f47.
The distinction between Enlightenment projects and genealogical projects is made in Alasdair MacIntyre (1990), Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, passim, and summarised in Roger Lundin (1993), The Culture of Interpretation, chapter 1. “Genealogy” comes from Friedrich Nietzsche (1887), On the Genealogy of Morality, in which Nietzsche sets out to trace the sources and history of what he took to be the flawed, deformed morality and culture of the late nineteenth century, whose values he saw as little more than a disguise for power struggles, malice, hate and resentment. MacIntyre argues that the Enlightenment’s displacement of all values other than reason itself produced a culture without defensible premises, exposing it to the attack which in due course matured from Nietzsche’s critique to the extreme assault mounted by Martin Heidegger, who saw Western culture as nothing: the world is haunted by absence, by Nothingness, the thing that noths.
