This chapter examines the debate among neo-Kantian thinkers about the origin, function, and reach of concepts. Neo-Kantianism inherits from Kant a series of dualisms, and that between concept and intuition attracted especially intense critical scrutiny. Cohen, Rickert and Cassirer can be understood as proposing a ‘functionalization’ of cognitive concepts that avoids a sharp and static distinction between ‘concept’ and ‘intuition’, and defending Kant’s transcendental project against naturalization and psychologization. The temporalization of concepts, in their constitutive role for experience, is thereby accentuated in different ways. This functionalization of concepts must, however, be situated against the emergence of the notion of value and the question raised by Nietzsche of the value of concepts, or knowledge, for life. The relation between concepts and values points to their historical and cultural embeddedness with reference to different worldviews, and hence reveals the relation between concepts, the unity of a world, and forms of life.

Emerson describes a range of experiences that constitute friendship: titanic battles between beautiful enemies; conversational brilliance and expansion; a joyful solitude, as if someone has departed rather than arrived; a generalized benevolence toward people in the street to whom one does not speak; the warm sympathies and household joy one shares with a familiar friend; the disappointment of a friend outgrown. His account shows an intense focus on moral perfection – on our unattained but attainable self, alone and with others – but an equally intense awareness of what he calls in “Experience” “the plaint of tragedy” that sounds throughout our lives “in regard to persons, to friendship and love.” The chapter’s coda charts the opposition in “Love” between love as the experience of being “swept away” and a skeptical vision of marriage as a prison, from which sex, person, and partiality have vanished.

This chapter begins with Ben Golder’s reflection on the meaning and stakes of genealogical histories that have prevailed in some quarters of the historiography of the twentieth century. Golder observes that the field of inquiry has generally moved on from “vindicatory” accounts of human rights politics to ones that demystify and problematize the evolution of those politics in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But Golder insists that there is no one way of problematizing dominant stories, and genealogy opens up a project of locating other perspectives from around the world and other voices in the making of human rights norms and politics.

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: that our experience is ordered by evaluative templates; how one framework came to subdue other alternatives; why morality enjoyed its factual success; and why it still holds a very tight grip on us. 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 beyond 1887 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.

This chapter demonstrates that Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis aims to bring into view that which insists on opacity – our moral prejudices – through the task of description. I pick up this descriptive work myself by outlining “the recurring forms” of evaluative frameworks (BGE 186). As this descriptive work unearths and brings to the surface what was buried – “the so well hidden land of morality” (GM P 7) – it also allows us to finally detail the shape of our moral prejudices. What we finally see is an interlocking system of value-commitments and value-feelings that shape our expectations of how the world works. I conclude by drawing out the implications for Nietzsche’s genealogical investigations. First, we notice that the main target of Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis are moral prejudices – complex systems of evaluation – rather than particular evaluative concepts or discrete moral judgments. Second, it shows that descriptive work is essential to bring into view that our experiences and expectations of how the world works are ordered and structured by systems of evaluation. Only then can we properly take up those secondary questions of their descent.

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) – 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.

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 more self-aware. For this reason, as I show in this Introduction, genealogical investigations hold out a distinctive promise: to bring into 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). I then set out the main claims of the book: 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, and to show us how we might come to feel differently about ourselves, even less prone to shame. How is this to be achieved? This book provides an answer to that question.

Having established that evaluative systems – such as Judeo-Christian morality, currently the predominant value system in the West – order our lives, in this chapter I examine their lineage. Given that our value systems are the products of dynamic struggles for superiority, I argue that their descent is traceable along historical and sociopolitical lines. Attending to these rather messy agonal processes, the descent of our value systems is accounted for without the need to appeal, as some have, to context-transcendent human types, or certain configurations of the drives. Finally, I close with some considerations on how conceptualizing the descent in this way provides further contours to our understanding of the method of genealogical investigation.

Chapter 7 draws on 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 a way of combating that precarity, he adopts, for a time at least, thoroughly moralized responses: He warded off precarity through decadence in the forms of either world-denial (pessimism) or ascetic self-renunciation. Finally, he confirms that refracting these automatic responses through his long-drawn-out illnesses opened up, for him, a new line of sight.

The conclusion reviews Schopenhauer’s conception of politics as the management of human strife. For Schopenhauer, politics was both indispensable and insufficient: rational political coordination can prevent society from descending into a chaos of mutual aggression, but because rationality itself is limited and metaphysically subordinate, it cannot redeem a fundamentally broken world. Schopenhauer’s attitudes – a sincere sensitivity to human and animal suffering, an uncompromising commitment to frank philosophizing, but also a fearful antidemocratic and anti-emancipatory view of society – place him outside the major ideologies of the modern age, such as liberalism, libertarianism, progressivism, and conservatism.

Proposition 67 of Spinoza’s hyper-rationalistic Ethics proudly proclaims that: “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death.” Well, in this book I have thought a great deal about existential death, and a good bit about the “noth-ing of the nothing” that such death discloses. Still, I have probably thought of noth-ing less than of death, so Spinoza might have to count me “free” on a technicality. There are, at any rate, worse things than being freed on a technicality. One can be convicted on a technicality, for example, or even convicted by technicality. Indeed, the later Heidegger suggests that we have all been convicted by technicality, technicity, or technologicity, that is, by “the essence of technology.” According to his view of our late modern age of technological enframing, we have all been thrown by Western history into the prison city-state (or polis) of nihilistic technologicity.

Chapter 4 focuses on the sensuous quintet integral to Guru Nanak’s metaphysical thought and praxis. Materially made up of transcendent fibers, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and seeing have the cognitive capacity to take audiences off to limitless territories, or inversely, get them tangled up in messy affairs. They belong to everybody irrespective of race, gender, sexuality, class, politics, or religion, and though they are different modalities, they are a part of the same unitary living body and work together intersensorially and synaesthetically. For Guru Nanak there is no stereotypical hierarchy between “lower” and “higher” senses; the five are equally saturated with ontological, ethical, psychological, and soteriological import and flourish in concert. However, in order to understand their critical role and function, the somatic agents are analyzed separately. Hopefully the positive, progressive Nanakian outlook can cure some of the chronic somatophobic abnormalities prevailing across cultures.

Nietzsche wrote in 1870 while preparing The Birth of Tragedy (1872), “Science, art, and philosophy are now growing into one another so much in me that I shall in any case give birth to a centaur one day.” The project of synthesizing philosophy, science, and art Nietzsche adumbrates here actually gets realized in The Birth of Tragedy, explaining the work’s distinctive character. It is a project whose origins lay with Friedrich Schlegel, the leading German Romantic philosopher, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Schlegel had warded off the obvious objection to incorporating art into philosophy/science that this would falsify the latter by championing a radical general skepticism about the veracity of cognition. Nietzsche takes over this aspect of Schlegel’s project as well. Moreover, this whole project of synthesizing philosophy, science, and art in light of a radical general skepticism survives after The Birth of Tragedy to reappear in different, more refined permutations throughout Nietzsche’s later works, constituting an indispensable key both to their character – in particular, their metaphysical-epistemological framework – and to their development. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the viability of the project, especially concerning the question of whether or not the radical general skepticism on which it rests is coherent.

This chapter explores images of plant life in philosophy and literature with particular focus on the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. It pursues the question of what we can learn about the nature of the human being and its place in the world from plants and the way they are rooted in earth. Over the past half-century, many voices identify our disconnection from the earth with the centrality of technological progress, capitalist production, industrialization, and globalization that are essential to our modern self-understanding and way of life. What was supposed to be the root of human distinction has ended up uprooting us. Is this because we have a distorted view of what it means to be rooted in the first place, and our dependency on the rootedness of plant life? This chapter interrogates the metaphor of the root in Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous novel Nausea. Whereas Sartre considers the earth as an inert background in relation to human purposes: always there, meaningless, the earth is the static backdrop of our human drama, Nietzsche’s vegetal imaginary puts forward an idea of human life as deeply embedded in both earthly and planetary life.