As such, ‘man’ became both the subject of knowledge from a transcendental standpoint as well as the object of knowledge from an empirical viewpoint thus leading to the paradoxical view Foucault calls, “Man’s doubles.” 33 This above explication of the truth axis is often referred to as Foucault’s archaeological period.34 In the power/knowledge period which perhaps 32

Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. A. Sheridan. (London, and New York: Pantheon, 1973). As has been mentioned countless times in the secondary literature, Foucault has a great deal of difficulty in defining how exactly we move from one historical a priori to another. However, in the Order of Things it seems clear that individual geniuses, thinkers such as Kant, Vargas and Nietzsche play an indispensable role in the transition from one episteme to the next. 33 Foucault, The Order of Things, 303–343. 34 There is a significant debate as to whether genealogy, that is, the period of Foucault’s writings just after the Archaeology of Knowledge, to those towards the end of his life, mark not only a significant shift, but a complete break with Foucault’s former archaeological project. Most contemporary Foucauldian scholars see a continuation between Foucault’s genealogical and archaeological periods. In fact, so does Foucault. I will argue, to the contrary that genealogy is able to supplant archaeology. This does not render archaeology totally irrelevant for genealogical inquiry as Alan Sheridan in Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth (New York: Tavistock Publications, 1980) p. 116 and Barry Smart in Michel Foucault (New York: Tavistock, 1985) pp. 42 and 47 seem to propose. But, it does mean that other forms of linguistic techniques and methods can also be used to help clarify a genealogical research program, while being ultimately subordinate to genealogy. Because ‘archaeology’ would require a separate tome I will not discuss it at any length in these two volumes.

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reaches its zenith with Discipline and Punish, the truth axis is conceived of quite differently. Instead of analyzing, in rather abstract terms, what can or cannot be thought of as ‘true’ within a particular historical epoch, Foucault, instead, concentrates on specific ‘regimes’ of truth and how such regimes were established. Foucault uses the term “regime of truth” to mean a discursive apparatus directly tied to power. As Foucault puts it: “ ‘Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements… ‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A “regime” of truth.” 35

Psychology and criminology are examples of academic disciplines, “regimes of truth”, which are tied to power and, in part, derive their truth conferring capacities from the close relationship these disciplines have to various institutions in modern Western democracies like the legal system and of course the asylum. However, there is a symbiotic relationship between these institutions and the discourses which are produced by them. These same discourses serve to justify and refine the practices and measures instituted in the penitentiary, the school system or the psychiatric hospital. Thus by focusing on the truth axis of a genealogical inquiry, the genealogist seeks to understand how institutional practices are maintained from a discursive standpoint, while also how these same discourses are continually generated by these same practices.36 Investigating the truth axis of modern Western societies from a genealogical standpoint entails unmasking and revealing a different combination of factors that gave rise to the ‘Sciences of Man’ than the one traditionally proffered and extolled. In essence, the goal of investigating concepts along the truth axis of a genealogical inquiry is to understand how certain truths, discourses and ideas came to be along with what specific truths, discourses and ideas were allowed to exist within a power/knowledge apparatus. It should be noted that there are problems with Foucault’s understanding of the truth axis with respect to the epistemic justification of the findings from this sort of investigation. Specifically, Foucault does not adequately 35

Foucault, in Paul Rabinow (ed), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 74. 36 It is generally agreed that there are three major periods to Foucault’s work: the archaeological, the genealogical and the subject. Roughly: 1962–1971, 1971–1980, 1980–84.

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explain how it operates with the other two axes (the power and the ethical) in a genealogical investigation. But perhaps the most glaring problem is with Foucault’s unfortunate equation of truth and power or more perspicuously his bold claim that power produces truth. As Foucault investigates the historical origins of criminology in preparation for the publication of Discipline and Punish, he comes to discover that truth, in all its forms, is necessarily linked to power—knowledge and power operate in such a way, that regimes of knowledge, ways of conceiving reality: individuals, the body, etc. are brought about by changes of power. This intimate and codependent relationship between knowledge and power leads Foucault to proclaim, (producing much criticism) that: We should admit rather that power produces (produit) knowledge (savoir) (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another (s’impliquent directmente l’un autre); that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.37

And later, in Two Lectures (1976), Foucault goes even further; he equates not only knowledge with power but truth itself: “We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth.” 38 Can Foucault justify any equation which holds that 37

Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 27. 38 Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures” in Power/Knowledge, Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 trans. and ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 93. This equation that truth =power has sparked the most criticism and controversy for Foucault’s genealogical project. Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth, Charles Taylor, Thomas McCarthy and many others have all criticized this equation between truth and power in much the same manner, and using much the same argument. Perhaps McCarthy puts this criticism best when he writes, “Having become more or less co-extensive with restraint, power becomes all too like the night in which all cows are black.” McCarthy concludes that Foucault has a one-dimensional ontology in which truth, knowledge and subjectivity are reduced in the end to effects of power. See Thomas McCarthy’s “The Critique of Impure Reason in Critique and Power” in Recasting the Habermas/Foucault Debate ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1994), 254. Of course the problem with this criticism stems from the crude way in which the equation is made but that being said it is a criticism that must be further investigated.

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Truth=Power? And perhaps even more importantly for my purposes, what does such an equation ultimately mean for genealogy? That is, if genealogy undertakes to study the origin of various historical ideas and events then what truth status do these investigations now have? Indeed, ‘What truth status does the investigation of the truth axis have?’ In his magisterial and extremely important essay, “Genealogy and Subversions”, Alasadair MacIntyre brings the above questions into focus by clearly demonstrating the problematic nature of genealogical inquiries. He writes: The ruptures in that history (of science), as identified by Bachelard and Kuhn, moments in which a transition is made from one standardized understanding of what is to be rational to some other, sometimes incommensurable standardized understanding of rationality, are also secondary phenomena. For they, like the standardized orders which they divide and join, are the outcome of assemblages and confluences in the making of which distributions of power have been at work, in such a way that what appear at the surface level as forms of rationality both are, and the result from, the implementation of a variety of aggressive and defensive strategies, albeit strategies without subjects. Truth and power are thus inseparable. And what appears as projects aimed at the possession of truth are always willful in their exercise of power.39

Unlike both Kuhn and Bachelard and even Foucault’s master Canguilhem, the genealogist delves deeper into the history of ‘Rationality’, the history of ‘Science’ and even the history of ‘Man’ than these other investigators. Genealogy reveals not just the ‘episteme’ or paradigm shifts which can rationally explain the important and decisive upheavals of thought that have taken place throughout history, rather, genealogy pulls back even this curtain of discourse and unmasks that here too power is at work. Paradigm shifts (Kuhn), epistemological objects (Bachelard) and even scientific ideologies (Canguilhem), still do not account for what the genealogies of both Foucault and Nietzsche uncover namely, the radical, non-rational source for academic disciplines. Instead of ending the inquiry as to the true nature of knowledge prematurely as these other investigators are wont to do, Foucault and Nietzsche reveal that one can go further and deeper into the very wellsprings of history by tracing not only the encroachment of power on the human body, but indeed the eventual production of the docile and sexual body by “bio-power.” 40 39

MacIntyre, NGM, 301. “Bio-power” is Foucault’s name for the mode of the will to power at work in contemporary societies. I will investigate this mode of will to power in section three of this 40

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Let us look at some specifics. For example, in The History of Sexuality Volume One, Foucault claims that the concept of sexuality, as it developed in the 19th century, cannot simply be traced backwards to a prior, underdeveloped concept like “the flesh.” Foucault shows that it is the seemingly trivial practices, (like church confessions) public policies, (town planning) earlier forms of knowledge (medical investigation) and documents (birth statistics) which, when assembled together in a rather haphazard and entirely contingent manner, would become unified under one over-arching category: ‘sex’. Furthermore, this ‘new’ concept does not just simply signify a new classification for knowledge, but signifies a new form of power. As Foucault writes: The notion of “sex” made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere: sex was thus able to function as a unique signifier and a universal signified.41

Sex is ‘used’ by power to gain a ‘hold’ on bodies by investigating bodies both individually (from what Foucault calls a retail perspective) and collectively. The data collected then serves to reinforce the acceptance and later ‘truth’ of ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality.’ Sex is formulated and produced through prior strategies of power coming together in a seemingly entirely chaotic manner. Sex and sexuality can neither be tracked backwards to a subject or prior concept as the monumental or whig historian might have it. Sex is simply a product of a non-rational will for more knowledge. And the will to knowledge, is, at heart, the will to power: it is the will to objectify for the sake of understanding that specific thing in question. While, the desire to understand “something”, Foucault thinks, is really a desire to master and control that “thing.” When we turn to Nietzsche’s conception of will to power (hereafter, WTP) we will come to understand WTP in much clearer terms. Thus, a complete answer to the question: ‘What sort of truth status do such investigations of the truth axis have?’ must wait for now. But I can say that 1) truth and power are never separable and 2) a solution to this problem will not be found in investigating the ‘Truth’, as it were, of genealogical chapter and in much greater detail in volume II. 41 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 154.

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inquires, but rather in investigating the epistemic merit and justification of said inquiries.

Section III: The Power Axis: Nietzschean Will to Power As we have discovered, a genealogist seeks to understand the relationship between power and knowledge. More specifically the Foucauldian genealogist is interested to learn how power inscribes itself onto a body. Next the genealogist attempts to discover how this same body is interpreted and subsequently used by a regime of truth. Turning to Nietzsche, it was discovered that he boldly extolled that all interpretation is an active, engaged practice. “Contemplation without interest…Nietzsche famously exclaims…is a nonsensical absurdity.” 42 Therefore, the desire for ‘truth’ too, it would seem, is simply a manifestation of will to power. ‘Truth’ is a weapon. It is wielded by one individual or group against another. More profoundly, Nietzsche proclaims that the use of the very concept of truth is always a deliberate attempt by one thing to control, subdue and absorb all those who are weaker. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche writes: But anyone who considers the basic drives of man…that every single one of them would like only too well to represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives. For every drive wants to be a master—and it attempts to philosophize in that spirit.43

Later in the same text Nietzsche goes on to write: “Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation.” 44 Exploitation, according to Nietzsche, is essential to life. The exploitation of some individuals, by others, can never be fully extirpated from modern society. Human beings simply cannot exist without it.45 42

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay III sec. 12, 555. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966) section, I:6, 203–204. 44 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, part IX, sec. 259, 393. 45 This of course does not entail that Nietzschean will to power merely manifests itself in the form of brute cruelty toward others. The will to power manifests itself in many, 43

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“Exploitation” Nietzsche evinces, “does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life” (Nietzsche’s Italics).46 In short, life and even the cosmos itself it seems, cannot be understood without taking into account the relationship between exploitation and WTP. In much of Beyond Good and Evil, the Genealogy and Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche stresses the organic form of will to power. In The Will-to-Power, the Holingdale and Kaufmann translation of Nietzsche’s Nachlass, Nietzsche moves away from a merely organic interpretation of WTP and now instead views it as a cosmological doctrine that is capable of elucidating the processes and principles that hold both within, and between, the organic and inorganic realms. Nietzsche famously writes in this regard: “The world is the will to power and nothing else! And ye yourselves are the will to power and nothing besides!” 47 But what, exactly, is “this will to power” and how can it be said that we “ourselves are the will to power and nothing else besides!” In order to understand this strange statement, it is of the utmost importance to focus on these dual aspects of will to power, namely the organic and inorganic. I contend that it is only by examining the relationship between the organic and inorganic realms of will to power that we will arrive at a better understanding of what power is according to Nietzsche and how power relates to genealogy. In the Nachlass, Nietzsche conceives the will to power as a fixed and definite quantity of energy that comprises all things. Things are simply compounded units of WTP. Further, WTP is contained within Space, while Space itself is conceptualized as a Newtonian, finite container for all things. In addition, this energy also gives rise to: A play of forces and waves of forces at the same time one and many increasing here and decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex…48

This energy expresses itself in different forms. For example, organic life and inorganic things are, in essence, nothing more than two different modes or many different forms. We will examine some of the modes the will to power may take in more detail in this section and in Volume II of Philosophical Genealogy. 46 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, part IX, sec. 259, 393. 47 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, sec. 1067, 550. 48 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, sec. 1067, 550.

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forces of compounded energy. Furthermore, each and every individual thing— regardless of whether it is organic or inorganic--is comprised of sub-forms and each of these sub-forms is comprised of its own sub forms of energy and so on until one reaches the bare quanta of energy. Initially, we can claim that particular forms of compounded energy are in competition with other forms. Moreover, this competition between different forms of energy is not for the sake of survival as the evolutionist would have it, nor for the eradication of the competing form. Rather, the true goal of this competition is to absorb other forms of energy; to make another form of energy part of one’s own. In essence, will to power expresses the basic drive of all things: a thing’s purpose is to use another thing in order to make itself stronger. If we turn to Nietzsche’s conception of organic life, we will see this struggle for life and of power in greater clarity. Life, according to Nietzsche, is defined as “an enduring form of processes of the establishment of force, in which the different contenders grow unequally.” 49 The connection between the inorganic and the organic, as both examples of WTP, can be seen in the act of growth. Daniel Ahern for example, in his admirable work Nietzsche as Cultural Physician, argues that even when we view a river and the mountain beside it, we should recognize that both are locked in the primordial battle of force versus force. As Ahern explains, “the river attempts to wash the mountain away while the mountain tries to resist this effort.” 50 However, according to Nietzsche, organic life expresses a higher form of WTP as a result of its dynamism and multiplicity of forms. Thus, a Venus flytrap, to borrow Ahern’s example, is a higher form of power because it uses deception in order to capture the fly, whereas the mountain and river are locked by the “inertia of power against power.” 51 But power, under Nietzsche’s model, is not just about one thing competing against another for the sake of sheer domination or merely out of self-interest. Nietzsche’s model of power is much different from that of Hobbes’. Rather, the will to power expresses “a desire to overwhelm…until at length that which has been overwhelmed has entirely gone over into the power domain of the aggressor and has increased the same.” 52 Moreover, this same desire on the part of all

49

Nietzsche, The Will to Power, sec. 642, 342. Daniel Ahern, Nietzsche as Cultural Physician (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 14. 51 Ahern, 14. 52 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, sec. 656, 346. 50

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things “to overwhelm” the will of other things is observable within the individual human being and in human civilization as a whole. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche argues that the metaphors which express the “battle of ideas” are really the sign language of WTP. All events in the organic world (organischen Welt) are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous “meaning” and purpose are necessarily obscured or even obliterated….Thus the essence of life (Wesen des Lebens), its will to power, is ignored; one overlooks the essential priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, formgiving forces (gestalatenden Kraft) that give new interpretations and directions….53

This passage not only provides a model for understanding how and why change occurs in the world, and in human civilization more specifically, but in addition, also demonstrates that WTP should not be understood as one’s ‘personal’ power as it were. Nietzsche would want no truck with contemporary new age philosophy gurus who speak about awakening the power within. WTP is far more complex than that. As Nietzsche shows in the first essay of the Genealogy, WTP can turn outwardly or inwardly. If it is expressed outwardly, then the expression represents exuberance for life and the individual who expresses WTP in such a manner is said to be life-affirming. But if it finds expression only in interior channels within an individual then it will denote someone who is crooked, hateful and full of resentiment.54 In section 310 entitled ‘Will and Wave’ of The Gay Science, Nietzsche again emphasizes the depersonalized nature of WTP. He writes, How greedily this wave approaches, as if it were something! … But already another wave is approaching still more greedily and savagely than the first and its soul, too, seems to be full of secrets and the lust to dig up treasures. Thus lives waves—thus live we who will—more I shall not say.55

Will to power denotes nothing more than the force waves of power which express themselves and not ‘us.’ We cannot choose our affects nor can we ‘choose’ our emotions in the sense that we stand somehow outside of them.56 One emotion, one thought, flows into the next from the formless ocean of life: “When we speak of values Nietzsche writes, “we do so under the inspiration and 53

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II: 12, 513–514. See especially On the Genealogy of Morals, GMI:7, 469–470. 55 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974) sec. 310 247. 56 This does not mean that we cannot choose how we act on our emotions nor how we may come to understand more appropriate ways to use our affects. 54

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from the perspective of life: life forces us to posit values; life values through us when we posit values…” (Nietzsche’s Italics)57 At this stage of our inquiry, it would appear that the self, subject, individual, whatever we wish to call it, is simply the expression of the most dominant affect at the present moment. Nietzsche seems to advocate an ‘expressivist’ view of agency in that the agent is simply his or her actions, thoughts and gestures with nothing left over. Moreover, WTP can also explain the battle, the turmoil and the struggle we experience when we feel we are not “ourselves”: here too, Nietzsche says, WTP is at work. Here too, within ‘us’, there is a struggle for power. WTP, it would seem, becomes the one over-arching, metaphysical, ubernarrative capable of explaining all events, causes and purposes in the inorganic and organic realms of the cosmos. Turning to Michel Foucault, it is evident that the Frenchman also conceives of power in much the same manner as his German predecessor. In the commentary entitled “Power and Strategies” Foucault notes, “that power is already there, that one is never outside of it, that there are no margins for those who break the system to gambol in.” (Foucault’s Italics)58 While in Two Lectures, Foucault acknowledges the productive force of power: individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application. The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or against which it happens to strike, and in so doing subdues or crushes individuals. In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals. The individual, that is, is not the vis-à-vis of power; it is, I believe, one of its prime effects.59

Finally, when discussing the apersonal nature of power in a discussion with Jacques Allain Miller, Foucault is asked: “So who ultimately, in your view, are the subjects who oppose each other.” Foucault responds in typical Nietzschean fashion: “This is just an hypothesis but I would say it’s all against all…Who fights against whom? We all fight against each other. And there is always within each of us something that fights something else.” (My Italics)60 As a genealogist, Foucault acknowledges that he is already interpreting within a ‘hermeneutical’ circle of power. Even the genealogist, as an individual, may be sub-divided into 57

Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, “Morality as Anti-Nature,” sec. 5, 55. Foucault, “Power and Strategies” in Power/Knowledge, 141. 59 Foucault, “Two Lectures” in Power/Knowledge, 98. 60 Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge, 208. Again, in decidedly Nietzschean fashion, Foucault calls those things that we fight against within us, “sub-individuals.” 58

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sub-personalities. He or she is composed of competing sub-individuals and therefore, as we will see, sub-perspectives. Another important aspect of genealogy that requires elucidation is the relationship between power and the body. More specifically it is important to understand how power engraves itself on the body and thereby an important task for the genealogist is to trace the regimes of truth and, in more general terms, the dispositifs (power/knowledge apparatuses) of past societies by seeing how the body was trained, tortured, used and punished in said societies. For example, in tracing the development of disciplinary power, Foucault notes that the disciplinary side of bio-power (the dispositif of our present society) must: …Master all the forces that are formed from the very constitution of an organized multiplicity; it must neutralize the effects of counter-power that spring from them and which form a resistance to the power that wishes to dominate it; agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations—anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions.61

Turning to what Foucault calls the lynch-pin of bio-power, namely ‘sex’, as well as the corresponding interpretation of ‘sex’ by psychoanalysists like Charcot and Freud, Foucault argues: All these negative elements—defenses, censorship, denials—which the repressive hypothesis groups together in one great central mechanism destined to say no, are doubtless only component parts that have a local and tactical role to play in a transformation into discourse, a technology of power, and a will to knowledge that are far from being reducible to the former.62

We may conclude then that Foucault’s understanding of the power axis is much more practical and pragmatic than Nietzsche’s. For Foucault, the importance of genealogy is one of uncovering the origins of distinct academic disciplines in order to show the inextricable entwinement between power and knowledge.63 For example, Foucault is interested in asking such question as: ‘How did the social sciences form?’; ‘What was the ‘archive’ or resources that provided psychology, sociology and criminology with their problems, hypothesizes and basic methodological parameters as ‘sciences’?

61

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 219. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 12. 63 More on this will be said when I investigate and explain the relation between the truth and power axis for Nietzsche. See below. 62

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Nietzsche, on the other hand, asks questions which are more esoteric. Nietzsche is interested in such questions as: ‘What value does the ascetic ideal possess?’Or: ‘What is the danger of slave morality?’ In order to investigate these seemingly contrastive methodologies further, I now turn to the three axes of genealogical inquiry as presented and interpreted by Nietzsche.

Section IV: The Three Axes in Nietzsche’s Genealogy Although I contended—based on a quotation from one of Foucault’s last interviews—that a genealogical investigation is comprised of three axes of inquiry (truth, power, subject/ethics), I argue that we can find these same axes in On the Genealogy of Morals. Proof for this assertion can be found in the preface. In section three, Nietzsche explains how his own personal problems regarding the justification of morality (which possessed him from a rather tender age) spurred him to investigate the history of morality in a genealogical manner. As Nietzsche explains: Under what conditions did man devise these value judgments good and evil? (Truth axis) and what value do they themselves possess? Have they hitherto hindered or furthered human prosperity? Are they signs of distress, of impoverishment, of the degeneration of life? (Power axis) Or is there revealed in them, on the contrary, the plenitude (die Fülle), force (die Kraft), and will of life, its courage (sein Muth), certainty, future?64 (Ethical axis) (My Italics)

If we examine the truth axis first, it is clear that Nietzsche is interested in discovering not only who had the authority to determine which discourses would be considered true from those which would be considered false, but is also interested in revealing the requisite underlying economic, cultural and, most importantly, psychological conditions which allowed those who possessed this so called ‘truth-making’ authority to exist. To be sure Nietzsche does not abandon some of his earlier interests with respect to ethical questions concerning the value of truth. Nietzsche remains every bit as intrigued with the question as to whether truth (if it indeed exists) is intrinsically valuable or only instrumentally valuable in the Genealogy as he was

64

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Preface sec. 3,453.

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in Beyond Good and Evil.65 For example, in the Genealogy, Third Essay Section 25 we find the following sentence: “The will to truth requires a critique—let us thus define our own task—the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question.” 66 The question as to whether truth is intrinsically valuable will be one of the most pressing and important themes for this book to answer. However, a detailed answer to this question will have to wait until a comprehensive overview of the genealogical method is laid bare first. Furthermore, Nietzsche is still very much interested in what might be called epistemic questions regarding the relationship between knowing subjects and the objects that they come to know. The question as to whether truth exists and whether human subjects can come to know such truths is a perennial theme in many of Nietzsche’s texts. The Genealogy is no different. But in other texts, especially in Nietzsche’s early work, he seems to suggest that the truth of truth, as it were, is that it is nothing more than a strategy of power. In “Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense”, for example, Nietzsche famously writes: Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and, which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly established, canonical and binding; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have been worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour.67

Much like Foucault, Nietzsche questions our faith in “truth” arguing in the above quotation that the very conception of “truth” as opposed to falsehood is simply a strategy that has ‘won out’ over competing ways of categorizing the world. This view of truth is further deepened and expanded in Nietzsche’s later writings like in The Gay Science: We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for “truth”: we “know” (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called “utility” is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary, 65

“We asked about the value of this will (the will to truth). Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance.” Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part I, sec. 1, 199 66 Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, GM: III, 25, 589. 67 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” included in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, Ed. Ronald Spiers and Raymond Geuss, Trans. Walter Kaufmann (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 146.

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perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day.68 (Nietzsche’s Italics)

But if human beings “simply lack any organ for knowledge”, which is to say that we do not possess any nascent capacities to understand the structures of the world, then both Nietzsche and Foucault, as genealogists, are presented with two significant problems: first, no historical or philosophical method, genealogy included, is any more epistemically meritorious (hereafter the EM question) than any other because since there is neither an organ for knowledge nor for truth it is impossible to come up with a set of criteria for epistemic justification. But there is a second and even more perplexing problem with Nietzsche’s position: both Nietzsche (and Foucault as I will show) believe(s) that genealogy is, in fact, more epistemically justified and empirically warranted than other interpretations of the same phenomenon. For example, when discussing English philosophers, such as Herbert Spencer, Nietzsche in the Genealogy is quite explicit in holding that these English psychologists are on the wrong road when it comes to the true origins of morality: According to this theory, that which has always proved itself useful is good: therefore it may claim to be “valuable in the highest degree,” “valuable in itself.” This road to an explanation is, aforesaid, also a wrong (falsch) one, but at least the explanation is in itself, reasonable and psychologically tenable (psychologisch haltbar).69

However, if Nietzsche is insistent that we have no organ for knowledge then how can he criticize another historical method of investigation? What gives Nietzsche the right to declare that one form of historiography is wrong if he is not sure that he has the right one? “Whence stands the genealogist?” 70 Why believe Nietzsche’s genealogy? The above question regarding the problematic nature of truth and knowledge in Nietzsche’s oeuvre, is a topic covered in extensive detail in the secondary 68

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Sec. 354, 300. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM I:3, 463. 70 This is a play on words from Carlos Jacques seminal essay: “Whence does the Critic Speak: A Study of Foucault’s Genealogy”, in MCFA Vol. III (1991), 97–113. Jacques raises this same question but answers it in, what I would claim an unsatisfactory manner. He argues that the truth of Foucault’s histories can only be justified from an aesthetic standpoint not from an epistemological. However, this response, or so I argue, still fails to explain why genealogy is preferable to other forms of historical and philosophical investigation. I examine this question in more detail in chapters 2 and in volume II. 69

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literature and, as such, provokes a more thoughtful, and careful investigation, (and articulation) on my part regarding the problems associated with the relationship between the power axis, the truth axis and the overall epistemic justification for genealogy as a whole. My complete answer to these problems must wait until volume two. However, in the next section of this chapter, I want to follow the line of reasoning Nietzsche uses in the above quotations in order to point out, at the very least, why I believe that many scholars are themselves on the wrong road when it comes to answering these difficult questions.

Section V: Justifying Genealogy in the Secondary Literature: Philological and Naturalized Critical Accounts Philological Accounts: Sarah Koffman and Jean Granier each attempt to answer the EM question by claiming that although Nietzsche’s genealogical method is not any more epistemically justified than any other method, nevertheless, it is hermeneutically and philologically sounder than other forms of historical and philosophical inquiry.71 That is to say, genealogy is a better interpretation than the more traditional ones proffered by philosophers in regards to the value and origin of morality for example, because it is more coherent, more probable and, in short, more believable than competing interpretations. Such a solution to the general problem of the EM question is quite plausible on the surface. After all, Nietzsche does not completely dismiss the English Utilitarian method of moral investigation, but rather seems to be suggesting that it is a superficial reading which lacks a more attentive eye to detail. We might say that the English psychologist’s ‘genealogical method’ is much like a good, but not exceptional undergraduate student paper: the basic ideas and concepts are reasonably well explained, but on a more profound level, there seems to be a lack of insight, imagination and critical appraisal. We can see this interpretation confirmed in the first section of essay one where Nietzsche suggests that 71

See Jean Granier’s, Le probleme de la Verite dans la Philosophie de Nietzsche (Paris: Seuil, 1966) and Sarah Koffman’s, Nietzsche et la Metaphor (Paris: Payot) 1972. John Rajchman argues much the same for Foucault’s genealogies. See his “The Story of Foucault’s History” in MCFA, 389–411.

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some may claim that these men, the English moralists, are “simply old, cold and tedious frogs, creeping around men and into men as if in their proper element, that is, the swamp.” 72 But, Nietzsche insists in the very same passage, that he does not believe that we should degrade these men in this way. In fact, Nietzsche seems to revere these men as he writes: I rebel at that idea; more, I do not believe it; and if one may be allowed to hope where one does not know, then I hope from my heart they may be the reverse of this—that these investigators and microscopists of the soul (Mikroskopiker der Seele) may be fundamentally brave, proud and magnanimous animals.73

Although Nietzsche remains critical of these like-minded, but misguided investigators of morality, one may still maintain that Nietzsche’s chastisement and vitriolic critique of these philosophers is simply directed to their inability to read moral phenomena carefully. However, this interpretation does not seem to pan out in the long run because there are numerous passages in essay one (and elsewhere) which suggest that these investigators of morality are not just sloppy readers, but are fundamentally mistaken. The passages in the first essay with regard to the English moral psychologists confirm that a purely philological interpretation of philosophical genealogy is incorrect: Nietzsche boldly asserts that such moralists are not only on the wrong road when it comes to investigating moral and historical matters properly, but in fact, that Nietzsche himself is on the right road.74 In section four of the first essay, Nietzsche writes: “The 72

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM I:1, 460–61. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM I:1, 461. 74 To my knowledge, David Couzens Hoy in his essay: “Nietzsche, Foucault and the Genealogical Method (1986)” in NGM, 251–268, is the first to make this distinction between genealogy as philology and genealogy as epistemology. Hoy opts for the former view. Bernard Williams also holds to a “genealogy as philology” position, in his “Nietzsche’s Minimalist Moral Psychology” (1993) also in NGM, 237–251. Daniel W. Conway in his article “Genealogy and the Critical Method” (in NGM, 318–334) argues that: “Genealogical interpretations are always abnormal and reactive, preying upon the normal, authoritative interpretations they challenge. Whatever degree of validity a genealogy acquires is therefore entirely relative to the interpretation it discredits (325)”. Despite being parasitic on more traditional views, however, Conway notes that genealogies are still important because they debunk those interpretations, which claim to be absolute. C.G. Prado in his important book Searle and Foucault on Truth (Cambridge University Press: 2006) seems to adopt Conway’s ‘reactive’ interpretation of genealogy with respect to Foucault’s concrete genealogical studies. However, Prado 73

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signpost to the right (Rechten) road was for me the question: what was the real etymological significance of the designations for “good” coined in the various languages? (Nietzsche’s Italics)” 75 I argue that this ‘right’ road that Nietzsche refers to in these opening passages of the Genealogy, is not simply about providing a superior interpretation of morality than the English type, but is about providing a superior method of investigation altogether. Nietzsche in the above passage, (along with the one that follows), clearly wants to contrast his genealogical position from that advanced by the English psychologists. Furthermore, he calls this method of observing what can actually be documented with respect to the long-sign chain of morality not just a “better” genealogical reading, but indeed a “fundamental insight. (wesentliche Einsicht)”76 This acknowledgement by Nietzsche and this attempt to inject what we may call more ‘objective’ evidence into historical and moral inquiry, suggests that Nietzsche’s task is not merely one of offering a more goes further than Conway by explaining how such “reactive” genealogies are important with respect to the subject who undertakes them (or reads them) because they allow the genealogist to think differently. Prado writes: “Essentially Foucault offers his genealogies as opportunities for us to think differently because they enabled him to think differently and so to become a different subject.” (135) Others, most notably Steven D. Hales and Rex Welshon in their Nietzsche’s Perspectivism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000) and Christoph Cox in Nietzsche, Naturalism and Interpretation, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), opt for a more epistemological approach to both genealogy and Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole. While again turning to Foucault, Todd May in his review of C.G. Prado’s book Searle and Foucault on Truth in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Sept. 2006, argues that Prado’s claim (that genealogies are important because they allow novelty of thought,) “even if correct, would commit Foucault to the truth or falsity of whether power relations are indeed stifling. There must be a fact of the matter about that. And part of the burden of his genealogies is precisely to show the stifling character of the evolution of particular practices. As I will argue momentarily, the problem in Prado’s analysis, here and elsewhere, lies in his confusing issues of truth with those of justification.” My study of this particular portion of the Genealogy (and of genealogy in general) serves to undermine merely a “philological” approach as well as a “reactive” interpretation of genealogy and the genealogical method. In the remaining sections and chapters of this book, I demonstrate, in detail, how genealogy may be epistemically justified. 75 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM I:4, 463. 76 Nietzsche, Zer Genealogie der Moral, in Nietzsche Werke Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari vol. 6, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), 276.

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philologically sound or coherent reading of humankind’s moral history, but an epistemologically justified and in short, more truthful account of humankind’s moral history. Again the epistemological account of genealogy that I am offering here in opposition to the “philological account” is further corroborated when Nietzsche argues that in order for one to truly investigate humankind’s moral swamp ground, “one must keep their hearts as well as their sufferings in bounds and have trained themselves to sacrifice all desirability to truth, every truth, even plain, harsh, ugly, repellant, unchristian, immoral truth.—For such truths do exist.—(Nietzsche’s Italics)” 77. The concern then, for Nietzsche, is not about providing a better reading with regard to the origins of morality, but rather of discovering the right method with which to approach the origin and value of morality. Since it has been shown that a purely philological understanding of genealogy is inadequate to answering the EM question, perhaps a more scientific, naturalized approach will do the job. Non-Philological Approaches to Genealogy: Naturalized and Critical Positions Thankfully, there has been a spate of books and articles written in the past few years on genealogy that seem to go against the grain of the philological approach as noted above. Most notable among these works is Brian Leiter’s Nietzsche on Morality. Leiter makes a convincing case for placing genealogy in the same category as the empirical sciences; that is to say, as a naturalistic sort of investigation rather than in the same category as, say, a literary critique. However, while Leiter argues that genealogy shares a similar naturalistic method of investigation with that of the hard sciences, this does not entail that genealogy is substantively naturalistic. According to Leiter, genealogy and the empirical sciences are naturalistic types of inquiry because both of these discourses share a similar method. Both the physical sciences and philosophical genealogy start from hypotheses that are empirically confirmable, and, falsifiable, instead of from a priori truths.78 More forcefully stated it may be said that genealogy shares with the sciences a deep seated contempt for any type of super-natural (and thus non-verifiable) hypothesis to explain natural phenomena. The genealogist tries to emulate the methods of the natural scientists, but puts these methods to different ends. Genealogy is not substantively naturalistic or in 77 78

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM I:2, 461. Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (New York: Routledge, 2002), 3

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Leiter’s parlance S-Naturalistic, because genealogical investigations are not reducible to these same hard sciences. Genealogy is methodologically naturalistic or is M-Naturalistic.79 Though Leiter’s position seems to steer a course between the Scylla of scientific positivism on the one hand--which would reduce genealogy to a mere chapter of empirical psychology (perhaps)--and the Charbydis of a purely philological approach or, dare I say post-modern account of genealogy on the other, nevertheless, Leiter’s position, when viewed in its entirety, is not without problems. First, I wholeheartedly agree with Leiter’s take on genealogy: genealogy is indeed a type of naturalized investigation. However, if genealogy is a type of naturalized investigation then truth and justification must be intrinsically valuable in themselves. Yet, Leiter explicitly argues against this claim in many places. Genealogy as a naturalized type of moral investigation according to Leiter only seems to have extrinsic value insofar as it allows higher types to recognize the causal powers of, what Leiter calls, morality in a pejorative sense (MPS). The true purpose (and worth) of The Genealogy is that it allows us to cast aside MPS in order for the higher types of human beings to flourish: “The genealogy of morality, Leiter reminds us, is but one instrument for arriving at a particular end, namely a critique of morality.” (My Italics)80 The problem then is that Leiter fails to commit fully to genealogy’s naturalized pedigree. A truly naturalized methodology, after all, is not secondary to the results with which you hope the method to achieve. This would be to put, in my parlance the curative aspects of genealogy ahead of the diagnostic. For example, physics is not simply a means for arriving at how to produce CD players, atomic bombs or launching satellites into orbit. Physics, rather, is the study of nature for the sake of understanding nature qua nature. Of course there are instrumental interests as to why scientists study the basic building blocks of the universe, but any hard science is dedicated to getting at the truth of that which it is studying. If genealogy is like these hard sciences because it uses a naturalized methodology which must minimally entail that it is trying to get at the truth of the matter at hand, then truth and justification must be intrinsically valuable to the investigation. Only an epistemological reconstruction of genealogy that places a premium on the intrinsic value of truth and justification can resolve the EM problem. 79

For further discussion of this issue, see Leiter’s very helpful first chapter entitled, “Nietzsche, naturalist or postmodernist?” in Nietzsche on Morality, 1–31. 80 Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 177. At the bottom of page 176 we find the following reminder: “In fact, as we shall see, “need” is too strong: a genealogy is one way of getting at the critique, but it is not, strictly speaking, necessary to it.”

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A second problem with Leiter’s account, as raised by Ridley and Owen, has to do with the problem of epistemic authority and the intended audience of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. The problem of EM is one of ascertaining which perspectives are more epistemically meritorious (or authoritative) than others. Leiter tries to resolve this problem by claiming that since the Genealogy is directed to a specific audience--namely the higher types--then no justification (of Nietzsche’s genealogies) is required since the work was composed for those who have the means to hear Nietzsche’s message. But, as Ridley demonstrates, this results in a contradiction in that it shows that Nietzsche’s selected audience “are not ‘predisposed’ to accept the authority of his standpoint after all.” 81 That is, if in fact higher types are truly different from the herd then they would not be subject to what Leiter calls the causal powers of MPS in the first place and therefore would not require a genealogy of morality to help them throw off the yoke of morality. In sum, Ridley and Owen show that Leiter’s account cannot explain how the higher types were duped by MPS in the first place. A third and final problem with Leiter’s account is that he fails to extract a workable, coherent genealogical method from Nietzsche’s work. To be sure, Leiter does explain some of the techniques Nietzsche uses in each essay of the genealogy. But, since Leiter is at great pains to show that these tools are not intrinsically valuable in themselves, he misses the opportunity to show how these very tools may be used by other genealogists working on very different problems. What I hope to demonstrate is how these same tools are essential to any genealogical type of investigation and how such tools are epistemically warranted. David Owen also addresses the same questions pertaining to truth and epistemic justification with respect to genealogy in several recent articles and at length in his wonderful book Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. Like Leiter, Owen argues that in his mature work, Nietzsche “…is committed to the view that one can have beliefs, make statements and so forth, that are true or false.” 82 Moreover, Owen is again in agreement with Leiter when he describes genealogy as a type of naturalized epistemological investigation.83 But where Leiter and Owen differ is with respect to the status of truth or more aptly put ‘truthfulness’ in Nietzsche’s corpus. While Leiter seems to hold that truth is only of instrumental value for 81

Aaron Ridley, “Nietzsche and the Re-evaluation of Values” in The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105: 171–191, 180. 82 David Owen, “Nietzsche, Re-evaluation and the Turn to Genealogy in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays, ed. Christa Davis Acampora. (Lanham Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.) 2006, 39–56, 44. 83 Owen, “Nietzsche, Re-evaluation and the Turn to Genealogy”, 45.

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genealogy as genealogy is a tool used for the higher-types (the intended audience of Nietzsche’s genealogy) to overcome MPS, Owen persuasively demonstrates that truth, and more perspicuously put, Nietzsche’s commitment to truthfulness, is intrinsically valuable both for Nietzsche and for the genealogical method. In this manner, any reader (and not just Leiter’s higher-type) who is committed to truth will be so affected by On the Genealogy of Morals that he or she will come to review, with new founded suspicion, the reasons he or she has for believing in both the origin and value of Christian morality. As Owen explains: Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality aims to show that those who hold this outlook (Christian morality) can only do so by ignoring or falsifying the historical story of how its various elements have emerged and the synthesis of these elements has developed. He does this by constructing what he takes to be a psychologically realistic and historically truthful account of this process and showing that this account cannot be accepted by those who hold the outlook in question in so far as holding this outlook requires that they have beliefs about the origins of the outlook that are incompatible with Nietzsche’s account.84

On this point I am in complete agreement with Owen. Genealogy ‘works’ because 1) it not only has a higher commitment to truth than more traditional methods of historiography but 2) it forces the reader to revise his or her views precisely because the account he or she previously accepted is no longer capable of presenting a truthful explanation of morality. In fact, genealogy places such a premium on truthfulness that it freely admits it is polemical: it examines a problematique from the genealogist’s personal vantage point and does not attempt to remove such a prejudice because it admits, at the outset, that it cannot. A second important aspect of Owen’s conception of the genealogical method has to do with the distinction he makes between ideology critique and genealogy. In Owen’s earlier essay “Criticism and Captivity: On Genealogy and Critical Theory,” he articulates the main differences between critical theory and genealogy by showing how each theory diverges with reference “to self-imposed, non-physical constraint on our capacity to self-govern.” 85 According to Owen, the main difference between Frankfurt school philosophers like Habermas and genealogists like Nietzsche, is that where ideology critique is concerned with the self-recognition of agents to understand that they suffer from false con84

David Owen. Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2007), 150–151. 85 David Owen. “Criticism and Captivity: On Genealogy and Critical Theory” in The European Journal of Philosophy 10:2 216–230, 216.

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sciousness, genealogical critique forces individuals to realize that they suffer from restricted consciousness. The differences between false consciousness and restricted consciousness may be summarily stated as follows: individuals are said to suffer from false consciousness when: i) They have false beliefs which legitimize oppressive social institutions, and ii) are also blocked in some way from recognizing the false beliefs they hold (through the media, the educational system, repressive sexual laws, etc).86 Possessing restricted consciousness on the other hand simply entails that the individual is captured by a picture of reality which is neither true nor false in itself, but is taken to be the only frame of reference in which questions regarding the truth and falsity of various issues may be legitimately asked. Put another way, being held captive by a picture involves the agent failing to recognize a second order belief with respect to one’s first order belief of a picture, namely, that it may indeed be false. In this sense, being held captive by a picture is more of an active form of self-imposed constraint to self-government because it is a result of the subject accepting (and failing to interrogate) the ways of construing the world that are put to it.87 Ideology critique on the other hand involves a passive element with respect to self-imposed immaturity because there is something or someone actively imposing an ideology on the subject. As Owen explains further in this profound and remarkably clear article, genealogies’ liberating powers can be attributed to four aspects: 1. 2. 3.

4.

It identifies a picture which holds us captive, whereby this captivity obstructs our capacity to make sense of ourselves as agents in ways that matter to us; This account involves a redescription of this picture which contrasts it with another way of seeing the issue in order to free us from captivity to this picture; It provides an account of how we have become held captive by this picture which enables us to make sense of ourselves as agents and, more particularly, to make sense of how we have failed to make sense of ourselves as agents in ways that matter to us; And in so far as this account engages with our cares and commitments, it motivates us to engage in the practical working out of this re-orientation of ourselves as agents.88

I think Owen clearly captures the curative powers of genealogical inquiry in this remarkable article. And I agree with Owen where he states that the principal difference between genealogy and ideology critique has to do with the 86 87 88

Owen, “Criticism and Captivity: On Genealogy and Critical Theory”, 217 Owen, “Criticism and Captivity: On Genealogy and Critical Theory”, 217 Owen, “Criticism and Captivity: On Genealogy and Critical Theory”, 224.

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differences between being held captive by an ideology and being held captive by a perspective. That said, the main problem with Owen’s understanding of genealogy is that he construes aspectival captivity as a purely cerebral, reflective mode of constraint. Indeed, even to claim that both ideology and aspectival captivity are two species within the genus of non-physical forms of constraint to self-government, is to misunderstand how strategies of power, (in the sense of how particular values, questions and truths would count as valid values, valid questions and valid truths) became invested with power in contemporary society. Let us not forget Habermas’ important insight, that, for the genealogist: “power … invades the bodies rather than the heads.” 89 Nietzsche demonstrates that it was the body that played a pivotal role in the formation of memory which then made guilt and Christian morality possible. Having a mistaken picture (aspectival captivity) is not just a form of non-physical constraint which impedes our abilities for self-government, but is in fact a manifestation of a very real physical production which manufactures—at the very least—parts of the self. More to the point, Owen fails to acknowledge how exactly the body is affected by power/knowledge and how once affected, causes one to close off potential life affirming viewpoints. While Owen seems to realize this objection in only implicit fashion in his recent book, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, where he acknowledges that “Nietzsche’s genealogy in particular is designed to mobilize our existing affective dispositions against ‘morality’ “… it is difficult to see how this may be accomplished on a purely reflective level.90 Part of the problem has to do with Owen’s construal of perspectivism and more precisely aspectival captivity. How, we may wonder, does the process of unmooring ourselves from such mistaken pictures occur given the unremitting normalizing power that controls our bodies as so carefully and grippingly portrayed by Foucault in Discipline and Punish? How does the docile body come to change its perspective by mere reflection? While Owen is correct in asserting that a successful genealogy does in fact mobilize the affects, he has failed to pinpoint the precise manner in which this mobilization occurs. In sum, Owen 89

Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 289. Owen remarks that Nietzsche is able to carry out his task of critical re-evaluation by rhetorically engaging ``his reader`s affects in the appropriate way. (p. 143). But mere rhetoric is clearly not enough. The affects must be challenged by engaging the very body of the reader and of the genealogist. I will elaborate on this last point in more detail in volume II. 90

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seems to assume that a careful historical and warranted investigation into the origin of ‘‘the traditional moral outlook’’ is sufficient in accounting for the agent’s subsequent enlightenment and emancipation. As I argue in the last section of this chapter, mere critical reflection is not enough. A genealogy is successful only insofar as it engages the very affects of the body. Leiter and Owen are both right in one sense: there is a relationship between the epistemological justification of a genealogical inquiry and the affects employed for, and mobilized by, the genealogist. A genealogy mobilizes the affects not simply by critiquing an outlook and then presenting a more truthful alternative account of how this outlook came to be invested with truth and power, but does so by using images, language and rhetoric to initiate the epistemic shift required to take such a new account seriously. That is to say, it is the ethical which informs the epistemological. It is the body which forces the mind to re-examine a mistaken picture of the world. If Nietzsche is correct (and sincere) when he writes in section seven of The Genealogy that “it is possible to discover such truths if only we keep our hearts and our sufferings in bounds” (My Italics) then there is both an epistemological as well as an ethical component to any genealogical investigation. In order to appreciate the relationship between truth, power and ethics, we now must turn to the final axis of genealogy, the ethical axis, in order to understand how all three axes function together in the course of a genealogical study.

Section VI: The Ethical Axis Turning to the ethical axis, the overarching purpose of genealogy is to facilitate self-transformation. Since genealogy is more concerned with evaluations rather than with values in themselves, what the genealogist values is the establishment of new values and new modes of existence for the subject engaged in a genealogical inquiry. Indeed, according to Nietzsche, the seriousness with which one approaches genealogy is rewarded with a peculiar cheerfulness or what Nietzsche calls gay science or joyful wisdom: But to me, on the contrary, there seems to be nothing more worth taking seriously among the rewards for it being that some day one will perhaps be allowed to take them cheerfully. For cheerfulness (Heiterkeit)—or in my own language gay science (die fröhliche Wissenchaft)—is a reward (Lohn): the reward of a long, brave, industrious, and subterranean (unterirdischen) seriousness of which to be sure not everyone is capable. (Nietzsche’s Italics)91

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Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM: Preface, 7, 457.

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By engaging in a genealogical inquiry, the genealogist embarks on the path of frohliche Wissenschaft 92 because genealogy is the requisite first step in emancipating a subject from his or her false and self-stultifying belief system. A successful genealogical investigation undermines one’s belief system for the sake of freedom: for the sake of discovering new ways to relate to the self or what Foucault calls the rapport a soi. By providing a more epistemically justified account of the origin and spread of Christian morality for example, Nietzsche allows not only higher types to flourish, but all individuals to re-evaluate and perhaps, create new morals for themselves. But, most importantly, it allows Nietzsche to overcome what Leiter refers to as the life-denying causal powers of MPS that profoundly affected Nietzsche’s philosophical development and subsequent intellectual direction.93 In sum, genealogy, as we will discover more fully in volume two, is an exercise (askesis) in freedom used primarily by and for the genealogist. This connection between genealogy and freedom does not entail that upon the completion of a genealogical investigation we are raised above our cultural and historical station by some sort of ‘skyhook.’ As we saw in the last section, it is clear that we cannot simply stand back and investigate two metaphysical perspectives side by side, enthralled by the fact that one of these no longer has any hold upon us. Genealogy, as we will see shortly, is not about escaping from perspectives it is about absorbing perspectives. We are always inside perspectives with our affections being absorbed and harnessed by one or another. Echoing what was shown in at the first section of this chapter, it must be remembered that the genealogist must always be reminded of the historicity of his or her circumstances. However, if the genealogist can never transcend a life-denying perspective, then how can one gain any critical distance from that perspective which once ensnared us? How can Nietzsche advocate a re-evaluation of values if it is always inherently possible that such a re-evaluation may stem from a yet unrecognized deeper slave-morality? Foucault’s work presents similar problems. Many scholars have questioned the coherency of Foucauldian resistance given that resistance is inseparable from power and vice versa. After all, such critics seem to ask in unison, ‘Is it not always possible that by escaping one form of normalization we land squarely in the net of another?’ Is it truly possible to escape power? 92

Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, GM Vorrede, 7, 267. For more on Nietzsche’s early religious education and philosophical doubts thereof, see Julian Young’s wonderful Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2010) chapter one. 93

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This problem—as to how genealogy can truly be separated from power and thus be truly emancipatory—has been leveled against both Nietzsche and Foucault alike on many occasions and by many writers in the secondary literature. One of the goals of this book is to provide a clear solution to this problem. But before explaining my solution in detail, it is important to understand how Nietzsche and Foucault understood this problem in order to work with, and later correct, their respective solutions. According to Nietzsche, genealogy allows one to live a more cheerful existence. However, Nietzsche clearly held that living “joyfully wise” is never complete and that we, as human beings, will always be subject to negative, life-denying and, generally, pessimistic feelings and thoughts. Another way of stating this is that genealogy serves as an anti-dote for one’s poisoned belief system, but that the anti-dote never completely cures the patient. In speaking of our poisoned belief systems Nietzsche wisely writes: “If only I were someone else,” sighs this glance: “but there is no hope of that. I am who I am: how could I ever get free of myself? And yet—I am sick of myself! (habe ich mich satt!)” It is on such soil, on swampy ground, that every weed, every poisonous plant (Giftgewächs) grows, always so small, hidden, so false (unrhrlich), so saccharine.94

What’s more, it seems that even Nietzsche’s great Free Spirit is morally sick. As Nietzsche reveals, even he is not immune from moral poisonings: “Which of us would be a free spirit, this free spirit asks, “if the church did not exist? It is the church, and not its poison, that repels us.—Apart from the church, we, too, love the poison.” 95 How can we escape from our own moral poisonings? If, as Nietzsche seems to imply, “we love the poison” and indeed are already poisoned, then at the very least genealogy needs to provide us with a remedy which would alleviate our symptoms. So, the question is: ‘How can we learn to keep our hearts and sufferings in bounds if our sufferings (our poisons) will always be with us?’ According to Kathleen Marie Higgins in her wonderfully lucid and incisive article “On the Genealogy of Morals—Nietzsche’s Gift,” at least a partial solution to this problem is immediately forthcoming. The purpose of genealogy is not to present a total cure or complete recovery from our moral failings, but rather to put forward a therapeutic tool we can use to re-interpret those beliefs that prevent us from leading an affirmative life. And according to Higgins, the most successful tool at our disposal for this purpose is 94 95

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM:III 14, 558. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM:I, 9, 472.

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laughter. “Laughter…Higgins writes,… is the ultimate cathartic that can alleviate our overly poisoned systems. Having himself, contributed to our excessively poisoned state, Nietzsche leaves us to laugh it out.” 96 By laughing at our previous system of beliefs, Nietzsche’s genealogy allows for, and, indeed, provokes, a transformation of both body and spirit. Genealogy allows us to reconstruct the grids of moral history by transporting us past the prisons of resentiment and normalization in order to set in motion a transformation of types.97 Such a transformation of both body and spirit is reached when “we can say with all our hearts, “Onwards! Our old morality too is part of the comedy!” We shall have discovered a new complication and possibility for the Dionysian drama of “The Destiny of the Soul”….98 In sum, genealogy is a circular process, an ellipse, a self-reflexive reflection on how the self was created. As I will conclude in the last section of this chapter, the three axes of genealogical inquiry: the truth, power and ethical axes, all come together to form an ellipse with the self.99 Turning to Foucault, the ideas of self-transformation and of laughter are central themes to his genealogical method as well. In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” for example, Foucault notes that: The new historian, the genealogist, will know what to make of this masquerade. He will not be too serious to enjoy it; on the contrary, he will push the masquerade to its limit and prepare the great carnival of time where masks are constantly reappearing.100 96

Kathleen Mary Higgins, “On the Genealogy of Morals—Nietzsche’s Gift” in NGM, 61. One can now also see the irony of Higgins title. Gift in German, means poison, to poison, vergiften. So Higgins, title, we might say, is Nietzsche’s gift that poisons. 97 See Gilles Delueze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: (Columbia University Press), 1983, 114–116. Also see Richard White’s article, “The Return of the Master: An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals” in NGM, 63–75. 98 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM, Preface, 7, 457–458. 99 For Nietzsche, the task of genealogy is to inspire the philosophers of the future. In The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche destroys all the gods of old, from the idea of God, to that of Science, even the belief in ‘Man’ and ‘Humanity.’ Nietzsche accomplishes this by demonstrating the contingent, arbitrary and most importantly, psychological sources each of these idols had for their very existence. It is precisely this psychological concern that motivates Nietzsche to write the Genealogy. For it is both Nietzsche’s psychological acumen as well as his concern for cheerfulness that sets the genealogist apart from similar historians of morals. In volume two, this idea, namely that of frohlich Wissenschaft, will be more fully developed. 100 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy History,”160–61.

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The purpose of this masquerade is to displace and subvert history. According to Todd May in his book Between Genealogy and Epistemology, Foucault explicitly views genealogy as a therapeutic science “capable of subverting the assurances of transcendence or meaning which history appears to offer to knowledge.” 101 In short, Foucault too, just like Nietzsche before him, believes genealogy to be a curative science both for the genealogist`s audience as well as for the genealogist. A genealogical investigation always comes full circle back to its author. This elliptical or self-reflexive effect of genealogy is clearly demonstrable in On the Genealogy of Morals, but can also be clearly seen in the genealogical works of Foucault. Indeed, Foucault explicitly acknowledges that the three axes of genealogy fold back on themselves creating the “subject”. Some interpreters have (wrongly) assumed that Foucault’s later, so called, turn towards the subject in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, represents a radical break with his earlier genealogical and archaeological work.102 This is not the case. In one of his last interviews with Paul Rabinow, Foucault insists that the formation of “subjects” was always a principal research concern. In fact, he summarizes his prior philosophical and research interests as an attempt to understand the relation a subject has to him or herself with respect to the three axes of genealogical inquiry. Foucault writes that there are three ways to study the relationship between the subject and the three axes of genealogical inquiry. He writes: First, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth, through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second a historical ontology or ourselves in relation to a field of power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, a historical ontology in relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents.103

101

May, Between Genealogy and Epistemology, 77. See Jurgen Habermas’ “Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present.” In Foucault: A Critical Reader ed. David Couzens Hoy (New York: Blackwell 1986), 108. See also Michael Kelly’s defense of Foucault in “Foucault, Habermas and the Self-Referentiality of Critique.” In Critique and Power: Recasting the Habermas/Foucault Debate, 365–391. Also see Eric Paras’ Foucault 2.0 (New York: Other Press), 2006. Paras argues that Foucault’s subject period or “the late Foucault” marks not just a radical departure from Foucault’s early power period, but also places Foucault squarely within the humanistic tradition with such philosophers as Kant. While Paras marshals forth a fair amount of archival evidence to bolster his position, nevertheless, I think a different interpretation can be drawn from his evidence. 103 Foucault, “Genealogy an Overview of a Work in Progress”, 351. 102

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A genealogical investigation changes and transforms the genealogist along three lines of flight 104: “How are we constituted as a subject of own knowledge?’; ‘How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations?’; ‘How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions?’..” 105 Furthermore, Foucault argues that these “how” questions imply that the genealogist qua subject must not only “determine the historical analyzes that are imposed on us [but more importantly] “…experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.” 106 Genealogy is necessarily self-reflexive. It cannot be value neutral precisely because the genealogist has a stake in the outcome of the investigation. Genealogy heralds a new method of investigation by the fact that philosophy will no longer be a practice in the “search for formal structures with universal value, but [will be conceived] rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, and saying.” 107 By understanding how our ‘‘doing, thinking and saying’’ have been limited by our current dispositif, genealogy sets itself the task of marking out new ways of doing, thinking and saying for greater freedom and creativity.

Section VII: Genealogy and the Body In the previous sections, I delineated the importance of each axis of genealogical inquiry and provided a very brief explanation of how these axes exist interdependently on each other. In this section, I argue that the body plays a significant role in a genealogical investigation and demonstrate the precise relationship between the body and the above three axes. According to The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, an axis can be defined as follows: “noun: 1. An imaginary straight line about which a body rotates; or with respect to which it possesses rotational symmetry.” 108 I contend that 104

This is a reference to James Bernauer’s Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Towards an Ethics for Thought. Bernauer’s book, still, I think, remains the best single secondary source for understanding Foucault’s project and intellectual development. 105 Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” 48. 106 Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” 50. 107 Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” 46. 108 The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, Tenth Edition Revised, ed(s) Judy Pearsall et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 93.

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the three axes of genealogical inquiry along with the body play a similar role in Foucault and Nietzsche’s respective genealogical methods. I argue that the function of the body, in a genealogical analysis, is best understood in terms of an object rotating along the three genealogical axes of inquiry.109 The body, then, is really the focus or, better put, the space that underlies the grid where the three axes intersect. It is, in addition, that singular entity which is most closely related to the ‘world.’ The body provides the external or non-doxastic link to the outside ‘world’ required in order to justify a genealogical inquiry. The genealogist first traces the practices, discourses and techniques used to control the body, harness its forces, prevent rebellions etc. in different historical dispositifs (power/knowledge apparatuses). He or she then demonstrates how the practices, techniques and discourses used in contemporary society to control the body are really genealogical developments of older, more ancient practices. The body serves as an external, yet, common link in what would otherwise be incommensurable dispositifs. In brief, it is the body which provides the source or well-spring for a naturalistic justification for a genealogical interpretation of an historical event. In order to flesh out the role of the body in a genealogical investigation, it is important to examine those sections—from both Foucault and Nietzsche’s genealogical works—that explicitly discuss the body in order to determine exactly how the body fits into a genealogical mode of inquiry. Perhaps the most explicit recognition of the importance of the body in relation to a genealogical inquiry can be seen in note 2 of the first essay, section 17 of the Genealogy: Indeed, every table of values, every “thou shalt” known to history or ethnology, requires first a physiological investigation and interpretation rather than a psychological one; and every one of them needs a critique on the part of medical science.110

Numerous other references referring to the importance of the body and specifically, what physiology and medicine may reveal about the body, (as well as how 109

The idea that the human body is just a social and historical construction, at first glance, seems difficult to establish. Elizabeth Groez’s book Volatile Bodies however, to my mind, does much to argue the validity of this position. 110 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMI: 17, 491. Compare this with section 57 of The Anti-Christ where Nietzsche seems to reduce one’s mental abilities and beliefs to one’s physiological development and body type.

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these revelations relate to morality), can be found in both the Genealogy and Nietzsche’s other writings.111 Further, Nietzsche persuasively demonstrates that the sine qua non of morality, namely memory, was tattooed into the human animal via the body. It was the body that had to be trained, measured and most importantly, tortured in 111

I am of course only referring to the term physiology and related cognates. A wide variety of other related medical and physiological terms can also be found in Nietzsche’s work. For a look at several important secondary works which emphasize the biological and physiological aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy, see Gregory Moore’s Nietzsche, Biology, Metaphor, (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Daniel Ahern’s Nietzsche as Cultural Physician, (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). Richard S.G. Brown’s two articles, “Nihilism: “Thus Speaks Physiology” in Nietzsche and the Rhetoric of Nihilism: Essays on Interpretation, Language and Politics edited by Tom Darby, Bela Egyed and Ben Jones (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989), 133–144. “Nietzsche: That Profound Physiologist.” (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2004). And finally, there is Wayne Klein’s Nietzsche and the Promise of Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997). Moore’s, excellent work places Nietzsche’s own conceptions of physiology squarely within their proper historical context with such men as Lamarck, Foster and Haeckel. Ahern offers more of an ontological explication of the body by reducing the body to its affects, drives and quanta of power. According to Ahern’s interpretation of Nietzsche, “the body serves as the blueprint to the healthy society.” Brown offers a more traditional and dare I say, naturalistic interpretation of Nietzsche’s notion of physiology and the body arguing that Nietzsche held that it was possible to read the values and morals of a group, or individual from the group’s or individual’s body type. This is obviously a strong, foundational view of the body. While Brown supports his thesis by marshalling forth an impressive array of textual support, nonetheless, if this is Nietzsche’s position then it seems to bring forward more problems than it solves. I will examine this strong foundational view of the body in in chapter 2 to spell out these problems and difficulties in more detail. Others, most notably Klein, try to steer in between this Scylla and Charbydis (an ontological approach and strong physiological approach) by holding that “the concept of physiology is suspended between the literal and the figurative, the biological and the semiological.” Eric Blondel in Nietzsche: The Body and Culture. Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy, trans. Sean Hand (Stanford University Press, 1991) argues that genealogy allows one to experiment with one’s body and therefore opens up the possibility for a Verfuhrer zum Leben (to live life dangerously). While, finally, Babette E. Babich in Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1994) argues in much the same manner. Although this latter interpretation would be the approach I too would take, more specification and explanation of what exactly this interpretation entails is required. I examine these various approaches in more detail in volume two.

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order to produce the first, five or six “I will nots” necessary for memory, guilt and the learning of morals. Nietzsche writes in this regard, “If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory—this is the main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth.” 112 A genealogical inquiry must not only examine, from a discursive standpoint, such concepts as “the social contract” or “the categorical imperative” for example, but must look through these concepts, as it were, in order to discover the necessary historical and physiological conditions required for these concepts to emerge. Morality is one of the fruits that sprang from the subjugation and torture of the human body. It is incumbent on the genealogist to investigate what bearing, if any, such conditions have on the fruit produced. We see an even more explicit recognition of the importance of the body for genealogical inquiry when we turn to Foucault’s “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” : “descent (Enstehung) Foucault writes, “attaches itself to the body. It inscribes itself in the nervous system, in temperament in the digestive apparatus;” 113 This is the first time that the connection between genealogical inquiry and the body is made by the Frenchman in his landmark essay, but certainly not the last. Foucault describes the body as the primary document for the genealogist because it is the body which is “the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas) the locus of a dissociated self adopting an illusion of substantial unity and a volume in perpetual disintegration.” 114 In effect, Foucault argues that historical events are readable and emerge via the body. But simultaneously, the body is a “volume in perpetual disintegration”: a document which is capable of being read, re-read, interpreted and re-interpreted, but is never exhausted. Genealogy’s task, according to Foucault, is then direct and relatively straight forward: it involves exposing “a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body.” 115 Continuing on this line of thought, Foucault, in both Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality Volume One, shows how power subdued and trained the body (as an economic and reproductive instrument of bio-power) from the assemblage of micro strategies, discourses and techniques. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault shows the effects the twin poles of bio-power had on the body. The first, discipline, trained the body and more precisely the body’s movements 112 113 114 115

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM: II, 3. 497. Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, 147. Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, 148. Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, 148.

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hence making the body more economically productive and docile. In addition, such training also proved itself useful in other spheres like in the army and in the school system while these systems fed back into the larger system of work. Surveillance is the second pole of bio-power. Surveillance of the individual’s body and most importantly the recognition by the individual that his or her body is being observed, forces the individual to reflect on his or her actions. Surveillance acts as a self-reflective mirror that simultaneously relates one’s own body to oneself as a text capable of being read by others, but also serves as one’s own text, which one must read in order to understand oneself. This ‘sign reading’ of the body is then ‘introjected’ back into the subject: the subject becomes increasingly more and more aware of his or her bodily movements. The subject then perpetually monitors whether his or her external behavior conforms to the ‘norms’ of a specific social setting. Thus, modern techniques of punishment—whether they are found in the penitentiary or in the barracks, the hospital, the school system or the workplace—are introduced in order to create a more docile, yet, productive body. Bio-power creates more productive bodies by disciplining and surveilling bodies.116 But, strangely enough, Foucault also notes that bio-power is invested in extracting and then using the secrets of the body. Bio-power is not just a brute constellation of physical restraints and force. Like all strategies of power, it too is infused with knowledge. In the History of Sexuality, Foucault provides a deeper understanding of bio-power and the specific role sexuality plays in extracting and utilizing such secrets of the body. Foucault writes: Sexuality must not be thought of a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special ‘knowledges’, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power (My Italics).117

As he continues his investigation, Foucault argues that sexuality is a further deployment of power/knowledge that serves as the lynchpin to bio-power. It is within the concept and practice of ‘sexuality’ in which diseases affecting the body politic can be traced back to their original source and it is the new concept 116 117

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 227–228. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. One, 105–106.

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and discourse of ‘sexuality’ that is responsible for ensuring the continuing propagation of the nation state. Thus, sexuality and the formation of the discourses of sexuality, like psychoanalysis, mark the further subjugation of the body, and, as Foucault suggests towards the end of The History of Sexuality, the imprisonment of the body by power/knowledge.118 From this partial and brief exploration of Nietzsche and Foucault’s genealogical investigations, it is obvious just how important the body is to a genealogical inquiry. However, we might ask at this point: ‘Why do both Nietzsche and Foucault believe the body to be the most important historical document for the genealogist to use and why is the body given more importance, than say, a moral agent’s conscious self-descriptions for his or her ethical actions or lack thereof?’ Or, indeed, the more pointed question: ‘What exactly is the body?’ Indeed does it not seem prudent to answer this question before a successful genealogical investigation can even begin? Do we not need to understand what the body is and how the genealogist should use the body before undertaking a genealogical investigation in the first place? I will now spend the rest of this chapter answering the first question and at least preparing the course for the rest of this book to follow in answering those that follow. David Couzens Hoy sheds some light on why Nietzsche regarded the body to be of paramount importance in the course of a moral investigation in his seminal essay: “Nietzsche, Hume and the Genealogical Method.” 119 As Hoy demonstrates, Nietzsche was not the first to offer a genealogy of moral sentiments. Indeed, Nietzsche confesses in section four of the very preface of the Genealogy that he was spurred “to publish something of my hypotheses concerning the origin of morality” because he read a “little book (Paul Ree’s Origin of the Moral Sentiments)120 “in which [he] encountered distinctly for the first time an upside-down and perverse species of genealogical hypothesis, the English type…” 121. Well before Ree, Hume had already provided a psychological explanation for the existence of such moral feelings as sympathy and compassion in his An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. What’s more in Hume’s celebrated multi-volume work The History of England he attempted to provide a psychologically tenable thesis for the historical evolution of moral 118

Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. One, 158. Hoy, “Nietzsche, Hume and the Genealogical Method” (1986), NGM, 251–268. 120 I will not go into any detail concerning the ‘history’ between Nietzsche, Ree and Salome. For this history see Rudolph Binion’s Frau Lou, (Princeton University Press, 1968). 121 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, preface, section four, 453. 119

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intuitions. As Hoy notes, Hume and Nietzsche’s respective genealogies share a common goal: both seek to provide a more coherent and naturalistic explanation for the advent and continued power of moral terms without relying on metaphysical, a priori justifications. Both seek to examine the actual, historical cause for such powerful feelings like sympathy, and resentiment, and both wish to lay bare the true psychological engines which drive our moral intuitions. As such “Genealogy…Hoy writes, “becomes a way to do nonmetaphysical philosophy.” 122 The difference between Hume and Nietzsche however, at least according to Hoy, has to do with their respective methodologies. Genealogy’s methods differ greatly from those employed by Hume primarily because Hume, in his History of England at least, took ‘people at their word.’ 123 That is to say, Hume assumed that present day feelings such as sympathy, anger and “being alarmed” were the same for the ancient Britons, for example, as they are for us, modern thinkers. By using our own sentiments as an interpretative touchstone, we can understand the actions of the ancients. For example, the reasons why Suetonius was called away by Nero before forming a proper government in Briton in 59 A.D. according to Hume, is that he was incapable of soothing the “anger” and “alarmed minds” of the Britons “after inflicting so many severities upon them.” 124 But there is a problem with this kind of analysis Hoy suggests: historical events in Hume’s histories take on an all too easy sense of familiarity.125 The reason as to why specific historical events took place is readily available: we simply have to put ourselves in the place of the major actors of the time and ask: “What would I do in that situation?” Such philosophical conjectures will not do for two principal reasons. First, to use one’s present ‘feelings’ of sympathy, anger or “being alarmed” in order to understand how historical persons reasoned and acted is strictly speaking ahistorical. It is not performing the “documentary grey” research necessary for a true philosophical and historical investigation of morality. Nietzsche was too acute a psychologist and historian to place this sort of faith in an agent’s conscious selfdescriptions concerning his beliefs or the reasons why he upholds them. Either people lie or worse, are completely unaware as to why they do what they do and from where such feelings originate. Furthermore, while relying on traditional 122

Hoy, “Nietzsche, Hume and the Genealogical Method”, 253. Hoy, “Nietzsche, Hume and the Genealogical Method”, 266. 124 Hume, David. The History of England: The Britons Volume 1 (1778) (Indianapolis Liberty Fund, 1983), section 1, The Britons. 125 Hoy, “Nietzsche, Hume and the Genealogical Method”, 266. 123

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historical documents such as testimonials, laws, treaties or even personal journals, is important, these sorts of documents may still fail to illuminate other ‘well springs’ of the human condition. Genealogy therefore, in order to be more truthful, more “documentary grey” than traditional forms of historiography, must turn to that which is Other than consciousness. It must be able to create hypotheses in order to test them against possible recalcitrant experiences. Only in this way can genealogy’s task as both Nietzsche and Foucault conceive it to be, offer a more justified and, as we will see shortly, subversive account of the world and our place in it. Genealogy, must turn to the ‘body’—that which is in ‘first contact’ with the non-doxastic—in order to justify its research program. Finally, genealogy is meant to be not only a therapeutic discipline, but also a subversive one. Genealogy seeks to unmask our most firmly entrenched beliefs. In order to accomplish this task, genealogy reveals both a more convincing origin for our moral laws, for example, but also a very different one too. Genealogy subverts our unquestioned belief in ‘truth’ by being more truthful than ‘truth’ itself. To carry out this task, genealogy turns to that, which, since Plato, has been considered the least trustworthy aspect of ourselves, namely, the body. Genealogy ‘believes’ in the trustworthiness of the body rather than the soul or mind simply because in order to undertake a subversive value reversal, genealogy must start with the most maligned “substance” in Western philosophy, the body. As Eric Blondel puts it in “The Question of Genealogy”: Genealogy will inevitably be heterology (ie. Discourse of or on the other) insofar as it uncovers the other hidden in the same. Because it concerns culture and the body, Nietzsche’s thought is radically ambiguous and impossible: it is between thought and body, between reason and unreason, between philosophy and Philosophy, and between the last avatar of metaphysics and the “new philosophers.” As Nietzsche says, this is a thought of the at tempt(ation), of Versuch and Versuchung.126

Genealogy replaces our sacrosanct ‘memories’ of history, culture and philosophy with “counter-memories” generated from a tracing of the imprinting and destruction of the body and, therefore, demonstrating in effect, that this tracing could have been different. Genealogy is a study in alterity and Otherness. To summarize, this chapter was meant to examine, though only tentatively, the principal components of philosophical genealogy. These components, if we recall, were the three axes of genealogy (power, truth and the subject), and the two most important ‘aspects’ of genealogy namely the doctrine perspectivism and the body. Nevertheless, we are no closer to under126

Eric Blondel, “The Question of Genealogy.” In NGM, 308–309.

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standing how all of these aspects and components ‘come together’ as it were, when conducting a genealogical investigation. In chapter two, I investigate the ontological and epistemological problems associated with Nietzsche and Foucault’s respective philosophical positions on the body. While, in chapter three, I clarify in greater detail some of the epistemological and ontological problems in adopting a Nietzschean perspectivist position. In chapter four I turn my attention to elucidating how Nietzsche and Foucault conduct their respective genealogical enterprises.

CHAPTER

TWO

THE BODY AS HISTORICAL DOCUMENT Section I: The Body and Genealogical Inquiry The human body is a key component to any genealogical investigation. According to Nietzsche, a moral investigation must begin with a physiological and medical analysis of the body before the investigation turns to an historical or philological examination of moral terms and practices.1 Presumably what Nietzsche had in mind was to investigate and classify bodies into different physiological types in order to discover whether there was a correlation between one’s physiology and value system. But there is another way in which Nietzsche uses the body during the course of a genealogical investigation. The body has a more abstract, purely epistemological role to play for it serves as the non-doxastic touchstone for the recording of values. For example, in essay two of The Genealogy, Nietzsche convincingly demonstrates that it was the ‘creation’ of human memory that served as the necessary condition for all moral values. Memory, Nietzsche shows, was first ingrained in the human body through physical torture. Thus, it is only by understanding why early forms of punishment were so severe, Nietzsche contends, that we can discover the genealogical origin concerning the true value of moral values. The tracing of moral values begins with an examination of the ways in which the body was tortured because it was through this torturing that values came to be engraved onto the human psyche. Foucault’s comprehension and explication of the place and role of the body in a genealogical investigation is both more explicit and clearer than Nietzsche’s. We have already observed in “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History” that the body is the principal document for the genealogist because it is the focal point for the emergence of forces. Foucault’s most important genealogical work, Discipline and Punish, further fleshes out how the genealogist should read 1

See note 2 in On the Genealogy of Morals.

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the body. Indeed, Foucault even offers an interpretative rubric for the reader to utilize. Foucault explains precisely how he intends to study power. Near the very beginning of Discipline and Punish, Foucault claims that his work will study how power targets and trains bodies. But more specifically Foucault will: “….try to study the metamorphosis of punitive methods on the basis of a political technology of the body (technologie politque du corps) in which might be read a common history of power relations and object relations.” (My Italics)2 I think it is fair to say that any attentive reader of Discipline and Punish cannot help but be moved by Foucault’s analysis. Foucault has indeed provided a convincing and coherent account of precisely how the soul gradually became, as he so eloquently puts it, “the prison of the body.” In this chapter I wish to investigate in much greater detail than I did in chapter one, precisely how the genealogist reads the body as an historical document. That is, I seek an answer to the question: ‘What is the epistemological relationship between the body and a genealogical mode of inquiry?’ In chapter one, I showed that a genealogical mode of inquiry is a naturalistic type of investigation. Therefore, the body, as the most important document for the genealogist, must ultimately be consistent with a naturalistic approach. Outlining in very broad brush strokes the epistemological relationship between the body and genealogical inquiry will be one of the goals of this chapter. However, the principal task will be to investigate the ontological status of the body within a genealogical historical investigation because it is only through understanding the body’s ontology that we will have a better understanding of the epistemic role the body plays. More perspicuously put, an epistemic reconstruction of genealogy will be subtended on the ontological status of the body. Before expanding further on the relationship between the ontological status of the body and the epistemological effects this status has, I would first like to call attention to the manner in which the body’s status in relationship to genealogy, in both of these senses, has been largely neglected by many writers in the secondary literature.

Section II: Genealogy, the Body and the Secondary Literature Many scholars do not seem terribly concerned with either the epistemological relationship of the body to genealogy nor with the ontological status the body holds during the course of a genealogical investigation. After all, if the body is 2

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 24.

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nothing but merely force waves of power, then the true questions concerning the epistemic merit of genealogy lie on the deeper, metaphysical problem regarding will to power itself. In other words, a treatment regarding the ontological status of the body must wait until the ontological and epistemological problems of Nietzsche’s theory of will to power have been worked out first. The result, unfortunately, is that the body is simply viewed as just another piece of furniture in the universe. Its true importance goes unnoticed. For example, Michael Mahon, in his otherwise excellent book, Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy, seems to be guilty of making just such an elision. He argues that: “Any thing, person, event, is construed by Nietzsche to be a matter of historical, practical, interpretation, and beneath the series of interpretations there is nothing, no thing. (My Italics)” 3 But if we were to consider the body such a “thing” then this would imply that the body too, is nothing but interpretation; there is no substratum to the body. The body then, much like everything else, possesses no determinate attributes, properties or qualities in and of itself because it is nothing but a “conglomeration” of will to power quanta. According to Mahon’s interpretation of Nietzschean will to power, the body is a construction, or perhaps better, a creation that we as human beings make, but there is no ‘body’ per se which exists independently of our interpretations. Such an ‘interpretation’ of the body however, raises a number of ontological and epistemic problems. First, if there is no ‘thing’ underneath the interpretations of a ‘thing,’ then, properly speaking, this implies that an interpretans is not predicated on an interpretandum and, therefore, is not an interpretation after all. For example, even if we accept that there can be different interpretations of a text this also implies that we also acknowledge that the text itself always transcends any interpretation of it. We use the text to check, determine and evaluate an interpretation by seeing whether or not the interpretation corresponds to the text. While this of course does not imply that there is only one correct reading of a text, it does imply that there can be better readings— readings which are more coherent, interesting, consistent, transformative and of course, more truthful; interpretations in other words that are more careful and more attentive to the statements that make up the text than others. However if, as Mahon implies, there is no body; no transcendent text, as it were, behind an interpretation of that text, then we are no longer using the word ‘interpretation’ in this manner because it would make no sense to claim that we can 3

Michael Mahon, Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 82.

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have two interpretations of the same thing if there is no thing to interpret in the first place. The two interpretations would be of a ‘no-thing’ and surely this does not make much sense. As such, if a genealogist did in fact subscribe to the theory that Mahon seems to put forward here, then such a position would be irrecoverably incoherent.4 A second problem with Mahon’s construal of the body is that it would be impossible to determine what would qualify to make one interpretation ‘superior’ (either epistemically or even pragmatically) to that of another. If we have two, so-called interpretations that correspond to a ‘no-thing’, then it would be impossible to determine which of these two interpretations is epistemically superior because there would be nothing to constrain the interpretation. That is to say, if we were asked to compare the merits of two different and competing interpretations of, say, Descartes’ Meditations, we would do so by first acknowledging that the text is the final arbiter of conflicting, interpretative disputes. If one were to argue that Descartes proved God’s existence in the second meditation instead of the third and fifth respectively then we would simply direct the person to the appropriate page and passage and point out that he or she has misinterpreted the text. However, if there is ‘no-thing’ underneath the interpretation of that thing, then it is as if we are spinning interpretations in a void—by definition we could never point to a line, statement, argument, indeed anything to determine which is the better interpretation. Thus, it would be impossible for Nietzsche to proclaim, as he in fact does claim several times (as shown in 4

Mahon’s misreading of Nietzsche can be confirmed by turning to those sections within his text that examine the ontology of will to power. For example he writes: “Nietzsche denies the notion of a substratum in all its forms.” (Mahon, Foucault’s Nietzschean Genealogy, 82). To justify this position, Mahon quotes at length from GM II: 12 which, to paraphrase, does support Mahon’s interpretation that the “entire history of a “thing”, an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations…” However, Mahon fails to quote the final paragraph of the section, which reads: “Thus the essence of life, its will to power, is ignored; one overlooks the essential priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new interpretations and directions….” (pp.514–515 of On the Genealogy of Morals in Basic Works of Nietzsche My Italics). Contrary to Mahon’s reading where he writes: “Any thing, person, event is construed by Nietzsche to be a matter of historical, cultural, practical interpretation, and beneath the series of interpretations there is nothing, no thing.” We can see from the above quote that it is the will to power itself which is ultimately responsible for interpreting a ‘thing.’ And furthermore, as I will show, the will to power is beyond any historical, cultural or practical interpretation. It is non-doxastic (causal) because it is simply the ‘world’ as it worlds.

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chapter one) that his method of historical inquiry, namely genealogy, is vastly superior to the English method. Despite the above ontological and epistemological problems in holding such a strange position, it may be a surprise to learn that many scholars subscribe to this sort of non-substratum view (where the body is simply a no-thing) of Nietzsche. In the next section, I examine in greater detail the problems that Brian Leiter has ably identified with respect to this non-substratum interpretation of the will to power.

Section III: The Non-substratum Position: “The Received View” Brian Leiter’s name, for what I have been calling the non-substratum position, is the “Received View.” In Leiter’s seminal paper: “Perspectivism in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals”, he convincingly demonstrates that a plethora of influential scholars including the likes of Arthur Danto, Alexander Nehamas, Sarah Koffman, Jacques Derrida, Tracy Strong and many others, would all accept something very close to Mahon’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s ontology.5 5

Brian Leiter, “Perspectivism in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals,” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, Ed. Richard Schacht, (University of California: Berkeley, 1994) 334–354. To be sure, there have been other anti-realist reconstructions of Nietzschean perspectivism such as Christoph Cox’s Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (University of California: Berkley, 1999). However, I think Leiter’s article is the most succinct work I have come across in terms of explaining, first, the problem he calls the “Received View” and second, in trying to articulate a consistent, perspectivist epistemology in a minimal amount of space. I will define anti-realism much as Robert C. Welshon defines the term in “Construing, Construing Perspectivism” in International Studies in Philosophy 34:3 2002, 35–40, as the thesis that holds that “the existence and character of entities in the world are mind-dependent,” 36. Leiter lists an impressive number of scholars who take this position. A partial list includes Arthur Danto’s Nietzsche as Philosopher; Tracy Strong’s, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration expanded edition (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1978); Paul de Man’s, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Alan Schrift’s Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation (New York: Routledge, 1990). I agree with all of the names on Leiter’s “Received View list” as it were except one: Nehamas. Alexander Nehamas’ Nietzsche Life as Literature (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985), clearly does not belong with the rest of this group. Nehamas’ definition of perspectivism is not to claim that the world does not have any definite character, but rather that we,

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According to Leiter, this ‘Received View’ of Nietzsche originated in the English speaking world with Danto’s Nietzsche as Philosopher. In that work, Danto claims that Nietzsche’s is a proto-anti-realist. He writes, “We score the blank surface of reality with the longitudes and parallels of concepts, but the concepts and ideas are ours, and they have not the slightest basis in fact. This is his (Nietzsche’s) doctrine of perspectivism.” 6 As Leiter shows this seems to entail that Nietzsche holds the four claims below: i. ii.

the world has no determinate nature or structure; our concepts and theories do not describe or correspond to this world because it has no determinate character; iii. our concepts and theories are mere interpretations or mere perspectives (reflecting our pragmatic needs, at least on some accounts); iv. No perspective can enjoy an epistemic privilege over any other, because there is no epistemically privileged mode of access to the characterless world.7

Leiter ably criticizes this position, but does not seem to realize that his own solution with regard to the problems that are posed by these four claims—both to the doctrine of perspectivism and by extension genealogy—are just as troublesome and myopic as the position he criticizes. I turn to Leiter’s solution to the problems with the ‘Received View’ in chapter three. In this chapter, I wish to delve much more deeply than Leiter ever did into these claims to demonstrate just how acutely problematic they really are. I therefore criticize the ‘Received View’ from three fronts: interpretatively, ontologically and epistemically. I now turn to each of these criticisms. My first objection to the ‘Received View’ claim is from an interpretative stance. Nietzsche, as is well known, is a notoriously difficult thinker to interpret. Whether one is a “lumper or a splitter” 8 one can still find conflicting positions as human beings, lack the necessary capacities to understand the world as it really is. We always come to an object with prejudices, interests, and values and, presumably, there are a large number of different human interests, attitudes and/or perspectives such that we cannot be sure that we have adequately captured all or any of reality. Thus Nehamas’ construal of the perspectivist problem is not so much ontological as it is epistemological. See Brian Leiter’s “Perspectivism in the Genealogy of Morals.” In NGM. 334–358. 6 Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press: 1980), 67. 7 Leiter, “Perspectivism in the Genealogy of Morals”, 334. 8 This distinction refers to those scholars who choose to either use the Nachlass as a genuine and accurate resource for Nietzsche’s thought or those who instead insist

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with respect to the same philosophical subjects in Nietzsche’s work. But to my mind, it is John T. Wilcox’s Truth and Value in Nietzsche (1974) which remains the most important monograph for bringing these contradictions to the fore. Wilcox first divides Nietzsche’s statements into two exhaustive and exclusive categories: non-cognitive statements and cognitive statements. The noncognitive category consists of those statements which hold “that values are not objective, are to be understood in terms of the persons who hold them, cannot be supported by facts or sound reasoning or are created rather than discovered.” 9 This is the ‘aesthetic’ or post-modern Nietzsche. This is the Nietzsche who stresses the importance and recognition of those subjective, inventive and imaginative capacities of human beings to construct their world. Wilcox supports the non-cognitive position by marshalling forth a plethora of passages from a variety of Nietzsche’s writings both early and late.10 Wilcox defines the cognitivist Nietzsche as follows: “values can be cognized or known. This implies that values are objective in at least one sense, so cognitivists are sometimes called objectivists.” 11 Thus, the cognitivist Nietzsche upholds that there are objective values which not only exist, but can be known by human beings. Once more, Wilcox provides an ample number of quotations from a variety of Nietzsche’s texts to support this view.12 This particular that only Nietzsche’s published works may be regarded as truly Nietzschean works. For more on this distinction, see Bernard Magnus’ article “The Use and Abuse of The Will to Power.” In Reading Nietzsche, ed. R.C. Solomon and K.M. Higgins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 218–235. 9 John T. Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche, (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1974), 11. 10 I shall mention only a few here: “This is my way; where is yours?—thus I answered those who asked me “the way”. For the way—that does not exist.” (Z III 11:2) From Beyond Good and Evil: “There are no moral phenomena at all but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.” Beyond Good and Evil section 108. “Insight: all evaluation is made from a definite perspective…” from Will to Power section 259. Finally, from The Gay Science section 184: Justice.—”I’d sooner have people steal from me than be surrounded by scarecrows and hungry looks; that is my taste. And this is by all means a matter of taste, nothing more.” 204. 11 Wilcox, 11. 12 Once more I shall only refer to a few quotations: “Nitimur in vetitum: in this sign my philosophy will triumph one day, for what one has forbidden so far as a matter of principle has always been—truth alone.” (Ecce Homo, 3) And again from Ecce Homo: “How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare? More and more that became for me the real measure of value. Error faith in the ideal is not blindness,

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Nietzsche, as we have already seen from chapter one, stresses the importance of investigating the true origin of values because truth is intrinsically valuable: the recognition of falsehoods is inherently important; presenting cogent reasons and arguments to support one’s belief is of fundamental worth. Wilcox’s problem consists in finding a way to synthesize, harmoniously, the cognitive and non-cognitive Nietzsches. But this task soon proves to be too difficult for Wilcox. He admits defeat on the second to last page of his work: But how that union (between the cognitive and non-cognitive) could be accomplished, how new values could be cognitive-and-more, that we do not discover. To these last intriguing problems in his meta-ethics, Nietzsche had the rudiments of several solutions, but nothing definitive; and major aspects of the problems remain unsolved.13

To be sure, this admission of failure does not impugn Wilcox’s otherwise careful and thorough analysis in any way. Rather, we must be intellectually honest with ourselves and fully understand just how deep these epistemic and ontological difficulties are regarding the amalgamation of the cognitivist and non-cognitivist Nietzsches before even attempting to provide a satisfactory solution to the problem. So, at best, the holders of the ‘Received View’ have only presented half of the evidence for their position. They have simply ignored the cognitivist Nietzsche. The second problem concerning the ‘no-thing’ interpretation of the body has to do with the ontological status of the body itself. If we lump the body into the same category as anything else (that is, the body too, is nothing but interpretation all the way down), then this view obviously contradicts much of what Nietzsche espouses regarding the nature of the body. But, of far greater importance, it downplays the very important function, indeed the very nature of the body or, more specifically, “bodies” have in a genealogical inquiry. In the previous chapter, it was argued that the body is the most important document for the genealogist because it is in direct contact with power. But some scholars take this even further. Richard S.G. Brown in an early article entitled “Nihilism: Thus Speaks Physiology” and more recently in “Nietzsche that Profound Physiologist” convincingly shows that Nietzsche believed that one’s morals along with his or her conceptions about the world, and perceperror is cowardice.” Ecce Homo, 3. Finally, from Twilight of the Idols: “The apparent world is the only one: the “true” world is merely added by a lie.” TI ‘Reason’ 2. 13 Wilcox, 201.

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tions thereof, are reducible to that individuals’ peculiar physiological make-up.14 Gregory Moore in his book, Nietzsche, Biology, Metaphor argues that Nietzsche’s entire philosophy is a product of the 19th century biological concern of eugenics and race-mixing etc.15 So to view the body as just another thing—as those who hold the ‘Received View’ clearly do—is not only to misinterpret exactly how important the body is for Nietzsche, but to misunderstand the purpose of a genealogical inquiry. Third and finally, if the body were nothing but an interpretation “all the way down” then this would imply that there is no connection between genealogy and the ‘world.’ In other words, it would be impossible to determine what makes one interpretation superior to another because there would be no interpretandum, but only an interpretans. That is to say, without the body to serve as the bridge between the doxastic and non-doxastic, between our belief system and the world, it is impossible, in principle, to determine how one belief set (as long as both are consistent and coherent) is more epistemically justified from that of another. The reason why genealogy is epistemically superior to other methods of historical and philosophical inquiry is precisely because it purports to be a more naturalistic type of investigative procedure. By paying strict attention to how the body has been trained, subdued and studied in various historical eras, we are in a better position to understand the power relations at work in those eras than by using more traditional, historical methods. Turning to Foucault, we see a different problem emerge. It is well understood that Foucault views the body as an historical document and that the task before the genealogist is to provide different readings of the body which may serve as alternatives to more traditional ones. The purpose of these alternative readings, it should be noted, is to provide subjects with alternative methods of living, of being. This interpretation seems to be standard fare in 14

Richard S.G. Brown, “Nihilism: Thus Speaks Physiology.” In Nietzsche and the Rhetoric of Nihilism: Essays on Interpretation, Language and Politics ed(s). Tom Darby, Bela Egyed and Ben Jones (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989), 133–144. See Richard S.G. Brown’s “Nietzsche that Profound Physiologist” in Nietzsche and Biology (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2004). 15 Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, Metaphor, 211: “Nietzsche’s Biologism is more wide-ranging more total than that of his immediate successors. Their work (Scheler, Spengler, Simmel, Lessing, Klages) also lacks the fundamental contradictoriness of Nietzsche’s position—a nineteenth century faith in the institutional authority of the biological sciences which co-exists uneasily with a belief that these same disciplines are infected with false values.”

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the Foucauldian secondary literature and I fully endorse it as well with some modifications. However, very little has been written regarding what precise methods Foucault uses to understand the body as well as what ontological status the body must have in order for these readings to have any epistemic justification. Thomas Flynn, for example, in his essay “Foucault’s Mapping of History,” correctly notes that Foucault’s genealogical research program is much different and implicitly, much better, than his earlier archaeological method because: It {Genealogy} moves beyond the earlier method {Archaeology} in its explicit focus on power and bodies.…This emphasis on the body as the object of discipline and control gives Foucault’s genealogical studies of the practice of punishment (Discipline and Punish) and of sexuality (History of Sexuality, I) their distinctive character.16

However, the ambiguity of how or why genealogy “moves beyond” archaeology or how genealogy is “distinctive” from Foucault’s earlier method is never answered by Flynn. This same ambiguity is found in Lois McNay’s Foucault and Michael Bernhauer’s Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight.17 Though all of these scholars correctly note the very important role the body plays in a genealogical inquiry and provide clear and succinct summaries of Foucault’s philosophical goals for both Discipline and Punish as well as the History of Sexuality, they never specify exactly what role the body plays in these concrete genealogical investigations. Presumably, one would assume that the difference between archaeology and genealogy, according to Foucault, is that where archaeology deals with discursive objects such as academic discourses and written texts, genealogy, on the other hand, studies non-discursive objects: the body. These methodologies differ because the purpose of archaeology and genealogy differ as well. The purpose of archaeology, crudely summarized, is to unveil how a statement serves to take on meaning and significance. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault shows that an entire environment consisting of discursive and non-discursive rules and objects must be in place before a statement can carry significant

16

Thomas Flynn, “Foucault’s Mapping of History.” In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault ed. Gary Gutting, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 34. 17 See Lois McNay’s Foucault, A Critical Introduction (New York: Continuum Press, 1994), chapter three and Michael Bernhauer’s Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Towards and Ethics for Thought, chapter five.

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importance.18 Archaeology, we might say, studies power once removed: the archaeologist studies how statements in specific disciplines or statements made by certain people have come to have the value they now have. Genealogy’s purpose is more immediate. Its purpose is one of establishing direct contact with a specific type of power in an historical era (a dispositif) in order to trace the precise genealogical thread of this particular dispositif’s development. The body and the signs written on the body, by power, are readable in a way in which traditional historical documents are not. Conscious reflections on power and coercion, as expressed in historical documents, are not pure—they are somehow tainted by ‘Reason’ and the author writing them: two domains which Foucault wishes to unmask as manifestations of power. The body is different from these other types of documents because it is directly targeted and invested by power relations. Foucault instructively writes in this regard: The body is…directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest, mark it, train it, torture it…This political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labor power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (system d’assujettissement)…the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body (corps productif) and a subjected body (corps assujetti).19

By attentively reading the markings of the body, by power, we are somehow able to come into contact with the historical “emergence” of the economic forces which lie dormant within the body. The body is quite simply “the inscribed surface of events” and nothing else.20 The body, Foucault maintains, holds a privileged place with respect to those historical investigations, like genealogy, which concentrate on explaining and examining the origin of historical power formations. But if the body does in fact hold a privileged place in a genealogical investigation, then we must answer why this is so. And to answer this ‘why’ question we must understand what the body is. Few scholars have noted the perplexing problems Foucault’s peculiar view on the human body produces. In order to 18

See Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, Trans. A.M. Sherdian (New York: Pantheon Books), 1972. Part II “Discursive Regularities.” 19 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 25–26. 20 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 83.

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answer these questions in the detail required, we need to investigate exactly what ontological status the body has in Foucault’s genealogical research program.

Section IV: Foucault’s Anti-Essentialist Body: Epistemological, Ontological and Ethical Difficulties If we recall, Foucault argues for an anti-essentialist conception of the body. In Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault writes: We believe, in any event, that the body obeys the exclusive laws of physiology and that it escapes the influence of history, but this too is false. The body is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest and holidays; is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances. “Effective” history differs from traditional history in being without constants. Nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for the understanding of other men.21

Furthermore, in an interview with Bernard-Henri Levy in 1977, Foucault wants to be absolutely clear that he is not advocating that underneath the production of the sexual body by power/knowledge there is a primordial, natural body from where one can resist power. On the contrary, Foucault states: “What you call naturalism, signifies the idea that underneath power with its acts of violence and its artifices we should be able to rediscover the things themselves in their primordial vitality: behind asylum walls the spontaneity of madness;…beneath sexual prohibitions the purity of desire.” 22 As Foucault clearly demonstrates later in the same interview, no such pure body exists. Finally, in an interview with the editorial staff of Quel Corps, Foucault implies that such revolutionary strategies predicated on recuperating the body as it is independently of a regime of truth are doomed from the start: I don’t’ believe in this talk of recuperation. What’s taking place is the usual strategic development of struggle…The revolt of the sexual body is the reverse side effect of this encroachment. What is the response on the side of power? An economic (and perhaps ideological) exploitation of eroticization, from sun-tan products to porno21

Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 153. B-H. Levy, “Power and Sex: An interview with Michel Foucault.” Telos 32 (1977):152–161, 158. 22

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graphic films. Responding precisely to the revolt of the body, we find a new mode of investment which presents itself no longer in the form of control by repression but that of stimulation. ‘Get undressed—but be slim, good-looking, tanned!’ For each move by one adversary, there is an answering one by the other.23

Paraphrasing Foucault, we could say that there is no great locus of Refusal; there is nothing against which power/knowledge is repressing.24 The body, as seems to be clear from these passages, is a construction of power through and through.25 Power produces not just the body but “... reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.” 26 All things, according to Foucault, seem to be nothing more than expressions of power. There are significant problems associated with what may be termed Foucault’s extreme social constructionist position of the human body. First, it was argued that the body provides the genealogist with the non-doxastic, untainted connection to how power has in fact manifested itself throughout history. But if the body is nothing but “interpretation all the way down” then what claim can genealogy make in being more ‘documentary gray’ than rival methods of historiography? Would not Habermas be correct when he notes that genealogies count no more and no less than any other historical interpretation?27 To be sure, some of Foucault’s defenders recognize the legitimacy of Habermas’ criticism and have advanced, what appear to be, two different solutions to cope with these concerns. The first solution tries to develop an onto23

Michel Foucault, “Body/Power” in Power/Knowledge, 55–62, 56–57. Foucault’s critique of the “The repressive hypothesis” is one of the important points made in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 12. 25 Earlier writings by Foucault like “Nietzsche, Freud Marx” also confirm Foucault’s constructionist stance: “There is nothing absolutely primary to interpret, because at bottom, everything is already an interpretation, each sign is in itself not the thing which is offered to interpretation, but interpretation of other signs. There is never, if you will, an interpretandum which is not already an interpretans.” Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud Marx.” Cahiers de Royaumont 6: Nietzsche. (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967) Trans. Jon Anderson Critical Texts III, 2, Winter `1986 26 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 194. Even in the later interview Pouvoir et Strategies, Foucault still adheres to this monistic view of power stating: ““I would suggest rather (but these are hypotheses which need exploring): (i) that power is co-extensive with the social body; there are no spaces of primal liberty between the”meshes of its network.” Foucault, “Power and Strategies.” Power/Knowledge, 134–145, 142. 27 See Jurgen Habermas’ The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 281. 24

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logical position I here call strict anti-essentialism, which upholds Foucault’s seemingly social constructionist view of the body while simultaneously arguing that some of the structures of the body are more contingent than others. The second way to defend Foucault is to claim that Foucault holds two different ontological views of the body: an empirical, superficial understanding of the body which power trains and invests and a second, deeper, ontological body which makes such training possible. In this section, I show why the latter view is clearly mistaken and demonstrate that while the former view has merit, it is unclear and needs to be restated. Deborah Cook argues for the first view. In her work, The Subject Finds a Voice, Cook holds that Foucault is not a mere constructionist when it comes to the body, but is clearly a realist of sorts. Power/knowledge does not produce the body, but rather reveals specific aspects of the body that already existed prior to our discovery of them. The body is a distinct object with definite structures and capacities that we can come to know. However, in other parts of her book, Cook seems to argue for an entirely different position. Cook writes: power and knowledge alone have created the body. Without its investment by these forces and without the discourses they have generated, the body, much like insanity in the Classical age, would not exist as a form, that is as a determinate object with specific qualities.28 (My Italics)

This quotation would seem to imply that Foucault is not a realist at all, but a nominalist of one stripe or another. All we have, indeed can ever have, are mere interpretations of the body. However, to attempt to discover what is underneath these interpretations is inchoate because it cannot be known. Yet, several pages after this passage, Cook indicates that there is some sort of material base upon which our interpretations of the body are grounded and, thus, just because it has no determinate shape does not mean that the body is a creation entirely.29

28

Deborah Cook, The Subject Finds a Voice, Foucault’s Turn Towards Subjectivity (New York: Peter Lang Revisioning Philosophy, 1993), 86. 29 Deborah Cook says as much on page 89 of The Subject Finds a Voice. Cook quotes the following passage from Discipline and Punish to account for this seeming interpretative contradiction: “The classical age discovered the body as object and target of power. It is easy enough to find signs of the attention then paid to the body—to the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skilful and increases its forces”. (My Italics) Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 136.

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One of the problems with Cook’s interpretation is that she does not seem to have the requisite ontological categories in place in order to classify, successfully, Foucault’s unorthodox ontological position (though I think she is on the right track for coming up with a satisfactory solution). For example, in discussing the formation of the sexual body and sexual discourse itself Cook writes, “Secondly, the knowledge associated with disciplinary power extracts from the body more information about its workings by obliging it to confess its secrets. The confession is the primary instrument of the Scientia Sexualis which has produced the sexual body.” 30 Once again, Cook contradicts herself by switching from a realist to an anti-realist viewpoint. Obviously, the force behind Foucault’s point is that knowledge is always power, and power, knowledge, because academic disciplines extract the essential secrets from the body so that the body’s inherent powers can be harnessed for economic and sexual production. Knowledge, that is, is discovering the real properties of the body so that it can understand these properties in order to better employ them. The force of Foucault’s point is mitigated if power/knowledge only extracts the secrets from a construction that does not actually exist. This last revelation also leads us to a second and related problem: if the body is merely a creation of power/knowledge then Cook must provide an explanation as to why discipline and surveillance work. Bio-power is always finding new ways and methods to successfully control each and every individual, while also making the individual more useful. Cook does not explain how the body can be successfully manipulated if power/knowledge were not in fact bringing to light fundamental structures and capacities inherent in all bodies.31 But, by far the most important problem regarding Foucault’s anti-essentialist interpretation of the body is with the ethical axis. Because if the body is completely passive, then how can we ever think, what Foucault calls “the outside” of power/knowledge? How can genealogy truly think the “Unthought?” That is, how may the genealogist remain critical of a particular dispositif if the 30

Cook, The Subject Finds a Voice, 89. This criticism and suggestion is raised, for the first time that I am aware of in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow’s excellent work on Foucault: Michel Foucault Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). However, in order to resolve how Foucault’s philosophical idea of the body can retain the sort of ‘instruction’ that bio-power imparts on the body, Dreyfus and Rabinow claim that it may be possible that Foucault is trying to establish the nascent structures of the body pace Merleau-Ponty. This position, however, as Foucault explicitly makes clear in an interview a year later, is not plausible. 31

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body, along with the individual, is a mere product of an historical system? How is resistance possible? Many scholars criticize Foucault precisely because of the above “resistance problem.” Elizabeth Grosz for example, in Volatile Bodies, persuasively argues that Foucault’s body is nothing more than a passive plaything for power/knowledge. Therefore any political and social philosophy built upon a Foucauldian conception of the body can never ‘truly get off the ground.’ 32 Put in other terms, Grosz’s point is that if Foucault’s idea of the body is one, that as Judith Butler also argues, is “totally imprinted by discourse” and that discourse is one of power/knowledge then it seems impossible for another discourse, another voice, to enter into such a monologue.33 Authentic resistance, therefore, would be impossible. Although neither of these writers presents in clear-cut terms the epistemological problems inherent in holding such an anti-essentialist view of the body, nonetheless, they have demonstrated an important problem for the ethical axis that needs to be addressed. A fourth difficulty with an anti-essentialist approach is raised by Nick Fox. Since Foucault denies any essential self, “such analyses” Fox writes, “leaves the non-discursive physical body entirely divorced from the discursive body written by power/knowledge.” 34 In other words, the same criticism that Foucault leveled at Merleau-Ponty in The Order of Things, as discussed in chapter one, can now be leveled at Foucault: on the one hand, a Foucauldian analysis holds that the body is construed to be an entity that transcends power/knowledge interpretations of it, yet simultaneously, the body is also considered to be an empirical object created solely by power/knowledge. Thus, the problem lies precisely in identifying how the first conception of the body or the non-discursive, (as a thing-in-itself) now relates and somehow conditions the discursive or (phenomenal) body. Both views of the body leave us with an unsatisfactory choice and the result, as is perhaps clear, is a new transcendental-empirical doublet: if the body is transcendent, beyond our understanding, then as Fox correctly notes this “leaves us with a meaningless and pointless construct. As such, the 32

See especially chapter 6 of Elizabeth Grosz’ Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. 33 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, (London: Routledge, 1990), 129–130. The same point is also made by Scott Lash when he writes that Foucault’s body is “passive and largely devoid of causal powers” in the very important paper: “Genealogy and the Body: Foucault/Delueze/Nietzsche” in M. Featherstone, M. Hepworth and B.S. Turner The Body, (London: Sage publishers, 1991), 261–270. 34 Fox, 424.

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‘sociology of the body’ becomes the ‘sociology of ?’ ” 35 While, on the other hand, if we accept that the body is an empirical and historical entity through and through, then we run into the problem explained above: Foucault’s body could never escape his ontology of power; bodily resistance would be impossible. Putting both views together is unintelligible and does not get us any closer to understanding what the relationship is or could be, between the non-discursive body and the discursive one. With these four problems in mind, it would appear as though Foucault’s ontological position with respect to the body in a genealogical investigation is doomed to be incoherent from the start. But that conclusion would be a mistake. Although there are a number of passages from Foucault’s oeuvre which suggest that the body is nothing but a construction of power/knowledge, nevertheless, underlying this explicit rejection of an essentialist conception of the body there is an implicit recognition that behind the discourses of power/ knowledge there remains something which is ahistorical after all. Indeed, on the last page of The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, Foucault not only suggests, from an ontological standpoint, that there is a body underneath the gloss of power/ knowledge, but indeed that it may be from such a body that we may be able to resist power effectively. Foucault writes, Moreover, we need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps in a different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite understand how the ruses of sexuality, and the power that sustains its organizations, were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we became dedicated to their endless task of forcing its secret, of exacting the truest confession from a shadow.36

Foucault not only seems to be suggesting that ‘sexuality’, as a discourse, is predicated on a fictional body that it alone constructs, he also seems to be arguing that beneath this discourse there still remains an economy of pleasures (drives?) circumscribed by what we call a ‘body,’ which may undergo yet another interpretation in a different dispositif But, if this is indeed Foucault’s view on the body then how do we square it with those passages which specifically argue for a constructionist, anti-essentialist position? Does this passage indicate that there is a cognitive and non-cognitive Foucault? Is Foucault claiming that genealogy studies the historically constituted body and that underneath this constitution there is a primordial, pristine and essential body from where power may be resisted? In order to explore these questions further, I now wish to investigate 35 36

Fox, 423. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 159.

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the possibility of upholding a purely essentialist view of the body in relationship to a genealogical mode of inquiry.

Section V: The Essential Body and Genealogy The essentialist position makes three claims which have epistemic, ontological and ethical consequences for the three axes of genealogical inquiry: 1) That underneath the historical, cultural or sociological interpretations of the ‘body’, there remains a natural or essential body which ultimately ‘grounds’ any interpretation of the body; 2) Genealogy has direct and epistemically justified access to this natural or essential body; 3) If the genealogist can understand and read the body correctly, then he or she can understand the true origins of history, society, religion, culture and, most importantly for Nietzsche and Foucault, morality, in order to create new, healthier values (in the Nietzschean sense of healthy) and new, healthier ways of living. Since there are far more passages in Nietzsche’s oeuvre to suggest that he was in fact in favor of this position, I now turn to investigate these key passages in order to flesh out this claim in full. In general, Nietzsche argues that we may understand the body if we are able to read the body correctly. Moreover, academic disciplines, like physiology and medicine, provide us with the proper interpretative rubrics for this “correct” reading. Finally, it is from this reading that we can come to understand the true origin of moral virtues.37 This position is well corroborated throughout Nietzsche’s late works. In section 57 of the Anti-Christ for example, Nietzsche argues that there are three distinct human body types. He goes on to argue that there is a set of moral beliefs, attitudes and dispositions which correspond to one’s physiological type.38 Furthermore, in The Will to Power Nietzsche writes that the goal of genealogy is “to understand all moral judgments as symptoms and a language of signs which betray the processes of physiological despair or failure.” 39 Finally, as demonstrated in chapter one, there are numerous sections in both the Genealogy and in Beyond Good and Evil which confirm the above interpretation. Taking these passages together, the purpose of genealogy, 37

As already mentioned, the importance of physiology and medicine cannot be underestimated in Nietzsche’s genealogical theory. See Book 1 Sec. 17 of The Genealogy. 38 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, sec. 57, 189–191 39 Nietzsche, The Will-to-Power, section 258, 139.

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it may be argued, is to diagnosis the physiological causes for the moral and cultural failings of society. The body then, is not just another historical document on equal footing with any other for the genealogist rather, the body is the immutable and permanent bedrock for culture and society in the first place. In short, the genealogist, as Daniel Ahern suggests, becomes the physician of culture by diagnosing (and in some cases) curing, our moral and social ailments via an examination of the body.40 Perhaps the best explanation and interpretation of this strong, ahistorical, essentialist view of Nietzschean genealogy, is expressed in Richard S.G. Brown’s article: “Nihilism: Thus Speaks Physiology.” Brown writes: In other words in the first formulation, Nietzsche argues that our surface values(morality) can be read as a sign language of the underlying affects of a herd, race or individual. In the second formulation however, Nietzsche claims that it is possible to read from the physiological needs or existential parameters of a herd, race, individual, to their respective values, that is, to be actually in a position to predict the morality or moral values that should be a reflection of the underlying physiological needs.41

To be sure, there is much to be said for this interpretation. What Brown suggests is that Nietzsche places greater significance on the second physiological formulation of genealogy rather than the first. That is to say, a person’s physiology or perhaps better put, his or her body type, is responsible for one’s moral and conscious development. In sum, one interprets from one’s bodily affects. If these affects are active and outward reaching, then we can expect that person’s beliefs to belong to the ascending type; they are strong, healthy and say ‘Yes and Amen’ to life. If, on the other hand, one’s affects are passive and reach inwardly then one’s beliefs are of the descending type; they are 40

See Ahern’s Nietzsche as Cultural Physician, 28. Richard S.G. Brown, 136. Brown retains much of this view in his recent “Nietzsche that Profound Physiologist” but places a decidedly Nagelian spin on his original interpretation. To my mind, Brown represents the strongest physiological, essentialist position in the secondary literature. While many other interpreters note the significant role that physiological and medicinal terms play in Nietzsche’s thought and philosophy, they never clearly determine whether Nietzsche’s discussions on physiology and health are to be taken metaphorically or literally. For this ‘weaker’ essentialism see Malcom Pasley’s “Nietzsche’s Use of Medical Terms.” In Nietzsche: Imagery and Thought ed. Malcom Pasley (Berkley: California University Press: 1978), 123–158. See also Thomas Long’s “Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Medicine.” Nietzsche Studien Band 19, (1990), 112–128. The above two articles are paradigmatic examples of this much more vocal (weak essentialist) school of interpretation. 41

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answer these questions in the detail required, we need to investigate exactly what ontological status the body has in Foucault’s genealogical research program.

Section IV: Foucault’s Anti-Essentialist Body: Epistemological, Ontological and Ethical Difficulties If we recall, Foucault argues for an anti-essentialist conception of the body. In Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault writes: We believe, in any event, that the body obeys the exclusive laws of physiology and that it escapes the influence of history, but this too is false. The body is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest and holidays; is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances. “Effective” history differs from traditional history in being without constants. Nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for the understanding of other men.21

Furthermore, in an interview with Bernard-Henri Levy in 1977, Foucault wants to be absolutely clear that he is not advocating that underneath the production of the sexual body by power/knowledge there is a primordial, natural body from where one can resist power. On the contrary, Foucault states: “What you call naturalism, signifies the idea that underneath power with its acts of violence and its artifices we should be able to rediscover the things themselves in their primordial vitality: behind asylum walls the spontaneity of madness;…beneath sexual prohibitions the purity of desire.” 22 As Foucault clearly demonstrates later in the same interview, no such pure body exists. Finally, in an interview with the editorial staff of Quel Corps, Foucault implies that such revolutionary strategies predicated on recuperating the body as it is independently of a regime of truth are doomed from the start: I don’t’ believe in this talk of recuperation. What’s taking place is the usual strategic development of struggle…The revolt of the sexual body is the reverse side effect of this encroachment. What is the response on the side of power? An economic (and perhaps ideological) exploitation of eroticization, from sun-tan products to porno21

Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 153. B-H. Levy, “Power and Sex: An interview with Michel Foucault.” Telos 32 (1977):152–161, 158. 22

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graphic films. Responding precisely to the revolt of the body, we find a new mode of investment which presents itself no longer in the form of control by repression but that of stimulation. ‘Get undressed—but be slim, good-looking, tanned!’ For each move by one adversary, there is an answering one by the other.23

Paraphrasing Foucault, we could say that there is no great locus of Refusal; there is nothing against which power/knowledge is repressing.24 The body, as seems to be clear from these passages, is a construction of power through and through.25 Power produces not just the body but “... reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.” 26 All things, according to Foucault, seem to be nothing more than expressions of power. There are significant problems associated with what may be termed Foucault’s extreme social constructionist position of the human body. First, it was argued that the body provides the genealogist with the non-doxastic, untainted connection to how power has in fact manifested itself throughout history. But if the body is nothing but “interpretation all the way down” then what claim can genealogy make in being more ‘documentary gray’ than rival methods of historiography? Would not Habermas be correct when he notes that genealogies count no more and no less than any other historical interpretation?27 To be sure, some of Foucault’s defenders recognize the legitimacy of Habermas’ criticism and have advanced, what appear to be, two different solutions to cope with these concerns. The first solution tries to develop an onto23

Michel Foucault, “Body/Power” in Power/Knowledge, 55–62, 56–57. Foucault’s critique of the “The repressive hypothesis” is one of the important points made in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 12. 25 Earlier writings by Foucault like “Nietzsche, Freud Marx” also confirm Foucault’s constructionist stance: “There is nothing absolutely primary to interpret, because at bottom, everything is already an interpretation, each sign is in itself not the thing which is offered to interpretation, but interpretation of other signs. There is never, if you will, an interpretandum which is not already an interpretans.” Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud Marx.” Cahiers de Royaumont 6: Nietzsche. (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967) Trans. Jon Anderson Critical Texts III, 2, Winter `1986 26 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 194. Even in the later interview Pouvoir et Strategies, Foucault still adheres to this monistic view of power stating: ““I would suggest rather (but these are hypotheses which need exploring): (i) that power is co-extensive with the social body; there are no spaces of primal liberty between the”meshes of its network.” Foucault, “Power and Strategies.” Power/Knowledge, 134–145, 142. 27 See Jurgen Habermas’ The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 281. 24

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logical position I here call strict anti-essentialism, which upholds Foucault’s seemingly social constructionist view of the body while simultaneously arguing that some of the structures of the body are more contingent than others. The second way to defend Foucault is to claim that Foucault holds two different ontological views of the body: an empirical, superficial understanding of the body which power trains and invests and a second, deeper, ontological body which makes such training possible. In this section, I show why the latter view is clearly mistaken and demonstrate that while the former view has merit, it is unclear and needs to be restated. Deborah Cook argues for the first view. In her work, The Subject Finds a Voice, Cook holds that Foucault is not a mere constructionist when it comes to the body, but is clearly a realist of sorts. Power/knowledge does not produce the body, but rather reveals specific aspects of the body that already existed prior to our discovery of them. The body is a distinct object with definite structures and capacities that we can come to know. However, in other parts of her book, Cook seems to argue for an entirely different position. Cook writes: power and knowledge alone have created the body. Without its investment by these forces and without the discourses they have generated, the body, much like insanity in the Classical age, would not exist as a form, that is as a determinate object with specific qualities.28 (My Italics)

This quotation would seem to imply that Foucault is not a realist at all, but a nominalist of one stripe or another. All we have, indeed can ever have, are mere interpretations of the body. However, to attempt to discover what is underneath these interpretations is inchoate because it cannot be known. Yet, several pages after this passage, Cook indicates that there is some sort of material base upon which our interpretations of the body are grounded and, thus, just because it has no determinate shape does not mean that the body is a creation entirely.29

28

Deborah Cook, The Subject Finds a Voice, Foucault’s Turn Towards Subjectivity (New York: Peter Lang Revisioning Philosophy, 1993), 86. 29 Deborah Cook says as much on page 89 of The Subject Finds a Voice. Cook quotes the following passage from Discipline and Punish to account for this seeming interpretative contradiction: “The classical age discovered the body as object and target of power. It is easy enough to find signs of the attention then paid to the body—to the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skilful and increases its forces”. (My Italics) Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 136.

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One of the problems with Cook’s interpretation is that she does not seem to have the requisite ontological categories in place in order to classify, successfully, Foucault’s unorthodox ontological position (though I think she is on the right track for coming up with a satisfactory solution). For example, in discussing the formation of the sexual body and sexual discourse itself Cook writes, “Secondly, the knowledge associated with disciplinary power extracts from the body more information about its workings by obliging it to confess its secrets. The confession is the primary instrument of the Scientia Sexualis which has produced the sexual body.” 30 Once again, Cook contradicts herself by switching from a realist to an anti-realist viewpoint. Obviously, the force behind Foucault’s point is that knowledge is always power, and power, knowledge, because academic disciplines extract the essential secrets from the body so that the body’s inherent powers can be harnessed for economic and sexual production. Knowledge, that is, is discovering the real properties of the body so that it can understand these properties in order to better employ them. The force of Foucault’s point is mitigated if power/knowledge only extracts the secrets from a construction that does not actually exist. This last revelation also leads us to a second and related problem: if the body is merely a creation of power/knowledge then Cook must provide an explanation as to why discipline and surveillance work. Bio-power is always finding new ways and methods to successfully control each and every individual, while also making the individual more useful. Cook does not explain how the body can be successfully manipulated if power/knowledge were not in fact bringing to light fundamental structures and capacities inherent in all bodies.31 But, by far the most important problem regarding Foucault’s anti-essentialist interpretation of the body is with the ethical axis. Because if the body is completely passive, then how can we ever think, what Foucault calls “the outside” of power/knowledge? How can genealogy truly think the “Unthought?” That is, how may the genealogist remain critical of a particular dispositif if the 30

Cook, The Subject Finds a Voice, 89. This criticism and suggestion is raised, for the first time that I am aware of in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow’s excellent work on Foucault: Michel Foucault Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). However, in order to resolve how Foucault’s philosophical idea of the body can retain the sort of ‘instruction’ that bio-power imparts on the body, Dreyfus and Rabinow claim that it may be possible that Foucault is trying to establish the nascent structures of the body pace Merleau-Ponty. This position, however, as Foucault explicitly makes clear in an interview a year later, is not plausible. 31

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body, along with the individual, is a mere product of an historical system? How is resistance possible? Many scholars criticize Foucault precisely because of the above “resistance problem.” Elizabeth Grosz for example, in Volatile Bodies, persuasively argues that Foucault’s body is nothing more than a passive plaything for power/knowledge. Therefore any political and social philosophy built upon a Foucauldian conception of the body can never ‘truly get off the ground.’ 32 Put in other terms, Grosz’s point is that if Foucault’s idea of the body is one, that as Judith Butler also argues, is “totally imprinted by discourse” and that discourse is one of power/knowledge then it seems impossible for another discourse, another voice, to enter into such a monologue.33 Authentic resistance, therefore, would be impossible. Although neither of these writers presents in clear-cut terms the epistemological problems inherent in holding such an anti-essentialist view of the body, nonetheless, they have demonstrated an important problem for the ethical axis that needs to be addressed. A fourth difficulty with an anti-essentialist approach is raised by Nick Fox. Since Foucault denies any essential self, “such analyses” Fox writes, “leaves the non-discursive physical body entirely divorced from the discursive body written by power/knowledge.” 34 In other words, the same criticism that Foucault leveled at Merleau-Ponty in The Order of Things, as discussed in chapter one, can now be leveled at Foucault: on the one hand, a Foucauldian analysis holds that the body is construed to be an entity that transcends power/knowledge interpretations of it, yet simultaneously, the body is also considered to be an empirical object created solely by power/knowledge. Thus, the problem lies precisely in identifying how the first conception of the body or the non-discursive, (as a thing-in-itself) now relates and somehow conditions the discursive or (phenomenal) body. Both views of the body leave us with an unsatisfactory choice and the result, as is perhaps clear, is a new transcendental-empirical doublet: if the body is transcendent, beyond our understanding, then as Fox correctly notes this “leaves us with a meaningless and pointless construct. As such, the 32

See especially chapter 6 of Elizabeth Grosz’ Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. 33 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, (London: Routledge, 1990), 129–130. The same point is also made by Scott Lash when he writes that Foucault’s body is “passive and largely devoid of causal powers” in the very important paper: “Genealogy and the Body: Foucault/Delueze/Nietzsche” in M. Featherstone, M. Hepworth and B.S. Turner The Body, (London: Sage publishers, 1991), 261–270. 34 Fox, 424.

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‘sociology of the body’ becomes the ‘sociology of ?’ ” 35 While, on the other hand, if we accept that the body is an empirical and historical entity through and through, then we run into the problem explained above: Foucault’s body could never escape his ontology of power; bodily resistance would be impossible. Putting both views together is unintelligible and does not get us any closer to understanding what the relationship is or could be, between the non-discursive body and the discursive one. With these four problems in mind, it would appear as though Foucault’s ontological position with respect to the body in a genealogical investigation is doomed to be incoherent from the start. But that conclusion would be a mistake. Although there are a number of passages from Foucault’s oeuvre which suggest that the body is nothing but a construction of power/knowledge, nevertheless, underlying this explicit rejection of an essentialist conception of the body there is an implicit recognition that behind the discourses of power/ knowledge there remains something which is ahistorical after all. Indeed, on the last page of The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, Foucault not only suggests, from an ontological standpoint, that there is a body underneath the gloss of power/ knowledge, but indeed that it may be from such a body that we may be able to resist power effectively. Foucault writes, Moreover, we need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps in a different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite understand how the ruses of sexuality, and the power that sustains its organizations, were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we became dedicated to their endless task of forcing its secret, of exacting the truest confession from a shadow.36

Foucault not only seems to be suggesting that ‘sexuality’, as a discourse, is predicated on a fictional body that it alone constructs, he also seems to be arguing that beneath this discourse there still remains an economy of pleasures (drives?) circumscribed by what we call a ‘body,’ which may undergo yet another interpretation in a different dispositif But, if this is indeed Foucault’s view on the body then how do we square it with those passages which specifically argue for a constructionist, anti-essentialist position? Does this passage indicate that there is a cognitive and non-cognitive Foucault? Is Foucault claiming that genealogy studies the historically constituted body and that underneath this constitution there is a primordial, pristine and essential body from where power may be resisted? In order to explore these questions further, I now wish to investigate 35 36

Fox, 423. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 159.

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the possibility of upholding a purely essentialist view of the body in relationship to a genealogical mode of inquiry.

Section V: The Essential Body and Genealogy The essentialist position makes three claims which have epistemic, ontological and ethical consequences for the three axes of genealogical inquiry: 1) That underneath the historical, cultural or sociological interpretations of the ‘body’, there remains a natural or essential body which ultimately ‘grounds’ any interpretation of the body; 2) Genealogy has direct and epistemically justified access to this natural or essential body; 3) If the genealogist can understand and read the body correctly, then he or she can understand the true origins of history, society, religion, culture and, most importantly for Nietzsche and Foucault, morality, in order to create new, healthier values (in the Nietzschean sense of healthy) and new, healthier ways of living. Since there are far more passages in Nietzsche’s oeuvre to suggest that he was in fact in favor of this position, I now turn to investigate these key passages in order to flesh out this claim in full. In general, Nietzsche argues that we may understand the body if we are able to read the body correctly. Moreover, academic disciplines, like physiology and medicine, provide us with the proper interpretative rubrics for this “correct” reading. Finally, it is from this reading that we can come to understand the true origin of moral virtues.37 This position is well corroborated throughout Nietzsche’s late works. In section 57 of the Anti-Christ for example, Nietzsche argues that there are three distinct human body types. He goes on to argue that there is a set of moral beliefs, attitudes and dispositions which correspond to one’s physiological type.38 Furthermore, in The Will to Power Nietzsche writes that the goal of genealogy is “to understand all moral judgments as symptoms and a language of signs which betray the processes of physiological despair or failure.” 39 Finally, as demonstrated in chapter one, there are numerous sections in both the Genealogy and in Beyond Good and Evil which confirm the above interpretation. Taking these passages together, the purpose of genealogy, 37

As already mentioned, the importance of physiology and medicine cannot be underestimated in Nietzsche’s genealogical theory. See Book 1 Sec. 17 of The Genealogy. 38 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, sec. 57, 189–191 39 Nietzsche, The Will-to-Power, section 258, 139.

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it may be argued, is to diagnosis the physiological causes for the moral and cultural failings of society. The body then, is not just another historical document on equal footing with any other for the genealogist rather, the body is the immutable and permanent bedrock for culture and society in the first place. In short, the genealogist, as Daniel Ahern suggests, becomes the physician of culture by diagnosing (and in some cases) curing, our moral and social ailments via an examination of the body.40 Perhaps the best explanation and interpretation of this strong, ahistorical, essentialist view of Nietzschean genealogy, is expressed in Richard S.G. Brown’s article: “Nihilism: Thus Speaks Physiology.” Brown writes: In other words in the first formulation, Nietzsche argues that our surface values(morality) can be read as a sign language of the underlying affects of a herd, race or individual. In the second formulation however, Nietzsche claims that it is possible to read from the physiological needs or existential parameters of a herd, race, individual, to their respective values, that is, to be actually in a position to predict the morality or moral values that should be a reflection of the underlying physiological needs.41

To be sure, there is much to be said for this interpretation. What Brown suggests is that Nietzsche places greater significance on the second physiological formulation of genealogy rather than the first. That is to say, a person’s physiology or perhaps better put, his or her body type, is responsible for one’s moral and conscious development. In sum, one interprets from one’s bodily affects. If these affects are active and outward reaching, then we can expect that person’s beliefs to belong to the ascending type; they are strong, healthy and say ‘Yes and Amen’ to life. If, on the other hand, one’s affects are passive and reach inwardly then one’s beliefs are of the descending type; they are 40

See Ahern’s Nietzsche as Cultural Physician, 28. Richard S.G. Brown, 136. Brown retains much of this view in his recent “Nietzsche that Profound Physiologist” but places a decidedly Nagelian spin on his original interpretation. To my mind, Brown represents the strongest physiological, essentialist position in the secondary literature. While many other interpreters note the significant role that physiological and medicinal terms play in Nietzsche’s thought and philosophy, they never clearly determine whether Nietzsche’s discussions on physiology and health are to be taken metaphorically or literally. For this ‘weaker’ essentialism see Malcom Pasley’s “Nietzsche’s Use of Medical Terms.” In Nietzsche: Imagery and Thought ed. Malcom Pasley (Berkley: California University Press: 1978), 123–158. See also Thomas Long’s “Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Medicine.” Nietzsche Studien Band 19, (1990), 112–128. The above two articles are paradigmatic examples of this much more vocal (weak essentialist) school of interpretation. 41

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unhealthy because they say ‘No’ to life. As is clear, this is a strict historical epiphenomenalism: in order to understand a past culture, one need simply examine the physical environment of the inhabitants of that culture including their physical needs; their land, language, neighbour and sky as Zarathustra says.42 From a genealogical point of view, such a method, if sound, would possess tremendous advantages. First, it would mean that all civilizations, historical events and/or even great persons could be better understood if the genealogist was able to interpret, correctly, the physiological, medicinal or ecological needs and requirements of such things. In effect, the great complexity of history can one and all be reduced to a single cause we call the ‘body.’ But, on the other hand, such an interpretation presents more problems than it solves and is explicitly anti-genealogical. For this interpretation of genealogy presupposes an “Ursprung”, or metaphysical origin after all. To philosophize and to practice genealogy in this manner is to be much like the dogmatic ‘men of science’ whom Nietzsche criticizes in essay one and three of the Genealogy. In effect, Nietzsche criticizes these men for their Egyptianism: their unquestioned faith in the so called “scientific truths” which they have discovered. The problem, however, is that by holding such a strong, essentialist view of the body as Brown and Ahern clearly do, is that we may not be critical of our very own form of Egyptianism. That is to say, the body becomes some sort of transcendent, unquestionable, absolute foundation of culture capable of helping us to understand our culture, our history and ourselves to be sure, but also acting as a limit and boundary for potential human possibilities. Rather than offering new possibilities, perhaps even dangerous and unexplored possibilities for living never before undertaken by humans, the purpose of genealogy, according to the essentialist, would be to mark, trace and categorize human beings into pre-ordained categories according to each individual’s peculiar body-type. Thus, the ethical axis, the axis responsible for providing the individual with new and untold possible flights of thought and action, would always and already be circumscribed by our specific body type. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, there is an epistemic problem associated with this interpretation: if the body is the one text in direct contact with the true well springs of humanity and civilization, then how exactly do we gain access to this so called “real body?” As Foucault points out in Discipline and 42

“Truly, my brother if you only knew a people’s need and land and sky and neighbour you could surely divine the law of its overcomings and why it is upon this ladder that it mounts its highest hope.” From Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra trans. R.J. Holingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), Book 1 sec. 9.

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Punish, our bodies are subjected to an unremitting normalizing power that runs from the penitentiary to the school, to the hospital, to the factory, to the barracks and finally back to the penitentiary. Given this interpretation, then how, one might query, would we know for certain that we have epistemic access to the ‘real’ body and not some disciplined forgery? If our bodies, from an external standpoint, are always under control by the twin aspects of bio-power, (surveillance and discipline) where does the undisciplined body start and where does the disciplined body end? We can also view this same problem from an internal perspective. If we interpret with our affects and our affects are predicated on our body type then what sort of genealogical history would one produce if one were already weak, impotent and pessimistic? In short, if this interpretation of Nietzsche is right, if it is in fact the case that our moral, epistemic and historical beliefs are nothing but the product of our body type, then would not Nietzsche’s own illness and poor health discredit much of his genealogy and philosophy? In short we might ask of these interpreters: ‘How can we recognize physical regression in others if the genealogist is in a state of physical regression to being with?’ Thirdly and from an ontological viewpoint, Nietzsche’s suggestion to look to medicine and other cognate disciplines to understand an individual’s physiological type is unhelpful in terms of distinguishing between the “true” body from the cultural body. For if we are to use physiological models to capture the essence of the body, then this presupposes that the physiological model of the body (as developed by the biological sciences) accurately describes what the body is, as it is, in and of itself. However, this seems to contradict both Nietzsche and Foucault’s understanding of genealogy. If we remember, a central claim of the essentialist position is that an individual, whether he or she is an historian, physician, “average joe” or even a genealogist, always interprets the world from his or her bodily affects. But since Nietzsche is quite clear that the physician and scientist in his own day are infected with the priestly values of asceticism and impotence, then their diagnoses would be merely the products of unhealthy perspectives.43 This tension between interpreting concepts like healthy/unhealthy, active/re-active, and life-affirming/life-denying in either metaphorical or literal terms is highlighted by Gregory Moore in his book Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor. On this problem Moore writes, Their work (Nietzsche’s contemporaries who were also interested in degeneration, decadence and eugenics) also lacks the fundamental contradictoriness of Nietzsche’s position—a nineteenth-century faith in the institutional authority of the biological 43

See especially the third book of the Genealogy.

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philosophical genealogy, volume i sciences which co-exists uneasily with a belief that these same disciplines are infected with false values; the characteristic hovering between literalness and metaphor, sincerity and irony.44

Without specifying the precise manner in which he is drawing upon the terms and concepts used in the biological and medical sciences it is difficult to comprehend how Nietzsche foresaw how health serves as the model for the ascending/descending type. If the disciplines of medicine, biology and physiology seem to be infected with Christian morality as well, then Nietzsche’s description of the strong and weak types seems at best vacuous and, at worst, completely and irrevocably inchoate. From the above criticisms of the essentialist position, it becomes clear why Foucault’s ‘Nietzsche Genealogy History’ can be read both as marking a definite allegiance to Nietzsche’s genealogical method, but also as a critique of this method. As Foucault writes on this very problem, “Why does Nietzsche challenge the pursuit of the origin (Ursprung), at least on those occasions when he is truly a genealogist?” (My Italics)45 After this paragraph, there is a conscious attempt by Foucault to further distance his genealogical method from that of Nietzsche’s.46 It is my contention that Foucault recognized (though only implicitly) some of the above problems with Nietzsche’s understanding of the body and, as a result, offered an alternative account of the body (as already noted) for genealogical purposes. Thus, it is clear that genealogy cannot be subtended by an ‘‘essential body’’ for the reasons outlined above. The question now turns on whether it is possible to re-work a Foucauldian constructivist view of the body such that we may gain the epistemological and ontological advantages from an essentialist approach along with combining these with a position more conducive to the spirit of genealogy.

Section VI: Truth, Power, Ethics and the Body In this, the final section of this chapter, I would like to re-investigate Foucault’s conception of the body in the hopes of making sense of the last page of The History 44

Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor, 211. Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, 78. 46 The principal problem that Foucault raises here, can clearly be seen in the preface to Zur Genealogie der Morals, specifically sections five and six where Nietzsche uses Herkunft (stock) interchangeably with Ursprung (origin). 45

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of Sexuality. If we remember, Foucault seemed to indicate that the body may have an economy of pleasures outside of sexual discourse. What’s more, he seems to indicate that if we were able first to extricate these pleasures from power/knowledge and then cultivate these pleasures that we would be free from domination. I argue that any so called recuperation of the body is inconsistent with much of Foucault’s work in this period. A new interpretation must be tried. My second task in this section is to criticize the ways in which scholars have tried to supplement, as it were, Foucault’s understanding of the body with a phenomenological account of embodiment. The reason for “beefing Foucault up” by means of supplementary philosophical positions is to make metaphysical elbow room for resistance. If all there is in the final analysis is power then resistance is impossible. I am sympathetic to this solution, but find it to be fraught with problems as well as being inconsistent with the essence of genealogy. Finally, my last task in this chapter is to sketch the minimal ontological and epistemological conception of the body a genealogical mode of investigation requires. Regarding Foucault’s excursus on the economy of pleasures within the body on the last page of The History of Sexuality, it appears at first glance that this passage seems to be at odds with Foucault’s overall position on the body in much of his oeuvre. The passages I quoted in section III overwhelmingly suggest that there is no thing called the ‘body’ underneath the historical interpretations of the ‘body.’ But the problem does not simply lie on the level of interpretation because there are intrinsic ontological and epistemological problems with this constructivist position. Foucault claims that the body is manipulated and trained by power/knowledge. However, in order for this claim to have the sort of force he wishes it to have, he would then, seemingly, have to admit that power/knowledge is in fact, discovering the essential properties and forces of the body in order to better control and exploit them. It is for these two reasons that Nancy Fraser, in Unruly Practices, questions whether Foucault, after all, may be advocating the recovering of ‘a particular conception of the body’ beyond all disciplinary power.47 It is also for the last reason that Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow also validate Fraser’s insight when they suggest that Foucault’s goal may be “to give content to Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of le corps Propre.” 48 Although, to be sure, Foucault’s account of the body would be somewhat different than Merleau-Ponty’s, nevertheless, Dreyfus and Rabinow suggest 47

See Nancy Fraser’s Unruly Practices, (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 1989), 54–69. 48 See Dreyfus and Rabinow’s Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 206.

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that Foucault “seems to be heading in this direction.” 49 I think both of these possibilities can be ruled out. First, with regard to Fraser’s point, I think it is a misinterpretation to read Foucault’s last page of the History of Sexuality as a dismissal of his earlier constructionist view of the body. A better interpretation is to suggest that Foucault’s purpose in discussing the body the way in which he does in this passage is to highlight the agonic, characterless, chaotic nature of power and the indefinite struggle between power and resistance. In “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” Foucault concretizes this point by implying that to ask: ‘What is the body?’ or ‘What is desire’ in and of itself is misguided because these very ‘things’ are only constructed after they have been “problematized.” 50 New things come into being when they become reinterpreted by other things for new purposes. Foucault’s point then, is not to resist power from those ‘eternal bodily structures beyond all dispositifs’, but rather to demonstrate that the ‘orders’ or ‘grids’ of bio-power are never fixed. But, Foucault suggests, if these structures are never definitively fixed, never definitively ordered, then it follows that alternative ways of structuring both self and body are inherently possible. So, while the last page of The History of Sexuality does suggest that Foucault is advancing his own ontological position of the body, he does so only to demonstrate that new formations and creations of the body are inherently possible. Therefore, it seems more plausible to interpret this passage in accordance with Foucault’s earlier, clearly constructionist stance. Concerning the second problem, I think it is clear that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “lived body” is not only inconsistent with Foucault’s view but, in addition, is unhelpful in resolving the problem of how bio-power and resistance are possible. If we remember, it is because Foucault acknowledges that bio-power successfully discovers our bodily ‘secrets’ in order to better harness our productive and procreative powers which implies that there is some sort of primordial body already ‘there’ prior to our interpretations. Furthermore, this ‘primordial body’ cannot also be a mere construction without the entire claim being epistemically incoherent and, in general, weakening Foucault’s thesis. For if the body were just a construction it would vitiate Foucault’s point; if the body is nothing but a historical construction in the first place then why care if 49

See Dreyfus and Rabinow’s Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 207. 50 Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of a Work in Progress” in The Foucault Reader, 350.

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bio-power is extracting our so called secrets? On the other hand, if Foucault accepts that these secrets are real, that is, these secrets are representative of the capacities of our actual bodies beyond any dispositif, then Foucault falls back into an essentialist position. As a way of escaping either horn of this dilemma Dreyfus and Rabinow suggest that Foucault may be a closet Merleau-Pontian. I hold that we can clearly rule out this interpretation in both its past and current forms. The first interpretation, as advanced by Dreyfus and Rabinow, we may describe as a foundationalist interpretation of Merleau-Ponty. The second is more of a historical approach recently advanced by Joanne Oksala in Foucault on Freedom. To rule out this attempt at supplementing Foucault, I briefly examine Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the “lived-body” as presented in The Phenomenology of Perception to show that Foucault implicitly and explicitly rejects such a conception of the body. With regard to the second approach, I argue that it is incoherent and unnecessary. According to Merleau-Ponty, it is the body-subject which is the mediator of the world. As a body-subject, I exist within a concrete environment and provide meaning to this environment. I am the core of meaning to the world, and the body, therefore, forms my ‘being-in-the-world.’ Although Merleau-Ponty is still a phenomenologist, this revealed world does not present itself from a constituting consciousness through a series of judgments, definitions and other conscious acts pace Husserl. Merleau-Ponty holds rather, that the world becomes significant on an unconscious level through the nascent structures of the body-subject. In addition, these structures and ‘grounds’ of intentionality, reveal me in a situation; a situation with various possibilities of being and which make my act of reflection on these possibilities itself possible.The principal manner in which I, as a “lived-body” relate to my world, according to Merleau-Ponty, is through perception: “The theory of the body…Merleau Ponty writes,…is already a theory of perception.” 51 The body forms a communion with the world through perception (broadly construed to include not just sight but all of the senses) since it is only through perception that the world can have any sort of meaning in the first place.52 Furthermore, the manner in which I perceive objects in the world is through a synthesis of perceptions. When I look at a cup for example, I can never see it from the infinite number of angles and contexts from which it can be seen. But, by looking at it from a number of different angles and perspectives, I arrive at a better understanding 51

See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, Trans. Colin Smith, (London: Routledge, 1962), 203. 52 Merleau- Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, 212.

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of the cup. The world then, for Merleau-Ponty, “is not an object such that I have in my possession the law of its making; it is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thought and all my explicit perceptions.” 53 This however, does not mean that the world is related to the subject in terms of a constituted phenomenal world and a transcendental noumenal realm which can never be known. Although it is true that there can be no final synthesis of the perceived object, because we are situated with a body, nonetheless, syntheses can be established through time, in which the object undergoes changes and transformations in the process. As a lived body then, I, as a subject, am always within a world of both truth and falsehood because a complete synthesis of objects is impossible. However, this does not mean that distinctions within this realm are not possible. The subject for Merleau-Ponty gives meaning to his world and yet is always situated within this same world. This meaning, however, more often than not, takes place on a pre-conscious level or that of the lived-body. For instance, the conception of ‘space’ is first formed in relationship to the body. Before we can even conceive of Newtonian space as an absolute container for all things, we already have an idea of space on an intuitional and hence bodily level. For example, the cup full of coffee in front of me is near and ready-to-hand. I am aware of its presence and its meaning for me in terms of my predilection to become thirsty. I am both aware of where it is and how far I have to reach in order to grasp it. In fact, it is my awareness of how far I have to reach for it which causes me to become aware of the “where” of the cup. Furthermore, I can also increase the motility of my body. For example, Merleau-Ponty notes that before we get use to a hat, car, cane, etc., we test it out in the world. We see for example what places the car can fit into and what it cannot or what the stick can reach that the arm could not.54 In addition, we are able to increase our sense of motility not because we understand how to use these objects in relationship to an absolute, primordial space, but rather by understanding or own bodily space first. In short, we can understand how to use other things, according to Merleau-Ponty, because we “incorporate them (these objects) into the bulk of our body.” 55 Oriented space, sensitive meaning and even sexual meaning, lie on the preconscious level of understanding. These are some of the nascent 53

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Adventures of the Dialectic trans. Joseph Beins ( Northwestern University Press: 1972), 107–108. 54 Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, 142. 55 Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, 143.

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structures Dreyfus and Rabinow were referring to when they claimed that Foucault’s understanding of the ahistorical body might possibly be viewed as continuing the work of Merleau-Ponty. However, it should be obvious by now that Foucault does not think of sexuality as a nascent, ahistorical structure of the human body. The entire first volume of The History of Sexuality, as well as numerous other interviews and essays, as I have shown, refute this interpretation. In addition, according to Merleau-Ponty: “sexuality, without being the object of any intended act of consciousness, can underlie and guide specified forms of my experience. Taken in this way, as an ambiguous atmosphere, sexuality is co-extensive with life.” 56 But if Foucault truly subscribed to Merleau-Ponty’s view of the body and more specifically Merleau-Ponty’s view on sexuality then it would be self-contradictory for him to provide a genealogical analysis of the concept of sex when, according to MerleauPonty, such a concept can never be completely “outstripped.” 57 It forms a necessary structure of the body that can never be fully grasped at the conscious level of experience. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty’s nascent structures of the lived body seem difficult to square with the view of the body Foucault advances. Foucault seems to hold that there is nothing but “interpretation all the way down” when analyzing any given concept, idea or “thing” including the body. We have seen that our notion of sex, a concept that we believe to be inherently part of our physiology, is nothing more than an historical deployment by power/knowledge. And indeed, even prior to Foucault’s explicit genealogical turn, Foucault still denied any sort of ahistorical structure to the human body. In Birth of the Clinic Foucault writes: “The exact superposition of the ‘body’ of the disease and the body of the sick is no more than a historical temporary datum. There have been, and will be, other distributions of illness.” 58 We may call the above arguments implicit rejections by Foucault, of MerleauPonty’s position of the “lived body” but there are also explicit rejections of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the body in at least two of Foucault’s works. In The Order of Things, Foucault accuses both Merleau-Ponty (as well as Husserl) of putting forth a self-refuting, empirical-transcendental doublet called ‘Man,’ while in “Theatrum Philosophicum” Foucault celebrates Delueze’s position on

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Merleau-Ponty The Phenomenology of Perception, 169. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, 171. 58 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception trans. A.M. Sheridan-Smith (London: Tavistock, 1973.), 3. 57

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the body which, in many ways, is antithetical to Merelau-Ponty’s. I now present Foucault’s criticism of Merleau-Ponty in greater detail. The nucleus of the concept ‘Man’, according to Foucault, is first clearly ‘ordered’ in the West by Kant. This unique construct, ‘Man’, simultaneously constitutes the objects of his or her experience via the transcendental aesthetic and the categories, while is himself an empirical object who is experienced by others. By postulating the idea of an embodied subject, Merleau-Ponty is attempting to understand subjectivity in terms of a transcendental being (Man) that gives meaning to things because his subjectivity is an intentional process. But at the same time we, as subjects, are always situated within a concrete, objective environment that forms, what Merleau-Ponty calls, our “cultural sedimentation,” which is, to some extent, beyond our control. The problem with such a view, according to Foucault, is that Merleau-Ponty fails to realize that his philosophical musings are purely empirical, historical and therefore arbitrary. In other words, Foucault’s point is that by employing the same starting point as Kant, namely ‘Man’, Merleau-Ponty’s ontology can never go beyond the historical.59 ‘Man’, according to Foucault, was brought into being when representation no longer became identical with thought. The painting, Las Meninas, which Foucault laboriously analyzes, depicts the impossibility of representing the subject in the Classical era: Perhaps there exists, in this painting by Velazquez, the representation as it were, of Classical representation, and the definition of the space it opens up to us. And, indeed representation undertakes to represent itself here in all its elements, with its images, the eyes to which it is offered, the faces it makes visible, the gestures that call it into being. But there, in the midst of this dispersion which it is simultaneously grouping together and spreading out before us, indicated compellingly from every side, is an essential void: the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation-of the person it resembles and the person whose eyes it is only a resemblance. This very subject-which is the same - has been elided.60

Kant is seen by Foucault as the first thinker to call into question the new problem of subjectivity. The subject of the modern age is much different than that of the Classical because the subject now becomes the very source of his own representation. Kant understood the need to ground our knowledge on something more primordial than mere representation. By introducing the condi-

59 60

Foucault, The Order of Things, 320–321. Foucault, The Order of Things, 16.

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tions of knowledge into thought, Kant made the human being both the subject and object of knowledge. This Copernican revolution in thought, as Kant came to describe his system, then led, Foucault believes, to the philosophies and empirical studies of Life (Biology), Labor (Economics) and Language (Linguistics). These three studies then formed what Foucault calls our modern historical a priori. As already noted in chapter one, a historical a priori may be defined as a historical positivity of discourse which sets the condition for the reality of statements.61 It constitutes the discursive limits as it were that thinkers worked with at a given time. The important point to note here though, is that we should not think of Kant’s Copernican revolution as a necessary development in the course of scientific advancement, but rather understand that it was merely a new way of “ordering things” within history. Foucault’s critique of Merleau-Ponty then, is that Merleau-Ponty takes man or the body-subject as his fundamental, ontological starting point for understanding both the subject and the world. But by revealing the structures within the body, Merleau-Ponty is attempting to understand the relationship between ‘Man’ and world as a transcendental structure that provides meaning to the empirical world, while since ‘Man’ has a body, he is also an empirical entity because he is part of the world. Foucault thinks that such an approach is naive and irrelevant for two reasons. First, the starting point itself is historical. Therefore, such an investigation can never arrive at ontological certitude. The phenomenologist cannot get any ontological traction because he is spinning his wheels in the ever changing and shifting sands of history. Second, if the body is always transcendent, always in some sense noumenal, always in a sense beyond our understanding, then we can never adequately bridge this gap between ‘this’ noumenal body and our own experiential, empirical or phenomenal body that both we and others experience as an object in the world. In short, the same unbridgeable chasm between Kant’s noumenal and phenomenal realm remains for Merleau-Ponty’s transcendental body and empirical body: we never arrive at a satisfactory understanding of our bodies or of ourselves as ‘lived bodies’ because the body too is “always just beyond our reach.” Turning to Foucault’s Deleuzian leanings, we can see that Foucault is very much in agreement with Deleuze with respect to the latter’s numerous criticisms of the celebrated phenomenologist. In “Theatrum Philosophicum” for example, Foucault explicitly criticizes Merleau-Ponty. According to Foucault, Merleau-Ponty failed (unlike Deleuze), to grasp the philosophical significance of 61

Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 127.

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the “event”. Foucault writes: “It is either the cat whose good sense precedes the smile or the common sense of the smile that anticipates the cat. Either Sartre or Merleau-Ponty.” 62 Rather than adopting either of these approaches, instead, Foucault admires Deleuze’s philosophy of the phantasm: the event that functions at the limit of bodies; against bodies, because they stick to bodies and protrude from them, but also because they touch them, cut them, break them into sections, regionalize them, and multiply their surfaces; and equally outside of bodies”...63

This view, however, as we saw, is the exact opposite of Merleau-Ponty’s. The body, according to Merleau-Ponty is viewed as a unity connected to the world by perception. The body through its nascent structures arrives at a better understanding of the world and provides the world with meaning. However, what Foucault seems to be celebrating here in Deleuze’s text, is the exact opposite of this notion, namely, the discombobulation of meaning that is found not ‘within’ the body, but rather around the ‘territory’ of bodies. In addition, the meaning of my experience according to Merleau-Ponty, seems to come from within the very deep structures of the body as subject. For Deleuze on the other hand, the phantasm exists on the outskirts of bodies. The phantasm topologizes the body as a whole and rests on the surface of bodies and even in between bodies.64 The event or phantasm can be reduced neither to a context of meaning nor, to the deep, underlying, pre-reflective structures of any one body. Thus, Foucault is not, contrary to Dreyfus and Rabinow, expanding nor expounding upon Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the lived-body. This brief examination of Foucault’s notion of the body still begs the question as to what the body is in and of itself. But perhaps, more importantly, we are still no closer to understanding how the body is able to retain the ‘lessons’ learned from disciplinary practices, nor how the body relates to the world, history and genealogy. Foucault’s anti-essentialist body is clearly incapable of answering any of these questions. For these reasons, Oksala makes a similar attempt as Dreyfus and Rabinow do, to ground Foucault’s body on something more primordial. But this attempt, too, as we will see, fails. 62

Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum.” Language, Counter-memory Practice, 175. 63 Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 169–170. 64 Foucault, “Threatrum Philosophicum.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 178.

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The second attempt at supplementing Foucault with Merleau-Ponty, as presented by Johanna Oksala is equally problematic. This position suggests a non-foundational reading of the body which is also consistent with Foucault’s historically constituted body. In the words of Oksala: “Rather than grounding the possibility of resistance on a foundationalist reading of Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject, which assumes the body to have a nascent logos, I will construct a non-foundational reading that is compatible with Foucault’s understanding of the body as historically constituted.” 65 Okasala’s first task is to re-interpret Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the body-subject as an ahistorical, foundational structure as understood by the likes of Dreyfus and Rabinow and instead to show that Merleau-Ponty’s, so called, “nascent structures” of the body subject are historically constituted. Drawing upon the work of Iris Young and Judith Butler but also criticizing these two scholars, Oksala claims that Merleau-Ponty was not merely interested in arguing for the historical situatedness of the body-subject, but also wanted to argue for the historical constitution of body-subjects. The difference between “historical situatedness” and “historical constitution” is that for the former, the body-subject “forms a universal foundation for subjectivity that only assumes different guises in different historical situations.” 66 As seen from the above excursus, sexuality is such a structure as it can never be outstripped: cultural sedimentation, to be sure, impacts a subject’s sexual behavior, relations and perhaps even desires, but sex, here understood as heterosexual relations, is something which is not historically constructed, but finds itself modified according to the cultural regulations and interpretations of different historical epochs. Historical constitution, on the other hand, suggests that even sexuality is part of cultural sedimentation and, therefore, the manner in which the subject relates to sexuality is itself constituted by the social and historical milieu in which subjects find themselves.67 Arguing against either horn of this disjunctive, Oksala offers a much more nuanced and empirically minded approach. Oksala argues that there are three entwined aspects of the Merleau-Pontian body-subject: 1) an anonymous, prepersonal subjectivity (the tacit cogito; 2) a personal subjectivity; and 3) interpersonal intersubjectivity. The pre-personal subjectivity is what may be referred to as the nascent corps propre discussed above. It provides the body-subject with an orientation within an environment and makes subjectivity possible. 65 66 67

Johanna Oksala, Foucault on Freedom, (Cambridge University Press: 2005), 133. Oksala, 137. Ibid, 137.

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Subjectivity, as we saw earlier, is always intimately imbricated with both body and world because my subjectivity is merely one with my existence as body. Now, what is unique with Oksala’s interpretation is that whereas this sort of subjectivity has been construed to be foundational for personal subjectivity, it is not necessarily foundational for interpersonal subjectivity. By drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s later essay, The Child’s Relations with Others, Oksala effectively demonstrates that even pre-personal subjectivity is historically constituted by an inter-subjective environment. Young children develop an increasing refined sense of bodily awareness through interacting with other children in a myriad of ways such as, for example, learning the norms of play (learning what type of “play” counts as too rough or appropriate). This understanding of what counts as appropriate play and what counts as rough play, for example, is something learned and eventually “absorbed” by the body. But, Oksala says, once learned it is something which does not require attentive meditation: it becomes incorporated into our very body subject. Thus, the 3rd level of subjectivity—intersubjective subjectivity—helps to constitute the 1st level, the tacit cogito. While I agree with Oksala in that both foundational and anti-foundational aspects are present in Merleau-Ponty’s work, I do not see how this point is either relevant or helpful for understanding the relationship between power and the body as understood by Foucault. In fact, it seems to obscure the problem further by only re-introducing the entire question that was to be answered, namely: ‘How does the body resist power?’ As Oksala mentions on many occasions the way in which the body becomes a body-subject is essentially ambiguous: “Our relationship to the world is fundamentally ambiguous and therefore resists conceptualization.” 68 And, two pages later, Oksala states: “The lived body is characterized by a fundamental indeterminacy because its relationship to the world is essentially open and dynamic.” 69 Finally, on the very same page and perhaps in an effort to clarify what amounts to a very unclear understanding of the historically constituted body-subject, Oksala writes: “The relationship between subjective, bodily normativity and the intersubjective horizon of meanings is dynamically interlocked in constant oscillation: shifting, resisting and adapting.” 70 Disappointingly, a more precise formulation of the constitution of the body is never advanced. In order for Oksala’s grafting of Foucauldian analyzes of power onto the Merleau-Pontian ‘lived body’ to work, it seems as though she would have to explain, in far clearer and more precise detail, how the body 68 69 70

Oksala, 149. Oksala, 151. Oksala, 151–152.

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absorbs disciplinary discourses and techniques. However, without an empirical investigation into these matters, Oksala does little in the way of resolving the ontological problems explicated above. A more promising interpretation would be to go the other way around: to demonstrate that the physical structures of the body, as defined by the biological and chemical sciences, are not static, but are dynamic: they are subject to change and can be changed by the subject. I describe this notion of the body to be that of a “looping kind of thing” as the subject is able to change and alter the body only by first understanding the biological structures of the body. This does not mean there would be no role for inter-subjective practices to play, but it does accord more weight (as it should be) to the physical constitution of the body rather than to inter-subjective sedimentation a la Oksala. Foucault, after all, is at great pains to demonstrate how techniques of discipline, surveillance and normalization are anything but inter-subjective in the sense that they are produced by the “life-world”, culture or society. Rather, he wants to show us that they are pan-subjective in the sense that inter-subjective meanings are produced by the existing power relations within specific environments which can be concretely analyzed and where strategies for normalization are historically documented. If Foucault is right; that we live in a carceral regime and that the individual is one of the prime effects of power, then it is important to analyze how, exactly, the individual serves as a conduit of power thereby helping to reinforce, albeit unconsciously, normalizing tendencies. By claiming that the process is ultimately ambiguous is to mystify the process of normalization and therefore by extension to mystify the process of authentic resistance as well. Cressida J. Heyes in her recent book entitled Foucault, Ethics and Normalized Bodies fleshes out the above point in wonderful detail. By examining how female bodies are normalized both through certain television programs (Extreme Makeover), as well as in concrete settings like dieting groups (such as WeightWatchers) she convincingly demonstrates that inter-subjective settings and hence the communication and inter-subjective relationships produced by said settings, are shot through with power.71 The invasive power of the gaze that we experience from others in seemingly innocuous and mundane settings like grocery stores and malls, is every bit as insidious and penetrating as the gaze from the warden of the paragonic pan-optic tower. And, of course, we too are responsible for casting normalizing gazes on all those considered “abnormal.” In 71

Cressida J. Heyes, Self-Transformations Foucault, Ethics and Normalized Bodies (Oxford University Press: 2007) 63–89.

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the simple act of walking in a mall we notice the morbidly obese person eating at a fast-food restaurant and sub-consciously question whether he or she should be eating so unhealthily; we notice individuals who have had too much plastic surgery; or those who are wearing clothing a tad too young for them. We also notice the gaze of others and question why this or that person is looking at us in that particular manner (the security guard who shoots us a suspicious look as we leave a store). What Heyes underscores in her poignant, personal narratives, are the myriad ways in which we become the guards and inmates of our own normalizing tendencies. These concrete analyzes show that Habermas is wrong: it is not just simply the case that our collective life-worlds (home-worlds) have been colonized as Habermas often says. This is too simple. The analogy of colonization still implies that the life-world is somehow static and passive; a part of our psyche has been claimed by a company brand name like Nike, Coca-cola or General Motors. Rather the life-world (if it even continues to make sense to use this term) is dynamic; it has become the very engine of normalization because we use our gaze, our gestures and our words to reinforce our own subjugation and to reinforce the subjugation of others. However, it needs to be stressed that it is only by documenting how, exactly, normalizing strategies are produced in concrete settings as well as how we act in response to such normalizing environments, that we are able to advance our understanding of the direction of power and, correspondingly, how we may best resist it. From our analysis it does not seem fruitful to supplement Foucault’s notion of the body with Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject. Still, this investigation was not for nothing for we are now much closer to understanding what sort of ontology of the body is required in order to resolve the problems discussed above. It is clear that it is more fruitful to see if we can ground Foucault’s body on a biological and medical position rather than on a body-subject which is inherently ambiguous. Second, that said biological structures are not fixed, but are capable of change. Furthermore, it would seem that such change would have to be enacted by the subject in order for authentic resistance to be possible. Finally, genealogy must engage the bodily affects of an individual such that the desire to change becomes the dynamic force for a lifestyle alteration. To resolve these difficulties, I will put forward my own solution to the problem pertaining to the ontological status of the body in volume II, chapter five where I argue that it is best to think of the body as a “looping kind of thing” instead of a constructivist or natural kind. Before elucidating that specific solution in more detail, I need to examine one more problem of genealogy, namely, the problem of perspectivism.

CHAPTER

THREE

PERSPECTIVES ON PERSPECTIVISM

Section I: Nehamasian Perspectivism Perspectivism occupies a central role in any genealogical inquiry for two reasons: first, a perspectivist position is necessarily critical. The perspectivist acknowledges that historical and philosophical accounts are value-laden. A genealogical study focuses on those responsible for the creation of values and not on values by themselves. This shift of focus from the analysis of values to those doing the evaluating, allows the genealogist to unmask the reasons, motives and strategies behind the ‘true’ value, as it were, of the evaluation. This critical use of perspectivism as explained in chapter one, is one of the most important diagnostic tools a genealogist has in her arsenal. Second, the critical or diagnostic function of perspectivism makes possible the curative and self-transformative powers of genealogy. A successful genealogical investigation reveals that morals, values and practices that were once believed to be absolute and unquestionable are now dubious. This realization, in turn, spurs the subject to search for new values and practices. By subscribing to a perspectivist epistemic position we are able to criticize our old set of values with the aim of embracing new ones. Although the perspectivist doctrine is extremely important to genealogy for the two reasons outlined above, many scholars, regretfully, neglect this diagnostic tool. Instead, these scholars focus solely on perspectivism’s tremendous aesthetic and ethical advantages. However, since the curative dimension to a genealogical inquiry is subtended by the diagnostic, it is necessary to determine whether the diagnostic component is successful. That is, the question: ‘Is perspectivism epistemically justified?’ must be answered first before we ask: ‘Is perspectivism ethically fruitful?’ Before turning to the ethical dimensions of perspectivism it is necessary to examine if there are any epistemological difficulties with the doctrine. I demonstrate, in this chapter, that there are many problems with the adoption of a perspectivist stance.

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Nietzsche: Life as Literature by Alexander Nehamas is one of the first works to elucidate the tremendous creative and life-transforming advantages to be had for a subject who adopts a perspectivist, epistemic position. But of far greater importance is Nehamas’ lucid analysis of the problematic features of perspectivism. In a much shorter article simply entitled “Nietzsche”, Nehamas succinctly summarizes the two principal problems he previously described in great detail, in his celebrated work. Nehamas writes, It is often claimed that perspectivism is self-undermining. If the thesis that all views are interpretations is true then, it is argued, there is at least one view that is not an interpretation. If on the other hand, the thesis is itself an interpretation, then there is no reason to believe it is true, and it follows again not every view is an interpretation.1

Just so that we can be absolutely clear about the epistemological problems concerning perspectivism as well as Nehamas’ solution which I will explain shortly, I will now reconstruct these two, standard anti-perspectivist arguments usually advanced in the secondary literature. First, it is often claimed that if perspectivism is true then it is false because perspectivism holds we cannot determine any view to be absolutely true. However, the perspectivist holds that her view, that is perspectivism itself, is the one absolute truth. In other words, if we interpret the following statement: ‘perspectivism is true’ to mean that this one perspective is absolutely true then we have found one statement that is aperspectival, thus contradicting the single tenet of perspectivism that all truth is perspectival. Thus, if perspectivism is true then, because it refers to itself, it is false. I call this the self-referential problem. Second, attempting to solve the self-referential problem by claiming that the thesis of perspectivism is just an interpretation and is, therefore, only perspectivally true or true in one perspective, but false in another, leads to another problem: if perspectivism is not true in an absolute sense, but simply one perspective amongst several competing perspectives then why believe it? I call this the incredulity problem. In taking these two problems into consideration, it seems correct to assert that perspectivism affirms the skeptical and relativist position which holds that no interpretation can be more justified than any other because either A) no interpretation can adequately capture all of reality or B) because there is no reality to capture in the first place. I will show that choice A leads to self-refutation and that choice B entails either a skeptical or relativist 1

Alexander Nehamas, “Nietzsche” in A Companion to Epistemology, 305.

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position.2 Given these two interpretations of perspectivism it is clear that an absolutist position which holds that there are identifiable, eternal and absolute truths (the exact opposite thesis of perspectivism), seems more tenable. If such objections to perspectivism were irrefutably true then the doctrine would have gained little scholarly attention. But perspectivism is intriguing because it is a position which appears on the surface to be so utterly incoherent such that it is impossible to save, but one that also resonates with our deeply seated beliefs regarding the contextuality of knowledge. To have knowledge is to have a true belief about an object or person from a point of view, that is, from a relation. And perspectivism, prima facie, simply reaffirms this obvious truism. To my knowledge, Nehamas is the first scholar to defend perspectivism from purely epistemic grounds alone. On the very same page where Nehamas explains the above two problems commonly associated with a Perspectivist theory of knowledge, he also provides a possible, though very tersely stated solution. Nehamas writes, But, this refutation assumes that if a view (in this case, perspectivism itself) is an interpretation it is ipso facto wrong. This is not the case. To call any view, including perspectivism, an interpretation is to say that it can be wrong, which is true of all views, and that is not a sufficient refutation. To show that perspectivism is actually false it is necessary to produce another view superior to it on specific epistemological grounds.3

Though perhaps difficult to follow as curtly stated here, Nehamas will rely on two arguments to show why both objections to the Perspectivist thesis are unjustified. First, Nehamas shows that any view is falsifiable. The upshot of perspectivism, according to Nehamas, is just to demonstrate that it rejects any statement that claims to be absolutely true and impossible to revise in light of further supporting or contradictory evidence for the claim. Since any claim may be more to less justified given the evidence available at time t, it would appear that those who reject a perspectivist, epistemic position are simply objecting to good, epistemological grounds for determining the justificatory status of claims which purport to be true. Nehamas’s second argument to defend perspectivism is to shift the burden of proof from the Perspectivist onto the objector to perspectivism. In order to provide an adequate refutation of a perspectivist theory of knowledge the onus, 2

As Nehamas presents this objection, it is rather curious as to why so many defenders of Nietzsche ultimately adopt this view well after the publication of Nietzsche Life as Literature. We shall examine this defense in more detail in section II. 3 Nehamas, “Nietzsche” in A Companion to Epistemology, 305.

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or so Nehamas argues, is on the critic of perspectivism. That is to say, Nehamas claims that the critic of perspectivism must, in positive terms, argue for an alternative epistemological theory that is superior to perspectivism. But, such an epistemological theory (which rejects perspectivism) Nehamas implies, will be found to be less epistemically meritorious than the thesis of perspectivism itself. Just how convincing is this second argument? Imagine an alternative epistemological position like infallible foundationalism. Although there are many different stripes of foundationalism, all foundationalists agree on at least two points: 1) Some justified beliefs are basic; that is they are justified independently of the support of any other belief and 2) All other justified beliefs are derived either directly or indirectly from these basic beliefs.4 The line that Nehamas’ is arguing is that such an epistemological theory, if seriously considered, would in fact be even more problematic than a perspectivist theory of knowledge. Why? Because, at least the perspectivist accepts that his or her beliefs might be false or unjustified. However, a true infallible foundationalist does not and could not make this concession. The basic beliefs for an infallible foundationalist are justified by the very fact that they are indubitable because the foundationalist assumes they have direct epistemic access to the veracity of these basic beliefs. We might call such beliefs ‘non-inferential’, ‘immediate’ or ‘given’ but which ever name one gives to them they are characterized by their indubitable quality. But, Nehamas argues, no belief is truly indubitable. Every belief is subject to possible revision. Foundationalism is a false starter precisely because it must assume a ‘given’. And by assuming that there is a given entails that the foundation is not epistemically supported. ‘Why can’t some beliefs simply be given?’ ‘Why can’t some beliefs be justified without any further support?’ We might hear the foundationalist retort. Perhaps the clearest objection to the entire notion of the ‘given’ can be found in Wilfred Sellars’ seminal paper “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” Sellars argues that the following uber-qualified statement: “This (a raw sense perception) seems red to me now.” Is in fact falsifiable and more importantly, cannot serve as an adequate foundation to knowledge. In order to understand this point, I now turn to examining Sellars’ paper in more detail.

4

See Susan Haack’s, Evidence and Inquiry, 14.

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First, Sellars challenges the foundationalist dogma which says that ‘raw sense’ impressions may serve as epistemic statements. According to Sellars, perceptions, when taken on their own, are non-epistemic; they have no justificatory status. They cannot be used as an epistemic foundation for a belief system because to possess knowledge presupposes that one has a justified belief about a state of affairs. Knowledge, that is, trades on propositions and the inferences that may be produced from such propositions, while propositions are statements that describe a state of affairs or a possible state of affairs. However, if the statement: “I see red now” is construed to be non-inferential or basic then it is also a non-belief and accordingly cannot be considered knowledge since it makes no claim about a state of affairs (since we are not saying that the object, in reality, is red). Thus, although the sentence “I see red now” is incorrigible in the sense that it cannot be falsified, it cannot be verified either because it is bereft of epistemic status. Such a sentence can serve no epistemic purpose.5 On the other hand, if we re-translate the sentence to now read: ‘This looks red to me now.’ As a proposition, it may now be fallible for its truth conditions require not a correspondence between the statement and the raw sense data, but an understanding of what redness means. What we are doing, according to Sellars, is not “directly sensing redness” but rather applying a concept to something namely the ‘this’. This understanding of the concept of redness that is being applied to the thing in question presupposes that we were trained to recognize red patches from green patches, blue patches, yellow patches, etc at least at one time in our lives. Thus, the understanding of a concept presupposes much more than just direct intuitive access to the concept. It also presupposes the conditions or learning environment in which the concept was taught and all of these learning conditions may be less ideal therefore leading to fallibility. Therefore, to make the distinction “looks red” means one understands the difference between x is red and x would look red to standard observers under standard conditions.6 Thus, according to Sellars, when such an ‘impression’, to use the old empiricist term, is put into propositional form it immediately loses its infallible standing because it presupposes that we first, understand the concept of ‘redness’ and incidentally the concept of ‘now’ and second, that we are applying these concepts correctly in this particular case. However, both the understanding of the concept and its application may be false. 5

Wilfred Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” in Science, Perception and Reality, (New York: The Humanities Press, 1963), 127–196, 171–172. 6 Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,”147.

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Second, we can produce a defeater for this particular example which once again shows that the statement is indeed defeasible or at least doubtful. In order to even state: “This appears red now.” Already presupposes we are correctly remembering what ‘red’ is. But, if we doubt our memories of what red is or what even ‘red’ seems to be, then the statement is clearly fallible. If, for example, we started working at a paint store and gradually acquired, through training and experience, a different conception and finer understanding of ‘red,’ then after a period of time our understanding and even our perception of ‘red’ would certainly change. The example again demonstrates that ‘redness’ is not an impression, but is rather a concept that is learned and acquired over time and in a concrete learning environment. Our comprehension and proper application of this concept, however, as is perhaps obvious, is dependent on a number of different factors.7 It is these various factors which may lead us to have a false understanding of a term. Returning to Nehamas’ point, it should now be clear that even the seemingly most infallible statement is dubitable. Although one might argue that perspectivism is unsatisfactory because with it we can never possess the absolute truth of how reality really is, nevertheless, at least one recognizes that one’s current theory or interpretation is always open to revision and change. So, although we, as perspectivists, can never ascertain absolute truth, no epistemic theory can either. Yet, here too, the perspectivist has an epistemic advantage over the absolutist because he or she at least recognizes that it is always possible to possess a better understanding and appreciation that one’s own belief system is in fact fallible. Nehamas’ delineation of the epistemic problems with respect to perspectivism is unparalleled in the secondary literature. However, his solutions to these problems are deeply problematic and unhelpful. First, I will examine Nehamas’ first argument, namely the one that suggests that all beliefs are falsifiable in principle and thus capable of revision. The problem with this sort of defense is that it is a clear case of petitio principii: Nehamas assumes a perspectivist stance without providing an independent argument for the position. Recall that to state that any view may be false, is already to assert that we, as human beings, and indeed as knowers, may only have views! That is to say, we can only have interpretations or mere perspectives! But, such a “view” is clearly circular because it clearly begs the question and asserts that all we are entitled to are merely 7

The above example is similar to the one Sellars himself uses. I chose to use my example because I think it resonates more with the contemporary reader. See Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”,142–144.

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perspectives which are in principle falsifiable. Nehamas already assumes that there can be no apodictic knowledge of the world that is not already an interpretation. But to make this claim is to assume perspectivism to be true without providing an argument for it. Nehamas does anticipate this objection. In Nietzsche Life as Literature, Nehamas claims that to assume that perspectivism is merely an interpretation is already to understand ‘interpretation’ in a pejorative sense. Nehamas writes: “...Both assume that interpretation is a second-best mode of understanding and thus misunderstood perspectivism, which denies that there can be even in principle a mode of understanding that is better, more secure, or more accurate than interpretation.” 8 By assuming that perspectivism is ‘merely’ an interpretation we make a fallacious inference: we move from the modal claim it is possible for an interpretation to be false to the modal claim that in actuality, since it is an interpretation, it is in fact false. Whereas, according to Nehamas’ understanding of the perspectivist problem, no such inference can be made. It is, according to Nehamas, “to take a further and unjustified step and to claim that there are in fact alternatives (of which we are aware) that rob it of its claim to being correct.” 9 Thus, just because perspectivism is falsifiable, just like any claim, does not thereby refute it in actuality. However, there is something amiss with this defense. As Hales and Welshon argue in Nietzsche’s Perspectivism, Nehamas’ “solution…is seriously and irredeemably flawed. Nehamas’s resolution of the puzzle is curious, for it proves no more than a tautology.” 10 Part of Hales and Welshon’s problem with Nehamas’ solution is with the introduction of modal terms to support his defense when no such modal terms are necessary to either a) state the problem, (of what Hales and Welshon call “the real problem of strong truth perspectivism”) or b) resolve it. Hales and Welshon then proceed to analyze—in painstaking and, as I will show, unnecessary detail—Nehamas’ argument in Nietzsche Life as Literature to reveal the hidden tautology on which Nehamas trades in making the defense. A clearer exposition of the problem may be gleaned from Nehamas’ shorter article. To repeat what Nehamas writes in “Nietzsche”: “To call any view, including perspectivism, an interpretation is to say that it can be wrong, which is true of all views”…again already assumes that a view, interpretation or perspective can be wrong in principle! Once more to already assume this is to assume too much. Since Nehamas is fond of using modal operators in order to support 8 9 10

Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche, Life as Literature, 66–67. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche, Life as Literature, 66. Hales and Welshon, Nietzsche’s Perspectivism, 25.

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his defense, let us examine the following statement: “It is necessarily true that God necessarily exists.” First, this statement, for some, is not an interpretation, view or perspective; it is, simply, the ‘Truth’. Moreover, this statement purports to be a truth that is a) verifiable (the ontological argument) and b) not falsifiable, because the falsification conditions would be impossible to fulfill: even the argument from evil does not necessarily prove that God does not necessarily exist. In short, in order to deny this absolutist claim, Nehamas must argue that such a statement is still possible of falsification. But notice that Nehamas can only argue for the falsity of this statement by denying the modal operator necessary without any justification in doing so. The only justification, it seems, to claim that such a statement is revisable, is to adopt a perspectivist theory of knowledge without any grounds to do so. Secondly, from a mere perspectivist stance Nehamas cannot claim, as he seems to in fact claim, that it may be possible for some views to be false in realia. That is to say, Nehamas has not established nor could he establish, from a merely perspectivist position, that it is possible for all possible views to be false de re rather, Nehamas may only prove this de dicto. Ernest Sosa explains the de re/ de dicto distinction in the following manner: “Belief de dicto is belief that a certain dictum or (proposition is true,) whereas belief de re is belief about a particular res (or thing) that it has a certain property.” 11 We can see the distinction between these two different sorts of belief if we examine the following statement: “All human beings are necessarily carbon based life forms.” If we interpret this as a de dicto reading then it is false: it is possible for us to imagine human beings who are not carbon based. However, if we examine this statement de re then it is necessarily true because all human beings in fact, in reality that is, are carbon based life forms. If we now apply this distinction to a belief that both Nietzsche and Foucault would surely reject, such as the statement: “God created the Cosmos.” Then under a de re reading this statement may in fact be true! However, if this statement is true in reality it cannot be false in reality! Examining the same statement from a de dicto interpretation, however, reveals that it is not necessarily true even if it is the case that God in fact created the cosmos in the manner he supposedly did. Therefore, for Nehamas to make the claim: “to call any view including perspectivism an interpretation is to say that it can be wrong, which is true of all views” is already to assume that the first book of Genesis may be false in reality and perspectivism, by itself, cannot make this claim. Just because we 11

Ernest Sosa. “Propositional Attitudes De Dicto and De Re,” Journal of Philosophy 67 No. 21 (1970): 883, 883–96.

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cannot grasp reality as it is, does not of course imply that reality does not have its own structure independent of our knowledge of it. So, at best, Nehamas’ ‘perspectivism’ cannot tell us anything about ‘Reality’; de re beliefs for the perspectivist are therefore meaningless because under a Nehamasian perspectivist interpretation they do not refer to anything. And, arguably, an epistemic theory which does not refer to ‘the world’ is not much of a theory. Thirdly, the manner in which Nehamas construes perspectivism is ultimately incoherent and leads us right back to the problem of self-referentiality. The underlying assumption of perspectivism is either that there is ‘no thing’ underneath any of the perspectives of that thing or alternatively, that because human beings are finite and fallible creatures we therefore lack the time or capacities to be able to grasp all of reality from one perspective; we therefore may only have different perspectives on reality. Either side of this disjunctive however, already assumes an aperspectivist absolutist stance—thus leading us back to the problem of self-referentiality. On the one hand, if the perspectivist assumes that there are only perspectives of a thing then the perspectivist has knowledge of that thing—he or she is stating that all things have an infinite number of perspectives and he or she could only claim this if he or she knew this to be true. On the other hand, if the perspectivist holds that there are real things in the world but because we, as human beings are epistemically limited to ever truly knowing these things absolutely, then the perspectivist is a making a positive, aperspectival, epistemic, absolutist claim about our very epistemic capacities qua human beings, but without any justification to do so. Thus, either the perspectivist knows at least something about Reality as it really is (that there is no thing behind the perspectives of that thing) or the perspectivist knows one absolute truth about human beings’ cognitive capacities (that we can never understand Reality because we lack the fundamental structures necessary to understand it). In either case, the Nehamasian perspectivist is claiming to know something that by virtue of his position he cannot know. Fourthly, and most importantly, there is an even more pressing difficulty with such a perspectivist position in terms of providing the justification for an epistemically sound genealogical method that we so desperately desire. Nehamas claims that perspectivism simply acknowledges that any view may in fact be wrong. If this is the case though, then how can Nehamas state from merely his perspectivist position, that a perspective, view or interpretation may be wrong? That is to say, perspectivism, as an epistemological theory, could neither determine the truth nor falsity of any perspective. All interpretations

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of a thing would be, to borrow Derrida’s term ‘undecidable’: any interpretation of a thing would be as equally valid as any other. We are left with this rather stale and uninteresting position because the central tenet of perspectivism assumes that either 1) we could never grasp all the angles, all the views or all the perspectives of any object or 2) that each person approaches the object with a different perspective, view or interest in mind as to why he or she is viewing that particular object in the first place. But, since we can only see a fragmented part of the object, but never the object as a whole, we could never claim that a ‘view’ is wrong. There is no privileged view—every view is equally as valid as any other view because one could never determine whether a view, interpretation or theory adequately corresponds to the object in question. Nehamasian perspectivism is clearly epistemically deficient. Lastly, let us now turn to Nehamas’ negative argument—the one that argues that in order to refute perspectivism the onus is on the critic to produce a better, alternative, epistemological theory. As is perhaps apparent, this is a very weak argument as it is rather easy to produce a “view” that is epistemically superior to perspectivism. If we examine the following passage from The Genealogy, we discover that Nietzsche holds that: “all interpretation consists of forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, inventing, falsifying and whatever else is of the essence of interpretation” (Nietzsche’s Italics)12. However, if interpretations or perspectives in their essence are a series of falsifications, ommittals and inventions, then surely this is not a very sound epistemological theory to begin with: ‘How can we be epistemically justified in accepting the thesis of perspectivism…’ we might hear the absolutist ask, ‘if the perspectivist not only admits, but also brazenly acknowledges that his views are falsifications, adjustments and inventions?’ Why accept such an unsound and problematic epistemology in the first place?’ It is one thing to accept that we are fallible creatures. It is quite another to accept that the very essence of interpretation consists of falsifications, inventions and filler. By what means and by what measure can we judge two competing perspectives? Why choose a genealogical account of the development of morality if, since it is an interpretation too, it is therefore no more valid and no less valid than any other theory? Once again, I do not think an adequate answer from Nehamas is forthcoming. Despite these difficulties, Nehamas presents a final defense of perspectivism in Nietzsche Life as Literature which may allow him to extricate himself from the above problems. Near the beginning of the book, Nehamas reminds us that: 12

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM:III. 24, 587.

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Nietzsche’s aestheticism is also connected with perspectivism in another way. The philology of the world, which I mentioned above, not only provides him with a literary model for many of his views but also motivates him to create what we may call a literary product. Nietzsche’s positive thinking consists…in the presentation, or exemplification, of a specific character, recognizably literary, who makes of these philosophical ideas as way of life that is uniquely his. The fact that this character is unique, that it is not described in a traditional sense, and that it is produced in a way that prevents it from ever being a model for direct imitation allows Nietzsche, as we shall see, to persist in his perspectivism without being obliged to construct positions which are merely negative.13

In other words, just because perspectivism fails to justify itself on an epistemological level does not mean that it cannot be justified on the aesthetic level. That is to say, if Nietzsche in broader terms conceives of the world as an active, dynamic and, ultimately, aesthetic creation generated by individuals living in the world, then it may be possible to justify perspectivism as just another interpretation; as just another perspective. Indeed, it does seem that Nietzsche justifies perspectivism precisely in this way when in section 22 of Beyond Good and Evil he writes on both interpretation and the Will-to-Power: “Supposing that this also is only interpretation—and you will be eager enough to make this objection—well, so much the better.” 14 perspectivism then, is just another perspectival interpretation or perspective on the world that opens us to new possibilities of being and living. As such, the epistemic difficulty is secondary and inconsequential to the aesthetic importance of perspectivism and if valid, such a defense would undercut much of the above criticisms. However, this position too is irredeemably flawed as I will show in the next section.

Section II: Perspectival Perspectivism Nehamas’ position is epistemically indefensible. Nehamas’ purported ‘knock down’ argument used to support perspectivism simply begs the question: he assumes a perspectivist position without providing any justification to do so. However, Nehamas also offers a second defense of perspectivism. This argu13

Nehamas, Nietzsche, Life as Literature, 3–4. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 22, 220–221. Also, see section 43 of Beyond Good and Evil, 243, where Nietzsche criticizes the idea that truth must be for everyman: “My judgment is my judgment,” Nietzsche writes. 14

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ment is designed to defend perspectivism on aesthetic grounds. On an aesthetic reading, perspectivism is preferable to absolutism because it offers the individual more opportunities to grow and evolve as an individual qua individual. By simply entertaining the idea that there may be different perspectives on an issue, object or concept, the individual is led to acknowledge that her original belief may not be as justified as she once believed. This realization, it is argued, invites her to investigate new ways of acting, behaving, thinking and doing. It promotes, a la Foucault, a new ethos for self-enlightenment and creativity. perspectivism allows one to become his or her own work of art reminding the genealogist that it is we, as human beings, who give meaning, value, interpretations and therefore existence, to both our lives and to the world itself. Many Nietzschean scholars, including Foucault, ultimately adopt this defense. For example, in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault claims that: The final trait of effective history is its affirmation of knowledge as perspective. Historians take unusual pains to erase the elements in their work which reveal their grounding in a particular time and place, their preferences in a controversy—the unavoidable obstacles of their passion. Nietzsche’s version of historical sense is explicit in its perspective and acknowledges its system of injustice. Its perception is slanted, being a deliberate appraisal, affirmation, or negation; it reaches the lingering and poisonous traces in order to prescribe the best antidote.15

Clearly, what Foucault emphasizes here are the great “curative powers” of ‘effective’ or genealogical history. According to Foucault, the genealogist is comparable to a cultural physician: just as a physician diagnoses a physical illness by using a number of means and methods and tools, so too the genealogist must examine cultural phenomena from several perspectives. It is only by diagnosing the illnesses of modern society, as it were, that the genealogist can prescribe the correct treatment. However, there is an aspect to the above comparison that is clearly disanalogous. Unlike the doctor who relies on scientific instruments and diagnostic tests to determine the specific illness that her patient is afflicted with, the genealogist, Foucault evinces, cannot provide herself with such objective methods. A genealogy is historical and empirical through and through. It too can always be subject to another genealogy. Genealogies are always subject to further revision. But Foucault makes an even stronger claim in the above passage. He suggests that the doctrine of perspectivism entails that a genealogical 15

Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,”156–157.

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investigation is necessarily slanted; skewed. Furthermore, it is pure folly to remove one’s prejudices from a genealogical inquiry because there is no nonprejudicial ground on which the genealogist or any investigator can stand. All we have are perspectives. Because Foucault never articulated a clear, epistemic position with respect to perspectivism, it is necessary to reconstruct his defense of the perspectivist thesis. If it is true that all we can have are perspectives and perspectives are conditional, they are not absolute—that is a claim deemed to be true in one perspective may be false in another—then this same property of conditionality would also hold true for perspectivism itself. Therefore, perspectivism, as an epistemic thesis, is perspectivally true. One might wonder whether this seeming epistemic defense of perspectivism may cohere and, in fact, enhance the aesthetic grounds for perspectivism. After all, there is much in Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche that a good genealogist must retain. Genealogy is a subversive discipline that asks the researcher to take risks, to experiment, to be creative, and to embark on unknown paths and journeys. An aesthetic defense of perspectivism is both possible and, indeed, necessary for genealogy. Is it possible to defend perspectivism on both aesthetic and epistemic grounds? Several recent commentators certainly try to defend perspectivism along these two very different planes. Perhaps the best defense of perspectivism from this aesthetic-epistemic standpoint is found in Ken Gemes’ article “Nietzsche’s Critique of Truth.” Gemes argues that “an overly strident rejection of the unconditional can quickly lead to paradox” 16 and that Nietzsche can avoid this self-referential paradox if “Nietzsche’s rejection of the unconditional is a conditional rejection.” 17 In other words, Gemes argues that Nietzsche does not argue directly against absolutism (and therefore, by implication, Nietzsche argues for perspectivism) because the thesis of perspectivism is only a conditional position. That is, Nietzsche only considers perspectivism to be perspectivally true because to consider perspectivism or indeed anything to be absolutely true, is to destroy the possibility for continual self-overcoming and development. As Gemes writes, “Nietzsche’s primary complaint against the unconditional is that it serves to promote the interests of average men, the herd, over the development of great individuals.” 18 Thus, perspectivism should not be thought of as an epistemic doctrine, but as a balm to be used against 16

Ken Gemes, “Nietzsche’s Critique of Truth,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. 52 (1992), 55, 47–65. 17 Gemes, 55. 18 Gemes, 57.

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what we, as subjects, all too often believe to be “permanent”, “absolute” and “unconditional” truths. Such truths, so the perspectivist argues, only serve as false boundaries, as it were, for thought and action. They prevent us from seeking new and untold possibilities for further development. George Stack and Lawrence Hinman present similar arguments to those of Gemes. George Stack argues that Nietzsche must adopt perspectivism “as a provisional hypothesis, a perspectival interpretation.” 19 While Hinman in his article, “Nietzsche, Metaphor and Truth” argues that truth is essentially a property of metaphors. When metaphors lose their metaphorical meaning within a particular language game, they become dead. It is only when metaphors become dead, Hinman continues, that they are then thought of as literal referents. As Hinman writes, “The literal is just an instance of a dead metaphor, ie; one whose metaphorical character has been forgotten.” 20 Such an interpretation allows Nietzsche to resolve problems concerning self-referentiality because he is able to demonstrate that language itself is formed from dead metaphors. Moreover, this still allows for, “a referential dimension to language (and) of truth claims (but only) within a particular language game” 21 because perspectives, just like statements within a natural language, are neither universal nor absolute. perspectivism, as an epistemic doctrine, is not absolutely true, but instead only perspectivally true. Although this defense of perspectivism is novel, there are two problems with this tactic. First, even if we are able to extricate perspectivism from the problem of self-referentiality, (which, as I will show we cannot) this still gives us no reason to accept a perspectivist position. Indeed, it makes the case for the absolutist that much stronger. Because if the thesis of perspectivism is only perspectivally true, then this implies that it, that is perspectivism, is not absolutely true in all perspectives. That is to say, there may be some perspectives where absolutism is true. However, if perspectivism is not true in all perspectives then surely such an epistemological position will ultimately lead to skepticism, relativism and, perhaps, nihilism. For if there is a possibility that absolutism is true in at least some perspectives then it seems to be plausible to believe that absolutism may be true in all perspectives. Indeed, why hold onto a Perspectivist theory of knowledge, which claims that we can never know the absolute truth about anything, 19

George Stack, “Nietzsche and Perspectival Interpretation,” Philosophy Today, 25, (1981), 221–241, 238. 20 Lawrence Hinman, “Nietzsche, Metaphor and Truth,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, (1982), 179–198, 189. 21 Hinman, “Nietzsche, Truth and Metaphor,”199.

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if such a theory also holds that it is not certain about its own position? Why not continue, as philosophers traditionally have done throughout the centuries to seek out and discover absolute truth? To defend perspectivism perspectivally seems to weaken the adoption of perspectivism in the first place. Many scholars seem to anticipate this objection and, as a result, try to find another support for the perspectival interpretation of perspectivism which is non-epistemic. It is as though perspectivism, as a position, was like a stilt walker with only one stilt, (the epistemological) propping him or her up and now scholars, realizing that the position is about to collapse, try to prop up the stilt walker with another (the aesthetic). Thus perspectivism, just like the stilt walker, now has an epistemological justification, though admittedly weak when taken on its own, but when combined with the aesthetic prop, allows the walker to stand. So, by accepting perspectivism to be only perspectivally true, it allows us to accept, without contradiction, the aesthetic support. For if perspectivism is only perspectivally true then this encourages us to examine other perspectives thereby allowing us to create and to be creative—creating new ideas and new selves. Thus although epistemically speaking perspectivism can never be satisfactorily justified, so the argument goes, this is neither fundamentally important nor Nietzsche’s intent. Nietzsche’s purpose, according to these scholars, is to allow us to be our own work of art which we can only achieve by allowing the sea of knowledge to remain open and uncharted in order to allow for new mappings of reality along with new destinations for the self. Though I am sympathetic to those who attempt to synthesize these two defenses of perspectivism into a coherent whole, nevertheless, it appears that it is the epistemic justification of perspectivism which ultimately suffers at the hands of the aesthetic. I argue that it is impossible to justify the epistemic virtues of perspectivism if we lean too heavily on the obviously important aesthetic virtues of perspectivism. As a consequence, genealogy as a philosophical and historical method would never be epistemically justified. As argued in Chapters 1 and 2, if we support our stilt walker by using these two weak supports, we can still reasonably ask: “What is the stilt walker standing on?” Much like C.I. Lewis’ counter-argument to coherentism, ‘The Drunken Sailors Argument’, the perspectivist stilt walker must ultimately ground his or her epistemology on the truth: ie. the non-doxastic.22 We must be more imaginative and find a solution which satisfies our aesthetic reasons for adopting perspectivism. 22

The Drunken Sailors argument is much like the isolation objection I raised in chapter 2. C.I. Lewis argues that to suggest “that empirical beliefs can be justified by nothing but relations of mutual support is as absurd as suggesting that two drunken sailors could

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Moreover, we have very good interpretative grounds to reject such a defense. Both Nietzsche and Foucault argue that genealogy is simply not just a more aesthetic or interesting method of doing history than other methods, but is a more truthful one. Genealogy is not looking haphazardly into the blue rather, it is documentary grey. This means that it must, independently of aesthetic considerations, justify itself epistemically and empirically first. So, although Nietzsche and Foucault do seem to justify perspectivism in this manner, nonetheless, this does not help us in creating an epistemically justified genealogical mode of investigation and will certainly not allow us to steer around the two principal objections to genealogy, namely the Charbydis of skepticism and the Scylla of relativism. In point of fact, such a defense would only seem to allow the Scylla of relativism to swallow us whole. Each axis of genealogical inquiry can and must be justifiable simply on its own merits. A dual support system simply will not work if that support system is not anchored in the ‘world’. Second and more importantly, such a defense of perspectivism is contradictory. Hales and Welshon in their seminal work Nietzsche’s Perspectivism convincingly (and rather tersely), demonstrate the logical problems with such a view. To conclude this section, I will now summarize and clarify their argument in greater detail. The first step of Hales and Welshon’s argument is to define perspectivism, (or what they call strong perspectivism) and absolutism. Hales and Welshon define strong perspectivism as “the claim that every statement is true in some perspective and untrue in another.” 23 Then absolutism can be defined as, the claim where, “there is at least one statement that is either true in all perspectives or untrue in all perspectives.” 24 If we accept these two definitions then we should notice that strong perspectivism and absolutism are contradictories; both cannot be true, but both cannot be false. Next, Hales and Welshon examine the thesis of strong perspectivism. There are three and only three possibilities. First, if strong perspectivism is true in all perspectives it is clearly false because strong perspectivism claims that there is no statement, which is true in all perspectives. Thus, the first possibility is eliminated because it contradicts the central thesis of strong perspectivism. Now let us examine the second possibility. The second possibility states that strong perspectivism is not true in any perspective. However, to claim that support each other by leaning back to back—when neither was standing on anything.” Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry, 27. 23 Hales and Welshon, Nietzsche’s Perspectivism, 22. 24 Hales and Welshon, Nietzsche’s Perspectivism, 22.

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strong perspectivism is not true in any perspective is to agree with Absolutism because Absolutism, if we remember, holds that, “there is at least one statement that is either true or untrue in all perspectives.” The one statement, in this case, is not-strong perspectivism or in positive terms, Absolutism. Thus, since 1) Absolutism is true, 2) strong perspectivism and Absolutism are contradictories and 3) if one contradictory is true then the other must be false, then strong perspectivism must be false.25 So far, the argument is quite straight forward: The strong perspectivist cannot claim that perspectivism is true in all perspectives because perspectivism denies that there is any perspective that is absolutely true. While, of course, the strong perspectivist cannot claim that strong perspectivism is untrue in all perspectives because he would argue against his position and perspectivism would simply be false.26 This leaves us with the third possibility: the one defended by Hinman, Stack, Gemes and others, that is, that strong perspectivism is only true perspectivally. Strong perspectivism is true in some perspectives and untrue in others. Now let us consider the first possibility. It is perfectly consistent to claim that strong perspectivism is true in some perspectives. This does not pose a threat to the perspectival, perspectivist thesis. Now, let us examine the other possibility, which also has two sub-possibilities. The first possibility states that strong perspectivism is untrue, absolutely, in all perspectives while the second states that strong perspectivism is merely untrue in some perspectives and not others. Let us say not-strong perspectivism is untrue, absolutely, in all perspectives. However, if not-strong-perspectivism is untrue absolutely, then Absolutism is true because it would be the same as claiming that strong perspectivism is absolutely true in all perspectives. But, as we know, this is the definition of Absolutism so this possibility will not work.27 Finally, this leaves us with the last possibility, that is, that not strong perspectivism is untrue perspectivally. However, if we examine this statement closely we see it is quite puzzling because to claim that not strong perspectivism is true only in some perspectives is to combine two contradictory claims. The first part of the conjunction denies what the second part, its negation, affirms.28 For the first part states, “No claim can be true in some 25 26 27 28

Hales and Welshon, 22. Hales and Welshon, Nietzsche’s Perspectivism, 22–23. Hales and Welshon, Nietzsche’s Perspectivism, 22–23. Hales and Welshon, 23.

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perspectives and not in other perspectives.” While the second part of the conjunction, the strong perspectivism part, states: “A particular claim can be true in some perspectives and not in others.” Thus, we have a contradiction: Not-strong-perspectivism denies the claim that statements can be true in one perspective and not in others, while to be true perspectivally implies that a statement is true in some perspectives but not in others.29 That is to say, since “the conditional unconditional defenders” of Nietzsche’s perspectivism must claim that strong perspectivism is untrue in some perspectives, in order to avoid absolutism this implies that the opposite statement or notstrong perspectivism, namely absolutism, must be true in some perspectives. However, by focusing on the very definition of absolutism, we know that absolutism must be true in all perspectives not just in some perspectives. Since the perspectival perspectivists cannot admit this, then absolutism’s contradictory or strong perspectivism must be true in all perspectives. But, of course, if strong perspectivism is true in all perspectives then “absolutism is true, or to put the matter in an equivalent form, if strong perspectivism is true in all perspectives, then strong perspectivism is untrue.” 30 As Hales and Welshon, summarize this conclusion: Hence, there is no statement that is true in all perspectives; that is, for every statement there are perspectives in which it is true and perspectives in which it is untrue. Yet then strong perspectivism is true in all perspectives, and this, as has been argued, entails that strong perspectivism is untrue.31

Clearly, perspectivism cannot simply be perspectivally true without contradicting itself. Another, alternative way to justify perspectivism is to adopt what Hales and Welshon call ‘weak perspectivism’. Weak perspectivism they define as, the thesis that there is at least one statement such that there is some perspective in which it is true, and some perspective in which it is untrue. Note that it is consistent with weak perspectivism that some statements have the same truth value in all perspectives, that is one can maintain that very many—nearly all—statements have their truth values perspectivally, and yet hold that nevertheless some statements have their truth values across all perspectives.32 29 30 31 32

Hales and Welshon, Nietzsche’s Perspectivism, 22–23. Hales and Welshon, Nietzsche’s Perspectivism, 22. Hales and Welshon, Nietzsche’s Perspectivism, 22. Hales and Welshon, Nietzsche’s Perspectivism, 31.

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Although I endorse this position (with some important qualifications) I argue that it needs to be more fully developed. Specifically, it is merely a logical solution to the problem. And although this marks an important advancement in the literature in and of itself, it tells us little about how we may use perspectivism for the service of self-creativity and self-knowledge. I explicate my full solution to the perspectivist problem in volume two of Philosophical Genealogy. But before I turn to this solution, I think it is important to examine at least one more attempt at defending the epistemic/aesthetic interpretation of perspectivism.

Section III: Perspectivism Naturalized Section one showed Nehamas’ defense of perspectivism to be untenable. Section two demonstrated that a perspectival, perspectivist position is incoherent. In this section, I turn to an interpretation of perspectivism which, on the surface, seems quite promising. Christophe Cox’s approach to the perspectivist problem marks a significant advancement in the secondary literature. In Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation, Cox demonstrates, rather convincingly I might add, that no single criterion of truth is sufficient for Nietzsche’s methodical aesthetic-epistemological view.33 Cox is the first scholar, to my knowledge, to merge the aesthetic dimension of perspectivism with the epistemological. In effect, Cox demonstrates that both the aesthetic and epistemological dimensions are interpolated: the chasm between the cognitive Nietzsche and noncognitive Nietzsche must be closed. According to Cox, Nietzsche revolutionizes epistemology by demonstrating “the overcoming of science and its passage into another discourse—that of art. Furthermore, taken in the broadest sense, art, (or the aesthetic) affirms everything to which Nietzsche’s genealogy has directed us.” 34 Such a viewpoint, as presented here, may appear to be nothing new. Nehamas, Derrida and many other scholars have also stressed that Nietzsche’s philosophy is more coherent and comprehensible if viewed in aesthetic terms rather than in epistemological terms alone. But what is new is that unlike both Derrida and Nehamas, Cox demonstrates that Nietzsche’s epistemology foreshadows some of the recent developments in analytic epistemology and philosophy of science. Following in the footsteps of Quine, Sellars, Davidson, Rorty and Feyerabend, Cox convincingly argues that perspectivism is not anathema to traditional, 33 34

Christoph Cox, Nietzsche, Naturalism and Interpretation 60–63. Christoph Cox, Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Interpretation, 65.

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epistemological criteria for the determination of warranted beliefs. Indeed, perspectivism, Cox evinces, holds itself to an even higher epistemic standard than more traditional, epistemological models of justification and truth because perspectivism denounces any uncritical belief in a “given”—a belief which is self-justifying. In fact, Cox claims that Nietzsche was a visionary of sorts in that many recent analytic insights into justification, truth and language were clearly present in Nietzsche’s work. Accordingly, Cox re-interprets section 481 of The Will to Power, which reads: “No, facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations” not to mean that facts do not exist and therefore all we have are mere perspectives, but rather to mean that facts can only be considered facts provided they are indexed to a model or framework. Cox writes: “Science, facts and truth are possible only within the framework of one or another interpretation, each of which construes the world according to a set of presuppositions that receive only relative, conditional justification. There is no such thing as absolute or unconditional truth.” 35 Understood in this manner, an observation is only considered a fact, provided that it is considered to be relevant to a particular theory. Facts only exist because they are indexed to theory, while a theory is supported by the sheer volume of its facts along with its power to predict and ascertain new facts about the world. A theory, therefore, is not simply built on facts but rather, both fact and theory are interdependent on one another. In short, there are no theories without facts because facts serve to corroborate a theory and there are no facts without theories because without theories there is simply nothing to observe. This last point does seem contentious. The all too common view of science is one where scientific theories are proffered to explain observed resemblances and patterns in nature. But this position has long been laid to rest. In his The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper argued that it is impossible to “build up a science” by first simply recording “facts” or, alternatively, what the logical positivists called “protocol statements” because: ….if I am ordered: ‘Record what you are now experiencing’ I shall hardly know how to obey this ambiguous order. Am I to report that I am writing; that I hear a bell ringing; a newsboy shouting; a loudspeaker droning; or am I to report, perhaps, that these noise irritate me? And even if the order could be obeyed: however rich a collection of statements might be assembled in this way, it could never add up to science.36 35

Cox,44–45. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1959) section 30,106. 36

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Such observation reports can never “add up to science” precisely because, “A science needs points of view, and theoretical problems.” 37 Without points of views, without theoretical problems, without perspectives, the scientist would not know what to observe or why she was supposed to be observing ‘this’ thing instead of ‘that’ in the first place. Stating this same point in Nietzschean terminology, a ‘science’ requires perspectives and more perspicuously stated, competing perspectives for it is only within such perspectives that an observation report counts as a fact and, therefore, as a support for a statement within a perspective. Perhaps Paul Feyerabend puts this same point best when he wrote: “The interpretation of an observation-language is determined by the theories we use to explain what we observe, and it changes as soon as those theories change.” 38 Thus, values for the perspectivist have the same epistemic and ontic status as facts have for scientific theories: just as facts in science are always theory-laden or theory ‘impregnated’ so too, Cox extols, values in a perspective are always ‘perspective-laden.’ To concretize these points we might say that to employ perspectivism entails adopting the framework of a specific group of people (for example early Christians). The genealogist then reviews the values of this group in order to determine what sort of statements will be construed as “facts” for that particular group: values that determine the very existence of the group such that if they were given up, the group would cease to exist. It should be clear that such “facts” do not simply become falsehoods once the genealogist performs an investigation. Rather, Cox seems to suggest that it is important to understand how these facts provide the necessary justification for the group’s unique perspective. In addition, it is also essential to understand how beliefs, behaviors and even feelings become facts within a framework and then how these same things serve to corroborate the framework at hand. In chapter four we will see how guilt is an example of a feeling which serves to corroborate and perpetuate a Christian 37

Popper, 106. Paul Feyerabend “An attempt at a Realistic Interpretation of Experience”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (58), (1958), 164. It should also be noted, that the DuhemQuine thesis says much the same thing. However, I do not quite agree with the formulation of the third rule of this thesis by Quine when he states: “There is no sharp boundary between synthetic statements whose truth (or falsity) is contingent upon empirical evidence, and analytic statements whose truth (or falsity) is independent of empirical evidence.” I will articulate my disagreement with this position in much more detail in volume II. See W.V.O. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1953), 47. 38

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perspective. It is presumed, that, with the more interpretative frameworks at the genealogist’s disposal, the more nuanced and detailed understanding of the values within a given framework she will have. But Cox’s solution, while elegant and novel, is not without problems. In fact, it is incoherent. If we analyze Cox’s position further we can better understand why. Cox’s position entails the following two claims: (1) Because “facts” themselves are internal to an interpretation there are no objective facts, which all interpretations must explain; This leads to 2: (2) But because two interpretations are not accounting for the same “facts” (Premise 1) one cannot determine which interpretation is more justified or more truthful than another. If Cox does not provide further criteria to assess what would make one perspective more meritorious than another, then he would be hard pressed to provide a convincing reason why Nietzsche’s aesthetic-epistemological genealogy, as he calls it, is to be preferred to other moral histories since none of these others histories would be making use of the same “facts.” In short, Cox would fall into the problem of epistemic incoherency outlined in chapter one; there would be no accepted metric by which to conclude what would make one interpretation more justified than another. To be fair, Cox glimpses the full force of this argument and attempts to extricate himself from the problem by arguing that there are other criteria that must be taken into consideration when it comes to determining the epistemic merit and justification of one perspective over that of another. We do not simply compare the two perspectives by examining how each of their supporters would go about explaining the same set of facts. The following is his less than successful attempt to resolve this problem: In the end, neither utility, coherence, correspondence, nor any other single criterion serves for Nietzsche as the determinant of truth. Rather, the truth of a statement or belief is the more or less stable result of its having been relativized to a particular theory or interpretation that itself has been found viable according to at least some of the most rigorous criteria of justification available.” 39

Cox goes on to argue that this, so called, ‘rigorous justification’ that he speaks of here is ‘individual’—that is, justification is determined singularly by each 39

Cox, 60.

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discourse and may be different among various discourses and academic disciplines. Cox writes: “There are many such criteria and no interpretation will fulfill all of them. Different criteria will be considered appropriate to different domains of knowledge and inquiry; and competing interpretations within a particular domain will take different criteria as dominant.” 40 Taking these quotations together, we might say that Cox is able to uphold a perspectivist theory of knowledge while simultaneously allowing for rigorous rules of justification and therefore steering clear of both skepticism and relativism. On a global view, Cox is claiming that it is impossible to have a ‘God’s eye view of reality.’ One can never determine the way things really are independently of one’s perspective. We are trapped within our perspectives. However, this does not mean that any and every view is just as valid as any other. Academic disciplines like physics, biology, art, history or sociology, all have different criteria to determine which interpretations, within their respective discourses, are better or more justified than others. Therefore, theories must take into consideration the same facts within their respective disciplines in order for those theories to be justified. It is just that these ‘facts’ would not extend beyond their individual academic disciplines. Thus, on a local level, it is possible to provide at least some methods and procedures to ascertain which views are better justified, but we must remember that no single, epistemological position such as foundationalism, coherentism, contextualism etc. will ever be the sole arbiter for justified true belief in all discourses and academic disciplines. In effect, Cox argues that Nietzsche is a forerunner of the recent turn in analytic epistemology from a foundationalist epistemological view to a non-foundational and from a realist metaphysics to an anti-realist metaphysics. The result is that interpretative frameworks are incommensurable in that it is senseless to compare two different perspectives with one another, but this does mean that epistemic justification cannot be had. Each perspective is responsible for determining which views will be considered more epistemically meritorious than others according to the procedures of justification established within that framework. Whether it is plausible that Nietzsche foresaw these developments in analytic philosophy is questionable. In any case, Cox’s solution, although novel and not without merit, is still problematic for several reasons. As I see it, there are at least three problems with Cox’s interpretation. First, in a footnote, Cox argues that Nietzsche’s epistemological position is in agreement with that of Richard Rorty’s. Indeed Cox quotes the following 40

Cox, 60.

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lines from Rorty’s most provocative book, Contingency, Irony Solidarity with great reverence and zeal: “There is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality apart from descriptions of the familiar procedures of justification which a given society—ours—uses in one or another area of inquiry.” 41 For Rorty, each scientific discourse and discipline will have its own rules for evidence, inquiry, methodology and procedure that are different and hence both irreducible to, and incommensurable with, any other such discipline. Therefore, in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity for example, Rorty argues that the world, as we come describe it, cannot be reduced to any singular conception, idea or theory of it. In fact, what we have, following the later Wittgenstein, is a fixed number of “language games”— academic discourses and disciplines that determine the meaning of sentences and therefore of “truth” within that particular game. As Rorty writes: “Uttering a sentence without a fixed place in a language game is, as the positivists rightly have said, to utter something which is neither true nor false—something which is not, in Ian Hacking’s terms, “a truth-value candidate.” 42 For Rorty, we simply should not view language as that of a jigsaw puzzle that we then try to fit together in our feeble attempts to unify both our language (and our knowledge) into one, grand, super vocabulary. Rather, we must learn to accept, via Rorty’s famous appeal to a Gestalt switch, that language games are more like alternative tools for understanding different phenomena. Therefore, such questions as “What is the place of consciousness in a world of molecules? Or “What is the relation of language to thought?” 43 Are ultimately reductive and, really, unanswerable questions. Answers for Rorty are only available within a pre-established language game or one in principle of being constructed. The upshot of Rorty’s approach can be summarized as follows: “…since truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.” 44 Thus, since we are contingent, finite creatures our truths must also be contingent. There is no ‘Truth’ per se but only truths that we humans invent. 41

Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, Truth, Philosophical Papers Volume 1(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23. Indeed Cox, in footnote 65 on page 60 states as much: “Here, Nietzsche is in agreement with Richard Rorty.” 42 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 18. 43 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, 11–12. 44 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, 21.

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Nevertheless, Cox’s acceptance of Rorty’s epistemological position—as one which is consistent with that of Nietzsche’s—only serves to present further problems for perspectivism. First, Rorty’s position, as James Robert Brown, Hilary Putnam and many others have noted, has problems accounting for scientific necessity or the nomological dimension of scientific discourse. Scientific discourses are not just on par with other language games such as art history or literary criticism for example, for the simple reason that science seems to be capable of extracting rules, regularities, laws or the nomos from nature. Scientific discourse, that is, is capable of explaining and successfully predicting natural phenomena that, prime facie, is not a human construction. Therefore, to argue as Putnam thinks Rorty does in fact argue, “that what is true is just a compliment we pay to sentences we agree with” 45 is to misunderstand exactly what science is and what scientists do. There is a world of difference between literary criticism and physics because we normally think the former to be a discipline which analyzes human constructions while the latter attempts to understand that which is not just a human construction, but rather that which constrains our very creativity as human beings. In other words, the sciences force us to expect the unexpected. We use science to confront and tame a recalcitrant, hostile world. But because Cox fully endorses Rorty’s approach to perspectivism, he also absorbs the contradictions, inconsistencies and overall skepticism of that position as well. Non-scientific discourses may very well have different criteria concerning their respective methodologies, procedures and styles while simultaneously affirming that they are internal language games. Science, however, not only has different methods than these other disciplines, but appears to have methods of a completely different kind. They are of the kind that must uphold a distinction between the literal and non-literal; the doxastic and non-doxastic. However, if Cox is to uphold the position that each discipline has its own methods of justification while not collapsing these methods into one ‘super’ vocabulary that Rorty abhors, then one must hold that scientific justification concerns real things as they really are! However, if we accept that genealogy, as demonstrated in chapter one, is a naturalistic, epistemological undertaking, then Cox must also reject genealogy’s naturalistic pedigree. After all, Rorty’s position is not a naturalistic one, but rather a purely aesthetic position and one that seemingly admits that science and art are on equal footing. Hence, the force of the critical power of genealogy, 45

Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1996), 69.

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as a naturalistic theory of morality, seems to have been blunted by accepting a Rortian position.46 Second and boldly stated, the above approach that Rorty takes is not the purpose of genealogy. Nietzsche, by utilizing a genealogical methodology tries to show that the contemporary disciplines and discourses of morality, philosophy, science, art, and law can one and all be criticized because they are not honest disciplines. Their practitioners do not fully scrutinize the methods they employ. If such disciplines are presented as absolute and construed to be completely removed from their historical origins, then they are nothing but lies and falsehoods. What Nietzsche calls for is an approach that would explain and attempt to eradicate the mistakes of method that have been glossed over in all of these disciplines and discourses. What Nietzsche calls for is a stricter notion and method of arriving at more truthful, sounder theories and hypotheses that extend across all disciplines and discourses. Thus, genealogy is not just on par with any other discourse, rather, genealogy is a unique discipline that has the right to critique distinct areas of knowledge such as theology, the natural sciences, (including physics and biology) and of course philosophy, because it is more epistemically rigorous and truthful than any of these sciences. As Nietzsche writes from Ecce Home: What mankind has so far considered seriously have not been realities but mere imaginings—more strictly speaking, lies prompted by the bad instincts of natures that were harmful in the most profound sense—all concepts “God” “soul” “virtue” “sin” “beyond” “truth” “eternal life.” 47

All of these ideas and concepts are in the proper domain of genealogy. Academic discourses do not have the authority to “self-justify.” Genealogies can, do, and must, undermine the epistemic warrant of academic disciplines so that these disciplines can be more self-conscious of how their most revered principles and methods were mistakenly believed to be warranted in the first place. But notice that if we accept a Rortian position as Cox does, one cannot engage in such genealogical criticisms. One cannot claim that one knows in any absolute sense or at least that one is epistemically justified in any way that these other methods and language games are false, wrong, or dishonest as Nietzsche 46

For a further development of this particular argument against Richard Rorty, see Jurgen Habermas’ The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 206–210. 47 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 712. Also see Twilight of the Idols III: 3, and the entire book three of the Genealogy where Nietzsche argues that scientists are sick and degenerate because they remain captive to the ascetic ideal.

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does indeed claim to know. In fact, Rorty himself, while acknowledging that his theory chimes with Nietzsche’s, nevertheless, makes it abundantly clear that Nietzsche is inconsistent on this point. He therefore wisely distances his position from that of the German Philosopher Rorty writes: Nietzsche has caused a lot of confusion by inferring from “truth is not a matter of correspondence to reality” to “what we call ‘truths’ are just useful lies.” The same confusion is occasionally found in Derrida, in the inference from “there is no such reality as the metaphysicians have hoped to find” to “what we call ‘real’ is really real…Such confusions make Nietzsche and Derrida liable to charges of self-referential inconsistency—to claiming to know what they themselves claim cannot be known.48

Thus, while Cox believes Nietzsche’s perspectivist position overlaps with that of Rorty’s liberal neo-pragmatic position, Rorty himself argues that Nietzsche’s philosophy is inconsistent. For, according to Rorty, Nietzsche is not merely interested in holding a skeptical epistemological position as Rorty is keen to do, rather, Nietzsche is claiming that he does indeed possess knowledge: that so called “truths” in respective discourses are nothing more than lies. Nietzsche would never be satisfied with the proposal made by Cox where we allow each respective domain of knowledge to have its own methods and procedures of justification. Finally, and as I have already sketched in chapter one, genealogy is composed of three axes of inquiry that intersect with one another. These axes are the truth, ethical and power axes. When one approaches Nietzsche’s work one must also pay careful attention to his most important doctrine, namely, the will to power. If we recall, the will to power is both a cosmological and biological doctrine that applies to all inorganic and organic things and processes. To be sure there are other texts, like in Beyond Good and Evil section 36, where Nietzsche claims that WTP is nothing more than a supposition. But no matter which interpretation of WTP one upholds, one must provide a full account of WTP and this entails explicating what, precisely, the relationship between power and truth is for Nietzsche.49 Therefore, when Cox speaks of “rigorous” 48

Rorty Contingency, Irony Solidarity, 8. For the Will-to-Power as an Ontological doctrine, see especially Martin Heidegger’s Nietzsche Volume 3: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans. Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row 1987). Rudiger Grimm, Nietzsche’s Theory of Knowledge (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1977). For a paradigmatic aesthetic interpretation of the will to power, see Arthur Danto’s Nietzsche as Philosopher. 49

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procedures of justification for discourses and disciplines, these procedures are as much a concern for ‘truth’ as they are for power. Indeed, Cox himself admits: Like everything else for Nietzsche, interpretations and their “truths” become and this becoming is a matter of struggle and power—not, as some have argued, a matter of what the strongest decree, or what gives a particular individual the greatest feeling of power, but of rules of formation and criteria of justification prevail or hold sway in a particular discourse at a specific cultural and historical moment.50

Yet how then can we truly speak of “rigorous” rules of formation and criteria of justification if these too are nothing but the rules that merely “hold sway” in a particular cultural and historical moment? If these rules themselves, to quote Rorty again are, “nothing but the familiar procedures of justification in a given society” then what would it mean or entail, pace Nietzsche, if a given society is already sick, degenerate and decadent? As is clear, justification cannot merely mean, for the genealogist (or even to the average scientist), just the outcome of what “holds sway” at a particular cultural and historical moment. Such rules would not be epistemically justified and would go against the subversive spirit of genealogy. Genealogy is a ‘curative science.’ The genealogist is a physician of culture seeking to diagnosis the social ills of modern society. Thus, the genealogist could never admit that genealogy’s ultimate justification is parasitic upon the discourses of the very society and culture in which one finds themselves. To do so, is to accept the epistemic position of tribalism: whatever is taken to be true in a particular society is ipso facto true. If this is the project and goal of genealogy, then surely it cannot be considered epistemically justified. Genealogy, as stated in chapter one, considers itself to be more truthful than those current positions, theories or discourses which currently hold true because these positions are false. Therefore, its procedures must be either and/or both more rigorous or of a completely different kind than those disciplines which are considered justified now.

Section IV: ‘Optical’ Perspectivism In this section, I wish to examine another interpretation (and solution) to the perspectivist problem as put forward by Brian Leiter. Although Leiter is aware of the epistemic problems associated with perspectivism, nevertheless, his solution fails for two principal reasons: 1) it ascribes a position to Nietzsche which is 50

Cox, 61.

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epistemically weak and 2) it is a position that is not in keeping with the essence of genealogy. We have already seen how Leiter criticizes what he calls the ‘Received View’ in chapter two of the present volume. I further identified many more ontological problems with the RV than what Leiter exposed in his decisive article “perspectivism in the Genealogy of Morals.” However, contained within this very same article is a solution to the epistemic piece of the Perspectivist problem and more specifically the EM question I raised in chapter two. To recap, the problem with the ‘Received View’ is that it is impossible to determine the epistemic superiority of one perspective over that of another if there is nothing to constrain the perspective. All perspectives are equally justified because, according to claim iv) there is no determinate character to the world by hypothesis and, therefore, no perspective is capable of revealing the inherent structures or things which exist in the ‘real’ world. From an exegetical standpoint there is another problem with claim iv) in that Nietzsche clearly believes that some claims are both more epistemically worthy than others and that some claims are simply false. As we have already seen in chapter one, there are several passages in The Genealogy, where Nietzsche suggests not only that the English genealogists are wrong but in fact that his, that is, Nietzsche’s genealogy, is more truthful.51 While, as Leiter notes in an important section of Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche claims: 51

See Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic GM I:3, 463 where Nietzsche writes: “According to this theory, (Herbert Spencer’s) that which has always proved itself useful is good: therefore it may claim to be “valuable in the highest degree,” “valuable in itself.” This road to an explanation is, aforesaid, also a wrong one, but at least the explanation is in itself, reasonable and psychologically tenable.” (My Italics). And then compare with the next section in the Genealogy: “The signpost to the right (Rechten) road was for me the question: what was the real etymological significance of the designations for “good” coined in the various languages?” (Nietzsche’s Italics) GM I:4, 463. Indeed Nietzsche goes so far as to call this not just a ‘better’ genealogical method but indeed “a fundamental insight” (wesentliche Einsicht) Zer Genealogie der Moral in Nietzsche, Werke Kritische Gesamtaugabe, Herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Mazzimo Montinari vol. 6, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), 276. Finally, Nietzsche is also quite explicit, near the very beginning of the first essay of the Genealogy, where he mention that in order to investigate humankind’s moral swampland, “one must keep their hearts as well as their sufferings in bounds and have trained themselves to sacrifice all desirability to truth, every truth, even plain, harsh, ugly, repellant, unchristian, immoral truth---For such truths do exist.---” GM I: 2, 461.

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philosophical genealogy, volume i Today we possess science precisely to the extent to which we have decided to accept the testimony of the senses—to the extent to which we sharpen them further; arm them, have learned to think them through. The rest is miscarriage and not-yet-science—in other words, metaphysics, theology, psychology, epistemology…In them reality is not encountered at all, not even as a problem.52

If we accept the RV however, it would be incoherent to make any epistemic claims whatsoever. Thus, the RV is incoherent. Furthermore, the above exegetical problem is further exacerbated because such an interpretation presupposes a theory of reality that Nietzsche explicitly rejects. In Twilight of the Idols, ‘How the Real World at Last Became a Fiction”, Nietzsche clearly rejects the Appearance/Reality distinction. It is impossible, or so Nietzsche argues, to hold that there is a real world underlying and supporting the apparent world because if the real world can never be known (because all we can ever know is the apparent world), then it is impossible to determine how the apparent world corresponds to the real world in the first place. In other words, any claim to knowledge is always perspectival. To know something is to establish a relationship between the subject (the knower) and the object (that which is known). However, to claim that we can know the true world as it is, in and of itself, is senseless: it is tantamount to claiming that we can have an aperspectival, perspective on an object. It is for these reasons that Nietzsche explicitly claims that the RV is misconceived.53 Yet, the ‘Received View’, as Leiter is quick to note, reinforces both these epistemic and exegetical claims! First, the RV holds that our perspectives are inadequate; we can never understand or see the world as it truly is, because there is no determinate character to the world. And yet, some perspectives on the world appear to be more valid when they are compared to the claims made by others. Second, because we can only have perspectives on this ‘world’ there must be another world that supposedly supports and, in some strange and mysterious manner, conditions these perspectives. Based on these two points Leiter persuasively concludes that the ‘Received View’ must be false: first, because it is epistemically incoherent and second because Nietzsche explicitly rejects this position. In order to salvage perspectivism from both epistemic incoherency and interpretative dishonesty, Leiter develops a two-fold argument. The first part of the argument is to draw out two central epistemological doctrines from GM: 52 53

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, (TI:III:3). Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/Anti-Christ, chapter 3, 50–51.

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III, section 12. These Leiter calls the Doctrine of Epistemic Affectivity (DEA) and the Doctrine of Perspectives (DP). For the second step of the argument, Leiter will then demonstrate how these two ideas are still consistent with Nietzsche’s rejection of the Appearance/Realty distinction. Leiter defines The Doctrine of Epistemic Affectivity (hereafter DEA) and the Doctrine of Perspectives (DP) in the following manner: (i) The Doctrine of Epistemic Affectivity (hereafter DEA) (a) All knowledge necessarily presupposes some interest or affect; as a result, (b) Knowledge can never be disinterested; and this implies. (ii) The Doctrine of Perspectives (Hereafter known as DP): as a consequence of the DEA, the knowledge situation is analogous to the optical situation in that both are essentially perspectives; so (a) just as knowledge always presupposes an interest; so too (b) Seeing always presupposes seeing from some particular direction under some particular conditions, and so on.54 From Leiter’s above analysis he then draws up four distinct Nietzschean claims: (1) Necessarily, we know an object from a particular perspective: that is, from the standpoint of particular interests and needs (perspectivism claim) (2) The more perspectives we enjoy—for example, the more interests we employ in knowing the object—the better our conception of what the object is like will be (Plurality claim) (3) We will never exhaust all possible perspectives on the object of knowledge (there are an infinity of interpretive interests that could be brought to bear) (Infinity claim) (4) There exists a catalogue of identifiable factors that would distort our knowledge of the object: that is, certain interpretive interests and needs will distort the nature of objects (Purity claim).55

As Leiter notes, two of these claims will be problematic for any coherent epistemological position, but, in point of fact, all of the above claims are problematic as we will see shortly. The most important (and problematic) claim for Leiter, is the Purity claim. The specific problem with the Purity claim is that it seems 54 55

Leiter, 343–344. Leiter, 344.

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impossible to “catalogue the identifiable factors that would distort our knowledge of the object” given that we can never fully know the object in the first place. It would seem that we would have to know the object aperspectivally before we could claim what conditions would serve to distort our collective knowledge of the object.56 The second problem has to do with the Perspectivist claim. Leiter interprets this claim to mean that a subject always interprets an object according to his or her ruling interests and drives. But if these interests always condition our knowledge of the object, then it does not seem to make any sense to claim that we can possess epistemically, justified true belief. In other words, it does not make much sense to speak about knowledge, truth, or epistemology, if it is impossible for knowledge to be separated from our interests, agendas, purposes or even prejudices.57 In order to solve these two problems, Leiter attempts to provide a satisfactory reconstruction of these claims that will 1) be epistemologically coherent; and 2) be consistent with Nietzsche’s rejection of the appearance/reality distinction as well as other, uncontroversial aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy. As far as the Purity claim is concerned, Leiter argues that we need some criteria to distinguish non-distorting needs and interests from distorting needs and interests.58 According to Leiter, such a solution can be gleaned by examining Nietzsche’s idea of the “strong” or “choice individual.” Leiter’s interpretation of Nietzsche suggests that the ‘strong’ and powerful persons who say “yes to life” are able to determine the ‘terrible truth of reality’. The strong person’s affects are able to see the object more accurately than the weak person because the affective interpretative drives which comprise the weak individual’s character are unable to bear the brute reality of existence. They require illusions, deceptions and lies. However, the strong are able to cope with the true nature of ‘Reality’ which, according to Nietzsche, can be described as the ruthless and unforgiving struggle for greater units of power.59 Thus, the ‘strong’ have an ‘inside track’ to the truth of reality, because their affects afford a clearer view of life in all of its undiluted harshness. The weak, on the other hand, require filters or other distortions to cope with ‘Life’ itself. To Leiter’s credit, this interpretation does seem to cash out. In section 39 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche remarks that: 56 57 58 59

Leiter, 346. Leiter, 346. Leiter, 346. Leiter, 346.

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Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous to the highest degree. Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the “truth” one could still barely endure—or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified.60

Leiter’s reading of these passages is such that we have a clear order of rank; those that are strong have the capacities to understand, though never completely, the tragic sense of “Life.” The weak on the contrary lack these necessary capacities to understand such harsh realities of existence. Therefore, the strong persons motto of saying, “Yes to reality, is just as necessary for the strong as cowardice and the flight from reality—as the ideal is for the weak, who are inspired by weakness.” 61 Based upon the above passages and several others that Leiter marshals forth, I think Leiter is correct to ascribe this view to Nietzsche. Leiter, therefore, solves the second problem as discussed above by finding the correct Nietzschean view of perspectivism at least in terms of how perspectivism relates to the ethical character of a subject. However, from an epistemological standpoint, Leiter never explains how Nietzsche can uphold the claim that there are strong and weak perspectives with respect to the true nature of “Life” because such a claim obviously begs the question: ‘How are we to determine the strong as opposed to the weak?’ Moreover, we might query whether Nietzsche’s claim is to be interpreted literally or metaphorically. In other words, is it those persons who are physically strong that possess truth conducive attributes? Or, must these drives, the drives which lead us to attempt to understand suffering, tragedy and loss, be “strong” (in a metaphorical sense, whatever this may mean) in themselves? Which of these options is Leiter advocating? Either option is problematic. Let us look at the last option first. If we understand Leiter to be putting forward only a metaphorical interpretation of the ‘strong’ or ‘choice’ individual then it is clear that those persons who possess these particular (strong) drives or affects in the appropriate degree and combination are those who can withstand suffering, loss and tragedy and, therefore, are the ‘chosen’ individuals who can delve deeply into the very wellsprings of human existence. But, if the designation ‘strong’ is construed in this way, such a criterion is obviously circular for we are claiming that the strong possess the 60

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, sec. 39, 239. 61 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, BT: 2, 728.

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proper instincts and drives in order to view undistorted reality, which entails that suffering and tragedy in this life are inescapable, while simultaneously, we know that they are interpreting reality correctly because they are strong and can withstand the suffering and torment that, simply put, is the very essence of ‘Life.’ It is perhaps for this reason that Leiter calls Nietzsche’s view “unusual”, but Leiter does not attempt to extricate Nietzsche from this rather inchoate and paradoxical position. Turning now to the first possibility it is clearly equally problematic. If it is truly the case that those persons who are physiologically strong are better at interpreting the ‘truth’ of reality than those who are weak, then we seemingly do not have a perspectivist position after all: one view, namely the perspective from the biological sciences and its correlates, would be true while all others would be merely perspectives, opinions or falsehoods. The only way we can uphold the Purity claim is if we can determine what ‘Reality’ truly is along with the best method that would allow us to access reality. But, given the Doctrine of perspectivism as stated above, the Purity claim is clearly inconsistent with DP. If we now turn to DP itself, we can see how this claim is equally problematic. Towards the end of the article, Leiter provides a very clear and succinct definition of the problem with regard to DP as initially defined. Leiter writes: Nietzsche effectively holds that reality exercises no epistemic constraint on our interpretations of the world (the “facts” themselves turning out to be simply affective projections). Without any such constraint however it is not clear what room there could be for the idea that interpretations could have different epistemic (as opposed to e.g. pragmatic) merits.62

In order to tackle this problem, first, Leiter argues, alongside Wittgenstein and Putnam, that we never ‘get’ at the objects themselves in the world for it is impossible to have a belief or judgment about an object without already having a concept, image or idea of that very same object. So to have a pre-given concept of what the object I am observing is, means that I cannot have a concept that is completely independent of the object nor an object completely independent of the concept: in order to know that I am looking at ‘that’ I need to know what the ‘that’ is from ‘this’, while without the ‘that’ I cannot know what makes the ‘that’ different from ‘this.’ Therefore, to require that I have a completely ‘Objective’ conception of ‘Reality’ as it really is, in and of itself, is contradictory. According to Putnam, “the idea of a comparison of words or mental representa62

Leiter, 347.

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tions with objects is a senseless one.” 63 Building upon this basic insight, Leiter is justified in rejecting what he terms ‘Strong Objectivism.’ Strong Objectivism, as defined by Leiter, is the position, which holds that “a fact is strongly objective only if everything we believe about it—even at the ideal limit-could prove mistaken. Strong objectivity, then, requires that global error be an intelligible possibility.” 64 Such an epistemological position, as Leiter correctly notes, is impossible to uphold. To insist that every belief about an object or a fact may be mistaken is to claim that our concept or understanding concerning an object may completely change. This is absurd. For if our conception of an object completely changed we would no longer be able to recognize the change. In other words, something about the object cannot change—at least some properties of the object must remain if in fact, we can be mistaken about one and the same object. Thus, Strong Objectivism is defeated. Instead, Leiter opts for what John McDowell calls modest objectivity. McDowell defines modest objectivity as the claim that, “We have no vantage point on the question what can be the case, that is, what can be a fact, external to the modes of thought and speech we know our way around in.” 65 Nevertheless, both McDowell and Leiter argue that we can still avail ourselves of the notion of objectivity—and truth. For, according to Leiter, it is our human beliefs, language, and cultural practices and perhaps even our cognitive learning processes, which serve as the necessary conditions for the very possibility of knowledge. These conditions, therefore, would effectively serve as ‘the modes of thought and speech we know our way around in’. In short, modest objectivity holds that we can never get to the ‘factum brutum’ as positivists claim nor at the Kantian thing-in-itself. Both of these ideals are not only just illusions, but are in fact unnecessary standards for truth and justification. For the modest objectivist, we simply view the object as it appears in the world from a number of different perspectives thereby gaining more knowledge about the object from perspective to perspective. After all the perspectives of the object are exhausted, then we can say we have complete knowledge of the object. However, and in keeping with the perspectivist claim, we can never reach this point precisely because of the infinity claim—there are an infinite number of perspectives on any object. Thus, we neither condition the object 63

Hilary Putnam, Realism and Reason: Philosophical Papers, Volume III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), viii. 64 Leiter, 349. 65 See John McDowell’s “Projection and Truth in Ethics,” Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas Department of Philosophy (1987), 11

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of experience, nor is the object transcendent; the object is not beyond all of our perspectives on it; it is not another Ding an Sich. Rather, it is simply the thing itself.66 Though Leiter’s attempt to resolve the Perpsectivist, Infinity and Purity claims is novel, there remain a number of problems with his proposed solution. First, the infinity claim which Leiter discusses earlier in the article is in fact problematic though Leiter does not seem to acknowledge this. The problem, briefly stated, is that if there is only a perspective “knowing,” if it truly is the case that we can see an object from an infinite number of perspectives, then knowledge would be impossible: Nietzsche could not make any epistemic claim whatsoever. For example, if we can view an object such as a chair (the example Leiter himself uses) from several different angles and then combine these perspectives, such a combination does not yield any more knowledge concerning the properties or nature of the chair than if we only viewed the chair from one perspective. Just because we have three, four, five or fifty perspectives on one object is inconsequential in relation to the infinite possible number of perspectives one can have on this very same object. Surely, we must admit that there must be both a finite amount of perspectives on any object and that some possible viewpoints of the chair do not count, strictly speaking, as perspectives. Otherwise, if we uphold a perspectivist theory of knowledge and the infinity claim, then every angle, every perspective, will just be one drop in an ocean of an endless number of possible contrary perspectives. Second, the Plurality claim is also problematic. If we recall, the plurality claim states that: “The more perspectives we enjoy—for example, the more interests we employ in knowing the object—the better our conception of what the object is like will be.” But, such a claim, as stated, is not specific enough to gain ‘real’ knowledge of an object. The Plurality claim is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for knowledge. Just because one has more perspectives on an object does not guarantee that one possesses any essential knowledge about that object. For example, just because we examine the exterior of a car from several angles, heights, etc. does not mean that we understand the car’s aerodynamic design, or the impact resistant structure of the bumper, or the dent resistant side door panels etc. Surely, these qualities of the car, these qualities of the object, are far more important than seeing the car from a particular angle, or height, as Leiter suggests. So, there must be a prior reason, or a prior agenda, as to why we intend to view the car from a particular perspective and what the 66

Leiter, 349–350.

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purpose is in viewing the car from that perspective in the first place. Thus, the plurality claim, as Leiter states it, is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for knowledge of the object in question.67 Finally, if we now turn to the perspectivist claim proper we see several other problems that are allowed to go unacknowledged and unchallenged by Leiter. First, let us turn to the Revised Perspectivist Claim. In light of Leiter’s anti-realist ontological position as well as his analysis of the purity claim, Leiter revises the perspectivist thesis now to read: “Knowledge of objects in any particular case is always conditioned by particular interpretative interests that direct the knower to corresponding features of the object of knowledge.” (Revised perspectivism Claim)68

To compliment this Revised Perspectivist Claim, Leiter adds what he calls the non-revisionist thesis and the anti-metaphysical thesis. The non-revisionist thesis Leiter defines as: “Within our epistemic practices, we can still ask our mundane questions about truth and knowledge, and aspire towards modest objectivity in the answers; only our metaepistemological and metaphysical views about these epistemic categories require revision.” 69 (The non-revisionist thesis)

While, finally, the anti-metaphysical thesis Leiter defines as: “The object of knowledge neither can transcend human interests (as realism would have it) nor is it simply constituted by particular interests (as idealism would have it).” 70 (anti-metaphysical thesis)

Although these claims are not problematic when taken on their own, they become problematic and indeed inconsistent when held together. In several paragraphs, Leiter implies that he is arguing in favor of a purely coherentist account of truth and epistemic justification a la Donald Davidson. 67

According to Amy Mullin, “A very similar point is made by Elizabeth Anderson, who argues in her “Knowledge, Human Interests, and Objectivity in Feminist Epistemology,” Philosophical Topics 23 (1995): 27–58 that we seek not only truth but significant truth from our theories.” For the genealogist, every truth related to his or her investigation is ultra-significant as a genealogical inquiry is not only an epistemic project but a project of and for the genealogist’s self-transformation. 68 Leiter, 351. 69 Leiter, 351. 70 Leiter, 351.

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However, towards the end of Leiter’s article, it is clear that Leiter also switches towards a contextual Wittgensteinian position by adopting and defining what McDowell calls “the modest objective approach.” Leiter writes: At the limit the modest objectivist claims, distinctively human beliefs, sensibilities, practices and dispositions are a condition of the very possibility of anything being true or knowable—but this does not mean that what is the case or what beliefs are justified depends directly on what any particular person or community believes, is sensitive to, has evidence for, or is disposed to talk about.71

I see three principal problems in construing both perspectivism and epistemology in general, under this view. First, Leiter implicitly accepts a Wittgensteinian contextual, and “modestly objective” approach towards epistemology, language and truth. But what exactly, does Leiter mean by “modest objectivity?” He seems to imply, by discussing Wittgenstein in some detail, that we can best understand Nietzsche as a contextualist — our practices, language, community etc. form the basis and necessary horizon for our beliefs, questions and forthcoming answers concerning the world. We can never get beyond our language or the beliefs of our community in any absolute sense because they form the necessary background or, to use Wittgenstein’s terminology, the “form of life” for any beliefs whatsoever. For Wittgenstein, the language habits and rules of a community form the necessary backdrop for the asking and answering of any question. As Wittgenstein puts it in The Philosophical Investigations: It is no doubt true that you could not calculate with certain forms of paper and ink, if that is, they were subject to certain queer changes—but still the fact that they changed could in turn only be got from memory or from other means of calculation. And how are these tested in their turn? What has to be accepted, the given, is—one could say—forms of life.72

Or, put another way, and going back to Leiter’s quoting of McDowell’s position: “We have no vantage point on the question what can be the case, that is, what can be a fact, external to the modes of thought and speech we know our way around in.” For the contextualist then, the justification of a proposition will ultimately be determined by the epistemic practices of a given community. However, the problem with such an approach is that we can never question “a form of life.” It is impossible for a form of life to be wrong because the very form of life provides the means and measures that make questions pertaining to 71

Leiter, 349. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, ed(s). G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959), 226.

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justification and of truth and falsehood possible in the first place. To claim that a form of life is wrong is much like describing the constitution to be unconstitutional.73 It is precisely for this reason that Wittgenstein calls a form of life a “given”—something that must of necessity exist in the ‘background’ in order to make the ‘foreground’ possible. But, as is obvious, this position is an extremely weak method of epistemic justification because “it does not posit beliefs justified otherwise than by the support of further beliefs.” 74 That is to say, the contextualist does not provide a non-doxastic (or causal) account of truth. Surely, a proper epistemology must take into account the non-doxastic as well as the doxastic aspects of any form of empirical inquiry.75 And, Nietzsche, of course, in many different passages and works suggests that naturalistic and empirical interpretations of phenomena are more important than merely conceptual and especially communal interpretations. Secondly, and expanding further on this criticism, if Leiter does in fact support this position then a genealogical method based upon it will ultimately lose much of its force. Genealogy, as we learned from chapter 1, is alterity. Genealogy will, as Foucault suggests in What is Enlightenment? “Separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do or think.” 76 In other words, the purpose of genealogy is simply not to believe that “We have no vantage point on the question what can be the case, that is, what can be a fact, external to the modes of thought and speech we know our way around in.” Rather, the purpose of genealogy is to transgress the current modes of thought and speech within our respective communities and indeed to trespass boldly into the very territory of the Unthought itself. Surely, both Nietzsche and Foucault introduce a completely new, incisive, fecund and tremendously profound approach with regard to our understanding of the origin of guilt or the development of the penal system respectively speaking. In essence, Leiter’s modest objectivity is too 73

This analogy comes from Lawrence Hinman’s article: “Can a Form of Life be Wrong,” Philosophy, Vol. 58, No. 225 (July, 1983), 339–355. Hinman argues that a form of life can indeed be wrong, but he must supplement his interpretation of Wittgenstein’s ‘‘form of life’’ by understanding it in Gadamarian terms. Secondly, his interpretation of the sections in The Philosophical Investigations and in On Certainty where Wittgenstein mentions the words “form of life” is extremely charitable. 74 Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 190. 75 Haack, Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology, 190. 76 Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, 46.

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modest because it could only represent the squint, the nook, the corner, the slug perspective of the herd--the insight of the common.77 Finally, Leiter contradicts his above analysis of what I call virtue perspectivism in volume two, with his acceptance of a Wittgensteinian approach to truth and language. Leiter’s earlier point, if we remember, was that the strong, those capable of affirming the suffering that we experience as human beings in life, were the ones who had a better understanding of reality than those who were weak. However, Wittgenstein would not and could not hold that those who were physiologically strong and healthy have a better, more intuitive understanding of life than those who were unhealthy. All are equal within the ‘form of life’ because it is the form of life, and not the individuals within them that shape the ‘meaning-horizon’ and thus the very conditions for truth and falsity within a language game. But once we accept the above conception of truth and justification as one that is strictly dependent on our linguistic community, then the importance of the individual greatly diminishes. Then again, if we assume the strong are much rarer than the weak, then Leiter contradicts himself. Leiter is simultaneously claiming that the strong can realize the ‘terrible truth of existence’ while also holding that we are conditioned by the rules and practices of our common, linguistic community. But by definition, the strong could never outstrip the larger, linguistic community they share with the weak and therefore could never truly escape the moral nor epistemic perspective of the herd.78 If my reasoning and interpretation of Leiter’s 77

It is clear from The Gay Science that Nietzsche would soundly reject Leiter’s Wittgensteinian appropriation of perspectivism. There Nietzsche argues that: “Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings.” (My Italics) (p. 298) and furthermore that: “Our thoughts themselves are continually governed by the character of consciousness—by the “genius of the species” that commands it—and translated back into the perspective of the herd…whatever becomes conscious becomes by the same token shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal; all becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to superficialities, and generalization.” 299–300. Clearly, Nietzsche would not accept Leiter’s modest (herd) objectivity. 78 Coker makes much the same criticism. He writes: “The reason that Leiter’s Nietzsche is not revisionary is that Leiter’s Nietzsche’s perspectivism amounts to a quasi-foundationalism analogous to form(s) of life as a (to-be-taken-as-) given, which, insofar as it presumes commonality, is either a philosophical fiction or is loaded with normative presuppositions, and which operate with a cognitive/non-cognitive opposition that would be rendered problematic by the deconstruction of scheme/content.” In “Construing perspectivism,” in International Studies in Philosophy 34:3, 2002, 5–28, 19–20.

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position is correct then surely such a position directly contradicts Nietzsche’s purpose of perspectivism. As Nietzsche writes in The Will to Power section 287: “The ideas of the herd should rule in the herd—but not reach out beyond it: the leaders of the herd require a fundamentally different valuation for their own actions, as do the independent, or the “beasts of prey” etc.” 79 In short, the Purity claim and Leiter’s adoption of a modest epistemic position are clearly inconsistent. While furthermore, Leiter’s epistemic position is not only weak from an epistemic standpoint, but is inconsistent with many other aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Thus an optical interpretation of Nietzschean perspectivism, grounded on an anti-realist metaphysical position seems to involve just as many problems as a ‘naturalistic’ position (‘naturalism’ as construed by Cox); a perspectival, conditional position (as seen in section II); and an aesthetic position (Nehamas). A possible solution to the problem of perspectivism, presented recently by John C. Coker, is to reject the scheme/content dualism on which the ‘Received View’, Leiter’s anti-realist thesis and even to some extent Cox’s position are predicated.80 To be sure, there are problems with Coker’s own construal of “construal perspectivism” primarily in terms of making room for the “non-doxastic” as argued by Rex Welshon in “Construing, Construing perspectivism.” 81 Yet Coker’s solution presents a possible key to unraveling the above problems. That being said, we have learned a great deal from the following investigation. First, a solution to the perspectivist problem must somehow incorporate both the naturalistic and aesthetic features of the thesis. By this I mean that it must be possible to justify the accuracy of some perspectives over others and it must also be possible to affirm that perspectives are creative, and dynamic interpretations and re-interpretations of the world. Second, Leiter’s point that the human knower must be able to distinguish those conditions and affects which would serve to distort the proper understanding of the object is well taken. Again, a solution to the perspectivist problem must explain how it is possible to have “false perspectives” or in the parlance of David Owen, it must be made clear how restricted self-consciousness is possible. Third and finally, Cox’s suggestion that any Nietzschean perspectivist philosophy must be antifoundational in terms of its epistemic justification is also duly noted. Any epi79

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Holingdale, (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), section 287, 162. 80 See John C. Coker’s “Construing perspectivism.” 81 See Robert C. Welshon’s “Construing, Construing perspectivism”, in International Studies in Philosophy 34:3, 2002, esp. 38.

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stemic theory which relies on “ultimate givens” or self-justifying beliefs must be rejected. In volume two, I combine all of the above points brought out here, to form a consistent and coherent account of perspectivism that is first, epistemically justifiable and second, consistent with philosophical genealogy. As for now, it is necessary to examine, in greater detail, the methods and research techniques that both Nietzsche and Foucault concretely employ in the second essay of The Genealogy and in the chapter entitled: “The means of correct training” in Discipline and Punish in order to understand how a genealogical investigation is conducted.

CHAPTER

FOUR

LEAD LINES OF DESCENT: THE METHODS AND TECHNIQUES OF PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY

Section I: Power in On the Genealogy of Morals In chapter one I showed that genealogy differs significantly from conventional methods of historical investigation. Whereas more traditional forms of historiography focus on explaining the rise and fall of kingdoms or the origin and transmission of ideas or customs for example, the principal purpose of a genealogical investigation is to unmask how discourses, ideas and institutional systems are byproducts of power. Power, but more specifically the struggle for greater power, so argues the genealogist, is responsible for creating the very objects, discourses and institutions of history itself. Power produces what we, as investigators, deem to be important historical “events” according to our agendas. Moreover, by comprehending power arrangements or as Nietzsche and Foucault call them “contracts”, “networks,” dispositifs and “constructions,” genealogy reveals a different interpretation of history than the one normally presented. A philosophical genealogical investigation reveals a more diverse, darker and more cynical source for the origin of ideas and historical events than the one often espoused for example in undergraduate college textbooks of history. Indeed, one of the underlying themes in Discipline and Punish is to argue that important social institutions--such as the penitentiary system as it exists in modern Western democracies--did not come about as a result of a more humanistic or compassionate understanding of the criminal and a desire to rehabilitate him or her. On the contrary, the penitentiary system was born from a multitude of intersecting causes including earlier ascetic practices

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(adapted from monasteries); previous institutions of ‘correction’ (sanitariums and gaols); new advancements in architecture (the pan-opticon); and finally new academic discourses (psychology). Each of these threads, as it were, became interwoven to form a coercive laboratory of power/knowledge dedicated to the study, control and future production of a criminal class. In effect, genealogy first displaces and then replaces our previous beliefs concerning how and why academic discourses and institutions were founded by demonstrating a sounder, better justified, but often more depressing hypothesis as to their true origins. But why is genealogy considered the philosophical and historical method of power? How can the genealogist prove that the penitentiary system, for example, is really a means for controlling and indeed producing criminals as Foucault contends? Why accept Foucault’s alternative historical narrative of the history of the prison system? In sum, ‘How can the genealogist justify such a research program?’ In order to answer this last question, it is incumbent to examine the purpose and methodologies of each of the three essays in The Genealogy, both Discipline and Punish, as well as The History of Sexuality Volume One. Additionally, we would also need to examine the numerous essays, notes and other writings by Foucault and Nietzsche, which explicitly discuss genealogical methods of inquiry in order to draw out, in full, each of their respective genealogical methods. Since to examine all of this material in such painstaking detail would necessitate several books and not just a chapter, I shall limit myself in this section to explaining, analyzing and delineating the main methods of investigation that Nietzsche uses in the second essay of The Genealogy. In the next section, I shall turn my attention to a section of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to demonstrate the similarities and differences between his methodological strategies of genealogical investigation in order to compare and contrast them to Nietzsche’s method. The second essay of the Genealogy is titled “Guilt”, Bad Conscience and the Like.” There are several goals of this essay. Nietzsche’s principal purpose isn’t just to investigate the historical origin of guilt, but the entire genealogical relationship between guilt and morality. That is, Nietzsche’s investigation into the sources of guilt will lead to the sources of promise making; how promise making leads to the creation of the first moral creature, man; and finally how the construction of ‘man’ leads to the great question of ‘man’: ‘How ought one to live?” But Nietzsche also seeks to move beyond the concept of ‘man’ too. For ‘man’ is a peculiar breed of animal. He is the only animal with “…the right

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to make promises.” And it is this right to make promises which gives man, Nietzsche continues, a “paradoxical task.” The task is paradoxical because man is the only creature for whom nature has bestowed the capacity to change his essence. The second essay is largely devoted to showing how mankind’s essence has gradually ‘evolved’ as a result of a confluence of historical forces that came together, paradoxically, in a determined, and yet, non-rational fashion. For the Christian reader, such an analysis, if true, would be devastating as it would serve to undercut her belief in freewill along with the belief in an all perfect Creator who has bestowed this very special gift of freedom onto His creatures. Clearly, this is one of Nietzsche’s goals and he succeeds in carrying it out in exemplary fashion. But there is another, more subtle goal connected to demonstrating this historical and, therefore, contingent formation of man. Nietzsche’s ‘problematizing’ of the nature of man to borrow a term from Foucault’s jargon, simultaneously offers the reader of The Genealogy (even the Christian!) a glimmer of hope as the reader cannot help but appreciate that she has the power to transform her essence. Regardless of whether one has an essence or not, there is still work to be done on oneself. And yet it is this very self-knowledge, namely, that we are malleable creatures which leads invariably to the question: “How does one want to be, how does one want to be remembered? And, if after much soul searching we discover who we would like to be, the next question we need to ask is: ‘Do we have the strength of character to keep the promise that we have made to ourselves to be this person?’ “Is this, Nietzsche exclaims… “not the real problem regarding man (Ist es nicht das eigentliche Problem vom Menschen)?” 1 At first glance, this so called “problem” may not seem very problematic at all. In our mundane, everyday life experiences we make promises to ourselves and to others (our spouse, our children, our boss) hour to hour, day to day, and from week to week. We also keep or break these same promises as the case may be. But if all of this is trivially true, which clearly it is, then why should our capacity to make promises be considered a “problem” and more importantly why would Nietzsche devote an entire essay to it? It is precisely here, that is, at the level of commonsense introspection regarding our mundane and often trivial daily life experiences that Nietzsche will begin his investigation. Nietzsche will walk down that long, dark path towards the origins of our collective ‘bad conscience’ by first starting off with .

1

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, “Guilt,” “Bad Conscience,” (Schlechtes, Gewissen) and the Like. GM: II, sec. 1, 493. (Zur Genealogie Der Moral edited by Kritische Gemengestaube vol. VI. 2., 307.

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our everyday experience of why making promises, remembering promises and, most importantly, doing everything in our power to fulfill our promises is so problematic. The first step of his account is to remind the reader that our propensity to forget is not parasitic on memory, but is rather a power onto its own. Drawing upon our own introspection, Nietzsche calls us to investigate how little we actually remember: what we ate for dinner two days ago; what the weather was like a week ago; what we wore yesterday; where we parked our car; etc. these are things we often have difficulty recalling. Indeed our capacity for forgetting, Nietzsche seems to suggest, is a more primordial component of the human animal than promise making. And, since in order to uphold a promise we must first remember our promise before any action can take place, why I remember promises that I made perhaps five or ten years ago Nietzsche suggests, as opposed to what I ate for dinner ten days ago is, at least, somewhat interesting. Still, is this analysis very profound? If I had a better memory might I not remember what I had for dinner ten days ago, one hundred days ago or 2 years ago? Is not forgetting really just the negation or lack of memory? Nietzsche anticipates this objection and clearly wants to challenge this rather common sense idea of forgetting. As Nietzsche makes clear, “forgetting” is its own power; it is not just the lack of memory. In fact, forgetting, Nietzsche contends, is responsible for our very survival as a species. He writes, “forgetting is no mere vis inertiae as the superficial imagine; it is rather an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression, that is responsible for the fact that what we experience and absorb enters our consciousness as little while we are digesting it.” 2 As he explains later, it is clear that we must put more value on our capacities to ‘forget’ sensations and experiences than on our powers for remembering. For example, I am not often aware of the hardness of the chair that I now sit on as I type this sentence. Nor, of the smells around me, as my neighbor fertilizes her lawn or the hustle and bustle of the street I live on as I type these very words. I am not aware of these things, so argues Nietzsche, precisely because I, as a human being, need to forget all of these events which I am clearly sensing (since I can consciously reflect on each of them at any given moment), in order to perform the task at hand: the writing of this book. If we could not forget the thousand fold perceptions that assault our senses on a daily basis, we could never focus our attention and energy on our work or even our own thoughts. Underscoring this last point, Nietzsche remarks: “...To make room 2

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II: 1, 493.

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for new things, Nietzsche reminds us, is “above all for the nobler functions and functionaries, for regulation, foresight, pre-meditation (for our organism is an oligarchy)—that is the purpose of active forgetfulness, which is like a doorkeeper, a preserver of the psychic order.” 3 If forgetting seems to be an ability that is more useful and powerful than remembering, then Nietzsche’s question, crudely summarized as: “How was man, the flighty and forgetful animal, bred to make promises?” seems all the more perplexing and profound. Furthermore, it is when the remembering of an idea or event leads to feelings of guilt, and in turn these feelings lead to both mental and physical suffering, that we immediately become aware of just how philosophically and psychologically intriguing Nietzsche’s question truly is. Before embarking on the long road to the final answer to this problem, Nietzsche first explains what the final destination of the road will be. As he often does in The Genealogy, he shows us what the future of humankind may hold for us both as a species as well as for the singular individual if and only if we have the courage to truly understand our history and possess the audacity to seize hold of our possible future. According to Nietzsche, If we place ourselves at the end of this tremendous process, (of how responsibility originated, and here Nietzsche means, being responsible for oneself) where the tree at last brings forth fruit, where society and the morality of custom at last reveal what they have simply been means to: then we discover that the ripest fruit (Früchte zeigigt) is the sovereign individual (souveraine Individuum) like only to himself, (das nur sich selbst gleiche,) liberated from morality, custom, autonomous and supramoral (for autonomous and moral are mutually exclusive) (der autonom und sittlich schliesst sich aus) in short, the man who has his own independent, protracted will and the right to make promises (der werklich versprechen darf)….this master of a free will, this sovereign man.4

For Nietzsche, such an “instinct” of holding oneself to one’s own law, not giving one’s oath and one’s word too lightly, (for the sovereign individual always does what he promises he shall do) is the great fruit that the sickly tree of guilt may eventually bring forth provided that we, as individuals, make it happen. Guilt is merely a way station on the track towards the sovereign individual, the exemplar for future humans. Some scholars have disagreed with the above interpretation regarding this valuation of the sovereign individual. They claim that the sovereign individual is not a moral exemplar at all. On the contrary, it is cleverly used by Nietzsche as 3 4

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII: 1, 494. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII: 2, 495.

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a further riposte aimed at Christian morality. This argument was first advanced by Lawrence Hatab in Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence. It has also found more recent defenders from the likes of Christa Davis Acampora.5 Their argument runs as follows: Nietzsche excoriates the usefulness of memory as well as the tremendously high valuation we have placed on it in the first several sections of the second essay. He claims that memory was the necessary condition for the emergence of morality in a pejorative sense (MPS) to borrow Leiter’s phrase. But the sovereign individual seems to be the logical outcome of the very culture which Nietzsche criticizes. Christian culture, Nietzsche thinks, places a higher premium on memory than any other culture in the history of humankind. Since the sovereign individual always remembers to fulfill the promises he or she has made, then the sovereign individual is anything but an exemplar for Nietzsche’s new morality but rather the ideal for the old, moral and all too Christian, ancien regime.6 Much can be and needs to be written on this topic, but that being said, there is an obvious flaw with the argument as presented. The overall goal of The Genealogy—which I think is clearly indisputable—is to show how practices, discourses and even physiological functions are not stable, but dynamic. That is, there is no intrinsic essence to any institution, law, moral code or human capacity. Nietzsche shows how our most cherished and sacred ideas were not sui generis, but emerged from more familiar, crasser, and thus, more lowly origins. What’s more, Nietzsche demonstrates that there is no inherent logic to these changes: even the hand was not always meant for grasping. Thus such things, at best, can only be explained as the result of the continual struggle for greater units of power. But if this is correct then it follows that even if we assume that ‘memory’ has been put to use in a life-denying manner throughout the history of humankind, this does not entail that it cannot be used differently, life5

See her “On Sovereignty and Overhumanity: Why It Matters How We Nietzsche’s Genealogy II:2.”in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays, Edited by Christa Davis Acampora, (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006), 147–163. 6 To be sure, Hatab’s argument is a little more nuanced as he also supplements his interpretation with some rather weak etymological evidence: he favourably compares ubersittlich (supramoral) with moralitat (morality) and argues that Nietzsche’s designator ubersittlich to describe the sovereign individual has modern, moral overtones. Since Nietzsche is at pains to reject modern (Kantian) morality, this is further evidence to support Hatab’s claim that the phrase souveraine Individuum is being used by Nietzsche in a pejorative fashion. See his Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence, (London: Routledge, 2005), 54

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affirmingly. It is the sovereign individual who reinterprets memory for a greater and more creative and laudatory purpose. In any case, now that Nietzsche has shown us a glimpse of the possible destination for humankind, he begins to show us the “genealogy” of promise making; “the long history and variety of forms” this “astonishing manifestation” took in order to bear forth this ripe fruit.7 Nietzsche’s first initial conjecture, which he will later re-enforce and solidify, is at once physiologically based as it is historically or even psychologically founded. In the most primal terms, Nietzsche argues that memory was metaphorically burned, carved and carefully tattooed into the human animal. As Nietzsche writes, Man could never do without blood, torture and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself (Es Gieng niemals ohne Blut, Martern, Opfer ab, wenn der Mensch es nothing hielt, sich ein Gedächtniss); the most dreadful sacrifices and pledges (sacrifices of the first-born among them), the most repulsive mutilations (castration, for example), the cruelest rites of all the religious cults—all this has its origin in the instinct that realized that pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics.8 (Alles Das hat in jenem Instinke seinen Ursprung, welcher im Schemerz das Machtigste Hülfsmitel der Mnemotik errieth.)

As we will see later, Nietzsche runs together evidence from several different disciplines often within the same paragraph (and, in this case, even in the same sentence!) in order to substantiate his hypothesis. However, we can tease out the biological, anthropological and historical proofs for his conjecture and separate them in order to assess each. Physiologically, we remember, as children, not to touch the stove when it is on. We remember to wear shoes or a coat when playing outside. As children, we seem to need and require pain in order to remember our times tables, proper rules for grammar, punctuation and spelling. Sitting in a hard chair or at a desk concentrating, repeating the same multiplication tables and rules of grammar until we ‘get them right,’ is a form of self-induced pain. Indeed, we may shake ourselves, slam our fist against a desk, or hit our leg when we forget a piece of knowledge that we thought we should have remembered! Such self-inflicted pain may even go unnoticed. Pain, on a physiological level then, forces us to remember key, causal interactions between ourselves and other objects so that we prevent injuring ourselves further. However, pain is also positive because it forces us to retain an important skill or remember a piece of information we would otherwise forget. 7 8

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII: 2, 496. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII: 3, 497.

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Turning to the historical, Nietzsche argues that we can also see evidence of the importance of pain by simply looking at ancient penal codes. As Nietzsche indicates: The worse man’s memory (Gedächtniss) has been, the more fearful has been the appearance of his customs; the severity of the penal code portrays perhaps the clearest example of the significant measure of the degree of effort needed to overcome forgetfulness (Vergesslichkeit) and to impose a few primitive demands of social existence as present realities upon these slaves of momentary (Augenblicks-Sklaven) affect and desire. (Nietzsche’s Italics)9

To provide even further support for his argument, Nietzsche lists no fewer than nine different, grizzly and tortuous methods of punishment. What’s more, Nietzsche deems these methods as being crucial for the establishment of civilization. They helped produced the first “five or six I will nots’.” 10 Memory, according to Nietzsche, is burnt into us at the earliest stages of human society. After establishing how memory came into the world, Nietzsche’s next task is to understand how that other “somber thing,” the consciousness of guilt, the “bad conscience,” came into being from these bizarre punishments. But, before Nietzsche continues to follow this genealogical thread, he takes a moment to criticize a common misinterpretation and, as he writes, “worthless” explanation of guilt as understood by other “genealogists of morals.” 11 It is those English Utilitarians and hedonists, such as Herbert Spencer and Paul Ree that Nietzsche specifically has in mind when he states that they argue incorrectly and with no historical sense to boot. Nietzsche’s harshness is well justified because these other, so-called “genealogists,” argue something to the effect that justice appeared on earth because: “the criminal deserves punishment because he could have acted differently.” 12 Such an interpretation, however, is clearly incorrect and unwarranted as it commits the fallacy of historical presentism: the English Utilitarians transpose their own, modern beliefs as to what they believe the purposes of laws, justice and punishment should be onto primeval and ancient persons. In effect, such ‘genealogists’ argue that we punish criminals today because we think they have the freewill to act differently. Ancient people, the argument continues, reasoned the same as we do now and 9

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II:3, 497. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II:3, 498. Among the nine that Nietzsche lists are “piercing with stakes” “quartering”…., and finally “smearing the wrongdoer with honey and leaving him in the blazing sun for the flies.” (498) 11 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II:4, 498. 12 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II: 4, 499. 10

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thus this is why ancient peoples founded the very laws, institutions of justice and courts we have today. The problem with this interpretation, according to Nietzsche, is that “whoever transposes it (this “genealogy” of our modern day conception of punishment) to the beginning is guilty of a crude misunderstanding of the psychology of more primitive mankind.” 13 The reason being is that the concepts and distinctions that such a view presuppose, such as knowing the differences between “intentional”, “negligent”, “accidental”, “accountable” etc, are conceptions of a “high degree of humanity.” 14 It would be impossible for such primitive lawmakers to have these sorts of concepts in mind even when, for example, Hanurabi’s code was constructed.15 Thus, Nietzsche says, we must pursue a different road in order to provide the correct account of the origin, meaning and purpose of both ‘punishment’ and guilt. Turning once more to the etymological origins of common German words (as he did in the first essay) Nietzsche notices an uncanny resemblance between the German word for guilt or Schuld and the German word for debts, Schulden. This similarity, Nietzsche surmises, must be more than a mere historical coincidence. Just as he did in the first essay where he examined and argued for the etymological origins of Schlecht (bad) and Bonus (Latin for good) to less abstract, more concrete words, Nietzsche argues that Schuld or guilt which is a very abstract concept, must originate from the more concrete and thus more readily understandable (at least for ancient peoples) Schulden (debt). This etymological clue is an extremely important piece of evidence for Nietzsche’s genealogical investigation. If Schuld is indeed a derivative of Schulden then we can offer a much different and yet sounder explanation as to why early human beings felt the need to punish others than the explanation espoused by the English Utilitarians. The English Utilitarians explain this need for punishment in terms of a gradual evolution and refinement of self-responsibility. But if we continue to follow the path that Nietzsche has now revealed then the fact that ancient peoples had punishments, as we briefly examined earlier, is not due because they believed that the wrong-doer is responsible for his unlawful deed. That inference, Nietzsche would say, is a very late concept and should not apply to earlier, pre-historic and indeed pre-human beings. Rather, as the etymological investigation suggests, these early human beings meted out pun13

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII:4, 499. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII:4, 499. 15 It is believed that Hammurabi’s code was written circa 1792–1750 B.C. See Robert F. Harper, The Code of Hammurabi (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1904). 14

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ishment because the original contract between creditor and debtor was broken. As Nietzsche expresses it, “The idea (is) that every injury has its equivalent and can actually be paid back, even if only through the pain of the culprit.” 16 The relationships of buying, selling, trading, trafficking and, of course, crediting and indebting, form the fundamental structures of any civilization. Specific terms of repayment were made between creditor and debtor. If the debtor could not pay the creditor what was promised then the creditor was allowed to take out his payment in a different kind as it were, “something else that he “possessed”, something he had control over; for example, his body, his wife, his freedom, or even his life.” 17 It is here, in humankind’s pre-history, that “severity, cruelty and pain” were absolutely necessary in order “to inspire trust in his (the debtor’s) promise to repay, to provide a guarantee of the seriousness and sanctity of his promise, to impress repayment as a duty, an obligation upon his own conscience…” 18. “Inspiring trust” in the debtor such that he would fulfill his promises to his creditors is a method of insurance universal to all human civilizations: “everywhere and from early times one had exact evaluations, legal evaluations, of the individual limbs and parts of the body from this point of view, some of them going into horrible and minute detail.” 19 To substantiate this claim, Nietzsche merely mentions, but does not explicitly quote from the Twelve Tablets of Rome and the ancient Egyptian practice of entombing the debtor along with the creditor’s corpse. The Twelve Tables insured that if the debtor was unable to pay his creditor in currency or any other tradable good then the creditor could remove a prescribed amount of flesh (the cutting of shares) from the debtor as specified by the Tables. Meanwhile the Egyptian practice of entombing the debtor along with the creditor was for a different ‘punishment’ such that “….the debtors corpse found no peace from the creditor even in the grave—and among the Egyptians such peace meant a great deal.” 20 At this point our genealogical journey reaches an obstruction: how can pain or the “cutting of shares” truly replace the money credited?21 For modern readers this sounds absolutely abhorrent! “There must be something more to ancient laws 16

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM:II 4, 499. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM:II 5, 500. 18 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM:II 5, 500. 19 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII:5, 500. 20 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII:5, 500. 21 “On the third market day let them divide his body among them. If they cut more or less than each one’s share it shall be no crime.” See Gary Edward Forsythe’s (Assistant 17

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than merely this!” Nietzsche hears his contemporaries exclaim. But Nietzsche not only anticipates this “modern” objection, but, once again, takes measures to ensure that we move past our own feelings of empathy that we have for the debtor in order to see ancient peoples as they viewed themselves. Moreover, Nietzsche seems to suggest in these passages that such feelings of empathy are dangerous for the true, truth seeker for two reasons. First, they serve to obscure the truth. They prevent us from recognizing the terrible and cruel reality of our collective pre-history as human beings. Second, they keep us from experiencing those feelings which will help us to arrive at greater truths. These truths are ones that are not simply cognized, but felt. More importantly, such truths assist us to cast off antiquated and restrictive ways of being. On the first point Nietzsche writes, Let us be clear as to the logic of this form of compensation (Ausgleichungsform): it is strange enough. An equivalence is provided by the creditor’s receiving, in place of a literal compensation for an injury (thus in the place of money, land, possessions of any kind), a recompense in the form of a kind of pleasure—the pleasure of being allowed to vent his power freely upon one who is powerless, the voluptuous (Wollust) pleasure “de faire le mal pour le plaisir de faire” (Of doing evil for the pleasure of doing it), the enjoyment (Genuss) of violation (Vergewaltigung) (Nietzsche’s Italics)22

According to Nietzsche, the enjoyment the creditor receives from violating the body of the one indebted to him, is more than just a re-payment of the original debt. It is a return to “the right of the masters…a warrant for and title to cruelty.” 23 This equation of gaining power = pleasure= making another suffer = repayment of funds, property, goods etc. may again sound strange to modern ears, but, Nietzsche shows that it in fact has its own logic. We may make sense of this logic by returning to the Twelve Tables of Rome. A common interpretation of the Twelve Tables suggests that it was a merely a legal means the Plebs could use to guarantee that their recent struggle with the Patrician class for greater rights and privileges would be codified in order to be preserved and, most importantly, enforced.24 However, the Twelve Tables, under Nietzsche’s interpretation, is shot through with at least two different investments of power. It does serve to mark the ascendancy of the Plebians to Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Chicago.) translation of The Twelve Tables of Rome, Table III, 2. c. 450 B.C. at www. Ragzinternational. com. 22 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII:5, 500–501. 23 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII:5, 501. 24 See The Cambridge Ancient History Volume VII: The Hellenistic Monarchies and The Rise of Rome, ed(s). S.A. Cook, F.E. Adcock, and M.P. Charlesworth (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1954), 456–467.

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be sure, but it also entrenches the power of the Patricians by providing the noble classes of Rome the right to treat those in their debt (most likely the plebs) in whatever manner they so desired. Thus, the Twelve Tables is an historical emergence representative of the agonic nature of power. The Twelve Tables marks a clear power struggle between two groups in history whose struggle may yet be re-interpreted differently according to one’s perspective. The document thereby demonstrates that power is fluid—historical documents are shot through with conflicting agendas and interpretations. The perplexing equation mentioned above (pleasure = causing someone else’s suffering = repaying one’s debts) is solved by understanding the basic metric which governs early human beings: deriving pleasure from another through pain and torture is perceived as being good for the person who executes the punishment. Nietzsche writes in this regard: “To see others does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle to which even the apes might subscribe.” 25 As Nietzsche explains earlier in the section, “the moral conceptual world of “guilt”, “conscience”, “duty”, “sacredness of duty” had its origin: its beginnings were, like the beginnings of everything great on earth, soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time.” 26 And to be sure, there is much historical proof to confirm Nietzsche’s initial hypothesis as he reminds us that, “Princely weddings, and public festivals of the more magnificent kind were unthinkable without executions, torturings, or perhaps an auto-da-fe, and no noble household was without creatures upon whom one could heedlessly vent one’s malice and cruel jokes.” 27 Though Nietzsche’s conclusion reached by his investigation may seem shocking and repugnant to modern eyes and ears, nevertheless, Nietzsche’s reflections are predicated on historical facts. And these facts, moreover, can hardly be denied. The attentive reader is forced to reconsider his or her former views regarding these matters not because Nietzsche’s arguments are remarkably cogent, (though as I will show in volume II that they are), but because Nietzsche has jarred the emotional stability, as it were, of his reader. The reader is forced to come to terms with certain feelings that she or he did not want to recognize as having any rational influence with regard to the explanation of the true causes behind historical events. Nietzsche begins section eight of the second essay with the words: “To return to our investigation: the feeling of guilt or personal obligation, had its origin, as we 25 26 27

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM:II6, 503. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII:6, 501. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII:6, 502.

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saw, in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship, that between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor…” 28. It is therefore, “buying and selling, (according to Nietzsche) together with their psychological appurtenances, [which] are older even than the beginnings of any kind of social forms of organization and alliances…”.29 This passage clearly reveals the very difficult position in which Nietzsche has put himself. For now he must now try to link this ancient, strange, almost alien standard of equivalence with our knowledge of how the legal system operates today. According to Nietzsche’s genealogical method, there must be a continuous line of descent and inheritance linking our present ideas to older, indeed, even prehistoric ancestors. After all, most human beings living in Western democratic societies would not think that our legal system is based on such a crude equation. While there are still some who argue that criminals must suffer more for their crimes than what they presently do, nonetheless, more emphasis has been placed on re-habilitation, prevention and deterrence by courts, lawmakers and those scholars working in criminal fields. The problem that Nietzsche now faces (and one incidentally that he fully realized) can be posed as follows: ‘How can the modern reader understand the ancient metric which holds that the increasing of one’s power = pleasure = making another suffer = re-paying of debt is at the root of the penal code today?’ Once more, Nietzsche will claim, we can understand our modern legal system and penal code through the perspective of power. This relationship between the creditor and debtor, which is easily understood in terms of early human civilizations, is then projected, writ large as it were, onto the “community”: “The community, too, stands to its members in that same vital basic relation, that of the creditor to his debtors.” 30 A community provides certain advantages to its members such as protection, peace, services, mates etc. In this manner, the community confers on its citizens certain privileges which the individual, by herself, would not be able to afford on her own. In turn--and here we still see the old creditor-debtor relationship--the individual is in debt to the community and must “re-pay” the community by upholding its laws. When an individual breaks these laws by attacking members within the community, he loses these rights and privileges. He is considered a law-breaker—“Elend”— outside the boundaries of the community and therefore “every kind of hostility may be vented upon him.” 31 28 29 30 31

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII:8, 506. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII:8, 506. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII:9, 507. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM:II 9, 507.

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As the community grows in members, services, technological advancement and physical boundaries, the initial feeling that an attack on any member of a community is an attack on the community itself is re-interpreted. As Nietzsche writes in this regard: As the power and self-confidence of a community increase, the penal law always becomes more moderate; every weakening (mildert) of imperiling of the former brings with it a restoration of the harsher forms of the latter. The “creditor” (Glaubiger) always becomes more humane (menschlicher) to the extent that he has grown richer; finally, how much injury (Beeinträchtigung) he can endure without suffering from it becomes the actual measure of his wealth. It is not unthinkable that a society might attain such a consciousness of power (Machtbewusstein) that it could allow itself the noblest luxury possible to it—letting those who harm it go unpunished. (Nietzsche’s Italics)32

This is most prophetic if we examine current trends towards punishment in industrialized countries. The contemporary idea of viewing the criminal as a “special individual case” who is in need of ‘treatment’ and whose violent behavior can be partially explained by his violent upbringing, means that the testimony of social workers, doctors, and psychiatrists increases in importance with regard to the rendering of verdicts. Over a period of time, the criminal is viewed less and less as a law-breaker and, thus as an “outsider” (someone who has broken his bond with the community and therefore his crimes must be discharged in kind; a tooth for a tooth) and rather as an individual who is abnormal; a sociopath, psychopath. He is a “dangerous individual” in need of rehabilitation. To be sure he is an individual that the community must take measures to protect itself against, but he is also an individual that the community has a responsibility to treat and improve. Before continuing to investigate this hypothesis, Nietzsche will return to the subject of the origins of the bad conscience. In section 11, Nietzsche examines two other popular genealogies of justice and punishment. The first claims that justice originates from the man of ressentiment. That is, justice is just another word for revenge; those who seek justice are the reactive types and seek to address wrongs which they feel have been done to them. Justice for the weak is simply what the strong might call revenge. Nietzsche rejects this interpretation. Nietzsche convincingly demonstrates that the law places binds on the reactive. “Wherever justice is practiced and maintained,” Nietzsche writes, “…one sees a stronger power seeking a means of putting an end to the senseless raging of ressentiment among weaker powers 32

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM:II 10, 508.

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that stand under it…. (Nietzsche’s Italics)” 33. The rule of law is established from strength not from weakness. Law overcomes ressentiment by symbolically representing any assault to individuals in the community not as an injury incurred by the subject, but rather as “a rebellion against the supreme power itself and thus leads the feelings of its subjects away from the direct injury caused by such offences.” 34 It is the law, therefore, that establishes (even from the perspective of the injured party,) “….an abstract, impersonal evaluation of the deed.” 35 Therefore, justice and injustice are not born out of revenge because, as Nietzsche rightly observes, the law serves as a stabilizing and limiting institution precisely so that re-active acts of retribution, revenge and ressentiment do not get out of hand and create a spiral of continuing violence. The second interpretation Nietzsche objects to, claims that it is the utility of punishment (‘punishment’ as a means of deterrence, correction or removal of the dangerous individual from society) that accounts for the actual origin of punishment itself. That is, Nietzsche is at pains to criticize those other “genealogists” who naively believe that “punishment was devised for punishing.” 36 Instead, he argues that the purpose of ‘punishment’, as viewed today, can never explain the origin of ‘punishment’ itself. We might surmise Nietzsche’s argument as: “What does deterrence have to do with the cutting of shares for the sake of power?” But, more important than the rejection of this hypothesis is what Nietzsche learns from his armchair hypothesizing. He argues that the Utilitarian has flouted a fundamental rule of sound, historical analysis. He writes: The cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior (uberlegenen) to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing (Überwältigen), a becoming master (Herrwerden), and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation (Neu-Interpretiern), an adaptation (Zurechtmachen) through which any previous “meaning” and “purpose” are necessarily obscured or even obliterated.37

There are several important points to note in this very illuminating passage. First, we see here perhaps the clearest example of exactly how Nietzsche 33 34 35 36 37

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM: II: 11, 511. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II: 11, 512. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II:11, 512. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II:12, 513. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII: 12, 513.

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understands history as the expression of the overflowing and overabundance of ‘Nature’, while ‘Nature’ is simply will to power. As he explains this very point in the next paragraph, But purposes and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function; and the entire history of a “thing”, an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous signchain (eine fortgesetzte ZeichenKette) of ever new interpretations and adaptations (neuen Interpretationen und Zurechtmachungen) whose causes do not even have to be related to one another but, on the contrary, in some cases succeed to alternate with one another in a purely chance fashion.38

This general hypothesis, namely, that historical change can be explained in broader terms of the will to power, is warranted. In the first essay, Nietzsche takes great pains to demonstrate that the present conceptions of good and evil are re-active; they are negative re-actions to positive feelings of what the nobles instinctively believe to be ‘good’ and ‘bad. In this sense, our present values of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are not absolute, but only demonstrate that a will to power, (in this case the herd led by their priestly leaders) overtook, conquered and thus re-interpreted the nobles’ earlier valuations. What we often believe to be a coherent, unchanging concept is often shot through with meaning, interpretation and Derridean differánce. From the standpoint of historiography therefore, will to power should neither be understood as a heuristic interpretative device, nor as a mere rhetorical contrivance, which Nietzsche uses merely to induce a “hermeneutics of suspicion”. Rather, will to power is both a metaphysical doctrine and constitutive of an empirical research program: it can be tested. Indeed it is even stated as such by Nietzsche. It is conceived as that one force that drives all organic and inorganic things to act in the manner they do. It is immanent within nature and explains all human, animal, organic and even inorganic behavior. And, although one may need more proof to determine how will to power may serve as the “meaning” or “sign” of a thing, nonetheless, Nietzsche has, I think, provided enough evidence to suggest that such an hypothesis can produce a successful, fruitful and epistemically warranted research program. Secondly, and returning to the quotation that begins, “ The cause of the origin of a thing”… it is also important to note that Nietzsche claims that this re-interpretation of a “thing”, this mastery of one thing over another, applies universally to all things because it can be verified in all discourses and studies. It 38

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII: 12, 513.

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is for this reason that Nietzsche writes “a physiological organ, a legal institution, a social custom, a political usage, a form of art, or a religious cult.” Etc. The suggestion, is that each of these discourses are to be understood in terms of will to power not because will to power is a transcendent, ontological doctrine, thereby leaving Nietzsche (as interpreted by Heidegger) to be the last metaphysician in the pejorative sense of this term, but rather because evidence of power struggles; of one thing mastering another thing and moreover, of one thing re-interpreting something else for its own benefit, is clearly evident when history is examined from each of the perspectives Nietzsche mentions. Later, in sections 12 and 13, Nietzsche marshals forth the theories of Spencer and Huxley as further evidence to support the cogency of the will to power as a scientific research program. He shows that it, much like Darwinian evolution, is capable of explaining change and adaptation in the organic world. He uses the rather commonplace example of a human hand. The hand, was not always for, and most certainly not “invented for the purpose of grasping.” 39 The hand as Darwin and his supporters suggest, did not always exist as we know it today. Its purpose evolved contemporaneously with the evolution of human beings. Although Nietzsche recognized that there were significant problems with Darwinian evolutionary theory—as he understood it by Darwin’s spindoctors—nonetheless, Nietzsche acknowledges that the English evolutionists assisted in eliminating the notion of a telos to nature which Nietzsche thought to be a further shadow of god.40 Evolutionary theory, according to Nietzsche, is epistemically superior than the more religiously inspired accounts of the world and cosmos because evolution is capable of explaining how more complex and complicated forms of organisms can develop out of earlier, more primitive species without postulating a divine cause. The will to power, Nietzsche is intoning in this passage, is a naturalistic account of how organisms evolve. At the very least it should be recognized as a legitimate, scientific rival to evolution. But, Nietzsche evinces, will to power is superior to evolutionary theory because it goes even further in its quest to arrive at a truly naturalistic ground for all organic life. Because evolutionary theory stressed that it was possible for simpler life forms to evolve into more complex ones, one could extend this further to also suggest that there is no sharp division between the inorganic and 39

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II: 13, 515. Specifically Nietzsche argues that such evolutionists neglected the fact that it is “the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new interpretations and directions although “adaptation” follows only after this,” See section 12 of the second essay, 515. 40

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organic worlds. Since everything is composed of the same basic energy, namely quanta of power, it is best to think of the inorganic/organic division in more fluid terms. Will to power explains how inorganic things may eventually transform themselves into organic things and how organic things can become more complex. Thus, will to power, from a pragmatic perspective at least, is preferable to other historical accounts because it can simplify and unify what are believed to be different and distinct academic discourses under one theory.41 Returning to his own investigation and following his own advice and method, Nietzsche claims that: In accordance with the previously developed major point of historical method (historischen Methodik), it is assumed without further ado that the procedure (Prozedur) itself will be something older, earlier than its employment in punishment (Strafe), that the latter is projected and interpreted into the procedure…42.

Nietzsche now distinguishes between two distinct aspects of punishment. The first, Nietzsche posits, is the enduring part of punishment, “the custom, the act, the “drama”, a certain strict sequence of procedures.” 43 The other aspect is the fluid element—the meaning, the purpose, the expectation etc. These two aspects are distinct from one another and we make a serious mistake if we think, as some naïve genealogists, that the meaning of punishment can be projected back onto the procedures of punishment. That is, the second aspect, the meaning aspect, always comes later; it has little causal efficacy on the first aspect.44 Nietzsche will later demonstrate why it is important to keep these two distinct aspects separate. Based upon the investigation thus far, one might think that Nietzsche will claim that the ‘bad conscience’ and later guilt, originated as a crude, simian, evolutionary defense mechanism of sorts by which primitive human beings would internalize the pain they would surely experience (because of punishment) if they failed to keep their promises. But, because this pain would be internalized it would always be with them (that is remembered) therefore causing these same individuals to fulfill their promises and thus, survive. However, Nietzsche would call this assessment too passive. Guilt is not to be found here. In fact, punishment hinders both guilt and the bad conscience because: “Punishment makes men 41

Of course all of this must be proved. I provide a more descriptive and detailed explanation of will to power in Philosophical Genealogy Volume 2. 42 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM: II 13, 515. 43 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM: II, 13, 515. 44 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM:II, 13, 515.

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hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance.” 45 Indeed, one need only visit penitentiaries and prisons to see that “the sting of conscience is extremely rare.” 46 Such institutions are “not the kind of hotbed in which this species of gnawing worm is likely to flourish.” 47 (Nietzsche’s Italics) In fact, he insists the opposite is more likely: punishment only further re-enforces the criminals’ hatred toward the police, detectives, judges and the law rather than having the criminal reflect and experience any “inward pain.” Hence, the roots of guilt did not grow out of this soil. At this point, one strand or one trail of the genealogical origin of guilt ends. Punishment, by itself, is not directly responsible for the development of the bad conscience. However, this does not mean that the genealogical “tracing” of punishment was for nought. As we will see, the “emergence” of punishment intersected with guilt and, furthermore, came to advance it. As we continue deeper down the genealogical path of guilt, we will discover that ‘punishment’, under a different name and for a different purpose, will come to have a very significant, albeit, indirect role to play in guilt’s creation. In section 16, Nietzsche puts forward his own hypothesis on how the ‘bad conscience’ developed: “I regard the bad conscience as the serious illness that man was bound to contract under the stress of the most fundamental change he ever experienced—that change which occurred when he found himself finally enclosed within the walls of society and peace.” 48 As Nietzsche explains, the first civilizations on earth forced humankind to become servile; instead of following their instincts by taking what they wanted and living as free creatures, these poor half-human, half-animal creatures as it were, soon found out that their instincts were mistaken. They could no longer take what they desired without consequence. Nor were they free to roam as they pleased. As Nietzsche explains in section 17, the first state did not come about “gradually or voluntary” rather it was enacted by a force of violence and “nothing but acts of violence.” 49 It is through violence, claims Nietzsche, that, “the oldest state thus appeared as a fearful tyranny, as an oppressive and remorseless machine, and went on working until this raw material of people and semi-animals was at last only thoroughly kneaded and pliant but also formed.” 50 As a result, these semi45 46 47 48 49 50

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM: II, 14, 517. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM: II 14, 517. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM: II, 14, 517. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM: II 16, 520. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM: II, 17, 522. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII: 17, 522.

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human creatures’ inner instincts were not only devalued, but indeed incorrect as they quickly found out (by means of painful practices of body mutilation). Their natural instincts toward adventure and war were no longer reliable guides. Instead, Nietzsche claims, they were forced to develop, out of necessity, their most fallible organ, namely that of consciousness, in order to think, infer and reckon. But, something else happened too. Such a dramatic change also produced what Nietzsche calls one of those “exciting lucky throws in the dice game of Heraclitus’ “great child”.51 Because these same instincts for war, adventure, hunting and indeed the most important instinct of all, the instinct for freedom, continued to make their usual demands but could not be satisfied in their usual way, that is, externally. Instead, all of these instincts turned inward: “as a rule they had to seek new and, as it were, subterranean gratifications.” 52 Hence, both the “soul” and ‘bad conscience’ were born. Believing this to be a plausible account and, incidentally, one that seemingly reaches “rock bottom” as it were (since this conjecture can neither be empirically proven nor disproven, at least in Nietzsche’s day), Nietzsche then proceeds to formulate the method which he will use to further support his analysis in the last sections of the second essay as well as in the third essay of The Genealogy. Nietzsche writes: All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly (Aussen) turn inward—this is what I call the internalization (Verinnerlichung) of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his “soul.” (Seele) The entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, (Tiefe) breadth, (Breite) and height (Höhe), in the same measure as outward discharge was inhibited.53

According to Nietzsche’s theory of will to power, such forces and inner drives within the human animal need to express and manifest themselves. This, we might claim, is a law that regulates flows of power. If the will to power, as it was articulated in early pre-historic terms for humans and other animals, cannot be outwardly expressed as violence against others, it then turns to do violence against oneself. Thus it was the sudden establishment of the State that caused the force waves of power in each and every individual to be dammed 51 52 53

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII: 16, 521. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II: 16, 520. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII: 16, 520.

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from any external release. This ‘damming’ of power then had the following consequences: That will to self-tormenting (Selstpeinigung), that repressed cruelty (Grausankeit) of the animal-man (Thiermenschen) made inward and scared back into himself, the creature imprisoned in the “state” so as to be tamed, who invented the bad conscience in order to hurt himself after the more natural vent for his desire to hurt had been blocked….54

Thus, the ‘bad conscience’ and later its full blown development into guilt, first developed when those first artists; those ancient, “blond beasts of prey”, ‘created’ the first state and incidentally, without either remorse or pity the animal ‘Man’ as we have come to know him today. The natural channels for freedom, war, adventure, hunting and the like, were restricted from the many pre-historic peoples that these first, few “artists” ruled. The rules the such ‘artists’ established would have been enforced through various severe, (and imaginative) painful, bodily procedures in order to guarantee the obedience of such half-human, half-animal like creatures. Thus, while ‘punishment’ does not create guilt per se, nevertheless, it still played an important role in ensuring that the first ‘human beings’ in history would discharge their natural, and now, pent up energies, to inflict pain and untold cruelties upon themselves first. Guilt, therefore, is a method of cruelty which only develops because early humankind’s natural instinct to hurt, exploit and use others was forced to turn inward because of the ‘punishment’ such creatures would receive if they failed to disobey the first “five or six I will nots’” of the new state. Having demonstrated the true origin of guilt and the relationship between guilt and punishment, one question remains: ‘How does “the exchange system of cruelty” which Nietzsche laboriously analyzed at the start of the second essay fit into this equation?’ In an interesting move, which admittedly seems like an ad hoc hypothesis and is by far the weakest of Nietzsche’s claims for the development of guilt and the bad conscience, he tries to tie in his former connection, which he made between Schuld and Schulden, to his conjectures regarding the origins of the first State and the origins of punishment. He argues that: Within the original tribal community (Geschlechtsgenossenschaft)—we are speaking of primeval times—the living generation always recognized a juridical (juristische) duty towards earlier generations, and especially toward the earliest, which founded the tribe…The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices (Opfer) and accom54

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II: 22, 528.

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philosophical genealogy, volume i plishments (Leistungen) of the ancestors that the tribe exists—and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt (Schulden) that constantly grows greater, since these forbears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits (machtige Geister) to accord the tribe new advantages and strength.55

However, such “re-payment” as Nietzsche notes, to the original founders of the tribe, was never cancelled out. Indeed, it only seemed to increase with interest. This creditor (the ancestor) always demands (in the eyes of the debtor, the present tribal community) more and more feasts, banquets, gladiatorial competitions and even wholesale sacrifices, so that the tribe will continue to survive. Indeed, Nietzsche suggests that it is only when a tribe increases in strength and size that “this rude logic is … carried to its end,” because “then the ancestors of the most powerful tribes are bound eventually to grow to monstrous dimensions through the imagination of growing fear and to recede into the darkness of the divinely uncanny and unimaginable: in the end the ancestor must necessarily be transfigured into a god.” 56 (Nietzsche’s Italics) One can already see where Nietzsche is going with this line of thought. In a less than convincing line of descent from these early feelings of indebtedness to the original ancestors of such “primeval tribes” to “the guilty feeling of indebtedness to the divinity that continued to grow for several millennia”,57 Nietzsche then demonstrates that the maximum feeling of guilt is achieved with the arrival of the Christian God. According to Nietzsche, “The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of indebtedness.” 58 The introduction of the Christian God into history is what marks “that stroke of genius on the part of Christianity” for it allows humankind’s torture of itself to reach a hitherto unknown intensity.59 But what is most interesting about Christianity, Nietzsche thinks, is that it is God, as the creditor, which pays Himself back. Because God sacrifices Himself for the sake of humankind’s own indebtedness to God, (since it was God who was responsible for ensuring the survival of the tribe of Israel) God, thereby, “makes payment to himself”.60 Indeed, God is the only being “who can redeem man from 55 56 57 58 59 60

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII: 19,524–525. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GMII: 19, 525. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II: 20, 526. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II: 20, 526. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II: 21, 528. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II: 21, 528.

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what has become unredeemable for man himself—the creditor sacrifices himself for his debtor, out of love (can one credit that?), out of love for his debtor!” 61 But why would human beings do such a thing Nietzsche ponders? Why “invent” a God that acts both as the creditor and debtor? For Nietzsche, the answer quite simply can be glimpsed by returning to the blockage of will to power and the necessity to turn this ‘force’ inward instead of expressing it outwardly: “This man of the bad conscience has seized upon the presupposition of religion so as to drive his self-torture to its most gruesome pitch of severity and rigor. Guilt before God: this thought becomes an instrument of torture for him.” 62 Such a thought becomes an instrument of torture precisely because it is a guilt “that can never be atoned for.” 63 Man’s natural, animal instincts will always serve to remind him that he can never measure up to the holiness and absoluteness of God; “of God as the Judge, as God the Hangman.” 64 In comparison to “the holy God”, humankind will always feel its own unworthiness. Humankind, in short, will always feel guilt before the “Creator” the “Lord”, the “Father” the “primal ancestor” and can therefore never repay its infinite indebtedness to “God.” 65 Thus, the first state, with its laws and practices of submission, as well as the first ancestors of this state who strictly enforced these laws without mercy, were directly responsible for the development of the ‘bad conscience’. These ancient rulers and “cruel artists” forced early humans to suspend and question their natural instincts for adventure, war and cruelty towards others. In addition, ‘punishment’ served as the means by which memory was introduced into history in order to remind these early human beings not to disobey the state. So, while the natural instincts for exploitation and expropriation and, in general, inflicting harm on others, were blocked for early humans, humanity was forced to find a new target, a new object for these corked forces. Such a target for cruelty was easily found in oneself. Furthermore, as the forces of the will to power were externally plugged for countless millennia, such drives were driven deeper and deeper to ever greater depths of self-torture, and self-mutilation. Finally, humankind found the ideal means of torturing itself to the point where it could find no relief and no escape: 61 62 63 64 65

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II: 21, 528. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II: 22, 528. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II: 22, 529. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM II: 22, 528. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM:II, 22, 528.

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an ideal, which, without fail, would always inflict pain in the human beast to its maximum intensity—the ideal of the Christian God. To conclude this rather detailed and lengthy section, I simply want to highlight several important points we have discovered from my analysis. First, genealogy is a valid and naturalized research program that focuses on understanding how ideas, institutions and historical events are products of power-struggles for more and more power. Nietzsche calls this struggle (Kamph) for power, the will to power and conceives the will to power as the one theme or narrative from which all other events, ideas, struggles and contests may be understood. However, the will to power is not an ontological doctrine in the traditional, philosophical interpretation of this term. It is not transcendent to the empirical struggles it seeks to describe and explain. It is naturalistic. It is immanent. It can be empirically verifiable and may be falsifiable. It is not as though the will to power is the ultimate and absolute foundation for ‘Truth’, ‘Knowledge’, ‘Reality’ and the like which cannot be questioned because it is that which conditions all other things. To impute such a view to Nietzsche would be to read him as a Neo-Kantian—the will to power would be on the same level as our a priori intuitions of space and time. Rather, the opposite is the case: will to power is a naturalistic, empirical and fallible thesis regarding how the “world” operates at its most fundamental level of existence. It is, therefore, inherently possible to put forward a competing theory which is capable of explaining, in greater detail, all human, animal and cosmic actions and interactions. Second, genealogy specifically targets for criticism a purely “intentional” kind of historiographical investigation. Instead of focusing on why certain individuals committed specific acts, such as Caesar crossing the Rubicon, Nietzsche, instead, wants to focus and trace the unconscious: the land that lies beyond the ‘mind’ as it were; the genealogical strand of history that reaches into the heart of the human body. It is for this reason that Nietzsche is rather harsh on the English Utilitarians throughout the Genealogy. Nietzsche criticizes such hedonistic ‘historians’ like Spencer and Paul Ree, for two principal reasons. First, they do not offer a satisfactory explanation as to why increasing one’s pleasure can be equated with what is good. ‘How can the English Utilitarians account for the pleasure one experiences in seeing another person in pain?’ We hear Nietzsche ask. ‘How can the hedonist explain the ascetic who stringently disciplines himself by denying his inner desires, needs and wants if all actions undertaken by individuals are to increase pleasure?’ It is precisely these sorts of questions that pose the most difficulty for the hedonist to explain without begging the question: to argue that the ascetic

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reverses what the ‘normal’ person believes to be pain and pleasure still does not causally explain either why or how the ascetic inverts these categories. An epistemically justified, interesting, useful and fruitful scientific theory which attempts to explain all human actions and behavior by reducing them to one principle must not only account for all human phenomena, but must also explain it without arguing in a circle. As Ivan Soll correctly notes, “Any desire or action that does not seem directed toward the increase of pleasure and avoidance of pain presents a problem to the psychological hedonist and, correspondingly, an opportunity to the proponent of any competing view.” 66 Nietzsche, at least in The Genealogy, does not shirk from providing a competing and more compelling interpretation to that of the English hedonists with regard to explaining the true origin of the ascetic ideal. Nietzsche’s answer to the problem posed by the ascetic ideal, the topic of essay three of The Genealogy, is to appeal to the primordial lust for power that is within all human beings. Moreover, it is this drive for more and more power, which, he believes, is even more basic than pleasure and pain. In fact, he argues that will to power is the superordinate motivation for all human action. In essence, Nietzsche argues that asceticism can be explained as a psychological response to a physiological defect. More precisely, Nietzsche claims that the ascetic ideal originates from a blockage of power much in the same way he explains the origin of guilt. But whereas guilt is produced by an external damming of one’s pent up energies, Nietzsche argues that the ascetic individual seems to have an intrinsic deficiency when it comes to expressing his energies outwardly. It is as though any expression of energy will result in the demise of the individual. As Nietzsche writes, The ascetic ideal springs from the protective instinct of a degenerating life (das asketische Ideal entspringt dem Schutz-und Heil-Instinkte eines degenerirnden Lebens) which tries by all means to sustain itself and to fight for its existence; it indicates a partial physiological obstruction and exhaustion against which the deepest instincts of life, which have remained intact, continually struggle with new expedients and devices. (Nietzsche’s Italics)67

Unlike the English hedonists, Nietzsche understands that the ascetic ideal must be grounded on a desire which is more primordial than mere pleasure and pain; indeed on something which is more primordial than just the conscious intentions of the actor. In other words, Nietzsche explains the origin of the 66

Ivan Soll, “Nietzsche, On Cruelty, Asceticism, and the Failure of Hedonism” in NGM, 168–193, 172. 67 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM: III, 13,556.

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ascetic ideal and consciousness in general, to something that can be empirically studied, quantified and investigated in further detail, namely, in terms of the variegated competing drives, along with the relationship between these drives that comprise the human body. We are now in a better position to understand why Nietzsche stresses in note 2 of section 17 of the first essay, that, …”every table of values,every “thou shalt” known to history or ethnology, requires first a physiological investigation and interpretation, rather than a psychological one; and every one of them needs a critique on the part of medical science.” (Nietzsche’s Italics)68 Unlike the hedonist who can never adequately answer the causal origins regarding the intentions of an individual, Nietzsche can, and indeed, does put forward a superior theory which does not beg the question by simply asserting that whatever is pleasurable to the ascetic is what a “normal” individual would call pain and vice versa. A theory of medicine that interpreted the body in terms of the will to power, so Nietzsche conjectures, could discover why certain individuals became ascetics through a scientific and empirical analysis of the body. This is something which the English Utilitarian cannot do. Nietzsche’s harsh rebuke of the English Utilitarians is warranted for a second reason: they are terrible historians. In fact, they are guilty of presentism: because they feel that everyone is out to increase his or her own pleasure, they therefore project their own present and personal motivations onto pre-historic peoples. Such a methodology, as Nietzsche makes clear, is historically anachronistic—‘What do present meanings and interpretations of punishment have to do with how and why methods of ‘punishment’ actually originated?’ Nietzsche tries to understand the “real” origin of historical events precisely by trying to comprehend pre-historic humans on their own terms. This entails, at minimum, that he appreciates how they must have of reasoned, behaved and interpreted reality. We do not get at the origin of punishment as it were by understanding such peoples by empathetically projecting onto them how we reason as modern individuals. Once more, Nietzsche seems to be saying, we must rely on the physical evidence at our disposal, as little as this may be, rather than relying on unreflective contemporary feelings and attitudes.69

68

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, GM: I, 17, Note 2, 491. Again the key word here is unreflective. We will see in volume 2 of Philosophical Genealogy that feelings have a very important epistemic role to play in the conducting of a genealogical inquiry.

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To be sure this does not mean that all of our feelings are epistemically unworthy when it comes to understanding moral and historical phenomena. Our emotions do in fact have a very important role to play (as I will argue in volume II), but one has to understand first what cognitive place said feelings will play in the genealogist’s methodology and second, the true epistemic content such feelings possess. Christopher Janaway has convincingly argued that Nietzsche asks us, the readers of his Genealogy, to re-explore the most violent and potent human emotions like vengeance, hatred, desire and lust in order to capture the feelings and thus motivation of pre-historic peoples.70 Genealogy is unlike traditional historical and philosophical investigations because it asks both its readers and investigator to use one’s feelings in order to get ‘inside’ the mindset of others. A cool, detached, investigative approach is antithetical to genealogy. A genealogy assaults both the mind and the body. A genealogical investigation, as David Owen remarks, challenges us to take a new perspective on something, but it achieves this by jarring us enough to leave the comfort of our current, all too placid and soothing perspective by which we view ourselves, others and the world. This “jarring” is accomplished, primarily, through the use of graphic images and disturbing events such as Nietzsche’s description of ancient methods of torture. This last point will be further explained in Volume 2 of Philosophical Genealogy. There, I will show the precise role the affects play in a genealogical investigation. In conclusion, Nietzsche’s investigation draws upon several different types of proof—sensory evidence, insight, historical documents and current scientific theories in order to substantiate its conclusions. By latching together all of this disparate evidence, Nietzsche is able to make a convincing case for both his method (genealogy) and the conclusions he reaches in each of the three essays of The Genealogy. To be sure, some of Nietzsche’s conjectures are simply that, merely conjectures, which may be replaced by more feasible and empirically testable hypotheses. And some inferences may be somewhat faulty or rash, but genealogy remains epistemically superior to the prevalent historical analyzes and methods used in Nietzsche’s day for three primary reasons: 1) Nietzsche has very strong direct evidence for his conclusions regarding the origin of guilt based on introspection and what we may term ‘‘common sense’’ assumptions. Moreover, this evidence coheres with other pieces of evidence including historical, biological, etymological, and anthropological facts; 2) Nietzsche then 70

See Christopher Janaway’s wonderful work: Beyond Selflessness Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy (Oxford University Press: 2007 (but especially chapter 12) for more on this issue.

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re-evaluates the epistemic merit of his immediate conjecture in order to bring it in line with what he has discovered with regard to these other warranted disciplines; 3) All of these disciplines mutually support one another: genealogy can, in some measure, epistemically support biology, anthropology, etymology etc. while all of these disciplines serve to support genealogy. Furthermore, each of these supports, as it were, can be further examined, scrutinized, accepted or rejected on their own epistemic merits. Genealogy then does not solely rely on evidence that is only of an intentional kind. In fact it eschews most types of intentional evidence, but always with good reasons. Rather, all of the theories a sound genealogical investigation puts forth are epistemically warranted by a variety of mutual supportive pieces of evidence which, when brought together under one narrative, are found to be logically coherent.71 To return to Brian Leiter’s commentary on the second essay of the genealogy, we have indeed confirmed that genealogy is a naturalistic investigation. Nietzsche reduces what is often considered supernatural phenomenon, such as guilt, to more terrestrial sources. Nietzsche seeks to dispatch both what philosophers and historians previously believed to be sound methods of investigation: analyzing ideas in terms of their essential and accidental attributes for philosophers, or trying to understand the intentions of “the great men of history” for historians. However, as Nietzsche mentions in section 409 of The Will to Power this purely intentional method of doing history or philosophy is mistaken. First because “Philosophers (1) have had from the first a wonderful capacity for the contradicto in adjecto;” and secondly because (2) “they have trusted concepts as completely as they have mistrusted the senses: they have not stopped to consider that concepts and words are our inheritance from ages in which thinking was very modest and unclear.” 72 Nietzsche seeks to reverse this methodology and to reveal a more justified source for the words, concepts and ideas we use by showing how they can be traced back to all things natural and bodily. Turning to the last and most important component to a genealogical investigation, namely the body, it is incumbent for us to understand precisely what role the body plays for philosophical genealogy. I contend that Nietzsche held the body to be the most fundamental touchstone (in a universe without any true fundaments) for understanding the will to power, while one can best study 71

Also see Mark Migotti’s illuminating article “Slave Morality, Socrates and the Bushmen: A Critical Introduction to On the Genealogy of Morality Essay I” in Nietzsche’s on the Genealogy of Morals Ed. Christa Davis Acampora (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield) 2006 pp. 109–131. 72 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 409, 220.

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the body by making use of all the discourses that study it, such as medicine, physiology, biology and chemistry. Nietzsche’s genealogy offers not just a naturalistic interpretation of moral phenomena, but a reduction of morality to more fundamental biological structures. Moreover, even these structures may be further reduced to more primordial components. As Nietzsche put it best when he wrote in KSA section 11 regarding his own thoughts on philosophical genealogy: “When I think of my philosophical genealogy, I feel myself connected with the mechanistic movement (reduction of all moral and aesthetic questions to physiological ones, of all physiological ones to chemical ones, of all chemical ones to mechanical ones.” 73 The Genealogy is just as much a veneration of a naturalistic interpretation of philosophy and historical understanding as it is a vitriolic denouncement of a purely conceptual and intentional reflective approach. Finally, and from my analysis of the second essay of The Genealogy, we can best describe Nietzsche’s genealogical method as that of a sounding line, lead line, or nautical plumb line. A sounding line as defined by The Oxford English Dictionary is “a weighted line used to measure the depth of water under a boat.” 74 Analogously, Nietzsche’s genealogical investigations seek to trace the line of descent of our present-day concepts to their ultimate, historical origins. That is to say, Nietzsche’s philosophical inquiry seeks to trace the genealogical line of descent from the complex and, seemingly, phenomenologically rich ideas that we experience and reflect on as contemporary subjects, to the true source from whence these ideas sprang. Such sources will be more concrete, less abstract and simpler to grasp. We saw such an investigation fully worked out in Nietzsche’s account of bad conscience and guilt. The bad conscience began with the result of a single action: it was forged by those warrior-artists who created the first political entity: the state. By establishing laws which were then gruesomely enforced through punishment, these same warrior-artists also created a new type of creature: man. In this sense, Nietzsche views genealogy as the method which seeks to discover the causa prima of a thing, event or institution. Thus, from our analysis, Nietzsche’s genealogical method studies, analyzes and traces the emergence of present-day concepts, ideas and institutions to their ultimate origins. In addition, we have also seen that Nietzsche’s genealogical method is an epistemically justified form of historical investigation, which 73

Nietzsche, Kritische Studeinausgaube (KSA) Vol. 11. Section 26, 432, quoted from Christoph Cox’s Nietzsche Naturalism and Interpretation, 216. 74 The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press,) 1371.

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substantiates its theories and hypotheses by providing a naturalistic, bodily interpretation and explanation for historical events and human behavior. When we turn to Foucault, we will see an even more intense focus on the body and a better understanding of what makes for a justified genealogical inquiry.

Section II: Power in Discipline and Punish As a genealogist and self-proclaimed Nietzschean, Foucault is also intrigued by power and how power “produces reality.” Power, according to Foucault produces not only discourses, concepts and institutions, but even what some may call more primordial, natural kinds of things such as bodies, and even physical needs like feelings and certain desires. In two important works published in the mid to late 1970’s and at the pinnacle of his power/knowledge period, Foucault traces the development or better put, the emergence of bio-power. According to Foucault, bio-power is a unique and very specific type of power that materializes fully in the 19th century. Summarily stated, bio-power creates more economically useful and physiologically healthy bodies via the confluence of discipline, surveillance, knowledge and normalization. The first of these major works of the seventies, Discipline and Punish, traces the emergence of the two poles of bio-power, namely, surveillance and discipline in the eighteenth century. The second work, The History of Sexuality, traces what Foucault calls the “lynch-pin” of bio-power; the development and “birth” of sex and sexuality in the nineteenth century. When taken together, these works serve to support Foucault’s rather pessimistic and cynical interpretation of contemporary Western industrial societies as resembling carceral regimes. In the remaining part of this chapter, I wish to examine Foucault’s genealogical method by teasing out what I believe to be the principal components of this method from two works: “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” and the section on the means of correct training from Discipline and Punish. Afterward, I will compare and contrast Foucault’s genealogical method to that of Nietzsche’s. In effect, I argue that we can harmoniously synthesize both approaches. In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” Foucault tells us that genealogy is primarily concerned with the hazardous play and emergence (Enstehung) of dominations. In contrast to traditional historical analyses, Foucault does not claim that ‘important’ battles or treaties (by themselves) change the course of history, but rather argues that it is the seemingly unimportant, local, manifestations of history (such as the blueprint of the Panopticon), which usher into reality, new

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crystallizations of power/knowledge—new dispositifs. Therefore, the emergence of an ‘event’ is not the final term of a specific historical development; rather the event’s emergence “marks a play of dominations and forces that has brought the event into being.” 75 The genealogist who correctly interprets the emergence of an event is simply attempting to track the formation of new power constructions. Genealogy, then, is predominantly concerned with documenting the emergence of new historical ideas, concepts, discourses and institutions such as, the ascetic attitude, or the penitentiary system for examples, and interpreting these emergents as signs of power. The genealogist tracks these signs of power by reading the markings that different regimes of power have imprinted on the human body. Historical ‘events’ such as the emergence of the Panopticon engrave themselves on the body. Foucault’s genealogical research program consists in the tracing of the many, disparate ways in which dispositifs have come to mark the body. Furthermore, by tracing these engravings, the genealogist comes to a better understanding of the ruling dispositif of the historical era under investigation. For example, Foucault notes that every dispositif in every era has attempted to harness the materially productive capacities of the body. But in order to harness these seemingly latent powers, these same dispositifs must interpret the body according to the regimes of truth available at their disposal. Regimes of truth are the apparatuses of knowledge that operate within a dispositif, but they are historically and intimately imbricated with means of ‘punishment’—relations of power. In order to understand this last point, it might be fruitful to turn to the manner in which the body was interpreted in the Middle Ages. Serfdom was the chief means of economic production. Serfs were certainly kept in line by the “strong right arm” of the lord of the land, but the soft, comforting words of the priest also assisted with the pacifying of the masses. Christianity, again, very coarsely put, was a regime of truth: it determined which statements would be justified and therefore valued and which were illegitimate, indeed, even forbidden. This very brief and simplistic interpretation of a regime of truth and the relationship between what Jeremy Carrette has called the ‘relations of meaning’ and ‘the relations of power’ in his wonderful study Foucault and Spirituality, may seem analogous to the Marxian distinction between the forces of productions and the means of production.76 And, to be sure, there are some similarities 75

Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, 150. See Jeremy R. Carrette’s Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality (New York: Routledge, 2000) 76

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between Foucault’s analysis of the rise of a disciplinary regime in Discipline and Punish and a more commonplace Marxist analysis. But it should also be noted that there are some important differences. First, for a traditional Marxist approach, the means of production are always subservient to the forces of production. They are simply the byproduct of the epiphenomenal effluvium of the real engines at work in history. But where the Marxist views an economic era through the lens of technological advancement alone, the Foucauldian shows that new dispositifs are formed from the haphazard intersection of a myriad of practices, discourses and events which become interwoven to form a new regime. Second, while a Marxist approach is materialistic it also places undo importance (at least according to Foucault) on the role of consciousness and, more specifically, false consciousness in order to explain the ‘maintenance’, as it were, of the relations of production. The proletariats are duped; they mistakenly believe that their interests chime with those of the bourgeoisie. They have unwittingly and unreflectingly accepted the bourgeoisie values of self-sacrifice, miserliness and self-identification with one’s profession, yet do not see any real monetary or personal benefits from these values. But, for Foucault, power is all pervasive; there are no distinctions between classes. All are affected by a dispositif. This last point is nicely brought out by Sandra Lee Bartky in her trailblazing book Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. Bartky shows that the types of normalizing powers that are responsible for creating the “perfect” feminine body are neither class nor race specific.77 All women in Western industrialized societies are relentlessly subjected to discourses and practices which tell them that they are not beautiful enough; their skin not supple enough; their bodies not thin enough and, further, that such deficiencies can be remedied by finding the appropriate regime; beauty, skin or exercise.78 And though it is true that “ the rising young corporate executive may buy her cosmetics at Bergdorf-Goodman while the counter-server at McDonalds gets hers at K-mart; the one may join an expensive “upscale” health club, while 77

Sandra Lee Bartky Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), 72. Of course, Bartky does not mean to occlude the great differences of status, power and opportunity that still exists between women of different races in North American society for example, she simply is attempting to show, by using a Foucauldian analysis of patriarchy, how power targets women’s bodies. 78 Bartky, p. 69–71.

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the other may have to make do with the $9.49 GFX Body-Flex II Home-Gym advertised in the National Enquire, both….., Bartky extols, are aiming at the same result.” 79 Both we might add are equally caught by the normalizing gaze which says whether you are a cashier or a CEO of a Fortune Five Hundred company, make sure that you are respectable, deferential and, most importantly, pleasing to look upon. I shall now investigate how bio-power, through the twin poles of discipline and surveillance, came to focus on the human body in the 18th and 19th centuries; why the body became invested by new a set of power relations and how this new interpretation of the body leads to a new dispositif, namely, disciplinary power. In general, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, as well as The History of Sexuality volume one: The Will to Knowledge, can be seen as further developing two of the three modern sciences which created the concept of ‘Man’ as evinced in Foucault’s earlier work The Order of Things. The first attribute of this new concept ‘Man’ is the biological aspect: ‘Man’ is a being that lives and dies. The second attribute is the economical: ‘Man’ is a being that works and creates wealth. While the third is the philological aspect: ‘Man’ is a being that is capable of speaking and writing by using language. These three academic discourses “create” the modern understanding of the concept ‘Man.’ In Discipline and Punish Foucault will explain the rise of disciplinary and surveillance technologies as both pre-conditions for and causes of the capitalist mode of production. While in The Will to Knowledge, Foucault will look at the biological aspect of man and will interpret ‘sex’ as the fundamental concept that made it possible to unify diverse forms of discourses and practices thus creating our current form of power: “biopolitics.” For the purposes of space and time, I shall only concentrate on the emergence of the “carceral” society in Discipline and Punish as seen in the chapter, “The means of correct training.” A new political economy of the body was slowly developing in the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unlike previous political regimes which focused on increasing the power and control of the monarch over his lands and subjects, the only “goal” of this new political anatomy of the body “would be… Foucault writes: “(a concern) with the body politic as a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communication routes and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them into objects of knowledge.” 80 The pre-condition, but 79 80

Bartky, p. 72. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 28.

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also the consequence of this new political technology of the body was the rise and spread of capitalism while the ultimate purpose of this new “body technology” was to create both more useful bodies through discipline along with more docile bodies through the combination of both discipline and surveillance techniques. When these practices, techniques and discourses are viewed from a distance they congeal to form what Foucault baptizes as our “carceral society.” Foucault seems to imply in Discipline and Punish that current Western democracies can be described as carceral societies for two reasons. 1) All of the most important institutions in modern industrialized countries resemble prisons and 2) the techniques and practices of discipline and surveillance, which were first developed in the prison system, have spread and extended themselves both across and indeed within the very fabric of the entire social body. The penitentiary system as well as places of employment such as factories and even schools, barracks and hospitals, are organized, administered and designed, in order to observe and to discipline the individuals within such systems in order to increase efficiency, obedience and effectiveness in accordance with the parameters and goals of each respective institution. In short, a carceral society is dedicated to the continual surveillance, objectification, discipline and normalization of all individuals in society. I now want to examine some of these techniques of surveillance and discipline in more detail in order to see how, where, and when, they emerged along with how they relate to the overall purpose of biopolitics, which Foucault argues is one of “normalization.” According to Foucault, there was once a “soldier ideal.” The soldier had a ‘naturally’ determined physique and attitude. Corresponding to the episteme of the Classical period, there were ‘obvious’ and ‘natural’ signs that would distinguish the soldier’s body from others in the natural order of things such as one having “a taut stomach, broad shoulders, long arms, strong fingers, a small belly, thick thighs, slender legs and dry feet.” 81 But “by the late eighteenth century, Foucault notes, “the soldier has become something that can be made; out of a formless clay, an inapt body the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually corrected etc.” 82 Contrary to the Classical episteme which viewed things as already possessing distinct ‘signs’ which represented inherent, immutable attributes that belong to that specific thing and no other, the 81 82

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 135. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 135.

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Modern episteme denies that things have natural essences. Instead the Modern episteme says we can mold, shape and forcibly change anything according to our purposes. That is to say, thinkers using a Modern episteme do not attempt to seek out the “ideal soldier” to place in one’s army. Rather, the soldier is made ‘ideal’ via discipline. The same could also be said for the ideal worker, student and prisoner: with the correct training any ‘body’ can be molded to become anything. What were the historical causes for this drastic shift in thought? And how exactly, did discipline come to permeate all areas of modern society from the prison to the workplace, to the schools to the barracks to the hospitals and back to the prison system? Answering these two related questions is one of the principal goals of Discipline and Punish. If new events are engraved on bodies as Foucault believes, then we should be able to answer the above questions by analyzing how the body came to be re-conceptualized. By concretely showing just how the body became reterritorialized, historically, we will be in a better position to answer these questions. Accordingly, I turn to Foucault’s account for the rise of disciplinary space and time in the eighteenth century to flesh out how docile bodies became produced. Space The first spatial condition of discipline is that of enclosure. In order for the disciplining of a particular group of individuals to take place successfully, they need to be separated and detached from society at large. Enclosures have a long history. There were many types of enclosed institutions in the Middle Ages like monasteries and some seminaries. These were autonomous and self-sufficient communities. However, what Foucault notes is that by the early eighteenth century, enclosed areas were now being used, first by the military and later by factory owners. Enclosures were employed by the military as standing armies became increasingly larger. The rationale was that they were useful in building morale and maintaining order. But, by the late eighteenth century, gated factories and factories with built in accommodations for workers were constructed in order to derive the maximum advantages of work by “neutralizing the inconveniences resulting (thefts, interruptions of work, disturbances and ‘cabals’) as the forces of production become more concentrated…” 83 83

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 142.

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The second condition for successful disciplining is the partitioning of bodies. By individualizing bodies into distinct sectors, classes and areas, discipline organizes an analytical space around bodies and even in between bodies thereby allowing for the tracking and assessing of each individual in the entire order of production and functioning of the system. It was deemed necessary to separate individuals in order to prevent them from “uncontrolled disappearance, or “dangerous coagulation” or “imprecise distributions.” 84 As such, the disciplinary techniques and institutions of the mid eighteenth century revitalized and incorporated the old architectural design of the monastic cell. The monastic cell was then reinterpreted, as it were, according to the institution in which it would used. Certainly it was employed in the prison system, but it was also used albeit in a different manner, in hospitals, the army and in schools. The goal was to ‘individuate’ bodies; to separate bodies off into cubicles where they could be further assessed, judged, re-warded or punished.85 Third, functional sites were necessary in order to control the populace more effectively. Functional sites were key spaces in which dangerous and unwanted communication might occur between workers, soldiers, or patients in a given institution. These spaces were quickly identified and were subsequently closely supervised to prevent individuals from gathering and communicating with each other. However, functional sites could also be put to beneficent purposes as well. In the Naval Hospitals of France in the mid eighteenth century and particularly at Rochefort, functional sites were put to positive uses. Before such a mobile and swarming mass of bodies in the early hospitals could be categorized as individual patients (with distinct illnesses and behavior patterns) this great bodily mass first had to be filtered; patients had to be assigned to various wings and areas of the hospital in order to be properly catalogued. But perhaps what is most interesting is that this so called ‘filtering’ first centered around the categories of finances and administration: medicines were placed under lock and key to prevent theft. The number of patients in the hospital as well as their whereabouts were carefully recorded so that budgets could be carefully regulated. Thus, administrative and economic concerns took priority to curing illness. Patients were catalogued not according to their respective symptoms, but according to how likely they were to steal from the hospital. Only later, Foucault claims, came the isolation of contagious patients and separate beds.86 Thus, 84 85 86

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 143. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 143. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 144.

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it was partially because of these separations (of individual patients and their illnesses) that produced a body of data, which then intersected with administrative, political technologies and medical technologies.87 So, Foucault also clearly wants to demonstrate (and this incidentally is where Foucault differs from many anarchist thinkers), that discipline is not bad or evil in and of itself. Discipline, that is, is not to be avoided at all costs. Rather, discipline has produced positive, life-enhancing effects. Indeed, Foucault notes, “Out of discipline, a medically useful space was born.” 88 Fourthly, the “rank, the place one occupies in a classification, the point at which a line and a column intersect, the interval in a series of intervals that one may traverse one after the other” 89 is another important condition for the disciplining of bodies. The ranking of individuals is demonstrable in the army, prisons and the factories in eighteenth century France. However, ranking was most effectively applied in various educational systems. School administrators increasingly classified their students according to rows, grades and groups. One of the benefits from this technique is that it served to discipline unruly students very efficiently. By placing an unruly student between two well behaved and serious students, the unruly student would be cut-off from others like him and gradually learn to accept the methods of the more disciplined students.90 Ranking bodies not only better individuates them thus making it easier for a supervisor to extract more work from the bodies in his charge, but most importantly, ranking marks in the individuals’ own mind how she compares with others. We will later see how ranking is connected with normalization. Fifth and finally, the individual must know his or her ‘place’ in relation to the whole. The worker must realize that he or she is only a part of a larger process, the soldier only one small cog in the entire army machine and the patient only one patient among many in the hospital. The final function of disciplinary space then, is to ensure that the individual recognizes the space, which he or she occupies in relation to the entire organization. Whether it is the prison, factory, school, hospital or army, the individual must understand where he or she ranks in the entire hierarchy.91 One method of classification that allowed both the individual and the administrator to understand where each subject ranked in terms of the orga87 88 89 90 91

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 144. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 144. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 146. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 147. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 148.

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nization as a whole was the tableaux vivants. Unlike the old, natural, taxonomy tables which were “situated on the axis that links character and category, disciplinary tactics are situated on the axis that links the singular and the multiple.” 92 In other words, the new disciplinary table could be used in order to understand and then correct both the individual, as he stands in relation to the whole as well as the whole in terms of the progress of each individual. In addition, the individual would also know exactly where he stood in this hierarchical order so that he could take the necessary steps and measures to improve his standing on his own. Disciplinary Time Just as there are five conditions to disciplinary space, there are also five conditions to disciplinary time. The first condition is the increasing use and distribution of the timetable. For centuries, the various religious orders were “masters of discipline.” Strict timetables, administered by abbots, instructed monks when it was time to pray, study, work, rest and eat. However, the importance of the timetable in our present society cannot be underestimated as it is used in a variety of modern institutions. The timetable was greatly refined in the eighteenth century specifying ever-exacting quantities of time of when and how much time it should take for a given activity. Armies began using the timetable in order to regulate soldiers’ training regimes. Elementary schools made use of the timetable in order to monitor and quantify the amount of time used to teach each subject.93 With the fine-tuning of the timetable by the military, industrialists and the schoolsystem in the eighteenth century, one could be assured that a “Time, (which is) measured and paid must also be a time with impurities or defects; a time of good quality, throughout which the body is constantly applied to its exercise.” 94 The second temporal condition of discipline lies in the temporal elaboration of the act. That is to say, the act must be, “broken down into its elements; the position of the body, limbs, articulation is defined; to each movement are assigned a direction, an aptitude, a duration; their order of succession is prescribed.” 95 This anatomo-chronological schema of behaviour, is clearly seen in the Ordonnance du 1er janvier 1766, pour regler l’exercise de l’ infantere. This marching maneuver, first initiated by the French army, specifies in exacting detail the precise length of the military marching step and the strictly defined 92 93 94 95

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 149. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 150. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 151. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 152.

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movements of the body necessary in order to take the ‘perfect’ step. Indeed, even the length of time one should hold one’s leg in the air before it touches the ground was carefully calculated.96 This coordination of precise bodily behavioral articulation and analysis of time and movement soon spread to other sectors. Factory workers, for example, now had to assemble products in a specific manner, while students had to hold their pencils exactly as instructed.97 Third, there is a correlation of the body and its gesture. Foucault writes: “Disciplinary control does not consist simply in teaching or imposing a series of particular gestures; it imposes the best relation between a gesture and the overall position of the body, which is the condition of efficiency and speed.” 98 The properly determined methods of writing, firing a gun, assembling a product, etc., are acquired skills that maximize productivity by eliminating excessive time. But not all techniques or methods are equal. Rather, the best methods of achieving the desired result soon make themselves known by the systematic collection of data. Furthermore, these techniques are then re-introduced into the system thus creating a feedback loop, which can be further studied to achieve increasing efficiency. The fourth condition of disciplinary time is what Foucault calls the bodyobject articulation: “Over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced, fastening them to one another. It constituted a body-weapon (corps-arme), body-tool (corps-instrument), bodymachine (corps-machine) complex.” 99 Discipline does not so much exploit the body; rather it attempts to establish a coercive and indissoluble link between the tool or weapon being used and the body. But what is perhaps even more important than the spread of this anatomo-chronological schema of bodily movement, is that it completely changes the old economic orders of “subjection that demanded of the body only signs or products, forms of expression or the result of labor.” 100 Now however, “the regulation imposed by power is at the same time the law of construction of the operation.” 101 In other words, in a disciplinary society, the primary concern of power is not that of exploitation, or the forceful mistreatment of the soldier, worker or schoolchild to ensure he obeys, produces, or learns the required command, product, or skill respectively speaking, rather, the primary concern is to ensure that the body and the body’s 96 97 98 99 100 101

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 151. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 151. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 152. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 153. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 152. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 152.

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movements are correctly following the command, making the product in the prescribed way or learning the lesson as it should be learned. Thus, there is no separation between the individual and the product. Power works on a micro, capillary level. Power fastens the body to the object it handles creating the “body-weapon, body-tool, body-machine complex.” 102 The fifth and final temporal element in discipline is its exhaustive use. Instead of viewing the timetable in negative terms, as in the monastery where it was a sin to waste time, discipline uses time positively: “It is a question of extracting from time ever more available moments and from each moment, ever more useful forces (toujours dadvantage de forces utiles).” 103 We see this in a variety of institutions in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century, but especially in the educational system. In the educational system of the nineteenth century and of our own day, it is preferred if children would learn and perform calculations as quickly as possible. As Foucault writes, “The more time is broken down, the more its subdivisions multiply, the better one disarticulates it by deploying its internal elements under a gaze that supervises them (un regard qui les controle), the more one can accelerate an operation or at least, regulate it according to an optimum speed.” 104 To sum up, we can claim that the importance of discipline is that it “fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings.” 105 It homogenizes the entire social body by working it individually, from a ‘retail’ standpoint and not wholesale. In other words, it orders the parts so that the whole can work more effectively and efficiently, while the parts can be organized when viewed from the whole. Already we can see how disciplinary techniques introduced into very different, variegated settings, came to spread over the entire social body by the early nineteenth century. I shall now examine the second pole of bio-power, that of surveillance, in order to further flesh out the techniques and discourses utilized by a carceral society in more detail. Surveillance Architecture Prior to the eighteenth century, architecture had two principal purposes either 1) to inspire awe in those who viewed great buildings or 2) for strategic reasons 102 103 104 105

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 153 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 154 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 154. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 219

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of defense. However, architects soon became concerned with another purpose. In the eighteenth century, architects designed buildings to focus on observing those inside of them. As Foucault explains, the purpose of architecture increasingly became to: permit an internal articulated and detailed control-to render visible those who are inside it; in more general terms, an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them (les offirir a une connaissance, les modifier).106 (Emphasis added)

This shift of building design first manifests itself in the military camp around the mid eighteenth century in the writings of Benton de Morange’s Historie de Guerre and Dissertations sur les Tentes. However, what is disturbing about this new building archetype is that it becomes a model for other institutions— hospitals, schools, prisons and workshops. The Ecole Militaire, a French military school constructed in the late eighteenth century, is an extreme example of this new obsession to transform those individuals who have come to live in institutions. Methods of surveillance and observation are applied to every minute detail of the cadets’ lives in order to mold the cadets into perfect soldiers: Their rooms consisted of small cells in which for every ten pupils, had an officer on either side (a droite et a gauche) in order to monitor them. In the dining rooms, there was a slightly raised platform for the tables of the inspector of studies that they may see all the tables of the pupils of their divisions during meals; … latrines have been installed with half doors (demi-portes) so that the supervisor on duty could see the head and legs of the pupils. And in addition with the side walls sufficiently high that those inside can not see one another.107

This school is the model for what Foucault calls “hierarchal observation”: an officer monitors each pupil; a commander monitors the officers; the principal of the school monitors each commander and finally a board of generals monitors the principal. What’s more, it is the very structure of the Ecole Militaire that inspires Jeremy Bentham to invent the surveillance machine par excellance, the Panopticon.108 I think it is now common practice to consider Bentham’s Panopticon to be one of the great, technological inventions of humankind. Much like the car or telephone, it is ubiquitous in modern society. Indeed its usefulness was fully 106 107 108

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 172. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 173 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 316.

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recognized by Bentham as he prophetically noted well over 200 years ago that the design of the Panopticon symbolized an: Idea of a New Principle of Construction applicable to any sort of establishment in which persons of any description are to be kept under inspection and in particular penitentiary-Houses, prisons, houses of industry, work-houses, poor-houses, Lazarettos, Manufactories, Hospitals, Mad-Houses and schools.109

According to Foucault, the Panopticon was the perfect mechanism of surveillance. No thing and no one could escape the watchful, unblinking eye of the central tower. All individuals within an institution—from the core to the outermost circumference—would forever be caught in the unrelenting gaze by the unseen “watchman” who occupied the very heart of the innermost, highest tower. In addition to there being a tall observation tower in the middle of the institution, there would also be a ring of cells encircling the tower. Bentham writes, The building is circular. The apartments of the prisoners occupy the circumference. You may call them, if you please, the cells. These cells are divided from one another, and the prisoners by that means secluded from all communication with each other, by partitions in the form of radii issuing from the circumference towards the centre, and extending as many feet as shall be thought necessary to form the largest dimension of the cell.110

The individuals housed within each cell could be viewed, at any time, by an inspector who would be stationed in a very high central tower. The cells would form the outer circumference from the tower and should be arranged in such a fashion, that no part of the cell could be screened from the inspectors’ view.111 Since the Panopticon was designed so that an inspecting gaze could be applied to each and every resident of an institution unremittingly, the structure of the lighting system was of crucial importance for two reasons: first, to allow the inspector to see each inhabitant of the institution in his trust and second, to prevent these same inhabitants from seeing him. It is for this reason that Bentham laboriously explains the sort of blinds that needed to be used: “It is conceived, that the light, coming in this manner through the cells, and 109

Jeremy Bentham, The Pan-Opticon Writings, ed. Miran Bozovic (London: Verso Press, 1995), 29. 110 Jeremy Bentham, The Pan-Opticon Writings, ed. Miran Bozovic (London: Verso Press, 1995), 30 111 Bentham, The PanOpticon Writings, 30.

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so across the intermediate area, will be sufficient for the inspector’s lodge.” On “the windows of the lodge, Bentham continues, there are blinds, as high up as the eyes of the prisoners in their cells can, by any means they can employ, be made to reach.” 112 Such blinds were necessary for two reasons: 1) it prevented the prisoners from seeing the central tower. Thus, if one did not know when she was being observed, one could conclude that one was always being observed. This inference was not lost on Bentham. In fact, he argued, that the Panopticon would pay for itself because “the gaoler will have no salary.” 113 2) It was important that prisoners could not communicate with each other and thus foment rebellion. The result, Foucault notes is that such cells become “…like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.114 Although such a structure was never constructed in reality, nonetheless, Foucault evinces that the Panopticon was “at once a programme and a Utopia.” 115 Indeed, Foucault boldly claims that, “there was scarcely a text or a proposal about the prisons which didn’t mention Bentham’s device—the ‘Panopticon.’ 116 We can now understand the reason for the great popularity of Bentham’s discovery; his “Columbus egg” as he called it. The Panopticon was exactly what educators, penologists, doctors and industrialists had been looking for. It represented (as Bentham himself fully realized) a complete reversal of monarchial power. One no longer needed to use arms, physical violence or threats to increase production, ensure order, or monitor schoolchildren. Instead the only condition necessary for discipline was simply: a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorizing to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against himself. A superb formula; power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be a minimal cost.” 117

Such a construction can be seen in its more evolved forms today. “Panopticism” understood in terms of “Big Brother is always watching you” is one of the cornerstones for the functioning of Western industrial societies. 112 113 114 115 116 117

Bentham, The PanOpticon Writings, 30. Bentham, The Pan-Opticon Writings, Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200. Foucault, “The Eye of Power”, in Power/Knowledge, 159, 146–166. Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” 147. Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” 155.

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The Panopticon and “Panopticism” had three primary functions. The first principal function of the Panopticon was “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power (fonctionnement automatique du pouvoir).” 118 “In short, the inmates are caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.” 119 The Panopticon is a machine that individualizes. It separates, divides and differentiates individuals, gestures, behavior and actions from the previously undifferentiated mass of bodies within an institution. Through the all pervasive gaze of Panopticism, the individual also comes to believe that he is being watched and monitored at all times. Thus, panoptic structures ensure maximum efficiency of power because they come to rely on the individual to police him or herself. The second principal function of the Panopticon has to do with its connection to knowledge: “But the Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behavior (modifier le comportement) to train or correct individuals.” 120 The Panopticon is able to advance the further subjection of bodies by helping wardens, guards, criminologists etc., to observe the minutest behavior of individuals. It could be used to experiment with different medicines, different forms of punishment and different methods of learning, which could then be monitored in order to identify their effectiveness.121 What’s more, the Panopticon is closely connected to the human sciences, Foucault remarks, because by “...using techniques of subjection and methods of exploitation, an obscure art of light and the visible was secretly preparing a new knowledge of man.” 122 This leads us to the third and final important consequence of the Panopticon; its utility. Factory owners, wardens, doctors, teachers, generals, anyone anywhere, could use the Panopticon if observation, production and efficiency were of the utmost importance. In short, the Panopticon “arranges things in such a way that the exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests but is so subtly present in them, as to increase the efficiency by increasing its own points of contact”.123 In summary, the Panopticon creates homogenous relations of power and maximizes and efficiently deploys power’s effects. It increases production in the workplace, it 118 119 120 121 122 123

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 203. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 203 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 171. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 206.

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suppresses revolts in the prison system, it ensures military drills are performed correctly and thereby it “strengthens the social forces.” 124 Normalization The intersection of these two vectors (disciplinary practices on the one hand, and surveillance techniques on the other,) creates both a new point on the power/knowledge grid as well as a new emergent in history. That is to say, the intersection of disciplinary practices and surveillance techniques introduces a new term and concept into Western thought: “normalization.” The practices and techniques of coercion and correction of bodily movements via discipline, combined with the monitoring and overseeing of these bodily movements and behaviors through observation, are intimately connected to one another: in order to apply corrective discipline to an individual that is, in order to ensure an individual is performing a task, properly one must be able to mark and differentiate this individual body from that of other bodies in the institutional setting. That is, one must be able to observe where the individual is and, most preferably, be able to see him or her at all times. Simultaneously, in order to see the individual and to be able to distinguish this particular individual from others, one must already mark the individual by means of discipline (where the individual ranks in the entire structure, at what area he should be in and at what time etc). Later, this discipline/surveillance dyad will provide the basic methodologies, techniques, files and archive for the social sciences. Knowledge is power and power is knowledge. The power/knowledge dyad can be clearly viewed if we turn to the birth of the social sciences. In order for the social sciences to classify, determine and create that which will be the target for disciplinary measures (the criminal, the delinquent, the lunatic, the student, the worker), they must simultaneously observe, by marking out and creating by means of discipline, that which must become clearly visible (the criminal, the delinquent, the lunatic, the student, the worker).125 The goal of the social sciences therefore, and seemingly the 124

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 208. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 170–171. For more on this connection between the social sciences and the carceral society see p. 305 of Discipline and Punish: “The carceral network constituted one of the armatures of this power-knowledge that has made the human sciences historically possible. Knowable man (soul, individuality, consciousness, whatever it is called) is the object-effect of this analytical investment, of its domination-observation.”

125

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goal of the carceral society, is to create and reinforce (through the collection, interpretation and implementation of more data) what Foucault labels “normalizing judgment.” Normalizing Judgment Normalizing judgment combines hierarchical ranking, disciplinary practices and surveillance technologies into a grid in which all individuals are ensnared and are related to one another along a number of intersecting angles: laterally, ascending, descending, etc. Because all individuals are related to one another in some manner, normalizing judgment should not be seen as a refinement of the previously instituted legal model. To break the law means that one is outside the community and requires punishment or is simply cast out of the community—the individual becomes an outlaw. Normalizing judgment is not just a ‘rational progression’ of this older model. Rather, the “Norm” is different, in that it is never completely broken nor is it completely upheld. The purpose of normalizing judgment is to place individuals along the axis of gradations between acceptable and unacceptable forms of behavior in a given context: the school, hospital, prison, workplace etc. Thus, and unlike other historical ages, contemporary society distinguishes itself from other epochs by imposing norms rather than laws. Like the spatialization and temporalization of disciplinary practice, there are five principal aspects to normalizing judgment. The first aspect of normalization is its ‘ceremonial’ context. For example, there are norms in the factory concerning the number of products that need to be assembled each day. There are norms in the school system, regarding the memorization and application of new knowledge and of course, there are norms in the military, prisons and hospitals. Each of these settings has its own laws, specific offences and forms of judgment. This can be seen, Foucault thinks, in the infra-penalties and punishments established to deal with time (lateness, absence, interruptions of tasks), activity, (inattention negligence, lack of zeal) and behavior, (impoliteness, incorrect attitudes etc).126 What distinguishes these new disciplinary procedures when compared to prior power regimes though, is their concern (perhaps we would say their hyper-concern), with micro infractions that the law and the judicial system previously did not take into account. Second, normalizing judgment establishes both an artificial and natural order. There are sets of regulations and conventions established in a factory. For example, there is a fixed number of products that must be assembled in a 126

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 178.

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given amount of time. On one level, this is an artificial order since the owner of the factory prescribes it. However, in another sense, it is also a natural order because it is based on what the ‘average’ factory worker should reasonably be able to produce during a given day. This assumption is then correlated to the true ‘norm’ of the workplace: a statistical average for the normal factory worker is generated from the actual production of products from all workers in the factory on a given day. The norm is established from statistical data which is then ‘crunched’ and fed back into the system. The perpetuation of the accumulation and analysis of this sort of data forms a feedback loop justifying the norm. Thus, “in a disciplinary regime punishment involves a double juridical-natural reference.” 127 Third, “disciplinary punishment has the function of reducing gaps.” 128 In other words, discipline is corrective. Discipline does not merely punish, but rather correlates and optimizes effects. The soldier who is slower than his peers at target shooting is ‘punished’ by having to repeat the exercise over and over again. But, the more he is ‘punished’ in this way, the better he becomes. This is another reason for seeing disciplinary punishment as distinct from previous legal kinds of punishment in earlier, historical periods. Disciplinary punishment no longer seeks to exact the king’s revenge on the criminal by subjecting the criminal’s body to a spectacle of torture, rather, as it punishes, discipline also exercises and improves.129 Fourth, “discipline is only one element of a double system: gratificationpunishment.” 130 For example, individuals are judged in the workplace in terms of where they fall between the two poles of perfect employee to incompetent employee. This makes for a precise quantification allowing the manager, teacher, warden or commanding officer, to determine how the individual compares with others in the same group. In addition, it also makes possible the exact methods to be employed regarding each particular individual’s punishment in order to “normalize” him or her. Fifth, and finally, normalization also rewards. Students who exceed their peers are allowed special privileges or money in the form of scholarships. Prisoners who behave well are allowed to apply for early parole. The subjection of the individual then, is not only concealed from the individual rather, the 127

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 179. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 179. 129 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, see pages 3–9 for the graphic torture of Damiens the regicide. 130 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 180. 128

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individual takes steps to ensure that his subjection continues.131 To sum up, normalizing judgment differentiates individuals, but also assembles individuals into a greater whole by ordering, identifying and classifying where and how individuals are connected to the whole. These three characteristics of the carceral regime (discipline, surveillance and normalizing judgment) make for quite a dystopic view of society. As Foucault pessimistically notes we are in “the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.” 132 No one is exempt from power/knowledge. “There are, no spaces of primal liberty in between the meshes of its (power’s) network” as Foucault famously exclaims.133 Where does Foucault believe such a disciplinary society is headed? Here is his answer found on the final pages of Part III of Discipline and Punish: The ideal point of penalty today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end an investigation that would be extended without limit (sans limite) to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgment that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed (dossier jamais clos), the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of the examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap (ecart) in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet infinity….The practice of placing individuals under ‘observation’ is a natural extension of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination procedures….Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?134

To conclude this section, we have seen that Foucault, just like Nietzsche before him, traces the genealogical development of ideas and institutions as manifestations and constructions of power. However, unlike Nietzsche, Foucault’s work is more explicitly tied to understanding the relationship between the body and the particular dispositif at work (in our case biopower) in a given historical era. The body, in Foucault’s genealogical investigations, serves as the focus and target of the power/knowledge relationships in the carceral society. For example, 131 132 133 134

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 181. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 304. Foucault, “Power and Strategies,” in Power/Knowledge, 142. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 227–228.

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“advances” in architectural design are instituted in many different buildings because these so called “advances” allow for a greater discipline and surveillance of the very bodies that inhabit them. Again, panoptic structures are introduced in the workplace, in prisons and other institutions in order to more easily view the behavior of inmates or employees’ bodies. Assembly line procedures, marching drills, even guides to good study habits, are institutionalized and deployed, in order to make the body more efficient, economical and productive in its respective settings. Foucault, in convincing fashion, demonstrates that many of our modern discourses, practices and techniques employed by institutions are created and reinforced in the interests of further controlling the body. Furthermore, our brief analysis of Discipline and Punish seems to confirm, in rather resounding fashion, Foucault’s own intention and research program as he remarks near the beginning of the work. Foucault seeks nothing less than to reverse completely the thesis of Durkheim’s article “Deux lois de l’evolution penale” and (other like minded accounts of the history and origin of the penitentiary system) published in le Annee Sociologiue IV, 1899–1900. According to Foucault, Durkheim only studies the “social forms” of prisons thereby mistakenly claiming that it was an increasing trend towards individualism, in modern society, that produced both legal and punitive institutional reform. In brief, Durkheim argues that lawmakers, as well as judges and the courts in general, distinguished between the severity of the crime as well as the intentions (pre-meditated murder as opposed to manslaughter for example) of the individual who committed it and then sentenced the guilty party accordingly. Instead, Foucault successfully demonstrates the opposite position in Discipline and Punish: it was the increasing individualization of the subject which was one of the primary effects and tactics of power and “penal mechanisms.” Thus, Foucault consciously puts forth an alternative theory to that of the more standard and traditional one of Durkeheim in order to determine whether this new theory is more warranted. I should also note that Foucault’s philosophical genealogy does not represent, as Thomas McCarthy for example argues, “a one-dimensional ontology in which truth, knowledge and subjectivity are reduced in the end to effects of power.” 135Nor does it imply that it is a relativistic study which, Habermas claims, “…if it is correct it must destroy the foundations of the research inspired by it as well. On the other hand, if it is incorrect, then the unmasking of

135

McCarthy, “The Critique of Impure Reason,” 262.

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the human sciences would lose its point.” 136 Indeed, near the beginning of Discipline and Punish, Foucault defines his research project in empirically verifiable and, therefore, empirically falsifiable terms. “This study which I now quote in full (Discipline and Punish) Foucault writes, obeys four general rules (regles generals).” 1.

2.

3.

4.

Do not concentrate the study of punitive mechanisms on their ‘repressive’ effects alone, on their ‘punishment’ (sanction) aspects alone, but situate them in a whole series of their possible positive effects, even if these seem marginal at first sight. As a consequence, regard punishment (punition) as a complex social function. Analyse punitive methods not simply as consequences of legislation (regles de droit) or as indicators of social structures, but as techniques possessing their own specificity in the more general field of other ways of exercising power. Regard punishment (chatiments) as a political tactic. Instead of treating the history of penal law and the history of the human sciences as two separate series whose overlapping (croisement) appears to have had on one or the other, or perhaps on both, a disturbing or useful effect, according to one’s point of view, see whether there is not some common matrix or whether they do not both derive from a single process of ‘epistemological-juridical’ formation; in short, make the technology of power the very principle of both of the humanization of the penal system and of the knowledge (connaissance) of man. Try to discover whether this entry of the soul on to the scene of penal justice, and with it the intention in legal practice of a whole corpus of ‘scientific’ knowledge (savoir), is not the effect of a transformation of the way in which the body is invested by power relations.

In short, try to study the metamorphosis of punitive methods on the basis of a political technology of the body in which might be read a common history of power relations and object relations. (My Italics)137 Contrary to both Habermas and McCarthy, Foucault starts Discipline and Punish on a conjecture. More perspicuously put, these 4 general rules serve as the empirical consequence from Foucault’s more general thesis that power and the struggle for greater power is the only causally efficacious force in history. In brief, Foucault hypothesizes that it may be possible to explain current penal laws, practices, discourses and institutions, by solely examining the body and, more specifically, the political investment of the body by power, rather than focusing on the minds, as it were, of politicians, judges, lawyers or reformers. That is, Foucault argues it is both possible and more epistemically justified if an investigator sought to explain the evolution of penal practices as a new invest136 137

Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 279. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 23–24. Surveiller et Punir, p. 28.

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ment of the body by power, rather than trying to explain these new procedures and practices in terms of an increasing ‘humanist’, empathetic and enlightened concern for improving the criminal. Durkeheim and others who try to explain prison reform by proffering this sort of explanation never explain how, exactly, the public became more morally refined or rational such that torture or public executions would no longer be tolerated. Foucault demonstrates that a sounder, more epistemically warranted argument is to claim that the identical and simultaneous modifications that took place in the school system, factories, penitentiaries, the army and hospitals, were both the cause and consequence of a new political anatomy of power called ‘‘biopower.’’ Another goal of Discipline and Punish is to demonstrate that punishment is positive and productive. Power is not just restricted to the penitentiary system. Punishment, when construed as discipline/surveillance, is positive creating greater efficiency, stability and production throughout the entire social body of modern civilization: in factories, schools, armies, hospitals and penal systems. Discipline, as the punishment of a carceral society, corrects as it punishes. Knowledge is not antithetical to power, but is coeval with it. Thirdly, and most important for my purposes, Foucault demonstrates that one can further comprehend the goals of this “new political technology of the body” by paying close attention to those institutions of power that came to focus more and more on ‘marginal’ bodies (the criminal body, the student body, the mad body, the woman’s body) in the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Analyzing how these bodies were disciplined, Foucault extols, will reveal the true ‘intentions’, as it were, of biopower. Always working alongside discipline is surveillance. Surveillance allows for a precise examination of the behavior patterns of individual bodies within an institution. It provided the emerging social sciences, the other armature of biopower, the archive and tools necessary in order to objectify, catalogue, record and experiment on individual bodies in order “to discover the body’s secrets.” Just as with Nietzsche, Foucault would prefer not to enter into the labyrinth of the mind in order to explain the rise of our current carceral regime. Instead, Foucault explains how our present society was formed by simply focusing on those discourses and practices that sought to control and intensify the forces of the body. Provocatively put, I would claim that Foucault is a behaviorist without believing in behaviorism. Foucault eschews all metaphysical theories regarding the inherent structures of both mind and body: there are no Husserlian eidetic structures to be found in subjectivity; no corps propre of Merleau-Ponty to be found in the body. As Foucault stresses in several places, bodies underwent precise

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regimes of training depending on where the body was located. Subjection, then, is a complex process of dressage and nothing more. The body for Foucault remains the chief genealogical document, but not because the body is an ahistorical blueprint for the understanding of how and what a society will come to value as it was with Nietzsche. Rather, as Foucault shows, the body has been re-interpreted, indeed re-ordered, towards new ends and new purposes. But, that being said, it is by studying the body that we come to have a better grasp of the origins, goals and, what Foucault calls, the problematique facing our present society. According to Foucault one must start with what he calls the “prolematique” that is peculiar to an historical epoch before undertaking a historical investigation. One that is, must trace “the way to analyze questions of general import in their historically unique form.” 138 That which is unique to our historical era is that of normalization and our place within a carceral regime. For Foucault, this problematique is intimately personal because power/knowledge targets every individual in society. Foucault’s investigation resonates with all of us since we are all caught within the network of power/knowledge. In sum, both Nietzsche and Foucault investigate a problem that is intensely and personally important for each of them and demonstrate why we, the readers of their texts, must care about the resolution of these problems as well. This notion of the ‘personal,’ as it relates to a genealogical inquiry will be more fully developed in Volume II.

Section III: Foucault and Nietzsche’s Genealogies In summary, Foucault’s genealogical investigations are very similar to those of Nietzsche. Both philosophers take issue with historical accounts that explain the origins of ideas or social and political institutions in merely intentional or Durkeheimian “social forms.” Instead, both philosophers place emphasis on providing a naturalistic account of historical events and phenomena. Both offer their genealogical accounts as hypotheses which are verifiable and of course, possible of falsification. Finally, the manner in which they demonstrate and provide epistemic warrant for their respective theories are both very similar and, 138

Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?,” 49. Since the notion of a problematique is very important in understanding the ethical axis of genealogy, I shall discuss it in more detail in Volume II.

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as will be shown, epistemically justified, as will be explained and examined in more detail in Philosophical Genealogy Volume II. However, there is at least one significant difference between the two genealogists: whereas Nietzsche thinks of genealogy as more of a nautical lead line, where the genealogist is trying to arrive at the one origin or causa prima of guilt, for example, Foucault, on the other hand, views genealogy in the opposite manner. For Foucault the line of descent, as it were, is more like a frayed rope. Foucault shows how disparate practices, discourses and techniques of discipline, surveillance, hierarchical observation and normalization were “woven together” in order to form a disciplinary society. Therefore, there is no common line of descent which leads from our current society to the 17th century let alone a line, which could be traced to pre-historic times. In short, we might say that Foucault starts with the homogenous and ends with the heterogeneous. Foucault traces the homogeneity of power in present society (the carceral regime) to its heterogeneous origins (the individual practices, discourses, institutions and techniques that eventually formed a power/knowledge network). Genealogy as Nietzsche understands it starts with the heterogeneous. That is he begins introspectively. He begins by attempting to understand the relationship between related feelings such as bad conscience and guilt. He then tries to find the one common origin for all of them. In this sense, Foucault’s genealogy is just the other side of Nietzsche’s. Nietzsche starts with the frayed rope; a multitude of seemingly different ideas, institutions, practices and concepts, and then slowly ties together these threads as it were, through insight, empirical evidence and conjectures to one ultimate end. Conversely, Foucault starts with the insight “Is it surprising that prisons, resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” as all of these institutions are merely manifestations of one power dispositif. In other words, he begins with the end of the rope in which all of the strands have been woven together. In sum, both Foucault and Nietzsche’s genealogical methods parallel the task of a family genealogical inquiry. If I wanted to discover who my ancestors were, I would trace a line which expands geometrically—to my father and mother, (2) to each of their respective parents (4) and to their parents (8) etc. Thus, I would attempt to discover the entire individual, genetic strands that came together to form ‘me.’ Analogously, the goal of a philosophical genealogical inquiry according to Foucault is to trace the line of descent of the problematique of a specific historical epoch to what were once individual and separate strands.

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The above conception of family genealogy is not exhaustive. There may be a different genealogical emphasis and thus a different way in which one might desire to trace one’s family genealogical tree. If I am interested in finding out if I am related to the Duke of Wellington for example, I would trace my ancestry in a somewhat different fashion. I would be interested in tracing a single genealogical thread to see if I was indeed related or not. Filling out the tree, as it were, is secondary to the primary goal of discovering a common descent. Analogously, the goal of a philosophical genealogical inquiry according to Nietzsche is one which starts by questioning whether there is a common link between the myriad of concepts and ideas to be found in present society that seem to be prima facie related to a common historical origin. Turning to the notion of power, it should be clear from my analysis in sections I and II that ‘power’ for the genealogist should neither be understood metaphysically nor ontologically. It is not as though power exists first before the world comes to be. Power is not some absolute substratum which then sensibly manifests itself by taking on different forms. Power is not before the world rather, power is the world as it worlds. In a genealogical inquiry it is better to understand power and more precisely put power relations, as relations which in fact exist and can be discovered using naturalistic methods of inquiry. The will to power is Nietzsche’s name for describing the historical struggle of human existence as it is invariably played out in seemingly dissimilar arenas: intellectually, spiritually, economically, politically and socially. To echo Imre Lakatos in his book The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, a philosophical, genealogical research program, which focuses on the deployment of power and the struggle for greater power is very far indeed from being ‘degenerate.’ In very general terms a research program, according to Lakatos, comprises all of the components that go into the establishment, proliferation and testing of a scientific model. Ideally, a scientific model is an understanding of some area of nature whereby novel facts about this area are continuously predicted, resoundingly confirmed and, ideally, resolve anomalies that its predecessor theory was unable to. A theory is said to be progressive if it matches very closely to this ideal and thereby introduces a new ‘problemshift’——the new model’s problems and perspectives are adopted by other scientists working in the same field.139

139

See Imre Lakatos’ The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, edited by John Worrall and Gregory Currie (Cambridge University Press: 1978) especially subsection (d4) of Chapter One.

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Lakatos calls the completely ‘theoretical’ component the “negative heuristic” or hard core of the research program.140 The core of a research program need not be falsifiable in order to be classified as a scientific model. Indeed as Lakatos famously states the “modus tollens cannot be directed toward it.” This is to say, that it is impossible for the hard core to be falsified. As Lakatos notes and as Duhem and Quine have clearly shown, it is always possible to save a theory… “from refutation by some suitable adjustment to the background knowledge in which it is embedded.” 141 Or as Quine put it: “Any statement can be held true come what may if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system.” 142 So although a well established fact may appear as an anomaly to a research program in the sense that the program is unable to explain its occurrence, nevertheless, this fact can be successfully accommodated by the program in question if one changes how the hard core of this program will be empirically interpreted. All that is required of a program with the designation of ‘progressive’ is that the core is capable of generating ever new and interesting possible truths concerning the connections that hold between things in nature. The more empirical wing of this program as it were or “belt” as Lakatos refers to it comprises the auxiliary hypotheses which are used to deflect possibly recalcitrant anomalies away from the hard core of the program. The hypotheses are referred to as the “positive heuristics” as it is these hypotheses, along with what is conventionally accepted to be the normal operating conditions of a well run laboratory in a given field, that serve to shape the experimental conditions required in order to put the predictions of the core on trial.143 As long as the core can continue to produce novel predictions; these predictions can be implemented, the implementation of these predictions are in accordance with experimental conditions which are taken to be standard in the scientific community at large and these predictions are successfully corroborated, then the program is said to be progressive.144 Lakatos adds that it is also a boon to have a dedicated and brilliant group of scientists who are emotionally invested in the furthering of the program.145 A degenerate program is one that simply can no longer measure up to either one or all of these criterion. That is, it may be the case where it is unable 140 141 142 143 144 145

Lakatos, 48 Lakatos, 96. W.V.O. Quine From a Logical Point of View (Harvard University Press, 1953), 11. Lakatos, 49–52. Lakatos, 31–35. Lakatos, 72.

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to generate possibly new and interesting connections between things in the world and/or a program whose predictions fail to materialize over a substantial period of time. When a program fails in either of these regards a new program will sometimes come onto the scientific scene and initiate what Lakatos calls a “problemshift”: the new model is able to predict new facts which in some cases would be thought impossible under the old model; corroborate at least some of these new facts; be able to explain all of the facts confirmed by the old model; and, ideally, explain why the former model was unable to accommodate recalcitrant results.146 Science progresses with the institution of problem shifts: the more problem shifts we have, the more theories are competing against one another to explain anomalies that the other program could not explain and thus our predictive power increases. That being said a research program may continue long after it is degenerate for many reasons and still make small advancements in its area.147 If we turn to examine genealogy and compare it with a hedonist, utilitarian position then it is easy to see that the utilitarian model is an example of a degenerate program. As discovered, the metaphysical core of the utilitarian model (at least as Nietzsche understood it) holds that humans act in accordance with the human utility calculus that I will hereby define as HUC. HUC: “A subject, A, will commit that action which affords the most pleasure at time t provided that A is not aware of any reason why this same action will knowingly produce more pain for A, either as an immediate consequence of that action or in the foreseeable long run.” Under Nietzsche’s construal of the English Hedonist position, HUC is interpreted to be the law that governs all human motivation. If we interpret this thesis in accordance with the theoretical part of a Lakatosian research program, this law constitutes the program’s metaphysical core. We can then use this law to make various predictions. For example, Smith is walking on a sidewalk in a busy, downtown, American city when he notices that the woman in front of him unknowingly drops 20 dollars from her purse. Using HUC we predict that Smith will grab the money for himself. But we need to add the following ad hoc hypothesis to both deflect a potential recalcitrant event away from the hardcore of the program as well as to ensure that the core can be properly tested. Thus, we also assume that Smith will not pick up the money for himself if the woman or if other individuals, in Smith’s immediate vicinity, notice that the money 146 147

Lakatos, 34. Lakatos, 35.

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was misplaced. Since Smith is walking in a rather crowded area and is therefore well aware that there are many people about, he reasons that it is highly probable that others have seen the woman drop money. Using HUC along with the following ad hoc hypothesis forming the empirical arm of the program, we further predict that the social stigma that comes from being regarded as a thief outweighs Smith’s initial inclination which is to take the money. We predict that Smith will opt to return the money to the woman. Smith does eventually return the money and thus the theory is confirmed. This model of human behavior would seem to work well with respect to explaining the intentions and actions of others in many similar situations. But this same theory cannot explain, as was discovered, the ascetic ideal. It fails to take into account why subjects willingly inflict pain on themselves. In light of this recalcitrant experience—which is well confirmed by the most casual examination of the history of Christianity—the program is an abject failure. This, namely the ascetic ideal, is the most devastating anomaly for HUC to explain. The will to power on the other hand can explain both why subjects act for the reasons they do (whether these reasons are unconscious or conscious) and also explain the reasons behind the adoption of the ascetic ideal. Persons become ascetics because 1) there is a predisposition to do so (according to Nietzsche they are physiologically degenerate in some fashion; and 2) by adopting an ascetic lifestyle a person who is perhaps physiologically weak can gain power over others by demonstrating that he is not afraid of what most human beings are afraid of, namely, pain. In volume II I investigate how I resolve the problems I addressed here in the present volume. Now that I have provided a concrete analysis of how genealogy works in practice, I think these it is now necessary to return to some of the more abstract philosophical questions that ended chapter two. For example: ‘Given that power can be studied empirically and ‘scientifically’, what, if anything does this have to do with the body?’ Indeed, ‘What is the importance of the body in genealogical research? ‘How does the body relate to the power axis as described above?’ ‘Finally, what exactly is the body according to the genealogist?’ Chapter five of Philosophical Genealogy answers all of these questions in explicit detail.

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INDEX OF TERMS

Absolute Spirit p. 9, 17 Archaeology p. 19-20, 66-67, 83, 85 Bio-power p.23, 30, 51, 52, 71, 77, 80-81, 162, 165, 172 Cognitive Nietzsche p. 64, 109, Coherentism p. 105, 113 Curative Science p. 2-3, 38, 41, 47, 91, 102, 118, Cyclopean View p.9 De dicto/De re p. 98 Diagnostic p.2-3, 38, 98, 102 Dispositif p. 4, 10, 30, 48, 49, 67, 71, 73, 80, 81, 133, 163, 164, 165, 180, 185 Ellipse p. 18, 46 Episteme p. 19, 20, 23, 166, 167, Epistemic Meritorious Problem (EM) p. 33, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 94, 113, 123

False Consciousness p. 41, 164 Forgetfulness p, 137, 140 Foundationalism p, 94, 113, 130 Hedonism p. 157 Hedonist Utilitarian Calculus (HUC) p.188, 189 Historical a priori p. 19, 20, 85 “Lived-Body” p. 81, 82, 86 “Lumper or a Splitter” p. 62, “Man’s Doubles” p. 20 Memory p. 42, 50, 51, 57, 128, 136, 138, 139, 140, 155 Monumental History p. 7, 8, 16 Morality in the Pejorative Sense (MPS) p. 38, 39, 40, 44, 48, 138, Naturalism p.68,109,131,161 Neo-Gnosticism p. 15

200

index

Non-Cognitive Nietzsche p. 64, 109 Panopticon p. 162,167,173,174,175,176, Presentism p. 9, 16, 18, 140, 158 Problematique p, 17, 40, 184, 185 Punishment p. 10, 52, 57, 66, 140, 141, 142, 144, 146, 147, 150, 151, 153, 155, 158, 161, 163, 176, 178, 179, 182, 183

Strong perspectivism p. 106, 107, 108 Sovereign individual p. 137, 138, 139 Therapeutic (powers of genealogy) p, 3, 45, 47, 55 Ursprung p. 11, 76, 78, 139 “View from Nowhere” p. viii, 13,

Rapport a soi p. 44 “Received View” p. 61, 62, 64, 65, 119, 120, 131 Regime of Truth p. 16, 21, 25, 68, 163 Resentiment p. 28, 46, 54 Restricted Consciousness p. 41

Weak perspectivism p. 14, 108, Whig historianism p. 7, 8, 9, 18 Will to Power (WTP) p. 4, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 59, 60, 61, 101, 117, 148, 149, 150, 152, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 186, 189

INDEX OF NAMES

Ahern, Daniel p. 27, n.50, n.51, p. 50, n.111, p. 75, n.40, p. 76, Anderson, Elizabeth p. 127, n.67 Babich, Babette, E. p. 50, n.111 Bentham, Jeremy p. 173, p. 174, n.109, n.110, n.111, p. 175, n.112, n.113 Bevir, Mark p. 4, n.6 Bernauer, James p. 48, n.104 Blondel, Eric p. 3, n.5, p. 50, n.111, p. 55, n.126 Bove, Paul A. p. 4, n.7 Brown, James, Robert p. 115, Brown, Richard, S.G. p. 50, n.111, p. 64, p. 65, n.14, p. 72, n.33, p. 75, n.41, p. 76, p. 87 Butterfield, Herbert. p. 9, n.5, p. 10, n.8 Carrette, Jeremy, R. p. 163, n.76 Conway, Daniel, W. p. 4, n.7, p.35, n.74, p. 36

Cook, Deborah. p. 70, n.28, n.29, p. 71, n.30, Cox, Christoph. p. 36, p. 61, n.5, p. 109, n.33, n.34, p.110, n.35, p. 111, p.112, n.39, p. 113, n.40, p. 114, n.41, p. 115, p. 116, p. 117, p. 118, n.50, p. 131, p. 161, n.73 Deleuze, Gilles. p. 85, p. 86 Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Rabinow p. 71, n.31, p. 79, n.48, p. 80, n.49, p. 81, p. 83, p. 86, p. 87 Elders, Fon p. 15, n.19 Feyerabend, Paul p. 109, p. 111, n.38 Flynn, Thomas p. 66, n.16 Fox, Nick, J. 72, n.34, p. 73, n.35 Fraser, Nancy p. 22, n.38, p. 79, n.47, p. 80,

202

index

Gemes, Ken p. 103, n.16, n.17, n.18, p. 104, p 107 Granier, Jean p.34, n.71 Grimm, Rudiger p. 117, n.49 Grosz, Elizabeth p. 16, n.19 , p. 72, n.32 Haack, Susan p. 94, n.4, p. 106, n.22, p. 129, n.74, n.75 Habermas, Jurgen p. 4, n.7, p. 9, n .4, p. 16, n.20, p. 22, n.38, p. 40, p. 42, n.89, p. 47, n.102, p. 69, n.27, p. 90, p. 116, n.46, p. 181, p. 182, n.136 Hacking, Ian p. 114 Hales, Steven and Welshon, Rex. p. 36, n.74, p. 97, n.10, p. 106, n.23, n24, p. 107, n.25, n.26, n.27, n.28, p.108, n.29, n.30, n.31, n.32 Harper, Robert, F. p. 141, n15 Hegel, G.W.F. p. 9, n.6 Heidegger, Martin p. 117, n.49, p. 149 Heyes, Cressida p. 89, n.71, p 90, Higgins, Kathleen, Marie p. 3, n.5, p.45, p.46, n.96, p. 63, n.8 Hinman, Lawrence p. 104, n.20, n.21, p. 107, p. 129, n73 Honneth, Axel p. 4, p. 22, n.38 Hoy, David, Couzens p. 35, n.74, p. 53, n.119, p. 54, n.122, n.123, n.125 Janaway, Christopher. p. 159, n.70 Kant, Immanuel p. 19, p. 20, n.32, p. 47, n.102, p.84, p. 85, Klein, Wayne p. 50, n.111 Koffman, Sarah p. 34, n.71, p. 61 Krupp, Tyler p. 4, n.6 Kuhn, Thomas, S p. 23 Lakatos, Imre p. 186, n.139, p. 187, n.140, n.141, n.143, n.144, n.145, p. 188, n.146, n.147 Lash, Scott p. 72, n.33 Leiter, Brian. p. 37, n.78, p. 38, n.79, n.80, p. 39, p. 40, p. 43, p. 44, p. 61, n.5, p. 62, n.5, n.7, p. 118, p. 119, p. 120, p. 121, n.54, n.55, p. 122, n.56, n57, n.58, n.59, p. 123, p. 124, n.62, p. 125, n.64, p. 126, n.66, p. 127, n.68, n69,

n.70, p. 128, n.71, p. 129, p. 130, n.77, n78, p. 131, p. 138 Lingis, Alphonso p. 16, n.19 Long, Thomas p. 75, n.41 MacIntyre, Alasdair p. 4, n.7, p. 23, n.39, Magnus, Bernard. p. 63, n.8 Mahon, Michael p. 59, n.3, p. 60, n.4, p. 61, Man, Paul de p. 61, n.5, May, Todd p.3, p. 36, n.74, p. 47, n.101 McDowell, John p. 12, p. 125, n.65, p. 128 McNay, Lois p. 66, n.17, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice p. 71, n.31, p. 72, p. 79, p. 80, p. 81, n.51, n.52, p. 82, n.53, n.54, n.55, p. 83,n.56, n.57, p. 84, p. 85, p. 86, p. 87, p. 88, p. 90, p. 183 Migotti, Mark P. 160, n.71 Moore, Gregory p. 50, p. 65, n.15, p. 77, p. 78, n.44 Nagel, Thomas p. viii, n.2 Nehamas, Alexander p. 3, n.5, p. 61, n.5, p. 62, p.92, n.1, p. 93, n.2, n.3, p. 94, p. 97, n.8, n.9, p. 98, p. 99, p.100, p. 101, n.13, p. 109, p. 131 Owen, David p. 39, n.82, n.83, p. 40, n.84, n.85, p. 41, n.86, n.87, n.88, p. 42, n.90. p 43, p. 131, p. 159, Paras, Eric p. 47, n.102 Pasley, Malcolm p. 75, n.41 Plato p. 55 Popper, Karl p. 110, n.36, p. 111, n.37 Prado, C.G p. 35, n.74, p. 36, n.74 Putnam, Hilary p. 115, n.45, p. 124, p. 125, n.63, Quine, W.V.O p. 109, p. 111, n.38, p. 187, n.142 Rajchman, John p. 34, n.71. Rhee, R. p. 128, n.72, Rorty, Richard p. 109, p. 113, p. 114, n.41, n.42, n.43, n.44 p. 115, p. 116, n.46, p. 117, n.48, p.118

index of names Schrift, Alan p. 61,n.5 Sellars, Wilfred. p. 94, p. 95, p. 95, n.5, n.6, p. 96, n.7, p. 109, Smart, Barry p. 20, n.34 Soll, Ivan p. 157, n.66, Sosa, Ernest p. 98, n.11 Stack, George p. 61, n.5p. 104, n.19, 107 Suetonius p. 54

Visker, Rudi p. 4, n.6 White, Richard p. 46, n.97 Wilcox, John, T. p. 63, n.9, n.11, p. 64, n.13 Williams, Bernard p. 4, n.6, p. 35, n.74 Wittgenstein, Ludwig p. 114, p. 124, p. 128, n.72, p. 129, n.73, p. 130

203