Nietzsche, Hume, and the Genealogical Method

Abstract

Genealogy is for Nietzsche a way of doing philosophy that shows not only the inadequacy of traditional metaphysics or “first philosophy,” but also the prospects for nonmetaphysical philosophy. In the preface to the Genealogy of Morals (§4) he says his own adaptation of the method of genealogy was motivated by his reaction to Paul Ree’s Origin of the Moral Sensations. This “upside-down and perverse species of genealogical hypothesis, the genuinely English type” is criticized for being too unhistorical, haphazard, or random. What is perverse is Ree’s social-Darwinian hypothesis that the most recent product of human evolution is, because of the survival of the fittest, also the highest product of human evolution. Nietzsche parodies Ree cruelly in laughing at the idea that the fittest and highest human type is the modern “moral milksop” (Moral-Zartling, GM Preface 7) who thinks of morality as “selflessness, self-sacrifice, or sympathy and pity” (GS 345). Equally perverse and “English” is Ree’s own “refined indolence,” his inability to take the problems of morality seriously.