Meta-Historical Transitions from Philology to Genealogy

Because nietzsche rejects a temporally static ontology, his statements about values, customs, and beliefs typically involve a historical reconstruction of some kind. Given that his professional academic training was in philology, it is tempting to see a continuity between his early philological method and his later historiographical techniques, in particular, his genealogy. Two recent studies, by James I. Porter and Christian Benne, respectively, have argued that philology and genealogy share a consistent historiographical framework in their attempt to expose and undermine various textual traditions. I argue here that, on the contrary, there is an important shift in Nietzsche’s meta-historical presuppositions between his earlier and later work. Whereas his early published philology is best characterized as a representational realism, the presentation of the genealogy should be considered representational antirealism.