Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals

Introduction

Among Friedrich Nietzsche scholars, it is fairly common knowledge that the identity of the subject, the concept, and the semantic referent break down in Nietzsche's works. Yet few scholars have focused on Nietzsche's view of the formation of the subject in his “Second Essay” from On the Genealogy of Morals to show the dynamic monism that emerges and how one might appropriate it for a feminist reading of Nietzsche.

In the “Second Essay”, Nietzsche traces the transformation of the subject from its early character, which I call the legal subject (Rechtssubjekt), to a subsequent formulation, which can be referred to as the so-called “unified” subject. My reading of the “Second Essay” (Nietzsche 1989) shows that for Nietzsche, human beings produce a concept of what it means to be a human being at any given time in Western history according to a reciprocal shaping that occurs among the concept of the subject and the developing constitutions6 of conscience and punishment. I have chosen three constitutions—subjectivity, conscience, and punishment—for two reasons. First, they are prominent themes in On the Genealogy of Morals.

Second, they include the extremes and center of a continuum that I call Nietzsche's monism. I provisionally categorize subjectivity as ideational (the immaterial extreme), conscience as psychosomatic (the center), and corporeal punishment as sociophysical (the material extreme). The borders of these categories aren't strict, but characteristic of a continuum they overlap (Gert, 85).

This work will examine whether and in what form the "Genealogy" by Nietzsche can be a critical method as philology or hermeneutical process or understand as pessimistic cultural criticism can be (Rawls, 102-132). The notion of genealogy appears in Nietzsche's work first and prominent position 1887 in the title of polemic. On the Genealogy of Morality the genetic logic in the title of this work will initially nothing more as the splitting of the nominative, and learn to mean a double genitive. The double genitive is distinguished in several important works of philosophy, and has reason to questioning of subject and object position in the possessive Construction given.

Discussion

Consider descendance in terms of human familial relations. Just as the English “relation,” the German Verwandte(r) can signify a particular human being associated with another by law or by birth. Verwandte and Verwandter signify the feminine and masculine case nouns, and mean “human relation” or “relative”—that is, a parent, a cousin, and so forth. Genetic familial bonds ate relations because the genes among certain people have mixed. An offspring never replicates one or the other of its progenitors, but is constituted by a new relation of genes. The notion of genetic relation is significant because it shows that relation, while not exclusively physiological, includes the physiological, the other of Western philosophy.

In addition to familial relations, Verwandtes leads to other meanings. It is related to several German words: verwenden (to apply, to put to use, to give purpose to); Verwandlung (metamotphosis, transformation); verwandeln (to transfigure, to transform); and wenden (to turn, to exchange). The signifier for the adjective verwandt ...