nietzsche critique of enlightenment

is perhaps no longer even possible for us, despite the severity of the scientific mind! "66 But Mill's justification for this elitist position is that it creates the circumstances in which, ironically, an ideal society will be possible. .because it is never thought of in terms of ideology, but essentially in metaphysical terms. And it is the pursuit of this idea, through constant self-improvement and self-creation, that motivates Nietzsche's humanism. 40Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche Contra Rousseau, 50. 64White, "Zarathustra and the Progress of Sovereignty," 110. . Despite his frequent and vitriolic attacks on Christian thought and on the variety of secularized Christianity which Kant represents, Nietzsche's project can thus ironically be read as a radical restructuring or rethinking of Christianity. As Kittman suggests, "for Nietzsche there is only the world of experience. Rather, it was that they represented an insidious nineteenth century manifestation of his old enemy, Enlightenment: older, wiser and more clever, and thus all the more threatening. Still, Nietzsche warns, if we insist on keeping our illusions, we must be made to realize that they are illusions, and dangerous ones at that. I would, however, make several modifications. Nietzsche writes in Daybreak: "science has, moreover, become something very useful to everyone. "35 Here Jaspers is clearly suggesting that the importance of the doctrine is the effect that it has on us. As Olivier Reboul writes, "the aristocratic man is autonomous: the term is from Nietzsche, but in an anti-Kantian sense. By pursuing a new kind of subjectivity very different from that implied by socialism, Nietzsche was actually being very responsive to the needs of the European community as he saw them. It seems likely that an adherent to Cartesian science would have trouble even imagining a science that was happy rather than rational or mechanistic. And universal, practical reason of the Kantian type became associated in Nietzsche's thought with "moral fanaticism."77. --What then is the danger? Stambaugh hints at this possibility when she writes: "the thought of eternal recurrence, particularly in its nihilistic, mechanistic form, becomes the highest obstacle to life. For Nietzsche, and later, his postmodernist disciples, the failure of the Enlightenment was a failure of philosophical courage. Stephen Schwartz argues that "the will to power is an explanatory theory and how convincing it is depends on how well it explains the data it is intended to explain, how well it fits with our entire view of how the world works, and how well it does against competing theories. "24 Heidegger goes on to state, however, that "we are affirming something far more essential, to wit, that he is thinking the selfsame in the historical fulfillment of its essence. From Kant to Nietzsche. "52 Clearly, Rousseau represents some kind of cultural decadent for Nietzsche. Even the method which Nietzsche adapts to argue for his Enlightened utopia has traces of Enlightenment. "25 For Heidegger, then, despite Nietzsche's critique of Descartes and despite the obvious differences between their two positions, Nietzsche's project is in some profound sense linked to that of Descartes. 29Blackbourn and Eley, Peculiarities of German History, 19. It represented, furthermore, an illusory solution that concealed what Nietzsche felt were the real paths to progress: self-overcoming and the overman. We find a similar passage in Twilight of the Idols: "Anti-Darwin. However, nationalists have certainly been known to make similar moves, calling for warfare in the name of national self-defense or to rectify a perceived national humiliation. As Kittman writes, "according to Nietzsche's idea, one achieves a new morality by listening to the voice of one's healthy body. In other words, when it came to Kantian ethics, Nietzsche's response was a resounding 'No' from the very first. Zarathustra says that "all 'it was' is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident--until the creative will says to it, 'But thus I willed it.' I intend to argue against this interpretation, however. "112 He then broadens this into a genealogy of consciousness in general: "consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings; it is only as such that it had to develop; a solitary human being who lived like a beast of prey would not have needed it. Why have I chosen three thinkers from Victorian England? And the party of peace is celebrated in the strongest Nietzschean terms, as being "opposed to feelings of revenge and resentment." Cambridge Journals publishes over 250 peer-reviewed academic journals across a wide range of subject areas, in print and online. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. 20Rousseau, Social Contract and Discourse on Inequality, 17. 123Gerhardt, "Selbstbegr�ndung: Nietzsches Moral der Individualit�t," 37. "45 This, then, is the shape of the eternal return as his "most abysmal thought." Anarchism could also be the motivating force behind Nietzsche's trenchant criticism of political institutions. There are other aspects of Christian doctrine in Kant's ethics. Zarathustra says: "to me justice speaks thus: 'men are not equal.' In Chapter Four I turn to the question of science. But the curious fact is that all there is or has been on earth of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, and masterly sureness, whether in thought itself or in government, or in rhetoric and persuasion, in the arts just as in ethics, has developed only owing to the 'tyranny of such capricious laws'.88. 77Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, 208. "129 For Nietzsche, the beauty that was revealed as he uncovered the groundlessness of our ideas of subjectivity lay in the possibilities created by this revelation. Going beyond his critique of the forces that act on particles, Nietzsche challenges the very idea of particles themselves: "The atom [that physicists] posit is inferred according to the logic of the perspectivism of consciousness--and is therefore itself a subjective fiction. For him, Kant represented the prime example of how this morality had become institutionalized and secularized in the European (and especially in the German) academy. As Gertrude Himmelfarb writes, "Mill decided that attention should be directed to the 'internal culture of the individual,' the cultivation of feeling, the development of the poetic and artistic sensibilities. rests on belief in the voluntary nature of our good or wicked acts, that is to say on an error. "26 Science tries to trap the real truth of the world, the truth of perspective and interpretation, in its web of objective absolutes. Alistair Moles, for example, "argues the general claim that this doctrine is an entailed consequence of other principles set down by Nietzsche in the course of constructing a theory of natural philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. "70 I do believe that White overstates the case for reading Nietzsche as some kind of pseudo-Kantian; as Mark Fowler notes, "the Kantian autonomous individual is not something [Nietzsche] thinks exists. I do not wish to dispute Heidegger's claim that Nietzsche's thought is a kind of metaphysics; indeed, it is a fundamental part of my argument that Nietzsche offers a transformed Enlightenment, a new brand of metaphysics. Hugo Bund, in a work from 1919, makes the rather bizarre claim that Nietzsche's works, those of socialism and those of the Catholic church all share a belief in universality, sameness and equality.46 Yet an investigation into Nietzsche's beliefs regarding various aspects of socialism shows Bunds's position to be untenable: Nietzsche emerges with a critique of socialism that is in many ways as virulent as his attack on liberalism. "33 As I have been arguing, it is precisely this value, which is a fundamentally Enlightened value, that distinguishes Rousseau's political thought, and that renders deeply problematic any interpretation of his politics that does not offer an account of his devotion to the sovereign, individual subject as an ideal. Much as he did with Darwin, Nietzsche offered a critique of Spencer as a decadent. By showing a philosophical position to be the simple result of a psychological need, he implies that people believe in this position not because the world really is that way, but only because they have a disposition to believe it. Despite his best efforts, Nietzsche's work contains persistent elements of Enlightenment. "82 Socialism, nationalism--and, we may suppose, liberalism as well--were much the same for Nietzsche. .are non-conservative and creative. Equally important is Nietzsche's concern with the principles of life and health. The "great wars" that were to come were to be wars of ideas. Indeed, as Gilles Deleuze suggests, aspects of Nietzschean thought such as the eternal return provide an ethical position as strong as Kant's. But we have not yet said what, exactly, Nietzsche liked about science. "137 This is the real value of modern, Enlightened science for Nietzsche: it clears a path for a new culture by undermining the old; here his warnings about the dangers of science make perfect sense, for the kind of cultural eradication Nietzsche is talking about is an extremely dangerous enterprise. 59Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism, 7. Most interesting for our purposes here, however, is Condorcet's concern for the future. Both are thus open to the same kinds of Nietzschean critiques, i.e. The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution. "In the case of Kant," Nietzsche writes, "theological prejudice, his unconscious dogmatism, his moralistic perspective, were dominant, directing, commanding. Nietzsche described this as his "most abysmal thought," and one can easily see why, for it implies that everything returns, including all that Nietzsche has worked so hard to overcome, even the exhausted ideas of the conventional Enlightenment and all the dross of modernity. The gay science, then, is a new science, a particular kind of science aimed directly against the serious, ponderous science of Descartes. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Nietzsche's critique of the nineteenth century Enlightenment's project to create democratic individuals was not a critique of the Enlightenment's general project to create viable subjects. In particular, Nietzsche objected to any politics that relied upon a Cartesian notion of the rational, autonomous subject--as indeed every nineteenth century political form did, to some extent. "103 The Christian, the moralist and the ascetic priest demand credit for their forbearance. Nietzsche suggests that the primary function of individual subjectivity prior to his time had been to fulfill a psychological need. '"94 What the fate of the "rabble" may be once the "new nobility" arises to oppose them is uncertain, but we may suspect that it will not be pleasant. "The reward Descartes promises for those who follow his scientific method is nothing less than mastery over nature," as Jacob notes.13 It was this reward that would inspire thinkers such as Darwin and Spencer to pursue the Cartesian scientific project into the nineteenth century. Nietzsche writes in a note from the Nachla�: "Starting point. This dissertation is an inquiry into the status, nature and extent of Nietzsche's critique of Enlightenment. By engaging in a project of radical self-creation, Nietzsche aligns himself with an Enlightened tradition which since Descartes has concerned itself with the creation of viable individuals. What's more, it was, in his mind, a desirable process. As we know, the meaning of earth is, for Nietzsche, the overman. However, this is not the case. To err! "89 Nietzsche saw how Darwin's theory had attained a hegemonic status in his century, and he struggled to overcome that. He writes, for example, in Beyond Good and Evil: "it is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) Humanity still has no goal. This attack on causality hints at a larger critique, a critique of the idea that rational science can be understood as the pursuit of truth. And indeed, Nietzsche does adopt evolutionary language from time to time in his writings, for example in "Schopenhauer as Educator," where he writes that "when a species has arrived at its limits and is about to go over into a higher species, the goal of its evolution lies, not in the mass of its exemplars and their wellbeing, let alone in those exemplars who happen to come last in point of time, but rather in those apparently scattered and chance existences which favourable conditions have here and there produced. The proper course for all cosmopolitan Europeanists was, in Nietzsche's view, to combat not Judaism but nationalism. For now I want to emphasize that, as Spiekermann puts it, for Nietzsche "the truth of nature-observation and natural science, if there is such a thing, lies in the truth of the living subjects who are part of that nature. "63 The century of science and the century of the mediocre man were, for Nietzsche, one and the same. "35 The problem with conventional, Enlightened science is, of course, this "nothing more," this exclusion of all other interpretations. Clearly, this is an area where Nietzsche remains very much a child of the Enlightenment. "116 By denouncing claims that knowledge is something exclusively possessed by autonomous thinking subjects, Nietzsche hoped to rescue us from a hopeless project: the project of trying to make existence fit into the limited framework of the traditional transcendental subject. Here Darwin's theory of sexual selection, which is a corollary to his theory of natural selection, serves as the basis for a prescriptive attempt to legislate certain social roles for women. "7 Not only does science furnish an inadequate account of the meaning of the world, but it does not even necessarily fulfill its goal of providing useful knowledge about the physical world. Richard White suggests provocatively that "the Overman is an important but limited ideal which gives us an initial perspective upon the imperative of sovereignty. "Bentham." There is no more poisonous poison anywhere: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, whereas it really is the termination of justice. It is perhaps appropriate that this chapter on Enlightened thought should end with a discussion of the work of Herbert Spencer, for Spencer represents in many ways the culmination if not the reducto ad absurdum of many of the Enlightened concepts I have been discussing. It is with Zarathustra and the Overman that this essence finally blossoms into a full-blown utopianism, and this is the subject of my next chapter. He writes in the Attempt at a Self Criticism added to the Birth of Tragedy in 1886: "what I then got hold of, something frightful and dangerous, a problem with horns but not necessarily a bull, in any case a new problem--today I should say that it was the problem of science itself, science considered for the first time as problematic, as questionable. Yet just as with Nietzsche's politics, we find that there are important limitations to his critique of Enlightened science. Lampert writes: Other features of the post-Reformation spirit are more ambiguous: the mobility and restlessness of the spirit, its thirst for independence, its faith in a right to freedom, its 'naturalness.' Heidegger is quite right when he argues that Nietzsche retains and even insists upon a kind of subjectivity. He writes: "There is simply for Nietzsche no coherent way to talk about politics of his day because--in genealogical perspective--the politics tend to be incoherent. Rosenberg, Alfred. A genuine son and perfect heir may yet grow from your seed, even for me: but that is distant. All too often, in Nietzsche's view, the ideal of equality expressed a mutual envy of, and a revenge against, individual personalities. "45 Here Nietzsche is hinting that the inner spirit of socialism is much the same as that of liberalism, and that what drives them is secretly similar. The rational, autonomous subject introduced by Descartes is essentially the same subject who makes free ethical choices in Kant's scheme; this is also the subject who makes the categorical imperative possible. Rather, he is a perspectivist. But it seems to me that the feeling of increase, the feeling of becoming stronger, is itself, quite apart from any usefulness in the struggle, the real progress: only from this feeling does there arise the will to struggle--"98 This is an extremely interesting passage, for although Nietzsche continues to be critical of Darwinian theory, he retains here the idea of progress, that is, the notion that forces might be acting on humanity to propel it towards some higher state. "127 We have seen what some of these abysses were: one who danced near them might be dismissed as antipolitical, branded a fascist, co-opted by those who wish to critique the possibilities of conventional subjectivity without reference to any new kind of selfhood. . As we saw in Chapter One, Kant justifies and grounds his universal Christian ethics in a discussion of universal reason. Indeed, as we shall see shortly, Nietzsche's political program did involve a kind of aristocracy or elite, and it is perhaps tempting to assume on the basis of this that he would have found Bismarck's imperial Reich, with its ruling Junker elite firmly entrenched in the upper echelons of the military and the bureaucracy, quite appealing. Specifically, although Nietzsche constructed a thorough and compelling critique of nineteenth century political forms and of the rational, autonomous Enlightened subject which stood as a necessary precondition to those forms, he made this critique in the name of a new politics which remained very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment. For Nietzsche, the natural state of humanity is brutal and savage, the best societies (such as the Greeks, with their agonistic politics) reflect this, and "Rousseau's question concerning civilization: 'Does man become better through it?' To Nietzsche, this universalistic approach reveals a certain ignorance about the world: "To assert the existence as a whole of things of which we know nothing whatever, precisely because there is an advantage in not being able to know anything of them, was a piece of naivet� of Kant, resulting from needs, mainly moral-metaphysical. For Rousseau, nature represents a kind of utopian ideal condition; it is the departure from this condition, as humans begin to congregate together in social groups and thus lose their independence, that is responsible for mankind's moral fall. Heidegger suggests that "the overman is the expressly willed negation of the previous essence of man. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Nietzsche's critique was not limited simply to an attack on the ideas of science, but was also directed against the culture of those ideas, and against the men who created that culture. The tone of the book is joyous, often celebratory. --. Greg Whitlock writes that "Nietzsche's Zarathustra. He writes in the Gay Science: "Let us introduce the refinement and rigor of mathematics into all sciences as far as this is at all possible, not in the faith that this will lead us to know things but in order to determine our human relation to things. That which is opposed to life earns Nietzsche's strongest wrath, and in his mind, Kant's ethics fits that description. Nietzsche is seeking a world in which people will want to affirm the eternal return. As Deleuze points out, "the eternal return gives the will a rule as rigorous as the Kantian one.�.�.As an ethical thought the eternal return is the new formulation of the practical synthesis: whatever you will, will it in such a way that you also will its eternal return. For now I merely wish to argue that theories such as the eternal return cannot be forced to fit into the framework of modern science. Nietzsche et la Question Politique. In the Genealogy, Nietzsche argues that modern man "needs to believe in a neutral independent 'subject,' prompted by an instinct for self-preservation and self-affirmation in which every lie is sanctified. Thus for Michalson "what is interesting is the way an explicitly Christian frame of reference keeps coming into view and takes considerable control at the decisive moments in Kant's account of moral regeneration. 141Moles, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature, xi-xii. Gilles Deleuze offers a very interesting description of Nietzsche's new ethics. Can you be your own judge and avenger of your law? Soffer, Walter. "92 By rejecting Kant's "intelligible freedom," Nietzsche implicitly rejects his entire ethical position. Furthermore, the radical change in Nietzsche's view of the Enlightenment is taken as evidence of the periodization of his thought, which some prominent Nietzsche scholars (e.g. Nietzsche's overman is the ultimate example of individual creativity and self-sufficiency. Nietzsche is no enemy of Enlightenment: as Georg Picht argues, he wants to deepen and broaden the European Enlightenment "and force it to take the next step. The danger of allowing Enlightened science to present itself as the only possible answer to our questions about the world is quite clear in Nietzsche's mind. Nietzsche saw the democratic tradition as the child of the resentful, vengeful morality that he hated most, the Christian. The problem with the Enlightenment for Nietzsche was not that its basic goals were flawed but that it had gone horribly wrong. For it desires an abundance of state power such as only despotism has ever had; indeed it outbids all the despotisms of the past inasmuch as it expressly aspires to the annihilation of the individual, who appears to it like an unauthorized luxury of nature destined to be improved into a useful organ of the community. 86Leinen, "Aristokratismus und Antipolitik," 208. But the alternative is to retain the inadequate categories of Enlightened subjectivity that have served us so poorly for so long. The autonomous will of Kant determines the universal, but remains restricted by the limits of reason. "67 Nietzsche had no interest in nationalist politics other than to condemn it, and no interest in national wars except to denounce them. Nietzsche is no longer using the language of Enlightened individualism to attack states here, but he is still clearly opposed to the ways in which the state "tames" people; that is, he is denouncing the state as that institution which takes away political agency. They have nothing to do with the natural world as it "really is," if that even means anything. Nietzsche's vision of the future now seems to acquire the negative characteristics of a utopia; it becomes utopian in the sense of being an idealistic, unattainable paradise as naive as anything Condorcet could have conceived. Before he could develop this new idea of science, however, Nietzsche must first complete his attack on conventional, Enlightened science, and his consideration of the cultural effects of Enlightened science in the nineteenth century was to be a fundamental part of that critique. 131Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, 80. Nietzsche: The Politics of Power. More subtle than political Enlightenment, the Enlightened science carried out in laboratories and libraries across Europe represented for Nietzsche an error as fundamental as any error of Enlightened politics. Nietzsche writes in the Nachla�: "We must prepare not only the earth, but also animals and plants, for the overmen,"16 and again, "Zarathustra said to his animals, 'we must make ourselves ready for our guests. He is not concerned with viewing them as would-be mirrors of nature's essence. In this way, Cartright shows that one of Nietzsche's most important goals in Zarathustra is to continue the project of the Enlightenment. "81 Spencer here is engaged in a practice of Enlightened science that should be quite familiar to us by now: he is seeking concrete, universal laws that will explain all possible occurrences. "Science must now demonstrate its utility! It is in the work of Herbert Spencer that this synthesis is completed. What Nietzsche is actually doing here is demonstrating the contingency of scientific law; the reader may recall that this is one of his favorite tactics for showing that a belief often taken to be universally valid is in fact nothing of the kind. It is especially interesting to explore Nietzsche's critique of biology in light of the fact that there is some significant debate as to whether or not Nietzsche's theories make him a Darwinist. However, we should be careful to note here that Nietzsche's critique of modern science must not be mistaken for a critique of the scientific enterprise in general. Furthermore, we get a strong sense here of what Nietzsche means when he uses "politics" in a perjorative way: he means the politics of nationalism, specifically, but more generally all the forms of modern politics that grow out of the Enlightenment tradition. The Antichrist In The Portable Nietzsche. Everything that Kant built, Nietzsche believes, he built "under the seduction of morality. Taken together, these various critiques form a debilitating attack on the Enlightened scientific enterprise as it was practiced in Nietzsche's century. In so doing, the overman is able to affirm the world in its entirety; the overman loves the earth and all history precisely as they are, without subtraction or addition. First, I do not believe that this approach adequately accounts for the influence that the Enlightenment retained, particularly in matters of science and politics, through the nineteenth century and indeed to the present day. These are not the only authors who represent the Enlightenment, by any means. Indeed, this seems plausible; as I argued in Chapter One, Rousseau's politics depends heavily on an Enlightened idea of the self. Babich, Babette E. "Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Scientific Power: Will to Power as Constructive Interpretation." Here he develops rules of intellectual procedure: "the first [is] never to accept anything as true that I [do] not know to be evidently so: that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to include in my judgments nothing more than what presented itself so clearly and distinctly to my mind that I might have no occasion to place it in doubt. Nietzsche's perspectivism is crucial here, for it stands in sharp contrast to the Cartesian method. "Autonomy and Quantum Physics: Nietzsche, Heidegger and Heisenberg." "63 Both Nietzschean Becoming and Enlightened progress are designed to facilitate the development of strong individuals. He writes: "I see on top and surviving everywhere those who compromise life and the value of life.--The error of the school of Darwin becomes a problem to me: how can one be so blind as to see so badly at this point? Michael Ruse argues convincingly that Darwin deliberately placed himself in the prevailing scientific context of his time, which was largely defined by the works of Herschel and Whewell. Kant derives, in short, all the major precepts and prerequisites of Christian ethics, but he derives them from reason alone. Nihilism pervades modern science in an unconscious, subterranean way, and is thus much more insidious and hard to detect. "93 Specifically, I wish to suggest that every one of Nietzsche's political critiques was formulated as part of a broader project, a project that motivated his entire political thought and indeed his philosophical thought in general. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. In a very Enlightened voice, Nietzsche's prophet denounces superstition and ignorance in the name of truth. Nietzsche's pervasive critique of the modern concept of selfhood--and the concomitant priority it accorded principles of identity and unity as the very sine qua non of philosophy--has had an explosive impact on the twentieth century. 22Moles, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature, 37. Indeed, Nietzsche occasionally equates the two, as in Human All Too Human, when he writes: "you wealthy bourgeois who call yourselves 'liberal', admit to yourselves that it is the desire of your own heart that you find so fearful and threatening in the socialists, though in yourselves you consider them inevitable, as though they were something quite different. You must also be the advocate of sorrow! I wish to deal with each of these criticisms separately. Donner, Wendy. Nietzsche might be arguing here for the creation of a stronger, more worthwhile Germany. --. Further, I feel that this individual, so crucial to Nietzsche's project, represents a refinement and culmination of the Enlightenment's project to create a viable form of subjectivity. He writes: "With Kant the Cartesian idea of the subject is clarified in the extreme, without its paradoxical structure. In a section of Zarathustra called "On the Despisers of the Body," Nietzsche has some very interesting things to say about humanity's physical existence. New York: Pocket Books, 1967. While some writers such as Hobbes and Rousseau have rather distinct views of human nature when it is not constrained by society, Nietzsche, in this piece, has little interest in portraying human nature as either fundamentally good or bad. Political Theory 21 (May 1992): 274-307. Nietzsche is frequently blamed for the nationalist disasters of our century. Indeed, as I shall argue shortly, there are a number of ways in which Nietzsche seems to argue deliberately and aggressively in favor of a certain kind of Enlightenment. This is the last and perhaps the most important way in which Nietzsche remains the captive of Enlightenment. Michael Ruse notes that "Lamarck saw things in the organic world as being end-directed, with the end in the animal world being man. "22 This is a more reasonable claim. It is through the category of absolute reason that Kant is able to maintain an essentially Christian ethical position without explicit reference to a Christian God. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987. Nietzsche's attack on nineteenth century political forms begins with a critique of the state. We must recall here Nietzsche's idea of the slave revolt. However, it is precisely here that I must disagree with Hatab, for Nietzsche certainly does have a sense of "progress in the world-order." In a note from the will to power, Nietzsche writes: "'regularity in succession is only a metaphorical expression, as if a rule were being followed here; not a fact. It will thus be with us throughout the present work. "It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose. "12 What the shape of that destiny is we shall see shortly; for now let us simply conclude that Nietzsche rejected the state as the temple of Enlightened, modern mass mediocrity. Nietzsche felt that while scientists like Spencer find in modern science a vindication of their instinct, they are actually responding to a false feeling; true instinct and true value really have nothing to do with modern science, since this kind of science is hostile to life. . History of European Ideas 11 (1989): 675-683. In its relentless pursuit of unattainable "truth," Enlightened science thus eclipses many other, equally valid ideas. Only the yoke for the thousand necks is still lacking: the one goal is lacking. We cannot think of an attraction divorced from an intention.--The will to take possession of a thing or to defend oneself against it and repel it--that, we 'understand': that would be an interpretation of which we could make use. Gerhard Gamm is quite right when he suggests that Kant represents the culmination of Enlightened ideas of subjectivity that originate with Descartes. Specifically, this "new hope" represents an attempt to improve the human condition; in this sense, Nietzsche's project is fundamentally humanistic. 48Blondel, "Nietzsche Contra Rousseau," 676. Indeed, Hatab goes on to note that although Nietzsche emphasizes becoming and change, "our culture emphasizes 'being,' ours is a world of substance-thinking. Strong, Tracy B. Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration. As we might expect, it does not fare well. What, then, are the parts of Enlightened thought that Nietzsche wishes to hold onto? 112Kaufmann, note to Beyond Good and Evil, section 264. "11 For Nietzsche, the superior mind is the one that can transcend the juvenile notions of causality to which we so fearfully cling. "64 However, Alan Kahan claims that the individual was the highest value for Mill, and places him alongside Burckhardt and Tocqueville, as an "aristocratic liberal" who valued the individual more than society.65 It is hardly surprising that there should be an interpretive debate of this kind, since as we have seen, the tension between individual needs (liberty) and social needs (utilitarianism) is very real in Mill's thought. Nietzsche does not explicitly mention Rousseau here, but in this remarkable passage, he outlines and rejects every component of the Enlightened politics for which Rousseau symbolically stands in Nietzsche's writing: liberalism, progress, equal rights and freedom. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. When we forget this we make the dangerous move of postulating it as something universal and indispensable. It was the hegemony of Enlightened reason. "131 Having thoroughly critiqued the restrictive concepts of liberalism, socialism, nationalism, and anarchism as well as the even more insidious illusions of free will and of conventional subjectivity in general, Nietzsche was now able to approach the project which had been his fundamental aim all along, but which had necessarily remained invisible until his critique of the past was complete. Clearly there was much of the utilitarian in Mill. In a very revealing note from the Will to Power, Nietzsche claims that he is "a few centuries ahead in Enlightenment not only of Voltaire but even of Galiani, who was far profounder. Indeed, Peel suggests that Spencer was obliged to theorize a particular kind of evolution in order to be able to derive the kind of progress he wanted: "because he wants to demonstrate history's inevitable path to perfection, he needs a guarantee of direction in evolution. In any case, the important thing for our purposes is to realize that there is a kind of science that Nietzsche admired and was even willing to extol as beautiful. "'You may indeed all be higher men,'" Zarathustra says, ". Thus eternal recurrence is something which the overman must learn to accept and indeed to will, while amor fati is the mechanism by which he becomes able to will the eternal return. One of the founding figures of modern liberalism, and a thinker who operates very clearly within the intellectual framework of the Enlightenment, Mill earns Nietzsche's wrath as a proponent of liberal progress and an ideologue of the politics of the Enlightened Cartesian subject. This was especially true, of course, in Germany, where the anti-Semitism that was already an essential part of nationalist rhetoric in the nineteenth century eventually reached its insane apex with the Holocaust. Just as in his critique of the political forms of Enlightenment, Nietzsche carried out a thorough investigation into the origins of the scientific Enlightenment, in this case choosing Descartes as his target. 47Spiekermann, Naturwissenschaft als subjektlose Macht?, 2. Quite simply, I am talking about Nietzsche's Enlightenment: as this is a work about Nietzsche, I select for discussion aspects of the Enlightenment that are directly relevant to his work. Darnton, Robert. Lewis White Beck. As a stimulus? Mill's essay "Utilitarianism" provides an eloquent interpretation and defense of the principles of utility. Zarathustra can't quite leave reason behind. He believed that human history was progressing towards a goal, his "tenth stage," a future era which Condorcet believed would see "the abolition of inequality between nations, the progress of equality within each nation, and the true perfection of mankind. His critique of the Enlightenment must be understood from the ground up: he began with an attack on the origins of Enlightened thought, broadened this to include the later practitioners of Enlightenment and finally, on the basis of the broader critique, mounted an attack on Enlightenment in general. If there can be no such thing as truth, then there certainly can be no scientific truth, and the only reason that Nietzsche singles out science from among the many false truths he might denounce is that science was in the nineteenth century the most prevalent of these "truths." Gone is the tension between rationalism and empiricism in Darwin. Sometimes the simple fact of a goal, even an unattainable one, is enough. 14Soffer, From Science to Subjectivity, 7. Of course, even Heidegger is forced to admit that Nietzsche makes some fundamental changes to Cartesian subjectivity. Nietzsche's critique of the possibilities of scientific truth has some important practical implications. "95 Like Mill, however, Spencer saw no inherent conflict between an ideology of social progress and a fervent belief in individualism. "46 The Enlightenment that Nietzsche wishes to pursue is not the Enlightenment of the French Revolution and Rousseau. "10 Indeed the state has a double effect here, in that by enslaving the masses it is ironically at the same creating humanity as a mass, rather than promoting the radical new kind of political agency that Nietzsche favored. Nietzsche writes in the Will to Power: "the 'subject' is only a fiction: the ego of which one speaks when one censures egoism does not exist at all. Nietzsche was no scientist. It is a totalizing and, some would say, totalitarian ethos; by making universal claims about humans and about their societies and their politics, Enlightenment threatens to silence unenlightened voices and discourses.1 It may well be, then, that Enlightenment is something that we will wish to overcome. Whatever his private feelings about Jews might have been, his public opinion, as shown in his published works, is quite clear: he acknowledged a Jewish "problem" only to the extent that the disease of nationalism produced one. --. "122 Here Nietzsche is discussing in the context of art a topic that would later become central to his political and philosophical thought. Michalson, Gordon E. Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral Regeneration. "31 In Lampert's view, then, Nietzsche emerges as a thinker who is pro-science but anti-Cartesian, which is exactly the position I wish to take. This is hardly surprising when we recall that the political system which Nietzsche most respected was that of the ancient Greeks. "58 The image here is a clearly totalitarian one. And on the issue of progress, Nietzsche's critique was especially limited. In a tirade against religion, Zarathustra says: "you know it well: your cowardly devil within you, who would like to fold his hands and rest his hands in his lap and be more comfortable--this cowardly devil urges you, 'There is a God.' This attack on the hegemony of Darwinian evolutionary theory contains a critique of the mechanisms by which Darwin accounts for evolution. Deleuze goes so far as to argue that Nietzsche's ethics represent an inverted Kantianism: In Kant, critique was not able to discover the truly active instance which would have been capable of carrying it through. "71 Far from being the enemy of the ascetic priest, the modern scientist is actually an ascetic priest par excellence, carrying on the work of the ascetic from within the comfortable disguise of scientific objectivity. --. More importantly, he is suggesting that Nietzsche is looking for a way to resolve the incomplete and problematic project of modern, Enlightened subjectivity. His critique of the political philosophy of his century was perhaps most clearly articulated in his attack on the liberalism of John Stuart Mill. Principles of Sociology. What does not receive criticism in Rousseau's work, however, is the autonomous Enlightenment subject. But what makes that "we" valid for him is that it shows a proper respect for the "I:" Rousseau's criterion for the just society is that it must maintain and preserve the freedom that humans enjoyed in the state of nature, before society. As Wilcox notes, Nietzsche seems to believe that "science gets at the truth, and represents a higher culture, because it is disciplined, whereas religion and metaphysics show themselves as self-indulgent. . Energy wasted on utopian pipe dreams was energy that could no longer be devoted to the actual improvement of humanity, as Nietzsche saw it. International Studies in Philosophy 22 (1990): 79-92. "21 This would seem at first to contradict my claims about Nietzsche's critique of the Cartesian method. But that doesn't change the importance of this freedom for him, since these geniuses are the ones who create the ideal society. Brookfield, Vermont: Gower Publishing Company, 1991. . He emphasizes the growth of science and rational knowledge, which are, of course, two other pillars of Enlightened thought. It allowed him to advocate and encourage certain particular beliefs about politics and society. That is, a critique of the independent subject implies a corresponding critique of that subject as a knowing entity, and therefore a critique of the possibilities of knowledge itself. This is the limit of Nietzsche's attack on the Enlightened politics of the nineteenth century. .Nietzsche's individualism thus shows itself to be both undemocratic and apolitical. Politics seems to represent for Nietzsche a symptom of the sickness that was consuming nineteenth century European society, namely the sickness of the Enlightenment. But Nietzsche goes on to write: "does it not thrill through all your senses--this sound of sweet allurement with which science has proclaimed its glad tidings. I don't believe so. diss., Rheinisch-Westf�lischen Technischen Hochschule Aachen, 1982. "57 Antosik seems to accept the equation that certain Nazi theorists made between Nietzsche's Overman and the Aryan supermen. Furthermore, evolutionary biology, with its insistence that the human species is constantly improving and progressing towards a better world, reflects important principles of the Enlightenment. Untimely Meditations. The title of the book in German is Die fr�liche Wissenschaft, where fr�liche connotes gay, happy or merry. The Will to Power. But those who are used to it would never wish to live anywhere else than in this bright, transparent, vigorous, electrified air--in this virile air. "The. Las Vegas: Peter Lang, 1978. Higgins also finds it difficult to sustain the position that Nietzsche was no humanist. For Nietzsche, Kant's only real option is to smuggle Christianity back into the Enlightenment, and this move conclusively proves for Nietzsche the bankruptcy of conventional Enlightened thought. Richard White, for example, claims that: following in the tradition of Kant, Nietzsche is inspired by an ideal of autonomy which expresses the highest achievement of the individual life; though in distinction to Kant, Nietzsche recognized that the basic tendency of modern life is directed towards the suppression of the individual, so that any attempt to illuminate the nature of autonomy must be profoundly difficult. We have already mentioned his attack on the state; this would certainly be in keeping with an anarchist position. 119Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 501. As he puts it in Beyond Good and Evil, "the will is not only a complex of sensation and thinking, but it is above all an affect, and specifically the affect of the command. Chapter Two deals with his attack on the origins of Enlightenment. The level of the species is not raised. "27 In Heidegger's view, then, Nietzsche is possible only as the heir to Descartes. 'but there is something in me that is of tomorrow and the day after and time to come. But it also an enterprise he saw as extremely important, and here Nietzsche retained a crucial aspect of Enlightenment thought. "68 The individual for Mill is a social good. Yes, Nietzsche is frequently critical of ideas, values and methods that fall under "The Enlightenment," but he also shares some of those things with The Enlightenment. The social contract is for Rousseau an historical or pseudo-historical phenomenon, and at first glance its purpose seems to be to create a strong community. He writes in Daybreak: "No utilitarians.--'Power which is attacked and defamed is worth more than impotence which is treated only with kindness'--that is how the Greeks felt. 23Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 115-116. Rationality, science and an unshakable faith in human progress found their material manifestation in the Crystal Palace exhibition, while the autonomous subject-self of the Enlightenment became enshrined in the discourse of political liberalism. "63 Although this passage shows that Nietzsche holds a firm belief in the value of warfare, it also begins to raise some puzzling questions. Moles suggests that "Nietzsche anticipated ideas whose full development was achieved only in the twentieth century revolution in physics, and which few, perhaps none, of his contemporaries had foreseen. . They provide, in short, the historical context without which we cannot fully understand Nietzsche's critique. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. "89 Clearly this is meant as a critique of the ways in which modern society and the modern state trivialize the individual and mold individuals into faceless herds. Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida. Walter Kaufmann) have disputed. Yet the situation is more complex than this, as Andrzej Rapaczynski notes: "the replacement of the unjust social order based on inequality with an institution of legitimate political authority is supposed to preserve an individual's freedom while ensuring the content and motivational viability of his moral system. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. . And yet Nietzsche must always remain frustrated as he attempted to remove utopian influences from his own thought, for he had his own ideal vision of what lay in store for humanity. Another aspect of Nietzsche's attempt to problematize the Enlightened political subject is his attempt to render that subject an historically contingent phenomenon. Rather, he developed these critiques as part of a much broader and more far-reaching attack on the autonomous, unified Enlightenment subject that made such political systems possible. Rather, it seems likely that Nietzsche saw in Bismarck someone capable of mounting in the political world a critique of liberalism similar to the one that, as we saw above, Nietzsche was mounting in the intellectual world. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. I would also like to say a word about the social status of these six men. "43 By stigmatizing the Revolution as a mere continuation of what Nietzsche saw as a bankrupt ethical scheme, and by installing Rousseau as the man responsible for this continuation, Nietzsche attacks both Revolutionary politics and their putative author, Rousseau. "106 Modern man is terrified of non-existence, and so seizes on every elusive, illusory possibility to try to convince himself that he has a stable, independent existence. "Nietzsche Contra Rousseau: Goethe Versus Catalina." the conclusions were to follow as ineluctably and irrefutably from the premises as in a scientific demonstration. "86 This is the essence of Nietzschean affirmation, and it points to the true meaning of eternal return. He thus repairs a breach in Enlightened thought. But his redefinition of human subjectivity was a first step that must be taken before these larger political questions could be addressed. Much as in our discussion of Rousseau, we see that there are two possible interpretations of Mill's political position, which we may loosely describe as egalitarian and elitist. Wahrheit als Differenz: Studien zu einer anderen Theorie der Moderne. 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