Is There a Genetic Fallacy in Nietzsche’s
Genealogy of Morals?*

by Paul S. Loeb

Endnotes

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, in Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe [=KSA], ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), Vol. 5; On The Genealogy of Morals [=GM] tr. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale in Basic Writings of Nietzsche [=BWN], ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968). With minor alterations, I have followed the translations cited in these notes.


2. Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 107.


3. Ibid., p. 110.


4. Besides Nehamas’ commentary, I find this strategy in Frithjof Bergmann, “Nietzsche’s Critique of Morality,” Reading Nietzsche [=RN], eds. Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); George Morgan, What Nietzsche Means (New York: Harper and Row, 1965); and Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983). I also find this approach represented in the following essays, all collected in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality [=NGM], ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994): Daniel W. Conway, “Genealogy and Critical Method”; David Couzens Hoy, “Nietzsche, Hume and the Genealogical Method”; and Robert C. Solomon, “One Hundred Years of Ressentiment: Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals.”


5. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 76100; cited by Nehamas, pp. 245, n. 1. However, Foucault does not emphasize Nietzsche’s aristocratically-evaluative employment of the notion, and I argue below that this employment in fact contradicts Foucault’s interpretation.


6. For Nietzsche’s argument regarding the plebeian descent of altruistic values, see GM I:9,10, 13, 14, 16, and GM II:22. For his characterization of aristocratic disvalue, see GM I:10. See also Section 260, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, KSA 5; Beyond Good and Evil [=BGE], tr. Walter Kaufmann in BWN.


7. Nor did Nietzsche inherit this use from Paul Rée, who wrote instead of his “naturwissenschaftliche Methode des Vergleichs und der genetischen Entwickelung,” in Die Enstehung des Gewissens (Berlin: Carl Duncker, 1885), pp. 6, 32.


8. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe [=KSB], ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1986), Vol. 8, pp. 108-113, 127; Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Christopher Middleton (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1969), pp. 269-70. Cf. also Curt Paul Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche: Biographie (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1978), Vol. 2, p. 538.


9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce homo [=EH], disputed Section in KSA 14, pp. 472-73; tr. Walter Kaufmann in BWN. For an earlier version of this account, see his April 10, 1888 letter to Georg Brandes (KSB 8, p. 288; Middleton, p. 293).


10. For Nietzsche’s advocacy, see his well-known December 2, 1887 approval of Georg Brandes’ description of his way of thinking as “aristocratic radicalism” (KSB 8, pp. 206, 213, 243; Middleton, p. 279). Commentators who have recently emphasized this advocacy have not, however, noted its extension to Nietzsche’s second-order methodology. Cf. Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), and Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).


11. Nehamas, p. 206. In the discussion that follows, Nehamas qualifies this conclusion while at the same time addressing the objection that, because “the nobles belong to an era that has passed once and for all” (p. 217), Nietzsche cannot be read as suggesting our return to the ancient nobles: “Though Nietzsche may not want us to go back to the specific instance of the type the nobles manifest, he may still want us to go back to the type itself” (p. 254, n. 8).


12. Nehamas also fails to link his awareness of Nietzsche’s aristocratic values to his claim that Nietzsche’s literal usage of the terms “genealogy” and “descent” is meant to emphasize the background values that essentially condition “the specific path traced through what are actually indefinitely complex family interconnections” (p. 101). See Note 23 below.


13. This effort was spearheaded by Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, tr. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), which was in turn influenced by Hermann Lotze, Gottlob Frege’s criticism, and the contemporaneous debate regarding “historicism”. Cf. Hans D. Sluga, Gottlob Frege (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 39-41, 53-56. In my dissertation, “The Anglo-American Revision of Kant’s Epistemology” (University of California at Berkeley, 1991), I trace the charge of psychologism back further to John Stuart Mill’s objections to William Whewell’s version of Kant’s epistemology. Cf. also John Skorupski, John Stuart Mill (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 164-66.


14. Morris R. Cohen, “History Versus Value,” Journal of Philosophy 11 (December, 1914): 710, n. 36; reprinted in Cohen, Reason and Nature (Glencoe: Free Press, 1931), p. 379. Cf. also Morris R. Cohen and Ernest Nagel, An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934), pp. 388-90.


15. Maurice Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge: an Answer to Relativism (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 19-20, 76-78; cf. also his essay, “Historicism,” in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: MacMillan, 1967). Influenced by Cohen, Mandelbaum uses the phrase “genetic fallacy” to identify the inference from origin to validity made by Karl Mannheim in Ideology and Utopia, tr. L. Wirth and E. Shils (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1936), pp. 24-33, 266-273, 292-94. Although Mannheim himself does not use the (German version of the) phrase, he is sensitive to this potential charge because it has already been raised in 1929 by Max Scheler, under the label “sociologism,” as an extension of Husserl’s attack on “psychologism” (Mandelbaum, pp. 149-150). I am grateful to William Beardsley for drawing my attention to these sources.


16. Mannheim, pp. 25, 310. Max Scheler, “Ressentiment,” in Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert C. Solomon (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), pp. 243-57.


17. Compare this account with Margaret Crouch, “A Limited Defense of the Genetic Fallacy,” Metaphilosophy 24 (July 1993): 227-240.


18. Schacht is also motivated by the threat of the “genetic fallacy” to stress the ways in which Nietzsche’s “genealogical subversions” fall short of “logically” rigorous refutations (pp. 124-130, 139, 351-54).


19. See GM I: 7-9, 13-15.


20. Götzen-Dämmerung, KSA 6, II; [=TI], tr. Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, NY: Viking, 1982).


21. Although he does not use the phrase “genetic fallacy,” Morgan offers this rationale as early as 1941 in the first edition of his commentary, p. 144. Both Bergmann (RN, p. 31) and Conway (NGM, p. 328) provide this account of why the genetic fallacy is a fallacy, but Conway does not attribute it to Nietzsche. Yirmiyahu Yovel, in “Nietzsche, the Jews and Ressentiment” (NGM, pp. 214-36), argues more specifically that Nietzsche’s genealogical hypotheses are “psycho cultural-existential” and therefore do not concern literal biological and historical heredity. From this he infers Nietzsche’s view that genealogical traits manifested in early life can be overcome through the evolution and adaptation of new depth-preferences and positions. Against this interpretation, see the remarks from Beyond Good and Evil below, as well as Nietzsche’s announcement that “every table of goods, every `thou shalt’ known to history or ethnology, requires first of all a physiological elucidation and interpretation, rather than a psychological one” (GM I:17n).


22. Nehamas, pp. 112-113. Morgan cites the same passages, p. 144, n. 16. Solomon may also have this discussion of punishment in mind when he writes that “Nietzsche himself argues against the genetic fallacy in the Genealogy” (NGM, p. 124, n. 4).


23. In highlighting the aristocratic background values that condition Nietzsche’s use of the terms “genealogy” and “descent,” these remarks also serve to refute Nehamas’ Wittgensteinian explication of this use (pp. 100-105). Indeed, Nietzsche would have perhaps regarded this kind of explication as itself a legacy of the modern plebeian deception about descent.


24. Following Kaufmann, this remark is typically cited as indisputable evidence of Nietzsche’s Lamarckian belief in the heritability of acquired traits (cf. Schacht, p. 335). But this interpretation assumes precisely what Nietzsche is concerned to deny in this remark—that the parents and ancestors acquired their heritable qualities and preferences. Properly understood, therefore, Nietzsche’s remark demonstrates his disputable aristocratic innatism, but not a disputable Lamarckism.


25. Although also cited as evidence of Nietzsche’s Lamarckism, this remark suggests rather his view that such a doctrine—in claiming the heritability of educationally and culturally acquired traits—is itself part of the modern art of deceiving about plebeian descent. This suggestion is supported by Nietzsche’s inclusion of Lamarckism among the misguided modern English plebeian views espoused by Darwin and his followers. See Note 46 below, and Nietzsche’s three unpublished anti-Darwin notes in Nachgelassene Fragmente: 1885-1887, KSA 12, 7[25] and KSA 13, 14[123], 14[133] ; The Will to Power [=WP], tr. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Press, 1968), 647, 684-85. Cf. also Werner Stegmaier, “Darwin, Darwinismus, Nietzsche, zum Problem der Evolution,” Nietzsche-Studien 16 (1987): pp. 274-75.


26. Cf. also GM I:13 for Nietzsche’s deterministic view of noble strength and plebeian weakness. On this view, it is also part of the plebeian deception that nobility is “free” to lose its hereditary value, and thus “accountable” for it as well.


27. See also Bergmann, RN, p. 31; Foucault, p. 83; Morgan, p. 144.

“[T]he cause of the genesis of a thing and its eventual utility, its factual application and arrangement in a system of purposes, lie toto coelo outside each other” (GM II:12). As his argument in the next clause indicates, Nietzsche’s term, “eventual” [schliessliche], is not meant to contrast a thing’s originating and current utility, but rather to suggest the succession of utilities imposed upon a thing following its origin. Thus, whereas Nehamas and others interpret Nietzsche to mean that a thing’s current utility does not imply the same originating utility, he in fact means that it does not imply any originating utility.

28. “[E]twas Vorhandenes, irgendwie Zu-Stande-Gekommenes immer wieder ... zu einem neuen Nutzen umgebildet und umgerichtet wird” (GM II:12). Nietzsche’s aristocratic innatism is itself supported by this methodological argument: a human being, or morality, must have already come into being with certain innate traits in order to acquire any further traits. The Lamarckian doctrine therefore illegitimately projects the acquired traits of the parents and ancestors back into their heritable descent.


29. Applying his methodological schema to the subject punishment, Nietzsche identifies the “procedure” as the thing that “has long existed [längst vorhandene]” before being given its latest employment and is therefore “enduring” relative to its fluid purposes. It follows that not only the thing, but the origin of the thing—its “invention”— is “something older, earlier” than the thing’s employment (GM II:13). I believe this warning contradicts Solomon’s suggestion (NGM, pp.


30. 95-98) as to why Nietzsche did not in fact make the kind of argument that he agrees would be an instance of the genetic fallacy. Following Scheler, Solomon suggests that Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals “is really more psychology than history” (but see Note 21 above); and that therefore Nietzsche’s genealogical hypothesis about ressentiment is meant to exhibit, not the origin of morality, but rather its intentional structure or content.


31. As incorporated into Nietzsche’s moral genealogy, this principle may be regarded as a second-order translation of the disdain for utility he sees built into the aristocratic mode of valuation: “... what had they [the nobles] to do with utility! The viewpoint of utility is as foreign and inappropriate as it could possibly be in the face of such a burning eruption of the highest rank-ordering, rank-defining value judgments” (GM I:2).


32. Nehamas’ other citation, from Section 44 of Daybreak (Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenröte, KSA 3; tr. R. J. Hollingdale [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982]), is neither specific enough nor late enough to count as evidence of Nietzsche’s views regarding the genetic fallacy in the Genealogy. Also cited by Morgan, p. 144, n. 16.


33. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, in KSA 3; [=GS], tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974). Cited by Hoy, NGM, p. 267, n. 4; Nehamas, p. 246, n. 5. According to Hoy, however, Nietzsche does not seem to be aware of the problem of the genetic fallacy in the Genealogy because he there intends genealogy “to come up with a definite valuation of the traditional moral virtues and principles” (NGM, p. 252).


34. Schacht, p. 424; also cited by Morgan, p. 144, n. 16.


35. Schacht, p. 352. Cf. also his recent “Of Morals and Menschen,” where he writes of “Nietzsche’s repeated insistence that the value of something is by no means settled by a knowledge of how it originated”; and that instead it is “above all by their fruits— and not merely by their roots” that Nietzsche would have us know morals (NGM, pp. 428-432).


36. KSA 12, 2[189]; WP 254. Cited by Schacht, pp. 352-54; also cited to this end by Morgan, p. 144, n. 16.


37. Schacht, pp. 351-52, 421; cf. also pp. 124-30, 349-54, 423-26. In a similar vein, Conway argues that Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals does not commit the genetic fallacy once we regard it as merely “enabling” an “extra-genealogical” critical method that he identifies as “immanent symptomatology” (NGM, pp. 328-331).


38. Schacht, pp. 421, 425.


39. Cf. also KSA 12, 2[163], 2[203].


40. Cf. Nietzsche’s contemporaneous Nachlass observation that “utilitarianism (socialism, democratism) criticizes the descent of moral valuations, but has faith in them” (KSA 12, 2[165]).


41. Although Nietzsche began writing the Fifth book of Gay Science in October 1886, he did not return his last corrections, and declare his work on it at an end, until June 1, 1887—shortly before he began writing the Genealogy on July 10, 1887. See Nietzsche’s letters to H. Köselitz (a.k.a. Peter Gast) on February 13 and August 8, 1887; and to E.W. Fritzsch on June 1, 1887 (KSB 8, pp. 23, 81, 123).


42. Paul Rée offered this genealogical hypothesis in Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen (Chemnitz: Ernst Schmeitzner, 1877), pp. 17-20, 61-63. But it was Nietzsche himself, in Human, All Too Human, who emphasized the “erroneous” aspect of this final genealogical stage: “Soon, however, one forgets the descent of these designations and fancies that the quality `good’ or `evil’ is inherent in the actions themselves, irrespective of their consequences: with the same error as that by which language designates the stone itself as hard, the tree itself as green—that is to say, by taking for cause that which is effect.” (Menschliches, Allzumensliches, KSA 2, 39; tr. R. J. Hollingdale [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986]). Nietzsche concludes the passage with the claim: “One has thereby attained to the knowledge that the history of moral sensations is the history of an error, the error of accountability: which rests on the error of freedom of will.” Cf. Brendan Donnellan, “Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Rée: Cooperation and Conflict,” Journal of the History of Ideas 43 (Oct. 1982): 605-06, who overlooks however the crucial ommission of any reference to “unegoistic” actions in Nietzsche’s version of the genealogical hypothesis.
    
43. Here, then, Nietzsche extends his aristocratic claim of plebeian (self-)deception about questions of literal human-descent to questions of metaphorical value-descent. For his argument that aristocratic valuation incorporates a contrast between the truthful noble character and the lying common man, see BGE 260, GM I:5, TI II:5. For his own second-order aristocratic contrast between the fair and just eye of the noble mode of valuation, on the one hand, and the false and prejudiced eye of the plebeian mode of valuation, on the other, see GM I:10, 11 and GM II:11.


44. In the Genealogy Nietzsche mentions the English psychologists’ unconscious hostility towards Christianity, thus suggesting the feeling of diminished value that their insight into some partie honteuse is meant to bring with it (GM I:1).


45. This is supported by the next Nachlass remark incorporated into Will to Power 254, where Nietzsche explains how answering his genealogical questions, “For whom?” and “Who interprets?”, will critically determine what our valuations are worth (KSA 12, 2[190]; cf. also GM P:3,6 and GM I:17n). Although Schacht agrees that this remark outlines Nietzsche’s final, and truly critical, “normative-valuational” stage, I believe he misinterprets Nietzsche’s interest in the value-originators whose life-conditions the values signify and favor as a (naturalistic) teleological or utilitarian interest (pp. 354-56, 380-84, 407-411, 422-23; Note 35 above). See for example Nietzsche’s 1888 Nachlass remark: “Formerly one said of every morality: `by their fruits you should know them’; I say of every morality: it is a fruit by which I know the soil out of which it grew” (KSA 13, 14[76]/WP 257).


46. For Nietzsche’s view of the origin of the plebeianism of modern ideas in England, especially Darwin, see BGE 253; for his view of Darwin’s projection into nature of Malthus and his own English plebeian descent, see GS 349 and TI IX:14; for his charge that Darwin conflated origin and utility, see WP 647 and GM II:12 (cf. by contrast, Nehamas, p. 245, n. 19; also Stegmaier, pp. 271-272); for his view of Darwin’s influence on the biased moral genealogy of Paul Rée, see GM P:7. These views all help to explain why Darwin’s The Descent of Man ([Murray, 1871]; Die Abstammung des Menschen, tr. J. Victor Carus [Stuttgart, 1871]), although containing chapters on the evolution of “moral sense” and the “genealogy” of man, was in fact not the inspiration for Nietzsche’s new emphasis on the “descent” and “genealogy” of morality. Instead, the latter should be regarded as deployed on behalf of his aristocratic critique of Darwin’s evolutionary genealogy of morality.


47. Cf. Keith-Ansell Pearson’s Introduction to the new edition and translation in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, On the Genealogy of Morality, tr. Carol Diethe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. xii, xx-xxi.


48. As against Foucault’s inference from the same conclusion: “This is undoubtedly why every origin of morality from the moment it stops being pious—and Herkunft can never be—has value as critique” (p. 81).


49. Nehamas, p. 110.


50. Ibid., p. 109.


51. Ibid., p. 112.


52. Thus, having cited Nietzsche’s separation of origin and purpose in his discussion of punishment, Nehamas writes: “Nothing about a thing, Nietzsche concludes, need remain constant ... Since both its form and purpose are constantly changing, punishment is constituted by the very history of those forms and practices, those purposes and meanings, that can be seen to belong to a single institution” (Ibid., pp. 102-103).


53. I would like to thank the participants of the NANS meeting for their help in improving this paper, especially Javier Ibáñez-Noé, Bernard Reginster and Richard Schacht. I would also like to thank William Barry, William Beardsley, Douglas Cannon, Harry Vélez Quiñones, Hans Sluga and Lawrence Stern for their helpful comments on this paper.