Recent scholarship has recognized the importance of Nietzsche’s idea of genealogy
and its employment as a means of criticizing modernity. This scholarship also
acknowledges that genealogy transcends its uses within Nietzsche’s texts to provide
the basis for an on-going critique of the present. What has not been understood
is how genealogy for Nietzsche is not just a general critical method but a
specific “art of interpretation” focusing upon the moral values of cultures and
cultural epochs. As a mode of interpretation, genealogy finds is “principle” in the
Will to Power and defines its “purpose” in the evaluation of modernity in terms
of this principle. In this sense, Nietzsche proposes that the “theory” of the Will to
Power replace the theory of the Will to Truth as the appropriate means of understanding
the truth of modernity. By contrasting my reading of Nietzsche against
what is arguably the leading interpretation of genealogy in Raymond Geuss’s
“Nietzsche and Genealogy,” I suggest how Nietzsche understood the relationship
of interpretation, truth, and modernity.
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