  Nietzsche thought that making sense of the concept of punishment must be a matter of unpacking the dense, synthesis of meanings (purposes, functions) that, over time, have been willfully interpreted into and forcibly imposed on specific procedures for inflicting harm (Nietzsche, 1998, 50–54). More generally, he understood that conceptual analysis can take the form of genealogy—that is, of historical inquiry that separates the distinct meanings that have been joined together and even conflated through episode after episode of reinterpreting one and the same, more or less stable set of phenomena (procedures, complexes of habits, feeling, ways of perceiving, and so  forth).[23]  In sum, Nietzsche held that historically formed concepts, like our notion of punishment, “are like ropes held together by the intertwining of strands, rather than by a single strand running through the whole thing” (Clark, 1994, 22). To analyze such concepts, he argued, “is not to find necessary and sufficient conditions for their use but to disentangle the various strands that have become so tightly woven together by the process of historical development that they seem inseparable” (Clark, 1994, 22)