Brian Lightbody

Philosophers have long used vignettes—symbolic images such as Sisyphus or the foraging ant—to convey the absurdity of human existence. Traditionally, these scenes are thought to reveal a metaphysical conflict between human striving and an indifferent universe. This paper argues, however, that their power stems not from cosmic insignificance but from a structural and affective clash between the first-person perspective, from which our actions appear meaningful, and the third-person perspective, from which they seem trivial. I contend that absurdity arises within this oscillation, amplified by an absurd vignette, which produces bodily and emotional disturbances later appraised as despair or futility. However, these vignettes obscure a crucial “second-person” perspective, as Stephen Darwall describes it—one grounded in dialogue, reciprocity, and moral agency. I propose restoring this relational stance through a therapeutic “philosophical hygiene,” exemplified by Socrates’ final myth in the Phaedo, to recover meaning beyond the absurd.

Nietzsche’s philosophy draws a sharp distinction between higher types and weaker individuals, the former defined by traits such as self-respect, resilience, and an affirmation of life—particularly through the acceptance of the Eternal Return. However, what it means for higher types to affirm life in all its tragic dimensions remains unclear. This paper argues that understanding their attitude toward death—what I term AD—is crucial for illuminating their life-affirming disposition. I challenge prevailing third-person, static interpretations (e.g., Leiter’s), proposing instead a dynamic, first-person approach informed by Foucault’s notion of technologies of the self and rapport à soi. I show that higher types affirm life precisely by confronting and integrating death—both literal and symbolic—into their self-conception. Through close readings of Twilight of the Idols and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I argue that higher types practice a “consummating death,” grounded in truthful self-reflection about their life’s goal and their diminishing capacity to pursue it. This technology of self—a practiced relationship to dying—reveals not only the psychological structure of Nietzschean strength but offers transposable strategies for those of us who are not higher types. Ultimately, affirming life may begin with learning how to die—truthfully, purposefully, and at the right time.

Philosophical genealogy constitutes a mode of inquiry that investigates either (a) the historical emergence of contemporary ideas, institutions, religions, moral norms, and even affective dispositions by tracing them to the intersection of diverse and often heterogeneous historical practices, beliefs, customs, and technologies or (b) demonstrates how a phenomenon could have emerged by providing a pragmatic reconstruction of the object under investigation. The following entry endeavors to explore various formulations of the genealogical method.

Chapter 4 solved the mystery surrounding the semi-animals and warrior artists Nietzsche refers to in GM II 16. Chapter 5 begins by tracing the individual skeins, in this case, cognitive and affective threads, that become entwined to create the kind of agency Nietzsche discusses in the Genealogy. My argument suggests that the internalization of drives is too symbolic and therefore cannot perform any real explanatory work. In keeping with implexic genealogy, I investigate the stable and fluid dimensions that account for the emergence of new phenomena in history. What really accounts for the formation of a new form of subjectivization, namely Christian subjectivity, is the environment that enhanced existing capacities of instrumental rationality of enslaved people on the one hand and dampened, on the other, cognitive virtues which served them well when these individuals were part of their respective tribes. On the affective side, religious narratives within states like Rome allowed enslaved people to release the pent-up trauma they experienced at the hands of their master, the Paterfamilias, into socially accepted ways. I use Christopher Fowles’s helpful article “The Heart of the Flesh,” to explain Nietzsche’s theory of emotions. I demonstrate that an impure somatic model justifies Nietzsche’s genealogical account for the rise and development of Christian morality in history.

Before outlining what I call implexic genealogy, I examine several interpretations of genealogy advanced in the secondary literature and the problems each of these methods generate. I then offer my novel reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals which places GM II 11 as the touchstone of The Genealogy qua method. Nietzsche discusses his much debated and perplexing idea of will to power in that section. What is unique here is that he advances will to power as a methodological principle that promotes the critical and ongoing engagement of all refutation of function. In other words, will to power serves as a reminder, methodologically speaking, that any attempt to grasp the fundamental well-springs of nature (or if genealogically construed, true origin of some historical phenomenon) is doomed to fail. This principle is then operationalized according to three procedures: the Separation Thesis (GM II 12), the Internalization Hypothesis (GM II 16), and the Rule of Conceptual Transformation (GM I 3). I explain each of these methods in detail.

In this chapter, my implexic account of drives and the context that informs them, which I have labeled parallel genealogy, is tested against two forms of Christian subjectivity. The first I call the internalized Augustinian model. The second I refer to is Tertullian’s externalist framework. First, I demonstrate how my theory of affects, which has both somatic and cognitive elements, explains a new phenomenon in history: the conversion experience exemplified in Augustine’s Confessions. I then demonstrate how we can better understand Augustine’s unique internalized Christian form of subjectivity by contrasting it with that of Tertullian’s externalized type. Toward the end of GM I, Nietzsche quotes extensively from Tertullian’s De Spectaculus ostensibly to justify the claim that the actual engine of Christian sentiments is the very hostile drives Nietzsche discusses in GM II 16. I don’t doubt that Nietzsche’s quoting of the penultimate passage of the Spectacles is meant to justify this claim. However, I contend there is another reason why Nietzsche invokes Tertullian in the final section of GM I. The logic of Christianity, whether this includes the incarnation, the notion of heaven, or causa sui freewill, are conceptual developments meant to decipher and utilize ancient affective neural pathways. Such concepts are not sui generis but emerge, genealogically speaking, due to prior existing material conditions and social practices. The movement from the internal to the external is in keeping with the fundamental process of genealogy, which is discovering the lines of descent that made a new phenomenon possible. Finally, I show how the evolution of one naïve kind of Christian subjectivization to a more sophisticated version took place.

In Chap. 4, I begin by reconstructing the customary view of GM II 16 along with the passages that support the standard model (most notably GM II 1, 3, and 17). According to the Received View, there is evidence suggesting that Nietzsche accepts a false scientific theory, namely, Lamarck’s Inheritability Thesis, to account for the growth of a new human “organ”—morality. I demonstrate that the passages interpreted by some scholars to prove that Nietzsche is a Lamarckian can be reinterpreted along Darwinian lines. I show that Nietzsche hits upon the correct drivers of phenotypical change in humans, namely, torture and enclosures (e.g. walls of early states), but misinterprets their actual impact. Nietzsche believes that these technologies are responsible for producing what I call “culture-serving memory” and the bad conscience by causing emotions that once were expressed outwardly to turn inward, triggering the “psychological digestion” of the human animal. In reality, however, these mechanisms are conducive to culling a specific type of undesirable individual, at least according to those individuals (whom Nietzsche calls warrior artists), namely those who are ultra-aggressive and instead breeding another class who is docile. Early states accomplish this goal by introducing artificial and unconscious selective pressures into the environment of humans.The second task of the chapter involves solving another mystery introduced by a recent paper by Iain Morrison. Morrison argues that the standard reading of GM II 16 is wrong: the events described in GM II 19–20 take place, chronologically speaking, before GM II 16, assuming, of course, Nietzsche’s intent in GM II is to provide an accurate portrayal of how the human species came to be. It behooves us to understand who is being tortured in GM II 16 and who is doing the torturing. If Morrison is right, and I think he is, then Nietzsche’s use of the term “semi-animals” to denote those who were domesticated by civilization must be hyperbole. I reveal that the semi-animals Nietzsche is referring to are tribal peoples who were captured and enslaved in political states, like Rome. I put historical flesh on my interpretation in the subsequent chapter.

This chapter explains the main features of drive theory as advanced in the secondary literature. I use Mattia Riccardi’s article “Virtuous Homunculi: Nietzsche on the Order of Drives” and its five-fold account of drives as a model unfolding each component of this framework in greater detail. In examining these five aspects of drive theory, I explore each feature’s principal problems. For this last component, the critical part, I utilize Tom Stern’s incisive article “Against Nietzsche’s Theory of Drives” which analyzes the problematic philosophical and philological features of Nietzsche’s drive theory. In combining Stern’s insights with my own, I demonstrate that applying the Separation Thesis to drive theory itself marks the way forward. To this end, I conceive of drives as implexes: they are the symbolic intersection between cognitive and affective components. I then argue that the task of genealogy is to trace how earlier, more ancient threads of these systems come to form new practices, discourses, and principally subjects. Finally, with this drive model now worked out schematically, I turn my attention to explaining drives in light of the Internalization Hypothesis in Chap. 4.Another critical issue raised in this chapter is the homunculi problem. Of the five-fold features of drives explained in this Chap. 3 one aspect stands out as the most problematic: drives evaluate. The idea that drives can evaluate some object or action as ‘good’ leads to the Homunculi problem where drives are like little agents. Riccardi attempts to solve this problem by relying on Dennett’s intentional theoretic stance model. I demonstrate that Riccardi is an insincere intentionalist and that his solution conjures up more difficulties than it solves.

According to some, humanity’s search to answer the question “What is the meaning of life?” fuels the creative fires that forge all of civilization’s great religious, spiritual, and philosophical texts. But how seriously should we take the question? In the following paper, I provide an implexic genealogical analysis of the cognitive structures that make the very articulation of the question possible. After outlining my procedure, my paper begins by explaining the main components of a genealogical inquiry. Next, I examine Camus’s and Nagel’s respective analyses of philosophical absurdity, paying particular attention to their different evaluations of avatars of the absurd, such as the myth of Sisyphus. Finally, I demonstrate how we may complete Nagel’s solution to the absurd (which counsels that whenever the seeming meaninglessness of life is raised in consciousness, we address it with an ironic smile) by providing an evolutionary pathway of how the cognitive scaffolding required to ask the question about life’s meaning arose. I argue that by reframing philosophical absurdity, we see the phenomenon in a different light. In this very reframing, we may become free from the malaise often connected to avatars for the absurd.

A recent paper by Tom Stern suggests that Socrates’s philosophical psychology, which emphasizes rational reflection, is superior to Nietzsche’s drive model when explaining human behavior. I argue that Stern’s analysis is wrong on three fronts. First, the models share common, though inverted, features. Second, Stern fails to consider the role of Socrates’s daimon when evaluating Socrates’s philosophy of mind; third, Nietzsche’s model is more warranted. In sum, Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology is a correction of the Socratic.

The Protagoras is the touchstone of Socrates’ moral intellectualist stance. The position in a nutshell stipulates that the proper reevaluation of a desire is enough to neutralize it.[1] The implication of this position is that akrasia or weakness of will is not the result of desire (or fear for that matter) overpowering reason but is due to ignorance. Socrates’ eliminativist position on weakness of will, however, flies in the face of the common-sense experience regarding akratic action and thus Aristotle was at pains to render Socrates’ account of moral incontinence intelligible. The key improvement Aristotle makes to Socrates’s model is to underscore that the conditioning of the akratic’s body plays a critical role in determining the power of one’s appetites and, accordingly, the capacity of one to resist the temptations these appetites present for rational evaluation. As Aristotle puts it, “For the incontinent man is like the people who get drunk quickly and on little wine, i.e., on less than most people.” (1151a 3-4). Aristotle presents what I shall call a somatic paradigm (i.e. the drunkard analogy) in order to tackle the problem of akrasia and it is this somatic solution that marks a significant improvement over Socrates’s intellectualist or informational model or so the tradition tells us. In this paper, I wish to push back on the above Aristotelian explanation. I argue that when one fully examines Socrates’ account of weakness of will that Aristotle’s solution is less effective than is traditionally thought. In fact, Socrates can bring Aristotle’s model into his own; just as Aristotle absorbs what is right about Socrates’s model, namely, that akratic action utilizes reason but to a limited degree, Socrates in Meno (77C-78A) develops his own somatic model of weakness of will that connects to the intellectualist paradigm of the Protagoras. To achieve this rapprochement between the two models, I zero in on the description provided by Socrates of those individuals who desire bad things knowing they are bad as “ill-starred” or “bad spirited” (κακοδαίμων ). The “bad-spirited” is the coward and, in contrast to Aristotle’s drunkard, becomes fearful quickly from little danger. This additional somatic component, when connected to Socrates’s position on akrasia in Protagoras adds a new twist to Socrates’s model in the following way: while no one wishes to be ill-starred such that more harm than good will befall one, one may become so as a result of the bad choices one knowingly makes. [1] “After him came Socrates, who spoke better and further about this subject, but even he was not successful. For he used to make the virtues into sciences, and this is impossible. For the sciences all involve reason, and reason is to be found in the intellectual part of the soul. So that all the virtues, according to him arise in the rational part of the soul. The result is that in making the virtues into sciences he is doing away with the nonrational part of the soul and is thereby doing away with passion and character…” (Aristotle, Magna Moralia 1.1. 1182 a15-26)

What is philosophical genealogy? What is its purpose? How does genealogy achieve this purpose? These are the three essential questions to ask when thinking about philosophical genealogy. Although there has been an upswell of articles in the secondary literature exploring these questions in the last decade or two, the answers provided are unsatisfactory. Why do replies to these questions leave scholars wanting? Why is the question, “What is philosophical genealogy?” still being asked? There are two broad reasons, I think. First, on the substantive side, the problem is that genealogical models will get certain features of the method right but ignore others. The models proffered to answer the first question are too restrictive. The second reason is that the three essential questions to ask regarding the nature of genealogy are run together when they should be treated separately. In the following paper, I address these problems by attempting to reconstruct genealogy from the ground up. I provide what I hope is an ecumenical position on genealogy that will accommodate a wide variety of genealogical thinkers, from Hobbes to Nietzsche, rather than a select few. Therefore, I examine two of the three questions above: What is philosophical genealogy and its purpose? I argue there are seven main features of genealogy and that these features may be used as a yardstick to compare how one genealogist stacks up to another along the seven aspects I outline in the paper.

Nietzsche’s “drive theory”, as it is referred to in the secondary literature, is a rich, unique and fascinating articulation of the human condition. In broad brushstrokes, Nietzsche appears to contend that all human psychology is either directly reducible to animal drives (e.g. sex, aggression) or indirectly explicable to the historical transformations thereof (e.g. ressentiment). Moreover, Nietzsche’s initial elucidation of drive theory in On the Genealogy of Morals (and elsewhere) is well-complemented with a fecund, profound, and clear elucidation of the concept in the secondary literature. Yet, there remains a glaring lacuna for all the discussion of drive theory in the scholarship. The secondary literature is delinquent in explaining how animal drives became incorporated to form the human psyche. Nietzsche’s account to elucidate how drives became “digested” or in his words “inpsychated” is called the Internalization Hypothesis. However, as it appears in GM: II, 16, the hypothesis is grossly inchoate. The result of this undertheorization is manifold; its deleterious effects resonate along many axes of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The present book, Internalized Valuation: A Genealogical Analysis of Nietzschean Drive Theory, offers an original and fruitful interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology. First, it clarifies what drives are. Second, it provides a new way of thinking about Nietzsche’s genealogical methods and then applies these insights to The Genealogy itself. What follows is a work that not only sheds much-needed light on Nietzsche’s philosophy of mind in general and his theory of emotions in particular, but also informs and illuminates problematic passages of Nietzsche’s Genealogy.

The Internalization Hypothesis (I.H.), as expressed in GM II 16 of On the Genealogy of Morals, is the essential albeit under-theorized principle of Nietzsche’s psychology. In the following essay, I investigate the purpose I.H. serves concerning Nietzsche’s theory of drives as well as the Hypothesis’s epistemic warrant. I demonstrate that I.H. needs a Neo-Darwinian underpinning for two reasons: 1) to answer the Time-Crunch Problem of Transformation, and 2) in order to render it coherent with Nietzsche’s physiological determinism as articulated in Twilight of the Idols. My re-examination of I.H., then, serves to underwrite the Hypothesis on solid empirical footing. In addition, my analysis provides further evidence to think that Brian Leiter’s initial (but naïve) type-fact reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy of psychology is accurate, deterministic warts and all.

Edmund Husserl questions the so-called “objectivity” and focus of modern science in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Husserl claims that the sciences as presently practiced and understood rest upon a “ground” that goes unnoticed and unacknowledged. Husserl calls this ground the life-world; the everyday horizon and environment that provide the sciences with the consistent structures of the objects they investigate. By extrapolating on what the life-world means for us as beings-in-the-world, Husserl hopes to resolve what he terms the “crisis of the European sciences.” In the following paper, I examine precisely what this “crisis” entails, how Husserl believes the crisis originated, and evaluate Husserl’s proposed solution to resolving this crisis.

: In his work Truth and Truthfulness, Bernard Williams offers a very different interpretation of philosophical genealogy than that expounded in the secondary literature. The “Received View” of genealogy holds that it is “documentary grey”: it attempts to provide historically well-supported, coherent, but defeasible explanations for the actual transformation of practices, values, and emotions in history. However, paradoxically, the standard interpretation also holds another principle. Genealogies are nevertheless polemical because they admit that any evidence that would serve to justify a genealogical account is indexical to a perspective. In short, genealogies are not true per se. This view of genealogy leaves it vulnerable to three criticisms. I call these three: (1) the reflexive, (2) the substantive, and (3) the semantic. In contrast, Williams argues that all genealogies provide a functional account for the manifestation of something and further, that a State of Nature story subtends these accounts. The upshot of Williams’ approach is that it makes for strange philosophical bedfellows. For example, Nietzsche’s account for the rise of Christian morality shares methodological features with Hobbes’ functional explanation for the emergence of civilization and yet Nietzsche seems to take issue with genealogists who are hypothesis mongers gazing haphazardly into the blue. In the following article, I flesh out, more fully, how to make sense of Williams’ novel reclassification of genealogy. I show that Nietzsche’s genealogies are State of Nature stories and, just like Hobbes’ State of Nature story in chapter thirteen of Leviathan, are subtended by our collective corporeality. I then demonstrate how Nietzsche’s three stories in the Genealogy, when brought together, serve to undermine what Williams refers to as “ . . . a new system (of reasons)—which very powerfully resists being understood in such terms . . . ” Finally, I explain how my reconstruction of Williams’ interpretation of the genealogy immunizes it against the three criticisms noted above.

In his book Foucault and Religion, Jeremy Carrette presents a compelling argument against Foucault’s genealogical method (what he terms “relations of force”). In brief, Carrette holds that while Foucault’s genealogical method effectively unmasked the origins of “rationality” and “madness,” it was less successful when explaining the materialization of “the spiritual.” Foucault’s analysis of spiritual practices is at best functional and, according to Carrette, fails to explain the psychophysical state of subjects engaged in religious customs. In the following paper, I argue that Carrette is correct; there are limitations to Foucault’s genealogical method, especially when explaining subjectivization processes, such as conversion experiences. However, I demonstrate that we can perform a successful genealogical investigation of the spiritual by adding an additional lens of analysis to “the relations of power” and “the relations of meaning” Foucault employs. I call this lens “the relations of affect.” I use this tool to explain Augustine’s transformative process, as observed in the saint’s Confessions.

Enneads I: 8.14 poses significant problems for scholars working in the Plotinian secondary literature. In that passage, Plotinus gives the impression that the body and not the soul is causally responsible for vice. The difficulty is that in many other sections of the same text, Plotinus makes it abundantly clear that the body, as matter, is a mere privation of being and therefore represents the lowest rung on the proverbial metaphysical ladder. A crucial aspect to Plotinus’s emanationism, however, is that lower levels of a metaphysical hierarchy cannot causally influence higher ones and, thus, there is an inconsistency in the Egyptian’s magnum opus, or so it would seem. Scholars have sought to work through this paradox by positing that Plotinus is a “paleolithic Platonist” or Socratic. The advantage of this approach is that one may be able to resolve the tension by invoking Socrates’s eliminativist solution to the problem of weakness of will, as found in The Protagoras. In the following article, I argue that such attempts are not wrong-headed just underdetermined. They take up the standard reading of Socratic moral intellectualism, namely the “informational” interpretation and, therefore, fail to render a coherent view of Plotinus’s moral philosophy. The following paper, in contrast, utilizes a new reading of intellectualism advanced by Brickhouse and Smith, which, when subtended with a “powers approach” to causality, resolves the aforementioned, problematic passage of Enneads.

This article examines genealogical investigations in an attempt to explain what they are, how they work, and what purpose they serve. It is a critique of Robert Brandom’s view of genealogists as naïve semanticists who believe that normative thinking, as it relates to all forms of epistemic inquiry and language use, is reducible to naturalistic causes. This reduction, Brandom claims, is hopelessly misguided and semantically incoherent since genealogies are not epistemically neutral in that “they count no more and no less,” as Habermas put it, than the traditional accounts of moral phenomena that they seek to replace. Nietzsche’s “story” of the origin of guilt in On the Genealogy of Morals is thus not even a useful fiction but merely meaningless. My analysis shows that Brandom’s understanding of genealogy is rather simplistic. While genealogists are naturalists insofar as they attempt to discover the specific historical causes that gave rise to current normative practices, they are neither reductive empiricists nor first-stage semanticists, as Brandom calls them, but multidimensional power-pragmatists.

I examine three kinds of criticism directed at philosophical genealogy. I call these substantive, performative, and semantic. I turn my attention to a particular substantive criticism that one may launch against essay two of On the Genealogy of Morals that turns on how Nietzsche answers “the time-crunch problem”. On the surface, there is evidence to suggest that Nietzsche accepts a false scientific theory, namely, Lamarck’s Inheritability Thesis, in order to account for the growth of a new human “organ”—morality. I demonstrate that the passages interpreted by some scholars to prove that Nietzsche is a Lamarckian can be reinterpreted along Darwinian lines. I demonstrate that Nietzsche hits upon the right drivers of phenotypical change in humans, namely, torture and enclosures (e.g., walls of early states), but misinterprets their true impact. Nietzsche believes that these technologies are responsible for producing what I call “culture-serving memory” and the bad conscience by causing emotions that once were expressed outwardly to turn inward causing the “psychological digestion” of the human animal. In reality, however, these mechanisms are conducive to breeding a particular type of individual, namely, one who is docile, by introducing artificial and unconscious selective pressures into the environment of early humans. In showing that Nietzsche’s genealogical account of memory and bad conscience is not underpinned on a false scientific theory and is consistent with Neo-Darwinism, I deflect a potentially fatal blow regarding the veracity of Nietzsche’s genealogies.

In their recent paper, “Epistemology for Beginners: Two to Five-Year-Old Children’s Representation of Falsity,” Olivier Mascaro and Olivier Morin study the ontogeny of a naïve understanding of truth in humans. Their paper is fascinating for several reasons, but most striking is their claim (given a rather optimistic reading of epistemology) that toddlers as young as two can, at times, recognize false from true assertions. Their Optimistic Epistemology Hypothesis holds that children seem to have an innate capacity to represent a state of affairs truthfully. In the following paper, I investigate the problems this research poses for deflationist theories of truth. Richard Rorty and Huw Price hold that the best way to understand truth or “the truth” is to understand the necessary conditions required for assertoric practice. Both philosophers present unique and very different deflationary theories when it comes to construing truth. I argue that neither philosopher’s approach is successful because they focus on truth and fail to recognize truthfulness as a norm of assertoric practice. I show that truthfulness is the elusive third norm of claim-based discourse and is consistent with Mascaro and Morin’s findings.