The Passive Body and States of Nature: An Examination of the Methodological Role State of Nature Theory Plays in Williams and Nietzsche

Abstract

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.