Hermeneutics vs. Genealogy: Brandom’s Cloak or Nietzsche’s Quilt?

ABSTRACT

This article examines genealogical investigations in an attempt to explain what they are, how they work, and what purpose they serve. It is a critique of Robert Brandom’s view of genealogists as naïve semanticists who believe that normative thinking, as it relates to all forms of epistemic inquiry and language use, is reducible to naturalistic causes. This reduction, Brandom claims, is hopelessly misguided and semantically incoherent since genealogies are not epistemically neutral in that “they count no more and no less,” as Habermas put it, than the traditional accounts of moral phenomena that they seek to replace. Nietzsche’s “story” of the origin of guilt in On the Genealogy of Morals is thus not even a useful fiction but merely meaningless. My analysis shows that Brandom’s understanding of genealogy is rather simplistic. While genealogists are naturalists insofar as they attempt to discover the specific historical causes that gave rise to current normative practices, they are neither reductive empiricists nor first-stage semanticists, as Brandom calls them, but multidimensional power-pragmatists.

KEYWORDS:

• Genealogy
• Brandom
• Nietzsche
• Inferentialism
• De Re/De Intellectu

Notes

1. MacIntyre’s “Genealogies as Subversions” remains the best work on genealogy. In it he explains why “Truth and power are… inseparable. And what appears as projects aimed at the possession of truth are always willful in their exercise of power” (301). In “The End of Humanism,” Bove similarly claims that genealogy cannot remain critical of power/knowledge once it becomes part of the academic world, and thus part of the current dispositif.

2. Conway in “Genealogy and the Critical Method” argues that “[g]enealogical interpretations are always abnormal and reactive, preying upon the normal, authoritative interpretations they challenge. Whatever degree of validity a genealogy acquires is therefore entirely relative to the interpretation it discredits” (325). Despite being parasitic on more traditional views, Conway notes that genealogies are still important because they debunk those interpretations, which claim to be absolute.

3. Habermas offers the locus classicus criticism of genealogy in Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: “if it [Foucault’s genealogical account of the carceral regime] is correct it must destroy the foundations of the research inspired by it as well. On the other hand, if it is incorrect, then the unmasking of the human sciences would lose its point” (281). For a similar complaint, see Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” 152–83.

4. There are two accounts of justification: philological and non-philological. The first argues that Nietzsche’s genealogies are no more true than the traditional accounts of moral phenomena they seek to subvert but are philologically and hermeneutically sounder. Early defenders of this position include Granier’s Le probleme de la Verite and Koffman’s, Nietzsche et la Metaphor. Rajchman argues much the same for Foucault’s genealogies in “Story of Foucault’s History,” 389–411. The defenders of genealogy include Hales and Welshon in Nietzsche’s Perspectivism, and Cox in Nietzsche, Naturalism and Interpretation. Leiter is perhaps this group’s spokesperson arguing in Nietzsche on Morality that genealogy, as a method, shares with the natural sciences a common empirical method and therefore is not S naturalistic but M naturalistic (3).

5. Brandom’s “Reason, Genealogy,” sec. 2. For Brandom’s lecture, see www.pitt.edu/~brandom/downloads/RGHM%20%2012-11-21%20a.doc. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 281.

6. Brandom illuminates the problem with Nietzschean genealogy by reimagining the ancient image of the Ouroboros (the snake that eats its own tail). He writes: “It (genealogy) becomes a snake, poisoning itself by biting its own tail” (emphasis added). “Reason, Genealogy,” sec. 1, 5. The idea that the very nature of a genealogical investigation is one where its very methodology invariably contaminates the conclusion of said inquiry, is unpacked by Brandom in section 2 of his lecture..

7. See Ahern, Nietzsche as Cultural Physician. The importance of physiology and medicine cannot be underestimated in Nietzsche’s genealogical theory. See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (hereafter GM) I 17, note 2.

8. Nietzsche, Daybreak, sec. 30.

9. Elster, Alchemies of the Mind, 42–43.

10. Nietzsche, GM II 13, 515.

11. Ibid., II 3, 497: “The worse man’s memory (Gedächtniss) has been, the more fearful has been the appearance of his customs; the severity of the penal code portrays perhaps the clearest example of the significant measure of the degree of effort needed to overcome forgetfulness (Vergesslichkeit) and to impose a few primitive demands of social existence as present realities upon these slaves of momentary (Augenblicks-Sklaven) affect and desire.”

12. For Foucault, as for Nietzsche, the body remains the primary document a genealogist utilizes in tracing the history of some value. However, unlike, Nietzsche, Foucault sees the body as a document in perpetual disintegration. See Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”

13. Robinson, Plato’s Early Dialectic, chap. 5.

14. Nietzsche, GM III 12, 489.

15. Ibid., II 13, 515.

16. Nietzsche, GM II 16, 520.

17. Nietzsche chronicles the battle between the warriors and the priestly caste throughout the Genealogy, but the main analysis is found in the first essay.

18. Nietzsche, GM II 22, 528.

19. See Butterfield, Whig Interpretation of History, 11.

20. Nietzsche, GM II 12, 513: “But purposes and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function; and the entire history of a ‘thing’, an organ, a custom can in this way be a continuous signchain (eine fortgesetzte ZeichenKette) of ever new interpretations and adaptations (neuen Interpretationen und Zurechtmachungen) whose causes do not even have to be related to one another but, on the contrary, in some cases succeed to alternate with one another in a purely chance fashion.”

21. See Nietzsche, GM Preface 7, 457: “For cheerfulness—or in my own language gay science—is a reward: the reward of a long, brave, industrious, and subterranean seriousness, of which to be sure not everyone is capable.”

22. For a forceful interpretation of genealogy’s curative capacity, see Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, esp. 145–52.

23. Chung, “Understanding Rationality in Hobbes and Hume,” 688.

24. Brandom, “Reason, Genealogy,” sec. 3, 7. Whether instrumental rationality is truly rational is another issue, but here I am taking a minimalist view that stipulates that one should pursue one’s aims if one can.

25. Kant, Fundamental Principles, 330.

26. Brandom, “Reason, Genealogy,” sec. 3, 7.

27. Sellars, Science, Perception, and Reality, 169: “In characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what it says.”

28. Brandom, “Reason, Genealogy,” sec. 3, 8.

29. Ibid., sec. 1, 3.

30. Kant, Fundamental Principles, chap. 1, 319.

31. See Janaway, “Naturalism and Genealogy,” 349: “More precisely, in order to grasp the real history of our values we require, then, some process that dissolves or explodes our apparently unified present-day concepts into their more primitive psychological components. Because our moral concepts are post facto rationalizations of inherited affects, to whose explanatory role we may be blind, our feelings for and against need to be aroused and questioned, if we are to grasp the variegated psychological truth behind our concepts.”

32. Brandom, “Reason, Genealogy,” sec. 1, 3.

33. Ibid., sec. 4, 11.

34. Brandom, Making it Explicit, 172; Brandom, Articulating Reasons, 81.

35. Brandom and Williams, “Inferential Man,” 370.

36. Ibid., 390.

37. See McDowell “Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,” 97–105.

38. Brandom, “Reason, Genealogy,” sec. 6, 17.

39. Brandom, Making It Explicit, chap. 3, 141–98.

40. This sentence refers to the distinction Brandom makes between commitments made in linguistic practice and the symbolic tokens that may be extracted from such commitments, which, when compared to other statements made by the speaker form logical connections. See Brandom’s Making It Explicit, 275–331.

41. Brandom, Articulating Reasons, 49.

42. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 48.

43. Brandom, “Reason, Genealogy,” sec. 6, 18.

44. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 120.

45. “Another term missing from the index is ‘Millikan’, but Brandom speaks, for instance, of some “consumer or target” of a representation, a theme Millikan has developed in depth, treating subpersonal consumers of (subpersonal) representations. The subpersonal machinery of cognition is another arena that Brandom refuses to enter, though many of the themes he explores are well-explored by Millikan and others. My point is not a procedural criticism—he should have cited this work—but a substantive one: by ignoring it, he creates the illusion (for himself and his readers) that his community-based account of meaning and representation can be an autonomous alternative to a naturalistic theory of the same topics. The themes he discusses so insightfully are not just accessible to naturalism; they are (already) explicable, to a significant degree, in naturalistic terms.” See Dennett, “Evolution of ‘Why’,” 8.

46. Brandom, “From German Idealism,” sec. 5, 22.

47. Dennet, “The Evolution of Why,” 7. Dennett employs skyhook to denote an impossible metaphysical picture, when something is suspended above the ground by some higher entity that is itself without support. His preferred model of suspension for some “higher” concept is that of a crane. See Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 76–83.

48. Quine, “Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes,” 178.

49. See Nelson, “The De Re/De Dicto Distinction.”

50. Nietzsche, GM II 1, 493.

51. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 19.

52. Ibid.

53. See Popper, Logic of Scientific Discovery, 106, for perhaps the clearest expression of the theory ladeness of fact objection.

54. Nietzsche, GM II, 2: “The task of breeding up [heranzuzüchten] an animal that may [darf] promise… requires as a condition and preparation the more immediate task of first making man to a certain degree necessary, uniform, like among like, regular, and consequently calculable.

55. Nietzsche, GM III 12, 555.

56. Broakes, “Belief De Re and De Dicto,” 377.

57. See esp. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 15. For an extended commentary, see Emden, Nietzsche’s Naturalism, 23–24.

58. Nietzsche, Will to Power, sec. 481.

59. See McGinn, “On the Necessity of Origin,” 57.

60. Brandom, “Reason, Genealogy,” sec. 2, 5.

61. Owen, “Criticism and Captivity,” 217.

62. Ibid.

63. See especially Nietzsche’s description of the 12 tables of Rome in GM II 5, 501. A common interpretation of the Twelve Tables suggests that it was merely a legal means the Plebs could use to guarantee that their recent struggle with the Patrician class for greater rights and privileges would be codified in order to be preserved and, most importantly, enforced. See the Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. 7, 456–67. However, the Twelve Tables, in Nietzsche’s interpretation, is shot through with at least two different investments of power. It does serve to mark the ascendancy of the Plebians, but it also entrenches the power of the Patricians by providing the noble classes the right to treat those in their debt in whatever manner they so desired. Thus, the Twelve Tables is a historical representative of the agonic nature of power.

64. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 156. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Sec. 36, 238: “The world viewed from the inside, the world defined and determined according to its intelligible character—it would be will to power and nothing else.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brian Lightbody

Brian Lightbody is Professor of Philosophy at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. His research focuses on philosophical genealogy, epistemology and dynamic choice theory. His publications include Nietzsche’s Will to Power Naturalized: Translating the Human into Nature and Nature into the Human (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Dispersing the Clouds of Temptation (Pickwick Press, 2015), and The Problem of Naturalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).