The prelude to the philosophy of the future: The art of reading and the genealogical method in Nietzsche

Abstract

As Nietzsche worked it out in Zur Genealogie der Morals (1887), genealogy is more than a critical and parodic strategy as many now understand it; for genealogy is also a ‘prelude to a philosophy of the future’ and an introduction to Also Sprach Zarathustru (Pts I-III, 1883-4).’ The genealogical method itself gave Nietzsche the opportunity of announcing in his prose writings certain central ideas that he had already expressed poetically inzarathustra. This is particularly true of the concept of the Will to Power, the philosophic status of which can only be ascertained through an understanding of the genealogical method. It is, then, both a destructive and critical method, directed to the past as well as the present, and it is a means of projecting and empowering a specific future. As such, genealogy becomes the method, not simply of reversing values, but of transvaluating them. Yet in both the ways in which the genealogical method works in these texts and the way in which it points to Nietzsche’s other writings, this method becomes more puzzling the more it is understood.2 Nietzsche opens the Genealogie with a discussion of interpretative methods. In the preface, he declares his intentions in writing this work. It is at once an attack upon the ‘English genealogists’ and ‘a polemic’ (eine Streitschrzj?) against Christian values; but it is also intended to be an introduction to a general theory of textual exegesis, to ‘reading as an art’ (das Lesen als Kunst). The preface introduces this theme, not perhaps without irony, as an attempt at re-educating his friend, Professor Paul Rte. RCe’s positivistic, utilitarian and Darwinian approach to the history of morals, recently published under the title of Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen (1877), is, as is well known, the target of Nietzsche’s most vicious attack in the first essay of the Genealogie.3 In the preface Nietzsche reports that ‘I have never read anything which I would have said to myself, “No”, proposition by proposition, conclusion by conclusion, to the extent that I did to this book’.4 In addition to this criticism, Nietzsche is even more annoyed by Rite’s methods of research and analysis. The Genealogie, Nietzsche announces, is intended to lead Rte ‘to adopt a better method for reaching answers.. . My desire at any rate, was to point out to so sharp and disinterested an eye as his a better direction in which to look, in the direction of an actual history of morality, (wirkliche Historie) and to warn him in time against gazing haphazardly in the blue after the English fashion’ (Nietzsche’s italics).5 Beyond the fact that Nietzsche is ironic in this preface and that his opening