The hammering of The Genealogy of morals and other writings: dismantling as to the conception of origin and history

Abstract

The conception of history understood as historiography, heiress of tradition, presents the features of linearity, rationality and progress. However, through the genealogical method, Nietzsche dismantles it: by taking as a starting point the organic constitution of man – composed of reflexes and instincts – he adopts a historical retreat that elucidates the internalization of instincts at the beginning of the civilization proces, without, however, falling into a linear and teleological conception of history. Thus, he discusses with the metaphysicists, with the Jewish-Christian tradition and with the moralists of his time who, according to him, write “ahistorically” in shades of “blue”. Genealogy, according to Nietzsche, on the contrary, is “gray”, it deals with what “has really been” (wirkliche Historie). Our work also aims to present the terms elaborated on by Foucault in what concerns history in the Genealogy, such as Herkunft (provenance), Erfindung (invention), Entstehung (emergence) as characteristics of what “really happened”’. All these considerations culminate in ideas that present the impossibility of the autonomy of reason, the breaking of this linear conception of history by glimpsing the theory of eternal return and, consequently, the very notion that follows from it, viz. that of progress.

Keywords: genealogy, history, Nietzsche.