Horner's Corner

Genealogy, Definition, History

by on Jun.15, 2009, under philosophy

nietzsche

‘..only that which has no history can be defined’  -Nietzsche

This is a very important insight of Nietzsche’s. It’s important because it challenges the Platonic/Socratic method of getting at the truth of a thing through a definition. Nietzsche is rejecting this approach because it implies that things have stable essences which the definition, if accurate, can capture. This can work for  a term like ‘triangle’  because triangles are the same for the 5th century BC as they are for us – they have no history; but it’s not a helpful approach for a concept like ‘justice’, ‘love’ or ‘the state’.

Nietzsche proposes a different approach: the genealogical investigation of meaning(s). This approach traces the way a concept has changed and developed in its meanings and uses over time. There is no assumption that this will stay the same. So instead of What is justice? he proposes that we ask: what was justice for  the x ? where x can be the Ancient Greeks, the Chinese in the 10th c CE, 19th century Victorians etc, etc. Concepts, practices and institutions can all get the genealogical treatment. It’s an approach that has had an influence on many theorists, notably perhaps Foucault – but also on less well known people like the political philosopher Raymond Geuss for instance (and even me) . It’s an insight that meshes well with recent strands of pragmatism, too (e.g. Richard Rorty), where words are viewed as tools and not mirrors of reality(see my essay on pragmatism, elsewhere on this site).

fam-tree

An attraction of the approach is that investigating how something has changed can be divorced from ideas of progress or telos: there is no ‘goal’ that the various understandings of  ”justice” are heading towards. What comes early may affect or even determine what comes later, (as Christianity was influenced by Platonism and itself influenced  later conceptions of justice found in socialism).  Like a family tree, influences and antecedents may be hugely various,  forming a vast ,branching network – with some limbs  which may have influenced each other,  and some proceeding in isolation and ignorance of each other (or a bit of both – like Platonism and Judaism before Christianity). There is no sense here of anyone or anything directing the process, nothing here of Hegel’s labours of the Spirit as it makes its way towards Absolute Knowledge.

Hermeneutics (art or science of understanding) as it has come to be  loosely understood  teaches a related lesson: don’t look for the knock down definition that will capture an unchanging essence – investigate the ways we use a term, the practices that reveal the place it has in the complex discourses of culture and history. So we get clearer about something we currently only have fuzzy ideas about – like someone focusing a picture so it changes from being a blur to being pin sharp (or as close as we can get)

When I wrote the art chapter of Thinking Through Philosophy I avoided asking ‘what is art?’ and instead asked the question: why do people value art? which, although not a genealogical approach (I didn’t have room for a full historical survey), is certainly informed by the spirit of genealogy and hermenutics. It seemed a good way to go about it.

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