Genealogy

The philosophical concept of genealogy, introduced as a term of art by Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), has come to be associated with two related but distinct practices of philosophical reflection. The first—of which Nietzsche's text is the primary exemplar—is critically directed to undermining some aspects or elements of our current evaluative orientation or perspective. The second—which is taken to be exemplified by David Hume's account of the origin of justice in Book III of his A Treatise of Human Nature (1740)—is directed to the vindication of some aspect or elements of our current evaluative orientation or perspective. More recently, the critical and vindicatory modes of genealogy have been revived, most notably by Michel Foucault and by Bernard Williams, respectively. What links the two practices is that they each seek to provide naturalistic histories or quasi-historical stories concerning the emergence of an evaluative orientation (say, justice or morality) that are designed to affect our confidence in the value and authority of the object of genealogical enquiry. Genealogy can be located as one kind of approach to the practice of engaging in philosophical reflection through historical reflection; examples of other approaches would include works ranging from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment to Alastair MacIntyre's After Virtue and Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self.

But on what grounds can (quasi-)historical stories about the formation and development of our norms, values, ethical beliefs, and so on that compose our evaluative orientation play any role with respect to our reasonable judgments concerning the value and authority of that perspective? A condition of the motivation of genealogical reflection is an acknowledgment that the history of how we come to have a given perspective that we now exhibit is not in and of itself vindicatory. In contrast to the Providential views of history targeted by Hume and the teleological views targeted by Nietzsche and Foucault, the genealogist starts from a standpoint in which the historical triumph of a given perspective cannot by itself be taken to underwrite any claim to normative legitimacy.

In the case of vindicatory genealogy, the central example is Hume's genealogy of justice. Hume's strategy is to provide a fictional history that demonstrates how people with certain relatively simple psychological motivations of the kind that we recognize as typical, given a plausible and probable set of circumstances, come to develop a virtue—and hence reasons for action—that they did not previously have. Notably, Hume's account of the [Page 550]emergence of the artificial virtue of justice is one in which a shift from one outlook to another is explained in functional terms such that the later perspective makes sense of itself and of the earlier orientation and of the transition from the one to the other, in such terms that holders of both outlooks have reasons to recognize the transition as an improvement. A more recent example of vindicatory genealogy that attempts to extend the approach is Bernard Williams's Truth and Truthfulness.

Perhaps the earliest example of a critical genealogy is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse of Inequality, which similarly starts from a simplified psychology to provide a functional account of how we reach a more complex psychological condition that holders of the early outlook would not be able to endorse and that holders of the present outlook must find disturbing. This approach is further developed by Nietzsche's Genealogy, in which he attempts to show how the different elements composing morality can be accounted for best in terms that are incompatible with the requirements of the outlook of morality.

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