Nietzsche, Genealogy, History by Foucault

These are my highlights of Foucault's Nietzsche, Genealogy, History by Foucault.

Rough Sketch the Original is found here: http://www.ucdenver.edu/academics/colleges/CLAS/Departments/philosophy/Students/Documents/%27Nietzsche%2c%20Genealogy%2c%20History%27%20by%20Michel%20Foucault.pdf

it i s obvious that Paul Ree 1 was wrong to follow the English tendency in describing the history of morality in terms of a linear development-in reducing its entire history and genesis to an exclusive concern for utility.

words had kept their meaning, that desires still pointed in a single direction, and that ideas retained their logic; and he ignored the fact that the world of speech and desires has known invasions, struggles, plundering, disguises, ploys.

however, genealogy retrieves an indispensable restraint: it must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality; it must seek them in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history-in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts; it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution, but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles . Finally, genealogy must define even those instances when they are absent, the moment when they remained unrealized (Plato, at Syracuse, did not become Mohammed).

Entstehung or Ursprung serves equally well to denote the origin of duty or guilty conscience;4 and in the discussion cif logic and knowledge in The Gay Science, their origin is indiscriminately referred to as Ursprung, Entstehung, or Herkunft .

another: in the first paragraph

of Human, All Too Human the miraculous origin (Wunderursprung) sought by metaphysics is set against the analyses of historical philosophy, which poses questions uber Herkunft und Anfang. Ursprung is also used in an ironic and deceptive manner. In what, for instance, do we find the original basis ( Ursprung) of morality, a foundation sought after since Plato? "In detestable, narrow-minded conclusions . Pudend riga. "

he ques tioned if God must be held responsible for the origin of evil . He now finds this question amusing and properly characterizes it as a search for Ursprung.

Why does Nietzsche challenge the pursuit of the origin ( Ursprung), at least on those occasions when he is truly a genealogist?

First, because it is an attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities; because this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession.

Examining the history of reason, he learns that it was born in an altogether "reasonable" fashion-from chance; 1 1 devotion to truth and the precision of scientific methods arose from the passion of scholars, their reciprocal hatred,their fanatical and unending discussions, and their spirit of competition-the personal conflicts that slowly forged the weapons of reason . 12

What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things . It is disparity . 14

The lofty origin is no more than "a metaphysical extension which arises from the belief that things are most precious and essential at the moment of birth . " We tend to think that this is the moment of their greatest perfection, when they emerged dazzling from the hands of a creator or in the shadowless light of a first morning.

"We wished to awaken the feeling of man's sovereignty by showing his divine birth: this path is now forbidden, since a monkey stands at the entrance ."

Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history . 18 Moreover, the very question of truth, the right it appropriates to refute error and oppose itself to appearance, the manner in which it developed (initially made available to the wise, then withdrawn by men of piety to an unattai nable world where it was given the double role of consolation and imperative, finally rejected as a useless notion, superfluous and contradicted on all sides)-does this not form a history, the history of an error we call truth?

Truth, and its original reign, has had a history within history from which we are barely emerging "in the time of the shortest shadow, " when light no longer seems to flow from the depths of the sky or to arise from the first moments of the day . 19

A genealogy of values, morality, asceticism, and knowledge will never confuse itself with a quest for their "origins, " will never neglect as inaccessible the vicissitudes of history . On the contrary, it will cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning; it will be scrupulously attentive to their petty malice; it will await their emergence, once unmasked, as the face of the other

The analysis of Herkunft often involves a consideration of race or social type . 20 But th􀙱 traits it attempts to identify are not the exclusive generic characteristics of an individual, a sentiment, or an idea, which permit us to qualify them as "Greek" or "English"; rather, it seeks the subtle, singular, and subindividual marks that might possibly intersect in them to form a network that is difficult to unravel. Far from being a category of resemblance, this origin allows the sorting out of different traits: the Germans imagined that they had finally accounted for their complexity by saying they possessed a double soul. (The dawn-nietzsche page 49)

Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present, that it continue s secretly to animate the present, having imposed a predetermined form on all its vicissitudes.

contrary, to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations-or conversely, the complete reversals-the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculation s that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents.

The search for descent is not the erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself.

Fathers have only to mistake effects for causes, believe in the reality of an "afterlife, " or maintain the value of eternal truths, and the bodies of their children will suffer. Cowardice and hypocrisy, for their part, are the simple offshoots of error: not in a Socratic sense, not that evil is the result of a mistake, not because of a turning away from an original truth, but because the body maintains, in life as in death, through its strength or weakness, the sanction of every truth and error, as it sustains, in an inverse manner, the origin-descent.

Why did men invent the contemplative life? Why give a supreme value to this form of existence? Why maintain the absolute truth of those fictions which sustain it? "During barbarous ages . . . if the strength of an individual declined, if he felt himself tired or sick, melancholy or satiated and, as a consequence, without desire or appetite for a short time, he became relatively a better man, that is, less dangerous. His pessimistic ide a s only take form as words or reflections. In this frame of mind , he either became a thinker and prophet or used his imagination to feed his superstitions . " 2

The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dis sociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration . Genealogy, as an analysi s of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history' s destruction of the body.

A s it is wrong to search for descent in an uninterrupted continuity, we should avoid thinking of emergence as the final term of a historical development; the eye was not alway s intende d for contemplation, and punishment has had other purposes tha n setting an example.

: the eye initially responded to the requirements of hunting and warfare; and punishment has been subjected, throughout its history, to a variety of needs-revenge, excluding an aggressor, compensating a victim, creating fear.

It is in this sense that the emergence of a species (animal or human) and its solidification are secured "in an extended battle against conditions which are essentially and constantly unfavorable . " In fact, "the species must realize itself as a species, as something---characterized by the durability, uniformity, and simplicity of its form-which can prevail in the perpetual struggle against outsiders or the uprising of those it oppresses from within . "

In this condition, we find a struggle "of ego isms turned against each other, each bursting forth in a splintering of forces and a general striving for the sun and for the light . " 28 There are also times when force contends against itself, and not only in the intoxication of an abundance, which allows it to divide itself, but at the moment when it weakens.

What Nietzsche calls the Entstehungsherd 31 of the concept of goodness is not specifically the energy of the strong or the reaction of the weak, but precisely this scene where they are displayed superimposed or face-to-face . It is nothing but the space that divides them, the void through which they exchange their threatening gestures and speeches

In a sense, only a single drama is ever staged in this "nonplace, " the endlessly repeated play of dominations . The domination of certain men over others leads to the differentiation of values;32 class domination generates the idea of liberty;33 and the forceful appropriation of things neces sary to survival and the imposition of a duration not intrinsic to them account for the origin of logic . 34

The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to di,Sguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them; controlling this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules.

5: Nietzsche's criticism, beginning with the second of the Untimely Meditations, always questioned the form of history that reintroduces (and always assumes) a suprahistorical perspective: a history whose function is to compose the finally reduced diversity of time into a totality fully closed upon itself

a history that always encourages subjective recognitions and attributes a form of reconciliation to all the

displacements of the past;

Historical meaning becomes a dimension of wirkliche Historie to the extent that it places within a process of development everything considered immortal in man. We believe that feelings are immutable, but every sentiment, particularly the noblest and most disinterested, has a history. We believe in the dull constancy of instinctual life and imagine that it continues to exert its force indiscriminately in the present as it did in the past. But a knowledge of history easily disintegrates this unity, depicts its wavering course, locates its moments of strength and weakness, and defines its oscillating reign

The body is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances.38 "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 understanding other men. The traditional devices for constructing a comprehensive view of history and for retracing the past as a patient and continuous development must be systematically dismantled

we must dismiss those tendencies that encourage the consoling play of recognitions. Knowledge, even under the banner of history, does not depend on "rediscovery," and it emphatically excludes the "rediscovery of ourselves." History becomes "effective" to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being-as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself. "Effective" history deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending. It will uproot its traditional foundations and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.

Chance is not simply the drawing of lots, but raising the stakes in every attempt to master chance through the will to power, and giving rise to the risk of an even greater chance.41 The world we know is not this ultimately simple configuration where events are reduced to accentuate their essential traits, their final meaning, or their initial and final value. On the contrary, it is a profusion of entangled events

The latter is given to a contemplation of distances and heights: the noblest periods, the highest forms, the most abstract ideas, the purest individualities. It accomplishes this by getting as near as possible, placing itself at the foot of its mountain peaks, at the risk of adopting the famous perspective of frogs. Effective history, on the other hand, shortens its vision to those things nearest to it-the body, the nervous system, nutrition, digestion, and energies; it unearths the periods of decadence, and if it chances upon lofty epochs, it is with the suspicion-not vindictive but joyous-of finding a barbarous and shameful confusion

History has a more important task than to be a handmaiden to philosophy, to recount the necessary birth of truth and values; it should become a differential knowledge of energies and failings, heights and degenerations, poisons and antidotes. Its task is to become a curative science.

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

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 .

A characteristic of history is to be without choice : it encourages thorough understanding and excludes. qualitative judgments---a sensitivity to all things without distinction, a comprehensive view excluding differences . Nothing must escape it and, more importantly, nothing must be excluded.

past? Their mistake is to exhibit a total lack of taste, the kind of crudeness that becomes smug in the presence of the loftiest elements and finds satisfaction in reducing them to size. The historian is insensitive to the most disgusting things; or rather, he especially enjoys those things that should be repugnant to him. His apparent serenity follows from his concerted avoidance of the exceptional and his reduction of all things to the lowest common denominator.

Nothing is allowed to stand above him; and underlying his desire for total knowledge is his search for the secrets that belittle everything: "base curiosity. " What i s the source o f history? I t comes from the plebs. To whom is it addressed? To the plebs. And its discourse strongly resembles the demagogue's refrain: "No one is greater than you and anyone who presumes to get the better of you-you who are good-is evil. "

echo: "No past is greater than your present, and, through my meticulous erudition, I will rid you of your infatuations and transform the grandeur of history into pettiness, evil, and misfortune. "

As the demagogue is obliged to invoke truth, laws of essences, and eternal necessity, the historian must invoke objectivity, the accuracy of facts, and the permanence of the past. The demagogue denies the body to secure the sovereignty of a timeless idea, and the historian effaces his proper individuality so that others may enter the stage and reclaim their own speech.

This historical trait should not be founded on a philosophy of history, but dismantled, beginning with the things it produced; it is necessary to master history so as to turn it to genealogical uses, that is, strictly anti-Platonic purposes . Only then will the historical sense free itself from the demands of a suprahistorical history .

The first is parodic, directed against reality, and opposes the theme of history as reminiscence or recognition; the second is dissociative, directed against identity, and opposes history given as continuity or representative of a tradition; the third is sacrificial, directed against truth, and opposes history as knowledge

our "unrealization" through the excessive choice of identities-Frederick of Hohenstaufen, Caesar, Jesus, Dionysus, and possibly Zarathustra

"Perhaps, we can discover a realm where originality is again possible as parodists of history and buffoons of God."

The parody of his last texts serves to emphasize that "monumental history" is itself a parody. Genealogy is history in the form of a concerted carnival.

"it is a sign of superior culture to maintain, in a fully conscious way, certain phases of its evolution which lesser men pass through without thought. The initial result is that we can understand those who resemble us as completely determined systems and as representative of diverse cultures, that is to say, as necessary and capable of modification

The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation.

In appearance, or rather, according to the mask it bears, historical consciousness is neutral, devoid of passions, and committed solely to truth. But if it examines itself and if, more generally, it interrogates the various forms of scientific consciousness in its history, it finds that all these forms and transformations are aspects of the will to knowledge: instinct, passion, the inquisitor's devotion, cruel subtlety, and malice.

The historical analysis of this rancorous will to knowledge53 reveals that all knowledge rests upon injustice (that there is no right, not even in the act of knowing, to truth or a foundation for truth) and that the instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous, opposed to the happiness of mankind).

Where religions once demanded the sacrifice of bodies, knowledge now calls for experimentation on ourselves, 54 calls us to the sacrifice of the subject of knowledge

We should now replace the two great problems of nineteenth-century philosophy, passed on by Fichte and Hegel (the reciprocal basis of truth and liberty and the possibility of absolute knowledge), with the theme that "to perish through absolute knowledge may well form a part of the basis of being." 56