Genealogy (philosophy)

In philosophy, genealogy is a historical technique in which one questions the commonly understood emergence of various philosophical and social beliefs by attempting to account for the scope, breadth or totality of discourse, thus extending the possibility of analysis. Moreover, a genealogy often attempts to look beyond the discourse in question toward the conditions of their possibility (particularly in Michel Foucault's genealogies). It has been developed as a continuation of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Genealogy is opposed to the Marxist use of the ideology to explain the totality of historical discourse within the time period in question by focusing on a singular or dominant discourse (ideology). For example, tracking the lineages of a concept such as 'globalization' can be called a 'genealogy' to the extent that the concept is located in its changing constitutive setting. This entails not just documenting its changing meaning (etymology) but the social basis of its changing meaning. Nietzsche criticized "the genealogists" in On the Genealogy of Morals and proposed the use of a historic philosophy to critique modern morality by supposing that it developed into its current form through power relations. But scholars note that he emphasizes that, rather than being purely necessary developments of power relations, these developments are to be exposed as at least partially contingent, the upshot being that the present conception of morality could always have been constituted otherwise. Even though the philosophy of Nietzsche has been characterized as genealogy, he only uses the term in On the Genealogy of Morals. The later philosophy that has been influenced by Nietzsche, and which is commonly described as genealogy, shares several fundamental aspects of Nietzschean philosophical insight. Nietzschean historic philosophy has been described as "a consideration of oppositional tactics" that embraces, as opposed to forecloses, the conflict between philosophical and historical accounts.