We stand as strangers in front of ourselves. That is the short answer to the question: Why genealogy? There is a longer one too.

Our motivations are often concealed deep beneath the surface of our awareness. Our joys and our jealousies, and our satisfactions and our disappointments, often obscure our history as they reproduce it. Our most cherished values are often those of our social institutions, and we have internalized these unconsciously. There is a foreign land within; our motivations and our feelings, and our reflective thoughts and our judgments are shaped, ordered, and held in place by evaluative templates that themselves often remain out of our awareness. The genealogist’s task, then, is to descend into the depths, to expose our evaluative templates’ lines of descent and to aid in their articulation. By bringing these dissociated or otherwise obscured frameworks of value into view, the genealogist exposes how these arrangements of value orient us at the same time as they enliven and empower or deaden and constrain us. What the genealogist reveals is that, while these broadly unexamined habits of evaluation once worked well to address certain needs, they now frequently function to further perpetuate our self-misunderstandings. Genealogical investigations thereby harbor the power to shift our evaluative horizons such that we might ultimately free ourselves from some of the more pernicious prescriptions of our values. Genealogical inquiries – most broadly – give us an account of why we have become self-estranged, so far from being at home with ourselves, so that we might yet become otherwise.

Genealogical investigations hold out a distinctive promise: to bring to reflective awareness the systems that organize our subjective experiences but do not even threaten to cross “the threshold of consciousness,” as Nietzsche puts it (GM I 1). Genealogical investigations might call to mind the image of an archaeologist on a dig, who knows that our deepest, most valuable treasures are not to be found at the surface level of analysis but rather require careful unearthing. What we see is their dedication to uncovering layer upon layer of sedimented artifacts. What we witness is a painstakingly careful, necessarily deliberate, scientific, and naturalistic process of revealing, disclosing, and sense-making. With excavation, we see the archaeologist’s commitments; the past persists. Unveiling and recovering human history is possible. Fragmentary evidence can be pieced together and reconstructed to illuminate past customs and forms of life as well as to shed some additional light on our current modes of life.

This comparison is helpful in many regards, but we must keep hold of some key differences. First, the site of a genealogical excavation is us and not our fossilized material history.Footnote ¹ Second, while the inactivity of the archaeologist’s site permits leisurely study, the scene of genealogical inquiry is active and vital. Far from making a passive and disinterested inquiry, the genealogist is implicated: They, too, are formed and transformed by the very value systems that are the source materials of their investigation. Finally, while archaeological excavation culminates in a sudden uncovering and thereby an immediate revelation, the genealogist must go over their terrain again and again. The reason is that the genealogist is tasked – in the first instance, at least – with showing us what we are unable to see: that we are unwittingly formed and informed by unexamined evaluative templates. The genealogist is tasked, that is, with exposing those pre-reflective convictions that are formed by “every tables of values” (GM I 17) that we have known, or our “sublime command ‘thou shalt’” (A 12), which form requirements and obligations for us, and which tell us that we should live certain forms of life. After making us conscious of these unconscious systems of value, the genealogist is further tasked with demonstrating how and why these evaluative systems took shape and exerted such a hold on us, before further investigating the extent to which such frameworks of value may be re-formed. If we are pre-reflectively attached to inherited values, norms, and ideals that constrain our behavior as they shape our reflective understanding, then genealogy, as a mode of investigation, is a much slower process than archaeology, but one that is uniquely suited to help us redress our self-estrangement. Indeed, if what I say about the aims of genealogical analysis bears out, if genealogy as a method aims to render us less obscure to ourselves, then the process might involve the unending task of becoming ever clearer, ever more familiar, to ourselves.

Genealogy is a method, then, in the sense called to mind by its etymological origins in the Greek term methodos – a “mode” of traveling or a “way of inquiry” – that aims to expose the systems of evaluation that shape our experiences but often escape our conscious awareness.Footnote ² More specifically, genealogy is a diagnostic method in the sense brought forth by the Greek diagnosis – “thoroughly distinguishing” – that seeks to meticulously understand these systems of evaluation through their historical origins and psychosocial, political manifestations.Footnote ³ Moreover, genealogy is a deeply personal form of investigation: It reveals what is “crushingly present” but remains stubbornly out of view.Footnote ⁴ The genealogist seeks to bring to light what we need(ed) to disavow, what we need(ed) to conceal, what we need(ed) to subdue, and what we need(ed) to defend against. To expose and see “new truth[s]” “among thick clouds,” as Nietzsche describes it in his retrospective analysis of On the Genealogy of Morality, requires this investigative practice to take the form of an immanent critique (EH “Genealogy”). After all, the systems of evaluation that genealogy takes as its object of inquiry – that it seeks to thoroughly distinguish and to understand – are as vital as they are intimate. Nietzsche’s genealogical work aims to render us less obscure to ourselves, to liberate us from those value systems that no longer serve our interests, perhaps even to feel less prone to shame. How is this to be achieved? This book aims to provide an answer to that question.

Precisely because genealogical investigations are attuned to our self-estrangement – the subject matter of On the Genealogy of Morality is, as Nietzsche says, the “descent [Herkunft] of our moral prejudices” (GM P 2; KSA 5 248) – they face a considerable practical challenge: We are unable to see the evaluative perspective – namely, our moral prejudices – that shapes and forms us and yet leaves us increasingly opaque to ourselves (GM P 1).Footnote ⁵ How could a genealogical investigation possibly bring into view our prejudices, that which we are unable and perhaps even unwilling to see? How might a genealogical investigation reveal that we operate according to evaluative horizons that shape our experiences as they structure our affective and cognitive lives while themselves remaining relentlessly pre-reflective? In Chapter 1, “The Descent of Our Moral Prejudices,” I focus on that undertaking and show how Nietzsche brings the horizon of meaning into view. The chapter begins by first clarifying that an evaluative system, as Nietzsche understands it, is an interconnecting system of rank-ordered affective and cognitive preconceptions and conceptions that form expectations of how the world works. After drawing attention to the main constitutive features of an evaluative framework, the chapter offers a close reading of section 186 of Beyond Good and Evil to take up the general question of what might enable us to scrutinize and render intelligible those evaluative horizons that give meaning to our judgments, feelings, and longings, and that form our moral perspective. The answer, as I draw it out, is through what Nietzsche calls the “task of description” (BGE 186). To make this case, I elucidate how Nietzsche’s descriptions of competing evaluative systems – that of the original nobles and that of the slaves – are essential because they make ever plainer how evaluative templates function either to broaden and expand or to narrow and constrict our cognitive and affective lives. In this way, Chapter 1 demonstrates: (1) that our experience is ordered by evaluative templates and (2) that these “essential and invaluable,” often opaque, organizational and constraining structures form the basis of our moral prejudices (BGE 188). In this way, I will show that only when we can observe and bring into view that systems of evaluation order and structure our experiences and expectation of how the world works can we then ask how it came to be that way.

Chapter 2, “The Order of Rank,” develops Nietzsche’s account of that how: Exactly how, I ask, do systems of evaluation come to enjoy their factual success? Drawing on Nietzsche’s “major point of historical method” (GM II 12), the answer to this question is that our evaluative perspectives give way to one another through dynamic processes of overpowering and subduing, in which fixed, deeply engrained practices take on different meanings. Precisely because the meanings attached to these practices, these habits, are the products of dynamic struggles for superiority – of subduing and overpowering, which can in turn be subdued and overpowered themselves – their descent is traceable along historical and sociopolitical lines. This demonstrates that genealogical investigations are, inter alia, historical in kind: Nietzsche tracks the sociopolitical conditions, the relational and interpersonal contexts, under which our systems of value came to be. My attention to the dynamic historical processes situates perspectival change at the site of interpersonal and relational struggles in which some forms of life came to dominate and command and others were subordinated.

This historical account not only functions to further expose that hitherto “hidden land of morality” (GM P 7) by articulating its constitutive features and explaining how one set of relational practices can give way to another; it also creates space for additional questions to emerge: Why do evaluative frameworks succeed each other in the ways that they do? If ascetic morality is a prejudice, how does it assist us in hiding from ourselves? Which unbearable affective responses does it screen out or subdue? If ascetic morality is a prejudice, what might it propel us toward? Which affective responses does it support or even require? What forms of life does morality encourage, even support? Taking up these questions and issues is the work of Chapter 3, “The Most Difficult Backward Inference.” The answer, in the reading that I propose, is that morality serves psychologically protective functions: It wards off the fear and anxiety born of powerlessness and vulnerability as it also functions to preserve and foster a sense of efficacy. When feelings of powerlessness strike, when feelings of inadequacy become overwhelming, morality can help us restore ourselves by enabling us to hold tight to a list of grievances and blame someone or something else for our suffering. The evaluative system, here, does double duty: Morality assists us in feeling less helpless and less powerless as it also fosters a sense of efficacy and perhaps even a sense of (moral) superiority.

I develop this line of argument further in Chapter 4, “The Moral Defense: Cruelty Turned Inward,” to explore another way in which morality functions to serve psychologically protective functions – through, paradoxically, the “will to self-tormenting” (GM II 22). By attending to this inwardly directed form of “self-ravishment” (GM II 18), I conceive of the protective, defensive functions of morality thus: In order to stave off, moderate, disavow, or dissociate, a painful affect “that is becoming unendurable” (GM III 15) – for instance, helplessness, impotence, “depression, heaviness … [or] weariness” – one turns to oneself as the “sole cause of [such] suffering” (GM III 20).Footnote ⁶ Such self-recriminations thereby: (1) drive “out of consciousness at least for the moment” the painful feeling (GM III 17) and (2) restore a sense of efficacy, a sense of power (GM III 15). After distinguishing between two prominent ways in which such cruelty turned inwards may be felt – namely, through guilt and shame – I argue that it is shame that plays an underdeveloped and underappreciated role in the Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality. In this evaluative framework, our shame, that familiar cut of self-reproach, is shown to serve psychologically protective functions as it renders us ever more obscure to ourselves.

The work of the first four chapters demonstrates that Nietzsche’s genealogical accounts can liberate us from our moral prejudices by exposing and bringing to light: (1) that our experience is ordered by an evaluative template (Chapter 1); (2) how one framework came to subdue other alternatives (Chapter 2); (3) why morality enjoyed its factual success; and (4) why it still holds a very tight grip on us (Chapters 3 and 4). The work of Chapter 5 is to substantiate these conclusions. I achieve this end by way of my reading of “The Psychological Type of the Redeemer,” which shows the links between On the Genealogy of Morality and The Anti-Christ. After clarifying what the type is, I argue that, thus understood, it enables us to notice that Nietzsche uses genealogical methods even after 1887, when the Genealogy was first published, and to better appreciate the central roles that feelings of shame and powerlessness, as well as longings for efficacy, play in conceptual reevaluations. Although this reading does not represent a common interpretive strategy, I show that it is one that Nietzsche himself recommends.Footnote ⁷

Then, in Chapter 6, I zero in on one of Nietzsche’s “granite” sentences (EH “The Gay Science”) – “What is the seal of having become free? – No longer to be ashamed before oneself” (GS 275)Footnote ⁸ – to demonstrate that Nietzsche’s genealogical investigations offer one possible pathway to such liberation – to freedom, that is, from the shame we feel when in front of ourselves. Nietzsche’s “rhetorical provocations”Footnote ⁹ are often saddled with this emancipatory task. In such a reading, his powerful and playful prose functions to “shame and revolt the reader” into a conceptual and, perhaps later, an affective change.Footnote ¹⁰ Even as this reading has its advantages – it explains Nietzsche’s distinctive prose as it explains its role in exposing and helping to reevaluate our values – shame presents a unique challenge for this view, as I show in Chapter 6. Arousing shame, I argue, only locks us further into our pre-reflective templates of how the world works and, more painfully perhaps, into endless feedback loops and cycles of more shame. Rather than simply shaming us into compliance, then, Nietzsche’s genealogical accounts demonstrate for us why we came to need shame’s safeguarding such that, perhaps, we might yet become like those who are so liberated, who no longer need the balm of self-torture, and who are no longer ashamed in front of themselves. It is Nietzsche’s genealogical investigations that reveal how our affective responses are themselves often framed and held in place by morality. My interpretation gains additional support from Ecce Homo’s final sentence: “Have I been understood? – Dionysus versus the Crucified” (EH “Destiny” 9). Here, I read Nietzsche as pointing to a historical moment and asking: What might it be like to have a sense of efficacy that does not come by way of self-contempt? Is it possible to learn to tolerate, rather than reactively evade through self-loathing recriminations, our most acute feelings of powerlessness?

I close by drawing from Nietzsche’s autobiographical writings to focus in on his philosophical methods. Here, I identify the three features of genealogical analysis. First, Nietzsche attests to being gripped and limited by theological and moral prejudices, which, as he further suggests, functioned to constrict his evaluative horizons (GM P 3). Second, Nietzsche substantiates further that those deeply entrenched patterns of value and habits of thought, which (non-consciously or pre-reflectively) shaped his outlook, also oriented him in a particular way toward his suffering. As ways of combating that precarity, he adopts, for a time at least, thoroughly moralized responses: He wards off precarity through decadence in the forms of either world-denial (pessimism) or ascetic self-renunciation. And third, he confirms that refracting these automatic responses through his long-drawn-out illnesses opened, for him, a new line of sight.

The chapters work together, one after the other, to reveal that Nietzsche’s greatest contribution to philosophical thought is the method of genealogy. What emerges from these chapters is a sense of the liberatory power of this mode of investigating: It might render us ever more familiar to ourselves and thereby less habitually shame-prone. What emerges is a well-trimmed, but much broader, pathway for our inquiries to take. Often, we are asked to choose sides: Is the object of genealogical analysis – namely, our moral prejudices – a purely psychological phenomenon or a historical–political one? Is the aim of genealogical analysis to subvert norms or vindicate our habitual forms of evaluating? Is the engine that drives this reevaluation rhetorical provocation or patient, argumentative unveiling? What emerges from this analysis is a much richer theoretical trail that seeks to retain as many of these elements as possible: Nietzsche’s genealogical investigations draw upon as they bring to light our subjugated histories and the psychic structures that they produce. Under genealogical analysis, our systems of evaluation are shown for what they are: psychological and historical–political phenomena, at once embedded in social systems of evaluation and embodied in our longings and desires. The well-trodden trail of a successful genealogical analysis is liberatory: It shows us how much our values have cost us and how our values orient us as they protect us. These aims are achieved through powerful, provocative rhetoric and suggestive, unwearied argumentation. We must be cautious, however, with the analogy of the pathway, as it might lure us into thinking that self-understanding is found waiting patiently for us at some final destination. Nietzsche’s historical methods and account of moral psychology show us that the longing for such an end point is the product of a system of evaluation that needs the certainty of a conclusive, definitive sense of self. Nietzsche’s genealogical accounts aim to disrupt that idealization – that we need a final, ahistorical account of ourselves – and reinsert that longing as an already politicized construct. Genealogy as a mode of inquiry seeks to tirelessly reacquaint us with ourselves and, for that reason, resists, for as long as possible, those definitive closures.

I have been suggesting that genealogical inquiries seek to postpone closures in all manner of ways – they seek to broaden our affective range, increasing not just our depth but our breadth of feeling; they aim to help us hold on to both the beauty and the ugliness of our histories; they aim to keep open the questions of whether our sense of efficacy needs to come at the high cost of self-contempt … But, please permit me now to make a single closure. When considering genealogy as a mode of inquiry, there is a debate concerning which evaluative perspective Nietzsche adopts to bring into view and critiqueFootnote ¹¹ our evaluative frameworks. Whereas some moor Nietzsche’s critique to a transcendent evaluative perspective, either a squarely scientific, context-transcendent point of view or a necessarily truth-seeking vantage point, I show that it is harbored within the systems of evaluation that he takes as his object of inquiry – notably, within the frameworks that form our moral prejudices.Footnote ¹² This means that Nietzsche’s analysis is not set adrift or otherwise free-floating but is necessarily harbored within the very system that he is seeking to identify and understand thoroughly through its historical origins and sociopolitical manifestations. Securing values and affects thus encourages us to explore the systems to which we adhere and the hierarchies of value and feeling established by and through relational and interpersonal contexts and sociopolitical and historical conditions. This goes some way toward establishing the view that Nietzsche’s genealogical investigations are immanent in kind: They concern the actual evaluative frameworks that we use to make sense of ourselves. As this closes off one interpretive pathway, it also goes some way toward opening another: As they attend to our pattens of value and our habits of being, Nietzsche’s genealogical inquiries are neither neutral nor disinterested.

The deeply personal context in which genealogical analysis takes place has encouraged many theorists to marshal this form of inquiry to better understand our most urgent social and political issues.Footnote ¹³ In their book Abolition. Feminism. Now., Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie proceed genealogically, seeking to offer an account of the origins of our current social-political movements for abolition and Black lives. They write:

Genealogical investigations seek to unearth long-buried sociopolitical lineages, trace their unique lines of descent, and breathe new life into our practices, which in this case aim to mobilize feminist abolitionism. As the concealment of these lineages and their “erasure weakens our ability to struggle, collectively, for the long haul,” genealogical unearthing carries forth a distinctive promise: to reorient our practice.Footnote ¹⁵ These genealogists ask us to notice that certain modes of life were encouraged to root and grow as others were left to atrophy. They ask us to notice, further yet, that such “organized disappearance persists.”Footnote ¹⁶ To these insights we can add a Nietzschean one: These erasures are deeply rooted in morality – in certain claims about worth and worthlessness, about which forms of life are valuable and which are without value or are even insignificant, and about which modes of living are worth preserving and which ought to be done away with. “Wherever we encounter a morality,” Nietzsche notices, “we also encounter valuations and an order of rank of human impulses and actions” (GS 116). To contend with these organized disappearances is to contend with normative significance, with morality itself.Footnote ¹⁷

This, of course, is where Amia Srinivasan will come to identify the latent hope at the core of genealogical investigations: Because our representational worlds can be made, she notices, so too can they be re-made.Footnote ¹⁸ These sociopolitical and historical insights matter. What they demonstrate to us is that our current evaluative horizons were once fashioned, which implies that they can be re-fashioned. But there is more. Describing the world as it is – as one constructed by, to make use of one of Srinivasan’s case studies, male power – is to re-describe the world. What counts as normatively significant is the product of relations of power, with certain forms of life set as the standard. “Male power,” writes Srinivasan, “not only constitutes reality, but moreover makes itself the standard of reality: to see things objectively is to see things as men see them. Thus to genealogize the world as a product of male power is already to worldmake.”Footnote ¹⁹ As we make use of our genealogical investigations, we must remain remarkably sensitive, as Srinivasan is, to the vital struggle between forms of life and the different affective and cognitive configurations that they perpetuate. We must ask: What ways of being does this mode of objectivity screen out or subdue? What forms of life does it propel us toward? These questions are at once discursive and disruptive. To see the world as made in an image is to reimagine normative possibility.

To my mind, there is much to commend in these accounts. They place genealogical investigations into the normative structures of our current forms of life on the scene of sociopolitical contexts and contests. They suggest, further still, however implicitly, that any genealogist worth their salt must be well disposed toward open-mindedness and cultivate modesty: It matters that the genealogist acknowledge where it is they begin their account, that they could have begun it elsewhere, and that genealogical investigations will always call forth their own renewal.Footnote ²⁰ When reading these impressive accounts, then, I would urge us to keep hold of another of Nietzsche’s key insights: We stand as strangers in front of ourselves not for sport but out of necessity (GM P 1). The genealogist must carry forth that modesty, even and especially before themselves. The genealogist must attend to the land within, to the ways in which value systems function pre-reflectively and the ways in which territory is often fiercely protected. This implies that our rational faculties or our historical insights can function to ward off deeper philosophical or psychological reflections.

Knowledge of political lineages, then, can keep at bay the genealogist’s unbearable affective responses – their helplessness, powerlessness, and vulnerability. By protecting against overwhelmingly strong affect, rationality and insight can further estrange the genealogist from themselves or from their unbearable sociopolitical lineages. As these forms of psychological protection distance the genealogist from their affective life, they can also forestall or close off further avenues of inquiry. When the fear of being overcome by grief becomes too great or when uncertainty becomes overwhelming, the genealogist may close off their inquiry in any manner of ways: through rationalizations or with “demand[s] for certainty” (GS 347). The problem that Nietzsche, as genealogist, uniquely identifies, then, is not simply that there is much – political lineages and modes of power – that remains unseen, though that, of course, is true. The problem that Nietzsche focuses on is one of perspectival captivity: We are locked into evaluative systems that shape us – that determine what we can work through and what we cannot – yet remain out of view. At stake, first, for any genealogist, then, is how we bring these systems into view, without mobilizing an automatic protective reaction. It is to this task that I now turn.