Introduction

It is a commonplace of contemporary Nietzsche scholarship to note that Nietzsche's turn to genealogy is situated within the broader context of his project of a re-evaluation of values (see e.g. Ridley 1998a; Geuss 1999a; May 1999; Leiter 2002). But what specifically motivates Nietzsche's development of genealogy? Given the continuing debates over the character of genealogy, debates that range over what genealogy is intended to do, for whom and how it is intended to achieve its work, one might suppose that Nietzsche's reasons for developing this mode of enquiry would be subject to some scrutiny; after all, if we can get clear about Nietzsche's reasons for turning to genealogy, we will be well placed to understand what this mode of enquiry is intended to accomplish. Yet what remains largely absent from contemporary Nietzsche scholarship is any attention to the claims of a developmental approach that, in elucidating Nietzsche's reasons for turning to genealogy, provides an interpretative basis for approaching On the Genealogy of Morality itself. Part I of this study aims to supply this lack by reconstructing the developmental context of the Genealogy.

We should note that a short response to this question concerning his turn to genealogy is provided by Nietzsche himself in the preface to On the Genealogy of Morality, in which this development is linked to his increasingly critical stance towards his “great teacher” Schopenhauer2 and his one-time friend Rée.