Europe Discovers Nietzsche 347solidly in Nietzschean territory. By describing modern practices of the
production of truth in hospitals, psychiatry, and prisons, he showed how
right Nietzsche had been to interpret the will to truth as an epistemic
form of the will to power. In his essay '"Nietzsche, la généalogie, l'his-
toire" (Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, 1971), which reprised themes
from his inaugural address at the Collège de France, Foucault explicated
Nietzsche's genealogical principle and clarified what he was adopting
from it for his own research.
A genealogist investigates the true origin of historical events and
ways of thinking without making absolute or teleological assumptions;
he is not taken in by the metaphysical notion that the origin bears the
truth and that meaning radiates out from it into practices, institutions,
and ideas. Foucault intended to destroy such originary myths, as had
Nietzsche before him. "The genealogist needs history to dispel the
chimeras of the origin" (Foucault, "Nietzsche" 80). Nietzsche had demon-
strated in On the Genealogy of Morals that a specific practice at some point
in the past had led to the imposition of punishment for those who devi-
ated from it, and myriad justifications for these disciplinary procedures
were supplied in the process. In other words, there was some initial way
of reining in our instincts, which was then transformed in the course of
time into a whole spectrum of human introspection, and eventually
emerged as our conscience. Like Nietzsche, Foucault poked fun at the
notion of "solemnities of the origin" (Foucault, "Nietzsche" 79) and
demonstrated that there was in fact no plan, intention, or grand design
at the beginning, but only a contingent constellation of "barbarous and
shameful confusion" (Foucault, "Nietzsche" 89).
Foucault applied Nietzsche's genealogical principle to concrete his-
torical research, maintaining that the bases of reason are not rational.
History regained its opaque factuality and no longer came across as a
realm full of meaning. Foucault drew on Nietzsche to develop his ontol-
ogy of contingency: "The forces operating in history are not controlled
by destiny or regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard con-