Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche's "Genealogy" (review)

More or less blow-by-blow guides to Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals proliferate.¹ Christopher Janaway's Beyond Selflessness, never mind its subtitle, is not one of these. Not that the book fails to offer guidance to GM; on the contrary, the book's fourteen chapters are chockablock with almost always interesting and occasionally novel suggestions on how to read Nietzsche's three increasingly well-known essays. Moreover, these suggestions are rendered in prose of exceptional clarity, featuring an especially engaging tone, with just the right blend of authority and humility in the face of Nietzsche's daunting texts. Still, the book is neither a systematic nor a comprehensive account of GM. In fact, the book reads like a cross between a monograph and a collection of essays, which is not surprising really, since no fewer than seven previously published essays have, in some form or other, made their way into the book. As Janaway readily acknowledges, "The work towards what eventually became this book began more than ten years ago and for a while remained somewhat piecemeal" (vii). Without taking anything away from its consistent insightfulness, the book remains somewhat piecemeal. Some chapters actually do offer blow-by-blow accounts of extended portions of GM, as in chapter 2's section-by-section discussion of Nietzsche's preface. Some chapters focus much more narrowly, as in chapter 12's explication of GM III:12's notorious claim that "there is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing.'" And some chapters make but little contact with GM at all, as in chapter 9's discussion of will to power. Every chapter, then, may be appreciated in isolation, which is not to say that the book contains no overlapping themes. It does, and one of them, justifiably in my view, predominates.

Interpreters of Nietzsche, and of GM especially, tend to engage two potentially related distinctions. On the one hand, there is a distinction between what might be called Nietzsche's descriptive and prescriptive, or his explanatory and therapeutic, aims. In GM I, for example, Nietzsche famously describes the so-called slave revolt in morality, explaining how the Christian values of morality, good and evil, came to supplant the aristocratic values of rank, good and bad. Here the interpreter needs a view on what prescription (if any) Nietzsche would have this description effect. In what way, and by what means, should Nietzsche's genealogically informed explanations of contemporary Christian values and guilt-laden Christian psychology and Christian ascetic ideals impact readers going forward? On the other hand, there is a distinction between the substance and style of Nietzsche's writing or—there may be no better way to put it—between Nietzsche the philosopher and Nietzsche the poet. Here the interpreter needs a view on the relation between the two, particularly on whether the philosophical substance of Nietzsche's thought can be isolated and appreciated independent of its rhetorical trappings. Put another way, the interpreter must have a view on whether Nietzsche's style is necessary to his aims: to, say, the (descriptive) genealogical investigation of contemporary moral values and, ultimately, to the (prescribed) revaluation of those values.

Janaway's own view is that Nietzsche's style is indeed necessary to the achievement of both his explanatory and therapeutic aims:

I give thematic prominence to questions about Nietzsche's method of writing, and seek to show why we should not succumb to the analytical habit of sidelining such questions. To treat Nietzsche's ways of writing—implicitly or explicitly—as merely modes of presentation, detachable in principle from some elusive set of propositions in which his philosophy might be thought to consist, is to miss a great part of Nietzsche's real importance to philosophy. Nietzsche simply does not behave as a conventional philosopher. . . . Nietzsche's way of writing addresses our affects, feelings, or emotions. It provokes sympathies, antipathies and ambivalences that lie in the modern psyche below the level of rational decision...