Square Pegs and Round Holes: Forcing Realism into a Paradigm and Keeping It There

Abstract

The first act of any genealogy of knowledge is to problematize received notions of a metatheoretical nature. Nietzsche established his radical reinterpretation of the genealogy of morals by contrasting the utilitarian theories of late-nineteenth-century mental and moral science with a more historically and etymologically correct examination of the emergence of a moral sense in antiquity, and the subsequent transvaluation of the first expression of moral being in the Judaeo-Christian valorization of the morality of the self. It was in this way that the modern conception of moral being, so uproblematically endorsed by the English utilitarians, came to dominate our conception of “correct” moral attitudes.¹ Nietzsche’s purpose in highlighting the descent of morality was to illustrate the limitations and the negativity of the foundations of modern morality, and to suggest a way of going beyond our current understanding of morality. Der Derian characterizes this aspect of the genealogical approach as “to act on a suspicion, supported by historical research” that the present meaning of a concept (in his investigation “diplomacy”) does not reflect the true complexity of that concept and that the present must be challenged by an “interpretative history.” ²