Nietzsche and Kant on Aesthetics and Anthropology 9781474275996, 9781474276023, 9781350035577

Table of contents :
Cover
Titles
Volume 1
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Editors:
Contributors:
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant
Abbreviations for Nietzsche’s Writings
Abbreviations or ‘Siglen’ for Nietzsche’s Writings in German
Abbreviations for Nietzsche’s Writings in English
Abbreviations of Kant’s Writings with Indicationof the Corresponding AA Volume
References
Nietzsche’s writings
Kant’s writings
Translations of Nietzsche’s and Kant’s Writings
Nietzsche
Kant
Introduction
1. The young Nietzsche’s acquaintance with Kant and Kantianism
2. Nietzsche’s criticisms of Kant
3. Outline of the volume
Notes
References
1 Nietzsche, Transcendental Argument and the Subject
1. Introduction
2. Transcendental argument in Kant
3. Nietzsche against transcendental argument
4. Necessary perspectives
Notes
References
2 From Pure Reason to Historical Knowledge: Nietzsche’s (Virtual) Objections to Kant’s First Critique
1. Introduction
2. Reason is a natural and historical product
3. Reason is one and the same thing as language
4. The formation of concepts of empirical objects
5. Concluding remarks
Notes
References
3 The Thought of Becoming and the Place of Philosophy: Some Aspects of Nietzsche’s Reception and Criticism of Transcendental I
1. Introduction
2. Spir’s concept of identity and Nietzsche’s tropological model of cognition
3. Nietzsche’s Parmenides in the light of Spir’s ontology
4. Nietzsche, Spir and the reality of time
5. The origin of representation from the becoming
6. The temporality of representation and the intentionality of drives
Notes
References
4 The Consequences of Kant’s First Critique: Nietzsche on Truth and the Thing in Itself
1. Introduction
2. Nietzsche on Kant’s first Critique: from The Birth of Tragedy to Human, All Too Human
3. Nietzsche on Kant’s first Critique: from The Gay Science onwards
4. The thing in itself and the problem of truth
5. Conclusion
Notes
References
5 Nietzsche and the Thing in Itself
1. Introduction
2. Kant and the thing in itself
3. Nietzsche’s criticisms of the thing in itself
Notes
References
6 Nietzsche on Kant’s Distinction between Knowledge (Wissen) and Belief (Glaube)
1. Introduction
2. Kant’s realm of belief
3. Lange’s reshaping of Kant’s normative realm
4. Nietzsche’s early reaction
5. Nietzsche’s late reaction
6. Conclusions
Notes
References
7 On Teleological Judgement: A Debate between Kant and Nietzsche
1. Teleology vs. contingency
2. Purposiveness and self-design
3. On the meaning of human existence
Notes
References
8 ‘Resolute Reversals’: Kant’s and Nietzsche’s Orienting Decisions Concerning the Distinction between Reason and Nature
1. Nietzsche’s esteem of Kant for his ‘resolute’ critical ‘reversal’ of the distinction between reason and nature
2. Kant’s orienting technique for making distinctions in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason
3. Kant’s persistent uncritical presuppositions
4. Nietzsche’s ‘revolution of the way of thinking’ regarding the distinction between reason and nature: Pluralization and funct
5. Kant’s far-reaching critical premises: Pluralization and functionalization of reason for orientation II
Notes
References
9 The Kantian Roots of Nietzsche’s Will to Power
1. Introduction
2. Nietzsche’s appraisal of Kant
3. The will to power: An alternative to Kant’s synthesis
4. Objections and replies
Notes
References
10 ‘Kant: or cant as intelligible character’: Meaning and Function of the Type ‘Kant’ and his Philosophy in Twilight of the Id
1. Text and intertext
2. Philosophy as ‘symptomatology’: ‘Kant’ in Twilight of the Idols
3. ‘Reason’ in philosophy
Notes
References
11 Nietzsche, Kant and Self-Observation: Dealing with the Risk of ‘Landing in Anticyra’
1. Kant on self-observation
2. Nietzsche on self-observation
2.1 Getting closer to Anticyra
3. Landing in Anticyra: A lucky shipwreck?
Notes
References
Complete Bibliography
Name Index
Subject Index
Volume 2
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Editors
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant
Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Writings
Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Writings in German
Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Writings in English
Abbreviations of Kant’s Writings
Abbreviations of Kant’s Writings with Indicationof the Corresponding AA Volume
References
Nietzsche’s writings
Kant’s writings
Translations of Nietzsche’s and Kant’s Writings
Nietzsche
Kant
Introduction
Contributions
Notes
References
1 The Problem of Normative Authority in Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche
1. Kant on the problem of normative authority
2. Hegel on the problem of normative authority
2.1 Hegel’s objection to Kant
2.2 Hegel’s alternative to the Kantian strategy
3. The relationship between the Nietzschean, Kantian and Hegelian theories of normative authority
3.1 Nietzsche agrees that freedom places determinate constraints on what can be willed
3.2 How Hegelian could Nietzsche’s theory be?
3.3 A theory that is both Kantian and Hegelian?
4. Nietzsche’s solution to the problem of normative authority
4.1 What is will to power?
4.2 Will to power as a claim about the essential nature of willing
4.3 Why does freedom require revaluation in terms of power?
4.4 The structure of Nietzsche’s theory
5. Conclusion
Notes
References
2 Normativity and Moral Psychology: Nietzsche’s Critique of Kantian Universality
1. Scene setting
2. Kant’s derivation
3. Nietzsche’s basic challenge
3.1 Nietzsche and normativity?
3.2 Nietzschean self-.legislation
3.3 Two objections
4. Nietzsche versus Kant on moral psychology
5. Concluding remarks
Notes
References
3 Kant, Nietzsche and the Discursive Availability of Action
1. Kant and the discursive availability of action
2. Nietzsche and the discursive availability of action
3. Differences between Kant and Nietzsche
4. Conclusion
Notes
References
4 Kant’s ‘Respect for the Law’ as the ‘Feeling of Power’: On (the Illusion of) Sovereignty
1. Kant on the motives of pure practical reason (KpV chapter III)
Interlude: An attenuated version of Kant’s account of Achtung
2. Nietzsche on remembering and forgetting
3. Nietzsche’s physiology of freedom
4. Conclusion
Notes
References
5 Freedom as Independence: Kant and Nietzsche on Non-Domination, Self-Love and the Rivalrous Emotions
1. Kant on freedom, self-love and maturity
2. Nietzsche on freedom and ethical pathologies
3. Nietzsche’s criticism of Kant
4. Conclusion
Notes
References
6 Autonomy, Spiritual Illness and Theodicy in Kant and Nietzsche
1. Conceptions of justice and autonomy
2. Genealogy and theodicy
3. Spiritual illness and the bad conscience
4. The redemptive potential of spiritual illness
5. Coda: Justifying nature
Notes
References
7 Phantom Duty? Nietzsche versus Königsbergian Chinadom
1. The origin of duty?
2. Nietzschean duties
Notes
References
8 Spontaneity and Sovereignty: Nietzsche’s Concepts and Kant’s Philosophy
1. Early neo-.Kantianism and the inadequacy of Kant’s psychology
2. Nietzsche’s uses of ‘spontaneity’
3. Spontaneity in the Nachlass of Daybreak
4. Nietzsche, Goethe and Schopenhauer on Kant’s ‘radical evil’
5. Nietzsche’s anti-Kantian ‘categorical imperative’ and the autonomy of the sovereign individual
Notes
References
9 Contra Kant: Experimental Ethics in Guyau and Nietzsche
1. Introduction
2.
3.
4.
5.
Notes
References
10 Question or Answer?: Kant, Nietzsche and the Practical Commitment of Philosophy
1. From answer to question (BGE 11, KSA 5.24–6)
2. A philosophy summarized in questions (GS 343–6, KSA 5.573–81)
3. Friendship and nihilism
3.1 Nihilism
3.2 Friendship and philosophy
3.3 Kant on friendship
3.4 Nietzsche’s inverted idealism
4. The practical commitment of Nietzsche’s philosophy
Notes
References
Complete Bibliography
Index
Volume 3
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Editors
Contributors
Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant
Abbreviations for Nietzsche’s Writings
Abbreviations or ‘Siglen’ for Nietzsche’s Writings in German
Abbreviations for Nietzsche’s Writings in English
Abbreviations of Kant’s Writings with Indicationof the Corresponding AA Volume
References
Nietzsche’s writings
Kant’s writings
Translations of Nietzsche’s and Kant’s Writings
Introduction
Contributions
References
Part I On the Third Critique
1 Nietzsche Contra Kant on Genius, Originality and Agonal Succession
1. Introduction
2. Schopenhauer as Kantian genius
3. The problem of originality and precedent in Kant’s account of genius
3.1 KU §32
3.2 KU §47
Intermezzo: Nietzsche’s programme of aesthetic perfectionism
4. Nietzsche’s engagement with Wagner: Daemonic transmissibility or agonal Betrachten
5. Agonal jealousy: Originality and mimesis
Conclusion
Notes
References
2 Art beyond Truth and Lie in a Moral Sense
1. Art and the question of truth
2. Kant: Aesthetic clarification of the ideal
3. Nietzsche: ‘Consciously remaining in untruth’ (bewusst in der Unwahrheit bleiben)
Notes
References
3 ‘Who is Right, Kant or Stendhal?’: On Nietzsche’s Kantian Critique of Kant’s Aesthetics
1. Introduction
2. The ‘promise of happiness’ versus ‘disinterestedness’
3. Rausch and idealizing
4. Rausch, instinct and judgement
5. Rausch, ‘power’ and the ‘vanity of the species’
6. Kantian versus Schopenhauerian disinterestedness
7. Spiritualization
8. Life and expansion of perspective in Nietzsche and Kant
Notes
References
4 Beyond the Beautiful and the Sublime?: Nietzsche, Aesthetics and the Question about the Subject
1. Introduction
2. The Kantian ‘beautiful’ and ‘sublime’: A critique of modern metaphysics
3. Nietzsche’s reassessment of the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘sublime’
Notes
References
5 From Kant’s Critique of Judgement to The Birth of Tragedy: The Meaning of the ‘Aesthetic’ in Nietzsche
1. Introduction
2. Nietzsche’s aesthetic conception of reality
3. Kant’s conceptual framework
4. The voice of nature
5. Return to the Apollinian-Dionysian dualism
6. The metaphysical experience of the aesthetic
Notes
References
6 Aesthetic Quantity, Aesthetic Acts and Willed Necessity in Nietzsche’s Engagement with Kant’s Critique of Judgement
1. Introduction
2. Moments of aesthetic judgement in Kant and Nietzsche
2.1 Quality – life and communicability
2.2 Quantity
2.3 Relation: Purposiveness without a purpose
2.4 Modality
3. Conclusion
Notes
References
7 Teleological Judgement and the End of History
1. Teleological judgement and historiographical judgement
2. Five arguments against teleology
3. An alternative to teleology
4. Reviving the argument against teleology in historical theory
Conclusion
Notes
References
8 Nietzsche and ‘the Great Chinese of Königsberg’
Notes
References
Part II On the Anthropology
9 Reason and Laughter in Kant and Nietzsche
1. Introduction
2. Kant: Laughter as an affect
3. Pleasure in nonsense
4. Nietzsche: ‘To laugh from the whole truth’
Conclusion
Notes
References
10 ‘jeder Geist hat seinen Klang’: Kant and Nietzsche on the Sense of Hearing
1. Introduction: Philosophy’s traditional disqualification of hearing
2. Kant’s revaluation of hearing in the Anthropology
3. The soundless dialogue between me and myself
4. Every spirit has its own sound
Notes
References
11 On the Role of Maxims: Nietzsche’s Critique of Kant’s Philosophical Anthropology
1. Introduction: Two anthropologies of character
2. Connecting Kant’s Anthropology to his critical project
3. Moral character in the Anthropology
4. Nietzsche’s genealogical anthropology
5. Character in the Genealogy of Morals
Notes
References
Complete Bibliography
Name Index
Subject Index

Citation preview

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Nietzsche’s Engagements with Kant and the Kantian Legacy Volume I Nietzsche’s Engagements with Kant and the Kantian Legacy Volume II Nietzsche’s Engagements with Kant and the Kantian Legacy Volume III

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Nietzsche, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics

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Nietzsche’s Engagements with Kant and the Kantian Legacy Edited by Marco Brusotti, Herman Siemens, João Constâncio, Tom Bailey Nietzsche has often been considered a thinker independent of the philosophy of his time and radically opposed to the concerns and concepts of modern and contemporary philosophy. But there is an increasing awareness of his sophisticated engagements with his contemporaries and of his philosophy’s rich potential for debates with modern and contemporary thinkers. Nietzsche’s Engagements with Kant and the Kantian Legacy explores a significant field for such engagements, Kant and Kantianism.   Bringing together an international team of established Nietzsche-​scholars who have done extensive work in Kant, contributors include both senior scholars and young, upcoming researchers from a broad range of countries and traditions. Working from the basis that Nietzsche is better understood as thinking ‘with and against’ Kant and the Kantian legacy, they examine Nietzsche’s explicit and implicit treatments of Kant, Kantians, and Kantian concepts, as well as the philosophical issues that they raise for both Nietzschean and Kantian philosophy. Volume I: Nietzsche, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics Edited by Marco Brusotti and Herman Siemens Volume II: Nietzsche and Kantian Ethics Edited by João Constâncio and Tom Bailey Volume III: Nietzsche and Kant on Aesthetics and Anthropology Edited by Maria João Mayer Branco and Katia Hay

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Nietzsche’s Engagements with Kant and the Kantian Legacy Volume I Nietzsche, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics Edited by Marco Brusotti and Herman Siemens

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Marco Brusotti, Herman Siemens and Contributors, 2017 Marco Brusotti and Herman Siemens have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the editors. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: Pack: 978-1-4742-7603-0 HB: 978-​1-​4742-​7477-​7 ePDF: 978-1-3500-3557-7 ePub: 978-1-3500-3558-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Brusotti, Marco, editor. Title: Nietzsche’s engagements with Kant and the Kantian legacy / edited by Marco Brusotti, Herman Siemens, João Constâncio, Tom Bailey. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017– | Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Volume 1. Nietzsche, Kant, and the problem of metaphysics / edited by Marco Brusotti and Herman Siemens -- Volume 2. Nietzsche and Kantian ethics / edited by João Constâncio and Tom Bailey – Volume 3. Nietzsche and Kant on aesthetics and anthropology / edited by Maria Branco and Katia Hay. Identifiers: LCCN 2016040856 | ISBN 9781474274777 (volume 1 : hb) | ISBN 9781474274791 (volume 1 : epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. | Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804. Classification: LCC B3317 .N5424 2017 | DDC 193–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040856 Cover design: Catherine Wood Cover image © Getty Images Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

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Contents Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant Translations of Nietzsche’s and Kant’s Writings Introduction  Marco Brusotti and Herman Siemens 1 2 3

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Nietzsche, Transcendental Argument and the Subject  John Richardson

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From Pure Reason to Historical Knowledge: Nietzsche’s (Virtual) Objections to Kant’s First Critique  Benedetta Zavatta

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The Thought of Becoming and the Place of Philosophy: Some Aspects of Nietzsche’s Reception and Criticism of Transcendental Idealism via Afrikan Spir  William Mattioli

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The Consequences of Kant’s First Critique: Nietzsche on Truth and the Thing in Itself  João Constâncio

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Nietzsche and the Thing in Itself  André Luís Mota Itaparica

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Nietzsche on Kant’s Distinction between Knowledge (Wissen) and Belief (Glaube)  Mattia Riccardi

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On Teleological Judgement: A Debate between Kant and Nietzsche  Beatrix Himmelmann

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‘Resolute Reversals’: Kant’s and Nietzsche’s Orienting Decisions Concerning the Distinction between Reason and Nature  Werner Stegmaier

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The Kantian Roots of Nietzsche’s Will to Power  Tsarina Doyle

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7 8

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Contents

10 ‘Kant: or cant as intelligible character’: Meaning and Function of the Type ‘Kant’ and his Philosophy in Twilight of the Idols Axel Pichler

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11 Nietzsche, Kant and Self-​Observation: Dealing with the Risk of ‘Landing in Anticyra’  Luca Lupo

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Complete Bibliography Name Index Subject Index

275 289 293

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Notes on Contributors Editors: Marco Brusotti is professor of history of philosophy at the University of Salento (Lecce, Italy) and lecturer in philosophy at the Technische Universität Berlin. He is president of the Nietzsche-​Gesellschaft, a member of the academic board of the Friedrich-​Nietzsche-​Stiftung, the director of the section of the ‘Colli Montinari’ Center for Nietzsche Studies in Lecce and a member of the editorial board of the database Nietzsche Online (Berlin/​Boston: De Gruyter). He has published widely on Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, is the author of Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis. Philosophie und ästhetische Lebensgestaltung von Morgenröthe bis Also sprach Zarathustra (De Gruyter, 1997) and has edited, with R. Reschke, ‘Einige werden posthum geboren.’ Friedrich Nietzsches Wirkungen (De Gruyter, 2012)  and, with H.  Heit and G.  Abel, Nietzsches Wissenschaftsphilosophie:  Hintergründe, Wirkungen und Aktualität (De Gruyter, 2011). Herman Siemens is associate professor of modern philosophy at Leiden University, adjunct professor at the Universidad Diego Portales (Chile) and research associate of the University of Pretoria (South Africa) and the Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal). He is president of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society and, with P.  van Tongeren, director of the Nietzsche-​Wörterbuch (De Gruyter). He specializes in Nietzsche and post-​Nietzschean philosophy, political philosophy and aesthetics and has published widely in these areas, including the book, coedited with V.  Roodt, Nietzsche, Power and Politics:  Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought (De Gruyter, 2008). He currently leads a research programme on Nietzsche and Kant as ancestors of contemporary agonistic and deliberative theories of democracy.

Contributors: João Constâncio is associate professor of philosophy at Nova University of Lisbon (UNL/​FCSH). He earned his PhD there with a dissertation on Plato. He

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Notes on Contributors

also does research at IFILNOVA/​FCSH, where he directs the research group ‘Nietzsche International Lab’ (NIL). He is the author of Arte e niilismo: Nietzsche e o enigma do mundo (2013) and co-​editor of four books on Nietzsche, including Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity (De Gruyter, 2015). He has also published many articles on Nietzsche, including ‘On Consciousness: Nietzsche’s Departure from Schopenhauer’, Nietzsche-​Studien 40 (2011). Tsarina Doyle is lecturer in philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She has written journal articles on various aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy and is the author of Nietzsche on Epistemology and Metaphysics: The World in View (Edinburgh University Press, 2009). Beatrix Himmelmann is professor of philosophy at The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø. She has worked extensively on themes in Kant and Nietzsche; her systematic interests focus on issues of practical philosophy. She has held visiting positions at Zurich University, at Humboldt University of Berlin, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-​Champaign and at Brown. From 2004 to 2012 she served as president of the German Nietzsche Society. Her book publications include Kants Begriff des Glücks (de Gruyter, 2003); (ed.) Kant und Nietzsche im Widerstreit (de Gruyter, 2005); Nietzsche (2006); and (ed.) On Meaning in Life (2013). André Luís Mota Itaparica teaches philosophy at Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia, Brazil. He has published several articles on Nietzsche. He is also author of Nietzsche: Estilo e Moral (Discurso/​UNIJUÍ, 2001) and co-​ editor, with Márcio José Silveira Lima, of Verdade e linguagem em Nietzsche (Edufba, 2014). Luca Lupo is researcher in moral philosophy and assistant professor in applied ethics and bioethics at the University of Calabria. His research focuses primarily on the textual and philosophical analysis of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly on Nietzsche’s ethics and anthropology. He is a member of the Interdepartmental Centre for Nietzsche Studies for Nineteenth-​and Twentieth-​ Century Studies, the Seminario Permanente Nietzscheano; the Groupe International de Recherches sur Nietzsche (GIRN); the Centro Studi di Filosofia e Psicoanalisi of the University of Calabria and editor of the Bollettino Filosofico. His publications include: Filosofia della Serendipity (Guida, 2012), Le colombe dello scettico. Riflessioni di Nietzsche sulla coscienza negli anni 1880–​1888 (ETS, 2006) as well as many articles in books and journals.

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Notes on Contributors

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William Mattioli is a PhD student at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil. He is a member of the Nietzsche-​Group UFMG (GruNie). He received his master’s degree under the Erasmus Mundus Program: EuroPhilosophie. His research interests include:  Nietzsche, neo-​Kantianism, epistemology and the problem of the Unconscious. Axel Pichler is a researcher (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) at the Stuttgart Research Centre for Text Studies. He studied philosophy and German studies at the Universities of Vienna and Graz (Austria), where he received his PhD in 2009 with a study on Nietzsche, die Orchestikologie und das dissipative Denken (Passagen, 2010). Thanks to a scholarship by the Fritz-​Thyssen-​Stiftung, he investigated the influence of textuality on Nietzsche’s philosophy at FU Berlin in 2012 (cf. Philosophie als Text –​Zur Darstellungsform der ‘Götzen-​Dämmerung’, De Gruyter 2014). Currently he is co-​editing a new critical edition of Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Mattia Riccardi is project-​ director at the Internationales Zentrum für Philosophie NRW Institute of Philosophy of the University of Bonn, Germany. After obtaining his PhD from Humboldt Universität, Berlin, he was postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Porto, Portugal. His main areas of research are the history of nineteenth-​century philosophy and the philosophy of mind. He has written a book on Nietzsche’s metaphysics and published articles in journals such as European Journal of Philosophy, Inquiry and Nietzsche-​Studien. John Richardson is professor of philosophy at New  York University. Besides numerous articles on nineteenth-​and twentieth-​ century continental philosophy, he is the author of Nietzsche’s System (Oxford University Press, 1996), Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (Oxford University Press, 2004), Existential Epistemology:  A  Heideggerian Critique of the Cartesian Project (Oxford University Press, 1986) and Heidegger (Routledge, 2012). He is also the co-​editor of Nietzsche (with B.  Leiter, Oxford University Press, 2001)  and The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (with K. Gemes, Oxford University Press, 2013). Werner Stegmaier is Gründungsprofessor at the Institut für Philosophie of the University of Greifswald; he occupied the chair of philosophy in the field of practical philosophy until 2011 and is currently co-​editor of Nietzsche-​Studien and the Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-​Forschung. His key publications

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include:  Substanz. Grundbegriff der Metaphysik (Frommann-​Holzboog, 1977); Philosophie der Fluktuanz. Dilthey und Nietzsche (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992); Nietzsches Genealogie der Moral. Werkinterpretation (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994); Levinas (Herder, 2002); Philosophie der Orientierung (de Gruyter, 2008); Nietzsche zur Einführung (Junius, 2011); and Nietzsches Befreiung der Philosophie. Kontextuelle Interpretation des V. Buchs der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft (de Gruyter, 2012). Benedetta Zavatta is Marie Curie Fellow at ITEM (CNRS/​ENS). Previously, she was a research fellow of the Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT) and visiting scholar at the Columbia University of New York (2013), at the University of Basel (2005–​2006), at Ludwig-​Maximillians University of Munich (Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow 2007–​2009) and at the Maison Française d’Oxford (2008). Her research focuses on Nietzsche and nineteenth-​century German Philosophy, and she has published numerous articles on Nietzsche’s relations to other philosophers.

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Acknowledgements Previous/​earlier versions of the papers by André Luís Mota Itaparica and by William Mattioli appeared in Portuguese in the journal Kriterion (Itaparica, André Luis Mota: ‘As objeções de Nietzsche ao conceito de coisa em si’. Kriterion, Vol. 54, no. 128, dez 2013, 307–​20; Mattioli, William: ‘O devir e o lugar da filosofia: alguns aspectos da recepção e da crítica de Nietzsche ao idealismo transcendental via Afrikan Spir’. Kriterion, Vol. 54, no. 128, dez 2013, 321–​48). The editors and publishers also wish to thank Walter de Gruyter for permission to use the figures in the chapter by Axel Pichler from:  Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘Arbeitsheft W II 3’, in: KGW IX/​7: Arbeitshefte W II 3 and W II 4, ed. by Haase, Marie-​Luise/​Riebe, Thomas/​Röllin, Beat/​Stockmar, René/​Trenkle, Franziska/​Weißbrodt, Daniel. Unter Mitarb. V. Weber, Karoline (2008, p. 129).

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Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant

Abbreviations for Nietzsche’s Writings All references to Nietzsche’s writings are from the following editions: BAW

Nietzsche, F. (1933–40), Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, Hans Joachim Mette/Carl Koch/Karl Schlechta (eds), Munich:  C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Reprinted as:  Frühe Schriften 1854–1869, Munich: DTV 1994. KGB Nietzsche, F. (1975–2004), Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, established by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, continued by Norbert Miller and Annemarie Pieper, Berlin/New  York:  De Gruyter. KGW Nietzsche, F. (1967–), Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, established by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, continued by Wolfgang Müller-Lauter and Karl Pestalozzi (eds), Berlin/New  York:  De Gruyter. KGW IX Nietzsche, F. (2001–): Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung IX:  Der handschriftliche Nachlaß ab Frühjahr 1885 in differenzierter Transkription, Marie-Louise Haase/Michael Kohlenbach et al. (eds), Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. KSA Nietzsche, F. (1980), Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, Giorgio Colli/Mazzino Montinari (eds), Munich/Berlin/ New York: DTV/De Gruyter. KSB Nietzsche, F. (1986), Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe in 8 Bänden, Giorgio Colli/Mazzino Montinari (eds), Munich/Berlin/ New York: DTV/De Gruyter.

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Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant

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Abbreviations or ‘Siglen’ for Nietzsche’s Writings in German AC EH EH (GT) EH Schicksal EH Vorwort FW GD GD Alten GD Fabel GD Sokrates GD Streifzüge GM GT GT Versuch JGB M MA VM WA WA Epilog WA Nachschrift WS Z Z I Verbrecher

Der Antichrist. Fluch auf das Christenthum Ecce homo. Wie man wird, was man ist see GT Warum ich ein Schicksal bin Ecce Homo, Vorwort Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (‘la gaya scienza’) Götzen-Dämmerung oder Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt Was ich den Alten verdanke Wie die ‘wahre Welt’ endlich zur Fabel wurde Das Problem des Sokrates Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen Zur Genealogie der Moral. Eine Streitschrift Die Geburt der Tragödie Die Geburt der Tragödie, Versuch einer Selbstkritik Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft Morgenröthe. Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freie Geister. Erster Band (MA II) Erste Abtheilung:  Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche Der Fall Wagner. Ein Musikanten-Problem Der Fall Wagner, Epilog Der Fall Wagner, Nachschrift (MA II) Zweite Abtheilung: Der Wanderer und sein Schatten Also sprach Zarathustra. Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen [1. Teil], Vom bleichen Verbrecher

Abbreviations for Nietzsche’s Writings in English A AOM BGE

The Antichrist Assorted Opinions and Maxims (HH II) Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future

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Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant

BT BT Attempt D D Preface EH EH (BT) EH (Z) GM GS HH (volume I) PTG SE TI TI Errors TI Fable TI Germans TI Improvers TI Morality TI Reason TI Skirmishes TI Socrates TL UM WS Z Z I Goals Z IV The Shadow

The Birth of Tragedy The Birth of Tragedy, Attempt at a Self-Criticism Daybreak or Dawn Daybreak or Dawn, Preface Ecce Homo. How One Becomes What One Is Ecce Homo, The Birth of Tragedy Ecce Homo, Thus Spoke Zarathustra On the Genealogy of Morals (or Morality). A Polemic The Gay Science Human, All Too Human Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (UM III) Schopenhauer as Educator Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer The Four Great Errors How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable What the Germans lack The ‘Improvers’ of Humanity Morality as Anti-Nature ‘Reason’ in Philosophy Skirmishes of an Untimely Man The Problem of Socrates On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral (or Nonmoral) Sense Untimely Meditations (HH II) The Wanderer and his Shadow Thus Spoke Zarathustra, A Book for All and None Part 1, Of the Thousand and One Goals Part 4, The Shadow

Abbreviations of Kant’s Writings with Indication of the Corresponding AA Volume AA

Anth Br

Kant, I.  (1900–), Gesammelte Schriften, ed. the Royal Prussian (later German, then Berlin-Brandenburg) Academy of Sciences, Berlin: Reimer, later De Gruyter, 29 vols. Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht/Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (AA 07) Briefe/Correspondence (AA 10–13)

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GMS GSK IaG

KpV KrV KU Log MAN NTH

Päd Prol ÜGTP

V-Mo/Mron WA WDO

Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant

xv

Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten/Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (AA 04) Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte/ Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (AA 01) Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht/Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (AA 08) Kritik der praktischen Vernunft/Critique of Practical Reason (AA 05) Kritik der reinen Vernunft/Critique of Pure Reason Kritik der Urteilskraft/Critique of the Power of Judgement (AA 05) Logik/Logic (AA 09) Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaften/ Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (AA 04) Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels/ Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (AA 01) Pädagogik/Pedagogy (AA 09) Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik/ Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (AA 04) Über den Gebrauch teleologischer Principien in der Philosophie/On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy (AA 08) Moral Mrongovius/Lecture on Moral Philosophy Mrongovius (AA 27) Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?/An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (AA 08) Was heißt sich im Denken orientiren?/What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? (AA 08)

References Nietzsche’s writings Emphases in Nietzsche’s writings:  normal emphases (= ‘gesperrt’ in KSA) are rendered in italics. Further emphases (‘halbfett’ in KSA for the Nachlass) are rendered in bold italics.

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Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant

Interventions/omissions: any interventions in citations by the author, including insertions of original German words, are indicated by square brackets: []. Any omissions by the author are also inserted in square brackets [. . .] in order to distinguish them from Nietzsche’s own ellipses. References to Nietzsche’s published/titled texts:  follow the standard abbreviations given in Nietzsche-Studien under ‘Siglen’ and are listed here. Authors have used either German or English abbreviations, followed by the section/aphorism number (e.g. JGB 12 or BGE 12, M 54 or D 54, GM I 13). For sections/chapters that are not numbered but named, the abbreviations from Nietzsche-Studien have been used or otherwise devised for easy identification when necessary, for example: Twilight of the Idols, ‘What the Germans Lack’, section 3 = TI Germans 3 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, On the Three Transformations  =  Z I Transformations. Page references, where given, are to the relevant passage in the Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA), not to any translations used. The format is as follows: BGE 12, KSA 5.76 (= Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 12, KSA volume 5, page 76); M 95, KSA 3.86f. (Morgenröthe, aphorism 95, KSA volume 3, page 86f.). References to the Nachlass: follow the notation in KSA, followed by volume and page and preceded by NL and the year, for example: NL 1883 15[44], KSA 10.491 = note 15[71] in KSA volume 10, page 491. NL 1885-86 2[15], KSA 12.74 = note 2[15] in KSA volume 12, page 74. References to the Nachlass material in Kaufmann’s The Will to Power (=WP) are given as references to the equivalent notes in KSA. References to Nietzsche’s letters:  include addressee, date, volume and page number in KSB (Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe) or KGB (Nietzsche Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe).

Kant’s writings Emphases and interventions/omissions are rendered as earlier.

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References to Kant’s texts: follow the standard German abbreviations given in Kant-Studien and are listed here. The abbreviations are followed by the page number(s) in the ‘Akademie Ausgabe’ (AA), for example, KU 238 (= AA vol. 5, p. 238), Anth 315–16 (= AA vol. 7, pp. 315–16). The relevant volume of the AA for each work is given in the list of abbreviations. Where relevant, the standard A and/or B version for first and second editions of Kant’s works are given, for example, KrV B150, KrV A743/B771. References to numbered sections/paragraphs are also sometimes given by the author, for example, KrV §25 B157, KU §1 204 (= AA vol. V, p. 204).

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Translations of Nietzsche’s and Kant’s Writings Next to their own translations, authors and editors have drawn on a broad range of available translations of Nietzsche’s and Kant’s writings, modifying and combining them as they considered appropriate. Translations used:

Nietzsche The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New  York:  Vintage (1974); The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.  J. Hollingdale, New  York:  Vintage (1968); Daybreak, eds Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1997); The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of idols, ed. Aaron Ridley, trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2005); Writings from Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2006); On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2007); Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin (1990); Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin (1992); Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1993); Untimely Meditations, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1994); Human, All Too Human, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1996); ‘On Schopenhauer’, trans. Christopher Janaway, in:  Willing and Nothingness:  Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator, Oxford:  Clarendon Press (1998); Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan, Washington: Regnery Publishing (1998); Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marion Faber, Oxford:  Oxford University Press (1998); On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J.  Swensen, Indianapolis:  Hackett Publishing Company (1998); Twilight of the Idols, trans. Duncan Large, Oxford:  Oxford University Press (1998); The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Ronald Speirs, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (2000); The Birth of Tragedy (and Other Writings), ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1999); Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes, New York: Oxford University Press (2005); Unpublished Writings

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from the Period of Unfashionable Observations, trans. R. T. Gray, Stanford: Stanford University Press (1999); Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, ed. R.-P. Horstmann and J. Norman, trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2002); ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, in: Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press (1979).

Kant Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1998); ‘Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces’, trans. John Handyside, in: Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation and Early Writings on Space, Westport, CT: Hyperion Press (1929); The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London:  Macmillan (1929); Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. James Ellington, Indianapolis, IN:  Bobbs-Merril (1970); Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, trans. Stanley L.  Jaki, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press (1981); Opus postumum, trans. Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1993); Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Werner S.  Pluhar, Indianapolis:  Hackett Publishing Company (2002); Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. and ed. Robert B. Louden, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2006).

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  1

Introduction Marco Brusotti and Herman Siemens

Nietzsche has often been considered a thinker independent of the philosophy of his time and radically opposed to the concerns and concepts of modern and contemporary philosophy. But there is an increasing awareness of his sophisticated engagements with his contemporaries and of his philosophy’s rich potential for debates with modern and contemporary thinkers. The present volume is the first of a set of three, which explore an extremely significant and fruitful field for such engagements, namely, Kant and Kantianism. Nietzsche’s explicit and implicit treatments of Kant, Kantians and Kantian concepts are examined, as well as the philosophical issues that they raise for both Nietzschean and Kantian philosophy. Nietzsche is not known as an admirer or follower of Kant, but on the contrary as one who criticizes and enjoys poking fun at him. There is no shortage of references to Kant, Kant-​related authors, theories and themes in his writings –​but do Nietzsche’s criticisms really deserve to be taken seriously? Are there also positive relations to Kantianism that inform and structure his thought? The affirmative answer to both these questions is a rather minority view among scholars. However, the fact that the whole issue is worth investigating is just what this book and its companion volumes intend to show.1 Nietzsche, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is the first of three volumes that address Nietzsche’s Engagements with Kant and the Kantian Legacy. The second volume, Nietzsche and Kantian Ethics, treats the critical relations between Nietzsche’s and Kant’s approaches to ethics and undertakes to explore the critical responses to Kantian senses of agency, freedom and responsibility, duty, equality and normativity, and to specific Kantian moral and political duties that can be derived from Nietzsche’s work. The third volume, Nietzsche and Kant on Aesthetics and Anthropology, focuses on questions specific to aesthetics (beauty, the sublime, disinterestedness, originality) and to anthropology (sociability, human nature and physiology), giving special attention to issues that cut across the two domains and defy any clear-​cut classification: the role of the senses (and

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of the drives) and the significance of the imagination in our manifold relations to the world (not just in aesthetic judgement and creation), as well as overlapping topics, such as laughter, language and genius. This first volume concerns epistemology and the problem of metaphysics. Phenomenon and thing in itself, empirical and transcendental, space and time, intuition and thought, the I, self-​observation and self-​consciousness, concepts and judgements, categories and schemata, teleological judgement: on these and other issues Nietzsche took a stance that can be put in relation to Kant. The question of historical mediation –​not only through Schopenhauer –​ arises from the beginning: the early Nietzsche sees a thread running from Kant through Schopenhauer to his own ‘tragic’ philosophy. On the other side, the late Nietzsche presents his own views for the most part as a radical subversion of Kant’s philosophy. Nietzsche himself thus encourages the widespread view that his thought is incompatible with Kant’s in style and results. While the difference between the two styles of thought must be conceded, Nietzsche still thinks ‘with and against’ Kant and the Kantian legacy. Dealing with different phases and aspects of his philosophy, the chapters of this first volume take up the question of the extent to which he criticizes and the extent to which he reformulates Kant’s critique of metaphysics. After a broad sketch of Nietzsche’s acquaintance with Kant in Sections 1 and 2, a survey of the specific topics of our volume will be given in Section 3, together with an outline of its contents.

1.  The young Nietzsche’s acquaintance with Kant and Kantianism ‘Among recent philosophers I have studied Kant and Schopenhauer with a strong predilection.’2 Applying for a philosophical chair, Nietzsche here intends to suggest to the rector of Basel University that he is well acquainted with Kant. Kant was indeed the first reference of the two most important philosophers for the young Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer and the neo-​Kantian Friedrich Albert Lange, author of the History of Materialism (1866; 1873–​75; Engl.: 1880): ‘Kant, Schopenhauer and this book by Lange –​I need no more than this.’3 The young philologist followed Schopenhauer and Lange in acknowledging Kant as an epoch-​making philosopher. But that Nietzsche ascribed to Kant a prominent symbolic role does not mean that he actually felt the need to go beyond what

  3

Introduction

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Schopenhauer, historians of philosophy or contemporary theorists wrote about him. Did Nietzsche, who never studied philosophy, ever read at least one of the three Critiques? It cannot be ruled out, but that he ‘studied’ Kant –​as he writes to Wilhelm Vischer-​Bilfinger –​does not necessarily imply a first-​hand reading. For various reasons, Nietzsche did not have much time to spend on Kant during his formative years: he first studied and then taught philology, had a very broad range of interests (from music and literature to natural sciences), intended to publish on Greek philosophy (from his Democritea to the Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks) and not only read Schopenhauer, his followers and critics, but also tried in general to pick up the state of the art in philosophy from scratch. Even later, with few exceptions (Montaigne, Pascal), he would continue to read his contemporaries rather than the classics of modern philosophy. Nietzsche does not seem to have ever owned any of Kant’s works, not even the Prolegomena, nor to have borrowed anything written by Kant from the library in Basel.4 Some scholars assume that in 1867–​68 he studied (some sections of) the third Critique first-​hand and/​or that two decades later, during his stay in Chur (8 May–​8 June 1887), he did some direct reading of works by Kant in the public library. But for the most part he seems to have consulted indirect sources; even the Kant quotations with page numbers we find in Nietzsche’s posthumous notes in these and other cases stem mainly from secondary sources.5 In 1884, Nietzsche also criticized the publication of the Opus postumum, but there is no clue that he really had a look at it.6 One could guess that he at some moment held writings by Kant in his hands; and it cannot be excluded that he read the one or the other of them, even if only in part. But there is no conclusive evidence. And this is not the main issue. The Critiques are texts which need to be worked through, again and again. They need to be studied, not simply scanned. What Nietzsche could have done as a direct reading would scarcely have been enough to enable him to master them. On the other hand, Nietzsche’s indirect, mediated contacts with Kant’s philosophy were more than frequent. Whereas he possibly never owned a single work by Kant, a good shelf of his personal library is filled with histories of philosophy (Fischer, Ueberweg), works about Kant (Lehmann,7 Kohl,8 Romundt9), writings by early neo-​Kantians in the narrower sense of the term (Lange, Helmholtz, Fischer, Liebmann) or by philosophers who –​even if they did not plea for a ‘return to Kant’ –​gave a central place to a critical confrontation with Kant (Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Spir and many others). The philosophical knowledge that Nietzsche gained in Schulpforta (concerning Emerson and ancient philosophy) did not in any way compare with the

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impressive philological skills he acquired there, which paved the way for his philological career. We do not know when Nietzsche came across Kant’s name for the first time (perhaps reading a classical author such as Schiller or Goethe). In any case, already in Pforta, he did become acquainted with at least one central accomplishment of Kant’s first Critique through his teacher in religion, Karl Eduard Niese (1804–​82). In (unpublished) notes On the Doctrine of Religion (‘Zur Religionslehre’), Nietzsche agrees with Kant’s criticism of the proofs for the existence of God. Loosely following Kant (cf. KrV B619), Nietzsche rejects, among others, the ‘cosmological proof ’, the ‘teleol proof ’ (with the physico-​theological argument as a subtype) and ‘Anselm’s o the ontological proof ’ (Mp V 33, 17). He establishes, for instance, that ‘[i]‌n the Critique of Pure Reason Kant has demonstrated the weaknesses’ (Mp V 33,18) of the teleological proof. Nietzsche also mentions the ‘Kantian o moral’ argument (Mp V 33,17), the ‘practical proof ’, and concludes: ‘Itself no proof for the merely thinking spirit, but only for the moral’ (Mp V 33,18).10 Hence, Nietzsche had already learned of Kant before discovering Schopenhauer in 1865. In October 1864, at the beginning of his studies in Bonn, he declares that he wants to focus his ‘scholarly activity’ on ‘Hebrew’, ‘the history of art and the history of philosophy since Kant, which I  am already studying privately with the help of a few books’.11 In the following summer semester of 1865 Nietzsche attended Carl Schaarschmidt’s course ‘General History of Philosophy’. In the context of a concise outline of the whole history of Western philosophy, Schaarschmidt (1857), perhaps drawing on a chapter from his Entwicklungsgang, also dealt with Kant.12 Close to the end of the (unpublished) Kollegnachschrift, conserved at the Goethe-​ und Schiller-​Archiv in Weimar (reference:  GSA 71/​41 C II 1), Nietzsche takes some lecture notes under the heading ‘Most recent philosophy’ (‘Neueste Philosophie’). Without mentioning Kant by name, the student writes down ‘1721–​1804’ (C II 1: 56), obviously a (mistaken) attempt to give the philosopher’s birth and death years, and lists some of his works beginning with the Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. On another page Nietzsche writes down very short ‘abstracts’ of the first and second Critiques. ‘Are there apriori. synthet. judgements?’. The brief summary of the first Critique, which begins with this Kantian question, contains the noteworthy statement: ‘We never experience anything of things in themselves. The teaching of the subjectiv. of all appear. was entirely new’ (C II 1: 61).13 The young student was able to gather basic Kantian conceptions like this from Schaarschmidt.

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On a sheet of paper that seems to be related to the end of the Kollegnachschrift, Nietzsche took his first known excerpts from Schopenhauer, specifically from the critical appendix on Kant’s philosophy.14 Was this in direct connection with Schaarschmidt’s lecture? Do these excerpts stem from his period in Bonn  –​ hence already months before Nietzsche’s official ‘discovery’ of Schopenhauer in the antiquarian bookshop of his landlord Rohn in Leipzig in the autumn of 1865? Some scholars assume so.15 This first known trace of Nietzsche’s acquaintance with The World as Will and Representation is more about Kant than Schopenhauer (cf. Figl 1991: 97ff.). The heading of Nietzsche’s notes, ‘Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy by A.  Schopenhauer’ [‘Kritik der Kantische[n]‌Philosophie von A.  Schopenhauer’] (C II 1:  59), should not mislead us. Nietzsche is not only interested in Schopenhauer’s arguments against Kant. Quite to the contrary:  here he summarizes only the first pages of the appendix, in which Schopenhauer praises Kant as the great pathbreaker in philosophy, before going on to criticize him. Accordingly, Nietzsche writes in the margin: ‘Introduction. Kant’s three principal achievements [Hauptverdienste]’ (ibid.). The first and foremost among them is the ‘doctrine of the complete divergence [der gänzlichen Diversität] of the real from the ideal’ (ibid.), that is, the distinction between phenomenon and thing in itself. Kant’s second main achievement is that he places ‘the moral significance of human acting’ in relation to ‘the thing in itself ’; his third, that he finally puts an end to the ‘the whole scholastic period’ (ibid.). In the following year, by the end of August 1866, the philosophical beginner enthused about Friedrich Albert Lange and his History of Materialism and Criticism of Its Present Importance. Among early neo-​Kantians, Lange had the most pronounced impact on the young philologist.16 This ‘supremely enlightened Kantian and investigator of nature’ deflated the question that was central for the young Schopenhauerian, reducing it to irrelevance:  the status of the thing in itself. By the end of August 1866 Nietzsche had not just reached the conclusion that appearances are a ‘product’ of our ‘organization’, but more radically that the whole ‘opposition’ of phenomenon and thing in itself is ‘conditioned by our organization’, thus excluding any metaphysical use of the ‘concept’ of thing in itself (letter to Carl von Gersdorff, end of August 1866, KSB 2.160).17 Schopenhauer and Lange, the two prominent readers of Kant who most impressed the philology student, developed Kant’s thought in very different, if not opposed directions: Schopenhauer towards idealism and metaphysics (even if the late Ergänzungen (volume II of The World as Will and Representation) in particular exhibit a considerable shift towards physiology), Lange towards

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empiricism and naturalism: ‘The physiology of the sense organs is the developed or justified Kantianism, and Kant’s system can be seen as a research programme, as it were, for the recent discoveries in this area’ (Lange 1866: 482).18 However, a principal reason for the appeal of Lange’s philosophy to the student is that he found in it a legitimation for further cherishing Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, even if only as a free art in the realm of concepts: ‘Art is free, also in the domain of concepts. If philosophy is art, then Haym can also crawl into a hole before Schopenhauer [sich vor Schopenhauer verkriechen]’ (KSB 2.160). Even adopting Lange’s ‘extremely rigorous critical standpoint’, Schopenhauer’s philosophy, when conceived as a ‘poetry in concepts [Begriffsdichtung]’, remains legitimate. Nietzsche thus makes fun of philosophers who intend ‘to refute Schopenhauer with reasons’ (letter to Paul Deussen, October/​November 1867; KSB 2.229), like ‘the overly audacious Überwegs [überverwegene Überwege] and the Hayms who are not at home in philosophy [in der Philosophie nicht heimische Hayme]’ (letter to Paul Deussen, second half of October 1868; KSB 2.328).19 But Nietzsche agrees with them that Schopenhauer’s metaphysical interpretation of the thing in itself is flawed. Nietzsche returns to the issue in his notes ‘Zu Schopenhauer’. Schopenhauer’s ‘attempt failed’ (‘der Versuch ist mißlungen’: NL 1867–​8 57[51], KGW I/​4.418).20 Rather than overcoming Kant, Schopenhauer’s metaphysics puts a poetic fiction (‘eine Erdichtung’), the will, ‘in the place of the Kantian X’. But even Kant’s ‘concept of a thing in itself ’ is, ‘to speak with Ueberweg, only a hidden category’ (NL 1867–​8 57[52], KGW I/​4.421).21 Besides this ‘hidden category’, the concept of the thing in itself, Nietzsche also rejects the overt categories, that is, Kant’s table of categories as a whole (ibid.). From Lange’s standpoint, Kantian ‘transcendental logic’ is mistaken, because it tries in vain to prove a priori what can be only investigated empirically  –​through the physiology of the senses. To Nietzsche this may have suggested that a thorough study of the architecture of the first Critique is not required. Prompted by Lange, the Leipzig Nietzsche contemplated writing a PhD dissertation, ‘half philosophical, half natural science’, under the heading ‘Concerning the Concept of the Organic since Kant’ (letter to Paul Deussen, April–​May 1868, KSB 2.269) or ‘Teleology since Kant’ (on this project, see Chapter  7 by Himmelmann in our volume). But he never completed –​or rather: never really began working on  –​this project. His notes are full of Kant quotations (even from the Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens), which, however, are essentially second-​hand, stemming mostly from Fischer’s two-​volume Immanuel Kant und seine Lehre or from Ueberweg’s Grundriß der Geschichte der

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Introduction

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Philosophie von Thales bis auf die Gegenwart, as well as from Lange.22 Since not every quotation has been traced back to second-​hand sources, a first-​hand reading of the relevant sections of the third Critique in K. Rosenkranz’s edition (Kant 1838, vol. 4) cannot be ruled out, and some scholars assume it.23 However, even if Nietzsche may have contemplated an extended direct study of Kant, he does not seem to have done so in the preparatory stage in April–​May 1868, before he gave the project up. Fischer’s Immanuel Kant is a seminal work, which played an important role in the Kant renaissance of the 1860s.24 Even if Nietzsche’s notes draw heavily on Fischer, who gives a more idealistic reading of the critical project than the author of the History of Materialism, Nietzsche essentially still follows Lange in criticizing Kant along historical and Darwinist lines. Kant was a child of his age and his alleged subjective need to view organisms teleologically was just contingent, culturally and historically, and disappeared in the nineteenth century. Darwinism shows that there is no principled difference between explaining things and explaining organisms; one may be as sceptical about the one as about the other enterprise. Even if Nietzsche thinks that Kant’s views are being pushed farther and partly superseded by contemporary natural science, his early outlook is still Kantian in a broad sense: we should give up the unattainable metaphysical goal of ‘ “absolute” truth’ (der ‘absoluten’ Wahrheit), be ‘content with a conscious relativity of knowledge’ (‘mit einer bewußten Relativität des Wissens’) as it is offered by science, and pursue ‘edification’ (Erbauung), that is, ‘art’ in the broadest sense, including metaphysics. At this point, before meeting Richard Wagner in November 1868, Nietzsche, still a philosophical beginner, is moving along the two paths opened by Lange: (1) the investigation of the ‘limits of knowledge’ (Erkenntnißgrenzen) and sceptical criticism of metaphysical presuppositions with a certain inclination to a materialism inspired by natural science; (2)  the view that any post-​Kantian metaphysics can only be a sort of edifying ‘conceptual poetry [Begriffsdichtung]’ (letter to Paul Deussen, end of April/​beginning of May 1868, KSB 2.269).25 But does this remain the standpoint of The Birth of Tragedy? How far can its ‘artist’s metaphysics’ (GT Versuch 2, 5, 7, KSA 1.13, 17, 21) be subsumed under ‘conceptual poetry’? On what basis does The Birth of Tragedy, as Nietzsche’s late Attempt at a Self-​Criticism points out, try to express ‘with Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulae’ something that would have been against the ‘spirit’ and the ‘taste’ (GT Versuch 6, KSA 1.19) of both thinkers? Whence the dramatic conflict between ‘Socratic’ science and tragic art? These general questions cannot be addressed here  –​as little as can the radical change in Nietzsche’s

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intellectual outlook that occurred after he met the ‘genius’ Wagner in his late Leipzig period and became more and more involved in his artistic and cultural projects. The neo-​Kantian criticism of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, and more generally, the early blend of radicalized theoretical neo-​Kantianism and ethical Schopenhauerianism, was clearly not compatible with Wagnerism. The Leipzig Nietzsche had left ‘conceptual poetry’ to Schopenhauer, rather than practicing it himself. In the early Basel years, however, he did not refrain from more constructive endeavours (cf. Gerratana 1988: 410). From 1869 on, in critical confrontation with Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious, Nietzsche modified his view of Kant’s role in the history of metaphysics, as well as in the philosophy of language. Thus, in a note from September 1870–​January 1871, Nietzsche follows Hartmann’s criticism of ‘Kant, Fichte and Schopenhauer’ (cf. Gerratana 1988: 413f.) and points to a possibility that ‘the Kantian-​Schopenhauerian idealists not recognized’:  a new metaphysics starting out, not from the individual intellect, but rather from a ‘primordial intellect [Urintellekt]’ (NL 1870–​1 5[79], KSA 7.111) akin to Hartmann’s ‘Unconscious’. In the ‘metaphysical ­presumption’ of The Birth of Tragedy the place of the Urintellekt is taken by the Ur-​Eine, the ‘primordial One’.26 With Lange and Hartmann, Nietzsche sees the philosophy of language as a development of Kantian themes (cf. Crawford 1988). In ‘On the Origins of Language’, a chapter of his Vorlesungen über lateinische Grammatik (winter semester 1869/​1870), Nietzsche follows Hartmann in insisting on the instinctive nature of language.27 He points out that this view of the origins of language was not yet established by Herder, but only by Kant: The right insight has currency only since Kant, who in The Critique of Judgement both recognized teleology in nature as a matter of fact [etwas Thatsächliches], on the other hand emphasized the wonderful antinomy that something may be purposive [zweckmäßig] without a consciousness. This the essence of instinct. (KGW II/​2.188)

Thus the philosophy of language builds on a Kantian basis. Already the opening of Nietzsche’s Origins insists on this point: ‘The deepest philosophical knowledge lies already prepared in language. Kant said: “a great, perhaps the greatest portion of what our reason finds to do consists in the analysis of concepts which human beings already find in themselves” ’ (KGW II/​2.185). Nietzsche takes Kant’s sentence, actually a misquotation, from Hartmann, who begins his Philosophy of the Unconscious (November 1868) with the passage from §5 of Kant’s Anthropology, where it comes from (cf. Crawford 1988: 17, 37f.). For Nietzsche, the philosophy of language is from the beginning a critical development of Kantian themes; the

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line running from Hamann, Humboldt, Lichtenberg, to Hartmann and Gerber leads to a criticism of Kant’s ‘impure reason’ (Gerber). Later developments of this critical line are discussed by Zavatta in Chapter 2 of this volume. After The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche’s image of Kant will be influenced, not just by Schopenhauer,28 Hartmann29 and early neo-​Kantianism, but by many post-​Kantian philosophers, more or less affiliated to Kant, each with his own personal agenda. Among them is Afrikan Spir, who begins to be important for Nietzsche as early as in 1873.30 In general, what Nietzsche’s minor contemporaries held to be Kant’s philosophy is often foreign to us. Thus, in the twenty-​first century, the difficulty of understanding Nietzsche’s view of Kant resides not only in Nietzsche’s scarce knowledge of the texts, but also in our own ignorance of the variegated positions of philosophers who do not belong to the ‘mighty dead’. Here the first neo-​Kantians, even if they are nowadays known only to scholars and far less than ‘later’ neo-​Kantians from Cohen through Natorp to Cassirer, belong to the less obscure figures and are much better known than, for example, Spir, Drossbach or Teichmüller.

2.  Nietzsche’s criticisms of Kant In the summer semester of 1871 Nietzsche told his students that the philologist ‘must study philosophy’ and would profit the most from ‘the unification of Plato a Kant’ (KGW II/3.372). And at the time of the Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche insisted on the ‘extraordinary courage and wisdom of Kant and Schopenhauer’, seeing in the ‘tragic’ thinker Kant a forerunner of Schopenhauer and of his own philosophy. But gradually Kant’s role as a forerunner of Schopenhauer lost its importance, Nietzsche’s philosophy changed and his remarks on Kant became more critical and finally very aggressive. There are several general reasons for this shift. The religious interpretation of the whole of Kant’s philosophy developed by his friend Heinrich Romundt may have been partly responsible for Nietzsche’s change of view. Among Nietzsche’s personal acquaintances were few philosophers. As a student he had met Karl Schaarschmidt and Jürgen Bona Meyer in Bonn. But his fellow students here and then in Leipzig were obviously philologists, even if Nietzsche’s ‘propaganda’ converted Rohde and others to Schopenhauer’s philosophy (and to Wagnerism). In the end, Paul Deussen became a historian of philosophy, who also wrote on Kant.31 In Wagner’s entourage philosophers were rather rare. In Basel, Burckhardt and Overbeck, the most eminent among Nietzsche’s befriended colleagues, were historians. Among Nietzsche’s friends,

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Paul Rée, who was a philosopher, was not very interested in Kant. However, Romundt was a Kantian (vgl. KGB 1/4.727f.). Romundt was a member of the philological association (Philologisches Verein zu Leipzig) from 1866 and became friends with Rohde and Nietzsche, who converted him to Schopenhauerianism. After gaining a PhD in philology in Leipzig in 1869, Romundt, who was profoundly influenced by Kant, switched from philology to philosophy; he became Privatdozent in Basel after writing a philosophical ‘Habilitationsschrift’ on Die menschliche Erkenntniß und das Wesen der Dinge, which he completed in 1872 and dedicated to Nietzsche.32 Nietzsche and Romundt are very likely to have had intensive discussions on Kant-​related topics. From the summer of 1872 to April 1875 Romundt shared the ‘Baumann cavern’ (Baumannshöhle) at Schützengraben 45 in Basel with Nietzsche and Overbeck. Hence Nietzsche could easily have borrowed books by and on Kant from his ‘fellow caveman’ (Syntroglodyte). Like Nietzsche, Romundt borrowed many books from the university library in Basel, and his Ausleiheliste (list of loans) in the years 1872–​75 may also offer some clues to Nietzsche’s background (cf. Treiber 1994: 3ff.; and Chapter 2 in this volume). Nevertheless, we do not know much about Romundt as a source of Nietzsche’s knowledge about Kant in the first half of the 1870s. What we do know is that for Nietzsche, Romundt’s conversion to Catholicism in the winter of 1874–​75 (cf. KGB I/4.727) was a traumatic experience. At the time Nietzsche was still working at the Untimely Meditations, but was moving swiftly in a very different direction: the ‘free spirit’ was not far off. For someone like Nietzsche, who had grown up in a staunch protestant milieu, a conversion to Catholicism was like a return to the Middle Ages. He counted Romundt among those in whose hands Kant himself becomes the instrument of a refined obscurantism (cf. VM 27, KSA 2.391f.). However, rather than reject such obscurantist readings, Nietzsche now surmised that Kant himself intended his critical enterprise in this regressive sense (see e.g. NL 1880 7[34], KSA 9.325). After Romundt’s conversion, Nietzsche’s remarks on Kant became gradually (not immediately) more and more dismissive. Was the Romundt experience thus the turning point in Nietzsche’s understanding of Kant’s personality and of his role in the history of philosophy? We would not go so far. Nietzsche’s whole philosophy was changing anyway. But certainly this episode influenced his general assessment: Kant was not a revolutionary, who might perhaps have made mistakes and been too compromising; rather, he was basically a reactionary: ‘in the end, an underhanded Christian’ (GD Vernunft 6, KSA 6.79) with a ‘backdoor philosophy’ (GD Streifzüge 16, KSA 6.121), whose success was ‘merely theologian-​success’ (AC 10, KSA 6.177).33

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For Nietzsche, Kant is quite often a representative, a placeholder. In the case of many of Nietzsche’s contemporaries we have to carefully distinguish between the sometimes deep influence they had on the development of his philosophical thought and the role their name plays in his published writings: some of these authors are not mentioned at all (Lange); some of them only in an anonymous, impersonal way, for example, simply as a ‘logician’ (Spir); some others again are the target of attacks and disparaging remarks (Hartmann, Spencer), sometimes after having inspired Nietzsche for over a decade (Dühring). Nietzsche actually refrains from mentioning authors whom he perceives to be of minor importance. He behaves quite otherwise towards Kant, who, because of his prominence is very apt to play the role of a symbolic actor on Nietzsche’s philosophical stage.34 Although Nietzsche’s self-​assured judgements often intend to suggest a close acquaintance, he nevertheless lacks some very basic knowledge of Kant’s philosophy. Even supposing some direct reading, Nietzsche’s knowledge of Kant is first of all fragmentary. His Kant is at best understood as a mosaic, a patchwork, a jigsaw puzzle built up from heterogeneous, and sometime contradictory pieces, a composed portraiture whose constituent images come from very different sources. The question of sources is relevant only in this sense. Kant himself does not seem to belong to Nietzsche’s ‘sources’, even literal quotations from his works are generally taken from the books of other philosophers. The later Nietzsche mentions Kant frequently and rather loosely; even when he names him explicitly, he does not need to have a source in or outside Kant (cf. Chapter 10 by Pichler in this volume). Kant often stands for other positions, and arguments Nietzsche elaborated in controversies with the minor contemporaries he actually read gain a higher ‘status’ being directed against the prince of philosophers. Nietzsche shares this tendency with most interpreters, who tend to eschew his minor contemporaries as of little interest. A good example is the way most scholars have dealt with JGB 17, seeing in it only a criticism of Kant. With its proposal to substitute ‘it thinks’ for the ‘I think’ (and finally to get rid even of the ‘it’ in ‘it thinks’), this aphorism recalls Lichtenberg’s criticism of Kant. But the aphorism does not mention either of them; and even if the ‘I think’ is obviously a Kantian concept, the aphorism criticizes ‘the logicians’ in general –​with minor philosophers of the time in mind.35 If taken as direct criticism of Kant, Nietzsche’s texts may often seem clumsy to today’s professional philosophers and experienced Kant readers. However, his texts look less weak, indeed often perspicacious, if they are not taken as ‘dialogues between pinnacles’. As contributions to a contemporary debate they show

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that Nietzsche was at the height of many ‘professionals’ of his time, who had delved in the three Critiques, even if Kant philology was still in its infancy. The later Nietzsche’s uncompromising criticism of Kant places him in clear opposition not only to Schopenhauer, but also to the early ‘back to Kant’ movement. Despite his intensive, although critical, engagement with the first generation of neo-​Kantians, Nietzsche obviously does not belong to them. It is, however, important to see that many of these professional philosophers had a rather loose relation to Kant’s theoretical philosophy (Lange and Liebmann, for instance, rather than Fischer, and not Cohen, whom Nietzsche does not seem to have known). That Nietzsche did not know Kant well may explain some of his statements and assessments; but sometime, and just when he clearly misses the point, he is simply taking up the opinion of the best reputed neo-​Kantians of the time. Just two examples: To study physiology with a good conscience, we must insist that the sense organs are not appearances [Erscheinungen] in the way idealist philosophy uses that term: as such, they certainly could not be causes! Sensualism, therefore, at least as a regulative principle, if not as a heuristic principle. –​What? and other people even say that the external world is the product of our organs? But then our body, as a piece of this external world, would really be the product of our organs! But then our organs themselves would really be –​the product of our organs! This looks to me like a thorough reductio ad absurdum: given that the concept of a causa sui is something thoroughly absurd. So does it follow that the external world is not the product of our organs –​? (JGB 15, KSA 5.29)

Now, two decades before Beyond Good and Evil, in August 1866, Nietzsche had synthesized the results of his reading of Lange’s History of Materialism in precisely this way, in a text that is a literal quotation from Lange’s own resumé in the first edition: ‘1) the world of the senses is a product of our organization. 2) our visible (bodily) organs are, like all other parts of the world of appearance, only pictures of an unknown object. 3)’ (letter to Carl von Gersdorff, end of August 1866, KSB 2.160; cf. Lange 1866: 493). In this letter the philosophical beginner commits himself to Lange’s theses, and the aphorism of BGE is thus a straightforward criticism of Lange36 and a sort of belated self-​criticism.37 One further example:  in January 1919 Karl Kraus remarks about the First World War –​‘The ‘categorical imperative’ has been perverted into a system of military discipline designed to inculcate the “will to power” ’ (F 501–​7, 113; quoted in Timms 1986: 14). The idea that the Prussian officer or civil servant was the embodiment of Kant’s categorical imperative was current in Germany

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in the 1870s. It was clearly formulated by the prominent neo-​Kantian Otto Liebmann38 and allowed nationalistic Germans to explain the victory in the war against France in terms of moral superiority. Nietzsche had clearly seen and sharply criticized such ‘applications’ of the categorical imperative, but without seeing them as a ‘perversion’ of Kant’s theorem. Quite on the contrary, Nietzsche accepted such readings as straightforward and made out of them an objection to the categorical imperative, for instance, when he saw in Kant’s philosophy ‘the highest formula for the civil servant [Staats-​Beamten]’ (GD Streifzüge 29, KSA 6.130). This may seem silly to today’s Kant scholars (and really gets Kant wrong); however, it is interesting as a polemical contribution to a contemporary discourse, in which nationalistic Germans –​among them many professional Kant scholars –​tended to read Kant in just this way.

3.  Outline of the volume The contributors to this and all three volumes take a variety of approaches to Nietzsche’s relation to Kant, making for a plurality of interpretations that bring distinctive features of their relation, both critical and positive, to light. Most, even if not all, authors acknowledge the task of establishing systematic relations between Nietzsche’s thought and Kant’s. But in order to do so they take different paths. In some chapters Nietzsche and Kant are directly confronted face to face:  the authors concentrate on comparative analysis and intend to establish direct relations between Kant’s and Nietzsche’s thought. Other authors focus more on the historically situated and mediated nature of Nietzsche’s relation to Kant. Benedetta Zavatta (Chapter  2:  ‘From Pure Reason to Historical Knowledge:  Nietzsche’s (Virtual) Objections to Kant’s First Critique’) belongs to the latter group of authors. According to her, Nietzsche did not address Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason directly but dealt with later theories that brought considerations from different fields such as the physiology of the senses (e.g. Helmholtz) or linguistics (e.g. Max Müller), to a simplified and reduced version of the conceptual apparatus of Kantian philosophy. This led Nietzsche to discuss issues that Kant could not have recognized as problematic, such as the image of the world (Weltansicht) on which reason (understood as conscious judgement) works, and to adopt a different methodology for enquiring into the human mind. What is more, this scientific background led Nietzsche to consider

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human thinking as involved in a process of natural evolution (characterized by laws of spontaneous variation and selection), linking it to culture and language as historical products. In this way, she argues, Nietzsche criticizes the Kantian ideal of ‘pure reason’ and replaces it with the idea of ‘habits of sensation’, which unconsciously direct our representation of reality. As a consequence, the traditional distinction between reason and instinct is abolished, as well as the Kantian separation of the ‘theoretical’ from the ‘practical’. According to João Constâncio, even if Nietzsche’s early readings of Schopenhauer’s and Kuno Fischer’s interpretations of the Critique of Pure Reason had an enormous impact on him, his engagement with Lange’s History of Materialism shaped his philosophical views even more. Mattia Riccardi and Beatrix Himmelmann also deal with Lange’s important role in Nietzsche’s attempt to develop Kantian themes, with reference to his early years (Himmelmann), but also to the late period (Riccardi). William Mattioli (Chapter  3:  ‘The Thought of Becoming and the Place of Philosophy:  Some Aspects of Nietzsche’s Reception and Criticism of Transcendental Idealism via Afrikan Spir’) outlines the importance of Afrikan Spir for Nietzsche’s critical reception of transcendental idealism from 1873 on. Spir was a minor philosopher who went against the grain by resisting the hegemonic tendency to naturalize Kantianism. Instead, he reduces the a priori to a single constitutive element, the principle of identity, which provides us with the concept of Being and the Unconditioned, and asserts an ontological extension of this concept. He thereby brings to light a set of theoretical assumptions in transcendentalism that Nietzsche critically associated with an ontological commitment to the normative concept of Being going back to Parmenides. Spir’s criticism of the Kantian thesis of the transcendental ideality and apriorism of time holds a central place in Nietzsche’s attempt to deconstruct metaphysical ontology, and with the concept of Becoming he also provides the basis for Nietzsche’s programme of historical philosophy. For other authors the issue of historical mediation is less important. Axel Pichler concentrates instead on the specific literary forms in Nietzsche’s writings and their philosophical importance. In Chapter 10 (‘ “Kant: or cant as intelligible character.” Meaning and Function of the “Type” Kant and His Philosophy in Twilight of the Idols’), he investigates the meaning and function of the ‘type’ Immanuel Kant in Twilight of the Idols. This text, he argues, operates with a strategic understanding of Kant’s thought that is frequently not supported by Kant’s writings, exceeding the transcendental framework by developing an alternative access to philosophical questions: the text’s protagonist exhibits the

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conditionality of his own epistemological position and thereby aims at showing that a non-​perspectival examination of epistemological questions is impossible. At the same time, this approach also has critical implications for systematic comparisons of Nietzsche’s philosophy with putative predecessors, such as Kant: any attempt at a systematic reconstruction and comparison of Nietzsche’s position and that of another philosopher is problematized to the extent that it abstracts from the literary specificity of Nietzsche’s text and its philosophical implications. John Richardson (Chapter 1: ‘Nietzsche, Transcendental Argument and the Subject’) addresses the central epistemological question of the transcendental and examines Nietzsche’s appropriation and revision of Kant’s typical form of ‘transcendental argument’. His chapter deals with Nietzsche’s conversion of Kant’s possibility-​conditions into life-​conditions, and considers what lessons he means to draw for our conception of ourselves as subjects. Nietzsche, like Kant, argues that we humans deeply and implicitly take ourselves to be subjects. But whereas Kant presents this as a ‘condition of the possibility of experience’, which justifies the validity of the posit, Nietzsche interprets it as a ‘life-​condition’, which deprives it of that justifying force and even makes it count against the posit’s validity. Richardson finally asks if we can and should stop viewing ourselves as subjects. Among the fundamental issues raised by Kant’s critical project, the traditional problem of the status of the thing in itself is particularly relevant to Nietzsche’s formulation of his own philosophy. According to João Constâncio, (Chapter 4: ‘The Consequences of Kant’s First Critique: Nietzsche on Truth and the Thing in Itself ’), Nietzsche’s rejection of Kant’s thing in itself is an immanent critique and belongs to a wider critique of Kant’s failure to see the ultimate consequences of his first Critique. Constâncio argues that Nietzsche’s reflection on these consequences marks the whole corpus of his writings, and that his criticism of Kant, as well as his more general departure from transcendental idealism, presupposes basic results from the Critique of Pure Reason. The most important are: (1) that our basic categories belong to our cognitive apparatus, not to things in themselves; (2) that our world is structured by these categories, which entails (3) that we cannot know things in themselves, and hence (4) that we cannot have access to absolute or metaphysical truth (at best, we have access to what Lange termed a ‘relative truth’); (5) consequently, metaphysics is impossible. According to Constâncio, Nietzsche’s critique of truth is a version of Lange’s interpretation of Kant’s view of truth; until the end, Nietzsche endorses a ‘falsification thesis’ and this endorsement also rests on premises drawn from Lange. Nietzsche’s final view is not a consistent and well-​worked-​out theory, but rather a paradoxical

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questioning of truth and the thing in itself motivated by normative (‘moral’) considerations, not by merely epistemological ones. In Chapter 5 (‘Nietzsche and the Thing in Itself ’) André Luís Mota Itaparica also deals with the practical side of Nietzsche’s criticism of the ‘thing in itself ’. Generally, scholars identify a path that leads Nietzsche from the assumption of an unknowable thing in itself in his youth to a final dismissal of this concept as self-​contradictory in his later philosophy. Itaparica, who basically agrees with this widespread view, deals with three objections to the concept of thing in itself made by the late Nietzsche and discusses the question whether what Nietzsche denies is really what Kant meant by thing in itself. Nietzsche distanced himself from Kant by rejecting any positive reading of the thing in itself, whether theoretical or practical. If Kant had understood that ‘thing in itself ’ is a contradictory concept, whose only utility consists in serving as a limit of what can be asserted meaningfully, he would not have contributed to a strengthening of a kind of metaphysics that he himself had tried to overcome. Nietzsche’s main target is Kant’s practical use of the concept of ‘thing in itself ’ and the return to articles of faith that it makes possible. This ‘return’ to faith or belief is addressed in Mattia Riccardi’s chapter (Chapter 6: ‘Nietzsche on Kant’s Distinction between Knowledge (Wissen) and Belief (Glaube)’). Riccardi focuses on Nietzsche’s reaction to Kant’s famously declared strategy of circumscribing ‘knowledge’ (Wissen) in order to make room for ‘belief ’ (Glaube). Despite an early sympathetic reaction, Nietzsche came to consistently reject this move for the rest of his philosophical career. Clark and Dudrick (2012), however, see a deep continuity with Kant’s philosophical project: they argue that Nietzsche too distinguishes between the space of reasons –​ what we ordinarily provide to justify what we do –​and the space of causes –​what scientists provide in order to explain a certain phenomenon. But the fact that Nietzsche consistently rejects the Kantian move to circumscribe ‘knowledge’ in order to make room for ‘belief ’, Riccardi argues, proves that Nietzsche does not share Kant’s concern with establishing a realm of reasons independent from that of causes. Teleology involves reasons which are causes, and Beatrix Himmelmann (Chapter 7: ‘On Teleological Judgement: A Debate between Kant and Nietzsche’) offers a comparative analysis of Kant’s and Nietzsche’s thought on this issue. In his early philosophical project ‘On Teleology since Kant’ (1868) Nietzsche is sceptical about Kant’s claim concerning the principle of purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit) as an a priori principle of judgement, which grounds our reflection on the particular in nature and human culture. Later on, Nietzsche

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will criticize Darwin, emphasizing the significance of individual ‘formative forces’, which he perceives as the sources of evolution and development. It is the appearance of strong, interesting, very special and lavishly gifted individuals, who squander themselves and their affluence, which reveals the potential of nature and of life. However, in 1868, following Lange’s discussion of Darwin’s account of the origin of species, Nietzsche argues that the purposiveness exhibited by life forms is a product of chance. According to Werner Stegmaier (Chapter 8: ‘ “Resolute Reversals”: Kant’s and Nietzsche’s Orienting Decisions concerning the Distinction between Reason and Nature’), Kant’s distinctions between subject and object, transcendental and empirical, form and content, depend on the distinction between reason and nature. Kant held fast to the concept of reason in order to ground the possibility of objectivity for a pure ‘science of nature’ and of universalizing moral maxims. For this reason he referred nature back to the concept of an unknown X. Nietzsche’s move, Stegmaier argues, is to propose a new concept of reason from the unknown X of nature. In doing so, Nietzsche leaves behind Kant’s persistent pre-​critical presuppositions and takes further Kant’s technique of orientation for making distinctions. The focus of this chapter is on Kant’s technique of orientation concerning distinctions. By ‘revolution of the way of thinking’ Kant means a reorientation of traditional fundamental distinctions in European philosophy. Concepts rest upon distinctions, and reorientations of the latter bring with them reversals in the meaning of those concepts. In following what he called Kant’s ‘resolute reversals’ and taking further his technique of orientation for making distinctions, Nietzsche gives new, anti-​Kantian meanings to key concepts like of nature and reason. However, as a consequence of his scant knowledge of Kant and due to his neo-​Kantian sources, Nietzsche overlooked the way in which Kant had already pluralized and functionalized reason for the sake of orientation, anticipating much of Nietzsche’s thought in this regard. Tsarina Doyle (Chapter 9: ‘The Kantian Roots of Nietzsche’s Will to Power’) argues that Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power emerges from his critical reflections on Kant’s epistemology. Does Kant’s account of synthesis succeed in establishing the empirical world as an object of knowledge? Does it really establish the objective applicability of the concept of causality, contrary to Hume’s scepticism? Nietzsche, disappointed by the shortcomings of Kant’s project, offers a naturalization with his will to power thesis. This thesis culminates in the view that the relational character of the empirical world is informed by intrinsic natures that secure the causal potency of empirical force and establish the mind-​ independent but knowable character of the world.

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According to Luca Lupo (Chapter  11:  ‘Nietzsche, Kant and Self-​ Observation:  Dealing with the Risk of “Landing in Anticyra” ’), Nietzsche wants to show how Kant’s critical inquiry is essentially based on assumptions that derive from self-​observation. Even though moving from different perspectives, both Kant and Nietzsche show a critical attitude towards self-​observation, which they see as practice that produces a constitutively unstable knowledge. Nietzsche paradoxically directs this criticism at the heart of Kantianism, reducing the Kantian enterprise to a form of self-​observation, thereby turning against Kant his own arguments against self-​observation in the Anthropology. This critical attitude, however, does not prevent Nietzsche himself from practicing self-​ observation, and in his last book, Ecce homo, he reaches the extreme limits and seems to materialize the risk of madness evoked by Kant. The thread that ideally binds the two thinkers is grasped by Michel Foucault, with whom Lupo deals in the last part of his chapter. Kant and Nietzsche were both committed to answer the question of the nature of what is human:  Kant saw madness as a danger; Nietzsche experienced and expressed it; whereas for Foucault it becomes a heuristic opportunity. As we have tried to indicate, the authors of this volume thus take a variety of approaches. Whether investigating historical mediations, analyzing Nietzsche’s criticisms of Kant, looking for critical developments and reformulations of Kantian, neo-​and post-​Kantian theses in Nietzsche’s philosophy or comparing the views of the two thinkers on relevant issues, the authors explore the complexities of Nietzsche’s relation to Kant and Kantianism in the domains of epistemology and metaphysics, and try to bring its distinctive features to light.

Notes 1 The three-​volume set was inspired by a series of international workshops and conferences on Nietzsche and Kant covering different areas of thought: Leiden 2011 (ethics), Queen Mary and Westfield 2011 (aesthetics), Lisbon 2012 (epistemology and metaphysics), Belo Horizonte 2012 (religion and ethics), Lecce 2013 (anthropology and history), Rome 2013 (politics) and Galway 2014 (religion). Many of the chapters in the set were presented in draft form at these workshops and revised in the light of our discussions. Other chapters have been commissioned for the set. 2 Letter to Wilhelm Vischer-​Bilfinger, January 1871, KSB 3.177.

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3 Letter to H. Mushacke, November 1866; KSB 2.184. The name ‘Kant’ also occurs in an earlier letter to Mushacke, always in the connection ‘Kant and Schopenhauer’ (letter to H. Mushacke, 11.7.1866; KSB 2.142). Cf. also the letter to C. v. Gersdorff, 15.8.1866; KSB 2.152. 4 However, his friend Heinrich Romundt would probably have had many books by and about Kant in the flat they shared. For Nietzsche’s loans from the library in Basel, cf. Crescenzi (1994). For Nietzsche’s personal library, cf. Campioni et al. (2003). For Romundt’s loans, cf. Treiber (1994 and 1993). On Nietzsche’s reading of and about Kant, see Brobjer (2003: 60ff.; 2008: 36ff.); also Bailey (2013). 5 On 1867–​68, see p. 6f. In Chur, Nietzsche seems mainly to have reread Kuno Fischer’s Immanuel Kant und seine Lehre. The Kant excerpts in NL 1886–​87 7[4]‌, KSA 12.264ff. have been retraced to this book. KSA 14.739 (and in one case Brobjer (2008: 129, n. 87; 2001: 421)) gives the corresponding references in Kant’s texts. See Brobjer (2001) on the references to Fischer. On Nietzsche’s stay in Chur, see Benders and Ottermann (2000: 665ff.), and on his use of the library there: Brobjer (2008: 38). In the Preface of Daybreak (dated autumn 1886), Nietzsche quotes from the Rosenkranz edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. 6 ‘[T]‌hey have been cruel enough to have recently celebrated and published the remaining magnum opus of his nonsense [Blödsinns]’ (NL 1884 26[371], KSA 11.248); ‘Kant’s fame has nowadays been blown up out of all proportion [ins Unbillige hinaufgetrieben]’ (NL 1884 26[412], KSA 11.261). 7 Lehmann (1878). This book belongs to Nietzsche’s personal library (= BN). 8 Nietzsche mentions Kohl’s dissertation ‘Immanuel Kants Ansicht von der Willensfreiheit’ (Kohl 1868) in his letter to E. Rohde of 3 April 1868 and shortly before (KSB 2.265; cf. the Nachbericht in KGB I/4.491). Nietzsche does not comment on Kohl’s treatment of Kant, but only goes into the role of his beloved Schopenhauer in the dissertation. The mixed experience of reading Kohl’s dissertation leads Nietzsche to the ‘sudden idea of defending a philosophical PhD sometime’ (ibid.). For Nietzsche’s unrealized dissertation project, that will also be related to Kant, see p. 6f. 9 Cf. later n. 32 10 On ‘Zur Religionslehre’ (Mp V 33 [= GSA 71/​221]), see Figl 1984: 62ff. (see p. 391 for a facsimile of the first page of the manuscript); on the proofs for the existence of God, 66ff., where Figl gives the original German text of all the passages we have translated. Cf. also Broese (2005: 364). 11 Letter to Hermann Kletschke, 31 October 1864; KGB I/4.15 (Nachträge; translation from Brobjer 2008: 46). According to Brobjer (2008: 46, 49), who does not give evidential support, Nietzsche was using Karl Fortlage’s Genetische Geschichte der Philosophie seit Kant (Leipzig 1852), which begins with a long chapter on ‘Kant’s life and writings’ (‘Kant’s Leben und Schriften’: Fortlage 1852: 10 –​84) and also deals

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Marco Brusotti and Herman Siemens with Schopenhauer. In general, Fortlage’s book concentrates on the consequences of Kant’s thought for post-​Kantian philosophy. In March 1865 Nietzsche simply notes the name ‘Fortlage’ (cf. 28[1], KGW I/​4.50; March 1865), but this does not mean that he necessarily refers to his History of Philosophy since Kant. Cf. Figl 1991; Broese 2005: 364f. For a schematic outline of the manuscript in key words, cf. Figl (1989: 458f.). Already in April–​September 1863 Nietzsche claims that we ‘do not know things in and for themselves’ (NL 1863 15[34], KGW I/​3.177), but there is no sign that he is referring to Kant here. The founder of the jüngere Tübinger Schule, the protestant church and dogma historian Ferdinand Christian Baur, makes a peculiar use of the distinction between things in themselves and appearances. In a passage quoted by Nietzsche, Baur’s Manual of Christian Dogma History [Lehrbuch der christlichen Dogmengeschichte] distinguishes between ‘the purely empirical and the critical outlook [Betrachtungsweise]’: only the latter discriminates ‘between things as they are in themselves and as they appear to us’ (NL 1867–​8 56[6]‌, KGW I/​4.367; for the source, see Langbehn (2005: 111f., n. 319)). Whereas for Baur, the historian can go beyond appearances and ‘pierce [. . .] the thick and impenetrable skin in which things in themselves are shrouded’, Nietzsche remarks critically that ‘the things in themselves’ are ‘something quite unattainable’ (ibid.). For a transcription of the whole sheet, see Broese (2004: 29); for a commentary, Figl (1991: 97ff.). As do F. Gerratana and R. Müller-​Buck in their Nachbericht in KGB I/​4.357. See already Metterhausen (1942: 59, 94f.), Figl (1984: 114f.) and then Broese (2005 and 2004). In his study Figl (1991: 91, 96f.) leaves the question open. According to KGW I/​4.384, the official ‘discovery’ of Schopenhauer’s main work in Rohn’s antiquarian bookshop probably occurred at the beginning of November 1865. During his lifetime Nietzsche read the History of Materialism in different editions (e. g. 1866; 1887) more than once (for details, see Salaquarda (1978 and 1979); Stack (1983); Brobjer (2008: 33f.). However, we agree with Crawford (1988: 69, n. 7) and Ansell-​Pearson (1988) that scholars should not simply jump from the well-​ documented early reading of Lange in 1866–​68 to associative speculations about his persisting influence on Nietzsche’s mature thought. In Leipzig Nietzsche was only beginning to outline his own philosophy, and Lange’s History of Materialism belongs to his earliest readings in contemporary philosophy. As his thought progresses and his readings (in philosophy and in the natural sciences) multiply, Lange’s impact becomes much more difficult to assess. This passage from Nietzsche’s letter to Gersdorff is an (undeclared) literal quotation from Lange (1866: 493). See p. 12. Here Lange is referring to Hermann von Helmoltz (cf. Riccardi 2009: 57f.). There is a rich literature on ‘unconscious inferences’ (unbewußte Schlüsse), a central concept in Helmoltz’s ‘Kantian’ physiology of the senses (cf. Helmoltz 1867), and

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on their substitution with ‘unconscious tropes’ in Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies. On Helmoltz, cf. Beiser (2014: 196ff.); on Nietzsche’s reading of Helmoltz, cf. Treiber (1994); on the ‘unbewußte Schlüsse’, cf. Orsucci (1994), Reuter (2009) and Chapter 2 in this volume. 19 On Nietzsche and Haym’s Arthur Schopenhauer (Haym 1864), cf. Barbera (1995); Riccardi (2009: 32ff.). 20 According to Schlechta’s Nachbericht (BAW 3.452), Nietzsche’s criticism of Schopenhauer in BAW 3.118 (= KGW I/​4.418) goes back to Otto Liebmann’s Kant und die Epigonen (1865; BN). But this is doubtful: Nietzsche did read Liebmann, but only much later –​in a letter from 21 August 1881 (cf. KSB 6.117f.) Nietzsche asks Overbeck to buy Kant und die Epigonen for him, as well as Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit (Liebmann 1880; BN). 21 Ueberweg’s objection, which implies the so-​called two-​objects-​view of the thing in itself, is discussed by Lange (1866: 267 ff.). Ueberweg (1867: 242) formulates his objection in volume three of the Grundriß; cf. the commentary in Nietzsche (1993: 262, n. 78); Riccardi (2009: 39, n. 46). 22 The Nachbericht volume to KGW I has not been published yet. The commentary to BAW 3.371ff. in BAW 3.458ff. (on Fischer, see also BAW 3.442; on Ueberweg, (BN) BAW 3.446) and the philological apparatus/​commentary by the editors G. Campioni and F. Gerratana in Nietzsche (1993: 271ff.) (still) give some direct references to Kant. 23 Cf. Janz (1978, vol. I: 199, 504); Brobjer (2008: 36); cf. the criticism in Bailey (2013, n. 1). 24 For the general relevance of Fischer’s Kant book, actually volumes 3 and 4 of his Geschichte der neuern Philosophie, and for a brief outline of the content, see Beiser (2014: 240ff.). 25 This letter briefly outlines a quite radical blend of ‘Langeanism’. Nietzsche announces a closer discussion of the ‘limits of knowledge’ (Erkenntnißgrenzen) in the philosophical dissertation on ‘the Concept of the Organic since Kant’ (KSB 2.269) he intends to complete by the end of the year. The letter does not mention Lange, but Nietzsche agrees with his whole approach: the ‘course of the relevant research, primarily in physiology since Kant’ shows ‘definitely and infallibly’ the ‘limits’ (Grenzen) of human knowledge and the ‘extent of our cognitive faculty’. Following Lange, Nietzsche defines ‘metaphysics’ as ‘conceptual poetry’ (Begriffsdichtung): ‘The realm of metaphysics, and therewith the province of “absolute truth” has undeniably been placed on a line with poetry and religion. Whoever wants to know something nowadays contents himself with a conscious relativity of knowledge [Relativität des Wissens] –​like e.g. all reputable natural scientists. Metaphysics thus belongs for some people in the domain of emotional needs [Gemüthsbedürfnisse], is essentially edification [Erbauung]: on the other hand, it is art, namely the art of conceptual poetry [Begriffsdichtung]; what must be

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Marco Brusotti and Herman Siemens maintained, however, is that neither as religion nor as art does metaphysics have anything to do with the so-​called “True in itself or being” ’ (KSB 2.269). ‘Individuation [Die individuatio] is in any case not the work of conscious knowledge, but rather of that primordial intellect. The Kantian–​Schopenhauerian idealists have not recognized this. Our intellect never takes us further than conscious knowing: but insofar as we are still intellectual instinct, we can still dare to say something about the primordial intellect. Beyond this, nothing will lead us’ (NL 1870–​1 5[79], KSA 7.111). On Hartmann, see besides Gerratana (1988) and Crawford (1988) also Thüring (1994) and Reuter (2009: 99ff.). See Crawford (1988: 17ff., 42ff., 51ff.). On Kant in Nietzsche’s lectures in the early 1870s, see also Brobjer (2008: 37f.). The late Nietzsche keeps on reading Schopenhauer and his criticism of Kant. In 1884, he works through Schopenhauer’s On the Basis of Morality (‘Über die Grundlage der Moral’), the second section of which is a critique of Kant’s foundation of ethics (‘Kritik des von Kant der Ethik gegebenen Fundaments’) (cf. Brobjer 2008: 32, 129, n. 89). In the 1880s, Nietzsche read Hartmann’s Phenomenology of Ethical Consciousness (1879). On Hartmann’s criticism of the sovereignty of the individual as a target of Nietzsche’s chapter in the Genealogy of Morality (GM II 2), see Chapter 8 by Brusotti in Volume II. Listing all works that may have contributed to Nietzsche’s reception of Kant goes well beyond the scope of the present introduction. We have been dealing only with the main inputs in the early years (Zöllner (cf. 1872) and others might also be added), and for the later period the task of reconstructing them would be even more difficult. On Spir, see Chapter 3 by Mattioli; on other authors, see Chapter 2 by Zavatta in this volume. For further suggestions, see besides Brobjer (2008: 129f., n. 89) and Bailey (2013) also, for example, Loukidelis (2013) and Riccardi (2009). Here we do not aim to list either the philosophers with whom Nietzsche became personally acquainted, or the people with whom he may have spoken about Kant, like, for example, the parson in Naumburg, Friedrich August ‘Wenkel, our tireless researcher in Kant und Schopenhauer’ (letter to Erwin Rohde, 8 October 1868, KSB 2.322). Like three of Romundt’s later writings on Kant (mostly with a personal dedication by the author), the ‘Habilitationsschrift’ (where the dedication is in print) belongs to Nietzsche’s personal library. During Nietzsche’s (conscious) lifetime, Romundt published, among others: 1882, BN (personal dedication: ‘To the physicist from the metaphysician as a sign of his deference [dem Physiker der Metaphysiker als Zeichen seiner Ergebenheit]’); 1883, BN; 1885a, BN; 1885b; 1886; 1887. On Nietzsche’s polemical remarks on Kant’s ‘radical evil’, see section 4 in Chapter 8 by Brusotti in Volume II: 229ff.

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34 Sarah Kofman (cf. 1979) subsumes Nietzsche’s criticism of the philosophical tradition under the metaphor of the ‘philosophical scene’. 35 For these ‘logicians’ and for an extended analysis of JGB 17, see Loukidelis (2013). On BGE 17, see also Brusotti’s chapter in Volume II; on Drossbach, see Zavatta’s chapter in this volume. 36 On the relation to Lange in this aphorism, cf. Hussain (2004: 122f.). 37 The vicious circle Rudolf Haym ascribes to Schopenhauer resembles the one criticized in JGB 15. According to Haym, Schopenhauer’s intention to combine Kant’s transcendental philosophy and Cabanis’s physiology could only lead to contradiction: the intellect produces the intellect. On Haym’s objection, cf. Barbera (1995: 130). 38 Liebmann writes about ‘die preußische Armee’: ‘Es offenbart sich darin der Geist der Disziplin und Subordination, das Postulat uneigennütziger strenger, gewissenhafter Pflichterfüllung, das Bewußtsein der Pflicht zu völliger Selbstaufopferung gegenüber Gesetz und Staat. Der borstige Egoismus soll den Mund halten, der Einzelne sich fortwährend als subordiniertes Glied der Allgemeinheit fühlen. Es ist der Geist des kategorischen Imperativs. Dieser Geist, der in Preußen vom geringsten Trainknecht bis hinauf zum König herrscht, [. . .] ist der Geist der politischen Zucht und Ordnung. Er macht uns groß. Er durchdringt unsere Armee vom Wirbel bis zur Zehe. Möge er immer gehegt und gepflegt werden!’ (Liebmann 1871: 12f.; quoted by Köhnke 1986: 219f.).

References Ansell-​Pearson, K. (1988), ‘The Question of F. A. Lange’s Influence on Nietzsche: A Critique of Recent Research from the Standpoint of the Dionysian’, Nietzsche-​Studien 17: 539–​54. Bailey, T. (2013), ‘Nietzsche the Kantian’, in Ken Gemes and John Richardson (eds), The Oxford Handbook to Nietzsche, 134–​59, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barbera, S. (1995), ‘Eine Quelle der frühen Schopenhauer-​Kritik Nietzsches: Rudolf Hayms Aufsatz “Arthur Schopenhauer” ’, Nietzsche Studien 24: 124–​36. Beiser, F. C. (2014), The Genesis of Neo-​Kantianism, 1796–​1880, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benders, R. J., and Ottermann, S. (2000), Friedrich Nietzsche. Chronik in Bildern und Texten, München/​Wien: Stiftung Weimarer Klassik bei Hanser/dtv. Brobjer, T. H. (2001), ‘Beiträge zur Quellenforschung’, Nietzsche-​Studien 30: 418–​21. Brobjer, T. H. (2003), ‘Nietzsche as German Philosopher: His Reading of the Classical German Philosophers’, in Nicholas Martin (ed.), Nietzsche and the German Tradition, Oxford e. a.: Peter Lang. Brobjer, T. H. (2008), Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

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Broese, K. (2004), ‘Nietzsches erste Begegnung mit Schopenhauer im Lichte eines bisher unveröffentlichten Manuskriptes aus seiner Bonner Studienzeit’, Schopenhauer-​ Jahrbuch 85: 13–​26. Broese, K. (2005), ‘Nietzsches frühe Auseinandersetzung mit Kants Kritizismus’, in B. Himmelmann (ed.), Kant und Nietzsche im Widerstreit, 364–​72, Berlin/​New York: de Gruyter. Campioni, G., D’Iorio, P., Fornari, M. C., Fronterotta, F., and Orsucci, A. (2003), Nietzsches persönliche Bibliothek, Berlin/​New York: de Gruyter. Clark, M., and Dudrick, D. (2012), The Soul of Nietzsche’s beyond Good and Evil, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crawford, C. (1988), The Beginnings of Nietzsche’s Theory of Language, Berlin/​ New York: de Gruyter. Crescenzi, L. (1994), ‘Verzeichnis der von Nietzsche aus der Universitätsbibliothek in Basel entliehenen Bücher (1869–​1879)’, Nietzsche-​Studien 23: 388–​442. Figl, J. (1984), Dialektik der Gewalt. Nietzsches hermeneutische Religionsphilosophie mit Berücksichtigung unveröffentlichter Manuskripte, Düsseldorf: Patmos. Figl, J. (1989), ‘Nietzsches frühe Begegnung mit dem Denken Indiens. Auf der Grundlage seiner unveröffentlichten Kollegnachschrift aus Philosophiegeschichte (1865)’, Nietzsche-​Studien 18: 455–​71. Figl, J. (1991), ‘Nietzsches Begegnung mit Schopenhauers Hauptwerk. Unter Heranziehung eines frühen unveröffentlichten Exzerptes’, in Wolfgang Schirmacher (ed.), Schopenhauer, Nietzsche und die Kunst (Schopenhauer-​Studien 4), Wien: Passagen Verlag. Fischer, K. (1860), Immanuel Kant. Entwicklungsgeschichte und System der kritischen Philosophie. Erster Band: Entstehung und Begründung der kritischen Philosophie. Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Zweiter Band: Das Lehrgebäude der kritischen Philosophie. Das System der reinen Vernunft, 2 vols [= Geschichte der neuern Philosophie, vol. III, IV], Mannheim: Friedrich Bassermann. Fortlage, K. (1852), Genetische Geschichte der Philosophie seit Kant, Leipzig: Brockhaus. Gerratana, F. (1988), ‘Der Wahn jenseits des Menschen. Zur frühen E. v. Hartmann-​ Rezeption Nietzsches (1869–​1874)’, Nietzsche-​Studien 17 (1988): 391–​433. Hartmann, E. von (1869), Philosophie des Unbewußten. Versuch einer Weltanschauung, Berlin: Duncker. Hartmann, E. von (1879), Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins. Prolegomena zu jeder künftigen Ethik, Berlin: Duncker. Haym, R. (1864), Arthur Schopenhauer, Berlin: Georg Reimer. Helmholtz, H. von (1867), Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, Leipzig: Voss. Hussain, N. J. Z. (2004), ‘Reading Nietzsche through Ernst Mach’, in G. Moore and T. H. Brobjer (Hg.), Nietzsche and Science, 111–​29, Aldershot/​Burlington: Ashgate. Janz, C. P. (1978), Friedrich Nietzsche. Biographie in drei Bänden, München-​Wien: dtv.

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Kant, I. (1838–​42), Immanuel Kant’s sämmtliche Werke, eds K. Rosenkranz and F. W. Schubert, 12 vols, Leipzig: Voss. Kofman, S. (1979), Nietzsche et la scène philosophique, Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions. Kohl, O. (1868), ‘Immanuel Kants Ansicht von der Willensfreiheit’, diss., Leipzig. Köhnke, K. C. (1986), Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus. Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus, Frankfurt/​ M.: Suhrkamp. Langbehn, C. (2005), Metaphysik der Erfahrung. Zur Grundlegung einer Philosophie der Rechtfertigung beim frühen Nietzsche, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Lange, F. A. (1866), Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, Iserlohn: J. Baedeker. Lange, F. A. (1873–​75), Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, 2. verb. u. verm. Aufl., 2 vols., Iserlohn: J. Baedeker. Lange, F. A. (1880), History of Materialism and Criticism of Its Present Importance, 3 vols, Boston: Houghton, Osgood. Lange, F. A. (1887), Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, ed. H. Cohen (Wohlfeile Ausgabe, Zweites Tausend), Iserlohn, Leipzig: J. Baedeker. Lehmann, R. (1878), Kant’s Lehre vom Ding an sich. Ein Beitrag zur Kantphilologie, Berlin: J. Sittenfeld. Liebmann, O. (1865), Kant und die Epigonen, Stuttgart: C. Schober. Liebmann, O. [without author] (1871), Vier Monate vor Paris. 1870–​1871. Belagerungstagebuch eines Campagne-​Freiwilligen im K.Pr. Garde-​Fusilier-​Regiment, Stuttgart. Liebmann, O. (1880), Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit. Eine Erörterung der Grundprobleme der Philosophie, Zweite, beträchtlich vermehrte Auflage, Straßburg: K. J. Trübner. Loukidelis, N. (2013), Es denkt. Ein Kommentar zum Aphorismus 17 von Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Metterhausen, W. (1942), Friedrich Nietzsches Bonner Studentenzeit 1864/​1865, Kassel, unpublished manuscript. Nietzsche, F. (1993), Appunti filosofici. Omero e la filologia classica, eds G. Campioni and F. Gerratana, Milan: Adelphi. Orsucci, A. (1994), ‘Unbewußte Schlüsse, Anticipationen, Übertragungen. Über Nietzsches Verhältnis zu Karl Friedrich Zöllner und Gustav Gerber’, in T. Borsche, F. Gerratana and A. Venturelli (eds), ‘Centauren-​Geburten’. Wissenschaft, Kunst und Philosophie beim jungen Nietzsche, 193–​207, Berlin/​New York: de Gruyter. Reuter, S. (2009), An der ‘Begräbnisstätte der Anschauung’, Nietzsches Bild-​und Wahrnehmungstheorie in Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne, Basel: Schwabe. Riccardi, M. (2009), ‘Der faule Fleck des Kantischen Kriticismus’, Erscheinung und Ding an sich bei Nietzsche, Basel: Schwabe.

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Romundt, H. (1872), Die menschliche Erkenntniß und das Wesen der Dinge, Basel: Georg. Romundt, H. (1882), Antäus. Neuer Aufbau der Lehre Kants über Seele, Freiheit und Gott, Leipzig: Veit. Romundt, H. (1883), Die Herstellung der Lehre Jesu durch Kant’s Reform der Philosophie, Bremen: Roussell. Romundt, H. (1885a), Grundlegung zur Reform der Philosophie: vereinfachte und erweiterte Darstellung von Immanuel Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Berlin: Nicolai. Romundt, H. (1885b), Die Vollendung des Sokrates: Immanuel Kants Grundlegung zur Reform der Sittenlehre, Berlin: Nicolai. Romundt, H. (1886), Ein neuer Paulus: Immanuel Kants Grundlegung zu einer sicheren Lehre von der Religion, Berlin: Nicolai. Romundt, H. (1887), Die drei Fragen Kants, Berlin: Nicolai. Salaquarda, J. (1978), ‘Nietzsche und Lange’, Nietzsche-​Studien 7: 236–​60. Salaquarda, J. (1979), ‘Der Standpunkt des Ideals bei Lange und Nietzsche’, Studi Tedeschi XXII, 1: 133–​70. Schaarschmidt, C. (1857), Der Entwicklungsgang der neueren Speculation als Einleitung in die Philosophie der Geschichte kritisch dargestellt von Dr. C. Schaarschmidt, Bonn: Marcus. Stack, G. J. (1983), Lange and Nietzsche, Berlin/​New York: de Gruyter. Thüring, H. (1994), ‘Beiträge zur Quellenforschung’, Nietzsche-​Studien 23: 480–​9. Timms, E. (1986), Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satyrist: The Postwar Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika, New Haven: Yale University Press. Treiber, H. (1993), ‘Zur Genealogie einer “science positive de la morale en Allemagne”. Die Geburt der „ré(e)alistischen Moralwissenschaft“ aus der Idee einer monistischen Naturkonzeption’, Nietzsche-​Studien 22: 165–​221. Treiber, H. (1994), ‘Zur “Logik des Traumes” bei Nietzsche. Anmerkungen zu den Traum-​Aphorismen aus Menschliches, Allzumenschliches’, Nietzsche-​Studien 23: 1–​41. Ueberweg, F. (1866–​67), Grundriß der Geschichte der Philosophie von Thales bis auf die Gegenwart, 3rd edn, 3 vols, Berlin: Mittler. Zöllner, J. C. F. (1872), Über die Natur der Cometen. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Theorie der Erkenntniss, 2 Aufl., Leipzig: Staackmann.

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Nietzsche, Transcendental Argument and the Subject John Richardson

1.  Introduction Nietzsche is a frequent and emphatic critic of what he calls ‘the subject’. This is ‘the thing that thinks’, in the broad Cartesian sense, that it is the thing that ‘is conscious’ –​to whom conscious experience is (as it were) presented. Together with this Nietzsche is also a critic of what we (but not Nietzsche) call ‘the agent’. This is ‘the thing that acts’, in the sense that it steers (and so causes) its behaviour by choices and reasons. (Nietzsche attacks this, I suggest, when he attacks our usual notion of ‘will’.) He wants, it seems, to talk us out of both of these views of ourselves. But on the other hand, Nietzsche also sometimes suggests that it may be necessary for us to take ourselves to be subjects and agents in order to live our human lives. He judges that they may be indispensable self-​conceptions, false though they are. They constitute our human perspective, and hence have full title to be ‘true for us’. I want to examine the interplay between these two positions, which stand in certain tensions with one another. Nietzsche seems to give us reasons not to believe that we’re subjects or agents, but then to have the unsatisfying afterthought that we have to continue to believe these things about ourselves after all. Is this indeed his view? If yes, how are we to continue to believe after having had the error exposed? Now these juxtaposed positions, that belief in oneself as a subject or agent is strictly false, but unavoidable, put Nietzsche in Kantian territory. Kant agrees with much of Nietzsche’s scepticism regarding the subject. He takes from Hume

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the lesson that we can never have evidence of a subject, and that it’s an error to treat this I as a substance. But he also agrees with Nietzsche’s (sometime) view that taking-​oneself-​to-​be a subject is necessary, since the ‘unity of apperception’ is a condition for any experience. Kant uses this necessity in his distinctive way, in a ‘transcendental argument’ that justifies what it shows to be a ‘condition of the possibility of experience’. ‘There must be a condition that precedes all experience and makes the latter itself possible, which should make such a transcendental presupposition valid’ (KrV A 107). In this case it justifies attributing all of one’s thoughts to an ‘I’. Nietzsche has, it seems, the ingredients for such a transcendental argument, but he mainly refuses to take this Kantian route. He insists relentlessly on the falsity of the subject and agent, and doesn’t meliorate it with the idea that it is after all true-​for-​us. I want to examine why he proceeds so –​and consider in what different direction he carries the originally Kantian points.

2.  Transcendental argument in Kant Kant’s use of transcendental arguments lies at the very crux of his great philosophical innovation, his ‘Copernican’ reversal. Familiarly, this reversal lies in his idea that ‘objects must conform to our cognition’ (KrV B xvi) –​not of course quite in general or completely, but for certain very basic structures of our cognition, in particular space, time and the categories. We impose these structures on the objects of experience, and this is necessary for –​is a ‘condition of the possibility’ of –​any experience. Here it’s important that ‘experience’ be meant in some minimal sense, such that it is quite indispensable for us: we wouldn’t recognize as ours a life –​it wouldn’t be a human life –​that lacked it. Those structures are preconditions for what we can’t do without. Kant uses these necessities to justify our belief in certain intuitions and concepts, as applying to things in our experience. Kant here means to answer the challenge of scepticism, of global doubt: the assertion that all we believe, even about the general character of things, either is or might be false. Kant takes it as settled that we are unable to answer such a doubt –​for example, Hume’s doubt against the I or subject –​by a straightforward proof of the belief. It’s this inability to prove directly (e.g. that I’m a subject) that dictates the transcendental form of argument that Kant innovates.1 We must employ those intuitions and concepts –​ for example, must think ourselves as subjects –​if we’re to have any experience of things at all.

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So the general schema for a transcendental argument is: i. we agree that X is indisputable/​indispensable, ii. but X is only possible on the basis of C (its condition), iii.  therefore we should accept C too. The argument purports to establish C on the basis of X.  Consider these elements. X is the starting point of transcendental argument, what we agree in/​about. This beginning must be something so minimal that any interlocutor will have to agree with it. (So in a way the argument tries to ‘start at the beginning’ as Descartes does.) The weaker and less disputable this starting point, the stronger the argument will be. I suggest that Kant’s principal starting point is (something like) ‘the having of experience’ –​where the latter is understood initially just by ostension to what we each know at first hand. (So our X stands for experience.) It is on the one hand apparently indisputable that we do have experience –​how could we be wrong? On the other hand it seems we wouldn’t or couldn’t dispense with having experience; to lose it would be to cease to be human. C is the condition we reason to, as what is required for X. It’s what the sceptic is shown he must accept, given that he already accepts that X. It should be noted that these are logical not causal conditions. Kant in fact produces chains of Cs: he argues that experience presupposes a C1, and that this in turn presupposes a C2 and so on. Indeed, conditions can even require one another, and so be jointly necessary for experience. In the Transcendental Deduction, C2 is a set of a priori concepts, the categories, including substance and cause. This condition is a condition for, first, being able to attribute all our thoughts to ourselves, that is, for the unity of apperception (C1). This unity is itself a more direct (and obvious) condition for experience (X). Only as organizing the world by the categories can we attribute all our thoughts to ourselves, and thereby have experience as we do and must. Now notice, about the C, that Kant takes it to have a different epistemic status from the X, at least initially. It is after all something one might try to deny. It’s something that sceptics do deny –​as Hume denies the I or subject. It’s not presumed that these sceptics must accept C by its own immediate claims; this is why the transcendental argument needs to reason them into it, from that firmer beginning they do accept (that they have experience). The argument shows that C is indispensable after all, though not as obviously or immediately as the X. There should even be a certain surprise (as not for the X) in being shown that C is necessary. The C’s necessity is hidden in a way the X’s is not.

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Seen in this light, the argument looks odd. It tries to show that the belief in C is necessary, as a condition for X, which we all agree to. But it needs to show this precisely because C can be and indeed is doubted, by the sceptic in particular. Hume, for example, doubts whether he’s a subject, and yet it doesn’t prevent him from having experience of our typically human kind. How can belief in C be necessary for something we constantly do, yet it be possible to dispute it? The answer to this puzzle draws in another central feature of transcendental arguments  –​one that I  think deserves more attention. These arguments depend on a distinction of certain ‘levels’ at which a concept or principle can be employed. The ‘belief in C’ that’s claimed to be necessary for experience is not an overt belief episodically affirmed in conscious thoughts and assertions, but a ‘deep’ or ‘background’ belief that is claimed to structure our thinking continually. Such, for example, is how we rely on the concept ‘cause’ in all our tiniest expectations of how our bodies can act on things. I assume I can cause changes in things around me. It’s this pervasive structuring role of the concept ‘cause’ that we can’t dispense with, not those overt pronouncements –​the sceptic shows that these can be given up. The unity of apperception is something that happens at this deep or subliminal level. I  may not, until I  read Kant, notice myself attaching an ‘I’ to (my) thoughts in this way. I needn’t attribute (my) thoughts and actions to this I explicitly, and don’t need to affirm the proposition that they’re all my own. It is something of which I can become conscious, not something of which I always am aware. So KrV A 123: ‘the standing and lasting I (of pure apperceptions) constitutes the correlate of all of our representations, so far as it is merely possible to become conscious of them, and all consciousness belongs to an all-​ embracing pure apperception’. As I’ll put it, the unity of apperception plays a ‘structural’ role. Finally let’s notice a certain limitation to Kant’s transcendental arguments, which will be important to us later. This limitation was pointed out by Stroud (1968) in a well-​known paper. Stroud argues that transcendental argument is unable, on its own, to defeat external-​world scepticism, because the necessary condition it justifies is not the existence of external things, but our belief in their existence. Stroud suggests that a transcendental arguer can bridge the gap between belief and things only by a verificationism or an idealism. Kant’s way of bridging it is idealism: our deep beliefs structure the things we experience, so that the latter are phenomenal not noumenal:  they are ‘things of experience’.

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3.  Nietzsche against transcendental argument Nietzsche operates within a broadly Kantian framework. He is a modern, in the philosophical age founded by Kant. So he is constantly struck by how we ‘construct’ the things we experience and make theories about. Indeed Nietzsche is notable for how vastly he multiplies the respects in which we so make things. His wide-​ranging psychology diagnoses one after another way our conception of things has been steered by interests other than truth and objectivity. They suggest that in wide-​ranging respects our ‘truths’ are ‘for us’ or subjective. Pursuant to this, Nietzsche takes over Kant’s idea that there are deep structuring posits serving as ‘conditions’ for our human experience. (He also follows Kant in calling these posits the ‘synthetic a priori’.) Very importantly for our future purposes, he thinks of these structuring posits as having been ‘incorporated’ in us; incorporation consists precisely in a notion or judgement being pushed down into our body’s habitual, instinctive viewpoint. Those posits are built into us ‘before’ or independently of any overt thinking of them. Nietzsche often seems to accept Kant’s account of just what (some of) these posits are –​beliefs in substances and causality, and belief that one is oneself a conscious ‘I’. ‘Here is a limit: our thinking itself involves that belief [“in the I, as a substance, as the only reality” –​JR] (with its distinctions of substance-​accident, doing, doer, etc.), to let it go means no-​longer-​being-​able-​to-​think’ (NL 1886–​7 7[63], KSA 12.317). ‘ “Subject”:  interpreted from out of ourselves, so that the I counts as subject, as cause of all doing, as doer [Thäter]’ (NL 1887 9[98], KSA 12.391). Like Kant, Nietzsche thinks the crucial feature of these posits is the way they allow us to organize our experience in time. But Nietzsche transforms the status of these posits, above all by naturalizing them. This naturalizing has one central effect on transcendental argument:  it converts Kant’s possibility-​conditions into life-​conditions.2 Nietzsche makes this change with reference to some of those very categories that are Kant’s Cs: instead of being possibility-​conditions, beliefs in substances and causes are life-​or existence-​conditions for us. Instead of logical conditions, they are now causal conditions. He harps on this point so often that it’s a plausible sign of what he thinks his own innovation is. [P]‌reservation-​ and growth-​conditions [Erhaltungs-​und Wachsthums-​ Bedingungen] express themselves in valuations /​all of our knowledge-​organs and -​senses are developed only with regard to preservation-​and growth-​conditions /​ trust in reason and its categories, in dialectic, therefore the valuation of logic proves

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Nietzsche has a number of terms for this idea; I  think they are for the most part interchangeable, though we’ll need to come back to talk about nuances. Let me list a few, with occurrences in his published works: Life-​condition (Lebens-​ Bedingung): BGE 188, KSA 5.110; AC 25, KSA 6.194. Lebensbedingung: GS 110, KSA 3.469; BGE 4, KSA 5.18; BGE 62, KSA 5.81; BGE 268, KSA 5.222; BGE 276, KSA 5.228. Bedingung des Lebens: GS 110, KSA 5.471. Existence-​condition (Existenz-​Bedingung): GS1, KSA 3.372; GS 7, KSA 3.379; GS 335, KSA 3.561; EH Destiny 4, KSA 6.368. Existenzbedingung: GM I 10, KSA 5.273; EH Destiny 4, KSA 6.368. Preservation-​condition (Erhaltungs-​Bedingung): AC 26, KSA 6.196; EH Books (BT) 3, KSA 6.312. Erhaltungsbedingung: AC 16, KSA 6.183. Growth-​ condition (Wachsthums-​Bedingung): BGE 188, KSA 5.110; AC 25, KSA 6.194. These uses of these terms in his books are the iceberg tip to a great many more uses in his notebooks.4 Now in what way is a life-​condition a ‘condition’? What is the nature of the step back from the X to this kind of C? The relation is not logical but biological, and Nietzsche understands this in broadly Darwinian terms. Life-​conditions are the drives and values that enable an organism to thrive, and they are there in the organism because they have so allowed it. Thus the relation is not just causal, but doubly causal: a. the condition tends to cause/​promote life; b. its causing/​promoting life has caused it to be there. That is, the C is a ‘function’ not just in the propensity (forward) sense, but in the etiological (backward) sense too: it explains why the feature is there.5 Nietzsche usually means that the drive or value evolved in order to play that role. With this notion of life-​conditions there is also a relativization to kinds of life. Every kind of life will count as an X with its own Cs, that is, the structural posits it must make in order to live that kind of life. Our interest is principally in the kind ‘human life’ (in general), but we should keep in mind that there are also such conditions for more particular types of persons, such as, for example, master or slave. In consequence of this, Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘synthetic a priori’ is much more diverse than Kant’s. Indeed, he thinks of our own structurings as standing in an evolutionary order within us: we have deeper structures that were deposited in our animal ancestry, and later, superimposed ones that turned us into humans.

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On first view the epistemic impact of Nietzsche’s change looks simple and obvious:  it’s to spoil Kant’s transcendental arguments, destroying their ability to justify those beliefs (e.g. in causation), at least as true. When possibility-​ conditions become life-​conditions, they are revealed as mere contingent causes of particular forms of life. The categories, for example, are just what we have had to believe in order to develop our distinctive human life. But, Nietzsche insists, this does not show these beliefs to be true.6 Life not an argument. –​We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we are able to live –​by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith no one could endure living! But that does not prove them. Life is not an argument; the conditions of life might include error. (GS 121, KSA 3.477f.)

Indeed, if anything, Nietzsche suggests, this conversion into life-​conditions reverses the argument’s force, making it count against the C’s truth. Diagnosing these beliefs as life-​conditions shows that we don’t hold them on epistemic grounds; it exposes our lack of reasons to believe them. The diagnosis explains these beliefs as established in us for quite non-​truth-​seeking motives; it would be mere accident if they were true. This critique of the Kantian argument-​form begins with Nietzsche’s recognition of Stroud’s point (from §1) that the argument can carry us only to belief: it shows we must believe in, for example, the categories, not that they’re true.7 It does nothing to prove them. ‘The law of causality a priori –​that it is believed, can be an existence-​condition of our kind; thereby it is not proved’ (NL 1884 26[74], KSA 11.168). [I]‌t is high time to replace the Kantian question, ‘How are synthetic judgements a priori possible?’ by another question, ‘Why is belief in such judgements necessary?’ –​and to comprehend that such judgements must be believed to be true, for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves; though they might, of course, be false judgements for all that! Or, to speak more clearly and coarsely: synthetic judgements a priori should not ‘be possible’ at all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgements. Only, of course, the belief in their truth is necessary, as a foreground belief and visual evidence belonging to the perspective optics of life. (BGE 11, KSA 5.25f.)

Here the point is not that categorial judgements are false but that they might be, and hence are not known (are false ‘in our mouths’).

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But Nietzsche further holds that these beliefs are not just unproven, they are indeed false. [W]‌e are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgements (which include the synthetic judgements a priori) are the most indispensable for us; that without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-​identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live –​that renouncing false judgements would mean renouncing life and a denial of life. To recognize untruth as life-​condition [. . .] (BGE 4, KSA 5.18)

Indeed Nietzsche gives a positive account of the true character of the world the categories are false about: it’s ‘becoming’ in such a way that it lacks the properties we project onto it. ‘[W]‌e have projected our preservation-​conditions as predicates of being in general /​because we need to be stable in our believing, in order to thrive, we have made the “real” world one not changing and becoming, but being’ (NL 1887 9[38], KSA 12.353). He purports to know this different character of the world on independent grounds. These points apply in particular to our posit of an I  or subject. Nietzsche sometimes says that this may be false: [T]‌hrough thinking the I is posited; but so far one believed as the people do, that in ‘I think’ there lay something immediately certain, and that this ‘I’ was the given cause of thinking, by analogy with which we understood all other causal relations. However habitual and indispensable this fiction may now be, –​this by itself proves nothing against its inventedness: a belief can be a life-​condition and nevertheless be false. (NL 1885 38[3], KSA 11.598–​9)

Elsewhere he says that it is false: Subject: this is the terminology for our belief in a unity among all the different moments of [the] highest feeling of reality. /​‘Subject’ is the fiction, as if many equal states of us were the effect of one substratum: but we have first created the ‘equality’ of these states; the setting equal and the making ready are the facts, not equality (–​this is much more to be denied –​). (NL 1887 10[19], KSA 12.465)

Now Nietzsche suggests in BGE 54 that Kant may have ‘seen through’ the subject: ‘Kant basically wanted to prove that [starting] from the subject the subject could not be proved,  –​nor the object either:  the possibility of an apparent existence of the subject, hence of “the soul”, may not always have remained foreign to him’ (BGE 54, KSA 5.73). Hill (2003: 181) points out the oddity to this, since Kant seems clearly to hold that ‘the self of apperception is only an

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apparent unity’. Hill suggests, plausibly, that Nietzsche hedges his compliment because he thinks that Kant still believes in a noumenal self that carries out the synthesis of the unity of apperception. This would give Kant a reason to think that the unity of apperception’s posit of a self is not just phenomenally but transcendentally true. Nietzsche claims to know the reality the I-​posit gets wrong. He stresses especially that the reality is something plural, lacking the unity the I-​posit claims. Note 40[42] puts the point tentatively: The assumption of one subject is perhaps not necessary; perhaps it is just as permitted to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle lie at the basis of our thinking and our consciousness generally? A kind of aristocracy of ‘cells’, in which mastery rests? To be sure, of equals [pares] which are accustomed to rule with one another and know how to command? /​My hypotheses: /​ the subject as multiplicity [. . .] (NL 1885 40[42], KSA 11.650)

Many other passages stress this multiplicity. These many attacks on unity seem to leave little of the Kantian argument still standing.

4.  Necessary perspectives Yet, as we’ve noticed, Nietzsche has all the ingredients for a Kantian justification of these posits –​strictly false though they are. For in agreeing them to be ‘conditions’ for human life he gives them the kind of credit that (it seems) should be important to him. If he makes truth itself perspectival, shouldn’t these Kantian posits count as true-​for our human perspective? Isn’t this the very kind of truth we should aspire to  –​given that Nietzsche denies the coherence of an objective truth about things in themselves? So he seems to have strong philosophical motives to take conditionality as justifying: strong reasons to recognize a kind of internal truth –​internal to the necessary human perspective –​and to be every bit as satisfied with such truth as Kant. Indeed, it might be argued that this is Nietzsche’s position, and that its real shape is merely disguised –​disguised by the far greater vehemence of his assertions that these necessary posits are (strictly, externally, transcendentally) false, than of his reminders that they have the only kind of truth we can achieve, a human truth. We might hear this position, for example, in the important note NL 1880 6[441], KSA 9.312: ‘There is “truth” really only in things that the human being invents e.g. number. He [the human] lays something in and then finds it again –​that is the kind of human truth [. . .] The world is thus for us the sum of

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relations to a limited sphere of erroneous basic assumptions.’ On this reading Nietzsche’s position is deeply Kantian, the difference being just rhetorical.8 Clark’s (1990) well-​known reading is relevant here. (I will offer perhaps only a caricature of it in order to locate it quickly in my problematic.) She argues that Nietzsche abandons his early denial of truth because it has rested on a ‘metaphysical correspondence theory of truth’, which understands truth as correspondence to things in themselves. He gradually realizes that the very notion of a thing in itself is incoherent, and that truth is dependent on our ‘cognitive interests’. Clark (Clark 1990: 135) calls this Nietzsche’s ‘neo-​Kantian position on truth’, and thinks that he expresses it metaphorically in his so-​called perspectivism. Clark thus distinguishes two notions of truth which she claims Nietzsche holds in sequence. It’s a fatal problem for her reading that Nietzsche does not stop, at any point in his career, calling these categorial beliefs false. In Clark’s (2012:  82)  more recent book, co-​written with Dudrick, the suggestion is that when he does so (in BGE 11 at least) Nietzsche is speaking a ‘new language’ in which ‘false’ means ‘without outside or transcendent justification’, so that ‘[i]‌t is not an objection to [those founding judgements –​JR] precisely because it is not a claim that they are false’ (in the usual sense). Clark and Dudrick are forced into this unpersuasive reading9 by the guiding thesis that Nietzsche takes himself to see that without any ‘things in themselves’ there is no ‘standard beyond man’ that the humanly necessary beliefs fall short of, hence no reason for Nietzsche still to hold the ‘falsification thesis’. This compels them to read away the clear evidence that he does still hold that the categorial beliefs are false. I concur that there are two notions of truth, but I think that Nietzsche holds both in mind right to the end. Some posits are necessary for human’s perspective, and hence true for it. But these posits are nevertheless false by a higher standard –​and we can even know that they are. Nietzsche can hold these two points together by applying them (as we’ve seen) at different ‘levels’. We only need to believe in our unity as a subject ‘down’ at the level of our implicit and structuring ‘basic assumptions’; it’s there that it’s true for us. So BGE 11 says that ‘belief in their truth is necessary, as a foreground belief and visual appearance [Augenschein], which belongs to the perspective-​optics of life’ (BGE 11, KSA 5.26).10 When, however, we think explicitly about the claim, we find it false by a different standard –​the standard of our human ‘will to truth’, which simply sees better than our structuring processes do. Let’s call this reading ‘bifurcation’. We must worry whether this dichotomy is psychologically sustainable: won’t the theoretical truth about ourselves tend to seep into our subliminal viewpoint? Or does Nietzsche think that the latter operates so deeply and automatically in

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us that our conscious beliefs can have no force against it? ‘[T]‌the strength of knowledge lies not in its degree of truth, but in its age, its embeddedness, its character as a condition of life [Lebensbedingung]’ (GS 110, KSA 3.469). The most deeply deposited posits –​laid down in our animal past –​will be the most unshakable in us. But to the extent that a posit is not immutable, but rather subject to erosion by contrary conscious thinking, it seems that we might –​if it’s indeed a life-​condition for us –​need to somehow forget and steer clear of the theoretical truths that could undermine it. Notice how Nietzsche’s view of the ‘death of morality’ is relevant here. The will to truth will undermine our moral values precisely insofar as certain theorized truths –​no God, no objective values –​will gradually work down into our valuing –​into that subliminal level of valuing that sets our everyday course. Finding the truth will sap our ability to care and strive for ‘higher values’ down among our drives and affects, where valuing is really effective. We are living through the long period –​nihilism –​in which the truth about morality is being incorporated. In this case, then, philosophical or scientific discoveries aren’t ‘insulated’ from an implicit valuing, but erode and ruin it. Does Nietzsche expect a similar effect on the faith that we’re subjects, or does this lie more deeply and fixedly in us? Morality can’t survive incorporation of the truth about itself; can the unity of apperception survive our insight that there is no subject? We should also notice how ‘bifurcation’ somewhat unravels the neo-​Kantian point. For it now appears that there are two ‘human truths’, one that it is necessary for us to believe subliminally, the other that we have reason to think consciously. But if in fact we can ‘see better’ in our conscious reflection, there’s less reason to call the necessary subliminal posits ‘true’ after all. Human is not limited to them, except in that implicit functioning. I think that bifurcation, with its variants and issues, is a live option for Nietzsche, but that he rates it a fallback position. It may prove necessary to sustain and defend our implicit faith in our subjectivity. But we don’t know yet –​ we have something better to try first. His ambition is to ‘experiment’ whether another and more satisfying strategy can succeed:  we should venture, courageously, as he thinks it, to incorporate more of the truth than we’ve so far been able to. We should aspire to believe in the truth that there is no subject not just in our episodic conscious thoughts, but in the implicit comportment that steers us all the time. If we fail, then we will find ourselves forced to explore bifurcation. Nietzsche’s stance towards these human-​making posits is not conservative but subversive. He tries to push the border, by experimenting ‘how far the truth can be incorporated’. To what extent can our implicit suppositions about ‘what

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thinks/​acts’ be revised in the direction of truth? To what extent can this be done, that is, without damaging us? We find Nietzsche’s basis for this project by going back to his naturalization of the Kantian a priori posits. The latter are revealed to be selected as needed for the flourishing of particular kinds of life –​for the life of different species, or even of different kinds of human. However these kinds are not themselves fixed, but in flux. There are circumstances when one kind of life can or must evolve, by revising its structuring assumptions to serve as basis for a new kind of life. This has happened repeatedly in human and indeed animal history.11 This means that Nietzsche has no allegiance to a human ‘essence’ that must be defended from variation. He anticipates and hopes that human will develop into something else, something higher. So NL 1887 10[17], KSA 12.462 speaks of the aim ‘to bring to light a stronger species, a higher type that has different Entstehungs-​ and Erhaltungsbedingungen than the average-​human’. ‘That which partly necessity, partly chance has achieved here and there, the conditions for the production of a stronger type, we are now able to comprehend and consciously will: we are able to create the conditions under which such an elevation is possible’ (NL 1887 9[153], KSA 12.424). Here Nietzsche claims another difference from Kant: he creates new values and thereby a new kind of life, whereas Kant was only a ‘critic’ (BGE 210, KSA 5.144). Nietzsche’s most famous statement of this ambition is of course his reference to (the character) Übermensch, who again is imagined as an individual representative of the kind. Superhuman is most distinguished, I suggest, precisely by its incorporation, into background ‘operating assumptions’, of more of the truth about things –​and about its ‘self ’ in particular. Superhuman is higher than human by virtue of living (and not just consciously thinking) with more of the truth. GS 11 already states the challenge: ‘It is still a quite new task, just dawning on human eyes and hardly recognizable, to incorporate knowing and make it instinctive, –​a task only seen by those who have grasped that so far only our errors were incorporated and that all our consciousness relates to errors!’12 I suggest: this is the set of experiments Nietzsche calls his readers into –​investigating how much truth we can come to recognize in our bodies, that is, in our habitual and operative background structuring. Can we replace the ‘age-​old incorporated errors’ (GS 110) with (incorporated) truths? He most dramatically puts it: The thinker: this is now the creature in whom the drive to truth and those life-​preserving errors fight their first fight, once the drive to knowledge has proven itself a life-​preserving power. Compared to the importance of this fight

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every other is a matter of indifference: the final question about the condition of life is here posed, and the first attempt is here made, to answer the question through experiment. How far does the truth bear incorporation? –​that is the question, that is the experiment. (GS 110, KSA 3.471)13

It’s Nietzsche’s will to push us in this direction that sustains his insistence that our founding beliefs are false. He continues to press his attack because he is not content –​as he thinks Kant is –​with believing these falsehoods, believing them even in the implicit structuring of his experience. Can he not just think but live in the truth about himself? He may, to be sure, be ready to create new falsehoods there –​in new background assumptions –​but these will at least take account of the previous falsehoods, and thereby surpass the life lived under them. His new structuring posits at least see better than the old. Nietzsche encourages us to rate kinds of life by how much of the truth they can recognize in their conditioning beliefs. So EH Destiny 4 says that to evaluate a type of human one must know his Existenzbedingungen, but that a condition of the (morally) good is the lie. The strongest are those who are able to bear to see most clearly, and who are able to ‘incorporate’ these truths into their deep viewpoint. Of course Nietzsche also expects that there are limits to just how much of the truth can be thus incorporated. He speculates at times what truths might turn out not to ‘bear incorporation’.14 But quite generally he admires the effort to push up against these limits experimentally. Now what would it be like to incorporate the truth instead of our current lie about the I and subject, in particular? The reality about ‘me’, Nietzsche thinks, is the set of drives and affects that, with their shifting strengths, alliances and competitions, make me up. What would it be like to think of myself –​at that implicit and structural level –​as being this that I really am? Can we modify the unity of apperception to reflect this truth? The great challenge concerns, of course, the ‘unity’ in the unity of apperception. Nietzsche has a persistent suspicion against unities of all kinds. ‘Everything that enters consciousness as “unity” is already immensely complicated: we have always only an appearance of unity’ (NL 1886–​7 5[56], KSA 12.205). The challenge is to see whether there is any real unity ‘behind’ our thinking or doing –​ anything that can count as the one thing that carries them all out. Now on the one hand it may seem that such unity is not hard to find. When I ‘attach an I to all my thoughts’, when I attribute them all to myself, why can’t I just attribute them to that set of drives and affects? Why can’t I take this as ‘my I’? Nietzsche treats these drives and affects as just the willful and affective aspects

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of my body, which seems a single enough thing. Isn’t it my body, according to Nietzsche, that ultimately does all my thinking? So why isn’t it just a matter of thinking of this body as the I that gives unity to my thoughts? In this case he would not be disputing the unity of apperception per se, just the way we identify this ‘I’. But clearly Nietzsche doesn’t think the problem can be solved so easily. He so often stresses the multiplicity of drives in each of us to suggest that the apparent unity of the body, just as that of consciousness, is misleading.15 These drives’ perspectives don’t combine into a single space and perspective that shares them. It may well be a different drive that thinks (occasions) different thoughts. Each of these drives would then appear to be a kind of subject in its own right; each would be the thinker of a subset of all the thoughts taken as ‘mine’. There would be many different subjects ‘in me’ –​and whatever single and encompassing ‘me’ the body could be, it would not be the thinker of the thoughts attributed to it.16 The problem goes still deeper than this. For specifying particular drives as the thinkers of thoughts, or doers of deeds, is a simplification. Nothing ever works in isolation, Nietzsche thinks; all effects issue from complex concatenations of forces. What thinks and acts ‘in me’ is never really a single drive, but a temporary synthesis of drives in relations to one another. ‘No subject-​“atoms”. The sphere of a subject constantly growing or shrinking –​the midpoint of the system as constantly shifting –​; in cases where it can’t organize the appropriate mass it decays into 2’ (NL 1887 9[98], KSA 12.391–​2). It is the momentary coming-​together into quite particular relations of command and obedience among a subset of drives that thinks ‘my’ thought or does ‘my’ deed. But such a passing coalescing of forces is not at all substance-​like, even to the extent that individual drives might be. There’s nothing that persists, from any one thinking or doing to another, that can count as the same source. This, I suggest, is Nietzsche’s principal ground for denying that there is any ‘doer behind the doing’.17 So the unity of apperception couldn’t accommodate the truth just by reidentifying the thing that thinks. Its faith in unity itself is under attack. It’s in a different direction, I suggest, that the unity of apperception mainly needs to be modified. It must be converted, above all, from a presumption to an aspiration. The thoughts thought in this body aren’t all thought by the same thing. But this body can acquire a will to think an ever-​greater share of its thoughts out of one drive –​or out of one stable synthesis of drives –​with its own perspective.

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This is Nietzsche’s principal lesson from his fragmentation of the self: not to give up on unity, but to work to make, so far as we can, a single thing out of our multiplicity. This must be the right kind of single thing. We must pursue a kind of unity we can have, which is unity under a single aim, the aim of a dominant drive, or of a stable synthesis of the drives. We must pursue a form of this unification that is ‘healthier’ –​more on the track of power or growth. This will come by a single aim that doesn’t deny and suppress other drives and interests, but gathers them into itself. This is a different model for unity than the subject’s, which pictures itself as a thing different in kind from the drives, and opposed to them. But, it should be asked, would we still be able to think if we deeply viewed ourselves in this way? If my thinking gives up that presumption of unity, it seems it might have to stop using ‘I’ –​and even need to invent some different grammar to speak in, which looks a hopeless task. How would the new thinking even think of that lesson I’ve said Nietzsche proposes  –​to work to make a single thing of oneself? Doesn’t ‘my’ thinking need to presume that there’s a single ‘I’ that now takes on the task? It might be doubted that thinking is possible at all in the absence of this presumption. Indeed we’ve already noted Nietzsche’s expression of this doubt in NL 1886–​7 7[63], KSA 12.317: ‘Here is a limit: our thinking itself involves that belief [“in the I, as a substance, as the only reality”] (with its distinctions of substance-​accident, doing, doer, etc.), to let it go means no-​longer-​being-​able-​to-​think.’ It’s clear that the task –​to incorporate the insight that there’s no subject –​is extremely difficult. As I’ve said Nietzsche offers it only as an ‘experiment’, and one that human will need to work at for a long time to come. The goal, I suggest, is something like this:  for one’s thinking to realize, at the implicit and background level, that it is in each case carried out not by anything that is already and automatically the same thing that thinks all the other thoughts that happen in this body. When this thinking says ‘I’, it does so without presumption that it is the same I as the one that does this body’s other thinking. Thinking learns a new modesty about itself –​not to claim to express an abiding subject. Instead of presuming that unity –​and taking it as something complete and inevitable –​this thinking aspires to express an I that gathers and unifies this body’s many particular I’s, the drives that have done its other thinking. A lot more would need to be said to make this new option concrete; I can’t attempt it here. I’ll conclude by quickly summarizing the overall line I’ve traced. Nietzsche shares Kant’s ingredients for his transcendental arguments: he agrees that our thinking depends upon structuring posits that cannot be justified and

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are, strictly speaking, false. We must presume them not as theoretical positions or doctrines, but as implicit, background presumptions constantly at work. And yet Nietzsche doesn’t, despite his advocacy of truth’s perspectivity, affirm these grounding posits as ‘true for us’ (the Kantian turn). He rather insists on their falsity –​as, for example, with the posit of an abiding subject or I, as the thinker of all one’s thoughts. But he doesn’t do so with an eye to bifurcating us between deep belief and conscious scepticism. Rather he wants human to aspire to revise those structuring posits by learning to ‘incorporate’ the truth about itself into the very way it thinks and says ‘I’.

Notes 1 To ‘try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition’ (KrV B xvi). 2 Schacht (1983: 162) recognizes how Nietzsche diagnoses categories as ‘conditions of life for us’. See also Constâncio (2011: 113). 3 See NL 1881 11[262], KSA 9.541, on the ‘incorporation’ of ‘life-​conditions’. 4 There are over 50 occurrences of either Existenz-​Bedingung or Existenzbedingung in KSA volumes 9–​13. 5 See Richardson (2004: 26–​35) for a discussion of this distinction. 6 ‘The achieved similarity of experience (about space, or the feeling of time, or the feeling of large and small) has become a life-​condition of our genus, but it has nothing to do with the truth’ (NL 1881 11[156], KSA 9.501). ‘The categories are “truths” only in the sense that they are life-​conditioning [lebensbedingend] for us: as Euclidean space is a conditioning “truth”. (Between ourselves: since no one would maintain that there is any necessity for there to be humans, reason, as well as Euclidean space, is a mere idiosyncracy of a certain kind of animal, and one among many . . .)’ (NL 1888 14[152], KSA 13.334). 7 ‘[W]‌hat is needed is that something must be held to be true; not that something is true’ (NL 1887 9[38], KSA 12.352). ‘But that a belief, necessary as it may be to the preservation of a creature, has nothing to do with the truth, one knows e.g. from the fact we must believe in time space and motion, without feeling ourselves compelled [the rest of the text is illegible]’ (NL 1886–​7 7[63], KSA 12.318). 8 This would contradict Gardner’s (2009: 12) claim that Nietzsche seems to have ‘failed to absorb the Kantian lesson that there is a middle way between “soul-​ substratum” and Humean impersonalism’. 9 It attributes to Nietzsche a ‘new language’ that inexplicably keeps the old standard (correspondence to things in themselves) he now rejects.

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10 Nietzsche here puts in the foreground what I would rather locate in the background. But in either case there is the contrast with a different ground or field of vision in which we can see things better. 11 The note NL 1886–​7 5[61], KSA 12.207, describes the change when humans acquired leisure to cultivate themselves into something higher: ‘[T]‌hen a host of virtues are superseded that had been existence-​conditions.’ 12 The note NL 1881 11[164], KSA 9.505, also connects incorporation with instinct. 13 Notice how the landmark note NL 188 11[141], KSA 9.495, in which Nietzsche expresses his first experience of eternal return (cited later in EH Books (Z) 1, KSA 6.335), speaks often of incorporation, including: ‘[I]‌n sum, to await how far knowing and the truth can be incorporated.’ The note NL 1881 11[143], KSA 9.496, makes it clear that the idea of eternal return is also to be ‘incorporated’, that is, thought habitually and implicitly. 14 ‘[T]‌his error cannot not be destroyed otherwise than with life [itself]: the final truth of the flux of things does not bear incorporation, our organs (for life) are erected on this error’ (NL 1881 11[162], KSA 9.504). 15 The note NL 1885–​6 2[91], KSA 12.106, says that, by contrast with our ‘perspectival illusion’ of unity, the ‘guide of the body shows a tremendous multiplicity’. 16 ‘Human as multiplicity: physiology gives only a hint of the wonderful interaction among this multiplicity and subordination and ordering of parts to one whole. But it would be false to conclude from one state to one absolute monarch (the unity of the subject)’ (NL 1884 27[8]‌, KSA 11.276–​7). 17 NL 1887–​8 11[113], KSA 13.54, says that both the doer and the deed are ‘faked’ [fingirt].

References Clark, M. (1990), Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, M., and Dudrick, D. (2012), The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Constâncio, J. (2011), ‘Instinct and Language in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil’, in J. Constâncio and M. Branco (eds), Nietzsche on Instinct and Language, Berlin: de Gruyter. Gardner, S. (2009), ‘Nietzsche, the Self, and the Disunity of Philosophical Reason’, in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Hill, R. K. (2003), Nietzsche’s Critiques; The Kantian Foundations of His Thought, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Richardson, J. (2004), Nietzsche’s New Darwinism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schacht, R. (1983), Nietzsche, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Stroud, B. (1968), ‘Transcendental Arguments’, Journal of Philosophy LXV: 241–​56. Repr. in Kant on Pure Reason, ed. R. C. S. Walker, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

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From Pure Reason to Historical Knowledge: Nietzsche’s (Virtual) Objections to Kant’s First Critique Benedetta Zavatta

1.  Introduction In a note from 1888 entitled ‘Theorie und Praxis’ Nietzsche criticizes Kant’s distinction between the ‘theoretical’ (theoretisch) and the ‘practical’ (praktisch). Kant seems to assume that theoretical problems can be solved by examining merely the purely mental (Geistigkeit), while practice has to be judged according to different criteria (NL 1888 14[107], KSA 13.285). Nietzsche objects to him claiming that all mental operations rely on physiology and what we consider to be the product of free thinking actually originated in instincts. His aim is to eliminate the very distinction between the theoretical and the practical on the strength of the argument that we never relate selflessly to the world.1 Our engagement with external reality is never contemplative, but always pragmatic. That is the reason why he rephrases the Kantian problem, ‘[H]‌ow are synthetic a priori judgements possible?’ as ‘[W]hy is belief in such judgements necessary?’ (BGE 11, KSA 5.24f.). While Kant aimed to legitimize the claims of universality and necessity made by the science of his time, Nietzsche was rather concerned with understanding the psychological type that made such a claim. Therefore his enquiry does not concern epistemology alone, but morality as well. The method of Nietzsche’s enquiry is also very different from the Kantian method, as he believes that historical knowledge is the only kind of knowledge we can rely on. Therefore, in Nietzsche’s view, we can better understand the way we think only by comparing the different forms of ‘regulative beliefs [regulative Glaubensartikel]’ (NL 1886 7[4]‌, KSA 12.266) that, from the dawn of humanity, have been needed for human beings to live. My aim

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is to examine some remarks Nietzsche made on the issues discussed in the Critique of Pure Reason, bearing in mind however that he did not have a first-​ hand acquaintance with this work.2 Nietzsche’s image of Kant’s philosophy is always mediated by his reading of Schopenhauer3 or other authors. As Tsarina Doyle (2004) underlines, when Nietzsche refers to Kant, he is mostly referring to a particular philosophical problem that he thinks originated in or is exemplified in Kantian philosophy. ‘Nietzsche is not so much interested in the historical Kant but rather with a set of philosophical difficulties that can be broadly termed Kantian in character’ (183). In the first part of my argument I will examine Nietzsche’s criticism of Kantian categories, that is, the pure concepts of the intellect. For this, I  will take into account Nietzsche’s writings from the period of Human, All too Human to the late 1980s. In the second part I will consider the problem of how the concepts of empirical objects are formed, pointing out the differences between Kant’s and Nietzsche’s approaches. While Kant uses the concept of ‘object of experience’ quite unproblematically, Nietzsche discusses the problem of (linguistic) categorization in great detail, drawing several hints from some neo-​Kantian authors of his time.

2.  Reason is a natural and historical product As Beatrix Himmelmann (2005:  29)  noticed, Nietzsche’s relation to Kant is ambivalent:  on the one hand he is praised for his victory over ‘Socratic optimism’ (BT 24) and the emphasis on the intrinsic limits of human knowledge. In the Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche describes Kant as a champion of courage and wisdom, in that he brought to light the constitutive gap between being and knowledge. Kant pointed out the constitutive human impossibility of grasping the essence of things and recognized that the knowing subject plays an active role in the knowledge process, insofar as sense-​and mind-​structures deeply affect the human world view. In this regard, Nietzsche’s philosophy can be considered as the prosecution and radicalization of Kant’s enterprise. On the other hand Nietzsche sharply criticizes Kant’s stance insofar as it is grounded on metaphysical assumptions. Nietzsche’s critical remarks on Kant in this regard helps us bring out the specific features of Nietzsche’s approach. Nietzsche’s criticism of Kant plays a particularly important role in the more general attack on Western metaphysics that Nietzsche carries out in the period

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of Human, All Too Human, while historicizing and naturalizing cognitive processes. In aph. 16 of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche polemically attacks those philosophers who regard the phenomenal world as a painting, and expect to be able to draw from it hints about its ‘author’. In other words, through the analysis of empirical phenomena they assume they have an insight into ‘things in themselves’, which are assumed to be their causes (HH 16, KSA 2.36). Actually, Nietzsche’s polemical attack here is not primarily directed against Kant, but rather against Schopenhauer. Nietzsche refutes Schopenhauer’s argument with the help of Spir’s theory of the thing in itself as ‘unconditioned and unable to condition anything’ (D’Iorio 1995:  248). Nietzsche states:  ‘From the unconditioned nothing conditioned can arise. Now, everything we know is conditioned. It follows that the unconditioned doesn’t exist. –​This is a superfluous hypothesis’ (NL 1884 26[429], KSA 11.265). Nietzsche’s further criticism of both Spir and Schopenhauer’s approaches in HH 16 is also interesting for our purposes, inasmuch as it could be extended to Kant as well. Nietzsche states: Both parties, however, overlook the possibility that this painting  –​what we humans call life and experience –​has gradually become, is indeed still fully in course of becoming, and should thus not be regarded as a fixed magnitude [feste Grösse]. (HH 16, KSA 2.36)

Nietzsche credits Kant with the merit of finding out that the laws that regulate phenomena are nothing but the way in which we think of them, that is, how we order them in time and space and link them using the categories of the intellect. However, Nietzsche objects against Kant that both the forms of pure intuition and the categories of intellect are not ‘fixed magnitudes’, but rather organizing forms that have developed historically. Our judgements are not made on the basis of inborn principles that precede experience and are independent of it, but are the products of ‘old-​age habits of sensation [uralter Gewohnheiten der Empfindung]’ (HH 16, KSA 2.37). Nietzsche concludes his argument looking forward to the day when, with the development of science, we shall be able to write a ‘history of the genesis of thought’ (HH 16, KSA 2.37), which will explain the origin and development of the forms by which we think. Before explaining what exactly Nietzsche means with the expression ‘habits of sensation’ we need to clarify his use of the word ‘sensation’ (Empfindung). This word commonly means both a sensory impression and the emotional/​affective investment made in it. In the Critique of Judgement (KU 205f.) Kant, however, strongly criticizes this double use of the term and suggests that it be applied only with reference to the ‘perception of an object of sense’ and its properties (like

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‘green’). In other words, in Kant’s view, ‘Empfindung’ is to be used as a synonym of ‘Sinnesempfindung’, and he suggests that the term ‘feeling’ (Gefühl) be used to refer to the inner affects (especially pleasure/​pain) produced by sensory objects, which are purely subjective and therefore void of cognitive value. Kant’s separation of ‘Sinnesempfindung’ from ‘innere Affizierung’ is rejected by Nietzsche as early as 1872–​73, when he identifies ‘feelings of pleasure and pain [Lust-​und Unlust-​ empfindungen]’ as ‘the actual material of all knowledge’ (NL 1872–​3 19[84], KSA 7.448; Siemens 2006: 147). In Human, All Too Human he then definitively replaces the Kantian notion of the ‘knowing subject’ with that of the organism or ‘Lebens-​ System’, whose reactions of pleasure and pain intervene in the constitution of mental representations of things. Nietzsche states: ‘In the first instance, any thing interests us organic beings solely in relation to pleasure and pain in us’ (HH 18, KSA 2.39). An organism senses (empfindet) external reality exclusively on the basis of the sensations of pleasure and pain that are generated through the interaction with it. Sensation therefore does not merely imply the passive reception of data (as in the Lockean or Kantian view), but involves interpretation and evaluation.4 As a consequence, the very distinction between pure cognitive data (e.g. green, round, etc.) and evaluative ones (useful/​harmful, pleasant/​unpleasant, etc.) is abolished. The traditional opposition of reason and instinct is abolished as well, together with the prejudice according to which instinct influences behaviour towards the satisfaction of needs, while reason has the power to release us from this dependence. Our instincts are the product of past judgement and, vice versa, our intellectual judgements are nothing but the development of instinctual judgement (Abel 2001).5 Nietzsche’s ‘habits of sensation’ (HH 16, KSA 2.37) can be thought of as recurrent patterns in processing nerve impulses, which ultimately lead to ‘sensations’. Such patterns are organizing principles that unconsciously and automatically direct our mental representation of reality, controlling how the brain elaborates incoming data. Once we are ‘accustomed’ to elaborating certain responses to external stimuli, cognitive routines consolidate in our mind, thus allowing us to save time and energy. Then instinctively we hypothesize the existence of a unitary, material object as the cause of the sensations we receive, and instinctively we place events along a timeline that allows only progression, not circularity.6 In HH 18 Nietzsche discusses the category of substance which, according to Spir, is the ‘original law’ of the knowing subject. Nietzsche maintains that even the category of substance, which seems to be a necessary condition for human beings to represent the world, has been formed over time.7 He states that this category originated in an ancient ‘habit of sensation’ that was not even specific of human beings, but manifested itself already in lower organisms: ‘the purblind

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mole’s eyes of this organisation at first never see anything but the same thing; [. . .] then, when the various pleasurable and unpleasurable stimuli become more noticeable, various different substances are gradually distinguished, but each of them with one attribute, that is to say a single relationship with such an organism’ (HH 18, KSA 2.39). With the progressive refinement of the perceptual apparatus the organism begins differentiating sensations and assumes them to be the effects of different substances. In other words, Nietzsche argues that, as our physiology evolves, our habits of sensation evolve too. Ultimately, he sees the Kantian categories of substance and causality,8 not as universal structures and distinctive features of human beings, but rather as ‘habits of sensation’, which have historically evolved from primordial forms. We are led to believe they are a priori since without them we cannot form any mental representation, but they have actually been adaptively selected among the many possible ones. We can therefore state that these organizing principles are ‘a priori for the individual, but a posteriori for the species or a type of culture’ (D’Iorio 1995: 246).9 In the 1880s Nietzsche further developed the research result from the years of Human, All Too Human and again tackled the idea that the principles through which we organize experience are not external to nature and history, but rather reflect our ‘conditions of existence’ and change along with them. In a posthumous note from 1881 he states: The life-​preserving principle [das lebenserhaltende Princip] must be sought in the way in which the first organic forms felt stimuli and judged what was outside themselves: that belief prevailed and preserved itself which made possible to go on living [bei dem das Fortleben möglich wurde]: not the truest, but the most useful belief. (NL 1881 11[270], KSA 9.545)

This view is further confirmed in a note from 1886: ‘Our conditions of existence prescribe the general rules by which we have to see forms, figures, rules’ (NL 1886 6[8]‌, KSA 12.236). Ultimately, Nietzsche considers Kantian categories as nothing but ‘means [. . .] by which we contrive the world according to utility-​ goals [Mittel [. . .] zum Zurechtmachen der Welt zu Nützlichkeits-​Zwecken]’ (NL 1888 14[153], KSA 13.336). Reiterating the thesis elaborated in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche states that we ‘know’ (or better: we feel and judge) phenomena only in relation to ourselves, and instinctively classify them according to the use they may have for our existence. The properties of a thing arouse our sensations e.g. that it is grey, and the shape, the kind of movement, above all its presence as a body and substance –​everything is connected with feelings of pleasure and unpleasure and consequently

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Benedetta Zavatta with trust, inclination, a pleasure in approximation or fear etc. [. . .]  –​so:  all properties of a thing are in truth stimuli in us, which partly increase the feeling of power, partly reduce it: every thing is a sum of judgements (fears, hopes, some things inspire trust, others do not). (NL 1880–​1 10[F100], KSA 9.437; see Siemens 2006: 148)

According to D’Iorio (1995), in the posthumous notes from 1881 onwards Nietzsche seems to suggest a triple stratification of the forms through which we organize experience. Each stratum has a different mobility. The oldest and most entrenched forms are those linked to our physiology, that is, to the physiology of human sensation. These forms are shared by all human beings. There is then a second level, which varies with culture. Usages and customs, laws, religious beliefs and moral codes determine certain ‘habits’ in representing the world –​ certain patterns for organizing our perceptions that change along with social practices. Finally, there is a third, purely individual level, which depends on one’s specific habits and tastes, which lead one to select from the data of experience those that most attract her attention. The assumption of such a stratification of the habits of sensations is confirmed by an analysis of the meanings which Nietzsche ascribes to the term ‘conditions of existence’ (Existenz-​Bedingungen). Nietzsche sometimes uses this expression to refer to the conditions of existence of the human species (see GS 1, KSA 3.372; NL 1881 11[330], KSA 9. 569; NL 1884 26[74], KSA 11.168), sometimes to the conditions of a certain group (NL 1883 24[15], KSA 10.651; NL 1885 34[57], KSA 11.438) and sometimes to the specific conditions of an individual (NL 1881 11[59], 9.463). The habits of sensations arose as a response to the environment or, in other words, to satisfy conditions of existence. Therefore some habits account for the conditions of existence shared by all humans (at the same stage of evolution)10; others are specific to a people (Volk); others again are characteristics of a specific person.11 Ultimately, the main differences between Kantian categories and Nietzsche’s habits of sensation can be summarized as follows. Kantian categories are eternal and immutable laws of the mind that precede experience and are independent of it. They are universal, that is, shared by all human beings, whatever their culture, and generate objective, that is, true knowledge. Nietzsche’s ‘habits of sensation’ are instead unconscious interpretative patterns that have been acquired (by the human species, by a people, by an individual) through interaction with the outside world, that is, through experience. Since they arose as a response to the external environment, they change along with it. None of these habits of sensations lead to universal and necessary knowledge, but only to contingent

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and mutable world views that, in turn, reflect the psycho-​physiological needs of their authors. The repercussions of these differences on the ontological and gnoseological positions of the two authors are striking. For both Kant and Nietzsche, the individual does not know things as they are in themselves, but only what appears to her as the result of her activity on what is given sensibly. Yet in Kant her world view is necessarily the same of any other human being, since the categories of the mind are universal forms. The novelty of Kant’s approach lies precisely in reformulating the traditional equation ‘subjective = arbitrary, objective = universal’. Mind categories are subjective universals that generate objectively valid knowledge. As a consequence, the world view that science gradually reconstructs is universally and objectively valid. In Nietzsche’s view, on the contrary, the fact that the vision of the world we live in is generally shared depends on the power of the social instinct, which leads us to standardize ‘habits of sensation’. In a note from 1881 he observes: When I go for a walk, I always marvel at the magnificent exactness with which everything acts on us, the forest like this, and also the mountain, and that there is no confusion, oversight or hesitation regarding all sensations [Empfindungen]. And yet, once there must have been enormous uncertainty and something chaotic; only after immense tracts of time was all this inherited in such a fixed manner; men who sensed distance, light, colour and so on in an essentially different way were marginalized and were barely able to reproduce. This way of sensing otherwise [anders zu empfinden] must have been felt to be ‘madness’ and shunned for centuries. One could no longer understand one another, the ‘exception’ was left aside and allowed to perish. An immense cruelty has existed since the beginning of all organic [life], excluding everything that ‘sensed otherwise’. Science is maybe only a continuation of this process of exclusion, it is completely impossible if it does not acknowledge ‘the normal human being’ [den Normalmenschen] as the highest ‘measure’, to be conserved by all means! (NL 1881 11[252], KSA 9.537)

According to Nietzsche, science, being complicit in the socialization process, pursues the uniformity of sensation (Empfindung) and makes of the ‘normal human being’ the ‘measure’ of reality. In other words, the generally shared world view that science provides is the result of a violent coercion systematically exercised on individual idiosyncratic taste. According to Nietzsche, knowledge does not progress by reinforcing the vision shared by the majority, but by collecting alternative interpretations of the world. Especially in his posthumous notes from

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the late 1880s and in On the Genealogy of Morals he points out that our knowledge of things will be all the richer, the more different points of view we are able to bring to them. It is thus only by considering different interpretations that we obtain an ‘objective’ vision of things (GM III 12, KSA 5.365).

3.  Reason is one and the same thing as language Nietzsche’s emphasis on the comparison among different points of view as the only way to achieve valuable knowledge leads us to a crucial point in his relation to Kant. Like Kant, Nietzsche aims at investigating the human mind or, more precisely, how we think about the world. However, whereas Kant derives his table of categories from Aristotle’s logic, Nietzsche considers history as the only reliable source of knowledge. In fact, Nietzsche realized that human criteria of representation are not absolute, but subject to historical development, by comparing different representations of the world: Error [Irrthum] is the basis of knowledge appearance, [that is,] semblance [Schein]. Only the comparison of many semblances can bring about verisimilitude [Wahrscheinlichkeit], that is, degrees of semblance. (NL 1880 6[441], KSA 9.311f.)12

However, the principles of organization for sense data cannot be observed directly. We cannot keep track of them so as to make a comparison. They must therefore be considered indirectly, in the mirror of language. My thesis is that it is mainly from the historical-​comparative study of languages that Nietzsche derived incontrovertible proofs of the evolution of what, following D’Iorio, we have called the second stratum of the organizing principles of perception (more flexible than the principles linked to physiology, and at the same time less volatile than those linked to temperament and individual habits). As Hamann and Herder pointed out, the weak point of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is the inadequate consideration of the role played by language in the transcendental synthesis. Hamann’s Metakritik (written in 1784 and published posthumously in 1800) defined as ‘naïve and impractical’ any analysis of reason that did not take into account the fact that reason is one and the same thing with language. Something like ‘pure’ reason can never be observed, because reasoning is always carried out in the historical form of language.13 Similarly, in his Metakritik (1799) Herder emphasized that every critique of reason should necessarily be complemented by a Sprachkritik, because language intervenes

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in any activity of the intellect.14 Humboldt continued in the direction set by Hamann and Herder, and added to their positions the claim that every language determines a particular vision of the world (Weltansicht), corresponding to its specific syntactic and semantic structure, which can then be further elaborated in a Weltanschauung. The possibility of intercultural communication is guaranteed by the substantial identity of human nature, both from a physical (phonetic apparatus) and psychic point of view (transcendental subjectivity). Humboldt’s aim was to use historical-​comparative linguistics to identify universal forms of language and then deduce from them corresponding universal forms of the human spirit. Such a project ran aground in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the study of non-​European languages brought to light how huge such differences can be. Steinthal, one of the few who undertook Humboldt’s task, realized at the end that it was unfeasible, since in non-​European languages some grammatical categories are not represented at all. Thus he concluded that there are no universal structures in language but, rather, that each language expresses its own psychology. Through the study of language we can thus aim to understand, not the universal ‘human mind’, but only the specific character of a people (Volksgeist). Steinthal thus turned Humboldt’s universal linguistic relativism (allgemeiner Sprachrelativismus) into a specific relativism (spezieller Sprachrelativismus) –​the theory that language constraints on thought are different from language to language –​and replaced the universal categories of logic with psychological principles. Nietzsche was acquainted with Steinthal’s works and ideas from 1869 (Zavatta 2009 and 2013). In particular, Nietzsche was struck by Steinthal’s criticism of an assumed ‘universal grammar’. The idea of ‘universal grammar’, very popular during the Enlightenment, was also part of Kant’s background in the Critique of Pure Reason. In fact, Kant deduced the table of judgements from the logical forms that judgement could assume, thus taking for granted the fact that the mental operation of judging is prior to and independent of its linguistic utterance. Nietzsche, on the contrary, regarded thinking and speaking as one single act. Already in Vom Ursprung der Sprache (1869), which he wrote immediately after his first reading of Steinthal,15 Nietzsche observed that our most common mental operations correspond to basic grammatical categories. A statement composed of ‘subject’ –​‘copula’ –​‘direct object’ corresponds to the mental operation of attributing a property to a substance. He states: ‘The most profound philosophical knowledge is already there in language . . . Think of subject and object; the concept of judgement is taken from the grammatical phrase. The categories of substance and accident are derived from subject and predicate’

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(KGW II/​2.185). Since in this text Nietzsche considers language to be the product of an unconscious artistic instinct or Spieltrieb, he concluded that linguistic forms determine conscious thought and not vice versa. At various points of his philosophical career Nietzsche then repeated the claim that the grammar of a language plays the role of a ‘Volks-​Metaphysik’ (GS 354, KSA 3.593), inasmuch as it suggests to people a vision of the world, which is then developed further by philosophers.16 Nietzsche’s endorsement of Steinthal’s ‘particular linguistic relativism [speziellen Sprachrelativismus]’ (Albrecht 1979: 228), according to which different languages exert different constraints on thought, emerges in exemplary fashion in BGE 20 (Albrecht 1979). After reiterating that all conscious thought simply fills in the grid that language makes available, Nietzsche claims that such a grid is different from one linguistic family to another. Indo-​European languages, whose syntax is based on predicative structure, provide the ideal conditions to develop metaphysical systems.17 When I say ‘The lightning flashes’ [Der Blitz leuchtet] I have posited the flashing [das Leuchten] first as an activity and then as subject:  thus to occurrence [Geschehen] a being [Sein] supplied which is not one with the occurrence, but rather remains [bleibt], is, and does not ‘become’. (NL 1885–​6, 2[84], KSA 12.103f.)

Formulating thoughts with this grammatical structure automatically evokes a hinterworld, which is assumed to be the real world:  something that remains while phenomena pass by. Ural-​Altaic languages, by contrast, where the predicative relation is less emphasized, support a different vision of the world (BGE 20).18 We can conclude that it was on the basis of the important results reached by historical-​comparative linguistics in the nineteenth century that Nietzsche formulated a theory according to which the key to reach ‘objectivity’ lies in the comparison between different world views. He opposed Kant’s assumption of a universal reason, following the path opened by Herder, Hamann, Humboldt and Steinthal. He then reformulated their considerations in the light of the most recent theories in the physiology of perception, which considered language not only in relation to thought but also to the body. According to Nietzsche’s theory, every people has a specific world view (Weltansicht), which is reflected in its language and originates in ‘physiological value judgements and racial conditions [physiologischer Werthurtheile und Rasse-​Bedingungen]’ (BGE 20, KSA 5.35). This view led Nietzsche to discuss issues that Kant had taken for granted, such as the categorization of empirical objects.

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4.  The formation of concepts of empirical objects Rorty (1979) claims that, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant was not interested in the conditions of knowing objects (knowledge of), but rather in the possibility of founding the truth of our propositions concerning those objects (knowledge that). That is to say, Kant was more interested in justifying the proposition ‘bodies are heavy’ or ‘the sun warms the stone’ than in explaining by what right we speak of body, sun, stone and so on. Thus, for Rorty, the Critique of Pure Reason is much more about how humans link objects of experience with each other (e.g. through causal relations, etc.), thus forming a coherent image of the world, than about how they represent such objects. Kant intentionally avoids discussing the categorization of empirical objects. In the Preface to the second edition of the KrV he states explicitly that he will take into account just what is found in reason before and apart from experience. Concepts of empirical objects are excluded from his analysis, as the nature of things is inexhaustible and we will never know all the features of an object. Umberto Eco (1999: 71, 73–​74) observes polemically in Kant and the Platypus: According to a Kantian example (P §23),19 I can move from an uncoordinated succession of phenomena (there is a stone, it is struck by the sun’s rays, it is hot –​and, as we shall see, this is an example of perceptual judgement) to the proposition The sun heats the stone. If we suppose that the sun is A, the stone B, and the being hot C, we can say that A is the cause whereby B is C. [. . .] But, if I am unable to say not only that this A is the sun and this B is a stone but also that this B is at least a body, all the universal and necessary laws that the concepts of the pure intellect guarantee me are worth nothing, because they could refer to any datum of experience. Perhaps I could say that there is an A that heats everything, whatever empirical concept I may assign to B, but I wouldn’t know what this heating entity is, because I would not have assigned any empirical concept to A. Concepts of the pure intellect have need not only of sensible intuition but also of concepts of objects to which they may be applied.

For Nietzsche, on the contrary, the formation of empirical concepts was a quite problematic issue. At his time, various neo-​Kantian authors he was acquainted with had reinterpreted the Kantian doctrine on the conditions of knowledge in the light of the physiology of the senses (Sinnesphysiologie), explaining how we produce an ‘image of the world’ starting out from sense data. Helmholtz’s theory of perception in particular exerted an important influence on Nietzsche’s thought during his Basel years (Treiber 1994).20 In

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his Handbuch der Physiologischen pysiologischen Optik (1867), Helmholtz translated Kantian subjectivism into physiological terms and conceived the forms of the phenomenal world not as the product of mental categories, but rather as reflecting the structure and activity of the senses. Developing what he called the ‘logic of perception’ (Logik der Wahrnehmung), Helmholtz argues that we perceive only nerve stimuli, from which we then produce the image of an external object as the cause of such stimuli (430, 442f., 444, 453). Our representation of the world is thus the product of unconscious inferences or ‘Analogieschlüssen’ (430).21 The link between stimulus and image, even though neither natural nor necessary, becomes ‘stable and inescapable’ (fest und unausweichlich) through ‘repeated use’ (häufige Wiederholung) (430). In other words, after some time we no longer notice or take into account the fact that the images of our mind depend on the conformation of our sense organs. Basically endorsing Helmholtz’s theory, with which he also became acquainted by reading Gerber and Zoellner, in On Truth and Lie Nietzsche describes the process of perception as follows: a nerve stimulation (Nervenreiz) is transmitted to the brain, which in response elaborates a mental representation of the object (Anschauungsbild) and a sound (Lautbild) that allows one to recall the stimulation and refer to it. At the same time, a qualitas occulta (e.g. hardness, bitterness, etc.) is assumed as the cause of our sensation. Then this property is attributed to a supposed external object, which is thought of as a neutral substratum. Nietzsche additionally points out that this mental operation corresponds to the synthetic judgement A is B (e.g. the pencil is red). The essence of definition:  the pencil is an elongated, etc., body. A  is B.  That which is elongated is at the same time coloured. Properties [Eigenschaften] only contain relations. A specific body is exactly [or: equal to] so and so many relations. Relations can never be the essence [Wesen], they are only consequences of the essence. The synthetic judgement describes a thing according to its consequences [Folgen], that is, essence and consequence are identified, that is, a metonymy. Thus, in the essence [im Wesen] of synthetic judgement there lies a metonymy, that is, it is a false equation [eine falsche Gleichung]. That is, synthetic inferences are illogical [Synthetische Schlüsse sind unlogisch]. When we apply them, we presuppose the popular metaphysics, that is, one that sees effects as causes. The concept ‘pencil,’ is confused with the ‘thing’ pencil. The ‘is’ [Das ‘ist’] in the synthetic judgement is false, it contains a transference [Übertragung], two

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different spheres are placed next to each other, between which an equation [Gleichung] can never take place. (NL 1872–​3 19[242], KSA 7.495; see Spir 1877: 13 and D’Iorio 1993: 4–​5)

Traditionally, the concept of an empirical object (like a pencil) is explained by listing a set of traits, which are assumed as corresponding to qualities (what empiricists called primary and secondary qualities) that every object belonging to this category must possess. Such properties are assembled together inasmuch as they are attributed to the same object. The problem that Nietzsche points out is that the object to which we ascribe the aforementioned properties (that corresponds to the grammatical subject of a synthetic judgement) does not pre-​ exist the properties themselves. Nietzsche wrote in a fragment from the same period: ‘We produce essences and abstractions as bearers of qualities, as causes of these qualities’ (NL 1872–​3 19 [236], KSA 7.494), and do not notice that an object is no more than the sum of the properties we attribute to it. In later years, Nietzsche picks up this issue again and develops it as follows: If the thing ‘acts’ [i.e. has effects: wirkt], this means: we grasp all the other qualities, which otherwise are still present here and are momentarily latent, as cause of the fact that a single quality comes to the fore: that is to say, we take the sum of its qualities –​x as the cause of the quality x: which is after all utterly stupid and crazy! (NL 1885–​6 2[87], KSA 12.105)

Thus, when we say ‘The body is heavy’ we assume that the set of properties that define the object A, less the property we predicate of it (B), is the cause of the property B. Nietzsche points out the blatant absurdity of such a belief and claims that synthetic judgements are as empty as the analytical ones. In other words, synthetic judgements add nothing to what we already knew of the object. In saying ‘the body is heavy’ we simply extract one of the attributes that make up the concept of body and then we give it back to it through the operation of predication. Nietzsche concludes:  ‘Strictly speaking, knowing has only the form of a tautology, and is empty’ (NL 1872–​3 19[236], KSA 7.493). Although Nietzsche essentially uses Helmholtz’s argument to criticize the process by which we create concepts of empirical objects and assume them to be causes of our sensations,22 he goes one step further and points out the important role that language plays in the creation of linguistic categories. Actually, we inherit patterns for the organization of perceptions into concepts of empirical objects from the culture in which we are embedded. Indeed, inasmuch as we have grown up in a specific linguistic community, we are used to refer to certain groups of perceptions through a specific word, thus thinking of them as an object.

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Benedetta Zavatta Our usual imprecise mode of observation takes a group of phenomena as one and calls it a fact: between this fact and another fact it imagines in addition an empty space, it isolates every fact. But actually, all our doing and knowing is not a succession of facts and empty spaces but a continuous flux [. . .] Through words and concepts we are still continually misled into imagining things as being simpler than they are, separate from one another, indivisible, each existing in and for itself. A philosophical mythology lies concealed in language which breaks out again at every moment, however careful one may be otherwise. (WS 11, KSA 2.546f.)23

As João Constâncio (2009:  86)  rightly observes, ‘Words as signs that express concepts create a given form for the phenomena, a form that determines the way things appear to us’. This means that it is the concept-​word (Wort-​Begriff) or, better said, lexeme that leads us instinctively to group together a set of perceptions coming from different senses (form, weight, texture, odour, etc.) in the representation of an object. Nietzsche finds support for his argument in his reading of two authors who took Kant’s philosophy as their reference point: Friedrich Albert Lange and Max Müller. Basically, Lange (1887) states that human beings see ‘objects’ in the world since they cannot avoid representing reality anthropomorphically. By projecting human attributes onto nature they imagine physical processes as actions of bodies on other bodies and group the sense impressions into discrete units. ‘What we call a “thing” is a group of appearances [Erscheinungen], which we conceive as one irrespective of broader connections and inner modifications’ (2:  217). Therefore language or, to be precise, the process of ‘naming’ (nennen) plays a fundamental role in formation of concepts of empirical objects for Lange. While the influence of Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus (1866) on Nietzsche has been already studied in detail (see e.g. Salaquarda 1978; Stack 1983), Nietzsche’s reading of Max Müller is less known. Max Müller, Sanskritist and professor of comparative mythology at Oxford, was also the first translator of the Critique of Pure Reason into English.24 The influence of Müller on Nietzsche can be appreciated particularly in regard to the theory concerning the origin of lexical concepts, which Müller calls ‘word-​concepts’ (Wort-​Begriffen). According to Müller (1887), all lexical concepts originated from a relatively small number of verbal roots, that is, monosyllabic elements that could not be broken down any further. Roots express everyday actions such as ‘scraping, digging, striking, joining, cutting, eating, drinking, going, moving, standing, passing, feeling, shaking, seeing, hearing, etc.’ (215). Such actions, as they were socially shared, required vocal

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signs (i.e. sounds) to recall them univocally. In other words, Müller maintains that it was under the pressure of the need to communicate that language developed. At an early stage in the development of language, roots were used holophrastically, that is, as a sentence. Then concepts and verbs were drawn from them. For instance, from the root ‘to split’ the word ‘tree’ was drawn, which originally meant ‘what can be split’ (they were used to make spears or boats).25 Quite interestingly, Müller states that the concepts of empirical objects are formed on the basis of practical purposes, that is, they reflect the specific interaction that human beings establish with them in order to achieve some purpose. Such purposes, in their turn, depend on needs, which are different from people to people. We can image that a people that had no urgent need to split trees and make boats from them called them differently. This fact, for Müller, explains the amazing semantic diversity between languages. Even in the same culture, an object or phenomenon can be named according to different kinds of interaction. Müller (1866) points out the originary polysemy that characterizes every language in its initial stage. With the passing of time, thanks to a process of ‘natural selection’ or ‘natural elimination’, among the possible ‘apperceptions’ of the world, only those ‘that constantly return, the strongest, the most used’ survive (290–​ 1). Importantly enough, from Müller’s linguistic theory the consequence can be drawn that language does not reflect the essence of things and, what is more, that such an essence cannot be assumed at all. Nietzsche was well acquainted with Müller’s theory since his Basel years (see Zavatta 2013) and greatly appreciated his theory on the origin of language. Endorsing Müller’s viewpoint, Nietzsche traces back the origin of consciousness and language to the need to communicate. ‘As the most endangered animal, [man] needed help and protection, he needed his equals; he had to express his neediness and be able to make himself understood’ (GS 354, KSA 3.591). Both consciousness and language are to be considered as adaptive answers to endangering environmental stimuli. The concepts and words that have been formed in the course of time served in the sharing of purposes, which in their turn were formulated in response to specific needs. Nietzsche points out that the oldest concepts –​those that have been preserved for the longest period of time –​reflect human beings’ most basic conditions of existence, since they have guaranteed their survival on earth. Among these basic conditions, there is the assumption of a stable reality on which one can rely. The fact that the concepts of ‘substance’ or ‘being’ are so entrenched in the human mind thus does not mean that they are ‘truest’. Actually, they are ‘the most false’, since they falsify and negate becoming:

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Benedetta Zavatta From etymology and the history of language we take all concepts as having become [geworden], and many as still becoming; and indeed in such a way that the most universal concepts, as the most false, must also be the oldest. ‘Being’, ‘substance’ and ‘unconditioned’, ‘likeness’ [or identity:  Gleichheit], ‘thing’ –:​ thinking invented these schemata for itself first and earliest, schemata that actually contradict most radically the world of becoming [. . .] (NL 1885 38[14], KSA 11.613)26

Ultimately, Nietzsche’s view can be summarized as follows: sense stimuli give rise to the mental representation of this or that object on the basis of our most recurrent interactions with the environment. In other words, the names that we inherit from our ancestors direct our organization of sense data into a mental image of reality. This is not at all negative. Indeed, the names that have been given to things recall to the mind not only a representation, but also a behavioural pattern that tells us the most successful interaction by far that has been established with the environment. Through language, as a repository of lexical meanings, one can exploit the knowledge matured by the species over centuries.27 However, the constraints imposed by language are sometimes perceived as a limitation on our freedom. Nietzsche observes that it seems as if ‘we cease thinking when we no longer want to think within the constraints of language’ (NL 1886–​7 5[22], KSA 12.110). Though recognizing the important role that language plays in determining the mental organization of experience, Nietzsche does not, however, defend a rigid linguistic determinism. Rather he sees a circular relation between language, thought and experience. The habit of collecting together a series of sense data in the mental representation of an object (that we call e.g. ‘leaf ’) clearly coerces our future perceptions. However, individuals with an idiosyncratic taste will experience things in ways that differ somewhat from the standard. These are the individuals that can become language-​innovators, that is, invent new words to name things, thereby highlighting new aspects of them (i.e. new possible interactions with them). These new words, insofar as they will prove useful and be shared by more and more persons, will then become new ‘habits of sensation’. In other words, these names then become the new matrix for the vision of the world shared by a certain linguistic community. Nietzsche concludes: ‘This has caused me the greatest trouble and still does always cause me the greatest trouble: to realize that what things are called is unspeakably more important than what they are. [. . .] But let also not forget that in the long run it is enough to create new names and valuations and appearances of truth in order to create new “things” ’ (GS 58, KSA 3.422).

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5.  Concluding remarks Nietzsche’s relation to Kant is mediated by his reading of many other authors that came after him, such as Schopenhauer, Spir, Helmholtz, Max Müller and so on. Nietzsche did not address the Critique of Pure Reason directly but dealt with later theories, which partly simplify and reduce the conceptual apparatus of Kantian philosophy, partly add considerations from different fields such as the physiology of the senses (Sinnesphysiologie) and linguistics (Sprachwissenschaft). This led Nietzsche to discuss issues that Kant could not have recognized as problematic, such as the image of the world (Weltansicht) on which reason (understood as conscious judgement) works. While Kant was concerned with the analysis of the concepts through which we work on that image, joining or separating phenomena in ‘judgements of experience’, Nietzsche aimed at understanding how we form the image of the world on which conscious reasoning works. In addition, Nietzsche criticized the Kantian ideal of ‘pure reason’ and regarded human thinking as a natural and historical product. He considered thinking as strictly dependent on physiology on the one hand, and on cultural processes on the other hand. As a consequence of his genealogical enquiries, Nietzsche eliminated the traditional distinction between reason and instinct. Reason, that is, conscious judgement, is actually preceded by a primary organic activity of interpreting and evaluating that does not differ ontologically from judging. Obviously these unconscious interpretations are not expressed propositionally, but are a set of chemical processes. However, they are much more ‘certain’ than those expressed consciously, since they contain the accumulated wisdom of the species over the centuries, which each individual has then to enrich through his personal experience. In addition, the Kantian separation of the theoretical from the practical is abolished by Nietzsche, who states: ‘Reason is [. . .] a support-​organ [. . .], it works in the service of the organic drives [. . .]’ (NL 1881 11[243], KSA 9.533). There is no such thing as a disinterested, universal, pure subject of knowledge, as Kant pretended, rather an all-​desiring self that is eager to appropriate more and more views on the same thing. Every one of these views is inevitably partial, of limited validity and is not at all ‘pure’, since it originates in specific needs or ‘conditions of existence’. Ultimately, Nietzsche replaces the Kantian ideal of transcendental, universal knowledge with a perspectivist theory of historical knowledge, according to which the more empirical views are taken into account, the more ‘complete’ and ‘objective’ our knowledge.

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Benedetta Zavatta From now on, my philosophical colleagues, let us be more wary of the dangerous old conceptual fairy-​tale which has set up a ‘pure, will-​less, painless, timeless, subject of knowledge’, let us be wary of the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason’, ‘absolute spirituality’, ‘knowledge in itself ’: –​here we are asked to think an eye which cannot be thought at all, an eye turned in no direction at all, an eye where the active and interpretative powers are to be suppressed, absent, but through which seeing still becomes a seeing-​something, so it is an absurdity and non-​concept of eye that is demanded. There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; the more affects we are able to put into words about a thing, the more eyes, different eyes we are able to use for the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘concept’ of the thing, our ‘objectivity’. But to eliminate the will completely and turn off all the emotions without exception, assuming we could: what? would that not mean to castrate the intellect? . . . (GM III 12, KSA 5.365)

Notes 1 As Tsarina Doyle (2004: 180) underlines, Nietzsche abolished the Kantian distinction between the constitutive and regulative use of reason, because he rejected any constitutive account of knowledge. 2 Treiber (1994: 5) suggests that we also consider as relevant for Nietzsche’s education the books that his friend Romundt borrowed during the years 1872–​75 from Basel library and brought home to the flat they shared in Schützengraben. Romundt knew Kant’s work well. In 1872 he was promoted to professor with the habilitation treatise Die menschliche Erkenntniss und das Wesen der Dinge (Basel 1872) and in the years 1872–​74 he held a lecture series on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. His list of borrowed books highlights a strong interest both in Kantian philosophy and in the new theories of perception, that is, physiology of senses (Sinnesphysiologie). Romundt was for Nietzsche a very important speaking partner, as we read in the letter sent to Paul Deussen on 25 August 1869: ‘Dr. Heinrich Romundt, younger than me and therefore more in the position of a study companion: he is tremendously precious to me because of his like-​mindedness on philosophical questions; I like to discuss long and important things with nobody more than with him’ (To Deussen, 25 August 1869, KSB 3.46). 3 Even if we cannot rule out the possibility that Nietzsche had first-​hand knowledge of Kant’s works and we have firm proof that already in the Basel years he was acquainted with the theories of some neo-​Kantian authors (such as Helmholtz, Spir or Lange), it is nevertheless undeniable that Schopenhauer played a fundamental role in his appraisal of Kantian philosophy. This is also demonstrated by the fact that

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as Nietzsche distanced himself from Schopenhauerian metaphysics, his view of Kant radically changed, becoming more and more critical. Nietzsche also departs from Schopenhauer’s view, according to which Empfindungen are mere data without spatial–​temporal determination. According to Schopenhauer, it is the understanding that transforms them into intuitions (Anschauungen) of determinate objects in space–​time through the application of the category of causality (see Böhning 1988: 17ff.). On the contrary, for Nietzsche Empfindung includes all these operations, which are performed unconsciously. As Siemens (2006: 152) notes, in later years, Nietzsche was to thematize interpretation and evaluation (Interpretation/​Auslegung and Wertschätzung) as pervasive and basic operations of life or Will to Power, to which ‘Empfindungen’ are subordinate as their instrument (Werkzeug: see e.g. NL 1885 40[61, 69], KSA 11.661, 668). Any conscious or unconscious effort of the human being is directed towards survival or, better, towards an increase in one’s power In this connection it is useful to recall Lupo’s (2006) distinction between drive (Trieb) and instinct (Instinkt). The drive determines the transmission of information coming in and out, so that it is the axis along which the stimulus travels from the sense organ to the brain and vice versa (57). The most useful drives (those that allow adequate and effective responses to the stimuli) are gradually consolidated into a more complex and structured apparatus of response that takes the name of ‘instinct’ (71). The distinction between drive and instinct is taken further by João Constâncio (2011: 96), who underlines the resemblance of the concept of instinct with that of ‘skill’: ‘We can add to this that, in some contexts, Nietzsche seems to follow Schopenhauer in understanding the instincts as skills. Instincts are akin to learned behavior but have goals that are not set by conscious mental states. As skills or “automatisms”, they are more permanent and complex processes than the drives. One drive is not a skill; only a consolidated relation of drives can be understood as a skill’. See NL 1881 11[329], KSA 9.569: ‘[R]‌epresenting and believing in what is identical to itself and permanent have to be grown together’. The fact that Nietzsche discusses only substance and causality confirms once more that his view on Kant is mediated by Schopenhauer. In the Appendix to World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer (2010) sharply criticizes the architecture of Kant’s thought and accuses him of creating ‘blind windows’ (i.e. unnecessary categories) simply to satisfy the desire to create a symmetrical design. ‘From this (table of judgements) he deduces twelve categories, an even dozen, symmetrically arranged under four headings, which later become a terrible Procrustean bed into which he violently forces everything in the world and everything that happens in human beings; he will recoil from no act of violence, he will scorn no sophism, just to keep repeating the symmetry of that table wherever he goes’ (457). At the end

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Benedetta Zavatta of his argument Schopenhauer concludes that, of the twelve categories, only one –​ causality –​is really necessary, and he shows how the others can be derived from it. Space, time, substance and causality are the four factors Schopenhauer uses to explain the world as representation. Of note is also GS 110, KSA 3.469: ‘Origin of knowledge. –​Through immense periods of time, the intellect produced nothing but errors; some of them turned out to be useful and species-​preserving; those who hit upon or inherited them fought their fight for themselves and their progeny with greater luck. Such erroneous articles of faith, which were passed on by inheritance further, and finally almost became part of the basic endowment of the species, are for example: that there are enduring things; that there are identical things; that there are things.’ See also NL 1881 11[262], KSA 9.540f. and NL 1881 11[335], KSA 9.572. As regards the transmission of such habits of sensation, Nietzsche contends that we should hypothesize a dual path: on the one hand habits that have become instincts are transmitted genetically. From his youth, Nietzsche endorsed Lamarck’s theory of inheriting acquired characteristics (see Campioni 2001: 32–​3). On the other hand they are implicitly and indirectly transmitted from one generation to another through culture. The ‘formidable consensus of men about things [ungeheure Consensus der Menschen über die Dinge]’ (NL 19[157] 1.468) is made possible primarily by the substantial uniformity of the human sense apparatus. For example, Nietzsche lists among these conditions the need to form a mental representation of reality (see NL 1884 26[58], KSA 11.163). ‘A person’s valuations reveal something about the structure of his soul and what the soul sees as its conditions of life, its genuine needs’ (BGE 268, KSA 5.222). Research in the field of cognitive linguistics over the past thirty years confirmed the fact that some basic cognitive schemas are shared by all human beings having the same physical structure and the same perceptual apparatus, while other cognitive schemas are strongly dependent on the praxis of a given culture. Among the ‘universal’ schemas we will find what Lakoff and Johnson call ‘primary metaphors’, that is, schemas which derive from the perception of the body as composed of parts, or from the experience of walking in an upright position and so on. Among the cultural schemas we find instead the metaphors created after the introduction of a certain forms of social praxis (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987; Grady 2007). Here Nietzsche is using the words ‘error’ and ‘semblance’ even if they are stripped of their traditional meaning, since there is no ‘truth’ or ‘essence’ of things against which they can be measured. They indicate rather the representations we believe in. For Nietzsche’s reception of Hamann, the mediation of Romundt proved to be decisive. Nietzsche began reading Hamann in March 1873, when he borrowed vols

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1 and 2 of his Schriften und Briefe, edited by Petri. However, these books do not contain the Metakritik, which was published later in vol. 4. On 9 December 1874 Romundt borrowed an earlier edition of the Metakritik über den Purismus der reinen Vernunft (contained in Roth 1825) and brought it to the house he shared with Nietzsche (see Treiber 1994: 5 note 12). On the relation Nietzsche–​Herder, see Bertino (2011). Regarding the topic of language he remarks: ‘For Herder, reason and language are inseparable: “the simplest judgement of human awareness is (not) possible without a characteristic mark [Merkmal]”. Human reason develops along with language, i.e. by the use of acoustic signs as marks of sensations’ (6f.). In November 1869 Nietzsche borrowed from Basel University Library Steinthal’s Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft bei den Griechen und Römern mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Logik (1863) and, in the bibliography for his Encyclopädie der klassischen Philologie we find Steinthal’s Philosophie, Geschichte und Psychologie in ihren gegenseitigen Beziehungen (NL 1869 75[3]‌, KGW I/​5.197). The distinction made by Trabant (1992: 56) between Weltansicht and Weltanschauung in Humboldt’s thought can be profitably extended to Nietzsche. Weltansicht is the primary image of the world, which we inherit from culture and that we generally don’t question. Weltanschauung is instead the conception of the world which we elaborate on the basis of the Weltansicht. According to Luca Lupo (2006) Nietzsche theorizes a dual consciousness: (1) the primary consciousness, expressed by the habits of sensation which, once they have been consolidated, become instincts; (2) the secondary consciousness, or abstract rationality, with which we make deductions and inferences. Lupo calls the former ‘organic consciousness’ because it is not the exclusive property of human beings, but shared with other life forms. The world as we perceive it (our Weltansicht) is the result that the primary consciousness offers us. What characterizes the primary consciousness is the Ursachentrieb –​the instinct to put order into the chaos of sensations through procedures of transformation and simplification. The secondary consciousness, by contrast, is the one traditionally understood as such –​conscious thought about the objects that the primary consciousness offers us. The example of the lightning flash is used by Trendelenburg in his Logische Untersuchungen (Albrecht 1979: 239), but Nietzsche took it from Drossbach’s Ueber die scheinbaren und die wirklichen Ursachen des Geschehens in der Welt (1884) (see Orsucci 2001: 221). Nietzsche returns to the example of the lightening flash several times in the Nachlaß (1885–​86) (see e.g. NL 1885–​6 2[78], KSA 12.98; NL 1885–​6 2[193], KSA 12.162). Using the same argument in Zur Genealogie der Moral, he discusses how the strong man cannot be separated from his strength (GM I 13, KSA 5.279). Another important source for Nietzsche in this regard was Lichtenberg’s Sudelbücher (1801) (see Stingelin 1996: 25).

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18 Andrea Orsucci (2006) suggests the possibility of an influence from Winckler, 1885. He discovered that the syntax of Indo-​Germanic languages emphasizes the subject who acts, while the syntax of Ural-​Altaic languages emphasizes the action performed by the subject. The syntax of Indo-​European languages treats subject and verb as two separate terms where the subject represents the author or cause of the action, which is expressed by the verb. On the contrary, in Ural-​Altaic languages subject and verb are conceived as one, and the phenomenon is expressed as a nounal phrase (instead of ‘I take’, they say ‘my taking’). 19 Eco refers to Prol 305f. 20 Both Nietzsche and his housemate in Basel, Heinrich Romundt, borrowed Helmholtz’s Handbuch der Physiologischen Optik (1867). Nietzsche additionally read several authors influenced by Helmholtz, such as Gerber, Lange and Zoellner. 21 Nietzsche found the word ‘Analogieschlüsse’ also in Zöllner’s treatise Ueber die Natur der Kometen. Following Helmholtz, Zöllner (1872: 201ss.) claims that perception is the result of unconscious processes of elaboration of sense data based on analogies (see Orsucci 1994: 199). This idea influenced Nietzsche strongly, as we can see from some notes from the winter of 1872–​73, where he conjectures that the action of ‘unbewusste Analogieschlüsse’ might be the basis of perception, moral judgements and, not least, the very impulse to knowledge (see NL 1872–​3 19 [93], KSA 7.450; NL 1872–​3 19 [97], KSA 7.451; NL 1872–​3 29 [16], KSA 7.632). After the reading of Gustav Gerber’s Die Sprache als Kunst (vol. 1, 1871), which occurred in September 1872 (see Meijers 1988; Meijers and Stingelin 1988), Nietzsche replaces the notion of ‘Analogieschlüsse’ with that of ‘tropes’. We read in a note from winter 1872–​73: ‘It is tropes, not unconscious inferences, on which our sense perceptions are based. To identify the similar with the similar [Ähnliches mit Ähnlichem identificieren] –​to make out one or other similarity in one and another thing is the primal process [Urprozeß]. Memory lives from this activity and practices continually. Misidentification [Verwechslung] is the primal phenomenon’ (NL 1872–​3 19 [217], KSA 7.487). 22 This process is an inversion of cause and effect, that is, a metonymy, as Nietzsche explains in more detail in his lectures on rhetoric (WS 1872–​73) and posthumous notes of the same period (see Zavatta 2013). 23 Constâncio quotes NL 24[14] KSA 10.651 ‘Man is a creature who constructs forms [ein formenbildendes Geschöpf]. Man believes in “being” and things because he is a creature who constructs forms and rhythms [ein formen-​und rhythmenbildendes Geschöpf]. /​The shapes and forms we see and in which we believe to have things do not exist [vorhanden]. We simplify ourselves and connect a number of “impressions” through shapes that we create. /​If someone closes his eyes, he realizes that a drive for the construction of forms [ein formenbildender Trieb] is constantly being exercised, and that innumerable things are attempted [versucht] to which no reality corresponds’ (cf. Constâncio 2011: 86; translation modified).

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24 Nietzsche’s personal library contains the second volume of Müller’s Essays, which comprises Beiträge zur vergleichenden Mythologie und Ethnologie (1869), and in Nietzsche’s annotations for the years 1869–​74 there are numerous references to the first volume of this work, including Beiträge zur vergleichenden Religionswissenschaft. On the subject of language, in November 1869 Nietzsche borrowed the Vorlesungen über die Wissenschaft der Sprache (1863–​66, 2 vols) and, in October 1875, the Einleitung in die vergleichende Religionswissenschaft, published together with Über falsche Analogien and Über Philosophie der Mythologie (see Zavatta 2013). 25 How this process works emerges in exemplary fashion from a passage of Max Müller’s (1892: 382–​3) essay Natural Religion: ‘Man discovered in a smaller or larger number of trees, before they were as yet trees to him, something which was interesting to him and which they all shared in common. Now trees were interesting to primitive man for various reasons, and they could have been named for every one of these reasons. For practical purposes, however, trees were particularly interesting to the primitive framers of language, because they could be split in two, cut, shaped into blocks and planks, shafts and boats. Hence from a root d a r, to tear, they called trees d r u or dȃru, lit. what can be split or torn or cut to pieces. From the same root they also called the skin δέρμα, because it was torn off, and a sack δορός, because it was made of leather (Sanskrit d r i t i), and a spear, δόρυ, because it was a tree, cut and shaped and planed.’ Natural Religion does not belong to Müller’s books which Nietzsche read. However, this theory of Müller’s can also be found in Ueber die Philosophie der Mythologie and in the Vorlesungen über die Wissenschaft der Sprache. 26 In The Surface and the Abyss (2010) Peter Bornedal criticizes Nietzsche because he uses the terms ‘word’ and ‘concept’ interchangeably, thus generating some confusion. Bornedal underscores that a word (e.g. ‘leaf ’) can be associated both with a specific representation of a leaf (this leaf) and with the general concept of leaf (the leaf), that is, to the Urform to which all the leaves in the world seem more or less to conform. In the first case, observes Bornedal, the sign ‘leaf ’ performs a nominal function, as it denotes an ‘ostensive’ referent, while in the second case it denotes an ‘extensive’ referent, which can never be exhaustively defined. Actually, according to the most recent theories in the field of cognitive linguistics (see Rosch 1973, 1975; and Taylor 1989) this contradiction does not exist. In order to create the concept of ‘leaf ’ there is no need to assume the existence of an Ur-​leaf. Quite simply, among the various representations of leaves that are gathered together under the same linguistic category, those that recur more frequently in our experience are assumed as the core, or ‘prototype’, of such a category. The ‘prototype’ of a category varies from one language to another. That is to say, for a people living at the equator the prototype of leaf will be different from that of a people living in Finland. In

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the first case it will be assumed as a prototype the representation of a banana leaf, while in the second case the leaf of a conifer. Using Nietzschean terminology, we can say that the representation of leaf that a people form most frequently will become the conceptual prototype of the category ‘leaf ’, that is, the cognitive schema on the basis of which one will judge any new phenomena as a leaf or not (perhaps with restrictions or specifications, to the extent that they differ from the first representation). 27 Lupo (2006: 77) points out: ‘Contrary to what we would expect, the so called instinct-​judgement is actually more elaborated and mediated, because it comes from the experience which the organism matured in the interaction with the external world over huge periods of time’.

References Abel, G. (2001), ‘Bewußtsein –​Sprache –​Natur. Nietzsches Philosophie des Geistes’, Nietzsche-​Studien 30: 1–​43. Albrecht, J. (1979), ‘Friedrich Nietzsche und das “sprachliche Relativitätsprinzip”’, Nietzsche-​Studien 8: 225–​44. Bertino, A. C. (2011), ‘Vernatürlichung’: Ursprünge von Friedrich Nietzsches Entidealisierung des Menschen, seiner Sprache und seiner Geschichte bei Johann Gottfried Herder, Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Böhning, T. (1988), Metaphysik, Kunst und Sprache beim frühen Nietzsche, Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Bornedal, P. (2010), The Surface and the Abyss. Nietzsche as Philosopher of Mind and Knowledge, Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Campioni, G. (2001), Les lectures françaises de Nietzsche, Paris: PUF. Constâncio, J. (2011), ‘Instinct and Language in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil’, in J. Constâncio and M. J. Mayer Branco (eds), Nietzsche on Instinct and Language, 80–​116, Berlin/​Boston, de Gruyter. D’Iorio, P. (1993), ‘La superstition des philosophes critiques: Nietzsche et Afrikan Spir’, Nietzsche-​Studien 22: 257–​94. D’Iorio, P. (1995), La linea e il circolo, Genova: Pantograf. Doyle, T. (2004), ‘Nietzsche’s Appropriation of Kant’, Nietzsche-​Studien 33: 180–​204. Eco, U. (1999), Kant and the Platypus. Essays on Language and Cognition, New York: Harcourt Brace. Grady, J. E. (2007), ‘Metaphor’, in D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 188–​213, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hamann, J. G., ([1784] 1951), ‘Metakritik über den Purismum der Vernunft’, in J. Nadler (ed.), Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3: Schriften uber Sprachen/​Mysterien/​Vernunft (1772–​1788), Wien: Herder.

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Herder, J. G., (1799), ‘Verstand und Erfahrung, eine Metakritik zur “Kritik der reinen Vernunft” ’, vol. 1 Vernunft und Sprache, eine Metakritik zur “Kritik der reinen Vernunft”, mit einer Zugabe, betreffend ein kritisches Tribunal aller Facultäten, Regierungen und Geschäfte, Leipzig: Hartknoch. Helmholtz, H. von (1867), Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, Leipzig: Voss. Himmelmann, B. (2005), ‘Kant, Nietzsche und die Aufklärung’, in B. Himmelmann (ed.), Kant und Nietzsche im Widerstreit, 29–​46, Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Lakoff, G. (1987), Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. (1980), Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lange, F. A. (1887), Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, Iserlohn und Leipzig: J. Baedeker. Lupo, L. (2006), Le colombe dello scettico. Riflessioni di Nietzsche sulla coscienza negli anni 1880–​1888, Pisa: ETS. Meijers, A. (1988), ‘Gustav Gerber und Friedrich Nietzsche. Zum historischen Hintergrund der sprachphilosophischen Auffassungen des frühen Nietzsche’, Nietzsche-​Studien 17: 369–​90. Meijers, A., and Stingelin, M. (1988), ‘Konkordanz zu den wörtlichen Abschriften und Übernahmen von Beispielen und Zitaten aus Gustav Gerber: Die Sprache als Kunst (Bromberg 1871) in Nietzsches Rhetorik-Vorlesung und in “Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne”’, Nietzsche-​Studien 17: 350–​68. Müller, F. M. (1866), Vorlesungen über die Wissenschaft der Sprache, Bd. 2, Leipzig: Mayer. Müller, F. M. (1887), The Science of Thought, London: Longmans. Müller, F. M. (1892), Natural Religion: The Gifford Lectures, London: Longmans, Green & Co. Orsucci, A. (1994), ‘Unbewußte Schlüsse, Anticipationen, Übertragungen. Über Nietzsches Verhältnis zu Karl Friedrich Zöllner’, in T. Borsche, F. Gerratana and A. Venturelli (eds), ‘Centauren-​Geburten’. Wissenschaft, Kunst und Philosophie beim jungen Nietzsche, 193–​207, Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Orsucci, A. (2001), La genealogia della morale di Nietzsche, Roma: Carocci. Orsucci, A. (2006), ‘L’enciclopedia nietzscheana delle “scienze dello spirit” nelle discussioni del primo ‘900: alcune corrispondenze. Nuove prospettive storiografiche’, http://​www.hypernietzsche.org/​files/​aorsucci-​1,1/​aorsucci.html. Rorty, R. (1979), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rosch, E. H. (1973), ‘Natural Categories’, Cognitive Psychology 4: 328–​50. Rosch, E. H. (1975), ‘Cognitive Representation of Semantic Categories’, Journal of Experimental Psychology 104 (3): 192–​233. Salaquarda, J. (1978), ‘Nietzsche und Lange’, Nietzsche-​Studien 7: 236–​60. Schopenhauer, A. (2010), The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Siemens, H. (2006), ‘Nietzsche and the Empirical: Through the Eyes of the Term “Empfindung”’, South African Journal of Philosophy 25 (2): 146–​58. Spir, A. (1873/1877), Denken und Wirklichkeit. Versuch einer Erneuerung der kritischen Philosophie. Erster Band. Das Unbedingte. Zweite, umgearbeitete Auflage, Leipzig: J. G. Findel. Stack, G. (1983), Lange and Nietzsche, Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Stingelin, M. (1996), ‘Unsere ganze Philosophie ist Berichtigung des Sprachgebrauchs’. Friedrich Nietzsches Lichtenberg-​Rezeption im Spannungsfeld zwischen Sprachkritik (Rhetorik) und historischer Kritik (Genealogie), München: Fink. Taylor, J. R. (1989), Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Trabant, J. (1992), Humboldt ou le sens du langage, Liège: Madarga. Treiber, H. (1994), ‘Zur “Logik des Traumes” bei Nietzsche. Anmerkungen zu den Traum-​Aphorismen aus Menschliches, Allzumenschliches’, Nietzsche-​Studien 23: 1–​41. Zavatta, B. (2009), ‘Die in der Sprache versteckte Mythologie und ihre Folgen fürs Denken. Einige Quellen von Nietzsche: Max Müller, Gustav Gerber und Ludwig Noiré’, Nietzsche-​Studien 38: 269–​98. Zavatta, B. (2013), ‘Nietzsche and 19th Century Linguistics’, in H. Heit and L. Heller (eds), Nietzsche im 19. Jahrhundert. Natur-​, Geistes-​, und Sozialwissenschaftliche Kontexte, Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Zöllner, J. C. F. (1872), Über die Natur der Cometen. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Theorie der Erkenntnis, 2 Aufl., Leipzig: Staackmann.

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The Thought of Becoming and the Place of Philosophy: Some Aspects of Nietzsche’s Reception and Criticism of Transcendental Idealism via Afrikan Spir William Mattioli

1.  Introduction The second half of the nineteenth century in Germany was the stage for a major dispute between streams of thought concerning the conditions of legitimacy both of intellectual activity in general and of our cognitive endeavors in particular.1 The core of this dispute was the question about what would be the most legitimate and appropriate method for the search of truth. After the collapse of the great philosophical systems of idealism, particularly after the death of Hegel, the spotlight turned to the empirical sciences searching for the epistemic authority capable of sanctioning our cognitive enterprises, which made materialism the main stream of thought at the time.2 Philosophy thus saw itself faced with the daunting task of recovering its dignity by delimiting the object of its reflection and the specific method to be used in its analysis. In doing so, it could thereby ensure its place in the range of intellectual activity, a place that was visibly threatened by the relentless advance of the natural sciences. The major strategy of academic philosophy of the time was to revisit the philosophy of Kant –​whose critical nucleus had been obscured by the speculative shadows cast on it by the post-​Kantian idealism –​seeking thereby to establish a less hostile and healthier relationship between philosophical reflection and empirical research, since those speculative systems had created an almost unbridgeable gulf between philosophy and science. But the way back to Kant found bifurcations. If on the one hand there was a movement of reconciliation (almost hegemonic in the first

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decades of the second half of the nineteenth century) that sought to assimilate materialism to Kantianism through a naturalization of its transcendental aspects (a movement carried out not only by philosophers but also by scientists of the time), on the other hand there was an attempt at a renewal of transcendental philosophy that placed all its chips on the specificity of philosophical reflection and its method, in contrast to the methods of the natural sciences, and therefore sought not an assimilation of materialism, but a compartmentalization of knowledge that assigned to self-​reflexive analysis methodological priority in the context of epistemological investigations. However, this was not to maintain the hostile relationship that prevailed then between philosophy and science: once their fields were delimited, as well as their objects, they could complement rather than attack each other. This was the position sustained by the philosopher Afrikan Spir. The attempt at a reformulation and renewal of critical philosophy carried out by Afrikan Spir from a strictly transcendentalist perspective thus moved against the tide of that hegemonic tendency of naturalizing Kantian transcendental philosophy. As important representatives of this naturalistic trend one can name philosophers and scientists such as Friedrich Albert Lange and Hermann von Helmholtz, but it leads back in some measure to Schopenhauer’s reappropriation of Kant’s transcendental-​idealistic theses. One of the central aspects of this theoretical movement to naturalize the transcendental is the proposition of methodological continuity between scientific research and philosophical analysis that considers the first as the only suitable method for the discovery of the a priori elements of cognition. This means that the supporters of this movement, though embracing the Kantian thesis about the existence of a priori elements that condition experience, reject the method of transcendental analysis based on the self-​reflection of the subject. For Lange (1866: 248f.), the discovery and analysis of the elements that universally account for experience and do not derive from it can only occur via experience itself and based on current resources of science, especially of the physiology of perception. The latter represented one of the most important branches of empirical science of the time. The most influential theory in vogue in this context, defended especially by the aforementioned Kantian physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, was that the world we know, the world of phenomena, is the result of operations of an inferential nature carried out unconsciously by the sense organs. Known as the theory of unconscious inferences, this explanation of the cognitive processes underlying our perception of the world goes back to the Schopenhauerian thesis of the intellectual character of intuition. According to this explanation, sense perception

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is based on an unconscious operation that consists of inferring from the effect or stimulus perceived by sensory organs the cause of this sensation, which is associated with an object in the world. It is in this process that the object identified as the cause of the impressions is intuited as such. For Helmholtz (1925: 4), who defended this thesis based on a series of empirical experiments concerning the specific energy of each organ and its reaction to external stimuli, that operation is of the same kind as logical deduction ‘to the extent that we obtain from the observed effect on our senses a representation of a cause for this effect, while, as a matter of fact, it is invariably simply the nervous stimulations that are perceived directly, that is, the effects, but never the external objects themselves’. Thus, the physiological explanation of how we form an image of the empirical world refers to an unconscious application of the principle of causality based on which the sensitive organs trace all sensation back to an object, which is projected outwardly and then perceived as its cause. The thesis in question, therefore, assumes on the one hand the universal and a priori validity of the principle of causality, a mental principle understood as the logical fundament of perception; on the other hand, however, it converts this logical function into a psycho-​ physiological function. As a matter of fact, it is no longer, as in Kant, a pure understanding that spontaneously applies a concept to impressions passively received by sensitivity, but rather it is the sensory organs themselves and the psycho-​physical structure associated with them that operate in inferential mode interpreting the sensory impressions causally. Thus, the physiology of perception, insofar as it concerns itself with that psycho-​physical organization (Lange’s term: physisch-​psychische Organisation), would be the most appropriate route to the discovery of the a priori principles of cognition. In his attempt at a renewal of critical philosophy and at restoring a more robust transcendentalist perspective, Spir criticizes this thesis with three arguments: 1. First, this thesis is allegedly at odds with the sense of the causality principle itself. For Spir (1877), what is involved in the principle of causality is that no change can occur without another change precedent in time, which it follows according to a fixed law. That is, in establishing the cause of a change we will always face another change, never an object or substance (I: 133). In order to better understand this argument one must keep in mind the deduction of the concept of causality proposed by Spir. We can divide his argument into two steps: a. For Spir, the concept of causality is derived from the principle of identity. He understands this principle as a fundamental law of thought, as the

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single element of the knowing subject that can legitimately be considered a priori. According to this principle, ‘every object in itself is, in its essence, identical with itself ’. This concept of the ‘self-​identical’ coincides ultimately with the concept of the Unconditioned, which corresponds to the notions of Being and Substance. In this sense, in accordance with our concept of substance, ‘self-​identity’ would be the original, essential and unconditioned state of every object in itself. In turn, for Spir, change means ‘non-​identity or a lack of agreement of the changing thing with itself ’ (255). Therefore, it cannot belong to the unconditioned essence of the object, which must correspond to an absolute identity. Thus, any change must be conditioned, namely, by something outside the object, something that is not the object itself, ‘and this is exactly what the principle of causality states: no change without a cause’ (I: 256). So for Spir, as noted by Michael Steven Green (2002: 76), the concept of causality must be understood as ‘the result of the application of “the original a priori concept of the original essence of things, which finds its expression in the principle of identity’ upon ‘the fact of change, which can only be perceived in experience” ’.3 b. Therefore, since all change is conditioned, it is inconceivable that it can emerge from the state of rest that characterizes the unconditioned essence of each object. Accordingly, no substance, in its essence, can be cause, since all causation implies conditionality. Thus, for Spir, no change can emerge from the original state of self-​identity. It follows, in turn, that the cause of a change, that is, its conditional, can only be another change, not a substance or object. That is why Spir argues that the thesis of unconscious inferences, in explaining the perception of an empirical object as an act of intuition of an external cause of impressions, is at odds with the principle of causality itself. 2. Second, the theory of unconscious inferences is supposedly in contradiction with the immediate nature of the knowledge of bodies. Insofar as it explains our perception of empirical objects and thus our belief in the existence of the external world based on the application of an inferential rule of logical nature, this thesis would not be able to explain the persuasive force, the intuitive certainty and the immediacy of our apprehension of the phenomenal world. In other words, it would not be able to explain the fact that reality is represented in our consciousness in a thoroughly immediate way and with a phenomenologically irresistible power of persuasion. As a hypothetical rule, the principle of causality could only provide us

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with a theoretical-​discursive knowledge about the outer world –​as our knowledge about the causal relationships between phenomena –​never with an immediate intuitive knowledge of the phenomena themselves. The latter presupposes a categorical cognitive rule that affirms unconditionally the substantiality of the world by prescribing the application of the concept of object as a substance (derived from the logical principle of identity) to the sense impressions, interpreting these impressions as different qualities of the same ontologically autonomous object. In this sense, the principle of identity also acts as an ontological discriminant that sets the a priori norm for determining and fixing the factual content of the representation as an empirical object, thus granting objectivity to experience. The unconditional character of the knowing subject’s law and of its application is what for Spir explains the immediacy of our certainty of the existence of the outer world, so that the principle of causality is subordinate to it. 3. Finally, this physiological theory of perception, in reducing the cognitive principle determining our apprehension of the world to an organic function that can be studied by empirical science, is said to ignore the particular status of the affirmation involved in the process of representation, whose fundamentally logical nature cannot be explained by physical laws. For Spir, physical (physiological) laws may explain certain psychological operations of association, as well as the mechanical causes of cognition resulting from our bodily organization, but they are unable to account for the logical principles of knowledge. A principle or law of knowledge is an inner disposition of the subject to ‘refer to objects the content that is given to it’ and, according to the nature of this content, to form judgements about the existence and nature of objects. Spir defines the logical laws involved in cognition as ‘general principles of affirmations about objects, that is, an inner need to believe something of objects [etwas von Gegenständen zu glauben]’. Such a disposition could never be the product of physical causes: ‘[W]‌e call this kind of laws logical laws, and these are, in their innermost essence, distinct from the objective physical laws to which belong also the laws of association’ (Spir 1877 I: 76). Such laws of association are secondary to the judgemental logic involved in the application of the concept of substance to the sensations. While a process like that of unconscious inferences could be physically explained through recourse to a physiological vocabulary (including the psychological or associative), the fact of consciousness, which is accompanied by the phenomenological evidence for the existence of bodies outside us (or by the feeling of evidence, even if its objective

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correspondence is false), can only be explained by a logical–​judgemental scheme that transcends the biological constitution of man (Reuter 2009: 96). It is ultimately a logical–​metaphysical scheme from which Spir draws ontological implications. It is on this point in particular that Spir’s programme of a renewal of critical philosophy most distances itself from the hegemonic trend in the second half of the nineteenth century in Germany, which tended to naturalize the transcendental. Regarding the sphere of cognition, it safeguards a logical space that is irreducible to the scope of explanation of the models of natural science, thus conserving a specific investigational method for philosophy, applied to what we might today call the logical–​normative order of reasons, unlike the natural sciences, which deal with the physical–​descriptive order of causes (Clark and Dudrick 2006: 159f.). This results in an entirely different relationship between natural science and philosophy, in which both complement each other instead of attacking each other. For where the territory of one comes to an end, there only begins the territory of the other. Natural science does not ask, for example, why and how we extract from the contents of our own consciousness the knowledge of a corporeal world outside us. The science of nature cannot answer that question either, since it takes the knowledge of the corporeal world as its last and supreme assumption. Yet it is up to philosophy to answer this question, in that, for this purpose, it goes back to what is immediately certain. (Spir 1877 I: 32)

2.  Spir’s concept of identity and Nietzsche’s tropological model of cognition Spir’s influence on some of Nietzsche’s central epistemological theses is variegated, as well as his importance concerning Nietzsche’s reception and criticism of transcendental idealism. Nietzsche appropriated and reinterpreted many theses and themes that featured Spir’s reformulation of Kant’s theory of the transcendental. Some of the key aspects of this project of theoretical reworking are, first, the reduction of the a priori to a single constitutive element, the principle of identity, which provides us with the concept of Being and Unconditioned, and second, the assertion of an ontological extension of this concept. Moreover, Spir served Nietzsche as a gateway to a set of problems involving both the dialogue between the theory of knowledge and natural science, as well as the interfaces

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between epistemology, ontology and metaphysics. He supplied Nietzsche with a systematic analysis of the main scientific and epistemological theories of the time, while bringing to light a set of theoretical assumptions in transcendentalism that Nietzsche would critically associate with an ontological commitment to the normative concept of Being that goes back to Parmenides. Spir is, therefore, one of the philosophers who provided the basis for the young Nietzsche’s interpretation of the pre-​Socratics, which aimed to confront their thoughts with certain contemporary positions both from science and philosophy. It is above all his interpretation and criticism of Parmenides’ thinking, as opposed to Heraclitism, that owes most to the conceptual framework borrowed from Spir. Parmenides is identified by Nietzsche as the precursor of an ontology whose normative assumptions and theoretical consequences would lead to a radical epistemological critique, which in turn is said by Nietzsche to find its most complete expression in Kant’s transcendental philosophy. On the other hand, Heraclitus is seen as the precursor of a type of essentially anti-​transcendentalist historical philosophy that, once allied to the results of scientific research, would imply a more pessimistic point of view in the face of the problem of knowledge.4 But before we get into details on this discussion, which is presented especially in the text Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks from 1873 –​a text that anticipates some central aspects of Nietzsche’s later error theory (see Meyer 2012: 137–​42) –​it is useful to concentrate on the Nachlass note 19[242] from 1872. This is one of the first notes written under the influence of the reading of Spir’s work. In this text, Nietzsche takes up Spir’s discussion of synthetic judgements, reinterprets it and comes to the conclusion that the processes that underlie our cognition are illogical in nature and imply the fictional and anthropomorphic character of knowledge. In the passage taken up by Nietzsche in the note in question, Spir analyzes the nature of the judgements that underlie our representation and our knowledge of the empirical world. He argues that the representation we have of an external world populated by bodies is only possible through the application of an a priori cognitive principle that acts categorically on all sensible content, fixing it as identity and unity. This principle, identified by Spir with the principle of identity, is supposed to be the key element in the organization of experience, enabling us to establish and identify stable empirical objects as substances, having as our source the ever unstable data of sensations. As a constitutive element of representation, therefore, the principle of identity ensures the objectivity of experience, working as an ontological discriminant that establishes the a priori norm for determining the sensible content of the representation as an empirical object. However, taken in its merely logical

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expression, the principle of identity allows only tautological judgements of the type A = A, while the judgement that allows one to describe the representation of an empirical object, although containing in itself a categorical application of the principle of identity, is of another nature. Accordingly, in the passage taken up by Nietzsche in note 19[242] Spir writes: For example, what representation would someone have of the essence of a pencil if one said to him: a pencil is a pencil? Obviously none. In order to describe a pencil, one must say something like: a pencil is an extended thing, long, thin, cylindrical, colored, hard, heavy, etc. Thus here we see in a unity (in the pencil) an entire collection of qualities encompassed or embraced that are different from one another. The unity of the different is generally called synthesis, and the sentences in which the essence of such a unity is expressed are called synthetic sentences or judgements. The general formula of synthetic sentences, the general expression of a synthesis is the sentence: ‘A is B’.5

Here Spir understands synthesis as a constitutive moment of our apprehension of the empirical world, characterized by a plurality of objects that include a variety of qualities. It is only through an act of synthesis that we are able to perceive different qualities –​which correspond to a plurality of sense impressions in the subject –​as belonging to the same thing, understood as the unity of this diversity. On the basis of the passage quoted it is possible to discern what constitutes for Spir the condition under which it becomes possible for us to experience objects in general. The object as a unity of different qualities is the result of a synthetic judgement in which certain complexes of sensations are referred to a substrate. According to Spir, this judgement (or synthesis) is ultimately founded on the fundamental logical law of the knowing subject, which posits a substance identical to itself as support of the sensations given in the perception. Without the subjective need to postulate unconditioned objects that remain the same no experience of the world would be possible. What we really perceive of what we call ‘objects’ is merely a plurality of qualities and attributes linked by a certain law, in conformity with which they always appear together. However, we think an object or a body beyond these complexes of sensations ‘as an individual unity which is so to say the support of the qualities [. . .] Here, the effort of thought is clearly to apprehend the many qualities just as many sides of the one indivisible essence of the thing’ (Spir 1873 I:  321). Accordingly, between the concept of substance on the one hand, which is immediately and originally derived from the principle of identity, and the need to represent objects or things existing by themselves on the other, there must be a logical–​predicative relation, which in turn corresponds to the judgemental framework within which synthetic

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sentences are formed. In the note 19[242] from 1872, Nietzsche takes up the passage from Spir quoted earlier and writes: The essence of definition: the pencil is an elongated, etc., body. A is B. That which is elongated is at the same time colored. Qualities only contain relations. A certain body is simply so and so many relations. Relations can never be the essence, only the effects of the essence. The synthetic judgement describes a thing according to its effects, that is, essence and effect are identified, that is, a metonymy. Therefore, in the essence of a synthetic judgement we have a metonymy, that is, a false equation [Gleichung]. In other words, synthetic inferences are illogical. When we apply them, we presuppose the popular metaphysics, that is, one that sees effects as causes. The concept ‘pencil’ is confused with the ‘thing’ pencil. The ‘is’ in the synthetic judgement is false, it contains a transference [Übertragung], two different spheres are posited next to each other, between them equation [Gleichung] never can happen. We live and think amid nothing but effects of the illogical –​in ignorance and false knowledge. (NL 1872 19[242], KSA 7.495f.)

Engaging directly with a naturalistic model of cognition (the model of unconscious inferences6), Nietzsche makes an argumentative move that seems to point in a direction divergent from the theoretical intentions of Spir. Whereas Spir allocates synthetic judgements to a logical space whose basis is the law of identity, Nietzsche understands these judgements as the result of a semantic (metonymic) transference that corresponds to the confusion or inversion between essence and effect. Identifying this semantic operation as a false equation (Gleichung), Nietzsche concludes that synthetic inferences are illogical, and he does that, as it seems, for two reasons: (a) first because he does not believe that the physiological process of transference (Übertragung: also signifying metaphor) from the nerve stimulation into an image can be described in logical terms, since it occurs in a domain of cognition (from nerve stimulus to image) devoid of abstract signs and whose analogical (metaphorical) associations (Übertragung) do not have a deductive–​inferential or even predicative form, being prior to any logical or conceptual structure; (b) second because the confusion between cause and effect, described by Nietzsche as a metonymy, transgresses the logical and conceptual rules that structure our rational understanding of the world, thus constituting a misapplication of the principle of reason. Now, it is precisely in this way that the young Nietzsche, under the influence of the linguist and philosopher Gustav Gerber (Die Sprache als Kunst)7 understands the principle that operates unconsciously in cognition:  as an illogical (metaphorical or

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metonymic) transference, which confuses subjective impressions with objective qualities inherent in an object, and then falsely projects this complex of impressions as an object into the external world. Gerber’s influence is clear here. This is exactly the definition the author of Die Sprache als Kunst gives to the figure of metonymy: inversion of cause and effect, by associating this trope with our way of applying the principle of causality, as when we say, for example: ‘this drink is bitter, instead of: the drink arouses in us a sensation of that kind’, or ‘the stone is hard, as if the hardness was anything other than our own judgement’.8 Following this suggestion from Gerber, Nietzsche states in On Truth and Lie (TL): ‘to infer from the nerve stimulus a cause outside us, that is already the result of a false and unjustified application of the principle of reason’. How could we dare to say ‘ “the stone is hard”, as if “hard” were something otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation!’ (TL, KSA 1.878). It is also in this context that he writes in the note 19[217] from 1872: ‘Our sensory perceptions are based on tropes, not on unconscious inferences’ (NL 1872 19[217], KSA 7.487). As we have seen, the model of unconscious inferences, which aimed to explain the physiological mechanisms that give rise to sensible perception, was in vogue in the second half of the nineteenth century in Germany, where the intellectual environment was characterized by a strong tendency to naturalize the transcendental, drawing on the empirical sciences for its methodological framework. Friedrich Albert Lange and the Kantian physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz were two of the main representatives of this movement. Afrikan Spir, by contrast, was a critic of this model and the trend it represented, since his project of a renewal of critical philosophy relied on the assumption that philosophy should make use of a distinct method of investigation based on a priori analysis of our cognitive functions. The tropological model developed by Nietzsche in the early 1870s under the influence of Gerber, in turn, aims to provide an alternative to the theory of unconscious inferences, but one that does not break with a certain vocabulary that is in large measure naturalistic. According to the hegemonic naturalization thesis, our image of the sensible world originates in a principle operating in sensory organs that is supposedly identical to the principle that governs our logical judgements. The explanation is based on the application of the category of causality to every sensation immediately given, so that we build a sensible picture of the world as phenomenon by referring all sensations to an object and interpreting it as their cause. So, given the assumption of the a priori and universal validity of the principle of causality, the organs responsible for the construction of the phenomenal world supposedly operate according to fixed and invariable laws, so that their operation is

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characterized by necessity and universality. Apparently, this is one of the central aspects of the theory of unconscious inferences against which Nietzsche asserts his tropological model. By claiming that what underlies our sensory perceptions are tropes, not unconscious inferences, he seems to want to emphasize that necessity, universality and logicality are interconnected conceptual characteristics that belong structurally to a level of abstraction, which does not correspond to the contingent dynamics of unconscious processes working in the background of cognition (see Mattioli 2010: 54f.). For the young Nietzsche, that conceptual columbarium is a late product of the formation of metaphors, which are the basis for the emergence of cognition and, as such, should be described as contingent, individual and illogical. Accordingly, Nietzsche understands our ‘inferential’ (projective) operations as illogical operations, or even as fallacies, because they are below the level of formal structure and are neither justified nor justifiable by conceptual rules of a logical nature –​on the contrary, due to their semantically arbitrary character, they violate those rules. That is why in note 19[242], in which Nietzsche takes up Spir’s discussion of synthetic judgements, he claims that we think and live constantly under the influence of the illogical, since we only build the phenomenal world on the basis of processes of metaphorization that carry with them an inevitable semantic arbitrariness. Within this context, the argumentative move made by Nietzsche in this and related notes follows a direction that diverges from Spir’s theoretical assumptions, in that the latter presupposes a formal structure, an a priori concept of Being –​of the ‘self-​identical’ –​in a sphere of cognition that, according to the position of the young Nietzsche, is prior to all logical–​predicative or conceptual form.9 This is the theoretical background that allows him to trace Spir’s explanation of synthetic judgements back to his tropological model. However, despite such fundamental difference between the positions of the two authors, an important point of convergence should be noted. This concerns the more general argument that our knowledge of the phenomenal world is marked by a contradiction or logical inconsistency. While for Nietzsche the falsehood and/​or the fallacious and illogical character of our knowledge are the result of a metonymic transference (Übertragung) in which two distinct spheres are equated –​the sphere of the ‘thing’ and the sphere of the qualities and relations –​so that cause and effect are confused and the thing is defined as the sum of its properties, for Spir, as Michael Green (2002: 62) puts it, synthetic judgement, in which various qualities are attributed to the same object, ‘is in conflict with the logical laws of self-​identity and non-​contradiction’. As we have seen, according to Spir, every empirical object, as a synthetic unity of a multiplicity

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of qualities, is the product of the application of our concept of substance to the complex of sensations, whereby the different sensations corresponding to qualities are attributed to a substrate. Our concept of substance, in turn, coincides with the concept of the Unconditioned, which is the most immediate expression of the epistemic norm governing our thinking: the principle of identity. But the Unconditioned, as such, cannot contain multiplicities, since multiplicity implies relation (the relation between the multiple qualities), and relation implies conditionality. Nietzsche seems to refer to this argument when he claims that qualities only contain relations and that relations can never be the essence, concluding that the ‘is’ in the synthetic judgement is false and/​or illogical, since it defines the ‘thing’ according to its properties, equating two distinct spheres between which there can never be an equation (NL 1872 19[242], KSA 7.496). Returning to Spir’s (1877 I: 190) argument, we can say that our knowledge of the empirical world, insofar as it is necessarily a product of synthetic judgements, is logically inconsistent, since it presupposes the application of the concept of Unconditioned (of the absolutely self-​identical) to the multiplicity of experience, in which it can never be fully instantiated: ‘If we conceive of an unconditioned object A, whose essence consists of two qualities a and b, then A is just as much a as b . . . But because a and b are different from one another, so it would follow that the object A, insofar as it is the quality a, is different from itself, insofar as it is the quality b’.10 Thus, the Unconditioned presupposed by the norm of thinking, the principle of identity in its purest form, must refer to an absolutely simple unity that could only be instantiated by an entity such as the Being of Parmenides. For Spir, such a Being actually exists. According to him, the disagreement between the concept of Unconditioned on the one hand, as expressed by the logical laws of identity and noncontradiction, and the empirical nature of bodies on the other, necessarily points to a side of reality beyond the sensible world in which this concept would be instantiated: this is what he identifies with the Kantian thing in itself, the very essence of things. Spir’s procedure can be seen as a sort of ‘inversion’ of the basic assumption of both the Kantian Transcendental Analytic and Dialectic, according to which pure concepts can only be legitimately applied to objects of experience, that is, to phenomena, never to the thing in itself. It is precisely through this limitation of the use of a priori concepts that Kant seeks to resolve the antinomies of reason. For Spir, on the contrary, the only legitimate application of the a priori concept of our thinking –​the concept of substance or the Unconditioned  –​is its application to the thing in itself, for when applied to the plurality and transitoriness of empirical objects it implies

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a logical contradiction with them (Riccardi 2009: 71f.). Spir (1877) hereby sustains a kind of Parmenidean ontology by identifying the thing in itself with the instantiation of our concept of Being. The a priori element of thinking, the logical principle of identity, has thus an ontological extension, so that the concept of the Unconditioned provides us with the only adequate representation of the essence of reality: ‘there can be no other legitimate order of thinking than that which enables and leads us to the correct knowledge of reality’ (I: 165).11

3.  Nietzsche’s Parmenides in the light of Spir’s ontology The proximity between the theoretical assumptions and consequences of Spir’s transcendental philosophy (as well as of Kant’s philosophy in some of its key aspects) on the one hand and Parmenides’ thought on the other did not go unnoticed by Nietzsche. That is why the discussions and arguments of the reformer of critical philosophy are taken as background for the presentation of Parmenides’ theses within the more or less implicit dialogue established by the young Nietzsche between the pre-​Socratics and his contemporaries. As suggested by Paolo D’Iorio (1993: 262f.), the first point of approximation between the two philosophers is the yearning for certainty. In the case of Parmenides, the search for certainty is alleged by Nietzsche to have led to a realm of logical abstractions entirely foreign to the Greek spirit (PTG 11, KSA 1.844f.). This is also a key theme in Spir (1877 I: 28–​30), who believes that every philosophy must take as its point of departure immediate certainties of a factual nature (that which is immediately given to consciousness as the immanent content of representation) and of a rational nature (that which is universally certain with respect to the general principles of knowledge). In Nietzsche’s interpretation, the ontology and criticism of our cognitive apparatus put forward by Parmenides are based on the same kind of ‘rational certainty’ vindicated by Spir, which concerns the general logical principles of knowledge. For Spir, the principle that satisfies the conditions for this rational certainty is the logical principle of identity (I: 30). With this in mind, Nietzsche writes about Parmenides: ‘the only single form of knowledge which we trust immediately and absolutely and whose denial amounts to insanity is the tautology A = A’ (PTG 10, KSA 1.841). Based on that logical certainty and truth, Parmenides came to the conclusion that only Being as pure identity, that is, that which can be expressed by a tautological proposition of the type A = A, really exists: Being is! Once we are forced to assign qualities to Being and to say something like ‘A = B (which is to say A = not A)’, we are in error. It is possible to recognize here Spir’s reflections

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on synthetic judgements discussed earlier and his conception of the illogical nature of our empirical knowledge. The diversity and the change of qualities comprise differences, that is, a denial of identity. That to which one can assign change and diversity, the whole sensible world, therefore, belongs to the realm of non-​Being, according to Nietzsche’s Parmenides: ‘Everything of which you can say “it has been” or “it will be” is not; of Being, however, you can never say “it is not” ’ (PTG 10, KSA 1.843). For Nietzsche, with that thought Parmenides made the first and most important criticism of our cognitive apparatus, thus splitting the domain of sensitivity (of temporality, change and diversity) and the domain of logical abstractions (of the logical principle of identity, the one eternal and timeless Being), a fission that would find its more precise formulation in Kant’s distinction between sensibility and pure understanding. The consequence of this ‘fatal criticism’ is the following: All sense perceptions, says Parmenides, yield but illusions [Täuschungen]. And their main illusoriness [Haupttäuschung] lies in their pretense that also non-​ Being is, that Becoming, too, has Being. All the manifold colourful world known to experience, all the transformations of its qualities, all the orderliness of its ups and downs, are cast aside mercilessly as mere appearance and illusion [Schein und Wahn]. (PTG 10, KSA 1.843f.)

Thus, Nietzsche sees in the philosophy of Parmenides the prelude to a radical epistemological critique and the birth of ontology. Since experience does not show us any entity that corresponds to our normative concept of Being, Parmenides has deduced that this concept, by being present in our thinking, must necessarily be capable of instantiation in an ontological dimension that lies beyond experience. Accordingly, the logical content of thought and its truth value have no reference to experience, but come from elsewhere, namely, from a supersensible world to which we are supposed to have a direct access by means of pure thinking (PTG 11, KSA 1.845). Here, the argument Nietzsche attributes to Parmenides is analogous to Spir’s argument that the disagreement between our concept of the Unconditioned and the empirical nature of the bodies necessarily points to a side of reality beyond the sensible world in which this concept would be instantiated.

4.  Nietzsche, Spir and the reality of time In the paragraphs that follow, Nietzsche mobilizes an important argument against the Parmenidean thesis of the identity between thinking and Being

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supposedly capable of assuring us of the existence of an essential and unconditioned ontological dimension beyond the sensible world. It is the argument (attributed by Nietzsche especially to Anaxagoras) concerning the mobility and temporal nature of thinking itself. If Being must be understood as an unconditioned, unchanging and timeless unity, then thinking, in order to be identical to that unity and to be able to truly grasp it, should have such characteristics. However, ‘it is quite impossible to designate thinking as a rigid persistence, as an eternally unmoved thinking-​in-​and-​on-​itself on the part of a unity’ (PTG 13, KSA 1.850). Thinking is always a movement of concepts and a succession of representations that occurs unavoidably in time. This is what the opponents of Parmenides could object against him, using an ad hominem argument and stating that in his own thinking there is succession and movement, which is why this thinking could not be real and therefore could prove nothing about the real. Using an argument that draws on some of the broad references to Kant’s transcendental philosophy featuring in his lectures on the Pre-​Platonic philosophers (KGW II/​4: 300f.), Nietzsche appeals to the Kantian thesis of the transcendental ideality of time and of the phenomenalism of inner experience to propose a solution to this philosophical perplexity into which the adversaries of Parmenides would have thrown him. To that objection Parmenides could answer, like Kant, as follows: ‘I can indeed say that my representations follow one another; but all that means is that I am conscious of them in terms of the succession in time, i.e., according to the form of inner sense. But this does not make time something in itself, nor a determination objectively inherent in things’ (PTG 15, KSA 1.857). This Kantian argument targets those who believe they have a privileged epistemic access to inner experience, to the inner facts and processes of our representational consciousness. The proponents of this internalist thesis would argue that, as much as we can and must be sceptical concerning external objects, nothing authorizes us to doubt the immanent content or the change of our own representations, which attests to the reality of time, since these representations occur necessarily in time. Kant claims that time does indeed have an empirical reality, in which all the changes we experience take place. However, we cannot avail ourselves of this argument to prove an alleged transcendental or absolute reality of time (see Small 2010: 21). The fact that the consciousness I have of my own representations disposes them in a temporal succession does not imply that time is a determination objectively inherent in things. Nietzsche observes in this respect that, according to the Kantian argument, it would be necessary to ‘distinguish between pure thinking, which would be timeless like the one Being of Parmenides, and the consciousness of this thinking, and the latter would already

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translate the thinking into the form of appearance, i.e., of succession, plurality and motion’ (PTG 15, KSA 1.857). What we have here is precisely the Kantian argument for the phenomenalism of inner experience. Against those who argue in favour of the thesis that we have a privileged access to the representations of inner sense, Kant asserts that inner experience, that is, the consciousness we have of ourselves in the flow of our representations, provides us only with a phenomenon of the same sort as those of the external world, which means that the content accessed by inner sense does not correspond to any reality that reaches beyond merely phenomenal reality. The central argument mobilized by Kant in this context is that of self-​affection, a notion that goes hand in hand with the thesis of the transcendental ideality of time (KrV B68–​9, B153–​4). Once the consciousness we have of ourselves and of our own representations emerges in the form of inner sense (time), it can give us nothing but a phenomenal subject, since the subject in its proper transcendental aspect must be located in a timeless dimension which is not conditioned by the forms of sensibility.12 In this sense, Parmenides could appeal to the Kantian thesis and say that the succession of our representations in consciousness is just a phenomenon, which does not correspond to the true nature of thinking, of the pure and self-​identical thinking located in a timeless dimension, like Being itself. In a second moment of his argument, Nietzsche then makes use of a decisive passage from Spir against the Kantian thesis. Taking up the core of the argument mentioned earlier, that the changes in our representations are real, Spir’s text develops this idea in a very sophisticated manner by making use of a phenomenology of representation inspired by Descartes: It is probable that this would have been Parmenides’ way out, although the counter-​argument would then be the same as A. Spir’s argument against Kant (in Denken und Wirklichkeit. 2nd ed. Vol. I, pp. 209f): Now in the first place it is clear that I can know nothing of succession as such if I do not hold its successive stages simultaneously in my consciousness. The representation of a succession, in other words, is not in itself successive; consequently it is completely different from the succession of representations. In the second place, Kant’s hypothesis implies such self-​evident absurdities that one can only wonder how he could have left them out of account. Caesar and Socrates, according to his hypothesis, are not really dead. They are just as alive as they were two thousand years ago and only appear to be dead due to an arrangement of my ‘inner sense’. Men as yet unborn are already alive, and if they have not yet appeared on the scene, this too is the fault of the arrangement of this

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inner sense. The main question is this: how can the beginning and the end of conscious life itself, together with all its inner and outer senses, exist only in the interpretation of the inner sense? The actual fact is that one absolutely cannot deny the reality of change. If you throw it out of the window it will slip back in through the keyhole. One can say ‘it merely appears to me that states and representations change’ –​but this appearance itself is something objectively given. Within it, succession indubitably has objective reality; within it something actually follows upon something else. –​Besides, it is necessary to note that the entire critique of reason can have its foundation and justification only in the presupposition that our representations appear to us as they are. For if they appeared to us as other than they really are, one could not make any valid assertions about them, hence produce no epistemology and no ‘transcendental’ examination of objective validity. And it is beyond all doubt that our representations appear to us as successive. (PTG 15, KSA 1.857f.)

If we abstract from some marginal details, the ad hominem argument and some rhetorical excesses in the text, we can say that the main philosophical argument in this passage is the following: if I say that my states of consciousness and my representations appear to me as successive and changing, then I am forced to accept that this appearance itself has an objective reality as a state of consciousness  –​reality from which we cannot dissociate temporality without radically contradicting the most basic phenomenological evidence of the representational process. In this sense, the structure of the argument in question is similar to the structure of the Cartesian cogito, and Spir’s incisive appeal to the factual content of representation as immediate certainties of consciousness, by analogy with Descartes’ philosophical method, is a proof of this similarity. Here there is an appeal to the radical phenomenality of representational consciousness, which is taken to its limits, and an appeal to the evidence of its constitutive form. Now, although Nietzsche (especially in his period of maturity) is usually deeply sceptical about the philosophical appeal to immediate certainties and facts of consciousness –​resulting in his incisive critique of both the Cartesian cogito (which resorts to the immediacy of thinking), as well as Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the will (which resorts to the immediacy of willing) –​this ‘minimal form’ of phenomenological argument in favour of the objective reality of time seems not to offend his cognitive prudence. It says nothing about a subject supposedly underlying the changes and offers the possibility of an ‘eliminative interpretation’ (Small 2010: 20) in favour of a thesis with which Nietzsche seems to agree very early on in his philosophical trajectory. What is considered in this argument is not the cogito as Nietzsche will understand it later, that is, the content of an act

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of consciousness understood as a thinking substance, but the form of cogitatio, namely, its temporal form as the immanent structure of every possible representation. According to this argument, the temporal modus of representations, the stream of consciousness, implies the objective reality of time. Thus, one finds here a phenomenological observation that time belongs to the essence of every cogitatio, a time that is constitutive of cogitatio itself and cannot be dissociated from it. Accordingly, temporality is not an accidental attribute of thinking and representation, which would be added to them insofar as they become phenomena for consciousness, but rather it is one of their most essential determinations. The successive appearing of immanent sensible data in the activity of representation, its constant change, is phenomenologically indubitable. Therefore, insofar as the succession and change of representations have objective reality, insofar as in the appearing of representations itself one thing really follows upon the other, we are not allowed to deny the reality of time.13 Kant’s thesis concerning the transcendental ideality of time would hereby be refuted. A deeper analysis of the argument shows the following: the first point of Spir’s critique cited by Nietzsche in the passage earlier –​namely, that we can know nothing of succession as such if we do not hold its successive stages simultaneously in our consciousness, and therefore, that the representation of a succession is not itself successive and is consequently completely different from the succession of representations  –​opposes Kant’s assertion that ‘the succession of representations is in no way different from our representation of succession’ (Spir 1873 I: 264). So, for Spir, the succession of representations cannot be identified with the representation of their succession. On the contrary, the representation of a succession is only possible once a succession of representations is given earlier in an objective manner, the reality of which one must affirm in the first place in order to be able to get an ulterior representation of the process, which means: if one does not affirm the existence of succession, that is, the existence of a real movement of one’s thinking, no representation of succession is possible. Furthermore, Spir claims that, in his fundamental distinction between thing in itself and phenomenon (representation), Kant has not made clear what he meant by phenomenon and what kind of reality he concedes to the world of phenomena. This is alleged to be his basic mistake, which led him to his false conception of the unreality of time. ‘He defined the phenomena everywhere as mere representations, but he did not distinguish these two completely heterogeneous things: “to be a representation” and “to be merely represented” or “to exist only in representation”. He did not distinguish the representation itself, as an objective process or object, from what is reproduced or represented in it’ (Spir

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1873 I: 266), This is a key point in Spir’s argument: to the extent that the existence of the representation itself, not of that which is represented in it, cannot be denied, we cannot deny the existence of an objective temporal succession either, for representations occur necessarily in time. That is to say: the temporality of the process of representation as an objective process cannot be ruled out. But Spir, moved perhaps by a certain ‘philosophical piety’ or simply by the principle of interpretive charity, acknowledges Kant’s reasons on two points regarding the thesis of the transcendental ideality of time: 1. The first is that Kant was right to say that ‘time in itself ’ is not something real, because it would be a mere abstraction of the successions that are actually given and it could not be represented without them. A ‘time in itself ’, in the sense of an empty time in which no change takes place, is a mere abstraction and thus unreal (Spir 1873 I: 265). This argument, which is found shortly after the passage taken by the young Nietzsche from the first volume of Spir’s work, anticipates a second critique by Spir directed against the Kantian understanding of time, which can be found in the second volume and concerns not the thesis of transcendental ideality, but the thesis of the a priori status of time. Nietzsche refers to this critique in the notes 35[56] and 35[61] from 1885, in which he quotes Spir: ‘time is not given a priori –​Spir 2, p. 7’ (NL 1885 35[56], KSA 11.537) and further: ‘so-​called time, a mere abstraction, neither objectively existing, nor a necessary and primal mode of representation of the subject” 2. p. 15’ (NL 1885 35[61], KSA 11.538). If not contextualized, these notes can lead to false interpretations of Nietzsche’s position on the issue. The inattentive reader can be misled by the impression that Nietzsche, here, uses a quotation from Spir to support the idea that time, in being a mere abstraction and existing neither objectively nor as a form of our cognitive faculty, has no reality that reaches beyond the realm of empirical consciousness. Hence, it would be not exactly a form of representation, but rather a product of it. However, this is a serious misreading.14 As mentioned, Nietzsche here refers to Spir’s criticism of the Kantian thesis of the a priori character of time. Spir admits that, if understood as empty time (and this is just the consequence of the Transcendental Aesthetic, which understands time as pure a priori form of phenomena), time cannot be real. What Nietzsche calls ‘time’, quoting Spir in the aforementioned note 35[61], is therefore not the time that is given to us in the experience of succession and change, but time as an abstract concept, as pure form, which is referred to by the expression ‘so-​called time’.

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This so-​called time is, in this context, the time of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetics, from which one has detached all content, that is, all succession and all possible change. It is empty time. However, such an empty time, in which there is no succession or change, exists neither for Nietzsche nor for Spir. The crux of Spir’s argument can be summarized as follows:  Kant says that time is a necessary representation that underlies all intuition. Therefore, we could extract all phenomena given in intuition, and time would remain as a pure a priori form. We could abstract from all succession and all change in time, but the time itself could never be suppressed (KrV A31/​B46).15 According to Spir (1877), Kant’s error consists first in his attempt to establish a strict parallelism between the intuitions of time and space. For the reformer of critical philosophy, it is true that spatial things are given to us only through the form of outer sense, or to put it in another way: the representation of things in space is constituted by us. But this is by no means the case with respect to temporal successions. These are actually and immediately given to us and their objective reality cannot be denied, while the existence of things in space always remains doubtful (II: 5). Second, unlike space, time is not a general form of representation or even a general representation, from which one could abstract the content that is given in it. This seems to be the central point of the argument, to which we have referred earlier. According to Spir, we can indeed represent an empty space, but an empty time is, for him, something inconceivable: ‘An empty time, i.e., a time in which nothing happens, in which no event and no succession take place, cannot be represented.’ Such an empty time is unrepresentable because time is nothing but the succession of changes by means of which it can be measured: ‘Besides the successions, nothing can be conceived that could serve as a measure of time. For this reason, the time disappears completely if we abstract from the actual successions’ (II: 7f.). The passage quoted by Nietzsche in note 35[61] from 1885 refers to the conclusion of this argument, where Spir states that ‘so-​called time is a mere abstraction and cannot be seen either as something objectively existing or as a necessary and primal mode of representation in the subject’ (II: 15). 2. The second point on which Spir believes that the Kantian thesis of the unreality of time comes from a legitimate intuition concerns the fact that the concept we have of the unconditioned essence of the world does not admit the possibility of change and therefore does not admit the objective reality of time. (It is in this sense that, for Nietzsche, transcendental philosophy,

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asserting the purely phenomenal and in a sense ‘illusory’16 character of the world of experience, is a modern and renovated version of the Eleatic theses.) For Spir (1873), time cannot belong to the thing in itself, because the thing in itself, according to the concept we have of it (derived from the principle of identity), cannot be subject to change. What is allegedly missing in Kant’s analysis is the theoretical subtlety in drawing the distinction between phenomenon and thing in itself. By assuming only two types of ‘objects’, corresponding to two different ontological levels –​the things in themselves on the one hand, which exist independently of representation, and the phenomenal things on the other, which exist in representation and therefore have no objective reality –​Kant has ignored a third ontological type or level: it is the representation itself which has an actual and objective existence, but is not a thing in itself. On this ontological level, to which also the knowing subject belongs, temporality has an objective existence and the reality of change cannot be denied (I: 266).

5.  The origin of representation from the becoming Although Nietzsche accepts Spir’s thesis of the reality of time and change, he rejects the assumption of a higher ontological level that would correspond to Parmenidean Being or the Kantian thing in itself and in which our concept of the Unconditioned could be objectively instantiated. Rather, he understands this concept as a necessary regulative fiction that responds to the vital interests of certain organic complexes aiming at the establishment and development of what we might call intentional operations and dispositions, which will enable the development of their cognitive–​adaptive capacities. Therefore, he has an ontological commitment concerning the temporal and changing character of immanent reality, which Spir refers to the intermediate ontological level of representational processes. In a series of Nachlass notes from 1881,17 in direct confrontation with Spir, Nietzsche seeks to understand the processes related to the intentional dimension of representation as something absolutely certain and essential in the universe. These notes appear to be sketches of what will be configured later as the hypothesis of will to power as processes of interpretation. In this series of notes, Nietzsche grants the status of a fundamental certainty (by analogy with the Cartesian cogito) to the (phenomenologically verifiable) fact that there are

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representations, and the representational capacity is seen as a primitive characteristic of Being itself. Hence, becoming and temporality, which are essential attributes of the operations related to representation, are considered as essential characteristics of Being in its global dimension, while permanence and identity are seen as fictions that are necessary for the representation to produce a cognitively determinable and therefore assimilable content. Without this fiction something like thinking could never arise: ‘thinking would be impossible if it did not fundamentally misconceive the essence of esse: it needs to affirm substance and the identical, for a knowledge of what is absolutely in flux is impossible’ (NL 1881 11[330], KSA 9.570).18 In this sense, according to Nietzsche, it is necessary that organic complexes create discontinuities in the continuous flow of events, so that they can perceive objects, substances, causal relationships; it is necessary that they be able to recognize the same over and against the non-​ identical, to abstract from singularity, plurality and change in order to identify phenomena and to adapt to the world, thus making possible their survival and evolution. This is allegedly an exigency for the conservation of life that could only take place with the emergence of a cognitive principle in an early phase of the development of organic complexes, a cognitive principle that acts in a regulative way, fixing as identity what is constantly changing, thus enabling the perception of the world as a world of stable ‘ideal’ objects. This thesis, which appears modestly in the published works and in more reckless statements in the posthumous notes, is developed more clearly mainly from the middle period on. It is in Human, All Too Human, with the programme of a historical philosophy allied to the empirical sciences, that Nietzsche for the first time clearly articulates his theory of becoming with his critique of transcendental philosophy, which culminates in an error theory according to which our concept of substance systematically falsifies the reality of becoming. His critique is targeted mainly at the philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as at the programme of renewal of critical philosophy pursued by Spir. Especially the aphorisms 2 (‘Family failing of philosophers’), 16 (‘Phenomenon and thing in itself’) and 18 (‘Fundamental questions of metaphysics’) make clear Nietzsche’s intention of transforming transcendental concepts into historical, conditioning factors linked to the evolution of organic beings in general, of the human species in particular, and of its social and cultural institutions. But the central point regarding the criticism of Spir and his concept of the Unconditioned can be found in aphorism 18. This aphorism seeks to reinterpret the principle of identity, which in Spir assumes the role of an original law of the knowing subject (in a transcendental sense), as an organic function:

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When one day the history of the genesis of thought comes to be written, the following sentence by a distinguished logician will also stand revealed in a new light: ‘The primary universal law of the knowing subject consists in the inner necessity of recognizing every object in itself as being in its own essence something identical to itself, thus self-​existent and at bottom always the same and unchanging, in short as a substance’. This law, too, which is here called ‘primary’, has evolved: one day it will be shown how gradually, in the lower organisms, this tendency comes into being. (HH 18, KSA 2.38f.)

Seen as an atavistic inheritance of the primitive stages of evolution of organisms, and confronted with the thesis of universal becoming, the subjective necessity to identify empirical objects as discrete and self-​identical entities (which Nietzsche promptly recognizes as cognitively imperative) loses its objective validity, giving rise to a general fictionalism. In this theoretical scenario, the role of philosophy can no longer be defined in justificatory terms, in the sense that it is to establish the universal conditions for the truth and validity of our judgements. Neither can it continue to claim for itself the epistemic authority to legitimize any kind of a priori or metaphysical knowledge. Rather, its task must now include a programme of ‘deconstruction’ regarding the normative force of metaphysical beliefs through a genealogical investigation of its origin, its meaning and its vital function. By trying to show, with the aid of the empirical sciences, ‘that every concept of the Unconditioned corresponds to a regulative fiction that originated in primitive organic forms and was transmitted through the mechanisms of heredity’ (Lopes 2008: 280) Nietzsche’s historical philosophy is committed to a certain naturalism that denies the kind of robust transcendentalism Spir wanted to restore.

6.  The temporality of representation and the intentionality of drives Space does not permit a more detailed analysis of the general context of Human, All Too Human and its confrontation with transcendental philosophy, especially with Spir.19 Nevertheless, some remarks about Michel Steven Green’s noncognitivist interpretation of Nietzsche’s epistemology need to be made.20 Perhaps the most fundamental problem Green sees in taking Nietzsche’s error theory literally (in the sense that we falsify the world by means of conceptualization) is the problem of justification or, in other words, the problem of self-​reference. As a matter

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of fact, ‘one must know (and so have true beliefs concerning) a good deal about the world and ourselves to even begin to argue about our cognitive inadequacies’ (Green 2002: 20). For Green, this would per se undermine the alleged universality of the error theory and involve it in a series of paradoxes. This is one of the main reasons that leads him to consider Nietzsche’s claims about becoming as referring to our cognitive relation to the world and not to the world itself (51f.). I believe, however, that Nietzsche’s error theory is ontologically motivated, that is, that he claims to have at least one true insight into the world: that the world is flux. This knowledge is justified by a phenomenological argument concerning the reality of time, inspired by Descartes and borrowed initially from Spir. We have had occasion to discuss the first occurrence of this argument in Section 4 of this chapter, and I shall deal briefly with its second occurrence now. This phenomenological argument is complemented by a series of scientific hypotheses derived from the most recent results of the empirical science of the time, especially from biology and physics (Karl Ernst von Baer, Wilhelm Roux and Roger Boscovich are some of the names that inspired Nietzsche). This means that Nietzsche’s programme of historical philosophy is founded on a kind of moderate scientific realism. But this does not mean that Nietzsche considers the sciences to be able to offer us a real image or description of what the world is like, for they cannot detach themselves from our primitive habits of thinking. They can, however, approximate the truth by building increasingly dynamic explanatory models and by confronting the internal paradoxes of their own theories. In aphorism 16 from Human, All Too Human he says that science can, quite gradually and step by step, illuminate the history of the genesis of the world as representation and, ‘for brief periods at any rate, lift us up out of the entire process’ (HH 16, KSA 2.38). So it can provide us with an insight into the absolute character of becoming. The role of science in Nietzsche’s thinking is therefore ambiguous: ‘The establishment of conclusions in science always unavoidably involves us calculating with false magnitudes’, but that does not mean that science cannot provide us in some measure with an epistemically (and even ontologically) legitimate knowledge, even if this knowledge is acquired in a negative way, by means of the paradox: ‘[U]‌p to the final stage at which our erroneous basic assumptions, those constant errors, come to be incompatible with our conclusions, for example in the theory of atoms’ (HH 19, KSA 2.40f.). Nietzsche is here referring above all to the development of atomism that culminates in the theory of Boscovich, who understands the atom as an unextended point. Now, if the final scientific finding is that what was considered to be the fundament of matter must be regarded as something unextended, that is, immaterial, we come

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then to a valuable insight concerning the validity and the limits of our concepts, but at the same time and to some extent to a sort of ‘negative’ knowledge about the world: there is nothing in the world that corresponds to the immutability of the atom (it is worth remembering that Nietzsche sees the atom as the result of a pluralistic version of Parmenides’ ontology of Being). In this sense, the results of scientific findings point to a confirmation of the thesis of becoming, to the absence of anything absolutely permanent in the world. Thus, Nietzsche is committed to an ontology of becoming derived from his abandonment of the Kantian thesis of the transcendental ideality of time, justified by phenomenological observation and supported by empirical evidence provided by the latest results of the natural sciences. Now, the phenomenological angle is found (besides its first occurrence in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks) in a series of notes from 1881 (to which we referred earlier) that deal with the problem of representation. In note 11[330] we find the following argument: the existence of representation is a fact; representation has, as representation, an objective reality: ‘I represent, therefore there is a Being’; the only being we know is the representing Being; representation belongs to the constitution of Being itself; representation occurs in time and its essential characteristic is its becoming; so, the only Being that is assured to us is changing; but the act of representation asserts permanence, that is, the contrary of Being (NL 1881 11[330], KSA 9.569f.). Again, the fact that Nietzsche attributes the representational capacity to Being has to do with his thesis that the processes in the world of becoming should be understood as processes marked by a kind of intentionality, as processes of interpretation that must falsify the essential character of becoming. It is important to draw attention to this point because it is fundamentally associated with the Nietzschean hypothesis of wills to power and with his theory of affects. The thesis according to which the dynamics of the wills to power is marked by a kind of intentionality implies the existence of a cognitive aspect in the unconscious dimension of affects. One of Green’s main arguments in favour of his noncognitivist interpretation concerns the fact that Nietzsche traces all thinking and conceptualization back to the dynamics of drives. The entire chain of mental events that seem connected according to logical relations is actually determined by the relationships between the affects, which, according to Green (2002: 120f.), undermines the idea that our thoughts have content at all. This is what he associates with the psychological sense of the noncognitivist thesis. For him, if what takes us from one thought to another is only our affects, there is nothing here that could be in error, and, therefore, thoughts do not have truth values, once drives are not cognitively constrained. But the fact that what

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determines our thoughts are the relations between our affects does not mean that our thoughts are devoid of content and, therefore, that we do not think at all. If the dynamic of affects is determined by representational processes, then it is not only the thoughts that are guided by the affects, but the affects are also pervaded by cognition21 (unconscious representations).22 One of the main objections Nietzsche directs against Schopenhauer (already to be found in his first attempt at a criticism of the Schopenhauerian metaphysics of will from 186823), concerns the radical dissociation of will from representation in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Nietzsche intends to restore to the will its cognitive counterpart,24 which is what motivates him to describe the volitional, affective and instinctual dimension of life forms using an intentional, agential and political vocabulary (see Lopes 2012). This aspect of his theory may also give us an answer to the question (also posed by Green (2002:  69)):  ‘[H]‌ow thought [which implies the concept of Being, W.M.] is possible at all in the world of becoming?’ What we can infer from Nietzsche’s hypothesis of wills to power is that the origin of the concept of Being within the world of becoming can only be explained on the basis of conflictual relations between the various wills (drive complexes) via a representational medium. Once an affect or drive establishes a relationship with another affect or drive, once it wants to overcome, master, incorporate or ally with the other affect, the active drive must be able to fix and individuate the target-​affect in some way, and this is only possible through a sort of intentional process, so that the affect can be taken as a target that offers resistance and must be overcome.25 In this sense, the intentional process of determining a target for domination, expansion or formation of alliances of power is concomitant with the emergence of representation: the directivity of the force corresponds ultimately to its representational character. It is a constant process of interpretation, of fixing (Fest-​stellen) within the world of becoming.26 Accordingly, the process of the falsification of becoming is immanent to the dynamics of the drives, since they need to fix becoming and individuate possible targets. So even though our thoughts are determined by the affects, it does not mean that they do not have any content or truth-​value, since the affects themselves have a representational content whose internal logic necessarily involves a falsification of becoming. I believe that Green does not pay adequate attention either to this particular aspect of Nietzsche’s psychology and ontology of affects or to his temporal realism,27 which leads him to an interpretation of Nietzsche’s error theory that does not seem to do justice either to his radical epistemological critique (which is ontologically motivated) or to the cognitive aspect of his theory of will to power.

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Notes 1 This chapter is based on a paper presented at the I International Congress Nietzsche and the Philosophical Tradition: Nietzsche and the Kantian Tradition, which took place at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais and at the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto (Brazil) in October 2012 together with the IV International Workshop Nietzsche & Kant. I would like to thank Michael Steven Green and Mattia Riccardi for the fruitful discussions during the congress. I would also like to thank Herman Siemens and Marco Brusotti for the comments and suggestions on the English version of the paper. 2 See, for instance, Lange (1866: 279–​83; Lopes 2011: 313–​18). For a more detailed analysis of the context in question, see Köhnke (1986: especially chapters III and IV); and Gregory (1977: chapter VII). 3 See Spir (1877 I: 247f.). 4 Even though the programme of historical philosophy allied to the empirical sciences and its epistemological counterpart articulated around the so-​called error theory are made ​​public only with the release of Human, All Too Human in 1878, the fundamental philosophical position underlying this programme, which has its inspiration in the Heraclitean intuition of becoming and is supported by the results of the empirical sciences of the time, is already present in the first Nietzschean analysis of the pre-​Socratic philosophers, presented both in his lectures on the Pre-​ Platonic philosophers (VPP) and in the unpublished text on the philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks (PTG). 5 Spir, Forschug nach der Gewissheit, p. 13, apud Green (2002: 62). 6 For a more detailed discussion of this point, see Orsucci (1994), Reuter (2004: 370), Mattioli (2010: 45 and 51–​6). 7 See Meijers (1988), Meijers and Stingelin (1988). 8 Gustav Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst. Erster Band. Bromberg 1871: 394, apud Meijers and Stingelin (1988: 357). 9 See, for instance, TL, KSA 1.881f.; note NL 1872 19[78], KSA 7.445. See also the passage concerning the origins of our concept of Being in PTG, KSA 1.847. 10 Translation by Green (2002: 63). Green makes use of this Spirean argument in order to explain Nietzsche’s error theory as a whole. For him, Nietzsche’s claims about becoming (which concern not only the temporal flow of things, but also the plurality of their qualities and relations) do not refer to what the world is like, but merely to our cognitive relation to the world. Once all empirical knowledge is contradictory due to its synthesis of being and becoming (conditioned and unconditioned), we are unable to make objectively valid judgements, and this would be Nietzsche’s (and Spir’s) reason to say that we falsify reality by means of conceptualization. Green’s conclusion amounts to what he calls the noncognitivist

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William Mattioli thesis, according to which, after all, there is nothing we can call cognition and, therefore, nothing that would falsify the ‘world’. This approach to Nietzsche’s error theory offers a very sophisticated interpretation of it, but I see some problems in it. First, I think that there is a significant difference (not considered by Green) between Nietzsche’s first reflections about truth and knowledge in his early notes dealing with the notions of metaphor and metonymy, on the one hand, and his later error theory, on the other. This difference has to do both with a change in Nietzsche’s understanding of what kind of processes lie at the basis of our cognitive functions and with a radicalization of his conception of becoming. As we have seen, the young Nietzsche, unlike Spir, does not believe that we have something like an a priori concept of Being syntactically active prior to the semantic relations that shape our experience of the external world. According to him, these semantic relations are the basis of all cognitive processes, whereas the concept of Being and the syntactic framework that is proper to it are derived. This changes in the works of the middle and later periods, in which Nietzsche develops a syntactic theory of cognition which is closer to Spir’s conception (on this point, see Anderson (2002: 100f.), Mattioli (2012)). Parallel to the development of this syntactic conception of cognition, a more realistic theory of becoming emerges, arising from his abandonment of the Kantian thesis of the transcendental ideality of time. The combination of these two theoretical moves is what gives his error theory its final shape, according to which we are always obliged to employ the concept of Being to the absolute and universal becoming of the world, thus falsifying its very essence. Green argues insistently that the becoming Nietzsche refers to is the becoming of the world we experience through our cognitive apparatus. But it is clear in almost all the passages in which Nietzsche talks about becoming that he considers the world of experience as a world of ideal stable objects, so this phenomenological world of multiple qualities inherent in fixed external objects can never be the chaos Nietzsche wants us to envision when he refers to the ‘absolute becoming’ that cannot be perceived or incorporated (I try to deal more closely with this problem in Mattioli (2011)). Furthermore, Green argues that the conclusion of Nietzsche’s error theory (that all knowledge we have of the world is necessarily false) is the same conclusion to which Spir is led by his own conception. But Spir’s (1877) understanding of that ‘fundamental antinomy’ does not lead him to the rejection of all empirical knowledge as false. On the contrary, for him, empirical knowledge, despite its logical inconsistency, is ‘true and legitimate’ (I: 144). Green’s argument also assumes that, for Spir (as it is alleged to be for Nietzsche), sensations are fundamentally chaotic. But Spir does not say that our sensations are chaotic in the sense presupposed by Green. On the contrary, they must be by nature arranged in a way that enables them to be apprehended as external objects. So, the content of the sensations is determined

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by rules that make it possible for them to be articulated in perception. Arguments against these two assumptions of Green’s interpretation can be found in the following passages by Spir: 1877 I: 142–​7; 1877 II: 53, 66f., 74f., 81, 92, 99. At the end of this chapter I will come back to this point and raise what I consider to be some other problems of the noncognitivist interpretation of Nietzsche’s position proposed by Green. 11 Compare the following passage: ‚Ausserdem ist es klar, dass der Satz der Identität eine allgemeine Affirmation über die Natur wirklicher Gegenstände aussagt; also kann er auch nichts Anderes sein, als der Ausdruck eines allgemeinen Begriffs von dem Wesen der Objecte oder der Wirklichkeit. Ist diese nicht die empirische Wirklichkeit, so ist sie folglich eine andere. Und erweist es sich, dass der Begriff des Mitsichidentischen derselbe ist wie der Begriff des Unbedingten, des Selbstexistierenden, so bezieht sich also der Satz der Identität auf das Unbedingte, das Noumenon, das Ding an sich oder das transcendentale Object, welches unserer Erfahrung zu Grunde liegt‘ (Spir 1873 I: 198). 12 For a more detailed discussion of this point, see Mattioli (2011: 241 (note 13) and 242–​8). 13 The same argument will occur again later in Nietzsche’s work, initially in the context of the notes from 1881 that present an alternative version of the cogito in favour of the reality of change and the global nature of representation as an essential characteristic of Being (see especially NL 1881 11[330], KSA 9.569–​70, but also: NL 11[321], [324] and [325], KSA 9.566–​68). Later, this argument will occur in the context of one of the formulations of the eternal recurrence theory (see NL 1885 36[15], KSA 11.556; Small (1994: 100)). 14 In his book Nietzsches Theorie des Bewußtseins, Erwin Schlimgen offers just such an interpretation of the problem of time in Nietzsche (see Schlimgen 1999: 83). 15 See Spir (1877 II: 7). 16 The characterization of the world of experience in terms of ‘illusion’ as a consequence of its purely phenomenal nature is a reflex of the influence of Schopenhauer’s notion of Erscheinung on Nietzsche’s understanding of transcendental philosophy in this context. On this topic, see Rethy (1991: 60f.). 17 See NL 1881 11[321], [324], [325], [329], [330], KSA 9.566–​70. 18 For a more detailed analysis of the argument presented in these notes, see Mattioli (2011: 248–​54). 19 For a more detailed discussion of these points, see Lopes (2008: 269–​319) and D’Iorio (1993: 270–​6). 20 See note 10 here. 21 See, for instance, NL 1881 11[93], KSA 9.475; NL 1884 27[19], KSA 11.279f.; NL 1885 34[124], KSA 11.462; NL 1885 41[11], KSA 11.487f. Luca Lupo (2006: 49) calls this cognitive–​intentional structure on the subpersonal level ‘primary

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consciousness’ and distinguishes it from the ‘secondary consciousness’ which corresponds to the personal level, where the intentional contents are articulated in a reflexive awareness. On this topic, see also Lupo (2006: 85–​132), Abel (2001: 9), Schlimgen (1999: 49–​54). On the notion of unconscious representation in Nietzsche, see Anderson (2002), Mattioli (2012). See the series of notes assembled under the title: Zu Schopenhauer, in KGW I/​ 4: 418–​30, particularly 426. See especially NL 1888 14[121], KSA 13.301: ‘mein Satz ist: daß Wille der bisherigen Psychologie, eine ungerechtfertigte Verallgemeinerung ist, daß es diesen Willen gar nicht giebt, daß statt die Ausgestaltung Eines bestimmten Willens in viele Formen zu fassen, man den Charakter des Willens weggestrichen hat, indem man den Inhalt, das Wohin? heraus subtrahirt hat: das ist im höchsten Grade bei Schopenhauer der Fall: das ist ein bloßes leeres Wort, was er “Wille” nennt.’ See, for instance, N 1888 14[80], KSA 13.260: ‘es bedarf der Gegensätze, der Widerstände, also, relativ, der übergreifenden Einheiten. . . Lokalisirt [. . .] wenn A auf B wirkt, so ist A erst lokalisirt getrennt von B.’ ‚daß, damit dieser Wille zur Macht sich äußern könne, er jene Dinge wahrnehmen muß, welche er zieht, daß er fühlt, wenn sich ihm etwas nähert, das ihm assimilirbar ist’ (NL 1885 34[247], KSA 11.504); ‘die fingirte Welt von Subjekt, Substanz, “Vernunft” usw. ist nöthig –​: eine ordnende, vereinfachende, fälschende, künstlich-​trennende Macht ist in uns. [. . .] Erkenntniß und Werden schließt sich aus. Folglich muß “Erkenntniß” etwas anderes sein: es muß ein Wille zum Erkennbar-​machen vorangehn, eine Art Werden selbst muß die Täuschung des Seienden schaffen’ (NL 1887 9[89], KSA 12.382); ‘Der Wille zur Macht interpretirt: bei der Bildung eines Organs handelt es sich um eine Interpretation; er grenzt ab, bestimmt Grade, Machtverschiedenheiten. Bloße Machtverschiedenheiten könnten sich noch nicht als solche empfinden: es muß ein wachsen-​wollendes Etwas da sein, das jedes andere wachsen-​wollende Etwas auf seinen Werth hin interpretirt. [. . .] In Wahrheit ist Interpretation ein Mittel selbst, um Herr über etwas zu werden. (Der organische Prozess setzt fortwährendes Interpretiren voraus’ (NL 1885 2[148], KSA 12.139f.); ‘in einer Welt, wo es kein Sein giebt, muß durch den Schein erst eine gewisse berechenbare Welt identischer Fälle geschaffen werden: ein tempo, in dem Beobachtung und Vergleichung möglich ist usw’ (NL 1888 14[93], KSA 13.271). For a sophisticated analysis of the interdependence between the intentional aspect and the temporal structure of drives, which amounts to a temporal realism of the perspectives Nietzsche ascribes to the wills to power, see Richardson (2006). For a related discussion of this problem, see also Stegmaier (1987), Small (2010: especially ­chapter 2), Mattioli (2011), Nasser (2015).

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References Abel, G. (2001), ‘Bewußtsein –​Sprache –​Natur. Nietzsches Philosophie des Geistes’, Nietzsche-​Studien 30: 1–​43. Anderson, L. (2002), ‘Sensualism and Unconscious Representation in Nietzsche’s Theory of Knowledge’, International Studies in Philosophy 34: 95–​117. Clark, M., and Dudrick, D. (2006), ‘The Naturalisms of Beyond Good and Evil’, in K. Ansell-​Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche, 148–​67, Oxford: Blackwell. D’Iorio, P. (1993), ‘La superstition des philosophes critiques. Nietzsche et Afrikan Spir’, Nietzsche-​Studien 22: 257–​94. Green, M. S. (2002), Nietzsche and the Transcendental Tradition, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. Gregory, F. (1977), Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany, Dordrecht/​ Boston: D. Reidel Publishing. Helmholtz, H. (1925), Treatise on Physiological Optics, trans. from the Third German Edition, ed. James P. C. Southall. Vol. III: The Perceptions of Vision. The Optical Society of America. Electronic edition (2001): University of Pennsylvania. URL: http://​psych.upenn.edu/​backuslab/​helmholtz. Köhnke, C. K. (1986), Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus. Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Lange, F. A. (1866), Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, Iserlohn: J. Baedeker. Lopes, R. (2008), ‘Ceticismo e vida contemplativa em Nietzsche’, PhD thesis, Belo Horizonte, UFMG. Lopes, R. (2011), ‘ “A almejada assimilação do materialismo”: Nietzsche e o debate naturalista na filosofia alemã da segunda metade do século XIX’, Cadernos Nietzsche 29: 309–​52. Lopes, R. (2012), ‘Das politische Triebmodell Nietzsches als Gegenmodell zu Schopenhauers Metaphysik des blinden Willens’, in J. Georg and C. Zittel (eds), Nietzsches Philosophie des Unbewussten, 147–​56, Berlin/​B oston: Walter de Gruyter. Lupo, L. (2006), Le colombe dello scetico. Riflessioni di Nietzsche sulla coscienza negli anni 1880–​1888, Pisa: Edizioni ETS. Mattioli, W. (2010), ‘Metáfora e ficcionalismo no jovem Nietzsche’, Revista Trágica 3 (2): 39–​60. URL: http://​www.tragica.org/​. Mattioli, W. (2011), ‘Do idealismo transcendental ao naturalismo: um salto ontológico no tempo a partir de uma fenomenologia da representação’, Cadernos Nietzsche 29: 221–​70. Mattioli, W. (2012), ‘Das Unbewusste als transzendentaler Raum perspektivistischer Weltbildung bei Nietzsche’, in J. Georg and C. Zittel (eds), Nietzsches Philosophie des Unbewussten, 173–​82, Berlin/​Boston: Walter de Gruyter.

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Meijers, A. (1988), ‘Gustav Gerber und Friedrich Nietzsche. Zum historischen Hintergrund der sprachphilosophischen Auffassung des frühen Nietzsche’, Nietzsche-​Studien 17: 369–​90. Meijers, A., and Stingelin, M. (1988), ‘Konkordanz zu den wörtlichen Abschriften und Übernahmen von Beispielen und Zitaten aus Gustav Gerber: Die Sprache als Kunst (Bromberg 1871) in Nietzsches Rhetorik-​Vorlesung und in “Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne”’, Nietzsche-​Studien 17: 350–​68. Meyer, M. (2012), ‘Nietzsche’s Naturalism and the Falsification Thesis’, in H. Heit, G. Abel and M. Brusotti (eds), Nietzsches Wissenschaftsphilosophie. Hintergründe, Wirkungen und Aktualität, Berlin/​Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Nasser, E. (2015), Nietzsche e a ontologia do vir-​a-​ser, São Paulo: Loyola. Orsucci, A. (1994), ‘Unbewußte Schlüsse, Anticipationen, Übertragungen. Über Nietzsches Verhältnis zu Karl Friedrich Zöllner und Gustav Gerber’, in T. Borsche, F. Gerratana and A. Venturelli (eds), ‘Centauren-​Geburten’. Wissenschaft, Kunst und Philosophie beim jungen Nietzsche, 193–​207, Berlin/​New York: Walter de Gruyter. Rethy, R. (1991), ‘Schein in Nietzsche’s Philosophy’, in K. Ansell-​Pearson (ed.), Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, 59–​87, London/​New York: Routledge. Reuter, S. (2004), ‘Reiz. Bild. Unbewusste Anschauung. Nietzsches Auseinandersetzung mit Hermann Helmholtz’ Theorie der unbewussten Schlüsse in Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne’, Nietzsche-​Studien 33: 351–​72. Reuter, S. (2009), An der ‘Begräbnissstätte der Anschauung’. Nietzsches Bild- und Wahrnehmungstheorie in Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne’, Basel: Schwabe. Riccardi, M. (2009), ‘Der faule Fleck des Kantischen Kriticismus’. Erscheinung und Ding an sich bei Nietzsche, Basel: Schwabe. Richardson, J. (2006), ‘Nietzsche on Time and Becoming’, in K. Ansell-​Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche, 208–​29, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Schlimgen, E. (1999), Nietzsches Theorie des Bewußtseins, Berlin/​New York: Walter de Gruyter. Small, R. (1994), ‘Nietzsche, Spir, and Time’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 32 (1): 85–​102. Small, R. (2010), Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s Thought, London/​ New York: Continuum. Spir, A. (1873/​1877), Denken und Wirklichkeit. Versuch einer Erneuerung der kritischen Philosophie, 2 Bände, Leipzig: J. G. Findel. Stegmaier, W. (1987), ‘Zeit der Vorstellung. Nietzsches Vorstellung der Zeit’, Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 41: 202–​28.

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The Consequences of Kant’s First Critique: Nietzsche on Truth and the Thing in Itself João Constâncio

1.  Introduction It is not clear whether Nietzsche ever read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, but in the late 1860s he certainly became well acquainted with its basic claims and arguments by reading Schopenhauer and Lange, as well as Kuno Fischer, Otto Liebmann and a few other neo-​and post-​Kantians.1 I shall argue that his reflection on the ultimate consequences of Kant’s first Critique marks the whole corpus of his writings, and I  shall argue that his criticism of Kant, as well as his more general departure away from transcendental idealism, rests on Kantian premises, or is ‘post-​Kantian’ in the sense of presupposing basic results from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In specific, I shall claim that (a) Nietzsche’s rejection of Kant’s thing in itself is an immanent critique and belongs to a wider critique of Kant’s failure to see the ultimate consequences of his first Critique; (b) Nietzsche’s critique of truth is a version of Lange’s interpretation of Kant’s view of truth; (c) Nietzsche’s endorsement of a ‘falsification thesis’ also rests on premises drawn from Lange’s (Post-​)Kantianism; (d)  Nietzsche’s final view of the consequences of Kant’s first Critique is not a consistent and well worked-​out theory of knowledge and truth, but rather a paradoxical questioning of truth and the thing in itself motivated by normative (or evaluative, or perhaps one should simply say ‘moral’) considerations, not by merely epistemological ones. I shall begin by pinning down the main theses of Nietzsche’s Post-​Kantianism. These are theses that I think Nietzsche holds from The Birth of Tragedy up to Twilight of the Idols. This is a controversial claim, particularly with regard to Nietzsche’s mature period, and so I shall also consider, in this first section, why

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many of his readers may doubt that his philosophy can really be classified as ‘Kantian’, or (more cautiously) ‘post-​Kantian’, in some relevant sense. I take Nietzsche’s Post-​Kantianism to comprise five main theses. 1. The first is that the basic categories of the world as it appears to us (i.e. of the ‘phenomena’) belong to our cognitive apparatus, not to things in themselves. This position is distinctively ‘Kantian’ (and not Humean, say) because it involves the claim that all our knowledge of the world is conditioned by a human cognitive apparatus (or a menschliche Organisation, as Lange famously put it) and, most importantly, that part of that apparatus is conceptual –​or, in other words, that not all of our basic categorizations are abstracted from experience (e.g. by way of ‘association’, ‘habit’ etc.). In an important aphorism from Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche quotes a passage from Kant’s Prolegomena (Prol §36 320) that expresses this view in a very clear formula: ‘the understanding does not draw its laws from nature, it prescribes them to nature’ (HH 19, KSA 2.41).2 Here in Human, All Too Human Nietzsche explicitly agrees with this thesis,3 and I shall try to show that he does nothing to retract from this agreement in his subsequent writings. 2. Second, Nietzsche holds the thesis that our prior categorizations, that is, the basic concepts and judgements that we do not draw from our experience (or from nature) but rather ‘put’ in our experience (or ‘prescribe to nature’), structure or give form to our world (‘the world we think we live in’, BGE 34, KSA 5.52). In Kant’s terms, they prescribe ‘laws’ to nature insofar as they are not only conditions of the possibility of our experience, but also ‘conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience’ (KrV A158/​B 197). However, we shall see that Nietzsche questions that such ‘laws’ have objective validity a priori in Kant’s sense. Nietzsche’s view is that insofar as our prior categorizations structure our world they are our most ‘indispensable’ judgements, but they are also ‘the falsest’ (BGE 4, KSA 5.18). 3. The second thesis of Nietzsche’s Post-​Kantianism is that there is no knowledge of ‘things in themselves’, or of the ‘thing in itself ’. This is Nietzsche’s position in the unpublished essay, Truth and Lie in an Extra-​ moral Sense, but also in Human, All Too Human. As is well known, the mature Nietzsche claims that the ‘thing in itself ’ is a non-​concept, or a self-​contradictory and hence nonsensical concept, a ‘contradictio in adjecto’ (BGE 16, KSA 5.29); and this is, of course, a more radical claim than the claim that there is no knowledge of things in themselves. But the more

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radical claim also entails that the less radical one is valid: in saying that we shouldn’t even speak of a ‘thing in itself ’, Nietzsche is still also saying that, contrary to our expectation, we have no knowledge of things in themselves or, put differently, that none of our categorizations is ‘objectively valid’ in an absolute sense. 4. The fourth thesis of Nietzsche’s Post-​Kantianism is that human subjects have no access to metaphysical truth, or that there is no truth if ‘truth’ means ‘metaphysical truth’, or ‘absolute truth’, or an ultimate, ontological truth –​ ‘the Truth’ about what reality ultimately is. This fourth thesis is in fact a reformulation of the second. To claim that there is no knowledge of things in themselves is tantamount to claiming that there is no access to absolute truth about things, or that that there is no metaphysical truth. It is crucial that we note that such a denial of absolute truth does not necessarily entail a denial of relative truth. In his History of Materialism, Lange argues precisely this point –​that Kant’s philosophy involves both a denial of absolute truth and an affirmation of ‘relative truth’.4 The ‘relative truth’ means, first of all, the ‘truth for us’, the plurality of ‘truths’ that can be found in scientific inquiry and, to some extent, also in everyday life (when we say things like ‘it’s raining’ or ‘I lost my ticket’). But the notion of relative truth that Lange attributes to Kant, and that he himself holds, is thicker than this. If, according to Kant, the reason why we have no access to absolute truth is that all we can know about reality is conditioned and made possible by our cognitive apparatus (i.e. by categorizations that this apparatus ‘prescribes’ to nature and does not draw from nature), then the relative truth, the truth ‘for us’, is precisely a truth conditioned and made possible by our cognitive apparatus, a ‘truth’ that is ‘for us’ insofar as it is relative to this apparatus. I shall consider this view of truth in more detail in what follows.5 At this stage of my argument, I believe we only need to take notice of two additional aspects. First, the relevance, for Nietzsche, of Lange’s view of truth –​that is, of Lange’s interpretation of Kant’s view of truth  –​is indicated by the fact that in Nietzsche’s lectures at Basel on pre-​Platonic philosophy throughout the 1870s (more precisely, from 1869–​70 to 1876), he explicitly defended that view, and in fact he formulated it in terms that made the connection with Lange’s Kantianism unequivocal. Materialism is absurd, Nietzsche wrote, if it fails to see that ‘everything objective is in many ways conditioned by the subject of knowledge’, but if materialism does not eliminate the role of the subject of knowledge, it can be a ‘salutary’ hypothesis which allows for the ‘relative truth’ to be sought in science; with materialism so

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understood, ‘all the results of science retain their truth for us, although not an absolute truth’ (Die vorplatonischen Philosophen, KGW II 4: 340). The second additional aspect to be noted at this stage is that if Nietzsche endorses Lange’s Kantian view of truth –​or, at least, a version of it –​then some light can perhaps be thrown on one of the most vexing textual puzzles offered by his writings. How can he claim that ‘there is no truth’ (as he famously does), and yet refer frequently to ‘his truth’ or ‘his truths’ or ‘the terrible truth’? How can he deny truth and still claim that his virtue as a free spirit is the truthfulness of ‘intellectual honesty’? How can he deny truth and, at the same time, praise the objectivity of science, as he so clearly does, for example, in The Antichrist? Could the solution of this puzzle be that he denies that there is absolute truth but acknowledges that there are relative truths? Note that this hypothesis presents a challenge for several types of common readings of Nietzsche. First, it challenges naturalist readings of Nietzsche because Lange’s Kantian view of truth involves a rejection of sensualism and attributes a very modest status to scientific truths. As Lange (1866: 234; 1875: 3) puts it, his view is that the point of Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ is to show that ‘the whole of objectivity is precisely not absolute objectivity, but merely an objectivity for the human being’. But, second, this approach also presents a challenge for postmodern readings. One of the hallmarks of these readings is the claim that Nietzsche dispenses with any conception of truth. Postmodern fictionalists, in particular, argue that Nietzsche’s critique of truth radically redefines the task of philosophy as the task of inventing new fictions that can pass for ‘truths’.6 5. The fifth and final thesis of what I call Nietzsche’s ‘Post-​Kantianism’ is the claim that Kant’s theoretical philosophy has changed philosophy forever by showing that metaphysics is impossible. That metaphysics is impossible follows from the claim that there is no access to metaphysical truth. But the point, here, is, first, the acknowledgement that even if many of the details of Kant’s theoretical philosophy are questionable, there is something fundamentally sound about his arguments for denying access to things in themselves, and hence to metaphysical truth; and, second, the point is the acknowledgement that the consequences of Kant’s first Critique are drastic –​ that philosophy will never be the same after the first Critique, that perhaps philosophy has even come to an end with the first Critique, so that the ultimate consequences of the latter are simply the victory of philosophical nihilism. Nietzsche suggests all of this quite clearly in a posthumous note from 1871–​72:

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The position of philosophy altered since Kant. Metaphysics impossible. Self-​ castration. The tragic resignation, the end of philosophy. Only art is able to save us. (NL 1871–​2 19[319], KSA 7.517).

The last sentence of this note –​‘only art is able to save us’ –​seems to have nothing to do with Kantianism, but that is not quite so. Once again, it basically expresses the same view that was held by Lange, whom the young Nietzsche considered ‘an extremely enlightened Kantian and a natural scientist’.7 As is well known, in the same letter where Nietzsche wrote these words about Lange he also aligned himself with Lange’s view that ‘philosophy is art’ –​that is, that after Kant’s destruction of metaphysics, philosophy can only be art  –​and that what philosophy can do as ‘art’ is to ‘edify’, that is, to promote certain evaluations from the ‘Standpoint of the Ideal’. Ansell-​Pearson (1988: 539) has argued that Lange’s notion of the ‘Standpoint of the Ideal’ is too ascetic for Nietzsche and ‘cannot be simply applied to the fundamental ideas of the “mature” period (1883–​1888) of Nietzsche’s intellectual output without blurring the crucial differences that lie between the two thinkers’. Yet there is very good reason to think that Nietzsche never really abandoned the idea that philosophy is, at least in part, something like ‘art’ and, especially, that philosophy is about something like ‘edification’. In the mature period, this becomes the idea that philosophy is about ‘creating values’, or that the task of philosophers is a life-​affirming ‘transvaluation of values’. Given that Kant has shown that philosophy cannot do metaphysics  –​that is, cannot engage in establishing what there is –​what philosophy can still do is to develop evaluative judgements –​that is, engage in establishing what ought to be; and given that establishing what ought to be cannot be based on knowledge of what there is, such a task can only be a creative, that is, ‘artistic’, task. The ‘edifying’ nature of this task is quite clear in Beyond Good and Evil, which is arguably Nietzsche’s most important book. Here, the ‘creation’ of ‘new values’ (BGE 211, 253, KSA 5.144, 197) is presented as having the edifying aim of sustaining the ‘tension of the spirit’ and promoting ‘high spirituality’, ‘high culture’ and the form of life of ‘good Europeans’ and ‘free, very free spirits’.8 But let us consider why one might feel entitled to doubt that Nietzsche’s mature philosophy retains his early Post-​Kantianism, as well as to doubt that there is any ‘Kantian’ dimension in his thought. 1. First, there is the rejection of the very concept of ‘thing in itself ’ as a ‘contradictio in adjecto’ (BGE 16, KSA 5.29). This rejection occurs in Beyond Good and Evil, and it seems to entail a twofold break with Kantianism. It seems to entail that the most fundamental distinction that Kant wants to make in the

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Critique of Pure Reason –​the distinction between phenomenon and the thing in itself –​is spurious, and therefore to entail that philosophy should not use that distinction or occupy itself with the epistemological questions that follow from it. Nietzsche seems to spell this out quite clearly in Book V of The Gay Science: As one might guess, it is not the opposition between subject and object which concerns me here; I  leave that distinction to those epistemologists who have got tangled up in the snares of grammar (of folk metaphysics). Even less am I concerned with the opposition between ‘thing in itself ’ and appearance: for we ‘know’ far too little to even be entitled to make that distinction. We simply have no organ for knowing, for ‘truth’: we ‘know’ (or believe or imagine) exactly as much as is useful to the human herd, to the species: and even what is here called ‘usefulness’ is finally also just a belief, a fiction, and perhaps just that supremely fatal stupidity of which we some day will perish. (GS 354, KSA 3.593)

Moreover, as this passage also suggests, the rejection of the very concept of ‘thing in itself ’ seems to entail the collapse of the idea of truth. How could one still speak of the ‘relative truth’ if the concept of ‘absolute truth’ is a contradiction in terms? The ‘useful’ is all there is; what we ‘know’ does not exist  –​we ‘know’ nothing, for we have no ‘organ for knowing, for the “truth” ’ (GS 354, KSA 3.593), and hence it makes no sense for philosophy to persist in pursuing truth. Philosophy ought to become, for example, a pursuit of ‘health’ or ‘affirmation’ –​ in the full realization that there is no truth and every valuation and every picture of the world is only a ‘fiction’. If this is Nietzsche’s mature conception of philosophy, it could hardly be less Kantian. 2. The famous chapter of Twilight of the Idols on ‘How the “True World” Finally Became a Fable’ is another crucial moment in which the mature Nietzsche seems to break with Kant and Kantianism in a decisive way. Here, he unequivocally equates ‘the truth’, or ‘the true world’, with Kant’s ‘thing in itself ’; in line with what he had written in §16 of Beyond Good and Evil and in §354 of The Gay Science, he claims that the idea of the thing in itself is now ‘an obsolete, superfluous idea, consequently a refuted idea: let’s get rid of it!’; and then he adds something apparently new, which seems to be the ultimate consequence of the rejection of the thing in itself as a contradictio in adjecto: now that the ‘true world’ is gone, the apparent or illusory world (die scheinbare Welt) is also gone: ‘[A]‌long with the true world we have also abolished the illusory world’ (TI Fable, KSA 6.81). There seem to be two ways of interpreting this. A fictionalist reading will tell us that in Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche’s denial of truth reaches its climax. The

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abolishment not only of the true world but also of the illusory world is thus seen as the most radical expression of a ‘falsification thesis’. A ‘falsification thesis’ –​a useful formula created by Maudemarie Clark (1990: 105–​106, 124, 133 and passim) in her critique of postmodern interpretations of Nietzsche –​is the claim that human concepts falsify reality, such that ‘the application of any concept of a thing, and any notion of permanence or unity, involve lies or falsification’, and hence even ‘our best empirical theories can be radically false’ or, put differently, even our best empirical theories involve conceptualizations and other ‘subjective factors’ (e.g. practical interests) that have a ‘distorting influence’ on our view of reality. The fictionalist reading will see the abolishment of the illusory world as the abolishment of the last residue of the idea of truth, the final, anti-​Kantian abolishment of the theory that representations can correspond or fail to correspond to an independent reality. There are only representations, and these are anthropomorphisms, human ‘errors’. Clark, by contrast, sees the abolishment of the illusory world as a logical corollary of the thesis that the thing in itself is a contradictio in adjecto, and thus as a decisive move away from the falsification thesis. Her argument is very clear: after realizing that the notion of a thing in itself is self-​contradictory, Nietzsche finally understood that he had to abandon the falsification thesis, as this thesis presupposed that there was a thing in itself which could be ‘falsified’. As Clark (1990: 120) puts it: ‘[I]‌f there are only representations, to what could they fail to correspond? What is left to be falsified? When Nietzsche claims in GS and BGE that logic and science falsify reality, what does he believe they falsify?’ According to Clark, Nietzsche’s realization that the falsification thesis is untenable led him, in his mature period, to abandon his ‘representationalism’ and replace it with a non-​representationalist perspectivism. She concedes that Nietzsche’s non-​ representationalist perspectivism ‘denies metaphysical truth’ (135)  –​but her point is that such a non-​representationalist perspectivism is compatible with a ‘neo-​Kantian position on truth’, or, in other words, with a ‘minimal correspondence account of truth and therefore with granting that many human beliefs are true’ (135; see also Clark 1998). The problem with Clark’s reading, however, is that the philological and textual evidence speaks massively against the claim that the late Nietzsche abandons the falsification thesis –​if anything, the Nietzsche of 1887 and 1888 is bolder than ever in denying truth and claiming that everything is ‘error’, ‘a fiction’ and so on. However, the fact that Clark’s view is very logical should give us pause. I shall get back to it later. In sum: (1) Nietzsche seems to break with Kantianism by rejecting the concept of thing in itself as self-​contradictory; (2) Nietzsche seems to break with

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Kantianism by concluding that, since the thing in itself is self-​contradictory, the distinction between appearances and reality (or between an ‘illusory world’ and a ‘true world’) should also be rejected –​and the philological evidence suggests that in doing so he endorses a very un-​Kantian ‘falsification thesis’. My task in what follows will be to try to show why these are not really fatal objections to the claim that Nietzsche retains his basic Post-​Kantianism in his mature period. However, in order to do this I shall begin by highlighting a few crucial ways in which his assessment of the meaning and consequences of Kant’s first Critique develops in his published writings, from The Birth of Tragedy to Twilight of the Idols.

2.  Nietzsche on Kant’s first Critique: from The Birth of Tragedy to Human, All Too Human Schopenhauer’s reading of Kant plays an important role in Nietzsche’s interpretation of the consequences of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. This is clear in The Birth of Tragedy. Particularly in §18, when Nietzsche quotes from Schopenhauer’s ‘Appendix on the Kantian Philosophy’, he uses the Schopenhauerian expressions ‘aeternae veritates’, ‘riddle of the world’ and ‘work of māyā’, and he presents Schopenhauer’s philosophy as having the same basic consequences as Kant’s by praising ‘the extraordinary courage and wisdom of Kant and Schopenhauer’ (BT 18, KSA 1.118). They both had the courage to show that there is no knowledge of things in themselves because the laws of space, time, causality (and inference) are not aeternae veritates concerning the innermost essence of reality, but only the form of human cognition (see, earlier, the first and the second theses of Nietzsche’s Post-​Kantianism). This, Nietzsche claims, is a ‘victory over optimism’ (BT 18, KSA 1.118), which has drastic consequences. Such a victory unearths the forgotten basis of Greek pessimism, and in fact leads to the project of returning modern culture to the ‘tragic knowledge’ of the Greeks, the ‘wisdom of the sylvan god, Silenus’, the ‘tragic’ or ‘Dionysian’ wisdom (BT 3, 7, 15, KSA 1.35, 56–​7, 101). This wisdom gives ‘insight into the horrible truth’ (BT 7, KSA 1.57) by discovering that the world is a ‘riddle’ which reason cannot solve, and that human existence is purposeless, ‘absurd’ (BT 3, 7, 15, KSA 1.35, 56–​7, 101). These normative and cultural conclusions are absent from Human, All Too Human. Here, Nietzsche considers the fundamental themes of Kant’s first Critique and assesses its philosophical consequences from a more ‘naturalistic’ point of view (or a more ‘Langean’ one, as we shall see), and he develops at least three new ideas, which were completely absent from The Birth of Tragedy.

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First, he now emphasizes the fact that, since the laws we find in nature are not ‘aeternae veritates’, we must have the epistemic modesty of regarding them as historical principles of our cognition and conceive of philosophy as a historical discipline, a ‘historical philosophizing’ (HH 2, KSA 2.25, cf. 11, 16, 145, KSA 2.30–​1, 36–​8, 141). This already involves some sort of break not only with Kant, but also with Schopenhauer. Although both Kant and Schopenhauer believe that a law such as the principle of causality is not an eternal law of reality itself, they still believe that such a principle is an eternal law of our way of representing reality  –​of our cognitive apparatus, our ‘organization’ (to borrow again Lange’s favorite expression). But Nietzsche wants to claim that even as a mere principle of our cognitive apparatus the principle of causality is no more than a historical principle –​the provisional result of a given evolutionary process, and not an ‘eternal fact’ about the human understanding. Today, this may look like a very radical departure not only from Kant and Schopenhauer, but also from any recognizable form of Kantianism. However, it is very likely that Nietzsche did not see it that way. Although he was certainly aware that he was breaking with an important aspect of Schopenhauer’s Kantianism (viz. its ahistorical view of cognition), he had no reason to believe that his historicizing of human cognition and of philosophy in general was any different from what some of the most prominent neo-​Kantians of the 1860s and 1870s were doing. Lange seems, again, to be the most important influence here.9 But Kuno Fischer, too, thought that ‘transcendental philosophy was an investigation not into the logic of cognition but into its origins’ (Beiser 2014:  246). Fischer treats the forms of sensibility and understanding (space, time and the categories) naturalistically as facts of human nature, and he sees Kant’s epistemology as a naturalistic doctrine about the genesis and development of human knowledge or as ‘a genetic and historical method’ that exposes ‘the ahistorical illusions of philosophy’ (247). A naturalistic reading of Kant committed to naturalizing all aspects of his thought by means of internal critiques of his system is one of the main trends of neo-​ Kantianism in the nineteenth century.10 Lange and Fischer certainly belong to this trend, and they gave Nietzsche a picture of Kant that had little to do with the logicism and anti-​psychologism of later generations of neo-​Kantians (e.g. in the Marburg school). In fact, Schopenhauer’s influential reading of Kant was already strongly naturalistic, especially in volume II of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. It is likely that Nietzsche saw Fischer’s, Lange’s and his own historicization of Kant’s views on cognition as a development of Schopenhauer’s tendency to naturalize Kant.11

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The second main idea that Nietzsche adds to his interpretation of the consequences of Kant’s first Critique in Human, All Too Human is fundamentally a question of emphasis. Nietzsche now emphasizes the fact that the laws of human cognition are linguistic phenomena. It is by making use of language that human beings fall prey to the ‘transcendental illusion’ that consists in regarding rational principles as eternal truths about the innermost essence of things. Here, Nietzsche’s Post-​Kantianism was, to a great extent, influenced by his reading of Gustav Gerber, from whom he took the idea that language is creative and fundamentally figurative –​and, hence, anything but a copy of an independent reality, or anything but a mirror of a thing in itself.12 The limits of human reason are, thus, the limits of language, and this includes the limits of logic and mathematics, as HH 11, KSA 2.30–​1, makes explicit. The third new idea is perhaps the most important one –​it is the ‘falsification thesis’. According to Schopenhauer’s interpretation of Kant, the thesis that space, time and causality are the forms of our cognition implies that the ‘world is our representation’, or that what we mean by ‘world’ or ‘nature’ is in fact just the object of ‘experience in general’, the realm of human representation (WWV I §1). Nietzsche’s idea is that we should understand this as meaning that space, time and causality are errors, and the world as representation is the world as error. He writes: When Kant says ‘the understanding does not draw its laws from nature, it prescribes them to nature’, this is wholly true with regard to the concept of nature which we are obliged to attach to nature (nature = world as representation, that is as error), but which is the summation of a host of errors of the understanding. –​To a world which is not our representation the laws of numbers are wholly inapplicable: these are valid only in the human world. (HH 19, KSA 2.41)

The last sentence establishes a clear connection between the thesis that the world is error and what I earlier called the first main thesis of Nietzsche’s Post-​Kantianism, that is, that last sentence shows that in Human, All Too Human Nietzsche sees the ‘falsification thesis’ as a consequence of the Kantian thesis that the basic categories of the world as it appears to us belong to our cognitive apparatus, the thesis that there are basic categorizations that our understanding does not draw from nature but prescribes to nature. If these categorizations (e.g. ‘the laws of numbers’) come ‘from us’, then surely they are valid ‘only in the human world’ (HH 19, KSA 2.41), only ‘for us’, that is, they are ‘errors’ in relation to reality itself. This may seem rather similar to what can be found in Schopenhauer. The latter draws the same conclusion –​namely, that if, as Kant has shown, the laws

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of space, time and causality are ‘subjective’ in origin, then their validity can only be ‘subjective’ as well –​and uses it as an argument for defending ‘idealism’ and claiming that the world as representation is ‘a semblance’, an ‘illusion’, or that Erscheinung is in fact Schein.13 But, there are two things to be noted here. 1. First, Schopenhauer’s idealism does not deny that the laws of space, time and causality are ‘objectively valid’ if this means (as it means for Kant) that they are valid for objects in space and time. There is no incompatibility between Schopenhauer’s metaphysical thesis that the world as representation is ‘illusory’, or mere Schein, and the Kantian thesis that there is objective knowledge of phenomena, particularly objective scientific knowledge of an empirical world. Schopenhauer himself sees no such incompatibility. His epistemology, no less than Kant’s, seeks to justify the possibility of knowledge (including a priori knowledge), so that he believes, no less than Kant, in the objectivity of scientific knowledge.14 The thesis that the world as representation is an illusion is, for him, a metaphysical thesis that asserts that the world as representation is not the world in itself (which leads to the claim that the world in itself, or the ‘thing in itself ’, is ‘will’, not ‘representation’). 2. Second, what Nietzsche writes in Human, All Too Human is not that the world as representation is ‘illusion’ (Schein) –​what he writes is that it is ‘error’ (Irrthum, HH 19, KSA 2.41; see also HH 16 and 29, KSA 2.36–​8 and 49–​50). He does not repeat or reiterate Schopenhauer’s metaphysical thesis –​instead, he puts forward a whole new thesis about the ‘world as representation’, the thesis that this world is ‘error’. The plausible reason for this is that now (by contrast with The Birth of Tragedy) he engages in a ‘historical philosophizing’ that fully rejects metaphysics and values science even above art. The rejection of metaphysics involves the rejection of any sort of speculation on, and even of any interest in, the ‘metaphysical world’ (HH 9, KSA 2.29), and so it also dispenses with the view that the empirical world, the ‘world as representation’, is a ‘semblance’, an ‘illusion’ (Schein), for not coinciding with the ‘metaphysical world’. In Schopenhauerian terms, what this implies is that Nietzsche’s philosophizing now aims to deal only with ‘relations’ and abstain from interpreting or giving any positive content to the ‘in-​itself ’ of things. The ‘thing in itself ’ becomes, at most, a heuristic concept that enables precisely the characterization of the empirical world as a world of mere relations and of knowledge, particularly of scientific knowledge, as knowledge of relations. That the empirical world is

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a world of relations is a crucial point that Kant makes in his Critique of Pure Reason. It means (i) that space and time (as ‘tota’) consist in spatial and temporal relations; (ii) that our knowledge of objects in terms of our categorizations is always knowledge of relations in space and time (e.g. of causal relations in space and time) –​that is, of relational properties; (iii) that all objects of our experience are ‘phenomena’ because all relations among them are ultimately a relation to a subject that has space, time and the categories as forms of cognition.15 In Schopenhauer’s system, this view –​the view that we can only know ‘relations of phenomena’ and that science is our exact, objective, but partial knowledge of how ‘the phenomena of the world’ relate to each other  –​is of paramount importance, not only because Schopenhauer takes it to be the most adequate characterization both of the empirical world and of science, but also because it reveals our need of metaphysics. This is a need to understand the world as whole and in itself, and not just in terms of ‘mere relations’ (lauter Relationen, bloße Verhältnisse).16 Thus, Nietzsche’s departure from Schopenhauer in Human, All Too Human amounts to the following: (a) he severs philosophy from any interest in metaphysics, that is, in the ‘thing in itself ’; (b) correspondingly, he now favors science over metaphysics, that is, knowledge of ‘mere relations’ over interpretation of the in-​itself of things; (c) he historicizes the Kantian/​Schopenhauerian a priori, that is, he argues that all our knowledge of ‘mere relations’ is historical and, therefore, revisable. But what this all means is that in Human, All Too Human Nietzsche’s view of knowledge and truth has become practically identical with Lange’s, that is, with the Langean version of Kantianism. That Nietzsche’s position on the thing in itself in Human, All Too Human is basically that of Lange –​sc. the position of the ‘ignoramus, ignorabimus’ –​is well known, and needs no further comment.17 That Lange greatly influenced Nietzsche’s naturalistic, evolutionary and historical conception of Kant’s theoretical philosophy is also well known.18 But does Nietzsche also accept the view that scientific knowledge is knowledge of a ‘relative truth’ in Lange’s sense? Most importantly, if he does, how could that square with the ‘falsification thesis’, the thesis that everything is error? First, it should be noted that Human, All Too Human combines the claim that the world as representation is the world as error (the first formulation of the falsification thesis in the published writings) with a whole series of passages where it is explicitly assumed that one can distinguish truth from untruth (HH 34, 225), that in everyday life it is perfectly possible either to ‘tell the truth’ or ‘lie’ (HH 54, 227, 506), that the sciences follow ‘the rigorous method of truth’ (HH

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109), that the truth can be searched for in science (HH 251, 257), that there are ‘important truths of science’ (HH 251) and that truths can be ‘known’ (HH 109), or that there can be ‘knowledge of truths’ (HH 146), especially with the aid of the special sciences (KSA 2.53–​5, 73–​4, 108, 142, 189, 191, 208–​209, 212, 321). This would be a serious contradiction were it not for the fact that these and other related passages involve the Langean claim that no human truths can ever be ‘absolute truths’, no matter how scientific they may be: ‘there are no absolute truths’ (HH 2, KSA 2.25), there are no ‘unqualified’ or ‘unconditional truths’ (HH 630–​6, KSA 2.356–​62). To some extent, this merely reiterates and reinforces the idea that human knowledge is historical and, therefore, radically revisable, or that ‘unimpeachable truths’ in science are just ‘truths [. . .] which have survived all the assaults of scepticism and disintegration’ (HH 22, KSA 2.43), For Lange, too, even the most well-​proven scientific truths have the modest status of provisional, hypothetical, heuristic, merely plausible or probable judgements.19 But the main point, both for Lange and for Nietzsche, is another one: that there are no absolute truths because our best judgements about the world are always relative to our cognitive apparatus –​relative to categorizations (‘laws’) that our ‘organization’ ‘prescribes’ to nature. We can only call them ‘truths’ if we understand them as ‘relative truths’ in Lange’s sense. Nietzsche thinks he is also entitled to call them ‘errors’, and the reason why he does is because he thinks he can claim that those prior categorizations are nothing more than the fundamental ‘errors’ that our species has developed in the course of its evolution: That which we now call the world is the outcome of a host of errors and fantasies which have gradually arisen and grown entwined with one another in the course of the overall evolution of the organic being, and are now inherited by us as the accumulated treasure of the entire past –​as treasure: for the value of our humanity depends upon it. Rigorous science is capable of detaching us from this world of representation only to a limited extent [. . .] (HH 16, KSA 2.37)

Scientific ‘truths’ are judgements resulting from these partial, imperfect detachments from error. Should we call them ‘relative truths’, or simply ‘errors’? Can we call them both things, as Nietzsche seems to assume we can? The starting point of Lange’s distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative truth’ is Kant’s assertion that ‘there is truth only in experience’ (Prol 374).20 There is truth in experience because the forms of our cognition are valid for experience (and not because all knowledge comes from experience, as a sensualist would claim).

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If what is given to us in experience accords with the form of our cognition, we have to accept it as ‘true’, although it is only true for us, not absolutely. As Stack (1983: 132) correctly explains, this is precisely Lange’s Kantian conception of ‘relative truth’: ‘We are only able to describe as “true” what necessarily appears so to our menschliche Organisation’. Experience gives a minimal criterion of truth, although only of relative truth. This might incline us to say that scientific judgements are ‘truths’ rather than ‘errors’. The problem, however, is that, as Lange himself was the first to see, if truth is ‘relative truth’, than truth can vary across knowers and over time: variations in the cognitive apparatus, as well as in experience, will determine variations in what should be accepted as ‘true’.21 This explains Nietzsche’s pluralistic view of truth, the view that there is no ‘truth in itself ’ (Wahrheit an sich) but there are innumerable relative truths.22 This view is implicit in Nietzsche’s frequent talk of ‘my truth’ (e.g. EH Destiny 1, KSA 6.365), ‘my truths’ (e.g. BGE 231, KSA 5.170) and so on. But it is more explicitly present when he writes, for example: ‘There are many eyes. The Sphinx also has eyes: and consequently there are many “truths”, and consequently there is no truth’ (NL 1885 34[230], KSA 11.498). This second ‘consequently’ is valid only if one assumes that ‘truth’ means ‘absolute truth’, and so the difference between the two formulas (‘there are many truths’ and ‘there is no truth’) is fundamentally nominal and rhetorical. Or, as Stack (1983: 147) shows, the difference between Lange and Nietzsche is just that ‘Lange hesitates to say what Nietzsche will dare to say: “there is no truth” ’ (318–​19). Let us now consider how Nietzsche’s position evolves from The Gay Science onwards.

3.  Nietzsche on Kant’s first Critique: from The Gay Science onwards In The Gay Science, the falsification thesis becomes of paramount importance. Space, time, causality and indeed the whole table of the Kantian categories, as well as all the transcendental principles that express them –​the principles that are presupposed not only in mathematics and physics, but even in our most immediate experience of nature –​become quite explicitly presented as ‘errors’ that have become ‘articles of faith’ for human cognition because they proved to be ‘useful and species-​preserving’ in the evolution of the human species (GS 110, cf. GS 110–​12, KSA 3.469–​73). The forms of human cognition, the ‘conditions of possibility’ of human experience, are ‘errors’, but as such they are also ‘conditions of life’ that structure our world:

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Life not an argument. –​We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we are able to live –​by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes, and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith no one could endure living! But that does not prove them. Life is not an argument; the conditions of life might include error. (GS 121, KSA 3.477–​8)

However, in The Gay Science Nietzsche also makes very clear that he sees the ultimate consequences of Kant’s first Critique as fundamentally normative and existential, and not just as theoretical. He claims that Kant’s relevance lies in the fact that it was his ‘strength and cleverness’ that broke open the ‘cage’ of Christian morality, indeed of the whole Christian Weltanschauung: And now don’t bring up the categorical imperative, my friend! The term tickles my ear and makes me laugh despite your very serious presence. I am reminded of old Kant, who helped himself to [erschlichen] the ‘thing in itself ’ –​another very ridiculous thing! –​and was punished for this when the ‘categorical imperative’ crept into [beschlichen] his heart and made him stray back to ‘God’, ‘soul’, ‘freedom’, ‘immortality’, like a fox who strays back into his cage. Yet it had been his strength and cleverness that had broken open the cage! (GS 335, KSA 3. 562)

The first Critique destroyed the possibility of a rational belief in ‘ “God”, “soul”, “freedom”, “immortality” ’, and hence in the basis of Christian morality. The second Critique (and indeed the whole conception of ethics and the idea of a ‘metaphysics of customs’ as outlined already in the first Critique) was basically an attempt to restore what was already broken forever  –​and, personally, for Kant, an attempt to ‘stray back into his cage’. The thing in itself is ‘another very ridiculous thing’, presumably because it is a self-​contradictory concept, but it was Kant’s revolutionary approach to the distinction between appearance and thing in itself that made him destroy the foundations of the whole edifice of the Christian world view. In fact, what he destroyed was the rational basis of what Nietzsche calls, in the Genealogy of Morality, the ‘ascetic ideal’. As Paul van Tongeren puts it, by the ‘ascetic ideal’ Nietzsche means the ‘protective structure that was built to hide the absurdity of life and world’, and the ‘corrosion’ of that structure (with the ‘death of God’) is what now confronts the modern human being with its lack of goals, lack of value, lack of meaning.23 In other words, by ‘ascetic ideal’ Nietzsche means a structure of meaning that provided answers to the metaphysical why-​questions (e.g. ‘why the human being at all?’, ‘why do I suffer?’, GM III 28, KSA 5.411) by projecting the existence of an absolute normative truth capable of giving goals to human life. This projection enchanted the world with metaphysical values,

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which means that it masked the fundamental goallessness and meaninglessness of human life (and indeed of the universe). Or, put differently, the metaphysical interpretation of existence provided by the ascetic ideal was unconsciously devised to give purpose to human existence, and this means: devised to cover up the fundamental goallessness of human existence. That is why the ascetic ideal managed to save the human will from ‘suicidal nihilism’ (GM III 28, KSA 5.411).24 Thus, Kant’s first Critique is, for Nietzsche, a decisive moment for the corrosion of the ascetic ideal –​an extremely decisive contribution to the ‘death of God’ and the modern confrontation with the goallessness and meaninglessness of human life. Why is the concept of ‘thing in itself ’ important in this context? Nietzsche makes the point that the way for Kant to ‘stray back into the cage’ was to preserve a conception of the thing in itself thick enough to let him draw a picture of it. That is, the ascetic ideal has always depended on the conception of a thing in itself qua an absolute normative truth, and by allowing, in his philosophy, the conception of such a ‘thing’ to continue to be more than a heuristic device for the discovery of the limitation of human knowledge (by, as it were, reifying the thing in itself and interpreting it as a ‘supersensible substratum’ where ‘transcendental freedom’ is possible etc.) Kant was able to believe that he could restore the protective structure of the ascetic ideal –​the structure which he had in fact destroyed forever. What the apparent disparagement of the thing in itself as ‘a very ridiculous thing’ does is in fact to bring to the fore the relationship between the consequences of Kant’s first Critique and nihilism. It is certainly not by accident that in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Genealogy of Morality the denial of truth will be expressed in the nihilistic formula, ‘nothing is true, everything is allowed’ (Z IV The Shadow, KSA 4.340, and GM III 24, KSA 5.399). But let us now consider Nietzsche’s approach to the first Critique in Beyond Good and Evil. This is the work where Nietzsche states the thesis that the thing in itself is a ‘contradictio in adjecto’ (BGE 16, KSA 5.29). I shall analyze this thesis in the next section. For now, let us just note that the fact the Nietzsche rejects the thing in itself, and hence also any form of ‘transcendental idealism’ based on the distinction between phenomena and noumena, does not, by itself, position him outside of Post-​Kantianism, or even of Neo-​Kantianism. The rejection of the thing in itself from Kantian premises is a common theme among nineteenth-​ century neo-​Kantians. Otto Liebmann (1865:  26), for example, dedicates an important part of his Kant und die Epigonen to the rejection of the thing in itself as a contradiction in terms, ‘ein hölzernes Eisen’, precisely the kind of immanent critique that we find in Nietzsche. But this does not preclude him from being a

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Kantian. On the contrary, his critical view of Kant played a crucial role within the ‘back to Kant’ movement.25 In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche also rejects the conception of philosophy as epistemology, or Erkenntnisstheorie. This might perhaps suggest that he is no longer interested in thinking along the lines of Kant’s first Critique. But, in fact, what he objects to is that philosophy be reduced to epistemology (‘Philosophie auf Erkenntnisstheorie reduziert’, BGE 204, KSA 5.131). Kant himself never reduced philosophy to epistemology, and even though this sort of reduction was an important tendency within Neo-​Kantianism, Fischer and Lange can hardly be accused of it, not to mention Schopenhauer. Note also that the reason why Nietzsche rejects the reduction of philosophy to epistemology in BGE 204 is just that it inverts the hierarchy between philosophy and science, that is, it reduces philosophy to a tool of science, while science ought in fact to be a mere tool of philosophy and help in the latter’s proper task, which is to ‘command’ and ‘legislate’ by creating new values. But Beyond Good and Evil is also the work where the falsification thesis gets one of its most forcible formulation: ‘the erroneousness of the world we think we live in is the most certain and solid fact that our eyes can still grab hold of ’ (BGE 34, KSA 5.52). Moreover, as in The Gay Science, in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche connects the falsification thesis with the idea that error is a condition of life, and he does this most clearly in two very famous aphorisms about Kant and his synthetic judgements a priori (BGE 4 and BGE 11, KSA 5.18, 24–​6). BGE 4 is where Nietzsche claims that Kant’s ‘synthetic judgements a priori’ are at the same time ‘the falsest judgements’ and ‘the most indispensable to us’. Here, he must have in mind not only such judgements as ‘7+5=12’, but also, and above all, the synthetic judgements a priori of the ‘Analytic of Principles’, as, for example, ‘all intuitions are extensive magnitudes’ or ‘in all change of appearances substance persists’ or ‘everything that happens has its cause’.26 These are the judgements on the basis of which we ‘arrange for ourselves a world in which we are able to live’ (GS 120, KSA 3.477), what Nietzsche calls in Beyond Good and Evil ‘the world we think we live in’ or ‘the world that is relevant to us [die uns etwas angeht]’ (BGE 34, KSA 5.52). Such judgements are either implicitly or explicitly used in our ‘best science’ –​ and, as Nietzsche writes, ‘it is precisely the best science that will best know how to keep us in this simplified, utterly artificial, well-​invented, well-​falsified world’: ‘[S]‌cience loves error because, being alive, –​it loves life!’ (BGE 24, KSA 5.42). However, such judgements are also active in our everyday dealings with ‘the world we think we live in’, and they act as ‘conditions of life’, as ‘useful and

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species-​preserving’ judgements, even before we apply any science to our experience. They structure our world, they ‘arrange’ for us ‘a world in which we are able to live’ (GS 120, KSA 3.477) before being used in the development of our ‘best science’. In the terminology of The Gay Science, such judgements are the fundamental errors that have become ‘articles of faith’ for us humans insofar as they have been incorporated (einverleibt) into our organisms, that is, insofar as they have become instinctive in the life of the human species (see GS 11, 110, KSA 3.383, 469–​71). Thus, Nietzsche does not wholly reject the Schopenhauerian thesis that only space and time but also causality and the other categories are intuitions that may or may not be conceptualized and articulated in words (WWV I §3 ff.). For he wants to be able to say that judgements such as ‘in all change of appearances substance persists’, or ‘everything that happens has its cause’, are active within human organisms as instinctive judgements –​and not necessarily as intellectual judgements.27 Put differently, he wants to be able to say that even if it be true that such judgements are anthropomorphisms that could only have arisen in the evolution of our species because language and consciousness enabled us to formulate them, it is also true that they have since time immemorial become instinctive and therefore now live within us as immediate, unconscious and instinctive judgements. They are at bottom, as Nietzsche repeatedly says, ‘grammatical functions’ and ‘logical fictions’ –​and yet they are also able to build representations and interpretations of the world at the pre-​linguistic level of instinct and from within the unconscious depths of the human organism. Kant’s synthetic judgements a priori are false, but they function as the very structure or form of ‘the world we think we live in’, even when we don’t articulate them in words and are therefore not conscious of them (see, earlier, the second main thesis of Nietzsche’s Post-​Kantianism). That is not to say that Nietzsche accepts that such judgements are really ‘a priori’ in Kant’s sense. For he does not accept that they are ‘necessarily and universally valid’, not even if this only means: ‘necessarily and universally valid for the phenomenal world’. We should try to understand this point as concretely as possible. When Nietzsche writes that we ‘have arranged for ourselves a world in which we are able to live –​by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes, and effects’ (GS 121, KSA 3.477–​8), he is basically agreeing with the first part of what Kant calls ‘the supreme principle of all synthetic judgements’, namely, that [t]‌he conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience [. . .] (KrV A158/​ B 197)

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But he rejects the second part, the part that states that they are necessarily and universally valid for every object of experience, or that ‘on this account [they] have objective validity in a synthetic judgement a priori’. (KrV B 197/​A 158). In other words, Nietzsche agrees that such principles as the principle of causality are ‘conditions of the possibility’ of the very objects of experience  –​that they constitute and structure the phenomenal world as such –​but he denies that the normativity implied in these principles should count as unconditional in any sense. In making this claim he seems to be making two different, though connected, points. (a) First, the implication is that the universality of those principles is merely historic, a product of human evolution and history: those principles structure the phenomenal world, but they are not an unchangeable structure of the phenomenal world. The structure of the phenomenal world can always be questioned, and is, therefore, always revisable. (b) Second, the implication is that, being historical and revisable, those principles are not really necessary. Since their ‘objective validity’ is, in fact, just intersubjective validity in a given historical context, they are not unconditionally binding. But the development of Nietzsche’s relationship with Kant’s first Critique and its consequences culminates in Twilight of the Idols. Pace Clark, the first thing to emphasize is that, here, Nietzsche presents one of his most clear and extended defenses of the falsification thesis, surely the most extended in the published writings. In the section ‘ “Reason” in Philosophy’, he writes: These days, on the other hand, we see ourselves mired in error, drawn necessarily into error, precisely to the extent that the prejudice of reason forces us to make use of unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, objectification, being; we have checked this through rigorously and are sure that this is where the error lies. (TI Reason 5, KSA 6.77)

His argument is quite clear: (a) as Kant has shown, our most basic conceptualizations –​what Nietzsche calls here ‘the categories of reason’ –​do not ‘come from the empirical world’ (‘aus der Empirie’, TI Reason 5, KSA 6.77) or, as the first main thesis of Nietzsche’s Post-​Kantianism holds, we do not ‘draw them from nature’, instead we ‘prescribe them to nature’ (HH 19, KSA 2.41); (b) and what this in fact means is that such categories (‘unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, objectification, being’) are human inventions, anthropomorphisms, ‘prejudices’ that we ‘use’ in order to make sense of reality, both in everyday life and in the sciences; (c) from which it follows that such categories, as well as the judgements that express them, are ‘lies’, ‘errors’, a ‘falsification’ of reality. Here as elsewhere, Nietzsche emphasizes the idea that these ‘categories of reason’, or ‘prejudices’

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and ‘presuppositions of reason’, are the most basic grammatical rules of human language, and that is why falsification is inevitable. Thinking presupposes language, and language presupposes the categories of reason, so that we cannot avoid making use of these categories. In fact, we cannot avoid making use of them not only as ‘the conditions of possibility of experience in general’, but also as ‘the conditions of possibility of the objects of experience’. If (to borrow Clark’s formulations) we attribute spatio-​temporal continuity under the same concept to (what we call) the ‘same thing’, such an attribution is just a species-​dependent conceptual construction and, in this sense, a ‘falsification’. Clark’s argument for denying that Nietzsche is really claiming any of this is that, throughout the section on ‘Reason’ in Philosophy, as well as in the title of the section, he places ‘reason’ in quotation marks. This, she argues, suggests that Nietzsche is attacking only those philosophers who believe in ‘pure reason’, that is, in the existence of a human faculty for a priori knowledge, or in a ‘non-​ natural faculty’ that could provide ‘knowledge uncontaminated by connection to the senses’ (Clark 1990: 106–​109). Falsification is inevitable if one ignores the ‘testimony of the senses’ and assumes that grammatical rules and basic epistemic norms reflect the structure of reality independently of any empirical evidence. But if one takes into account the way in which the senses show ‘becoming, passing away, and change’ (TI Reason 5, KSA 6.77), there is no reason to believe that conceptualization necessarily involves falsification. But it is quite hard to agree that this is what Nietzsche means. As just quoted, he writes vigorously and explicitly that just by making ‘use’ of unity, identity, permanence or being ‘we’ are ‘drawn necessarily into error’ (‘necessitirt zum Irrthum’, TI Reason 5, KSA 6.77; italics added). Moreover, in making the point that what makes falsification inevitable is the fact that the categories of reason have always been and remain today embedded in the structure of language Nietzsche explicitly claims that the development of language has always been based, and remains based today, on ‘the most rudimentary form of psychology’ (TI Reason 5, KSA 6.77), that is, in a false psychology (a psychology that posits elementary ‘unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, objectification, being’ in the psychological realm). Thus when Nietzsche asserts, in ‘Reason’ in Philosophy, that the categories of reason draw us ‘necessarily into error’, he is obviously attacking ‘pure reason’, as Clark claims, but he is attacking it precisely in the same sense in which he had already attacked it not only in Human, All Too Human but especially in Beyond Good Evil, where he argued that ‘synthetic judgements a priori do not have “to be possible” at all: we have no right to them, and in our mouths they are nothing but false judgements’ (BGE 11, KSA 5.25).

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There is no reason to doubt that Nietzsche’s claim in Twilight of the Idols is the very strong claim that language and the ‘categories of reason’ make falsification all-​pervasive and inevitable.28 Twilight of the Idols is also the book where Nietzsche writes that ‘along with the true world we have also abolished the world of appearances’ (or ‘the illusory world’, ‘die scheinbare Welt’,TI Fable, KSA 6.81). What is interesting to note is that both in the section where he writes this and in the preceding section where he explains his views more plainly, or less allegorically, he emphasizes that he sees the abolishment of the ‘true’ and of the ‘illusory’ (scheinbare) world as an abolishment which is very far from being essentially theoretical. He writes that the division of the world ‘into a “true” half and an “illusory” (scheinbare) one, whether in the manner of Christianity or in the manner of Kant (an underhanded Christian, at the end of the day), is just a sign of décadence,  –​it is a symptom of declining life’ (TI Reason 6, KSA 6.79). This is because the projection of the existence of a ‘true world’ beyond appearances expresses an instinctive need to devaluate this world, that is, to look down at this earthly world (the only one whose reality could ever be established, because ‘eine andre Art Realität ist absolut unnachweisbar’, TI Reason 6, KSA 6.78) as valueless in comparison and in opposition to another, better world: ‘It would not make any sense to fabricate a world “other” than this one unless we had a powerful instinct for libelling, belittling, and casting suspicion on life: in that case, we would be using the phantasmagoria of an “other”, a “better” life to avenge ourselves on life’ (TI Reason 6, KSA 6.78). This implies that the ‘true world’ is indeed much more than a theoretical positum –​it is, rather, ‘a moral–​ optical deception [Täuschung]’ (TI Reason 6, KSA 6.78). Thus the importance of Kant is not only that he showed the true world to be ‘unattainable, unprovable, unpromisable’ (TI Fable, KSA 6.80), but also, and crucially, that he unintentionally showed that the ‘true world’ was invented to give meaning to lives dominated by the instinctive devaluation of this earthly world. That is why Nietzsche can say that, with Kant, the ‘true world’ became ‘unattainable, unprovable, unpromisable, but the very thought of it a consolation, an obligation, an imperative. (Basically the old sun but through fog and scepticism; the idea become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian)’ (TI Fable, KSA 6.80). The question had always been ‘the old sun’ (the old, Platonic sun, the ‘Good in itself ’), and this old sun had always provided some sort of ‘consolation’ by providing ‘an obligation, an imperative’, that is, an absolute normative truth. At the end of Section 1, I  enumerated two basic objections to the claim that Nietzsche retains a form of Post-​Kantianism up until the last phase of his

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thought. I shall now try to answer these objections in the light of what I have just tried to show about how Nietzsche’s approach to Kant’s first Critique evolved from The Birth of Tragedy to Twilight of the Idols.

4.  The thing in itself and the problem of truth Nietzsche’s claim that the thing in itself is a ‘contradictio in adjecto’ (BGE 16, KSA 5.29) has been very carefully analyzed by Mattia Riccardi (2010) in his excellent paper on ‘Nietzsche’s Critique of Kant’s Thing in Itself ’. Riccardi starts by establishing that the best interpretation of the meaning of Kant’s thing in itself is a ‘two-​aspect-​view’, according to which the appearance and the thing in itself are not two separate objects, but two ways of considering the same object: the thing in itself is X considered as what it is independently of any relation to something else (or qua tale, per se), the appearance (or phenomenon, Erscheinung) is the same X considered in relation to human cognition (or as it is ‘for us’, or as experienced by way of our cognitive apparatus). As Riccardi shows, both the ‘two-​aspect-​view’ and its alternative, the ‘two-​ objects-​view’, are interpretations with a long history and are discussed by Schopenhauer, Fischer and other sources of Nietzsche’s knowledge of Kant’s distinction between phenomenon and thing in itself. Following Rae Langton (1998), Riccardi (2010: 341–​2) (correctly) interprets the ‘two-​aspect-​view’ in terms of properties: As Kant puts it, the object as a phenomenon is defined only through its relations to other things. Its properties are therefore strictly relational ones. In contrast, when considering the object ‘in itself ’, we focus on its intrinsic, non-​relational constitution. This characterization follows directly from the concept of the ‘thing in itself ’, since to be ‘in itself ’ can in no way be determined from outside. As Kant points out, ‘through mere relations (bloße Verhältnisse) no thing in itself is cognized’ (CPR, B 67). The difference between ‘appearance’ and the ‘thing in itself ’ can therefore be explained as follows: – Appearance = object considered with regard to its relational properties – Thing in itself = object considered with regard to its non-​relational properties.

This way of understanding the distinction between thing in itself and appearance (or between thing in itself and its appearance in human experience and cognition) is not only the best interpretation (especially in the light of Kant’s own

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clarifications in the Opus postumum), but also very helpful, as Riccardi shows, for the interpretation of Nietzsche’s rejection of the concept of thing in itself as self-​contradictory. It must be said, however, that Kuno Fischer, Nietzsche’s main source on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, belongs to the school of thought that rejects the ‘two-​aspect-​view’ and sees the thing in itself as a thing numerically different from the phenomenon (Fischer 1860: 404 ff.). It must also be said that Nietzsche seems to have believed that Kant thought of the thing in itself as numerically different from the phenomenon, for he criticizes him for believing that he could present the thing in itself as a cause of the phenomena (NL 1886–​7, 5[4]‌, KSA 12.186). But there is also no doubt that, as Riccardi indicates, other passages from the Nachlass suggest that he did think of the thing in itself as a thing considered with regard to its non-​relational (or intrinsic) properties, and of the phenomenon as a thing considered with regard to its relational properties.29 It is very likely that Nietzsche is here following Schopenhauer, who criticized Kant for conceiving of the thing in itself as an object that could ‘cause’ an appearance to arise, and who was very clear (in volume II of The World as Will and Representation) in adopting a two-​aspect-​view and conceiving of the thing in itself as the same ‘thing’ as the empirical object, but considered independently of its appearance with relational properties in human experience and cognition.30 So, if we can assume that Nietzsche was aware (via Schopenhauer) that the real challenge is the critique of the thing in itself as another view of the same object and not as another object, we can follow Riccardi’s analysis and reconstruct Kant’s ‘contradictio in adjecto’ argument as follows: P1 The word ‘thing’ designates an object considered with regard to its relational properties. P2 Since the expression ‘thing in itself ’ includes the word ‘thing’, it designates an object considered with regard to its relational properties and, at the same, considers that object with regard to its non-​relational (or intrinsic) properties. C Ergo, the expression ‘thing in itself ’ is self-​contradictory. We can add that, as Riccardi argues, it was Kant himself who showed that our contentful, non-​empty conception of what a ‘thing’ is derived from our cognition of objects in space and time in accordance with the basic categories of our finite understanding. We know of ‘things’ because we know of relations of phenomena, that is, because we know objects qua phenomena, or objects with properties that they have only in relation to other objects in the context of being

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known in our representation of a spatio-​temporal reality ruled by the categories of our understanding. There is no doubt that, as Riccardi (2010:  342)  puts it, ‘Kant argues that we must also conceive of empirical objects “in themselves”, i.e. we must attribute to them some indefinable non-​relational nature, even if from the outset we are unable to know what it may look like’. But this is what involves the contradiction: the moment I say ‘thing’, or ‘object’, I am already conceiving of an X with relational properties; indeed, the moment I say ‘property’, I can only mean something if I am referring to a relational property. Kant fails to notice that the concept ‘thing’ excludes the conception of an ‘in-​itself ’. But if Nietzsche claims that nothing can have intrinsic properties, or that properties are always relational, then he surely develops an ontology of internal relations that matches such a claim? Does Nietzsche have such an ontology? Riccardi argues that the ‘will to power’ is precisely such an ontology, a theoretical account of what Nietzsche himself calls a ‘relation-​world’ (Relations-​Welt, NL 1888 14[93], KSA 13.272). The will to power accounts ‘for the strictly “relational” nature of reality, in which objects come to have the shape they actually have only by means of their reciprocal correlations: “there is no ‘essence in itself ’, relations first constitute essences” (NL 1888 14[122], KSA 13.303)’ (Riccardi 2010: 351). Nietzsche’s view, according to Riccardi, must be that this is true of phenomena, that is, of the ‘empirical world’ –​for there is no other world besides the phenomenal or empirical world, and hence the will to power is the essential feature of this world, not of things-​in-​themselves. But here, I think, we encounter a decisive problem. There is little doubt that the way in which Nietzsche develops the hypothesis of the will to power in the Nachlass involves a complex ontological theory of internal relations, and it may well be true that, as Riccardi (2010: 343) claims following Paul Guyer (1987: 350), Kant, by contrast, has a ‘prejudice against the ultimate reality of relations’. But Kant’s contention that empirical objects have relational properties involves the contention that they are representations and, hence, that their relational properties are also representational properties. Kant’s claim is that, for example, every object given in space has spatial properties which are relational because they would be nothing at all if it were not for their relations with the spatial properties of other objects –​but his claim is also that space is just a form of our faculty for representing intuitions (our ‘sensibility’) and, therefore, the properties of every object given in space are relational because they exist only ‘for us’, that is, in a relation to us –​to our cognitive faculties. The first problem that this creates is that it is not at all clear whether the hypothesis of the will to power implies that the relational properties which emerge from relations

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among wills to power are representational properties. Nietzsche does not really seem to put any effort into developing a theory of appearances, or a theory that explains how exactly we are supposed to conceive of represented objects in terms of internal relations. But, second, and most importantly, Kant has an argument for claiming that we cannot consistently think that representations can exist just by themselves. This is the argument that ‘we at least must be able to think’ the objects of our experience ‘as things in themselves’, because ‘otherwise there would follow the absurd proposition that there is appearance without anything that appears’ (KrV B XXVI). In order to conceive of ‘appearances’, we have to conceive of something that appears –​even if this ‘something’, the ‘thing’ that appears, does not exist ‘in-​ itself ’ or cannot be known ‘in-​itself ’. It is ‘absurd’ (as Kant puts it) to think that ‘phenomena’ qua representations can subsist by themselves –​that is, the concept, the thought of a ‘thing in itself ’ is required for phenomena to be conceivable as representations. Thus, just as Nietzsche can say that Kant’s conception of a thing in itself is self-​contradictory, so Kant could retort that Nietzsche’s conception of the phenomenal world is the self-​contradictory conception of an appearance without anything that appears. Nietzsche’s claim to have abolished the ‘illusory world’ along with the ‘true world’ only makes this problem more acute. What does Nietzsche want to say with that claim? Given that, as I tried to show earlier, the claim is part of Nietzsche’s new formulation of the falsification thesis in Twilight of the idols, its point might simply be that ‘error’ (Irrthum), or ‘falsity’ (Falschheit) and ‘falsification’ (Fälschung), is not the same as ‘illusion’ (Schein, Illusion), and therefore we can conceive of empirical reality as constituted solely by ‘errors’ (or by the ‘falsifications’ that we have incorporated in the course of the evolution of our species etc.) without regarding such a world as an ‘illusory world’, a ‘scheinbare Welt’. The empirical world is Erscheinung, phenomenon, empirical appearance, but it is not Schein in the sense of ‘illusion’, or mere appearance. The phenomena become mere appearances, and error becomes illusion, only when opposed and contrasted to an absolute truth –​only when we regard the phenomena as a sort of imperfect copy or re-​presentation of the ‘true world’ of the ‘thing in itself ’. But if we abolish the true world, or if we abolish the ‘thing in itself ’ (by showing it is a self-​contradictory concept etc.),, then we no longer need to regard the phenomena as illusions or mere appearances: we can abolish the ‘illusory world’ along with the ‘true world’, and yet still hold that the empirical world is a world of error.

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According to Nietzsche’s claims in the section on ‘Why the “true world” finally became a fable’ in Twilight of the Idols, Kant’s distinction between appearance and thing in itself is a modern version of the Platonic interpretation of this earthly world as an illusion, a ‘cave’ in which there are only ‘copies’ of the ‘real world’ outside of it. (This results from the fact that one of the main ideas of the chapter as a whole is that only Nietzsche’s own philosophy abolishes the ‘illusory world’). But, to be fair to Kant, one has to say that he also distinguishes phenomenon from Schein qua illusion. Kant explicitly holds that Erscheinung is not Schein, that is, that the empirical world is not an ‘illusion’ (KrV B 349/​A 293 ff., also B70). Schopenhauer has disregarded this Kantian distinction, and insisted that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason implies that the world as representation is a world of illusion (see WWV I Appendix). Has Nietzsche been misled by Schopenhauer in his interpretation of Kant? If he believes Kant does not distinguish Erscheinung from Schein, he has. When, in Twilight of the Idols, he rejects the idea that the empirical world is an illusion, he is in fact being true, at least to some extent, to the spirit of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. However, he is, of course, not mistaken in understanding as a drastic radicalization of Kantianism his reiteration of what he had been claiming since Human, All Too Human: if the categories of reason are not drawn from nature, but rather prescribed to nature by our understanding, then they are ‘errors’, a ‘falsification’ of reality. The problem, however, is that there is no paradox-​free way of asserting the falsification thesis if one wholly rejects the notion of a thing in itself and abolishes both the ‘true’ and the ‘illusory’ world. How can the categories of reason be ‘errors’ if there is no truth? How can Nietzsche assert that the empirical world consists wholly of ‘errors’ or ‘falsifications’ without making some sort of distinction between illusion and reality? Clark’s (1990: 120) objection, already quoted once earlier, is perfectly cogent: ‘[I]‌f there are only representations, to what could they fail to correspond? What is left to be falsified? When Nietzsche claims in GS and BGE that logic and science falsify reality, what does he believe they falsify?’ It is possible that Nietzsche’s sharp logical eye saw a contradiction in the notion of a thing in itself, but failed to see a similar contradiction in the notion of an appearance in which nothing appears, or a representation which does not represent anything, or a falsification without anything to falsify, or an error which is not a failure to attain a possible truth. But there is another possibility: the possibility that Nietzsche was fully aware that he was expressing a self-​contradictory view, or, more precisely: the possibility that he wanted to formulate his view of the consequences of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in the radical form of paradox. Can we explain why he may have wanted to do this? What is the point of

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saying that there is no truth and everything is false if one knows that there is no way to say it without falling into paradox, or even contradiction? Ken Gemes (1992) has shown long ago that many of Nietzsche’s denials of truth have specific contexts and aim at attacking not truth itself, but rather ‘other (contingently, that is, historically) allied notions’, which Nietzsche considers worthy of attack ‘because of their contingent life-​destroying capabilities’ (64). For example, Nietzsche often seems to be putting forward a general denial of truth based on a new theory of truth when, in fact, he is only criticizing the Christian’s claim to base his/​her asceticism on truth, rather than on his/​her individual will. What looks like a theoretical attack on truth is fundamentally an attack on the use of truth for the ‘resignation of responsibility’ (49–​51). More generally, this indicates, according to Gemes, that (a)  Nietzsche has no theory of truth and, in fact, is not interested either in theories or definitions of truth; (b) what he is interested in is in showing, usually by rhetorical means that include the denial that truth exists, how human beings use the notion of truth ‘for promoting various forms of life’ rather than for progressing ‘towards the objective truth’ (65). There is much to be said for this view, and although my own view is not identical with it, I take the idea that Nietzsche’s denials of truth are more rhetorical than epistemological as an important clue to understanding Nietzsche’s decision to embrace the most paradoxical formulations of the falsification thesis, as well as of the denial of truth (which, pace Gemes, I think is really a general denial of truth, not just a contextual one). Nietzsche has no well-​worked-​out theory of truth (or of knowledge). He does present the outline of a theoretical critique of truth, but he does not develop, out of that critique, a coherent positive theory of truth (e.g. a sceptical theory of truth). At the theoretical level, his famous denial of truth is essentially based on three main ideas:  (a)  first, the realization that Kantianism entails a denial of metaphysical truth –​that is, that the Kantian view of empirical objects as somehow constructed by our cognitive apparatus (or by its prescription of a ‘law’ to nature) entails denying the possibility of knowledge of things in themselves; (b) second, as we just saw, the thesis that the very concept of the ‘thing in itself ’ –​and, hence, of metaphysical, absolute truth –​is self-​contradictory; (c)  finally, the idea that the concept of a metaphysical, absolute truth (or, as he puts it in BGE 4, ‘the wholly invented world of the unconditioned and self-​ identical’, KSA 5.18) is just one among other conceptual simplifications which, like the categories of reason, are useful for the species:  ‘truth’ belongs to the ‘conditions of life’ that make the preservation of the human species possible, and this means that ‘truth’ (as the famous posthumous note goes) is just ‘the

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type of error without which a certain species of living beings could not live’ (NL 1885 34[253], KSA 11.506). Being a contradiction in terms and, as such, nothing more than a simplification that is useful for the preservation of the human species, ‘truth’ is just one more falsification, and hence ‘there is no truth’, ‘truth does not exist’. But the rhetorical dimension of this conclusion should be clear. ‘Truth’ is here tantamount to ‘metaphysical truth’. An argument based on those three ideas may well warrant the conclusion that there is no metaphysical or absolute truth, but it does not warrant the conclusion that no legitimate concept of truth is possible. In specific, such an argument is not enough to rule out that there is a relative truth, a ‘truth of relations’ in Lange’s sense. As suggested earlier, nothing in the development of Nietzsche’s thought in the published writings indicates that he ever abandoned the Langean Kantianism of Human, All Too Human, particularly Lange’s distinction between ‘absolute truth’ and ‘relative truth’. On the contrary, there is an important fact that indicates that this distinction never ceased to be relevant for Nietzsche: until the end, he always combined the denial of truth with praise of scientific objectivity, with praise of ‘truthfulness’ and intellectual honesty (Redlichkeit), and especially with his pluralistic discourse on ‘truths’ that vary across knowers and over time (‘my truth’, ‘my truths’ etc.).31 Similarly, the claim that there is never a pure ‘will to truth’ –​because the ‘will to truth’ is, in fact, a ‘will to death’ (GS 344, KSA 3.576), a will which strives to promote life-​denying forms of life and not really a pure progress towards the objective truth  –​is much more restricted than Nietzsche’s rhetorical bravado sometimes suggests. Nietzsche’s real point is that philosophers are never motivated by a pure ‘will to truth’, because philosophy is, fundamentally, an evaluative activity, such that what real philosophers do is come up with new evaluative judgements, ‘new values’ (BGE 211, 253 5.144, 197): ‘true philosophers are commanders and legislators: they say “That is how it should be!” they are the ones who first determine the “where to?” and “what for?” of people’ (BGE 211, 5.145). But, unlike the philosophers, the true ‘scholars’ (broadly, the genuine ‘scientists’ of all fields, including the sciences of ‘spirit’) can easily be motivated by a pure ‘drive for knowledge’, that is, a pure ‘will to truth’: Of course: with scholars, the truly scientific people, things might be different –​ ‘better’ if you will –​, with them, there might really be something like a drive for knowledge, some independent little clockwork mechanism that, once well wound, ticks bravely away without essentially involving the rest of the scholar’s drives. [. . .] In contrast, there is absolutely nothing impersonal about the philosopher etc. (BGE 6, KSA 5.20)

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This way of differentiating between philosophers and scholars suggests that there is a serious motive behind the rhetorical bravado of claiming that ‘there is no truth’ and wanting to fall into paradox. Before Kant showed that the ‘true world’ –​that is, the world of metaphysical truth –​is in fact ‘unattainable, unprovable, unpromisable’ (TI Fable, KSA 6.80), philosophers (like the founders of religions and sects) relied on the idea of a ‘true world’ for accomplishing their task of ‘commanding and legislating’. Kant still tried to do this –​he tried, in his moral philosophy, to assure us that the thought of the ‘true world’ remained, at least, ‘a consolation, an obligation, an imperative. (Basically the old sun but through fog and scepticism; the idea become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian)’ (TI Fable, KSA 6.80). But this is what Nietzsche considers to be lost forever. The idea that there is an absolute normative truth, the idea that there is a metaphysical truth which gives epistemic warrant to certain moral norms and ends rather than others, the idea that ‘the old sun’ (the Platonic ‘Good in itself ’, BGE Preface, KSA 5.12) is a truth, not a merely human evaluation –​this is what is lost forever, this is what has ‘died’ with the ‘death of God’. Nietzsche’s paradoxical denial of truth –​or, in other words, his paradoxical affirmation of the falsification thesis –​is his effort to find the most vivid and radical formulation of this crucial insight. Or, put differently, Nietzsche’s paradoxical denial of truth is in fact the strongest rhetorical expression of the most drastic consequence of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: the final corrosion of the protective shelter of the ‘ascetic ideal’ and the advent of an age in which human beings cannot pretend to be able to rely on ‘truth’ in order to set their goals, values and purposes.

5.  Conclusion If my interpretation of Nietzsche’s denial of truth is correct, then this denial is compatible with the acknowledgement of the possibility of relative truths. If his denial of absolute truth had led to a coherent epistemology, and not to a paradoxical (or even self-​contradictory) ‘falsification thesis’, perhaps the concept of a relative truth might also have had to fall. Perhaps the concept of a relative truth is just one more paradox –​for how can there be a relative truth if there is no absolute truth? But the fact is that Nietzsche does not tackle these and the other epistemological questions that his denial of truth raises. His mature perspectivism seems to involve an interpretation of the relative truth as a ‘perspectival’ truth, but since that perspectivism also involves the

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denial of absolute truth, it entails the same sort of paradoxes as the falsification thesis.32 Nietzsche seems to have left for future epistemologists the task of sorting out whether a post-Kantian critique of truth like the one he defended can be formulated without paradox. For, as I  suggested, that is not what interests him. What is really of importance for him is that even if a radical post-Kantian critique of truth still leaves room for something like a relative truth, this relative truth (a truth conditioned and made possible by our own cognitive apparatus) cannot function as the ultimate basis of a new system of values, that is, of a new normative or prescriptive ‘truth’. The (‘ascetic’ or ‘metaphysical’) idea of a normative or prescriptive truth depended on the idea of an absolute truth, or of truth as ‘divine’ and synonymous with ‘the Good in itself ’.33 That this idea is now ‘dead’ means that we now have to consider all our values as fundamentally fictitious and projected –​or as fundamentally based on our ‘will’ (i.e. as decisions). After the ‘death of God’, modern human beings are confronted with a naked nihilism, which shows human existence to be in itself goalless, valueless and meaningless.34 ‘Nothing is true, everything is allowed’ (Z IV The Shadow, KSA 4.340, and GM III 24, KSA 5.399) –​ could this be the ultimate consequence to be drawn from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason?

Notes 1 See Brobjer (2008: 36–​40, 104, 128–​30, 195, 229). 2 Kant’s original text reads: ‘der Verstand schöpft seine Gesetze (a priori) nicht aus der Natur, sondern schreibt sie dieser vor’ (Prol §36 230). Nietzsche’s quotation in HH 19 is precise, except that he deletes Kant’s ‘(a priori)’. 3 He writes: ‘so ist diess in Hinsicht auf den Begriff der Natur völlig wahr’ (HH 19, KSA 2.41); the title of §36 of the Prolegomena is: ‘Wie ist Natur selbst möglich?’ 4 See Lange (1866: 240–​1, 244, 249, 502; 1875: 10 ff., 14, 738). 5 See also Stack (1983: 132 ff., 146 ff., 197 ff., 318–​19), who argues that Nietzsche’s allegiance to Lange’s Kantian view of truth lasts until the end of his philosophical career. 6 The fictionalist reading of Nietzsche goes back to Vaihinger and is, I think, an important trend in continental Europe today: see, for example, Jacob Dellinger’s brilliant defence of the fictionalist approach in Dellinger (2013a, b), just to name two of his papers. For a recent exposition of and attack on a typical ‘postmodern’ reading of Nietzsche on truth and knowledge –​namely, Foucault’s (2011) reading

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in his Cours au Collège de France, 1970–​1971 –​see Bouveresse (2016). Clark (1990) was the book that launched what is now commonly known as the ‘naturalist’ reading of Nietzsche on truth and knowledge. The view that Nietzsche rejects the absolute truth while acknowledging the possibility of relative truths is held not only by Stack (1983), but also by Wilcox (1982) and Schacht (1983). Gemes (1992) argues that, in fact, Nietzsche has no theory of truth and his apparent denials of truth serve specific rhetorical purposes in specific contexts; he criticizes Wilcox’s and Schacht’s position by remarking that ‘it gives us a Nietzsche who is merely rehashing familiar Kantian themes, minus the rigor of Kant’s exposition’ (49). I shall come back to all of these positions later. 7 See the famous Letter to Carl von Gersdorff from late August 1866; translation by Brobjer (2008: 33). 8 See Branco and Constâncio (forthcoming). 9 See Salaquarda (1978) and Stack (1983: 195 ff.). 10 Beiser (2014) shows that this trend goes back to the very first generation of neo-​ Kantianism (Fries, Herbart and Beneke). 11 On Schopenhauer’s naturalism and its influence on Nietzsche, particularly on Nietzsche’s view of Kantianism, see Clark (1998), Constâncio (2011). Nietzsche’s copy of volume II of Schopenhauer’s major work is ‘fairly heavily annotated throughout’ (Brobjer 2008: 125, n. 58). 12 See Meijers (1988); see also Crawford (1988: 199 ff.), D’Iorio (1993: 259 ff.) and Guervós (2012: 71 ff.). The relationship between the categorizations that make cognition possible and language was already an important theme in TL, but it does not come up in the published writings before HH. 13 See, for example, WWV I Anhang and WWV II §1 12; see Rethy (1991: 60). 14 See WWV I §§1–​16, §17, §24. 15 See KrV B66–​7 and B72 (Anm.); see also: KrVA22/​B37–​A25/​B40, A26–​7/​B42–​3, A30/​B46–​A32/​B48, A265/​B321, A438/​B466, B522. In B66–​7, Kant writes ‘daß alles, was in unserem Erkenntnis zur Anschuung kommt [. . .] nichts als bloße Verhältnisse enthalte’; in B72: ‘Was gar nicht am Objecte an sich selbst, jederzeit aber im Verhältnisse desselben zum Subject anzutreffen und von der Vorstellung des letzteren unzertrennlich ist, ist Erscheinung.’ 16 See WWV I §4 10, §7 39, §24 95 (‘Was den Inhalt der Wissenschaften überhaupt betrifft, so ist dieser eigentlich immer das Verhältniß der Erscheinungen der Welt zu einander’), §24 97, §24 144 (‘zeigen uns diese Erkenntnisse [die gesammte reine Mathematik und die reine Naturwissenschaft] weiter nichts, als bloße Verhältnisse, Relationen einer Vorstellung zur andern), §34 210§38 208; Anhang 528. 17 See HH 1, 9, 10, 16–​19, KSA 2.23, 29–​30, 36–​41; see Salaquarda (1978: 246 ff.) and Stack (1983: 112 ff.) 18 See Salaquarda (1978: 246 ff.) and Stack (1983: 195 ff.).

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19 See Stack (1983: 146 ff.). 20 This quotation from Kant’s Prolegomena appears in Lange (1866: 241; 1875: 10); ‘Alles Erkenntniß von Dingen aus bloßem reinen Verstande oder reiner Vernunft ist nichts als lauter Schein, und nur in der Erfahrung ist Wahrheit’ (Prol 374). 21 See Stack (1983: 147). 22 The expression ‘Wahrheit and sich’ occurs in TL 1, KSA 1.883, NL 1873 29[8]‌, KSA 7. 625 and NL 1888 14[152], KSA 13.334. In this last note, Nietzsche writes that we can speak of the categories as ‘truths’ (‘Die Kategorien sind “Wahrheiten” ’), provided that we understand this only in the sense that they are ‘conditions of life for us’ (‘nur in dem Sinne, als sie lebenbedingend für uns sind’). See also Stack (1983: 220–​1). 23 See ­chapter 10 by van Tongeren in Volume II; see also van Tongeren (2012: 83–​133). 24 See Constâncio (2016a). 25 On Liebmann’s (bad) arguments against the thing in itself, see Beiser (2014: 289 ff.). 26 Kuno Fischer’s exposition of the Analytic of Principles (which Nietzsche certainly read) is quite detailed (see Fischer (1860: 352 ff.)). 27 Nietzsche distinguishes between ‘instinctive judgements’ and ‘intellectual judgements’, for example, in NL 1887 10[167], KSA 12. 554–​5. See Lupo (2012) and Constâncio (2016b). 28 Anderson (2005) gives a good detailed account of Nietzsche’s view of falsification in TI Reason. His previous account, as well as his previous critique of Clark, in Anderson (1996) was much less convincing. (See Brian Leiter’s criticism of Anderson and his defence of Clark in Leiter (2015: 14)). Nietzsche’s engagement with the post-​Kantianism of Afrikan Spir –​that is, his development of a strongly critical view of him –​had a very important role in the preparation of TI Reason, particularly in the version of the falsification thesis it includes: see D’Iorio (1993). Note also that the famous claim that ‘the senses do not lie at all’ (TI Reason 2, KSA 6.75) does not entail that the senses do not falsify. Lying involves judgement, and hence requires concepts. The senses cannot lie because they are preconceptual. But this claim is perfectly compatible with Nietzsche’s usual view of the senses, namely, that the senses are a ‘simplifying apparatus’ which ‘falsifies’ by simplifying the ‘chaos of sensations’ and so on. I owe this last remark to Pietro Gori. Note, finally, that Nietzsche’s falsification thesis includes the idea that self-​knowledge also falsifies, that is, the idea that concepts also falsify our subjective or first-​personal view of ourselves: see Katsafanas (2015), as well as the Introduction of Constâncio, Branco and Ryan (2015). 29 See NL 1887 10[202], KSA 12.580, and NL 1888 14[103], KSA 13.280, two passages in which this is clear, and which are both quoted by Riccardi (2010). 30 See WWV II, §17, §18; see Sousa (2012) and Constâncio (2013).

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31 The praise of intellectual honesty is particularly strong in The Gay Science; the praise of scientific objectivity is particularly strong in The Antichrist. (In fact, in The Antichrist Nietzsche’s view of science seems to be as positive as it was in HH, so that he identifies ‘reason, knowledge, research’ with ‘the way to truth’, AC 23, KSA 6.190). See, for example, Anderson (2005); see also Bouveresse (2016: 62 ff.). The following passages include examples of Nietzsche’s use of expressions and formulas that involve what I have been calling his ‘pluralistic’ view of truth: BGE 43, 202, 231, 253, 296, KSA 5.60, 124, 170, 196, 239; EH Books 1, EH (TI) 2, EH Destiny 1, KSA 6. 299, 354–​5, 365. 32 On ‘perspectival truth’ (i.e. a truth about perspectives, not about things in themselves), see Richardson (1996: 262–​80); on the paradoxes of Nietzsche’s perspectivism, see Stegmaier (2012: 130–​6). 33 See, for example, GS 344, KSA 3.576–​7, AC 10, KSA 6.176–​7 and NL 1887 10[192], KSA 12.571. AC 10, KSA 6.176, identifies ‘the concept “true world” ’ with ‘the concept of morality as essence of the world’. 34 I give my interpretation of this ‘naked nihilism’ –​and I distinguish it from what I call the ‘masked nihilism of the ascetic ideal’ (Constâncio 2016a).

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(eds), As the Spider Spins: Essays on Nietzsche’s Critique and Use of Language, 63–​88, Berlin/​Boston: de Gruyter. Guyer, P. (1987), Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Katsafanas, P. (2015), ‘Kant and Nietzsche on Self-​Knowledge’, in J. Constâncio, M. J. M. Branco and B. Ryan (eds) (2015), Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, 110–​30, Berlin/​Boston: de Gruyter. Lange, F. A. (1866), Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, Iserlohn: Baedeker. Lange, F. A. (1875), Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, Zweites Buch. Geschichte des Materialismus seit Kant, Zweite, verbesserte und vermehrte Auflage, Iserlohn: Baedeker. Langton, R. (1998), Kantian Humility. Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Leiter, B. (2015), Nietzsche on Morality, second edition, London and New York: Routledge. Liebmann, O. (1865), Kant und die Epigonen, Stuttgart: Carl Schoder. Lupo, L. (2012), ‘Drives, Instincts, Language, and Consciousness in Daybreak 119: “Erleben und Erdichten” ’, in J. Constâncio and M. J. M. Branco (eds), As the Spider Spins: Essays on Nietzsche’s Critique and Use of Language, 179–​95, Berlin/​Boston: de Gruyter. Meijers, A. (1988), ‘Gustav Gerber und Friedrich Nietzsche. Zum historischen Hintergrund der sprachphilosophischen Auffassungen des frühen Nietzsche’, Nietzsche-​Studien 17: 369–​90. Rethy, R. (1991), ‘Schein in Nietzsche’s Philosophy’, in K. Ansell-​Pearson (ed.), Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, Routledge: London and New York. Riccardi, M. (2010), ‘Nietzsche’s Critique of Kant’s Thing in Itself ’, Nietzsche-​Studien 39: 333–​51. Richardson, J. (1996), Nietzsche’s System, Oxford/​New York: Oxford University Press. Salaquarda, J. (1978), ‘Nietzsche und Lange’, Nietzsche-​Studien 7: 236–​60. Schacht, R. (1983), Nietzsche, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Schopenhauer, A. (1949a), Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, in A. Hübscher (ed.), Arthur Schopenhauer, Sämtliche Werke, Wiesbaden, Brockhaus, 1946–​1950, vol. 2 (quoted as WWV I). Schopenhauer, A. (1949b), Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II, in A. Hübscher (ed.), Arthur Schopenhauer, Sämtliche Werke, Wiesbaden, Brockhaus, 1946–​1950, vol. 3 (quoted as WWV II). Sousa, Luís de (2012), ‘Knowledge, Truth, and the Thing in itself: The Presence of Schopenhauer’s Transcendental Idealism in Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lie in an Extra-​Moral sense (1873)’, in J. Constâncio and M. J. M. Branco (eds), As the Spider Spins: Essays on Nietzsche’s Critique and use of Language, 39–​61, Berlin/​Boston: de Gruyter.

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Stack, G. J. (1983), Lange and Nietzsche, Berlin/​New York: de Gruyter. Stegmaier, W. (2012), Nietzsches Befreiung der Philosophie, Kontextuelle Interpretation des V. Buchs der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft, Berlin: de Gruyter. van Tongeren, P. (2012), Het Europese nihilisme. Friedrich Nietzsche over een dreiging die niemand schijnt te deren, Nijmegen: Vantilt. Wilcox, J. (1982), Truth and Value in Nietzsche, Washington: University Press of America.

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1.  Introduction To look into Nietzsche’s criticisms of the notion of thing in itself means to return to a traditional problem in Kant and Nietzsche studies. In both cases, we are talking about a complex and multifaceted issue that is essential to Nietzsche’s philosophical work, but whose meaning has given rise to controversy among commentators. For this reason, the assessment of Nietzsche’s criticisms of the Kantian concept of the thing in itself presupposes, from a historical point of view, a prior understanding of these controversies and, from a systematic point of view, an account of the meaning of the notion of the thing in itself in both authors. Among the Kantian topics discussed by Nietzsche, the question of the status of the thing in itself is particularly relevant to the elaboration of his own philosophy. Generally speaking and with natural differences in emphasis, commentators tend to identify, in Nietzsche’s philosophy, a path that would lead him from the assumption of the thing in itself in his youth to a rejection of the thing in itself, regarded as a contradictory concept, in his late philosophy. The disagreement among them occurs when it is called into question whether the concept of the thing in itself that Nietzsche rejects is exactly what Kant understood by thing in itself.1 In order to address this question, I will first present the different ways in which one can understand the Kantian concept of thing in itself. Second, I will investigate how closely Nietzsche’s criticisms match some of those meanings. These tasks cannot be accomplished without reference to part of the vast and complex literature that this subject has left as an inheritance to Kant and Nietzsche studies.

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2.  Kant and the thing in itself The question of the thing in itself plays a fundamental role in Kant’s critical philosophy, since the distinction between the correlative terms appearance/​phenomenon and thing in itself/​noumenon/​transcendental object is an important distinction for determining the limits of knowledge and identifying transcendental illusions. For Kant, the main failure of the previous metaphysics has consisted in overlooking the distinction between thing in itself and appearance, their realms and the appropriateness of applying certain classes of concepts to these realms. Dogmatic metaphysics has not paid attention to the boundaries of human knowledge, which has led it into insoluble problems, so that it has not been able to establish itself as a reliable form of knowledge, something already accomplished by mathematics, logic and physics. Without an investigation of the realms and limits of knowledge, metaphysics will continue to transgress the boundaries of knowable objects illegitimately and pretend to know things in themselves (i.e. objects that transcend the realm of possible experience), ignoring the distinct realms in which pure concepts of understanding and ideas of reason respectively can be applied (Prol 339f.). The foregoing account can be regarded as an uncontroversial interpretation of Kant’s philosophy, but the same cannot be said about the meaning of the distinction between thing in itself and appearance. As a matter of fact, the relation between thing in itself and appearance can be understood in at least five ways: (1) As a distinction between ontologically distinct realms and objects: a sensible and an intelligible world, so that the latter would be cause or fundament of the former2; (2) as two kinds of distinct objects: things and representations of things3; (3)  as a semantic distinction between two concepts4; (4)  as two distinct transcendental reflections on the same object (when submitted to epistemic conditions and when these conditions are withdrawn)5; and (5) as a metaphysical distinction, in which the same object is considered with respect to the intrinsic and extrinsic properties of a substance.6 As all of these interpretations are, to different degrees, defensible in the context of Kant’s work itself, it is clear that each of them depends on an understanding of the critical project as a whole. Nevertheless, beyond these different ways of understanding the distinction between thing in itself and appearance, one can also retain three related general distinctions, which are important in order to assess Nietzsche’s account of the thing in itself, as well as the development in his understanding of it: (1) The distinction between a two-​worlds interpretation

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and a two-​aspects interpretation7; (2) the distinction between a positive and a negative meaning of ‘noumenon’8; and (3) the distinction between the thing in itself considered from a theoretical and a practical point of view.9 In my view, the dialogue between Nietzsche and Kant concerning the thing in itself depends on these further distinctions.

3.  Nietzsche’s criticisms of the thing in itself According to Clark, Nietzsche’s claims concerning the thing in itself can be periodized as follows: (1) The time of The Birth of Tragedy and ‘On Truth and Lies in an Extra-​moral Sense’, when Nietzsche presupposes the existence of the thing in itself; (2) between Human, All Too Human and The Gay Science, when Nietzsche assumes an agnosticism about the thing in itself; (3) the late period of Nietzsche’s philosophy, when he definitively refutes the thing in itself, regarding it as a contradictory concept.10 In this chapter, I will focus on the late period of Nietzsche’s work. In this context, it is important to see that Nietzsche is heir to an understanding of the thing in itself that presupposes the two-​worlds interpretation and the discussion of the problem of affection.11 Thus, his first objection to the thing in itself recalls a traditional criticism of Kant, according to which he did not have the right, from the point of view of critical philosophy itself, to maintain the existence of a thing in itself as cause of appearance, insofar as the category of causality has an application only to the realm of possible experience: Kant no longer has a right to his distinction ‘appearance’ and ‘thing-​in-​itself ’ –​ he had deprived himself of the right to go on distinguishing in this old familiar way, in so far as he rejected as impermissible making inferences from phenomena to a cause of phenomena  –​in accordance with his conception of causality and its purely intra-​phenomenal validity –​which conception, on the other hand, already anticipates this distinction, as if the ‘thing-​in-​itself ’ were not only inferred but given. (NL 1886–​7 5[4]‌, KSA 12.185f)

Kant has unjustifiably postulated a world of distinct entities apart from the phenomenal realm, the things in themselves, taking them as causes of appearances, after he has secured the impossibility of any knowledge that transcends the phenomenal realm. In order to do that, he has applied a category to the realm of the thing in itself. But this is not allowed, insofar as one of the most important theses

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of transcendental idealism consists in denying the application of the concepts of the understanding to objects that transcend the realm of experience. Besides, when Kant sees a relation of causality between thing in itself and appearance, he has not only considered the thing in itself as an inferential conclusion, but has also taken its existence for granted. At times Kant actually defines the thing in itself as cause or ground of appearances.12 He also implies that there is a realm of intelligible objects, an intelligible world, in contrast to the apparent world. But this interpretation, which presupposes the existence of two ontologically distinct entities, can be understood as an extremely literal reading of these passages. Moreover, it reveals a misunderstanding of subtle aspects of transcendental idealism. As a matter of fact, there are many passages, including in the Opus postumum, in which Kant explicitly rejects this interpretation and defends a two-​aspects interpretation, according to which thing in itself and appearance are two distinct ways of considering the same object: under the formal a priori conditions and without them.13 In these passages, Kant explains how one should understand the relation between thing in itself and appearance, as well as the statement that the thing in itself is the cause of appearances. It is absurd to speak of appearance without there being something that appears. A positive attribution of properties to that something is, however, prohibited. Therefore, the thing in itself is only a name that expresses a something  =  x. One cannot know anything about that thing, although one can think it, since, in order to do so, it is only necessary that one does not violate the principle of noncontradiction. That is then a logical possibility. In this sense, the thing in itself is an ens rationis, whose real existence is problematic, but which can be thought of without contradiction. Talking about things in themselves would not be a dogmatic point of view, contradictory to the spirit of transcendental idealism, but a consequence of this idealism itself. There is a difference between a category as a pure concept of understanding, which is the result of the unified function of a judgement (and therefore a concept empty of content), and the use of an already schematized category (and therefore applied to an intuition in the realm of experience). The categories have objective reference to appearances only at the level of empirical use, when they relate to intuitions that give content to representations. At a merely logical level, one can think about a thing in itself as cause or ground of appearances, insofar one cannot talk about an appearance without there being something that appears.14 Even if one presupposes the existence of such an object, this does not imply any knowledge of it. One can even affirm that the subject of knowledge, being the owner of a passive faculty (sensibility),

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has to presuppose the concept of an object that affects sensibility, producing representations. But nobody can affirm its objective reality.15 Although Kant actually asserts that the thing in itself is the cause or ground of appearance, one can maintain that he does not transcend the boundaries of experience and does not make an inconsistent use of the category of causality. The traditional objection repeated by Nietzsche here is not effective, because Kant’s talk of the thing in itself concerns the logical use of the concept and is not a case of applying a pure concept of the understanding to an object that transcends the limits of experience. Thus, in the passage quoted earlier, the more pertinent objection does not consist in calling into question the mistaken application of the category of causality, but in the criticism of Kant’s presupposition of the existence of the thing in itself, which will be developed further in Nietzsche’s second and third objections. The second objection that Nietzsche raises is that Kant transgresses the boundaries of transcendental idealism when he regards the thing in itself as the essence (Wesen) of appearance. In order to do it, Kant would have to justify the distinction between a thing and its essence16: It matters little to me whether someone says today with the modesty of philosophical scepticism or with religious submission: ‘The essence of things [Wesen der Dinge] is unknown to me’, or whether another, bolder man, who has not yet learned enough of criticism and mistrust, says: ‘The essence of things is to a large extent unknown to me.’ I maintain towards both of them that they certainly still pretend to know, or imagine they know, far too much, as if the distinction they both assume were justified: the distinction between an ‘essence of things’ [Wesen der Dinge] and a world of appearances [Erscheinungs-​Welt]. (NL 1886–​7 6[23], KSA 12. 240f.)

According to Nietzsche, one would need a point of view external to all perspectives in order to distinguish between the appearance and essence of things, because only from that point of view could one know whether there are intrinsic properties of things. A thing in itself is understood, in this way, as an absolute ‘constitution of things’ (Beschaffenheit der Dinge: NL 1887 9[40], KSA 12.353). But Kant himself already limited our knowledge to our faculties, so that to talk about things in themselves as the essence of things would be contradictory to the presuppositions of transcendental idealism: To make such a distinction, one would have to conceive of our intellect as afflicted with a contradictory character: on the one hand adapted to a perspectival way of seeing, as precisely creatures of our species must be to preserve their

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existence; on the other, capable of grasping this perspectival seeing as perspectival, the appearance as appearance. (NL 1886–​7 6[23], KSA 12.241)

To assert that there is an essence of an appearance means, for Nietzsche, to believe in the possibility of standing apart from all perspectives.17 But the essence of a thing cannot be isolated from its perspectives. A  thing can only be thought of as being made up of perspectives. A thing in itself is thought of, however, as a metaphysical substance, independent of any relations. One cannot, therefore, affirm the existence of a thing in itself, just as one cannot affirm the existence of a ‘meaning in itself ’, since every meaning is already a meaning posited by a perspective: ‘The “essence” [Essenz], the “essentiality” [Wesenheit] is a kind of perspective’ (NL 1885–​6 2[149], KSA 12.140). In his second objection, Nietzsche argues that one cannot suppose that, beyond the appearance, there is the possibility of thinking a something in itself, even less thinking about its intrinsic properties. When Kant postulated the possibility of things in themselves in contrast to appearances, he was presupposing knowledge of something that his own agnosticism could not permit: that there are things and that these things, considered in themselves, have essential properties. The understanding of the thing in itself as the essence of appearance is an interpretation that Nietzsche inherited, among others, from Schopenhauer and Lange. One can actually maintain that Kant understands the things in themselves as substances, considered from the point of view of their intrinsic proprieties. But, even in this case, Kant would not be transgressing the limits of transcendental idealism. Once again, the thing in itself can be thought without contradiction as a substance:  logically, as first subject of a predication; ontologically, as substrate of intrinsic properties. In neither case is it thought as the schematized category of substance.18 The core of Nietzsche’s second objection consists in showing that the thesis according to which things in themselves have intrinsic properties is a dogmatic one, since it presupposes a point of view apart from all perspectives. However, as we have seen, Kant could only be affirming a logical use of the category of substance, rather than its objective reality. Nevertheless, this second objection points to a crucial step to Nietzsche’s third objection, namely, that the thing in itself is a contradictory concept, because it presupposes the existence of something independent of any relations. For Nietzsche, a thing is constituted by relations. Thus, the concept of the thing in itself is a logical impossibility. In his third objection, Nietzsche adopts an unorthodox Kantian reading, when he advances a kind of inflated meaning of the negative concept of noumenon

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as a limit-​concept. He is drawing an extreme consequence from Kantian doctrine itself, according to which the negative concept of noumenon expresses the limit of what can be thought meaningfully. Kant attributes to the thing in itself the status of a problematic concept. But Nietzsche does not consider it merely problematic; he regards it as absurd, meaningless. Kant is censured for having accepted such an absurd concept, without having paid attention to his own presuppositions. Kant, for Nietzsche, has not seen that the conception of something, of which we know only that we know nothing, is an idea that contradicts reason itself: (By the way: even in the Kantian concept of ‘the intelligible character of things’, something of this lewd ascetic conflict [Zwiespältigkeit] still lingers, which likes to set reason against reason:  ‘intelligible character’ means, in Kant, a sort of quality of things about which all that the intellect can comprehend is that it is, for the intellect –​completely incomprehensible.) (GM III 12, KSA 5.364)

The main objections raised by Nietzsche to the Kantian concept of the thing in itself are, then: (1) that it involves a forbidden use of the category of causality; (2) that it is conceived, unjustifiably, as the metaphysical essence of appearances; and (3) that it is a contradictory concept, because it presupposes a thing that is independent of any relations. Insofar as any interpretation of the status of the thing in itself depends on a particular reading of transcendental idealism, Nietzsche’s interpretation is no exception. Hitherto, we have seen Nietzsche’s criticisms of the concept of the thing in itself from a theoretical point of view. But in order to understand the role played by the Kantian project in Nietzsche’s thought, it is necessary to take into consideration the three distinctions mentioned at the beginning: (1) between a two-​worlds interpretation and a two-​aspects interpretation; (2) between a positive and a negative meaning of noumenon; and (3)  between thing in itself considered from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. In the first case, Nietzsche interprets the relation between thing in itself and appearance as a relation between two distinct realms (an intelligible and a sensible world), thereby reproducing the metaphysical duality established since Plato. Nowadays, the two-​aspects interpretation has been gaining force in Kantian studies, which does not mean, however, that the two-​worlds interpretation is absurd or without textual basis. If we consider the thing in itself from a theoretical point of view, the two-​aspects interpretation seems to have more textual support; if we consider its practical meaning, the two-​worlds interpretation becomes more plausible. Nietzsche is explicit about this practical meaning:

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The true world, unattainable, unprovable, unpromisable, but the very thought of it a consolation, an obligation, an imperative. (Basically the old sun, but through fog and scepticism; the idea become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian). (TI Fable 3, KSA 6.80)

In this passage, Nietzsche charges Kant with maintaining a Platonic distinction, when he establishes the possibility of distinguishing between phenomena (apparent entities, the ‘apparent world’) and noumena (intelligible entities, the ‘true world’). The distinction between what can be known and what can be thought is already, for Nietzsche, a split between two radically distinct realms. Nietzsche claims that Kant, facing the threat of scepticism and the need to preserve the practical realm, had to deny theoretical access to the ‘true world’ of the thing in itself, in order to make space for articles of faith in the practical realm, such as God, freedom and immortality of soul: ‘to create room for his “moral realm” he [Kant] saw himself obliged to posit an indemonstrable world, a logical “Beyond” –​it was for precisely that that he had need of his critique of pure reason!’ (D Preface 3, KSA 3.14). Because of this, Nietzsche denies the thing in itself as logical possibility: if this possibility were open, one would be allowed to think of a moral kingdom. Thus, even if the two-​worlds interpretation may not be entirely defensible theoretically, it points to an indisputable aspect of Kant’s work: the return of the noumenon in the practical realm. For instance, in the transition from the theoretical to the practical realm, Kant postulates, through the concept of transcendental freedom, a distinction between the intelligible and empirical character of an agent. In the practical realm itself, he presupposes a community of intelligible beings as the condition for realizing a moral action. Kant makes a distinction between the positive and negative meanings of noumenon and discards the former, since it would presuppose an intellectual intuition, reserving for the latter the meaning of mere logical possibility, as a warrant for the insuperable limits established by transcendental idealism. But, as we have seen, there is a third distinction at play in the broad conception of the thing in itself: between objects of knowledge (the realm where the negative meaning is applicable) and objects that do not have a phenomenal manifestation (but play a crucial role in the practical realm). These two meanings (theoretical and practical) are clearly distinguished in the second Critique. As a matter of fact, in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant reveals that his objective in the first Critique had been to reserve a space for the noumenon, in order not to regard it as fictional, and so to give space for its legitimate use in the practical realm,

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in the second Critique, where the supersensible, forbidden in the first Critique, finally finds its own place: Here the critique’s puzzle as to how one can deny objective reality to the suprasensible use of the categories and yet grant them this reality in regard to the objects of pure practical reason is also for the first time explained. (Kant, KpV 8) For while that critique urged us to allow objects of experience taken as such  –​ including even our own subject –​to hold only as appearances, but yet to base them on things in themselves, and therefore not to regard everything suprasensible as invention and the concept of the suprasensible as empty of content, [practical reason now yields confirmation]:  practical reason, on its own and without having made an agreement with speculative reason, now provides a suprasensible object of the category of causality, namely freedom, with reality (although –​since this [freedom] is a practical concept –​it also does so only for practical use); thus it confirms by a fact what in the speculative critique could only be thought. (Kant, KpV 9)

Nietzsche does not accuse Kant of performing any kind of internal contradiction. He understands that the Ideas of reason are thought as practical concepts and therefore are limited to this realm. What he objects to is Kant’s postulation of a positive value to the thing in itself and the consequent adoption of traditional metaphysical conceptions. As such, Kant would have contributed to a strengthening of a kind of metaphysics that he himself had tried to overcome.19 On the one hand, that was the explicit objective of critical philosophy. Nietzsche recalls several times the famous passage from the Preface to the second edition of Critique of Pure Reason, in which Kant affirms that he ‘had to deny knowledge in order to make room to faith’ (KrV B XXX).20 On the other hand, Nietzsche is not original in making such a criticism of a practical aspect of the Kantian project, and its consequent return to metaphysics. However, the most important point for understanding this discussion is to realize that to some extent Nietzsche follows Kant’s negative concept of noumenon (as a limit-​concept). He distances himself from Kant by rejecting any positive reading of the thing in itself (theoretically or practically). In conclusion, in spite of his general criticism of the thing in itself, the central point of Nietzsche’s account resides in the practical use of this concept and the return to articles of faith. According to Nietzsche, Kant could have abandoned these if he had understood what a thing in itself is: a contradictory concept, whose only utility consists in serving as limit of what can be asserted meaningfully.

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Notes 1 2 3

4

5

6

7 8

A previous version of this chapter was published in Portuguese in: Kriterion, v. 4, n. 128, December 2013, 307–​20. Among others, the following authors have discussed this question: Riccardi (2009; 2010), Houlgate (1993), Salaquarda (1978) Stack (1983). The classical formulation of this understanding was given by F. H. Jacobi (1787). According to Paul Guyer (1987: 335): ‘Kant does not need to postulate a second set of objects beyond the ones we ordinarily refer to in order to strip space and time from things as they are in themselves, and not just from our concepts of them, because the ontology from which he begins already includes two classes of objects, namely things as tables and chairs and our representations of them’. Henry Allison (1983: 240) attributes that idea to Erich Adickes: ‘Other passages suggest that Kant’s claim is semantic. On this reading, Kant is affirming a relation of logical implication between the concept of an appearance and the concept of a thing as it is in itself, rather than a causal relation between the entities falling under these concepts’. This is Allison’s (1983: 241) interpretation: ‘To consider the things as they appear, or as appearing, is to consider them in their relation to sensible conditions under which they are given to the mind in intuition. Correlatively, to consider them as they are in themselves is to think them apart from all reference to these conditions’. The distinction defended by Rae Langton (1998: 20): ‘Considered this way, Kant’s distinction between phenomena and things in themselves is very far from being a phenomenalistic distinction between mental representations and things independent of the mind. It can be summarized thus. Distinction: Things in themselves are substances that have intrinsic properties; phenomena are relational properties of substances’. As we have seen, Jacobi defends a two-​worlds interpretation; Allison defends a two-​ aspects interpretation. I will not discuss the distinction, not always consistent even in Kant’s texts, between appearance (Erscheinung), phenomenon (Phaenomenon), on one hand, and thing in itself, noumenon and transcendental object, on the other hand, as Allison has. He understands appearance as an undetermined object of an intuition, and phenomenon as an object that is determined by formal transcendental conditions; he understands the thing in itself as an undetermined object that is withdrawn from formal transcendental conditions, the transcendental object as a something = x that is presupposed in all intuition and noumenon, in negative sense, as a limit-​concept (an entity thought of as not being an object of a sensible intuition), and, in positive sense, as an entity thought of as object of a non-​sensible intuition (cf. Allison 1983: 244f).

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9 Allison and Houlgate maintain that, at least in a practical sense, the ontological distinction between noumenon and phenomenon is important: ‘The conception of a noumenon as an ontologically distinct entity is required only in order to allow for the possibility of conceiving God (and perhaps rational souls). This conception is, therefore, important for Kant’s metaphysics, including his metaphysics of morals, but it does not enter directly into a transcendental account of the conditions of possibility of human knowledge’ (Allison 1983: 239). According to Houlgate (1993: 121): ‘Kant’s concept of the thing in itself, the “noumenon” or the “transcendental object” –​these terms are in effect interchangeable –​has two different functions. On the one hand, it permits Kant to draw a distinction between the finite objects which we experience, and the unconditioned, “infinite” objects, such as God or the soul, which, he maintains, we do not experience’. 10 Clark (1990). More precisely, Clark thinks that Nietzsche would have had grounds to overcome the concept of thing in itself since The Gay Science, but he only accomplishes this overcoming when he developed his perspectivism in On the Genealogy of Morals. For a detailed discussion about this issue, see Riccardi (2010). 11 Arthur Schopenhauer, Afrikan Spir, Otto Liebmann, Kuno Fischer and F. A. Lange are the authors whom Nietzsche used as the sources in his reading and appropriation of transcendental tradition (cf. Riccardi 2009). Lange played an important role in Nietzsche’s reading of the thing in itself. According to Lange (1974), given the impossibility of accessing the thing in itself, it can only be conceived as a problematic entity and a limit-​concept. 12 These passages are well known. For instance: KrV B xxvi, A 288; Prol 288f., 314f. 13 ‘We must, with respect of the intuition of an object in space or in time, at all times make the distinction between the representation of the thing in itself and that of the same thing as appearance –​although we can attribute to the former no predicates, but, as = x, can regard it only as a correlate for the pure understanding (as cogitabile, not dabile) in which concepts, not things, are contrasted with one another. The proposition: All sense-​objects are things in appearance (objecta phaenomena) to which a noumenon corresponds as the ground of their coordination; but no particular intuition (no noumenon aspectabile) corresponds to the latter, for that would be a contradiction with respect to the subjective element of the principle’ (AA 22:33). 14 The thing in itself would thus be a concept thought analytically: it only means the same object considered apart from the transcendental conditions. Again, knowledge of the thing in itself that would have caused appearance is not affirmed; what is thought is its possibility, through an analytic judgement. This is permitted, since it is thought without contradiction. 15 Cf. Allison (1983: 254). 16 According to Nietzsche, to talk about a thing is already to presuppose the idea of substance, which, in its turn, is a projection of the belief in a metaphysical

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subject: ‘It believes in the “I”, in the I as being, in the I as substance, and it projects this belief in the I-​substance onto all things –​this is how it creates the concept of “thing” in the first place’ (TI Errors 5, KSA 6.91). A thing in itself would be a substance conceived in its essential properties, other than as it appears to us, that is, it would be independent of all perspectives. 17 ‘The intellect cannot criticize itself, simply because it cannot be compared with other species of intellect and because its capacity to know would be revealed only in the presence of “true reality”, i.e., because in order to criticize the intellect we would have to be a higher being with ‘absolute knowledge.’ This presupposes that, distinct from every perspectival kind of outlook or sensual–​spiritual appropriation, there is something, an ‘in-​itself.’ But the psychological derivation of the belief in things forbids us to speak of ‘things-​in-​themselves’ (NL 1886–​7 5[11], KSA 12.188). 18 This is Langton’s (1988) argument. Her interpretation is based on Kant’s discussion with Leibniz in the ‘Amphibology’ (KrV B324f). In many passages of this section of Critique of Pure Reason, Kant really seems to agree that the thing in itself might be identified with the metaphysical substantia noumenon, that is, a first subject of all predication, which, ontologically, would be the substrate of intrinsic proprieties, in contrast to extrinsic, relational, proprieties, which constitute appearances. Thus, Kant’s distinction between thing in itself and appearance would not be an epistemological or phenomenological one, but an eminently metaphysical one. Besides, it would not be a forbidden use of the category of substance, since he is not using the concept of substance from the ‘First Analogy’ here, which presupposes the schematized category of substance, the substantia phaenomenon (an appearance that only comparatively, and not absolutely, could be considered substance). He is making a logical use of this category. The metaphysical error would be to apply this concept to appearances. 19 Although recognizing that Kant does not want to make any metaphysical statement when he talks about a ‘noumenal world’, stressing that Kant does not postulate anything about its knowledge and existence, and concluding that Kant does not transfer the moral question to a transcendent realm, Allen Wood (2008: 138) is obligated to admit that Kant sometimes implies exactly this: ‘Unfortunately, in some places it appears that Kant himself wants to make positive use of noumenal freedom –​as yet another indirect proof of transcendental idealism (KpV 100–​3), or as some sort of intimation (or even cognition) of our membership in a supernatural world beyond the natural world of sense (G 451–​3, KpV 105). Apparently Kant also found it morally fitting that, as often as we think of human beings as ends in themselves having absolute worth or dignity, we must also think of them as having some supernatural (or noumenal) destiny, setting them apart from all those lesser beings whose fate is to be merely a part of nature.’ 20 D 197, KSA 3.172; NL 1872–​3 19[34], KSA 7.426f; BGE 2, KSA 5.16.

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References Allison, H. (1983), Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, New Haven: Yale University Press. Clark, M. (1990), Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, New York: Cambridge University Press. Guyer, P. (1987), Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Houlgate, S. (1993), ‘Kant, Nietzsche and the Thing in Itself ’, Nietzsche-​Studien 22. Jacobi, F. H. (1787), David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus. Ein Gespräch, Breslau: Gottlieb Löwe. Lange, F. A. (1974), Geschichte des Materialismus, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Langton, R. (1998), Kantian Humility. Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Riccardi, M. (2009), ‘Der faule Fleck des kantischen Kriticismus’. Erscheinung und Ding an sich bei Nietzsche, Basel: Schwabe. Riccardi, M. (2010), ‘Nietzsche’s Critique of Kant’s Thing in Itself ’, Nietzsche-​Studien 39. Salaquarda, J. (1978), ‘Nietzsche und Lange’. Nietzsche-​Studien 7. Stack, G. (1983), Lange and Nietzsche, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Wood, A. W. (2008), Kantian Ethics, New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Nietzsche on Kant’s Distinction between Knowledge (Wissen) and Belief (Glaube) Mattia Riccardi

1.  Introduction Much ink has been spilled on Nietzsche’s relation to Kant, usually with the aim of showing how profoundly their philosophical projects differ. Yet attempts to bring Nietzsche closer to Kant have also regularly appeared in the literature.1 The one recently put forward by Clark and Dudrick (2012) clearly stands out for the philosophical sophistication of their case. Clark and Dudrick argue that –​however deep their differences –​Nietzsche’s project should be seen as taking up that of Kant. In their eyes, what grounds this alleged continuity is Nietzsche’s recognition that certain questions inhabit a normative realm which goes beyond that of the empirical sciences and thus constitutes an autonomous ‘space of reasons’.2 This is not to deny that Nietzsche defends a substantive version of naturalism. Rather, what Clark and Dudrick point out is that he is not a naturalist all the way up. His naturalism only has, and only aims at having, a certain reach. Beyond that, the domain of the normative –​most notably, that of our moral and aesthetic valuations –​opens up.3 There is no doubt that Kant admits of a normative domain which transcends the explanatory powers of the empirical sciences. Indeed, as long as he spells out the conditions under which alone empirical knowledge is possible, Kant takes himself to be uncovering its constitutive limits. As he writes in a famous passage from the ‘Preface’ to the Critique of Pure Reason, he ‘had to deny knowledge [Wissen], in order to make room for belief [Glaube]’ (KrV Bxxx, translation changed). This passage is important for a number of reasons. First, it offers a straightforward characterization of the strategy underlying Kant’s normative

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project. Second, it qualifies the normative realm opposed to that of empirical knowledge as the realm of belief. (I shall go back in due course to the issue of what he might mean with this term.) Third, in a way more contingently related to the subject matter of this chapter, in his works and Nachlass Nietzsche repeatedly refers to the Kantian move described in the quoted passage (to be discussed in Sections 4 and 5 of this chapter). Thus, his reaction to this move is likely to provide a reliable clue as to whether, and to what extent, Nietzsche actually takes over Kant’s normative project. As the interpretive issue at stake runs very deep, Clark and Dudrick mount a powerful and multifaceted argument to substantiate it. The claim that Nietzsche, in some sense, takes over Kant’s own project is just a part of this complex strategy. More precisely, the holding of this specific claim is supposed to provide evidence in favour of their general normative reading. In this chapter I shall focus on the specific claim and question its cogency.4 Though no decisive rebuttal of the normative reading as such can be taken to follow from the argument I shall present in this chapter, if the points I raise hold, Clark and Dudrick would have one piece of evidence less to support it.5

2.  Kant’s realm of belief The general outline of the story Kant alludes to in the ‘Preface’ is well known. He argues that knowledge (Wissen) can only be of empirical objects, that is, objects of sensory awareness.6 So there can be no knowledge of things that transcend the reach of our senses, such as God or the soul. This means that we are in no position to know whether a certain proposition about God or the soul is or is not true. However, according to Kant we should not conclude that propositions of this kind are just meaningless. Quite to the contrary, he argues that they are the legitimate target of an epistemic attitude which, though distinct from knowledge, is nonetheless justified. Such epistemic attitude is belief (Glaube). Thus, for Kant, though we cannot know, say, that the soul is immortal, we are entitled to so believe. It is important to note that in the ‘Canon of Pure Reason’, a much later section of the Critique, Kant offers a precise characterization of knowledge and belief as distinct epistemic attitudes –​a characterization which is arguably reflected in his usage of the terms in the ‘Preface’. There, Kant distinguishes between opinion, belief and knowledge, which he defines as follows (KrV A822/​B850):

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i. opinion is ‘taking something to be true with the consciousness that it is subjectively as well as objectively insufficient’; ii. belief is ‘taking something to be true [which] is only subjectively sufficient and is at the same time held to be objectively insufficient’; iii. knowledge is ‘taking something to be true [which] is both subjectively and objectively sufficient’. An important point that emerges from Kant’s discussion is that, in certain domains, only a specific epistemic attitude is allowed. For instance, he writes that ‘[i]‌n judging from pure reason, to have an opinion is not allowed at all. [. . .]. Hence it is absurd to have an opinion in pure mathematics: one must know, or else refrain from all judgement. It is just the same with the principles of morality’ (KrV A823/​B851). The claim, thus, is that only knowledge is the epistemic attitude permitted when it comes to a priori judgements. In the case of judgements about things that cannot be objects of sensory awareness, such as ‘God exists’ or ‘A future life exists’, belief is, in turn, the only appropriate attitude. As Kant notes, ‘[i]n the transcendental use of reason, on the contrary, to have an opinion is of course too little, but to know is also too much’ (KrV A823/​B851). So Kant tells us that knowledge is unattainable when it comes to objects that transcend the limits of sensory awareness. The epistemic attitude that remains open to us in such matters is, rather, belief. Though belief lacks the kind of strong evidence which supports knowledge –​it is ‘objectively insufficient’, as Kant puts it –​, it does not amount to the mere entertaining of an opinion either, which is ‘subjectively as well as objectively insufficient’. Moreover, whereas opinions are held with a low degree of confidence, belief is a matter of firm endorsement. But how is that possible, given that belief does not rest on the kind of objective grounds on which knowledge relies? Kant’s answer is that, in the case of belief, the firmness of one’s commitment is justified by the specific practical situation in which one finds oneself. Thus, as Andrew Chignell (2007: 333) puts it, belief is according to Kant an attitude which has ‘nonepistemic grounds or merits that are sufficient to make it rational in particular contexts, even if it doesn’t have sufficient objective grounds’. Now that we have a rough picture of Kant’s notion of belief, we can go back to the passage from the ‘Preface’ we started with. What is the subject matter of the belief Kant felt urged to make room for? The most natural answer is what Kant, later in the ‘Canon’, calls ‘moral belief ’. As we saw, a belief is an attitude that always relates to specific practical interests or goals. Though most of them are prompted by the concrete situations we happen to face and are therefore

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contingent, for Kant a subset of our practical goals descend directly and necessarily from our very nature as moral beings. If the belief in a certain proposition  –​that God exists, for instance  –​fosters the pursuit of such goals, this constitutes a sufficient ‘nonepistemic merit’, to use Chignell’s terminology, for a resolute endorsement of it to be rational. Therefore, though we are in no position to claim to know that God exists, we are entitled to believe, and firmly so, that it does. To conclude, according to Kant, the normative realm that lies beyond that of empirical knowledge is the realm of belief –​more precisely, that of moral belief. Importantly, Kant stresses that the ‘language [. . .] of a firm belief’ which is left over even after one has ‘surrender[ed] that of knowledge’ is nonetheless ‘justified by the sharpest reason’ (KrV A745/​B773). As Chignell (2007: 325) again aptly notes, this means that Kant ‘is not a full-​blown subjectivist about leaps-​ of-​Belief:  he remains committed to the enlightenment dictum that we must think for ourselves and that this, in turn, requires that we somehow think from the point of view of every other rational agent’. The manner by which we gain access to and navigate Kant’s normative realm is therefore through an instance of rational reflection to be performed a priori and, consequently, equally available to every human being.

3.  Lange’s reshaping of Kant’s normative realm In this section I shall consider the way in which the neo-​Kantian philosopher Friedrich Albert Lange redefines Kant’s original conception of a normative realm that transcends the explanatory powers of the empirical sciences. This excursus is pertinent because, as I shall try to show in the next section, Nietzsche’s understanding of Kant’s move was profoundly shaped by his reading of Lange’s History of Materialism, at least in his young years.7 Lange believes the critical part of Kant’s philosophy to be his genuine achievement. He thus endorses the project of investigating the transcendental conditions governing our experience of the world and our knowledge of it. However, he holds Kant’s attempt to show that the assumption of a noumenal world is justified by rational demands intrinsic to our practical nature to be but an inconvenient concession to pre-​critical, that is, dogmatic metaphysics. His diagnosis is that ‘Kant refused to see, like already Plato before him, that the “intelligible world” is a world of poetry [Welt der Dichtung] and that it is precisely herein that

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its value and dignity lay’ (Lange 1887: 415). But what does it mean to say that the normative domain that transcends empirical knowledge is to be conceived as a ‘world of poetry’, rather than the Kantian realm of practically justified belief?8 The short answer to this question is that our normative commitments do not respond to demands of reason that are universal and accessible via a priori reflection. Rather, Lange suggests that something akin to artistic creativity is the source of such commitments. This clearly emerges in a passage from the first edition of the History of Materialism that much impressed the young Nietzsche. There, Lange (1866: 269) claims that the kind of ‘level-​headed scepticism [besonnene Skepsis]’ embodied by Kant’s critical project should serve the revelation of the Beautiful and of the Good, since it separates these domains [Gebiete] from that of the empirical truth and extirpates the bad weeds of dogmatism, so that knowledge [Erkennen] and creation [Schaffen] deliver their own fruits equally unconstrained.

There should be no doubt that Lange is here presenting ‘creation’ as an alternative to Kant’s ‘belief ’.9 This substitution has important consequences. First, as already noted, sensitivity to the normative –​Lange refers to the ‘revelation of the Beautiful and of the Good’ –​is no longer conceived as primarily dependent on some kind of transcendental exercise of reason. Second, in a very un-​Kantian fashion, he thinks of the normative realm separated from that of empirical knowledge as inhabited not only by moral values, but also by aesthetic ones. Indeed, the very notion of ‘creation’ enlisted by Lange stems, like that of poetry, from the domain of art. If our normative commitments are not primarily grounded in rationality, how are we then to conceive of them? Though this point is decisive, Lange remains somewhat elusive. He talks of ‘ideas’ and ‘ideals’, which, by exceeding the strict limits to which empirical knowledge is subjected, purport to provide orientation for our lives as agents. On the one hand, such ‘ideas’ and ‘ideals’, Lange seems to suggest, are typically conveyed through artistic means; at least, he repeatedly refers to Friedrich Schiller’s philosophical poems as an illustration of such a normatively driven creative force (see, for instance, Lange 1887: 828).10 On the other hand, it is not clear what, according to Lange, is supposed to ground one’s attachment to a given value. Why do we happen to be at all committed to moral and aesthetic ideals? Lange seems to take this to be a brute fact about our nature as human beings. He also seems to think that an individual is inclined towards this rather than that ideal by something like contingent psychological and historical factors.

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Though Clark and Dudrick sometimes refer to Lange’s views in order to better illuminate some of Nietzsche’s own claims, they do not discuss specifically his revision of Kant’s normative approach. However, their few remarks seem to fit –​or, at least, not to contradict –​the picture I am here recommending, since they present Lange as pursuing the project of naturalizing Kant’s transcendental philosophy by, at the same time, rejecting any reductive form of materialism. More importantly, they also argue that the normative project defended by the late Nietzsche comes much closer to Kant’s original one than does Lange’s spurious variant (see Clark and Dudrick 2012:  73). This is so, they argue, because the late Nietzsche, like Kant, comes to see our normative commitments as essentially grounded in our rational capacities, though he does not conceive such capacities as universal and given a priori, but rather as emerging through cultural and historical processes. Hence, in virtue of this recognition, Nietzsche’s naturalism turns out to be more moderate than Lange’s. This is a reading I shall question by arguing that the late Nietzsche can be ascribed a position that is, at the very most, in the vicinity of Lange’s. Before that, however, we need to take a look at the earliest reaction to the Kantian move documented in his writings.

4.  Nietzsche’s early reaction Nietzsche’s first reference to the passage from the ‘Preface’ to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason occurs in a long and rather obscure Nachlass note from 1871. The note starts by quoting the passage, to which Nietzsche adds the following comments: Curious opposition, ‘knowledge and belief’! What would the Greeks have thought of this! Kant knew no other opposition! But we do! A cultural need [Kulturnoth] drives Kant: he wants to rescue one domain [Gebiet] from knowledge: this is where the roots of all that is highest and most profound, art and ethics, are set down –​by Schopenhauer [. . .] Taming [Bändigung] the drive for knowledge –​whether for the benefit of a religion? Or of an artistic culture? That is about to become evident; I  favour the second alternative. (NL 1872–​3 19[34], KSA 7.427)

These lines allude to a range of themes Nietzsche had long been reflecting on. I shall spell out those which prove relevant to our present discussion.

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A thing that immediately catches one’s eye is that Nietzsche’s understanding of Kant’s move seems to conform to Lange’s, rather than Kant’s own position. Consider, for instance, Nietzsche’s characterization of the domain Kant separates from knowledge as harbouring ‘the roots of all that highest and most profound, art and ethics’. As we have seen in the previous section, this by no means corresponds to Kant’s conception of moral belief, but rather to Lange’s aestheticist revision.11 That this is the case is also confirmed by some passages from the Birth of Tragedy where the same Langean distortion of Kant’s strategy is already at work: Let us recall, then, how Kant and Schopenhauer made it possible for the spirit of German philosophy [. . .] to destroy scientific Socratism’s contented pleasure in existence by demonstrating its limits, and how this demonstration ushered in an incomparably deeper and more serious consideration of ethical questions and art [. . .] (BT 19, KSA 1.128)

Equally noteworthy is that Nietzsche fully embraces the (in his eyes) Kantian move consisting in ‘taming the drive for knowledge’ in order to save ‘a domain [Gebiet] from knowledge’. What he challenges is, rather, the goal pursued by means of this move, which he identifies as the project to provide religion with a new footing. It is not clear to whom this disagreement is primarily directed. Of course, it may be easily targeting Kant’s original conception of ‘moral belief ’, since this amounts to the acceptance of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. However, it could also be directed at Lange’s own position, since he still presents the religious ideal as one of the most worthy and powerful. Be this as it may, Nietzsche opts for a different outcome by suggesting that Kant’s move should serve the quite different project of a spiritual renovation aiming at bringing about a new kind of artistic culture. This is, of course, still the project to which the Birth of Tragedy is devoted. In the series of Nachlass notes from which the previous passage is taken, Nietzsche emphasizes that philosophers are those saddled with the task of forging new ideals. A philosopher who is up to this ambitious enterprise is labelled by Nietzsche the ‘philosopher of tragic knowledge’ (der tragischen Erkenntnis): He tames the unleashed drive for knowledge, not by means of a new metaphysics. He does not establish a new belief. He feels [empfindet] it to be tragic that the ground of metaphysics has been cut away and can never be satisfied by the colourful kaleidoscope of the sciences. He works toward a new life: he returns to art its rights. (NL 1872–​3, 19[35], KSA 7.427f.)12

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To summarize, Nietzsche’s early reaction to Kant’s move, when viewed through Langean lenses, is positive. Like Lange, he takes the project of harnessing the knowledge drive by showing its constitutive limitations to be the epochal achievement of critical philosophy. Of course, Nietzsche argues that this move should serve a quite different purpose, namely, the kind of cultural rejuvenation envisaged in the Birth of Tragedy. This departure from Kant’s original conception of the realm of belief is surely indebted to Lange’s own view that artistic or quasi-​artistic creation is the force that alone can produce normatively binding ideals. Let us now turn to what the late Nietzsche makes of Kant’s move.

5.  Nietzsche’s late reaction Since the aim of this section is to consider Nietzsche’s later reaction to Kant’s distinction between knowledge and belief, it will be instructive to first look at those passages where Kant’s move is directly addressed. This textual evidence compellingly shows that his judgement remains consistently dismissive. A first reference occurs in the second volume of Human, All Too Human: Ingenious metaphysicians who prepare the way for scepticism, and through their excessive acuteness invite mistrust of acuteness, are excellent instruments in the hands of a more refined obscurantism.  –​Is it possible that even Kant can be used to this end? that he himself, indeed, according to his own notorious declaration, desired something of the kind, at any rate for a time: to open a path for belief by showing knowledge its limitations [dem Glauben Bahn machen, dadurch, dass er dem Wissen seine Schranke wies]? (AOM 27, KSA 2.391f.)

Some years later and still in a similar fashion, Nietzsche writes that ‘the movement [German culture in the first half of the nineteenth century  –​MR] as a whole set knowledge in general below feeling and –​in the words Kant employed to designate his own task –​“again paved the way for belief by showing knowledge its limitations [Glauben wieder Bahn zu machen, indem man dem Wissen seine Gränzen wies]” ’ (D 197, KSA 3.172). Again, Nietzsche takes this movement to embody a dangerous ‘spirit of obscurantism and reaction’, which has been finally defeated by ‘that very Enlightenment’ based on the ‘study of history, understanding of origins and evolutions, empathy for the past’ and ‘a newly aroused passion for feeling and knowledge’ (ibid.). In the ‘Preface’ added in 1887 to the same work, Kant’s move is again ridiculed as motivated by his moral views: ‘to create

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room for his “moral realm” he saw himself obliged to posit an indemonstrable world, a logical “Beyond” –​it was for precisely that that he had need of his critique of pure reason!’ (D Preface 3, KSA 3.14). Finally, the same assessment is still voiced in a late Nachlass note, where Nietzsche argues that ‘the back-​to-​Kant movement in our century is a movement back to the 18th century: one wants to regain a right to the old ideals and to the old Schwärmerei  –​hence, a theory of knowledge that “sets limits [Grenze]”, i.e. allows one to posit at will a realm beyond reason [Jenseits der Vernunft] . . .’ (NL 1887 9[178], KSA 12.442f.).13 Now, this textual evidence seems to leave no doubt that the middle-​to-​late Nietzsche rejects Kant’s move altogether. One could however argue that Nietzsche still remains sympathetic, if not to its letter, at least to its spirit. After all, the young Nietzsche had already endorsed a version of the move –​Lange’s one –​ which substantially diverges from Kant’s original one. So perhaps Nietzsche’s target is just Kant’s appeal to the notion of moral belief and not the very idea of a normative realm separated from that of empirical knowledge. A suggestion along these lines may seem motivated by some claims Nietzsche makes in aphorism 10 from Beyond Good and Evil. There, he praises a group of contemporary philosophers labelled ‘anti-​realists and epistemo-​microscopists’ (BGE 10, KSA 5.24) for rejecting the crude positivism which had become the standard view of his time. As Clark and Dudrick (2012) rightly suggest, what Nietzsche seems to have in mind is a group of (in a somewhat loose sense) neo-​ Kantian philosophers, among whom Clark and Dudrick also count Lange himself (70). Of these philosophers, Nietzsche writes: By taking sides against semblance [Schein] and expressing the word ‘perspectival’ even with arrogance, by granting their own bodies about as little credibility as they grant the visual evidence [Anschein] that says that ‘the earth stand still’, and so, with seemingly [anscheinend] good spirit, relinquishing their most secure possession [. . .], who knows whether they are not at bottom trying to re-​ appropriate something that was once possessed even more securely, something from the old estate of a bygone belief [Glaube], perhaps the ‘immortal soul’ or perhaps ‘the old God’, in short, ideas that helped make life a bit better, which is to say stronger and more cheerful than ‘modern ideas’ can do? (BGE 10, KSA 5.23)

Though there is no doubt that this passage refers to philosophers like Afrikan Spir, Gustav Teichmüller and Maximilian Drossbach,14 it is less clear that Lange, too, is one of the ‘anti-​realists and epistemo-​microscopists’ Nietzsche has in mind here. After all, hostility towards modern ideas can hardly be attributed to the author of the Arbeiterfrage (1865). But even if we grant that Lange is among

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the philosophers Nietzsche has in mind in BGE 10, the overall tone of the aphorism is nonetheless ambiguous. On the one hand, he praises them for assuming unfashionable attitudes. On the other hand, he stresses that they are thereby motivated by the project of securing a new grounding for the religious beliefs in the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, which obviously looks very much like Kant’s notion of ‘moral belief ’. Now, it is clear that what Nietzsche finds praiseworthy about these philosophers is precisely not their attempt to restore the eroded faith in Christian values, but rather their ‘mistrust in [. . .] modern ideas’ and ‘disbelief in everything built yesterday and today’ (BGE 10, KSA 5.23). As he writes near the end of the aphorism, ‘[t]‌he essential things about them is not that they want to go “back”: but rather, that they want to get –​ away’ (BGE 10, KSA 5.24). Thus, given the peculiar stress of the aphorism, one can even bracket out their backward-​looking attitude: ‘what do we care for their retrograde shortcuts!’ (ibid.). But that is nonetheless what they do embody: a reactionary instance. When Nietzsche is concerned to draw our attention to this aspect of the strategy pursued by Kant and most of his followers, as the case in all the passages quoted at the beginning of this section, he indeed dismisses it as fuelled by obscurantism, moral prejudice and Schwärmerei. Hence, on closer scrutiny, no real sympathy for this feature of the Kant-​inspired tradition emerges from BGE 10. Nonetheless, it still seems that the late Nietzsche is attracted by at least some of the features of the Langean position he embraced when he was working on the Birth of Tragedy. In particular, Lange’s claim that normatively binding ideals are primarily the product of artistic or quasi-​artistic creation seems to echo in many of the claims we can find in Nietzsche’s writings from the 1880s. Thus, as this claim constitutes the core idea of Lange’s position, the fact that the late Nietzsche remains committed to it may be taken to indicate that his conception of normativity is still in the spirit of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. There is no reason to doubt that Nietzsche sticks to the view that values are a creative achievement: as Zarathustra succinctly puts it, ‘[e]‌steeming is creating’ (Z I Goals, KSA 4.75). Moreover, the late Nietzsche still believes that genuine philosophers are only those up to such a value-​forging enterprise (see BGE 211). At the same time, it seems hard to deny that Nietzsche’s repeated and harsh dismissal of Kant’s move as such expresses, indeed, a deep discontent with the very project of ‘taming the drive for knowledge’ in order to make room for a distinct, purely normative realm. My diagnosis is that he comes to believe that the only motivation for a strategy of this kind is one’s unwillingness to abandon one’s set

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of moral and religious beliefs. Once this rationale is put aside, the move becomes meaningless. This points to the conclusion that the attitude the late Nietzsche takes towards a Langean solution is somewhat ambiguous. The only Nachlass notes from this period in which he comments on Lange seem to confirm this impression. On the one hand, Nietzsche depicts Lange as an ‘honest animal which, in the absence of more honest ones, could even be recommended to the German youth’ (NL 1885 34[99], KSA 11.453). On the other hand, Lange is said to have the ‘instincts of frightened beings and of those who are still dominated by morals’ (NL 1884 25[318], KSA 11.94). In this respect, thus, Lange does not differ from the ‘anti-​realists and epistemo-​microscopists’ described in BGE 10. Though this provides good reasons to resist the conclusion that Nietzsche’s late view can still be considered a version of Langeanism, I  shall not further pursue the issue here. For, crucially, even if we were to grant this claim, no support in favour of the substantial normative reading proposed by Clark and Dudrick would derive from it. To appreciate this point, we need to consider in more detail how Lange answers the question of how evaluative commitments come about. As we saw, he firmly rejects Kant’s view, according to which they respond to universal demands of reason. Rather, he believes that our attachment to particular values and norms depends heavily on historical and psychological factors. In an important passage, Lange (1866: 276) puts forward a hypothesis about the relevant psychological process by considering the case of the moral law: We can treat the representation of the moral law [Sittengesetzes] only as an element of the process of thought as it occurs in experience, which has to fight against all other elements, such as drives, inclinations, habits, influences of the moment, and so on. And this fight, as well as its outcome –​the moral or immoral action –​follows in its entire course the universal laws of nature, to which the human, in this respect, is no exception at all.

At the psychological level, Lange thus takes the moral law –​the perhaps most paradigmatic case of a norm –​to be a representation that plays a certain role in the overall economy of our mind. Accordingly, norms are not essentially different from other psychological factors that also contribute to determining the course of one’s actions. Put differently, to make sense of the fact that some of our actions conform to certain norms we do not need to conceive of ourselves as agents inhabiting a ‘space or reasons’ constitutively irreducible to empirical

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knowledge. The resources provided by standard psychological theorizing are enough for this task. To conclude, even if we grant that the late Nietzsche still holds a position akin to his early Langeanism, there is no reason to suppose he thereby accepts a Kantian conception of normativity. For it is precisely when it comes to the nature of the normative domain in which our values are rooted that Lange radically departs from Kant. On the one hand, Lange no longer believes that values are universal and accessible a priori, but takes them to be the product of artistic or quasi-​artistic creation. On the other hand, he argues that one’s coming to endorse and act in accordance with a certain norm is just a natural phenomenon suitable to standard psychological explanation. This indicates that Clark’s and Dudrick’s appeal to a separate ‘space of reasons’ is unwarranted even for a supposedly Langean Nietzsche.

6.  Conclusions The most Kantian view endorsed by Nietzsche lies somewhere in the vicinity of Lange’s position. Nonetheless, the Nietzsche who embraces it is not the late Nietzsche Clark and Dudrick are concerned with, but rather the young Nietzsche of the period (roughly) around the Birth of Tragedy. If we focus on the late Nietzsche, and in light of the textual evidence considered earlier, his rejection of Kant’s strategy should not be up for grabs. More plausibly, one could argue that his view still bears substantial similarities, if not to Kant’s original project, at least to Lange’s revisionary version of it. However, even this does not suffice to vindicate the substantive normative reading proposed by Clark and Dudrick, for Lange already abandons the full-​blooded Kantian conception of normativity they are after.

Notes 1 For a representative collection, see Himmelmann (2005). 2 Clark’s and Dudrick’s use of the expressions ‘space of reasons’ and ‘space of causes’ explicitly refers to Sellars (1991b). Though the original context in which Sellars introduced this distinction is epistemological (see § 36), he takes the general idea that normative facts cannot be reduced to non-​normative facts to have a broader scope. Elsewhere Sellars (1991a: 38) characterizes the contrast between the ‘space

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of reasons’ and the ‘space of causes’ as that between ‘categories pertaining to man as a person who finds himself confronted by standards (ethical, logical, etc.) [. . .] to which he may or may not conform’, and ‘the idea that man is what science says he is’. This is roughly what Clark and Dudrick also have in mind, as they contend that ‘to describe human beings using the language of agency (as acting, believing, knowing, etc.) is to see them in a network that is not merely causal but normative’ (Clark and Dudrick 2012: 131; see their discussion on pp. 124–​35 and p. 139). 3 The main target of Clark and Dudrick is the strong naturalist reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy defended by Leiter (2002). 4 Similar worries are also raised by Louden (2014), with whose insightful remarks I agree. 5 By commenting on Kant’s famous ‘Preface’ passage, Clark and Dudrick (2012: 76) admit that their reading would be weakened ‘if Nietzsche failed to recognize Kant as thus acknowledging the importance of the will to value’, that is, of a normative sphere irreducible to that of empirical explanations. As I shall try to show in Section 5, Nietzsche’s repeated references to the same passage suggest, rather, that he plainly rejects Kant’s move. 6 Strictly speaking, this description of Kant’s position is false, for he obviously allows for a priori knowledge that is not about empirical objects, like in the case of logics or mathematics, not to mention the a priori knowledge of the transcendental conditions of empirical knowledge itself. I shall qualify Kant’s position later. 7 Salaquarda (1978; 1979) and Stack (1983) are the classical studies on Nietzsche’s debts to Lange. 8 That Lange’s (1887: 829) ‘world of poetry’ constitutes a normative realm is confirmed, for instance, by a passage where he contrasts the ‘world of being’, that is, the empirical world, with the ‘world of values’. 9 Lange (1866: 276) explicitly states that Kant’s appeal to the notion of belief is here of no help: ‘This [critical philosophy –​MR] teaches us that all our knowledge based on the senses and the intellect shows us only one side of the truth. The other ones we cannot see, whether through science, or through belief, or through metaphysics, or through any other means whatsoever’. 10 Beethoven and Raphael are also cited as examples in the first edition of Lange’s History (see Lange 1866: 269). 11 It is fair to say that Nietzsche’s sympathy for Lange’s aestheticist twist on Kant’s original project depended on his previous Schopenhauerianism. This already transpires from Nietzsche’s early reaction to Lange’s book as documented by two letters he sent to his friend Carl von Gersdorff –​the first one at the end of August 1866 (KSB 2.159f.) and the second one on 16 February 1868 (KSB 2.57f). 12 See also note NL1872–​3 19[39], KSA 7.431. 13 See also D 544, KSA 3.314f. 14 On this, see Riccardi (2009: 207–​15).

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References Chignell, A. (2007), ‘Belief in Kant’, Philosophical Review 116 (3): 323–​60. Clark, M., and Dudrick, D. (2012), The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Himmelmann, B. (ed.) (2005), Kant und Nietzsche im Widerstreit, Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Kant, I. ([1781/​1787] 1998), Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Woods, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lange, F. A. (1866), Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, Iserlohn: J. Baedeker. Lange, F. Al. (1887), Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, ed. H. Cohen (Wohlfeile Ausgabe, Zweites Tausend), Iserlohn, Leipzig: J. Baedeker. Leiter, B. (2002), Nietzsche on Morality, London: Routledge. Louden, R. B. (2014), ‘Nietzsche as Kant’s True Heir?’, The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 45 (1): 22–​30. Riccardi, M. (2009), ‘Der Faule Fleck des Kantischen Kriticismus’. Erscheinung und Ding an sich bei Nietzsche, Basel: Schwabe. Salaquarda, J. (1978), ‘Nietzsche und Lange’, Nietzsche-​Studien 7: 236–​60. Salaquarda, J. (1979), ‘Der Standpunkt des Ideals bei Lange und Nietzsche’, Studi tedeschi 22 (1): 133–​60. Sellars, W. (1991a), ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’, in Science, Perception and Reality, 1–​40, Atascadero: Ridgeview. Sellars, W. (1991b), ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, in Science, Perception and Reality, 127–​96, Atascadero: Ridgeview. Stack, G. (1983), Lange and Nietzsche, Berlin, New York: de Gruyter.

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On Teleological Judgement: A Debate between Kant and Nietzsche Beatrix Himmelmann

The problem of teleology was of utmost importance to both Kant and Nietzsche. Teleology is a theory claiming that télē or purposes orient processes of development and evolution. There are questions arising from this assumption: Are there final causes in nature? Are we allowed to extend judgements regarding purpose and meaning beyond the realm of human activity and its products? Even though Kant was dealing with issues of purpose and purposiveness at least since the Critique of Pure Reason, it was not until he had finished his first and second Critiques that he ‘discovered’, as he himself stated, a ‘new kind of a priori principles’ of human reason, namely, ‘purposiveness’ (Zweckmäßigkeit).1 Spelling out this principle in his third Critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgement, Kant aims at completing his project of founding a truly critical philosophy that escapes dogmatism as well as scepticism. Critical philosophy is a requirement of ‘self-​knowledge’, as Kant holds, affirming a Socratic understanding of philosophy (KrV AXI). For Kant, critical philosophy is established by instituting a ‘court of justice’ that allows for the examination of reason’s claims and pretensions ‘according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws’ (KrV AXI–​XII). The principle of purposiveness belongs to them and, moreover, plays a central role within the framework of Kant’s system, since it is supposed to provide for a ‘transition’ (Übergang) between the spheres of freedom and nature. We will be looking into the details of Kant’s argument later on. First and foremost, we have to see and to emphasize that one of the first philosophical topics occupying young Nietzsche was –​the question of teleology and purposiveness in and after Kant! It is well known that he wrote notes on this issue in April and May 1868.2 At that time, he was even planning to write a dissertation on the concept of the organic since Kant (‘der Begriff des Organischen

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seit Kant’).3 Nietzsche’s comments clearly show that he hardly studied original Kantian texts, namely, the Critique of the Power of Judgement. Instead, he was much influenced by interpretations of Kant, for instance, the account of Kantian philosophy Kuno Fischer gives and, particularly, the naturalistic reading –​and criticism –​of Kant offered by Friedrich Albert Lange. Lange’s arguments which he expounded in his History of Materialism and the Critique of Its Present Importance (Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart) set the stage for Nietzsche’s discussion of the question of teleology and purposiveness, not only when he started out thinking about this issue, but also later on when he developed his –​anti-​teleological –​theories of the will to power, of genealogy and eternal recurrence.

1.  Teleology vs. contingency In his most influential book on the History of Materialism, the first edition of which appeared in 1866, Lange criticizes materialistic conceptions for their shortcomings, for instance, their proneness towards concealed metaphysical assumptions (one example is their employment of the concept of ‘Kraft’, force). In this situation, he pleads for a return to Kant’s philosophy properly understood. The picture of Kant presented by Lange differs significantly from the understanding Kant’s early successors favoured. Lange cuts off Kant’s ambitions to establish critical metaphysics. According to Lange, Kant accepted only one kind of cognition: empirical knowledge which Lange classifies as ‘strictly rational’ and takes to entail a naturalistic view of the world.4 It should not come as a surprise, then, that Lange is sceptical towards the idea of teleology and towards several features of Kant’s practical philosophy as well. Since Nietzsche adopted Lange’s approach, so is he. They both embrace the position that Darwin’s theory on the origin of species had opened up only a few years before Lange’s book was published, and they both attack teleological arguments from this angle. Darwin famously deemed the struggle for existence and natural selection decisive for the survival  –​or extinction  –​of species. Both of these theorems seem to pose a serious, if not lethal, challenge to teleological accounts of natural history, a part of which is the genesis of human beings. It has to be considered contingent on Darwinian premises, since it is the result of variation in nature, which is not goal-​directed as is man-​made variation in domestication (in breeding and cultivating). Variation in nature appears to follow a process of

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accidental modification of organisms, which, over the course of time, turns out to be more or less favourable to the preservation of this or that particular organism. Apparently, variation in nature is produced by chance without following any telos, intention or plan. Lange observes along with Darwin that natural selection works on the basis of a tremendous amount of resources at its disposal. He mentions the immense waste of germ cells, thousandfold production of elements perishing in the same breath they emerge and the exercise of trial and error, showing the complete absence of any concern whatsoever with failure. Lange (1866: 403) presents an interesting analogy: Nature proceeds just like a man who, in order to shoot a hare, fires millions of guns or, in order to enter a locked room, buys ten thousand keys and tries them all out. The conclusion Lange draws and Nietzsche repeats is this: There is no purposiveness in nature as there is only blind chance (blindester Zufall) (402). Of course, among the infinite instances of natural events there will also be those that we consider purposive or favourable. What can be regarded purposive, Lange says, is but a special case amid an ocean of nothing more than birth and destruction, balancing each other.5 Nietzsche sums up: ‘The purposive is the exceptional case. The purposive is a result of chance. It reveals complete unreason.’6 But for both Nietzsche and Lange, placing emphasis on the accidental character of the purposive does not imply the claim that universal laws of nature might have ceased to be in force (404). Not at all! Nietzsche responds to this kind of misunderstanding by presenting an argument that is well known from Spinoza’s work: ‘We ascribe to chance those effects whose connection to their causes we do not see.’7 Kant, however, contended in Nietzsche’s view that there is a ‘compulsion’ (Nöthigung) to think of organisms (Naturkörper) according to concepts of purpose. But, Nietzsche objects, even if we allow for the method of arguing by analogy with human understanding –​and it is us who are aware of purposes because of our idea of human agency  –​we might just as well refer to what we have learned about the formation of so-​called purposive constellations from lucky coincidence. That is, we might refer to happy coincidences of talent and fortune, lucky lottery results and so on. From this Nietzsche, together with Lange, infers that the necessity of assuming purposiveness, allegedly supported by Kant, is hardly correct and still less at the present stage of the debate, informed as it is by Darwin’s discoveries.8 At least since Darwin, it seems clear that we should replace a teleological explanation of the purposive phenomena we encounter with a naturalistic picture, acknowledging that these phenomena emerge in a way which has

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to be seen as intrinsically pointless and meaningless. If there is something we deem beautiful and good, it is not something aimed at but something that has come to light by accident, by a stroke of luck (cf. Lange 1866:  402). Its genesis suggests that it might disperse as haphazardly as it was produced. There is a note Nietzsche wrote in 1872/​73, which reads: ‘The dreadful consequence of Darwinism, which, after all, I  believe is true. All our veneration concerns qualities which we hold to be eternal: moral, artistic, religious etc.’9 Nietzsche is afraid that they are, in fact, not everlasting but might undergo change and variation. This is one of the reasons why he thinks we have to conceive of philosophy as a historical discipline; in Human, All Too Human, he explains his view in some detail: Now, everything essential in human development occurred in primeval times, long before those four thousand years with which we are more or less familiar. Man probably hasn’t changed much more in these years. But the philosopher sees ‘instincts’ in present-​day man, and assumes that they belong to the unchangeable facts of human nature, that they can, to that extent, provide a key to the understanding of the world in general. This entire teleology is predicated on the ability to speak about man of the last four thousand years as if he were eternal, being the natural direction of all things from the beginning. But everything has evolved; there are no eternal facts, nor are there any absolute truths. –​ Thus historical philosophizing is necessary henceforth, and the virtue of modesty as well. (MA 2, KSA 2.24f.)

Nietzsche’s speculations on the ‘future of man’10 and his call for living a life open to trial and experiment11 also belong in this context of historical philosophizing, informed and inspired by Darwin’s theory. But is it really inevitable that we have to bid farewell to the idea of teleology in the aftermath of Darwin?

2.  Purposiveness and self-​design To begin with, I would like to point out that teleological language is quite alive in modern biology. Biologists speak of the functions of biological traits or genetic programmes that control biological processes. They ask what a particular trait is for, or what purpose it has for the functioning of the organism as a whole (cf. Breitenbach 2009: 31). The mere fact that teleological vocabulary is still to be found in life sciences suggests that teleology’s explanatory power has not yet run out.

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For Kant, this kind of evidence would not come as a surprise. In science as well as everyday life we undoubtedly work with the notion of organic in contrast to inorganic being, thus discriminating between the two of them. Kant argues that we would not be able to understand the concept of an organism without explaining the interplay of its parts and the goal-​directed movements of the whole organization in terms of purposive interaction (KU 372–​6). Organisms are products of nature whose parts are thought of ‘as existing for the sake of the others and on account of the whole’ (KU 373). Yet Kant is exceedingly careful and conscientious when he delineates the epistemic status of teleological judgements. They are not to be regarded as determining judgements, resting on our capacity to subsume given instances under universal theoretical concepts of the understanding or universal practical concepts of reason. They have to be regarded as reflective judgements, assessing the particular according to the specific principle of the power of judgement, purposiveness, and thus only ‘with respect to itself ’.12 Therefore, Kant does not speak of ‘autonomy’ in this case but of ‘heautonomy’, legislation that does not prescribe laws to nature or freedom, but to the power of judgement ‘itself for reflection on nature’ (KU 185–​6). In sum, it can be said: The purposiveness of nature is thus a special a priori concept that has its origin strictly in the reflective power of judgement. For we cannot ascribe to the products of nature anything like a relation of nature in them to ends, but can only use this concept in order to reflect on the connection of appearances in nature that are given in accordance with empirical laws. This concept is also entirely distinct from that of practical purposiveness (of human art as well as of morals), although it is certainly conceived of in terms of an analogy with that. (KU 181)

We have to see now in what way Kant includes us, human beings who are part of nature and know about purposes, in the picture of nature set out in his third Critique. He distinguishes between ‘internal purposiveness’, the principle guiding our reflection on any individual living thing or organism, and ‘external purposiveness’, the principle guiding our reflection on their relations towards each other (KU §63 366f.). Obviously, all living things are connected and interrelated –​serving each other as sources of nourishment, providing a favourable habitat for each other and so on. Moreover, humans are clearly integrated into these correlations. What is special about them as a species and might –​in this respect –​distinguish them from all other species of which we know is a feature that is most thoroughly portrayed in Kant’s Anthropology. In this book, published in 1798 and presenting a mature version of the lectures on anthropology he gave at the

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University of Königsberg, Kant deals with ‘the human being according to his species as an earthly being endowed with reason’ (Anth 119). The concluding chapter of the book discusses ‘the character of the (human) species’ (Anth 321–​33). Humans are, formally speaking, ‘terrestrial rational beings’. We cannot determine their character by comparing them to other rational beings, since we do not know of any apart from us. But we can say, Kant argues, and nothing else remains to us ‘in order to assign the human being his class in the system of animate nature’, that ‘he has a character, which he himself creates’ (Anth 321). In what sense does he or she do so? The human being is able to set himself ends. Hence, he is capable of creating a character for himself –​‘according to ends that he himself adopts’ (Anth 321). It is due to his endowment with practical reason that this possibility is open to him. Evolution13 has created him as an animal, but as an animal rationabile, and Kant himself translates: ‘an animal endowed with the capacity of reason’ (Anth 321). To this animal, not only do opportunities of self-​organization present themselves, a trait it shares with all the other organisms (cf. KU 374), but also the option of self-​design. Because of this peculiarity, no less a figure than Darwin ([1871] 2004: 170) stated: Human ‘civilization thus checks in many ways the action of natural selection’. The second protagonist of evolutionary theory beside him, Alfred Russel Wallace, declared with respect to the special position of the human being: ‘Man has [. . .] escaped “natural selection” ’ (Wallace 1864: clxviii).

3.  On the meaning of human existence The prospect  –​or even necessity  –​of human self-​design is certainly an idea that appealed to Nietzsche as well. His thoughts on the ‘future of man’ and his praise of individuals who gamble their lives through experiment and temptation have already been mentioned. As we will see, Kant gives a clear outline of what it means to develop from an animal rationabile towards an animal rationale, an educated and cultivated rational animal. Nietzsche, on the other hand, shies away from any fixation:  any purpose by which we should abide or any destination (Bestimmung). He relies on the creative potential of the will to power instead. Kant puts his faith in reason and its inherent end or purpose. Nature is perceived as supportive of reason’s purpose. Not least because of this link we are justified, on Kant’s view, in reflecting on nature as something purposive in itself and in relation to us.

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Before we analyze Kant’s ideas more closely, let’s consider one objection that may be raised at this point. We might ask: If we affirm purposiveness of nature, how shall we come to terms with what Darwin calls ‘struggle for existence’, or ‘struggle for life’ or, generally speaking, ‘the great and complex battle of life’?14 In his notes on teleology, Nietzsche rightly observes that it is only ‘viability’ (Existenzfähigkeit) that could be regarded as purposive according to the standards of evolutionary theory. His comment is: ‘That does not say anything about the degree of reason exhibited.’15 Kant, too, addresses this problem.16 Within species and between all of them we certainly see this struggle, this grand battle at any time, involving a great deal of destruction, suffering and annihilation. Moreover, the distinguishing mark of the human species in particular might be its extraordinary destructiveness.17 Nature and life will go on, at least for quite a while, despite those tendencies –​but in a way that can count as purposive? What looks like a fatal objection, though, will turn out to be a prerequisite for Kant’s argument. ‘Discord’ (Zwietracht) at all levels with which nature has imbued man at least as amply as other animals is, in Kant’s view, to be regarded as her means to enforce the establishment of concord through reason (Anth 322). Human beings, perhaps in contrast to all the other animals, are able to realize that life involves ‘great and complex battle’ and to take a stance towards this fact in some way or other. Their rationality allows them to be aware of the conditions of life. Another disposition that might be unique, the gift of freedom, allows the issue of conflict to be dealt with in a fashion that is appropriate to human self-​ understanding. There is a lucid passage from Kant’s Lectures on Ethics, where he spells out the idea of freedom: Freedom is a part of the capacity which gives all others their infinite usefulness, it is the highest degree of life, it is the property that is a necessary condition at the basis of all perfections. [. . .] If all creatures had a faculty of choice such that it is bound to sensuous drives [solche an sinnlichen Trieben gebundene Willkühr], the world would have no value; the inner value of the world, the summum bonum, is the freedom to act in accordance with a faculty of choice that is not necessitated. Freedom is therefore the inner value of the world. (V-​Mo/​Mron 1482)

Notably, purposiveness turns out to be linked to the inner value of the world, freedom. While recognizing that conflict is fruitful and, in fact, indispensable to nature’s and culture’s flourishing by providing necessary incentives, Kant holds that humans ought to pursue their possibly discordant ambitions according to the form freedom requires and, finally, cannot do otherwise. If freedom is a

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property at least humans share, a capacity of choice that is not necessitated and, for this reason, bestows value on choice as well as its bearer, it is against humanity and against ‘the inner value of the world’ to hinder or harm or destroy the use of this faculty. Yet it will be hindered, harmed or destroyed if any exercise of individual freedom is not restricted in such a way that it can coexist with any other. This is only possible if there are laws regulating the use of freedom. Kant argues that there are such laws –​being, in fact, nothing apart from freedom but the form freedom calls for if it is to be preserved. Kant discriminates between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ legislation, between right and morality –​a distinction I won’t be able to discuss here. What is important is that the purpose of reason is to cultivate and civilize human struggle for life according to laws of freedom, thereby opening up the scope for aesthetic and contemplative attitudes towards the world, such as science, art, religion and so on, of which, as far as we know, no other animal is capable. In Kant’s view, nature is supportive of this end, particularly by providing man with the ambivalent and even contradictory trait of ‘unsocial sociability’ (ungesellige Geselligkeit) (IaG 20), thus compelling him to cope with this disruptive tension by means of the only natural weapon he possesses: reason (cf. Anth 322). Kant is confident that the ‘education of the human race, taking its species as a whole’ (die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts im Ganzen ihrer Gattung) (Anth 328) will be successful –​in spite of horrible setbacks which remain possible at any time. Nietzsche arrives at completely different conclusions. He takes up the issue of teleology in his mature writings after having initially discussed it against the background of Darwin’s theory of evolution, informed by Lange’s account. Later he develops a rather critical position towards Darwin (cf. Ansell-​ Pearson 1997; Moore 2009). He is sceptical of the view that self-​preservation is the goal of life. But so is Kant, as far as the self-​preservation of man as a natural being is concerned. The vocation of the human being (die Bestimmung des Menschen) is purely practical, argues Kant, and what is at stake is the cultivation of the exercise of human freedom.18 Nietzsche, however, does not put value on freedom and what might follow from its appropriate use, as Kant does –​or if so, in a quite different sense (cf. Siemens 2009; Acampora 2015). Accepting and affirming conflict as a means of flourishing, Nietzsche is rather concerned about restrictions that limit freedom, such as ‘states of legality’ (Rechtszustände) which, in his view, might hinder the ‘true will of life’ (eigentlicher Lebenswille).19 To be sure, he highlights the need for discipline (Zucht), mastery (Herrrschaft, Können) and self-​mastery (Selbstbeherrschung), virtues that help to confine and shape freedom (cf. Siemens 2009, 444–​51).

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Yet, Nietzsche certainly does not share Kant’s view (cf. IaG 22) according to which ‘the greatest freedom’ realized in a society, freedom that allows for a ‘thoroughgoing antagonism’ (einen durchgängigen Antagonismus) between the members of a society, needs to be accompanied by ‘the most precise determination and security of the boundaries of this freedom’ in the guise of universally binding laws of right. Far from agreeing with Kant on this point and seeing the institution of ‘a perfectly just civil constitution’ as ‘the supreme problem’ (die höchste Aufgabe) the human species has to solve (IaG 22), Nietzsche holds that laws, just like certain ways of understanding moral obligation, can prevent humans’ most active forces from being productive.20 Influenced by the work of Wilhelm Roux (cf. Roux 1881; cf. Müller-​Lauter 1999), Nietzsche emphasizes the significance of ‘formative forces’, creative forces, which shape an organism from within, and thus actively, as compared to the importance of ‘exogenous influences’, which give rise to an organism’s accomplishments merely re-​actively. It seems to Nietzsche that the latter were much overestimated by Darwin and Darwinism.21 It is the active ‘formative forces’ that Nietzsche perceives as the power source, driving forward not only biological processes but processes of evolution in general. These processes are and ought not to be guided by any predetermined purpose. As Nietzsche puts it in the second essay of his Genealogy of Morality: There is no more important proposition for all kinds of historical research than that which we arrive at only with great effort but which we really should reach, –​ namely, that the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends [ein System von Zwecken], are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering [Überwältigen], dominating [Herrwerden], and in their turn, overpowering and domination consist of re-​interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ [‘Sinn’ und ‘Zweck’] must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated. (GM II 12, KSA 5.313–​14)

If there were any purpose in toto that Nietzsche might accept, it definitely would not be the survival of the fittest herds, which, Nietzsche thinks, Darwin’s theory suggests. It would be the appearance of strong, interesting, very special and lavishly gifted individuals, the higher types which squander themselves and their affluence, revealing the potential of nature and of life.22 Their emergence

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is as unpredictable as it is rare and precious. It certainly does not fit in with any teleological scenario. There is no predetermined ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ of human existence according to Nietzsche. On the contrary:  Meaning and purpose may be bestowed upon human life when and if ‘the plant “man” [die Pflanze “Mensch”] has [. . .] grown [. . .] to a height’ (in die Höhe gewachsen ist) (JGB 44, KSA 5.61), thereby showing in an exemplary manner the possibilities inherent to human life. Unless specific conditions are in place, this kind of development will be unattainable though. In Nietzsche’s view, the struggle for life must not be structured and mitigated by laws, rules or institutions, in short: by any superordinate patterns. The late Nietzsche, however, sets out to complement this approach; he introduces and discusses the idea of strict obedience to a given set of laws such as the Hindu Law of Manu (cf. AC 57, KSA 6.241ff.). The objective is to aspire to ‘the highest art of life’ (die höchste Kunst des Lebens) by preventing ‘the continuation of the fluid state of values, the examining, selecting, practising of the criticism of values in infinitum’ (die Fortdauer des flüssigen Zustands der Werthe, das Prüfen, Wählen, Kritik-​Üben der Werthe in infinitum). Instead, the Manu Law summarizes and codifies, according to Nietzsche, ‘the experience, wisdom, and experiments in morality’ of many centuries, thus bringing things to a close (es schliesst ab) and contributing to the refinement of human life in this way.23 At all times, though, Nietzsche inveighs against the assignment of ‘equal rights’ (Gleichheit der Rechte) to human beings; instead, he insists on acknowledging their multifaceted differences and admitting a corresponding ‘order of rank’ (Rangordnung) for rights and values.24 Recognizing the conditions that might give rise to ‘the higher type of man’ (der höheren Art von Menschen), in contrast to those nourishing ‘the common man’ (de[n]‌gemeinen Mann) (JGB 30, KSA 5.48), requires understanding that there cannot be any enhancement of ‘the species “human” ’ (JGB 44, KSA 5.62) without the appreciation of what Nietzsche calls the ‘pathos of distance’ (Pathos der Distanz).25 What is at stake is an enhancement entirely different from the idea of ‘the universal, green pasture happiness of the herd, with security, safety, contentment, and an easier life for all’ (JGB 44, KSA 5.61). For Nietzsche, the meaning and purpose of human existence is not, as it had been for Kant, a question to be solved by the species as a whole, but an issue to be finally settled by the courage, confidence, talent, imagination, perseverance, luck and solitude of truly great individuals. Contingency, which he thinks the strongest individuals are strong enough to accept after all,26 being able to comply with and gain from any course of things, contingency and not teleology, offering

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false promise, comfort and ease, is the framework that Nietzsche, unlike Kant, prefers for reflecting on the ‘last things’.

Notes I’d like to thank the editors of this volume for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of my chapter. 1 Cf. Kant’s letter to Carl Leonard Reinhold of 28 and 31 December 1787 (Br 10: 514). 2 NL 1868 62[1]‌–​[58], KGW I/​4.548–​78. 3 Cf. the letters Nietzsche wrote to Paul Deussen (end of April/​beginning of May 1868) and to Erwin Rohde (3./​4. May 1868), KSB 2.269f., 274. 4 Cf. Lange (1866): V: ‘Wohl aber ist sicher, dass Kant nur eine einzige Art der Erkenntnis gelten liess, die empirische und streng verstandesmässige, welche zu einer durchaus naturalistischen Weltauffassung führt.’ 5 Lange (1866: 404–​405). Cf. Nietzsche, NL 1868 62[3]‌, KGW I/​4.549. 6 NL 1868 62[5]‌, KGW I/​4.550: ‘Das Zweckmäßige ist der Ausnahmefall. Das Zweckmäßige ist zufällig. Es offenbart sich darin völlige Unvernunft.’ 7 NL 1868 62[19], KGW I/​4.555: ‘Wir schreiben dem Zufall die Wirkungen zu, deren Verknüpfungen mit den Ursachen wir nicht sehen.’ Cf. Spinoza ([1677] 2002): 238–​43 (= Part I, Appendix). 8 NL 1868 62[3]‌, KGW I/​4.549. 9 NL 1872–​3 19[132], KSA 7.461: ‘Die entsetzliche Consequenz des Darwinismus, den ich übrigens für wahr halte. Alle unsre Verehrung bezieht sich auf Qualitäten, die wir für ewig halten: moralisch, künstlerisch, religiös usw.’ 10 Cf., for instance, GM II 11, KSA 5.312–​13. 11 Cf. FW 324, KSA 3.552f.; NL 1883 7[261], KSA 10.321: ‘Experiment als wirklicher Charakter unseres Lebens und jeder Moral: etwas Willkürliches muß daran sein!’ 12 KU 169. For the whole argument, cf. KU 179–​81. 13 For an interpretation of Kant’s concept of evolution, cf. Roth (2008): 276–​81. 14 Cf. Darwin ([1859] 2008: 49–​51, 63). 15 NL 1868 62[43], KGW I/​4.566: ‘Nichts ist damit ausgesagt über den Grad der darin offenbarten Vernunft.’ 16 Cf. KU §82 427–​8. 17 Cf. IaG 17–​18. 18 Cf. KpV 146–​8; KU 261f.; KrV A840/​B868. 19 GM II 11, KSA 5.312–​13. 20 For a critical investigation into Nietzsche’s account, cf. Himmelmann (2014).

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21 Cf. NL 1886–​7 7[25], KSA 12.304: ‘–​der Einfluß der “äußeren Umstände” ist bei Darwin ins Unsinnige überschätzt; das Wesentliche am Lebensprozeß ist gerade die ungeheure gestaltende, von Innen her formschaffende Gewalt, welche die “äußeren Umstände” ausnützt, ausbeutet.. . .’ 22 Nietzsche’s focus on the evolution of the individual is also emphasized by Gregory Moore (2009, 523–​9), who provides plenty of textual evidence. 23 For a critical discussion of Nietzsche’s suggestions regarding great legislation and great legislators, including Zarathustra, cf. Sommer (2015: 262–​4). 24 JGB 44, KSA 5.61f.; cf. JGB 30, KSA 5.48 et passim; cf. also AC 57, KSA 6.243. 25 Cf. GM I 2, KSA 5.259; JGB 257, KSA 5.205; AC 43, KSA 6.218 et passim. 26 Cf. NL 1887 N 5[71] (= Der europäische Nihilismus), KSA 12.212; cf. GD Streifzüge 49, KSA 6.152.

References Acampora, Ch. D. (2015), ‘Being Unattached: Freedom and Nietzsche’s Free Spirits’, in R. Bamford, Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, 189–​206, London: Rowman & Littlefield. Ansell-​Pearson, K. (1997), ‘Nietzsche contra Darwin’, in K. Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition, 85–​122, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Breitenbach, A. (2009), ‘Teleology in Biology: A Kantian Perspective’, Teleology. Kant Yearbook 1: 31–​56. Darwin, Ch. ([1859] 2008), On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, rev. ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press. Darwin, Ch. ([1871] 2004), The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, London: Penguin. Himmelmann, B. (2014), ‘Nietzsches Philosophie der Macht als Philosophie der Endlichkeit’, in S. Dietzsch and C. Terne, Nietzsches Perspektiven, 15–​30, Berlin/​ Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Lange, F. A. (1866), Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, Iserlohn: J. Baedeker. Moore, G. (2009), ‘Nietzsche and Evolutionary Theory’, in K. Ansell-​Pearson, A Companion to Nietzsche, 517–​31, Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-​Blackwell. Müller-​Lauter, W. (1999), ‘Der Organismus als innerer Kampf. Der Einfluß von Wilhelm Roux auf Friedrich Nietzsche’, in W. Müller-​Lauter, Über Werden und Wille zur Macht. Nietzsche-​Interpretationen I, 97–​140, Berlin/​New York: Walter de Gruyter.

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Roth, S. (2008), ‘Kant und die Biologie seiner Zeit’, in O. Höffe, Immanuel Kant: Kritik der Urteilskraft (Klassiker Auslegen), 275–​87, Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Roux, W. (1881), Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus. Ein Beitrag zur Vervollständigung der mechanischen Zweckmäßigkeitslehre. Leipzig: W. Engelmann. Siemens, H. (2009), ‘Nietzsche contra Liberalism on Freedom’, in K. Ansell-​Pearson, A Companion to Nietzsche, 437–​54, Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-​Blackwell. Sommer, A. U. (2015), ‘Is There a Free Spirit in Nietzsche’s Late Writings?’, in R. Bamford, Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, 253–​65, London: Rowman & Littlefield. Spinoza, B. ([1677] 2002), ‘Ethics’, trans. S. Shirley, in M. L. Morgan (ed.), Spinoza: Complete Works, 213–​404, Indianapolis/​Cambridge: Hackett. Wallace, A. R. (1864), ‘The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of “Natural Selection”’, in Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 2: clviii–​clxx [followed by an account of related discussion on pp. clxx–​clxxxvii].

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‘Resolute Reversals’: Kant’s and Nietzsche’s Orienting Decisions Concerning the Distinction between Reason and Nature Werner Stegmaier

1.  Nietzsche’s esteem of Kant for his ‘resolute’ critical ‘reversal’ of the distinction between reason and nature Nietzsche’s most noteworthy evaluation of Kant comes from the third treatise of On the Genealogy of Morality, not from the part regarding the philosophers (§§ 6–​10), but from the part regarding the priests (§§ 11–​22). Since the priests were far more successful in asserting their distinctions, Nietzsche takes them far more seriously. But philosophers become priests at the moment when their distinctions are believed in and when their distinctions become so self-​evident that they appear to be predetermined and not undertaken. In § 12 of GM III, Nietzsche thanks Kant for his ‘resolute reversals’. In the preceding section, he dealt with the Indian ‘ascetic priests’ and their ‘evaluation of our life’ (GM III 11, KSA 5.362). He takes this theme further in GM III 12 and turns his attention entirely to Kant’s distinctions and his guiding concept of reason. The wellknown text of GM III 12, which we are going to interpret here, does not need to be quoted extensively. In a way that was decisive for European philosophy, Parmenides set out the concept of reason (noeîn, noûs) in such a way that it was to secure a single truth for everyone, the truth of being (eînai, ousía), against the perspectivism of the senses, in which everything always appears to be different to everyone. On this basis, Plato and Aristotle constructed the metaphysics and logic that were to dominate European philosophical thinking for millennia, as a constant opposition to the sensuousness and temporality of reality. When Kant in his KrV had this concept of reason exclude itself from the realm of the truth of being, as

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he did, he drove it into self-​contradiction. At the same time, however, he created with the self-​limitation of reason a willingness (in Nietzsche‘s words) to ‘see differently, to want to see differently’ and, along with it, a new flexibility of the spirit that Hegel then made into method with his dialectical ‘movement of the concept’. But Hegel thereby prepared the way for evolutionary thinking, albeit unintentionally, for which Nietzsche appreciated him (‘without Hegel no Darwin’, FW 357; Stegmaier (1987, 1990, 1997a)). Perspectival and evolutionary thinking then enabled Nietzsche to conceive of ‘objectivity’ in a new way. Thus Nietzsche ascribes the decisive reorientation to Kant’s ‘resolute reversals of accustomed perspectives and valuations’. According to Kant, reason can no longer simply exclude sensuousness; for the senses ‘affect’ reason (affizieren), constantly unsettle it, irritate, fascinate and drive it each time in their direction. An unrestrained and unmastered nature speaks through them, against which reason must make an intense effort to remain ‘pure’, in order to hold on to a stable and universally valid lawfulness of nature. According to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche’s most important philosophical teacher, reason is nonetheless driven on by the affects qua blind will, and for this reason Schopenhauer, still in debt to the Parmenidean tradition of European philosophy, wanted to ‘eliminate’ this will and find respite from it in art. Nietzsche resolutely reversed also Schopenhauer’s evaluation. He did not want to redeem reason from nature, but on the contrary to embed it as deeply as possible in nature, to ‘naturalize’ (vernatürlichen) it (FW 109, KSA 3.469). He thought of nature as radically lawless, as that in which ‘laws are lacking absolutely’ (JGB 22, KSA 5.37), as conceptually undefinable and capable only of symbolic designation as wills to power, which are constantly affecting each other (JGB 36, KSA 5.55). Despite the radical shift in meaning, Nietzsche held on to the concept of reason and its distinction from nature, giving them a plausible, easily accessible meaning. Unlike Kant, who in this respect has remained up till now an example, Nietzsche did not accomplish this by means of sharp and consistent definitions. Rather, it was by way of a new kind of perspectivism that he developed in a long chain of aphorisms running across his work, an ever richer and more manifold, and, as it is called today, ‘thick’ description of it (Geertz 1973) in ever new contexts (Stegmaier 2012: 86), without ever unifying it in a synoptic or at all systematic manner.1 While Kant reoriented the distinction between reason and nature, Nietzsche thought of reason itself as a comprehensive faculty of reorientation in a nature in which orientation is the only possibility. Both share the philosophical premise that human orientation has reality, however it may be constituted in itself, only in distinctions of its orientation, distinctions for which it however

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can decide, as Kant first showed and then Nietzsche did in a radicalized form. In this respect, Nietzsche’s philosophy is to be understood as a ‘radicalization of Kantianism’ (Ottmann 2000: 411).

2.  Kant’s orienting technique for making distinctions in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason In GM III 12, Nietzsche clearly alludes to the Preface of the second edition of the KrV, in which Kant tries once more to clarify the sense of his critical undertaking by comparing it to Copernicus’s ‘revolution of the way of thinking’ in the ‘explanation of celestial motion’.2 With the sentence, ‘ “intelligible character” means for Kant a way in which things are constituted of which the intellect comprehends just this much, that for the intellect it is –​completely incomprehensible’, Nietzsche is visibly targeting Kant’s hypothesis that reason is determined to grasp ‘the unconditioned’, but ‘not of things insofar as we do not know them, as things [Sachen] in themselves’ (KrV Vorrede B XX). Since things are given only perspectivally through our perception, ‘things in themselves’ are an unknowable X for reason. Nietzsche, who as we know had not read much of Kant, but who set about ‘making out of every U an X, [. . .] a real, proper X’ (FW Vorrede 3, KSA 3.350; Stegmaier 1999), was familiar with the Preface to the second edition of the KrV at least in parts, be it second-​ hand or through his own reading (Brobjer 2008: 36–​39, 129). In any case, he cited the (very popular) passage multiple times: ‘I had to deny knowledge [Wissen aufheben] in order to make room for faith’ (KrV Vorrede B XXX), even if only this passage.3 Here Kant is no longer concerned with things themselves, but with the way in which they are distinguished.4 In what follows, we will read the much studied text, especially its first half regarding ‘speculative reason,’ from Nietzsche’s perspective and with an eye on Kant’s technique for making distinctions. From the beginning, Kant is concerned with ‘discovering’ the right ‘path’ for the business of reason (‘Vernunftgeschäft’: KrV Vorrede B VII), that is, with an orientation of reason, after what he takes to be centuries of disorientation. Given the ‘endless controversies’ of metaphysics (KrV Vorrede A VIII), the only way left is ‘revolution’, ‘change’ (Umänderung), a ‘changed method’, in short: a ‘changed way of thinking’ (Veränderung der Denkart) (KrV Vorrede B XII, XVI, XVIII, XIX). Accordingly, ‘ways of thinking’ are paths on which one can ‘turn around’ or ‘reverse’ (umdrehen, umkehren) or reorient oneself in thought. They differ, not according to their logic, the ‘formal rules for all thought’ (KrV Vorrede B Xf.), but in their direction or precisely in the orientation of their distinctions. The

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language of direction (des (Sich-​) Ausrichtens, (Sich-​) Richtens nach etwas) –​ one that Kant uses continuously in his text –​is foundational for the language of orientation (Stegmaier 2008: 191–​4). It thus makes a difference in which direction a distinction is used, in this case, if reason is understood from nature or nature from reason. Nietzsche calls this a reversal (Umkehrung) of ‘perspective’, but also of ‘evaluation’ (Werthung): The side of the distinction, from which the other side is understood, can be valued higher. This applies not only to reason over and against nature, but, for instance, also to the truth over and against untruth, morality over and against immorality, beauty over and against ugliness, determinacy over and against indeterminacy, the unconditioned over and against the conditioned, certainty over and against uncertainty and so on. Kant avails himself of theses orientating ‘perspectives and evaluations’ in making distinctions for the sake of his ‘reversals’ or ‘revolutions.’ Traditionally as well as in everyday language, reason has been understood on the basis of nature, as part of human nature. As part of nature, it is assumed that reason perceives and recognizes nature as it is given in itself. The so-​called natural attitude continuously reinforces this supposition. Here, the distinction between reason and nature still is reversible: nature leads to reason, reason leads to nature. Kant’s ‘revolution’ or ‘reversal’ reverses this and makes the distinction irreversible. His way of thinking about knowledge is such that reason does not read off the laws from nature, but rather dictates them to it (Prol § 36); going counter to appearances (‘Augenschein’), Kant calls it a ‘a manner that is counter-​ intuitive [widersinnisch], but true’ (KrV Vorrede B XXII Fn). This makes sense if like Kant one starts out from the view that nature, as it appears and as has been reinforced ever more by modern natural science, is fully regulated by laws, laws that in their universal and timeless validity are not given to individual and temporal perception, but can only be thought ‘purely’ by a ‘pure’ reason. Thus, if there are to be laws of nature at all, the counter-​intuitive claim (Widersinn) must be taken on that reason ‘dictates’ (vorschreibt) its laws to nature. In terms of the technique of distinction, reason must be removed from nature, if lawfulness is to be thought, and it must be assumed counter-​intuitively that ‘the objects must conform [sich richten] to our knowledge’, ‘before they are given to us’ (KrV Vorrede B XVI). One must orient oneself differently. That one can orient oneself in this way has until today been shown in the most trenchant and plausible manner by the example of Copernicus, according to whom ‘the observed movements are to be sought not in the heavenly bodies, but in their observer’ (KrV Vorrede B XXII Fn). With Thales in mind, Kant introduces the concept of construction. For Kant, Thales already recognized in

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antiquity that in geometry he ‘had to bring out what was necessarily implied in the concepts that he himself had formed a priori and had put into the figure through construction [durch Konstruktion], not that which he saw in the figure, or what he could discern in the bare concept of it, so as to read off its properties, so to speak’ (KrV Vorrede B XII). Though Kant himself reserves the concept of construction for mathematics (KrV A713/​B741), the twentieth-​century concept of constructivism was derived from it, in the general sense that ‘reason has insight only in that which it produces itself after a plan [Entwurf] of its own’ (KrV Vorrede B XIII). According to Kant, this becomes clear not only in the triumph of modern experimental natural sciences but also in the judiciary, when the judge ‘compels witnesses to answer those questions that he puts to them’ (KrV Vorrede B XIII). At the same time however, the judicial interrogation of witnesses shows that the constructivist way of thinking, as a reversal (Umkehrung) of the natural attitude, deepens the possibilities of knowledge, but also limits them. For with this way of thinking, one remains limited to the questions that one can raise from one’s own position: one remains captive to one’s perspective. Like a witness at court, nature cannot say anything about which she was not asked. Access to nature thereby becomes itself contingent  –​the interrogation of nature could always have run otherwise. So Kant himself designates his ‘revolution of the way of thinking’ as an ‘Einfall’ (KrV Vorrede B XIV), that is, as a contingent thought. Yet such ideas are not arbitrary. As in the case of Copernicus, they are evaluated according to whether they allow one to orient oneself better in thinking. That is to say, distinctions are not or not only made with regard to what appears to be given, but at least also with regard to their power of orientation. In this way and only in this way, can reason ‘learn’ something from nature (‘to seek in [nature], not fictitiously ascribe to it, what it must learn from it [nature], according to what reason itself puts in nature, and of which it could know nothing for itself ’, KrV Vorrede B XIV); not, however, about nature, as it might be in itself, but about reason’s own orientation about nature and in nature. The freely chosen, constructed or chanced-​ upon distinctions are tested in view of whether they disclose more of nature for orientation than others, even if nature as a whole remains unknown. It is for this purpose, Kant writes, that concepts are set up (‘eingerichtet’, KrV Vorrede B XVIII Fn); one experiments with them until the ‘corresponding objects given in experience are commensurate with them [the a priori concepts –​WS]’ (KrV Vorrede B XVIII), so that both fit together. Orientation proceeds experimentally. For this commensurability or fit, Kant himself appeals to an ‘experiment’ –​ namely, whether there is no conflict (‘Widerstreit’) of perspectives on the

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concepts of reason under the ‘twofold point of view’ (doppelten Gesichtspunkt), that is, the point of view on themselves on the one hand, and the point of view on their disclosive power for experience on the other. If there is no conflict, ‘the experiment decides in favour of the correctness of that distinction’ (KrV Vorrede B XIX Fn). The Copernican Turn is an orientation-​experiment in the making of distinctions: the correctness (‘Richtigkeit’) of distinctions lies in their appropriateness for a sufficiently successful orientation. It is the business of reason, in turn, to decide on this correctness, and precisely this is its ‘critique’, literally the distinction (Unterscheidung) between reason itself and nature, as well as its decision (Entscheidung) concerning the appropriateness of this distinction (krinêin = to distinguish, to decide, to select, to judge). According to Kant, the experiment succeeds as desired (‘nach Wunsch’, KrV Vorrede B XIX): by means of these decisions of orientation, reason is able to preserve its unconditioned character free of contradiction (KrV Vorrede B XXI Fn). It orients itself in line with itself (Stegmaier 2016, chapter III). However, to this end its distinctions need to be conceived as ‘made’, constructed, since otherwise reason would have no scope for its decisions of orientation. Despite all the critique, all the polemic and all the ridicule of Kant’s philosophy that Nietzsche expressed in his late writings, he decidedly followed Kant’s ‘resolute reversals’ and took them further in his own way, without investigating further the architecture of Kant’s distinctions. What he learned from Kant was his new technique in making distinctions, the method of orienting and reorienting distinctions, so as to orient reason in line with itself. In general, Nietzsche no longer treated distinctions as distinctions of what is given, but rather as distinctions by means of which we first distinguish and decide what there is; as distinctions that could always be otherwise, that could always be made and oriented otherwise. It is in this way that his ‘transvaluation’ of ‘values’ first became possible. For their part, distinctions are then not in themselves given, not matters of fact, but instead they are actions, operations that are undertaken in changing situations for the sake of changing purposes. That in turn is how Kant understood them, namely, as ‘synthesis’ or formation following ‘forms’ (Formung nach ‘Formen’).

3.  Kant’s persistent uncritical presuppositions Kant also had a very critical awareness regarding his own ‘critical enterprise’ (KU 170). He presented his revolution of the way of thinking ‘only as a hypothesis’ (KrV Vorrede B XXII Fn) and designated the KrV as a whole as ‘a treatise

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on method, not a system of science itself ’ (KrV Vorrede B XXII). From the viewpoint of Nietzsche’s further reversals, as we know, Kant nevertheless held fast uncritically to presuppositions at key points in his writings, which Nietzsche then dismissed. For the distinction between reason and nature the following points are decisive: 1. The auto-​presupposition of reason: If reason constructs its concepts by itself, this goes also for its concept of itself. Reason can, then, no longer presuppose that it is given as such. Insofar as that which is real (wirklich) must also be given sensuously, yet reason itself cannot be given sensuously, it follows, according to the criteria of the KrV, that reason itself is not real. Yet Kant never puts the existence of pure reason seriously in question in the KrV. It is only for practical philosophy that he raises the question. But in the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten Kant writes: ‘Now, a human being really finds in himself a capacity by which he distinguishes himself from all other things, even from himself insofar as he is affected by objects, and that is reason’ (GMS 452). From the viewpoint of the ‘distinction of a world of the senses [Sinnenwelt] from a world of understanding [Verstandeswelt]’, reason can be found in the latter, in the ‘intellectual world [intellektuellen Welt]’ (GMS 451). In fact, the intellectual world again is just a mere construction of reason itself and therefore there is nothing to be ‘found’. Kant also admits this to be ‘a kind of circle’ (GMS 450). His solution then is to introduce a ‘Factum’ of a special kind for the reality of reason (KpV 31), a fact that is indeed not given sensuously, but expresses itself under ‘necessitation’ (Nöthigung, KpV 20) by the categorical imperative for the testing of its moral maxims. 2. The presupposition that reason has a ‘nature’: Of the reason that he discovers, Kant writes that it is an ‘organised body’ (organisierter Körper), in which all limbs have their precisely determined sense (Sinn) for one another (KrV Vorrede B XXIII and XXXVIIf.). He thereby presupposes for reason itself a well-​ordered and therefore completely cognizable nature already, which is not constructed, but only needs to be reconstructed, a ‘glorious order, beauty and [providential] care [Fürsorge] everywhere displayed by nature’. This ‘possession’ remains ‘undisturbed’ by the critique (KrV Vorrede B XXXIII). It is this ‘nature’ which ‘our reason stalks with its restless striving’ to find itself on ‘the secure path of science’ (KrV Vorrede B XV) and thereby to secure the ‘completeness’ (Vollständigkeit) of its self-​knowledge (KrV Vorrede B XXIIIf.). At the same time, Kant takes this ‘totality of pure reason’

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as ‘human reason in general’ (allgemeine Menschenvernunft, KrV Vorrede B XXXVIII). The presupposition of a well-​ordered, beautiful and caring nature was made obsolete by evolutionary thought. 3. The presupposition of the Aristotelian distinction between form and content: For Kant, the a priori ‘forms’ of intuition and of the understanding belong to the nature of reason (in the widest sense, encompassing all the intellectual faculties of knowledge), and he says of them that they lie ‘ready a priori in the mind’ (im Gemüte]) (KrV A20/​B 34; Röttges 1999: 265ff.). However, they too are not given, but obviously constructed –​for the declared purpose of making the possibility of a pure natural science conceivable. Kant does not reflect critically on the distinction between form and content either, adopting them instead from Aristotle’s metaphysics as self-​evident. There, the distinction has the function of making it possible to think the essence (Wesen, ousía) as timeless, even of that which becomes (Werdendes), especially of living beings (Lebendiges). The timeless form is supposed to take up changing, material content, without itself thereby changing. To suppose something timeless in nature, be it in the nature of reason, be it in nature outside reason, was, as we can see today, precipitate and became untenable from the point of view of evolutionary thinking. Nietzsche explicitly overcame the presupposition of fixed forms in GM II 12 (‘The form is fluid, the “meaning” even more so . . .’; Stegmaier 1994: 70–​ 88). Furthermore, the forms of intuition in Kant’s construction of pure knowledge become paradoxical: the forms of intuition are at the same time content for the forms of understanding (Stegmaier 1997b: 61–​94). 4. The presupposition of the necessity of an unconditioned for everything conditioned: For Kant a series of conditions continuing to the infinite cannot be thought; it must be closed off with an unconditioned and grounded in the latter. For Nietzsche it definitely can: He explicitly called for it (FW 374). Thus, for Kant it was a ‘necessary idea of reason’ (KrV Vorrede B XXI Fn) to assume a ‘Ding an sich’ for knowledge, even though it was not knowable; and it was all the more necessary to understand reason itself, which recognizes this, as a ‘Ding an sich’ too. Nietzsche considered himself to be free from both. 5. The presupposition that philosophy is a rigorous science: In Nietzsche’s view, it was no longer a binding presupposition for a critical philosophy to conceptualize it as a rigorous science, in which every step of thought ought to be demonstrable to everyone in equal measure. For Kant, this was his main goal, the actual task. At the same time, Kant thereby laid down reason

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in terms of certainty, truth and unity; presuppositions that Nietzsche equally put in question and have become ever more questionable until today. Nowadays, there is no significant philosophy that would affirm pure reason in order to become a rigorous science and that would have the prospect of being generally recognized as such. 6. The presupposition of the certainty of Aristotelian logic: Finally, Kant could still rely on Aristotelian logic as a formal condition for a rigorous science, and he grounded transcendental philosophy to a considerable extent on it, beginning with the derivation of the categories of the understanding from the ‘logical function of the understanding in judgements’ (KrV A70/​B95). Aristotelian logic also appeared to Kant to be given and not (in the main, at least) to be something constructed. Nietzsche, on the contrary, was ready to go so far as to understand even that as only ‘an art of schematization and abbreviation, a mastery of multiplicity through an art of expression [. . .] for the purpose of communicative understanding [Verständigung]’ (NL 1886 5[16], KSA 12.190).

4.  Nietzsche’s ‘revolution of the way of thinking’ regarding the distinction between reason and nature: Pluralization and functionalization of reason for orientation I Nietzsche’s goals in philosophy were no longer to ground the objectivity of the pure natural sciences through theoretical reason, nor to test personal maxims of agency against a universal norm of moral legislation, nor to think aesthetic and teleological judgements as claiming universal validity. For him, universalization as such had become questionable and this required him to come to a new understanding of reality from separate, perspectival orientations taking into account their evolutionary changes, that is, time. Reason hereby lost the functions that Kant ascribed to it, and so reason no longer needed to be presupposed as unconditional. Precisely this unconditional presupposition of reason was the target of Nietzsche’s well-​known criticism (Müller 2011); in the end, Nietzsche liked to put ‘reason’ in quotation marks as in the relevant section of TI ‘Reason’ in Philosophy. However, as mentioned, his critique remains very global and hardly takes into account the constructive function that Kant ascribed to the concept of reason. Kant’s idealization of reason, according to which reason is a faculty

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of thinking the unconditioned for everything conditioned, is generalized and criticized by Nietzsche: ll

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as a habitual defence against vitality, sensuousness, corporeality, temporality and historicity on the part of philosophers who believe in reason (GD Vernunft 1); as a fearful impulse towards unity, reification (Dinglichkeit), substance, permanence (GD Vernunft 2); as getting reality wrong out of contempt for the senses (GD Vernunft 3); as an insistence on the most general and hence emptiest concepts and on their claim to be self-​originating (God), so as to preclude their external origins and thereby their becoming (GD Vernunft 4); as remaining attached to the ‘metaphysics of language’ and its suggestion of a ‘doer and deed’ and of the ‘I as being’, ‘I as substance’ (GD Vernunft 5); as a ‘moral-​optical illusion’ (moralisch-​optische Täuschung) born of a revenge against life through the invention of an ‘other kind of reality’ (GD Vernunft 6); and in general as mere ‘idiosyncrasies’ of philosophers who had become hostile to life.

Nietzsche for his part presents these accusations in an unmistakably idiosyncratic way, as agitated ripostes in a fictional dialogue (‘You ask me about the idiosyncrasies of the philosophers? . . .’, GD Vernunft 1). He does not simply argue logically, he does not ‘refute’ (widerlegen) where strong convictions of belief are at issue, such as ‘being in possession of the unconditional truth on one or other matter of knowledge’; believers are not open to refutation (MA 630, KSA 2.356).5 Instead, through the literary form of his critique of reason, his conscious polemic and hence personal tone, he makes known a ‘state of emergency’ (Nothlage) he himself is in; a new kind of emergency, replacing that of Socrates (cf. GD Sokrates 10, KSA 6.72).6 In the latter case, Socrates had the ‘need’ (nöthig) ‘to make a tyrant of reason’ –​so as to escape other tyrannies, Nietzsche surmises, especially the tyranny of the senses and the ‘dark desires’. It was necessary to be ‘clever, clear, lucid at any cost [. . .]: any surrender to the instincts, to the unconscious leads downwards . . .’ (GD Sokrates 10). In the meantime, the state of emergency appeared to Nietzsche reversed: philosophers had become so obsessed with their idealized and idealizing reason that they could no longer hear ‘the music of life’; their idealism made them deaf to its reason (FW 372; Stegmaier 2004a). For in no way did Nietzsche dispense with the concept of reason. He used it continuously to counter its idealistic constriction. Reason retained a decisive

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orienting function for him, only it is another function, harder to grasp, yet everywhere evinced. For Nietzsche, it is still reason alone that can observe this orienting function, but now it is a reason freed from idealistic restraints. In what follows, we will sketch in broad strokes the picture that Nietzsche gives of this notion of reason, drawing on a selection first of notes, then of aphorisms that follow one another in his work. A clear starting point can be found in a note from 1875, where Nietzsche compiled ‘everything I no longer believe [glaube] –​and also what I do believe.’ He begins by stating that the human ‘stands in the great maelstrom [Strudel] of forces’ and imagines that maelstrom to be rational and to have a rational purpose: error! /​The only rational thing that we know is the bit of reason humans have:  he must really strain it, and it always ends in his ruin if he wanted to surrender to something like ‘providence’. /​The only happiness lies in reason, the rest of the world is a sad affair. But I see the highest reason in the work of the artist, and he can feel it as such; there may be something that, if it could be produced with consciousness, would yield a yet greater feeling of reason and happiness; e.g. the course of the solar system, the begetting and formation [Bildung] of a human being. (NL 1875 3[75], KSA 8.36)

This is high praise indeed for reason –​especially coming from Nietzsche. He still understands it constructivistically, as reason that creates out of itself a rational environment, not only in the shape of a knower, but also and even more so in the shape of an artist or an educator. Reason is situated on both sides: that of the knower, artist or educator on the one side and in their respective works on the other. For Nietzsche now draws boundaries differently:  reason drifts in a maelstrom of the irrational and can create only little islands of happiness and rationality. It belongs to a nature that as a whole is irrational, and this nature, on the one hand, renders it possible and, on the other, challenges it continuously to assert itself by suffusing it with rationality. It is as if reason has nature not only in front of, but also next to, and behind it. So in terms of the technique for making distinctions, one can no longer work with simple oppositions (Gegensätze). According to another note that follows shortly thereafter, ‘[t]‌hat which is good and rational in the human being’ is ‘a matter of chance or semblance [scheinbar] or the flip side of something very irrational’ (NL 1875 5[20], KSA 8.45). It is a contingency among contingencies and it changes contingently7; it is the result of a natural evolution and therefore itself temporal. This will be Nietzsche’s view till the end.

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That is how Nietzsche, after his break with Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, opens his first book of aphorisms, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (MA 1, KSA 2.23–​4:  ‘Chemistry of Concepts and Sensations’), and then again his second, Morgenröthe (M 1, KSA 3.19:  ‘Deferred Rationality’). In both cases, he poses the question concerning the ‘emergence’ (Entstehung) of ‘the rational out of the irrational’, of ‘logic out of the illogical’ and of ‘truth out of errors’, rejecting all manner of ‘miraculous origins [. . .] directly out of the core and essence of the “thing in itself ” ’ (MA 1, KSA 2.23). He argues in evolutionary terms that the rational must have resulted from a quasi-​chemical combination of heterogeneous elements, which allowed stable structures to arise at a certain point. Such chance combinations could be successful or not, and they were successful when they continued to stabilize themselves further. Nowadays, this is called the emergence of autonomy, understood as freedom to make one’s own decisions (Entscheidungen) in enduring dependency on one’s conditions of possibility. The rational that gives form to itself in this way out of nature is, to put it paradoxically, at the same time conditioned and unconditioned, or only conditionally unconditioned. Kant’s simple opposition between the conditioned and the unconditioned becomes obsolete. The function of reason, to bring rationality to nature, issues from nature itself. But the more autonomy in this sense stabilizes its conditioned unconditionality, the better it maintains itself under its conditions of possibility, the more easily it forgets these conditions  –​or interprets them for its part as already rational: ‘All things that live long are gradually so infused with reason that their provenance [Abkunft] in Unreason [Unvernunft] thereby becomes improbable’ (M 1, KSA 3.19). Yet, the more reason, emerging in this way out of nature, runs up against limits in suffusing nature with rationality or discerning a logic in nature, the more it also sees that much remains irrational and also how, as irrational, it is necessary for reason: The illogical necessary. –​Among the things that can reduce a thinker to despair is the knowledge that the illogical is a necessity for humans, and that much good proceeds from the illogical. It is implanted so firmly in the passions, in language, in art, in religion, and in general in everything that lends value to life, that one cannot pull it out of these fair things without mortally injuring them. Only very naive people are capable of believing that the nature of human beings could be transformed into a purely logical one; but if there should be degrees of approximation to this end, what would not have to be lost if this course were taken! Even the most rational human from time to time is in need of nature, that is to say, of its illogical fundamental relation [Grundstellung] to all things. (MA 31, KSA 2.51)

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Here, the ‘the nature of human beings’ (Natur des Menschen) is still reason, only now it is fortuitous, temporal, capable of transformation, alive; one that can only maintain itself as such in nature, which for its part is fortuitous, temporal, capable of transformation, alive and conditions it. Reason is neither fixed nor can it be assumed to be equal in all. When Socrates and Plato claimed that ‘whatever the human does, he always does what is good’ (MA 102, KSA 2.99) and reason tells the human what the good thing is, Nietzsche was in complete agreement with them. Yet everyone of course does ‘what appears to him to be good (useful), according to the degree of his intellect, the standard of his rationality’ (MA 102, KSA 2.99). From an evolutionary and realistic point of view, ‘rationality’ is not only individual, but can also be different in changing situations for the same individuals. Nietzsche hereby reoriented Kant’s concept of reason in a radical way. Reason, when seen as individual and temporal in this way, can only be grasped and surveyed in a very limited way, even by rational beings; inevitably, it is exhibited only in manifold differences and nuances. Its apparent uniformity (Einheitlichkeit), upon which its apparent equality among all human beings rests in philosophy, was only formed historically by consistent schooling, especially in Europe, where reason became an educational programme (Bildungsprogramm: cf. MA 265, KSA 2.220: ‘Reason in School’). By way of millennia-​long cultivation, it became the model of ‘rigorous thinking, cautious judging, consistent reasoning’, of a ‘tight’, ‘consistent and critical’ and in the end logically ‘correct thinking’ that could be handed down through schooling. Finally, in modernity it developed in a novel manner into a ‘scientific sense’ (wissenschaftlichen Sinn), which was given a permanent organization at the universities. The ‘reason’ that we know and value, and to which we are fond of appealing, is the product of a millennia-​ long education or, as Nietzsche preferred to call it, ‘Züchtung’, but is therefore no reason ‘in itself ’. In a whole series of aphorisms that follow, Nietzsche takes issue with the belief in such a reason in itself –​through the technique of exposing it as paradoxical. The title ‘Rational Unreason’ (Vernünftige Unvernunft, MA 386, KSA 2.266) expressly announces this. The aphorism, or rather maxim (Sentenz) in its brevity, poses a riddle: ‘In the maturity of life and the understanding the human being is overcome by the feeling that his father was not in the right to beget him.’ That is irrational, insofar as being born is the presupposition for being able to speak in this way about being born. It is rational in the sense of Silenus’s dictum that it is better not to have been born, or at least to die soon, that is, according to the ‘tragic knowledge’ (GT 15, KSA 1.101) Nietzsche gave such importance to in

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GT. In Nietzsche’s understanding, the rational irrationality of this knowledge lay in the fact that it was precisely its portrayal in tragedy that enabled the Greeks to live on –​until Socrates brought reason into stark opposition to unreason and tragedy died. Thereafter, the merely rational reason, detached from life, relegated the tragic and life-​embracing rational unreason to the status of irrational ‘feeling’. In order to return to life-​embracing (un-​)reason, one has again to reverse and to withdraw from the life-​detached concept of reason its timelessness and claim to equal validity for all –​to become, in Nietzsche’s image, a solitary wanderer for some time (MA 638: ‘The Wanderer’). Now, Nietzsche calls that ‘to approach to some extent freedom of reason’ (‘einigermaassen zur Freiheit der Vernunft kommen’) –​no longer by way of simply declaring the status of the unconditioned à la Kant, but through extreme experiences without any pregiven goal. Nietzsche sketches on the one side the experience of nocturnal deserts, his image for the hollowing out of all reason; on the other side the experience of ‘only good and bright things’, of a ‘pure, translucent, transfigured and cheerful face’ (ibid.) on a bright morning, his image for a well turned-​out rationality. Through such experiences, one can gain something, only something of ‘freedom of reason’, freedom not in the sense of an allegedly unconditional and only fictional freedom of the will, but in the sense of ‘spaces’ or ‘playing fields’ (Spielräumen) that reason acquires through its wanderings step by step, but which can also be lost again. Reason has and does not need a fixed concept of itself, but rather mistrusts every such concept. Nietzsche consequently thinks ‘Reason in the World’ (WS 2, KSA 2.540) from the viewpoint of this contingent, individual, temporal reason as well, which acquires and loses gradually its ‘spaces’ and which, therefore, is ‘not too rational’. From this perspective, ‘the world’ in which this reason is enmeshed is ‘not the epitome of an eternal rationality’. Paradoxically, this is exactly what Nietzsche wants to ‘demonstrate once and for all’, yet in so doing seems to presuppose an equal reason in all humans. However, this apparent equal reason is, as one already knows (MA 265: ‘Reason in School’), just the sign of an intensive schooling to respect demonstrative proof (Beweise). There is still the individual freedom to respect such proofs or not. Nietzsche challenges this freedom in the face of proof, by way of further demonstrative proofs that openly intend paradoxes, initially to demonstrate the paradoxes of the doctrine of free will (WS 23, KSA 2.557–​8): ‘Whether the adherents of the doctrine of free will are permitted to punish?’ According to the ‘prevailing view’, which is also presupposed in criminal law, someone is capable of

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action, guilt and punishment if he or she ‘applies reason’. Here this means ‘acting from reasons’ that are also comprehensible to the judges. Thus, one is penalized for the ‘intentional denial of better reasoning [besseren Vernunft]’ in accordance with which, in the opinion of the judges, one could and should have acted. Now the moment of paradox: ‘But how can anyone intentionally be less rational than he must be?’ Consequence: If that defies thought, reason cannot ‘be the cause, since it cannot decide against the better reasons’. Way out: If one calls on the ‘free will’ for help, one concedes that one can act without any reasons whatsoever; in that case, however, one is not permitted to punish. Or –​something that Nietzsche here does not consider any more  –​one already binds the free will to something universally rational and good, like Kant, while indicating that otherwise the will is basically evil. Nietzsche’s approach opens up a third way to unravel the paradox: It would be possible to think of a ‘deed without a “wherefore”, without a motive, without a provenance [Herkunft], [as] something without purpose or reason [Vernunftloses]’, which Nietzsche later has Zarathustra address in his speech ‘On the Pale Criminal’. Such a deed would merely testify to a ‘poor reason’ (Z I Verbrecher, KSA 4.45–​7). Something that is happily suppressed in democratic or democratizing times: reason (Vernunft), as the capacity to give reasons (Gründe), can have different degrees in different people, it can be or become more or less rational or irrational.8 In WS 185 (KSA 2.632–​3: ‘On the rational death’) Nietzsche takes up once more the becoming-​irrational of reason (MA 386, KSA 2.266) in relation to the topic of death. There, he opposes ‘involuntary (natural)’ death to ‘voluntary (rational)’ death and considers the human being in deliberately non-​idealistic terms as a machine that is only meaningful as long as its ‘maintenance costs’ do not exceed its utility. At that point in time, voluntary death, that is, suicide, is rational; involuntary, natural death, by contrast, is ‘the suicide of nature, that is, the destruction of the rational being by the irrational, which is bound to the former’. It is irrational for the human body, which needs reason in order to live, to ‘murder[.]‌’ this reason. This paradox can only be whitewashed by appealing to ‘the higher reason (of God)’, ‘to which the low reason has to accommodate itself ’. But suicide –​Nietzsche again does not say this explicitly –​in the normal sense is also paradoxical, insofar as it bereaves reason of the possibility continuing to being rational. The opposition between reason and nature, rationality and unreason, becomes paradoxical in both directions. The opposition cannot be maintained as an opposition. Like Kant before him, Nietzsche therefore moves from the opposition between reason and nature to the self-​relation of reason, but here again in a new

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way. In WS 189 (KSA 2.635–​6: ‘The Tree of Humanity and Reason’) Nietzsche talks about ‘a task for reason given by reason’, namely, ‘to prepare the earth for a growth of the greatest and most joyful fertility’. Reason should become a manifold reason of manifold people who, each in their own way, test new ways of living and growing and thereby challenge each other unremittingly through an evolutionary competition. As a consequence, the fertility of ‘the whole fruit-​tree of humanity’ will increase overall. According to Nietzsche, at a higher stage of evolution ‘instinct’ no longer suffices for this task. Instead, reason, now become autonomous, must ‘confront the task face to face’ and take it on consciously. But then again, this reason can only be a single reason with its degree of influence on others. Its self-​relation now includes the relation to the other reason of many others. Equally, it is no longer a ‘pure’ reason, but a self-​relation that continually enriches itself with relations to others (Stegmaier 2016, Einleitung). In this way, Nietzsche restricts and extends the concept of reason at the same time. He restricts it to individuals, each in its different way rational, and extends its modes of operation through them. Nietzsche deals with this in Morgenröthe. Once something has started out as rational and proven itself, it becomes routine, passes into ‘feeling’ and goes on operating in an unknown and unconscious way: ‘How we are all irrational. –​We still draw the conclusions from judgements, which we hold to be false, from teachings, in which we no longer believe  –​ through our feelings’ (M 99, KSA 3.89). Nietzsche can thus posit reason already in dreams, as a ‘poetizing [dichtende] reason’. Accordingly, drives that cannot act out in the waking state can get their ‘nourishment’ in dreams (M 119, KSA 3.111: ‘Experiencing [Erleben] and Poetizing’). The apparently irrational, random connections of dreaming reason do not differ in principle from the poetized forms of waking reason. In a dream, reason just has a greater ‘freedom of interpretation’. One must be all the more on one’s guard (sich hüten) not to attribute one’s own reason, one’s own limited interpretations, to nature itself. ‘Rationality or Irrationality are no predicates for totality’ (NL 1881 11[157], KSA 9.502). All orders that we attribute to nature are shadows of the old God, who is supposed to have created them following rational plans. Thus, one has to make the effort to ‘de-​divinize’ nature and ‘naturalize ourselves as humans with the pure, newly found, newly redeemed nature!’ (FW 109, KSA 3.469; Bertino 2011). Neither in reason nor in nature, then, can a pregiven and unified nature be presupposed. Instead, what must be presupposed is that the complexity of nature, out of which reason emerges and of which it is a part, still is more comprehensive than reason can disclose. Later, Nietzsche will note that ‘the true world of causes is hidden from us: it is unutterably more complex’ than ‘the

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intellect and senses can grasp’; these are ‘above all a simplifying apparatus. Our false, diminished, logicized world of causes is the world in which we can live. We are “knowing” as far as we are able to satisfy our needs’. Nowadays, one speaks of a reduction of complexity. Nietzsche adds: ‘The study of the body gives [us] an idea of the unutterable complications’ (NL 1885 34[46], KSA 11.434). The body can serve as ‘guiding thread for understanding the poorer’ phenomenon, namely, reason which still shows ‘an immense manifoldness [Vielfachheit]’ (NL 1885, 2[91], KSA 12.106). Nietzsche’s Zarathustra addresses this in the famous speech On the Despisers of the Body (KSA 4.39–​41). Here, reason becomes a ‘tool and plaything’ of the body. The highly complex organization of the body, not even remotely transparent to reason, guides the human’s orientation in its world in a way that is more complex, precise and prompt than traditional reason believes it can. The ‘reason’ of the body is therefore greater and more comprehensive. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra also presents this difference in degree as an opposition, namely, between a ‘small reason’ of the intellect and a ‘great reason’ of the body. At the same time, the extension of the concept of reason given here shows what he means by ‘reason’: less an order-​creating, much less a law-​giving reason, than an orientating reason. In German, ‘Sinn’ in the phrase ‘a multiplicity with one sense [Sinn]’ is the direction that the body gives to the plurality of its organs and organizations, including the intellect; the directedness towards a certain form of behaviour in the given situation. Whereas Kant wanted to orientate reason anew, Nietzsche understands reason itself as orientating. Further, when Zarathustra claims the great reason of the body to be ‘a war and peace, a herd and a shepherd’, this is also about orientation, about orientating the orientation of organs and organizations, affects, instincts, drives and so on in relation to each other. According to Nietzsche, they can compete with each other and occasionally fight each other, but also reach a settlement with each other. Where they orientate themselves in relation to each other as animals do in a herd, they need a shepherd for the sake of a common orientation. By no means need this be the intellect or the ‘small reason’ which says ‘I’. On the contrary, Nietzsche introduces a new concept, the ‘self ’, in order to designate the self-​relation or the self-​organization of the body itself, which, with the help of its great reason, makes all the pluralities of the body into functions of the common orientation. To this end, this self or its orientation (Stegmaier 2008: 293–​302) must continuously scan the constantly changing situations for promising forms of behaviour so as to exclude impending dangers. (‘The self always listens and seeks: it compares, coerces, conquers, destroys. It is also the I’s ruler.’) The self-​organizing self of orientation acts in

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an inconspicuous and largely unknown way ‘wisely’, that is, with a combination of circumspection (Umsicht), far-​sightedness (Weitsicht) and consideration (Rücksicht) towards the conditions and consequences of a given mode of behaviour and when necessary, with caution (Vorsicht). These are the classical virtues of orientation over which great reason disposes much more than small reason and which it can deploy very quickly. Small reason, by contrast, does not even see its own function (‘There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom. And who knows then to what end your body requires precisely your best wisdom?’), and that is why it is small. In the end, it cannot see why it uses certain concepts or why it decides for certain distinctions. (‘Your self laughs at your ego and its proud leaps.’ ‘What are these leaps and flights of thought to me?’ it says to itself. ‘A detour to my purpose. I am the leading strings of the ego and the prompter of its concepts.’) For instance, the self, the self-​organization of the body with its outstanding power of orientation, makes the I, consciousness, the intellect, feel pain only at certain points, namely, at such points, where conscious thinking can help to prevent bodily handicaps. (‘The self says to the ego: “Feel pain here!” And then it suffers and reflects on how it might suffer no more –​and just for that purpose it is supposed to think.’) In sum, the traditional, so-​called reason has only a limited function of orientation within the far more comprehensive orientation of the body in its natural environment, whose complexity remains largely unknown. In the less emotive language of the aphorism-​books, in which Nietzsche also uses foreign words, unlike in Z, he takes this up with the distinction between ‘instinct and reason’ and summarizes both under the formula ‘evaluation of things’. Reason, which ‘wants some ground or “what for?”, some purpose or utility behind our values and actions’, functions also here as a ‘tool’ of instinct: ‘we have to follow our instincts but persuade reason to come to their aid with good motives’ (JGB 191, KSA 5.112). By leaving reason on one side of the distinction, Nietzsche can again intensify it gradually to a ‘great reason’ with a superior power of orientation. This ‘great reason’ then stands out as an ‘elevated, independent spirituality’, a ‘will to stand alone’, an ‘elevated and hard nobility and self-​responsibility’ above the mediocrity of the reason of the herd (JGB 201, KSA 5.123). Finally, Nietzsche assigns this great reason –​understood as the ‘semiotic of being well turned out, of ascending life, of the will to power as the principle of life’, as ‘self-​affirmation, self-​glorification of life’ –​not to epistemology, but to aesthetics. To this end, he creates a new word, the verb ‘vernünftigen’ (to make rational), and puts it on a line with ‘verklären’ (to transfigure) and ‘verschönen’ (to beautify:  WA Epilog, KSA 6.51). Accordingly, reason, like art, makes the

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world ‘endurable’, it does not justify it –​Nietzsche silently, but clearly corrected the famous formulation from GT 5 in FW 107 (KSA 3.464). Reason shows itself ‘in reality’, which it construes in such a way that one can orientate oneself sufficiently in it, ‘not in “reason” ’, which was isolated from and opposed to it in the European tradition of philosophy (GD Alten 2, KSA 6.155–​6).

5.  Kant’s far-​reaching critical premises: Pluralization and functionalization of reason for orientation II Yet, as is well known, Kant did not restrict his distinction between reason and nature to the critique of pure theoretical reason. He also pluralized and functionalized reason, and his technique for making distinctions reached further than Nietzsche suspected on the basis of his limited textual knowledge. Kant-​ scholarship itself has only become aware of this in the past decades, in particular through the Kant-​interpretations of Friedrich Kaulbach (1990) and Josef Simon (2003), who themselves read Kant from a Nietzschean viewpoint. Within Anglo-​ American Kant-​and Nietzsche-​scholarship this has gone virtually unnoticed, as have the consequences that the philosophy of orientation has drawn from it. To conclude, I would therefore like to draw attention to some of the most important points: 1. First, there is Kant’s sustained talk of the ‘use of reason’ (Gebrauch der Vernunft). Not only does he distinguish its ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’, its ‘dogmatic’ and ‘regulative’ uses and so on, but also its ‘appropriate’ (angemessenen), its ‘free’, its ‘instrumental’, ‘natural’ and ‘technical’ (technischen) uses –​to name a few of the 60-​odd adjectival qualifications employed just for the use of reason, not to mention the many more employed for the use of the understanding (Schlicht von Rabenau 2014: 106). Hence, reason appears differently in different functions. However, since the reality of reason cannot, according to the criteria of the KrV, be fixed, it appears only in such functions. 2. Kant also seems to have conceded this without further ado. In the introduction to his regularly held Logic course, he naturally followed the perspectivism of the Leibniz school (without thereby taking over the rational ontology, psychology and theology of Wolff). There, he linked the differential use of reason to ‘horizons’ and thereby to ‘standpoints’, from which such horizons open up, and treated these horizons of knowledge

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prior to the ‘formal criteria of truth’, such as the law of non-​contradiction (Log 51ff.; cf. Stegmaier 2004b: 258f.). He placed the ‘capabilities and ends of the subject’ for disclosing the world, always limited, under the concept of horizon (Log 40). No one, Kant says, can think beyond his horizons and it is ‘reckless’ (verwegen) ‘to want to determine the horizon of others, partly because one does not know their capabilities, and partly because one does not know their intentions [Absichten] sufficiently’ (Log 43). The horizons of reason can be as manifold as its uses. Kant distinguished explicitly a logical, an aesthetic and a practical horizon, an historical and a rational horizon, a universal and an absolute horizon, a particular and a conditioned, a private horizon, a horizon of common sense (or ‘healthy reason’: gesunde Vernunft) and a horizon of science (Log 40–​4). Horizons and standpoints can exist next to each other and be changed over time without the necessity of grounding them in a common principle: Kant does not indicate such a principle for his distinction of horizons, nor does he integrate them into a system, but leaves them in their contingency. This obtains especially for the ‘determination of the private horizon’, which, according to Kant,   depends upon various empirical conditions and special considerations, e.g., age, sex, station, mode of life, etc. Every particular class of men has its particular horizon in relation to its special powers of cognition, ends, and standpoints, every mind its own horizon according to the standard of the individuality of its powers and its standpoint. (Log 41)

To these individual powers belong also the ‘mental endowments’ (Gemütsgaben: Anth 197), the understanding, judgement-​power and reason. In the Anthropologie Kant makes extensive ‘observations’ concerning ‘how one differs from another in these mental endowments or in their habitual use or misuse’ (Anth 197). The ‘rational horizon’ (rationale Horizont) is distinguished by the fact (among other things) that it ‘can be fixed’ in view of ‘how far reason can go here a priori without any experience’. Accordingly, even the KrV stands within a particular horizon, namely, the ‘horizon of science’ (Horizont der Wissenschaft: Log 41). 3. Within the horizon of science, Kant distinguished again one’s ‘own’ reason and an ‘other’s reason’ (fremde Vernunft). Even though he often appears to, Kant does not simply assume one unitary reason. He used the formula ‘fremde Vernunft’ time and again,9 most conspicuously in his essay Was ist Aufklärung? The maxim ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’ (WA 35) only makes sense if reason is not already assumed to be universal

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and common.10 The formula also comes up in KrV, in the decisive but less considered ‘Transcendental Doctrine of Method’. According to this, one cannot judge from one’s own standpoint the extent to which one’s own judgements has ‘only private validity’ (Privatgültigkeit: KrV A820/​ B848). Therefore, we ought always to make the ‘experiment’ (Versuch) of communicating our judgements to others ‘with the grounds that are valid for us’ and to see ‘if they have the effect on the reason of others [fremde Vernunft] as they do on our own’ (KrV A821/​B849). But even this does not secure the objectivity of the judgement (Simon and Stegmaier 1998). According to Kant’s three maxims of Enlightenment,11 the first demands that ‘one use [sich bedienen] one’s own reason’ and not ‘follow someone else’s reason [fremder Vernunft folgen]’ (Anth 200); the second that ‘one put oneself in viewpoint [Gesichtspunkte] of others’ (Log 57), so as not to become a ‘logical egoist’ (Anth 128); but the third is that one ‘always think consistently with oneself [mit sich selbst einstimmig]’. According to this third maxim, everyone has in the end to decide (entscheiden) for themselves which judgement they want to take as correct, after having weighed up the judgements of the others. Even after taking the reason of others into consideration, no one can get beyond their own reason. Nietzsche’s perspectivism claimed nothing else. In the KrV Kant formulated it as ‘universal human reason, in which everyone has his voice’ (jeder seine Stimme hat), which is unmistakably his own (KrV A752/​B780). Accordingly, the unity and universality of reason is already for Kant not a fact, but a norm. 4. Finally, it was Kant who gave the concept of orientation a home in philosophy with his essay Was heißt: Sich im Denken orientieren?12 There is no need to present its meaning for Kant at length here (see Stegmaier 2008: 78–​96), but with this concept, Kant already went beyond the concept of reason, without intending to or even admitting it to himself. He was also forced to do so by a situation of need, a ‘lack’ (Mangel: WDO 139) that reason itself can see but cannot make good: the fact that, at the moment when reason, ‘purified’ of relations to the world and nature, wants to engage with the world in order to know something in it and to act in it, it needs orientation. As Kant had already discovered early on, this begins with the right–​left distinction or the distinction between ‘region[s]‌of the world’ (Weltgegend), which are neither given to the senses nor determinable by the understanding. It extends to moral agency, in which reason must be permitted to ‘believe’ (glauben) what it cannot ‘know’ (wissen), namely,

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that God will one day reward actions worthy of happiness with a happy life. Such orientations are ‘a need of reason itself ’ (‘der Vernunft eigenes Bedürfniß’: WDO 136). According to Kant, with the ‘right’ conferred by this need, reason is allowed ‘to assume something and to accept what it cannot presume to know through objective reasons, in thinking’ (WDO 137). In the case of the need of reason for orientation, ‘need’ is equivalent to ‘insight’ (Bedürfnis für Einsicht: WDO 138 Fn), or orientation prevails over thought. It is a natural need, a need which constantly keeps us alive to the situatedness of human reason in a body and its environment; for Nietzsche, it is the need of a reason of the body as well, of a great reason. Already with Kant, reason becomes a function of orientation. Translated by Herman Siemens

Notes 1 I owe the selection of texts cited in large part to Hakaru Kodama, who is working in Greifswald on a thesis on Nietzsche’s concept of reason. Like him, I focus mainly on published texts or texts prepared for publication and thus authorized by Nietzsche himself. The interpretations are my own. 2 GM III 12 has mostly been interpreted in relation to Nietzsche’s perspectivism. Cf. recently Dellinger (2016). Here, I relate GM III 12 to the KrV, especially to the Preface of the second edition. For the relations to the KpV and the KU, see Gentili (2015). 3 NL 1872–​3 19[34], KSA 7.426 f. (literal and extensive rendering), VM 27, KSA 2.392 and M 197, KSA 3.172 (very free paraphrase). 4 On this point, Kant had written in the first edition of the KrV the following (taken up in the second edition): ‘Das, was hierbei streitig wird, ist nicht die Sache, sondern der Ton. Denn es bleibt euch noch genug übrig, um die vor der schärfsten Vernunft gerechtfertigte Sprache eines festen Glaubens zu sprechen, wenn ihr gleich die des Wissens habt aufgeben müssen’ (KrV A744f./​B772f.). 5 On the limited leeway on the one hand and the manifold varieties of refutation on the other hand, cf. MA II WS 211, KSA 2.644; M 95, KSA 3.86f.; FW 39, KSA 3.406f.; FW 84, KSA 3.439ff.; FW 106, KSA 3.463f.; FW 260, KSA 3.517; FW 347, KSA 3.581ff.; GM Vorrede 4, KSA 5.250f.; GM III 11, KSA 5.361ff.; WA Nachschrift, KSA 6.40ff.; WA Epilog, KSA 6.50ff.; GD Sokrates 3, KSA 6.68f.; GD Fabel, KSA 6.80; AC 10, KSA 6.176f.; AC 45, KSA 6.221ff.; AC 53, KSA 6.234f.; EH Vorwort 3, KSA 6.257ff.; EH (GT) 2, KSA 6.311f.; EH Schicksal 3, KSA 6.367. 6 On Nietzsche’s heuristic of Not, cf. Stegmaier (2013: 154–​6).

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7 Cf. M 123, KSA 3.116: ‘Reason –​How reason came into the world? In an irrational way of course, by chance. One will have to divine it [errathen], like a riddle [Räthsel].’ 8 On Nietzsche’s new teaching concerning free will, rationality as the feeling of freedom, see M 544, KSA 3.314–​15, and FW 76, KSA 3.431–​2. 9 See above all (following the compilation by Simon (2003: 22, Fn. 21)) TG 349; KrV A821/​B849; KrV A836/​B864; Anth 200 and 202; ÜGTP 182; Log 22; Päd 441. Simon develops his overall interpretation of Kant from the topos of the fremde Vernunft. 10 Cf. also WDO 146: ‘Selbstdenken heißt den obersten Probierstein der Wahrheit in sich selbst (d.i. in seiner eigenen Vernunft) suchen, und die Maxime, jederzeit selbst zu denken, ist die Aufklärung.’ 11 Log 57. Kant repeats and varies the maxims in Anth 200 und in KU §40 294. According to the Introduction to the Log, it is about ‘allgemeine Regeln und Bedingungen der Vermeidung des Irrthums überhaupt’; according to Anth, about ‘Maximen’ of the ‘Vorschrift’ to attain ‘Weisheit’; according to the KU, about ‘Maximen des gemeinen Menschenverstandes’. 12 With this essay, Kant came to the support of Moses Mendelssohn in the Pantheismus-​Streit, who first transposed the concept of orientation from geography to philosophy (Stegmaier 2008: 62–​77). Despite his commitment to perspectivism (FW 354, KSA 3.593), Nietzsche, on the contrary, avoided the concept of orientation; probably because Eugen Dühring, with whom he did not want to get confused, used it extensively.

References Bertino, A. C. (2011), ‘Vernatürlichung’. Ursprünge von Friedrich Nietzsches Entidealisierung des Menschen, seiner Sprache und seiner Geschichte bei Johann Gottfried Herder, Berlin/​Boston: de Gruyter. Brobjer, T. H. (2008), Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context. An Intellectual Biography, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Dellinger, J. (2016), ‘Aufklärung über Perspektiven. Eine Lektüreversuch zum zwölften Abschnitt der dritten Abhandlung von Nietzsches Zur Genealogie der Moral’, in H. Feger, (ed.), Nietzsche und die Aufklärung in Deutschland und China, Berlin/​ Boston: de Gruyter. Geertz, C. (1973), ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays, 3–​30, New York: Basic Books. Gentili, C. (2015), ‘Prospettiva e ascetismo’, in B. Giacomini, P. Gori and G. Grigenti (eds), La ‘Genealogia della morale’. Letture e interpretazioni, 211–​38, Pisa: Edizioni ETS.

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Kaulbach, F. (1990), Philosophie des Perspektivismus. 1. Teil: Wahrheit und Perspektive bei Kant, Hegel und Nietzsche, Tübingen: Siebeck/​Mohr. Müller, E. (2011), ‘Vernunft’, in C. Niemeyer (ed.), Nietzsche-​Lexikon, 2nd ed., 399–​401, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Ottmann, H. (2000), ‘Immanuel Kant’, in H. Ottmann (ed.), Nietzsche-​Handbuch. Leben –​ Werk –​ Wirkung, 411f., Stuttgart/​Weimar: Metzler. Röttges, H. (1999), Das Problem der Wissenschaftlichkeit der Philosophie, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Schlicht von Rabenau, M. (2014), Der philosophische Begriff des Gebrauchs. Platon, Kant, Wittgenstein, Münster: Mentis. Simon, J. (2003), Kant. Die fremde Vernunft und die Sprache der Philosophie, Berlin/​ New York: de Gruyter. Simon, J., and Stegmaier, W. (1998), ‘Einleitung zu’, J. Simon and W. Stegmaier (eds), Fremde Vernunft. Zeichen und Interpretation IV, 7–​22, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Stegmaier, W. (1987), ‘Darwin, Darwinismus, Nietzsche. Zum Problem der Evolution’, Nietzsche-​Studien 16: 264–​87. Stegmaier, W. (1990), ‘Die Zeitlichkeit des Lebendigen. Kant, Hegel und die Prinzipien von Darwins Evolutionstheorie’, in H. Busche, G. Heffernan and D. Lohmar (eds), Bewußtsein und Zeitlichkeit. Ein Problemschnitt durch die Philosophie der Neuzeit, 75–​87, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Stegmaier, W. (1994), Nietzsches ‘Genealogie der Moral’. Werkinterpretation, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Stegmaier, W. (1997a), ‘Geist. Hegel, Nietzsche und die Gegenwart’, Nietzsche-​Studien 26: 300–​18. Stegmaier, W. (1997b), ‘Immanuel Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunft’, in W. Stegmaier (with the collaboration of Hartwig Frank), Hauptwerke der Philosophie. Von Kant bis Nietzsche, Stuttgart: Reclam. Stegmaier, W. (1999), ‘Das Zeichen X in der Philosophie der Moderne’, in W. Stegmaier (ed.), Zeichen-​Kunst. Zeichen und Interpretation V, 231–​56, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Stegmaier, W. (2004a), ‘ “Philosophischer Idealismus” und die “Musik des Lebens”. Zu Nietzsches Umgang mit Paradoxien. Eine kontextuelle Interpretation des Aphorismus Nr. 372 der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft’, Nietzsche-​Studien 33: 90–​128. Stegmaier, W. (2004b), ‘Orientierung zum Handeln in wechselnden Horizonten’, in R. Elm (ed.), Horizonte des Horizontbegriffs. Hermeneutische, phänomenologische und interkulturelle Studien, 251–​66, Sankt Augustin: Academia. Stegmaier, W. (2008), Philosophie der Orientierung, Berlin/​New York: de Gruyter. Stegmaier, W. (2012), Nietzsches Befreiung der Philosophie. Kontextuelle Interpretation des V. Buchs der ‘Fröhlichen Wissenschaft’, Berlin/​Boston: de Gruyter. Stegmaier, W. (2013), Friedrich Nietzsche zur Einführung, 2nd ed., Hamburg: Junius. Stegmaier, W. (2016), Orientierung im Nihilismus –​Luhmann meets Nietzsche, Berlin/​ Boston: de Gruyter.

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The Kantian Roots of Nietzsche’s Will to Power Tsarina Doyle

1.  Introduction This chapter examines how Nietzsche’s will to power thesis emerges from his engagement with Kant’s epistemology. Although some commentators have disputed the extent to which Nietzsche in fact read Kant, arguing that his understanding of Kant is second-​hand,1 it cannot be disputed that the figure of Kant looms large in Nietzsche’s intellectual background and thematically informs many of his philosophical stances. As Nietzsche himself tells us in a letter, three figures cast their shadow over his thought. These are Kant, Lange and Schopenhauer, with Kant heading the list of this threefold influence.2 Nietzsche employs the figure of Kant, as he employs all historical and philosophical figures, as a representative of arguments or ways of thinking that he endorses or rejects.3 The figure of Kant serves to focus Nietzsche’s thought on both theoretical –​epistemic and metaphysical –​concerns, and on practical, evaluative, ones. However, as his denial that theory can be meaningfully divorced from practice testifies (NL 1888 14[107], KSA 13.285–​6), Nietzsche is sensitive to the manner in which theoretical questions inform and shape practical issues. It is with some justification, therefore, that I will focus on how Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will to power emerges from his critical reflections on Kant’s epistemology. Since my aim here is to excavate the logic of Nietzsche’s theoretical philosophy, I use Nietzsche’s reflections on Kant and Kantian themes to understand, not Kant per se or even whether Nietzsche interprets him charitably, but rather, the philosophical rationale that informs the proposal of the will to power thesis. The chapter will be structured in three parts. The first (Section 2) focuses on Nietzsche’s assessment of both the merits and demerits of Kant’s project and, in particular, the success of Kant’s account of synthesis in establishing the empirical world as an object of knowledge. Nietzsche praises Kant’s aim to establish the

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objective applicability of the concept of causality, contrary to Hume’s scepticism, but is disappointed that Kant, in his view, falls short of bringing this aim to a successful resolution, despite a promising stance adopted in his pre-​critical writings in response to the vis viva debate. Section 3 assesses how Nietzsche’s will to power thesis responds to the shortcomings of Kant’s project by offering a naturalization of Kantian synthesis. Nietzsche puts forward an argument, contrary to Kant, as he sees it, in favour of the mind-​independent but knowable character of the world, an argument that culminates in the thesis that the fundamental constituents of reality, relational powers, are also intrinsic. Finally, I  consider potential objections to these arguments and suggest, in reply, that Nietzsche’s response to Kantian synthesis in the guise of the will to power carries with it important existential implications.

2.  Nietzsche’s appraisal of Kant That Nietzsche is engaging with Kantian themes is evident from his earliest to his late writings. In particular, he singles out for praise what he sees as Kant’s efforts to overcome rationalist dogmatism by restricting our knowledge to the empirical world of space, time and causality and denying the possibility of pure conceptual access to things as they are in themselves. This is evident, for example, in BT, where he writes: The hardest-​fought victory of all was won by the enormous courage and wisdom of Kant and Schopenhauer, a victory over the optimism which lies hidden in the nature of logic and which in turn is the hidden foundation of our culture. Whereas this optimism once believed in our ability to grasp and solve, with the help of the seemingly reliable aeternae veritates, all the puzzles of the universe, and treated space, time, and causality as entirely unconditional laws of the most general validity, Kant showed that these things actually only served to raise mere appearance, the work of maya, to the status of the sole and supreme reality [. . .] (BT 18, KSA 1.118)

Although this passage is taken from Nietzsche’s first published book, he praises Kant’s efforts to render the empirical world an object of knowledge in both his early and late writings. But there is a difference in his praise across these periods. In some of the early writings, he not only endorses Kant’s aims but also his method. Thus we find him embracing a constitutive account of mind, arguing

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that the relation between the mind and the empirical world must be understood in terms of the dependency of the latter on the former. In these writings, though, Nietzsche wavers between different accounts of the constitutive mind. In the unpublished On Truth and Lie in an Extra-​Moral Sense (TL, KSA 1.875–​90), for example, he adopts, what he takes to be, a faithful Kantian idealist position, holding that the empirical world is constituted through the imposition of human cognitive forms on the data of sense. While in BT, Nietzsche endorses the idea that the empirical world is mind-​correlative, the mind which is responsible for its constitution is not a human mind but rather a quasi-​divine world artist that projects the forms of the empirical world.4 Despite these differences in the description of the constitutive account of mind in the two texts, Nietzsche agrees that the world of our empirical experience is dependent on mind and divorced from the intrinsic, mind-​independent, character of things in themselves.5 In his later writings of the 1880s he continues to praise Kant’s efforts to render the empirical world an object of knowledge. However, here the focus is on Kant’s response to the dangers of empiricism rather than rationalism. Thus we find that in GS Nietzsche’s commendation comes in the guise of his approval of Kant’s rejection of Humean scepticism. In particular, Nietzsche praises Kant’s argument, contrary to Hume, in favour of the objective applicability of the concept of causality: Let us recall [. . .] Kant’s tremendous question mark that he placed after the concept of ‘causality’ –​without, like Hume, doubting its legitimacy altogether. Rather, Kant began cautiously to delimit the realm within which this concept makes sense (and to this day we are not done with this fixing of limits). (GS 357, KSA 3.598)6

According to Hume, although we possess the concept of causality, the objective applicability of this concept in a judgement cannot be rationally justified. The reason for this is that while the imagination encourages our assent to beliefs and renders us psychologically disposed to believe that the world operates according to necessary causal laws, it operates independently of rational constraints. Devoid of these constraints, we cannot justifiably be assured that the concept of causality is objectively applicable. Central to Kant’s response to Hume’s challenge is his account of synthesis in the Transcendental Deduction section of his Critique of Pure Reason (KrV). Although Kant wrote two versions of the Deduction, Nietzsche doesn’t explicitly distinguish between them and instead stresses the role of the psychological faculties in Kant’s efforts to demonstrate the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge generally. He writes:

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But let’s think about it, it is high time. ‘How are synthetic a priori judgements possible?’ wondered Kant, and what did he answer? They are facilitated by a faculty: unfortunately, however, he did not say this in four words, but so cumbersomely, so venerably, and with such an expense of German profundity and ornateness that people misheard the comical niaiserie allemande in such an answer. (BGE 11, KSA 5.24)

However, despite the fact that Nietzsche doesn’t distinguish between the A and B versions of the Deduction, it is in the A version that Kant formulates his account of synthesis in terms of psychological faculties most strongly. According to Kant, synthesis takes place in three logically separable but practically inseparable stages, where each stage is attributed to a distinct mental faculty. The three stages  –​apprehension in intuition, reproduction in imagination and recognition in a concept  –​are performed by the faculties of sensibility, imagination and understanding, respectively. Appealing to synthesis, Kant argues, contrary to Hume, that our beliefs about the world are rationally justified because the imagination’s contribution to cognition operates under the rule-​governed guidance of the concepts of understanding. However, while in some of the early writings Nietzsche endorses Kant’s method of restricting our knowledge to that of the empirical world, in the later writings he becomes increasingly critical of this methodology. Nietzsche still praises Kant’s aims of rendering the empirical world an object of knowledge, central to which is his need to establish the objectivity of causality, but he maintains that Kant’s account of synthesis is flawed and prevents him from successfully executing these aims. Consequently, Nietzsche argues that Kant’s project has yet to be brought to fruition. Although he is not explicit about the reasons for Kant’s failure, we can reconstruct his argument by piecing together remarks that he makes about Kant. When we do this we find that Nietzsche detects three problems in Kant’s efforts to make the empirical world an object of knowledge and to establish the objectivity of causality. The first sees Kant guilty of psychologism and the genetic fallacy. The second sees Nietzsche turn his back on his own early Kantian position to criticize what he sees as Kant’s argument in favour of the existential dependency of empirical objects of knowledge on human minds. Finally, the third focuses on the sceptical implications of the mind-​dependency of objects in the context of Kant’s reference to the thing in itself. According to Nietzsche, these problems must be overcome if the true aims of Kant’s project are to be successfully achieved. I  will reconstruct Nietzsche’s three criticisms before turning to his response.

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Nietzsche contends that Kant mistakes the psychological origin of our beliefs for a rational justification of them. In response to Kant’s argument in favour of the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, Nietzsche writes: ‘But the origin of a belief, of a strong conviction, is a psychological problem: and a very narrow and limited experience often produces such a belief!’ (NL 1886 7[4]‌, KSA 12.265).7 He also writes that ‘ “[f]acilitated by a faculty” –​that’s what he had said, or at least that’s what he had meant. But what kind of an answer is that? What kind of explanation? Isn’t it rather simply repeating the question?’ (BGE 11, KSA 5.25). One might attempt to defend Kant here by pointing out that Nietzsche misunderstands Kant’s argument and that, in particular, he fails to appreciate the constraining role of transcendental apperception, which as non-​empirical and a necessary presupposition for the application of a priori concepts saves Kant from the charge of the genetic fallacy.8 Although Nietzsche does not offer a direct response to this criticism, we can nonetheless see that, for him, the transcendental self cannot provide the much needed constraint. The reason for this is that, in Nietzsche’s view, the transcendental self is an empty notion. Nietzsche agrees with Kant’s argument against rational psychology in the Paralogisms section of KrV but maintains that its scope should be extended to include a rejection of all non-​empirical accounts of the self (BGE 54, KSA 5.73). However, rather than abandon the meaningfulness of the concept of self altogether, he contends that we should replace the contentless notion of a non-​empirical self with the contentful notion of the ‘mortal’ self, constituted by hierarchical relations between drives and affects (BGE 12, KSA 5.27). Within the context of Kant’s account of synthesis, such a view of the self is incompatible with the need for a rational constraint. That is, within the context of Kant’s understanding of the relation between mind and world as one where the former constitutes the latter by imposing its cognitive structures on the ‘given’ data of sense, the empirical self is unable to supply the requisite ingredients of universality and necessity. Although Nietzsche does not overtly address the matter, he appears to be sensitive to an ambiguity between the different levels, empirical and transcendental, on which Kant’s account of synthesis is operating and which Kant does not make explicit. Nietzsche’s sensitivity to the issue is manifested in his interpretation of Kantian synthesis as empirical rather than transcendental but in his awareness that it is supposed to deliver a type of knowledge that is more than contingent (he acknowledges that it is supposed to be synthetic a priori in BGE 11, KSA 5.24). The basis for his interpretation can be found in the A Deduction where Kant emphasizes the reproductive role of the imagination, although he replaces the account of threefold synthesis in the B Deduction with figurative synthesis

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that emphasizes the a priori and transcendental role of the productive imagination. Transcendental synthesis entails the synthesis of both empirical objects and the empirical self. Empirical synthesis, however, entails that the empirical objects of the spatio-​temporal world both affect and are combined by the empirical self.9 Although a charitable interpretation might take the distinction between transcendental and empirical synthesis as justification of Kant’s claim that empirical objects are mind-​independent but that the conditions of their knowability are mind-​dependent,10 Nietzsche does not interpret it in this way. Rather, he points to what he thinks is the vacuous character of Kant’s appeal to transcendental conditions, and emphasizing the empirical account of mind as the only contentful account of mind available to us, he commits Kant to the view that the mind-​dependency of objects derives from an empirical account of synthesis. This brings us to the second difficulty that Nietzsche detects in Kant. This problem pertains to the constitutive role that Kant assigns to the mind and which results, in Nietzsche’s mature view, in an illegitimate reduction of the empirical objects of our knowledge to mind-​dependent representations. According to Nietzsche, Kant’s efforts to harmonize our knowledge with the world results in the view that the objects of our knowledge must conform to the conditions of human understanding. In line with his interpretation of synthesis as empirical, Nietzsche interprets transcendental idealism as a form of Berkelian empirical idealism. This means that the empirical objects of our knowledge must be understood as constituted by and existentially dependent on the human mind. Thus, in Nietzsche’s view, Kant runs together the epistemic conditions of knowing an object with the existential conditions of its existence.11 Nietzsche’s interpretation of Kant’s idealism can be accounted for when we consider that its formulation is heavily influenced by Schopenhauer who interprets Kantian idealism as entailing the existential dependency of empirical objects on the human mind.12 Although Nietzsche endorsed such idealism in some of his early writings, he was nonetheless aware of its sceptical implications in a Kantian context. For example, in ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, he writes, ‘If Kant ever should begin to exercise any wide influence we shall be aware of it in the form of a gnawing and disintegrating scepticism and relativism [. . .]’ (SE 3, KSA 1.355). This sceptical threat is to be initially detected, in Nietzsche’s view, in the relativized account of objectivity implied by Kant’s argument that the world as it is known by us is constituted by the human mind. In this context the empirical world of our knowledge is reduced to a mere ‘appearance’ and our knowledge is relativized to our human point of view. In his defence it may be argued that relativized objectivity is unproblematic for Kant on the grounds that his constitutive

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account of mind secures universal and necessary knowledge and that such hallmarks secure the intersubjective validity of human knowledge. As long as we combine this with metaphysical indifferentism,13 it might be suggested, we need not worry about whether our experience of the world fulfils the non-​relative standard of metaphysical correspondence.14 One might go so far in support of this argument to point out that Nietzsche himself seems to propose a version of it in HH. There he argues that metaphysical knowledge, to the extent that it cannot make a practical difference to us, should not be allowed to interfere with our empirical knowledge. As long as our empirical experience is coherent, uniform and intersubjectively testable, the additional question of whether it fulfills the requirements of metaphysical correspondence is superfluous (HH 9, KSA 2.29–​ 30).15 Although this argument might have some merit, both philosophically and textually, it is ultimately unsatisfactory when we consider its proposals in the light of Nietzsche’s interpretation of Kant. This interpretation, as we have seen, downplays the significance of Kant’s appeal to the universality and necessity of our intersubjective empirical knowledge on the grounds that such universality and necessity cannot be secured by the empirical level on which Kant’s account of synthesis operates. Although Kant appeals to transcendental levels of both the self and its activity in synthesis, for Nietzsche the transcendental self is an empty concept and is therefore unable to offer the rational constraints and guarantees needed to secure the argument in favour of relative, but intersubjectively valid, objectivity. Moreover, the problem of scepticism and relativism is compounded, in Nietzsche’s view, by the third problem that he detects in Kant. This is the problem surrounding Kant’s combination of empirical idealism with a reference to the thing in itself. According to Kant, the empirical objects of our knowledge belong to the world of space and time, which is a world of external relations. This means that the properties of an empirical object are not intrinsic to it but are characterized by its spatial relation to other objects. However, in Kant’s view, these relations, constituted by the human mind, are ‘only the relation of an object to a subject, and not the inner properties of the object in itself ’ (KrV B67).16 That is, these relations, constituted by the human mind, are not ultimately real and therefore require ontological support from intrinsic properties or mind-​independent properties considered ‘in themselves’ and apart from all relations (KrV B67). For Kant, although the thought of such a thing in itself is implied by the argument of the Transcendental Deduction and its appeal to the relative objectivity of the phenomenal world of our experience, it is nonetheless a ‘problematic’ (KrV A255) idea in that we cannot know it to actually obtain. However, although

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there is evidence that Kant intended the distinction between phenomena and noumena to be a distinction between two ways of knowing one and the same object rather than two ontological spheres (KrV Bxxvii), Nietzsche interprets his reference to the thing in itself as a reference to a numerically distinct world that lies beyond our cognitive reach.17 Moreover, Kant’s reference to it, in Nietzsche’s view, carries with it sceptical implications that undermine his efforts to establish the empirical world as an object of knowledge and to establish the objective applicability of the concept of causality, contrary to Hume. When these factors are taken into consideration, according to Nietzsche, it becomes impossible to be indifferent to Kant’s thing in itself.18 This is made particularly evident when we consider that Kant’s transcendental project, which culminates in the argument of the Transcendental Deduction and its account of synthesis, is a product of his ongoing preoccupation with the metaphysical status of ‘force’ in the vis viva debate between the Cartesians and the Leibnizeans. Nietzsche seems to have been aware of this and his understanding of how Kant responds to it bears consequences for his estimation of the success of synthesis as a response to Humean scepticism and the issue of causality, in addition to forming the background to Nietzsche’s own response to Kant in the guise of his proposal of the will to power thesis. It is therefore worth the effort to now turn to a brief rehearsal of Kant’s pre-​critical and critical response to the vis viva issue by way of leading into Nietzsche’s proposed alternative to Kant’s account of synthesis. The central issue under discussion in the vis viva debate, which began with Leibniz’s The Memorable Errors of Descartes and Others (1686), was whether we can intelligibly speak of internal ‘living force’ in nature distinct from external mechanical force and whether such living force can be measured. The possibility of mathematical quantification was identified with the empirical reality of force. According to Descartes, empirical force is reducible to external dead pressure whose effects are mathematically quantifiable as the product of the quantity of matter and velocity. Force, therefore, for Descartes, must be understood in terms of external motion and motion is to be measured in terms of spatial transfer. Leibniz, however, objected that material substance cannot be defined in terms of extension because it is unable to explain inertia or the resistance of bodies to motion. Rather, Leibniz contends that force is the dynamic essence of matter. However, he argues that while the effects of empirical force can be measured as the product of the quantity of matter and the square of velocities, it is reducible to a more primitive internal force which constitutes the substantial form of monadic, non-​empirical substances and whose metaphysical reality cannot be empirically instantiated.

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Throughout his career Kant struggled to reconcile the relational character of the scientific empirical world operating according to mechanical force with its metaphysical reality or intrinsic nature. In an early essay, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (PTG, 1873, KSA 1.801–​72), Nietzsche indicates in his praise for Kant’s pre-​critical text Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (NTH) that he is aware of Kant’s struggle with the concept of force. Although he endorses Kant’s distinction between appearances and things in themselves in some other writings of the same early period, in this particular text Nietzsche praises Kant’s pre-​critical efforts in NTH to capture within one ontological domain the necessary and intrinsic status of mechanical empirical force: Is it not a sublime thought, to derive the magnificence of the cosmos and the marvellous arrangements of the stellar orbits wholly from a single, simple, purely mechanical movement, from a mathematical figure in motion, as it were! Instead of seeing in it the intentions and the intervening hands of a machine-​ god, he derived it from a type of oscillation which, once having begun, is necessary and predictable in its course and attains effects which are the equal of the wisest calculations of ratiocination; and of the utmost planning of purposiveness –​but without being them. (PTG 17, KSA 1.866–​7)

Kant’s argument in NTH that empirical mechanical force is the medium for the self-​organizing character of nature differs from his earlier stance on this issue. In 1749 he had attempted to combine the Cartesian and Leibnizean views of force by arguing in favour of the need for both external and internal force. External force, he argues, is required to set a body in motion but internal force is required to preserve it in motion.19 However, Kant changed his mind on this issue when he discovered Newton and the law of inertia. This discovery taught Kant that internal force was no longer required to explain how a body continues in uniform motion despite the fact that no continuous external force is applied. This discovery informs Kant’s position in NTH where he appeals to only one type of force and where the Leibnizean notion of internal force is abandoned and external forces become the vehicles for the self-​organizing character of mechanical nature. According to Kant in NTH, complex systems evolve from the operations of mechanical forces. Here, for Kant, the empirical and the metaphysical go hand in hand. However, in his critical writings Kant denies that mechanical nature can be known to be self-​organizing. To claim that the operations of mechanical nature are governed by a self-​organizing principle, Kant argues, still involves

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an illegitimate attempt to capture the inner or intrinsic character of things by dogmatically bypassing the empirical conditions of knowledge and presupposing direct insight into things in themselves. Thus, in the ‘Amphiboly’ section of KrV, he argues that empirical substance is constituted by external relations in space, and since we would be guilty of an amphiboly, that is, the illegitimate ‘confounding of an object of pure understanding with appearance’, if we were to claim knowledge of things in themselves, our knowledge must, accordingly, be restricted to that of external spatial relations (KrV A270/​B326). Rejecting Leibniz’s non-​relational noumenal substance, Kant concludes that ‘substantia phaenomenon in space’ is ‘nothing but relations, and it itself is entirely made up of mere relations’ (KrV A265/​B321).20 If intrinsic natures obtain at all, according to Kant, they must do so at the level of non-​empirical and mind-​independent things in themselves. Although Nietzsche praises Kant’s argument in NTH, he is ultimately less satisfied with Kant’s critical position.21 Once again, we must engage in a degree of reconstruction to formulate the reasons why. When we do, we find that the reasons relate to Nietzsche’s dissatisfaction with Kant’s idealism and his account of synthesis. According to Nietzsche, Kant’s mature writings understand force as a mental projection (hineingedichtet) (NL 1884 24[13], KSA 10.650; BGE 21, KSA 5.35–​6). Indeed Kant himself writes that the form of intuition or appearance ‘does not represent anything save in so far as something is posited in the mind’ (KrV B67). As such, empirical force captures only external spatial relations that are constituted by the human mind. In so doing, Kant, in Nietzsche’s view, fails to capture the intrinsic quality of force. We can appreciate why this might be important to Nietzsche when we consider that Kant refers to this intrinsic quality as the ‘causality of the cause’ in the Third Antinomy. We can surmise that the failure to capture the causal impetus informing causal relations influences Nietzsche’s assessment of Kant’s ability to respond to Hume on the causal question. That this is so can be discerned from Nietzsche’s suggestion that Kant’s view that causal relations must be understood in terms of spatial and temporal succession constituted by the human mind fails to contentfully capture the objectivity of real causal relations: Causalism.  –​It is obvious that things in themselves cannot be related to one another as ‘cause and effect’, nor can appearance be so related to appearance; from which it follows that in a philosophy that believes in things in themselves and appearances the concept ‘cause and effect’ cannot be applied. Kant’s mistakes. (NL 1885 2[139], KSA 12.135)22

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Moreover, Nietzsche concludes that despite Kant’s efforts to save the legitimacy of the concept of causality, his reference to mind-​independent things-​in-​ themselves ultimately underestimates the ‘validity of the knowledge attained by the natural sciences and altogether everything that can be known causaliter’ (GS 357, KSA 3.599). From this we can see that Kant, according to Nietzsche, renders force empirically ideal. This charge obviously sits uncomfortably with Kant’s view that force is constituted by spatial relations and that spatiality is the marker of the empirically real. Nevertheless, Nietzsche suggests that the fact that spatiality, for Kant, is imposed by the human mind belies this claim and deprives force of genuine causal power. For Nietzsche, if force is to be causally efficacious we must understand it to be both empirically and metaphysically real. That is, even if we can show that space is not just a cognitive structure of the mind but rather is characteristic of mind-​independent reality, empirical force must not be reducible to mere relations in space. Rather, causal relations must be relations of powers in space. Accordingly, force must be informed by an inner intrinsic nature. Nietzsche sets out here what is required for Kant to successfully complete the project of establishing the empirical world as an object of knowledge. However, the problems that, in his view, beset Kant’s account of synthesis and causal relations ultimately preclude the completion of the project. Therefore Nietzsche proposes an alternative account of synthesis, central to which is a non-​impositionist account of mind and an argument in favour of empirically real relations that are informed by intrinsic natures. This alternative account comes in the guise of the will to power thesis, to which I now turn.

3.  The will to power: An alternative to Kant’s synthesis Nietzsche proposes the will to power as an alternative to Kantian synthesis. His alternative holds that the relational character of the empirical world is informed by intrinsic natures that secure the mind-​independence and causal potency of empirical force. According to Nietzsche, the will to power captures the intelligible character of fundamental power-​wills that although ‘synthetically related to one another’ are not ‘a delusion in the Berkelian or Schopenhauerian sense’ (BGE 36, KSA 5.54).23 The transition from Kantian synthesis to the will to power is mediated by Nietzsche’s critical reflection on Kant’s account of self-​consciousness, which

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arises, according to the argument of the Transcendental Deduction, as a result of the activity of the self in synthesis. The active self that accompanies my representations but that cannot be known to be a substance culminates in Kant’s rejection of the traditional substantialist and introspective view of the self in the ‘Paralogisms’. Nietzsche thinks that this move on Kant’s part is significant, not simply for its own sake but also because it ultimately serves to undermine the very idea of a non-​empirical self whose role is to constitute objects. In earlier times people believed in the ‘soul’ just as they believed in grammar and the grammatical subject. They said that ‘I’ is a condition, that ‘think’ is a predicate and thus conditioned: thinking is an activity for which a causal subject must be thought. And then, with admirable tenacity and cunning, people tried to see whether perhaps the reverse was true: that ‘think’ was the condition, and ‘I’ the conditioned; ‘I’ would thus be a synthesis, which was made through the thinking itself. Basically, Kant wanted to prove that the subject could not be proved by means of the subject, nor could the object be proved either. Perhaps he was already familiar with the possibility of an apparent existence of the subject (that is, the soul), this thought that was once present on earth, tremendously powerful, in the philosophy of Vedanta. (BGE 54, KSA 5.73; cf. BGE 17, KSA 5.31)

According to Nietzsche, the removal of the idea of a substantialist self undermines the distinction between non-​empirical selves and objects that they constitute. It is a short step from here, he contends, to his own position that the ordering synthetic principle of reality is to be found immanently situated within reality rather than imposed by the cognitive structures of the human mind. This is because idealism, the claim that the objects of our knowledge can be reduced to mind-​dependent representations, is defensible only if we can intelligibly appeal to an immaterial substantial self upon which the empirical world, including the human brain and sense organs, existentially depend. Without an immaterial substantial self, idealism, Nietzsche maintains, must collapse into a reductio ad absurdum that holds that the empirical self in the form of the brain is both an object in the natural world and cause of the natural world (BGE 15, KSA 5.29).24 It follows from this, Nietzsche contends, that if Kant is to reject the self of rational psychology in the Paralogisms then he must, if he is to avoid such a reductio, accept that synthesis operates independently of human minds in the natural world. Nietzsche sees himself as bringing Kant’s argument to its logical conclusion. He maintains that once we reject Kant’s constitutive account of mind that holds that the empirical world of our experience is constituted by forms imposed by the mind, we can understand the relation between mind and world

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naturalistically. Thus, Nietzsche proposes, contrary to Kant, that the human mind and its forms of cognition emerge through interaction with the world. This amounts to the view that mind and world are continuous and that while the forms of space, time and causality, for example, are forms of human cognition, they also belong to the structure of mind-​independent reality. This conclusion follows directly from Nietzsche’s translation of the human mind back into nature (BGE 230, KSA 5.169) and it entails that the world of our experience is empirically accessible to but ontologically independent of human minds.25 Nietzsche’s view that synthesis operates immanently within the world, rather than being understood as an imposition of the human mind, culminates in his claim that the empirical world must be understood in both relational and intrinsic terms. He contends that once we relinquish the distinction between immaterialist substantialist selves and the objects that they constitute, we see that the empirical world must be understood in terms of complexes of relational powers: If we give up the effective subject, we also give up the object upon which effects are produced. Duration, identity with itself, being are inherent neither in that which is called subject nor in that which is called object: they are complexes of events apparently durable in comparison with other complexes –​e.g., through the difference in tempo of the event (rest –​motion, form –​loose: opposites that do not exist in themselves and that actually express only variations in degree that from a certain perspective appear to be opposites. There are no opposites: only from those of logic do we derive the concept of opposites –​and falsely transfer it to things). (NL 1887 9[91], KSA 12.384)

This conclusion follows from Nietzsche’s interactionist account of mind, which establishes that mind-​independent reality must have a causal structure in addition to causality being a form of our cognition. Our understanding of this causal structure can take various forms but, he argues, the best empirical evidence points to a Boscovichean account of causality as action at a distance rather than a mechanical account of causal relations in terms of contact (BGE 12, KSA 5.26). Moreover, allowing for the possibility of objective knowledge that he thinks is missing in Kant, Nietzsche proposes that we can contentfully conceive the intrinsic nature of the relational forces that make up nature analogously to our own experiences of willing and desiring (BGE 36, KSA 5.54). Arguing that a ‘force we cannot imagine is an empty word’, Nietzsche maintains that the ‘victorious concept “force” [. . .] still needs to be completed:  an inner world [eine innere Welt] must be ascribed to it, which I designate as “will to power” ’ (NL 1885 36[31], KSA 11.563). Consequently, he proposes that we can capture the

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‘intelligible character’ (BGE 36, KSA 5.55) of the relational powers that make up the empirical world without collapsing into dogmatism.26 Nevertheless, given Nietzsche’s charge that Kantian synthesis is guilty of the genetic fallacy one cannot help but wonder whether Nietzsche is not similarly guilty. This concern is heightened by the fact that in BGE Nietzsche maintains that psychology is the key to the basic issues (BGE 23, KSA 5.39). However, his rejection of Kant’s and indeed his own earlier impositionist account of mind in favour of an interactionist account of the relation between mind and world indicates that he must be able to differentiate his own appeal to psychology from that of Kant’s. By understanding the forms of our psychology as ‘provisional assumptions’ (‘Annahmen bis auf Weiteres’) (NL 1884 26[12], KSA 11.152) through which we understand the world, Nietzsche holds that our interests guide our investigation of nature but he does not attempt to guarantee, contrary to Kant as he sees it, that our interests will be instantiated in the empirical world from the outset. Rather as heuristic maxims for investigating the world, the forms of our psychology are capable of evolving and refinement over time.27 The forms of our cognition have, in Nietzsche’s view, an important historical dimension that they lack in Kant. Since the forms of our knowledge evolve and develop through interaction with reality, Nietzsche allows for the continuous refinement of our knowledge over time.28 Thus, in response to possible objections to Nietzsche’s use of analogy and indeed objections that Nietzsche himself levies at illegitimate uses of this method independently of his engagement with Kant,29 it must be stressed that, in the context of my interpretation of him, Nietzsche is not guilty of presupposing the transparency of the mind to itself and then using such supposed psychological ‘facts’ as a foundation for understanding mind-​independent reality. This is because, for him, although our understanding of the world must always be coloured by our specifically human point of view, our proposals must be treated as provisional conjectures that are deemed warranted, or not, through a process of subjecting these conjectures to critical scrutiny. Only those that can be supported by strong reasons in their favour, he contends, can be accepted as rationally justified (GS 2, 319, KSA 3.373, 2.550–​1).30 But, even assuming that the proposal of the will to power can avoid the charge of the genetic fallacy and that it is justifiable on the grounds outlined earlier, what does Nietzsche mean when he appeals to the intelligible character of things and is this appeal consistent with his other claim that the empirical world is relationally structured? On my understanding of Nietzsche’s proposal, to say that force operates according to an intrinsic nature is not to deny the relationality of force but rather it is to say that its relationality, contrary to Kant, emanates from its internal

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nature rather than from mind-​imposed relations and that its obtaining is mind-​ independent. Thus, Nietzsche’s argument is that force is metaphysically real and not just relative to us. However, if he is to avoid the charge that Kant levies at Leibniz, Nietzsche must show that the metaphysically real is physical and that the metaphysical reality of causal powers is compatible with their physical instantiation. To be physically instantiated force must be spatially located and, for Nietzsche, such spatial location cannot be constituted by the human mind as it is in Kant. Unfortunately, Nietzsche does not address this issue explicitly. Moreover, the spatial location of causal powers is a contentious issue, independently of the Kantian–​Nietzschean context under discussion here. The contention surrounding the issue impacts on Nietzsche’s response to Kant because it implies that the concept of spatiality, even if it is not considered to be an imposition of the human mind nevertheless presupposes a fundamentally un-​Nietzschean idea. That is, spatiality presupposes non-​relational material substances. According to this argument, causal powers can be considered to be spatially located only if they are grounded in a non-​relational substance, which itself has a non-​power nature (Foster 1982: 67–​9).31 However, there is a counterargument available, which can facilitate the spatial location of powers without committing Nietzsche to the idea that they must be grounded in a power-​less substrate. George Molnar provides us with such an argument. He probes what we mean by a substantial object and contends that our common understanding of such objects is that they are bulky or voluminous objects. He argues that although bulky or voluminous objects must have size and shape, it is more correct to say that such objects fill rather than occupy space. On this basis, he contends that only sub-​microscopic objects, such as powers, can be properly said to occupy a space, and they do so by being located at mathematical points. Moreover, while our common understanding takes these objects to have an intrinsic nature, he argues, it is not ultimately prescriptive about whether this intrinsic nature must have a non-​power character. Consequently, he proposes that we should adopt a position that he calls ‘moderate dispositionalism’, which holds that objects have extrinsic and intrinsic properties. Its intrinsic properties have a power nature while spatial location is an extrinsic property. This means that an object can change its spatial location with its intrinsic, power-ful, nature intact (Molnar 2006:  175–​9).32 Nietzsche’s description of the world as will to power as ‘a firm, iron magnitude of force set in a definite space as a definite force [sondern als bestimmte Kraft einem bestimmten Raum eingelegt]’ (NL 1885 38[12], KSA 11.610) fits with Molnar’s argument.33 However, even so, the fact

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that it does raises a question of its own in addition to doing nothing to alleviate further possible concerns. It is to these potential problems that I now turn in Section 4.

4.  Objections and replies In this final section I will address four possible and interrelated objections to my reconstructed interpretation of Nietzsche’s engagement with Kant. All four objections, in different ways, serve to question Nietzsche’s commitment to the will to power thesis as I have presented it, in addition to casting doubt upon the Kantian influence to the thesis. The first objection questions the consistency of my interpretation of the will to power with its emphasis on relations. The second and third question the Kantian context to the argument, while the fourth casts doubt upon Nietzsche’s commitment to the will to power thesis, even if it transpires that it is an internally consistent proposal. In addition to indicating how these objections can be alleviated, I  will also offer reflections on the ultimate significance of Nietzsche’s proposal of the will to power thesis as an alternative to Kantian synthesis. The first possible objection is that, even if the argument in favour of the spatial location of causal powers succeeds, its location of powers at points, in something reminiscent of Boscovich’s appeal to mathematical points, runs the danger of understanding powers as discrete and atomistic. Although we have seen that this position is logically defensible in its own right, it nonetheless poses a problem for Nietzsche’s understanding of the relational character of powers. Nietzsche often understands this relational character in terms of the existential dependency of powers on one another rather than their dependency on human minds. He takes this proposal to be an anti-​essentialist one that entails that what something is is determined by its relations to other ‘things’ (NL 1885 2[85], KSA 12.104). But, relationality, understood in terms of non-​essentialism and mutual existential dependence, is philosophically problematic. The difficulty here is that the ‘things’ upon which a non-​essentialist power depends have no essence, since they too are defined in terms of their relations. Consequently, the anti-​ essentialist position succumbs to the problem of an infinite regress of existential dependency and collapses Nietzsche’s relational metaphysics into incoherency.34 Molnar’s argument in favour of the spatial location of powers allows Nietzsche to avoid this problem because it understands powers to be spatially discrete and therefore existentially independent of one another.35 However, endorsement of

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this option does not require Nietzsche to give up on the relationality of powers. Rather, he can continue to claim that all things are relational. But, on my interpretation, the relationality of powers is manifested in a process of agonistic competition for expression of their intrinsic natures rather than through their existential dependency on one another. The strength of this interpretation is that relationality and intrinsicality are no longer mutually exclusive. Also, it moves powers, in Nietzsche’s view, from their former Kantian home in the thing in itself and provides them instead with an empirical address. However, the resolution of one potential difficulty leads to another. This one calls into question not just my interpretation of Nietzsche but also my interpretation of Nietzsche’s understanding of Kant. Thus the second possible objection that I want to consider is that my interpretation of Nietzsche’s understanding of Kant is a reconstruction and, more than that, it is a reconstruction founded on remarks that Nietzsche makes that add up to a rather uncharitable interpretation of Kant. Informing this objection might be the claim that Kant is not guilty of making causal powers mind-​dependent in an existential sense and therefore that Nietzsche’s attempt to ‘trump’ Kant on this issue as presented here is misguided. To these possible objections I offer the following responses. Yes, my presentation of Nietzsche’s understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of Kant’s theoretical philosophy is reconstructed from comments, often scattered, that Nietzsche makes about Kant. But, what else is one to do? Nietzsche does not offer a sustained examination of the arguments of any one philosopher in any one place. Rather, what motivates Nietzsche’s thinking is not so much particular philosophers but rather the issues that reflection on those philosophers highlights. Thus, Nietzsche tells us that he uses particular figures to highlight specific philosophical issues (EH Wise 7, KSA 6.274). Therefore, my presentation must necessarily be an active reconstruction, and, for as long as that reconstruction helps to make sense of the logic of Nietzsche’s own philosophical thinking then it is, in my view, entirely justified. To the issue that the reconstruction presents an uncharitable interpretation of Kant, I  can only respond that the interpretation has been dictated by what Nietzsche actually says about Kant. While this may be a reason to be critical of Nietzsche as a Kantian commentator, it is not a reason to reject Nietzsche’s own naturalized version of synthesis in his account of the will to power. If we take Nietzsche seriously when he says that he refers to particular philosophical figures as a way of drawing our attention to specific philosophical issues, then it is Nietzsche’s own philosophical position that is of the utmost significance to us here. The extent to which Nietzsche’s understanding of Kant sheds light on Nietzsche’s own

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philosophical project should, therefore, override concerns about whether his understanding of Kant is a faithful one or not. Still, unless a response is offered, my interpretation of the Kantian context to Nietzsche’s proposal of the will to power thesis might be called into question from another angle. That is, it might be objected that Nietzsche is neither offering a limited endorsement of Kant nor attempting to complete his supposedly unfinished project of securing the objective applicability of the concept of causality. The reason that will be produced here is the claim that, rather than applauding Kant’s efforts to respond to Hume, Nietzsche in fact endorses a Humean account of causality, with all the scepticism that this account entails. Thus, the third possible objection questions Nietzsche’s interest in establishing the objectivity of causality by arguing that he adopts a Humean stance on this issue. The Humean interpretation holds that, for Nietzsche, the idea of causal power is an anthropomorphic projection with no objective correlates in the world, a fact that renders the concept of causality a fiction, even if it is a useful one. It might also be argued by proponents of the Humean interpretation that, in Nietzsche’s view, we are acquainted with effects rather than causes. The Humean objection is particularly challenging because, at least on the face of it, it is not without textual support. For example, in BGE 21 Nietzsche seems to deny that our appeal to causality is anything more than a useful projection: One should not make the mistake of concretizing ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ as do the natural scientists (and whoever else today naturalizes in their thinking), in conformity with the prevalent mechanistic foolishness that pushes and tugs at the cause until ‘it has an effect’; ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ should be used only as pure concepts, as conventional fictions for the purpose of description or communication, and not for explanation. (BGE 21, KSA 5.35–​6)

The Humean idea that we are acquainted with effects rather than causes is suggested by Nietzsche’s anti-​essentialism, for example, when he writes that ‘the properties of a thing are effects on other “things” [. . .] i.e. there is no thing without other things’ (NL 1885 2[85], KSA 12.104). However, when we look at Nietzsche’s claim that the concept of causality is a useful fiction rather than objectively applicable to the world more closely, we find that it is not the applicability of the concept of causality per se that he rejects, but rather a particular account of causal relations. In particular, he argues that the mechanistic account of causality as spatial transfer through impact is philosophically dubious on the grounds that its appeal to bulky material substances takes the evidence of the senses at face value rather than offering a refined interpretation of them (BGE

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12, KSA 5.26). But, just like his rejection of a substantialist self (BGE 12, KSA 5.27), he maintains that our rejection of a particular model of causality does not warrant the rejection of causality as an objective phenomenon tout court.36 Thus Nietzsche argues that the mechanistic account of causality through impact can be replaced with an account of causality as action at a distance where the ‘actors’ are not material substances but rather relational and intrinsically constituted causal forces. The appeal to intrinsically constituted force is clearly incompatible with the anti-​essentialist suggestion that we are acquainted with effects rather than causes. However, there are both philosophical and textual reasons to undercut the anti-​essentialist position. In addition to the fact that anti-​essentialism, as Nietzsche presents it, succumbs to the charge of incoherence as a result of the threat of an infinite regress of existential dependency, it is obviously inconsistent with his appeal to the intelligible character of synthetic relations in BGE 36 (KSA 5.55) and with his praise for Kant’s efforts at overcoming Humean scepticism in GS. Nietzsche’s anti-​essentialist denial of causal power is also inconsistent with his attempt, under the influence of Boscovich, to offer a non-​mechanistic model of causality (BGE 12, KSA 5.26; GS 112, KSA 3.473). However, as a corollary to the Humean interpretation of Nietzsche and objection to my argument, some commentators may argue instead that Nietzsche is critical of the concept of force. For example, in GM I 13 Nietzsche criticizes the natural scientist’s claim that ‘force moves, force causes’ (GM I 13, KSA 5.279). However, Nietzsche is not rejecting the concept of causal power or force per se here. Rather, he is rejecting a particular concept of force. The concept that he rejects is one based on the idea of force being grounded in a neutral or property-​less substrate such that we can separate the doer from the deed. By rejecting this model of force, Nietzsche claims that force is essentially powerful where power comes in degrees of weakness and strength. Consequently, he writes: A quantum of power [Kraft] is just such a quantum of drive, will, effect –​more precisely, it is nothing other than this very driving, willing, effecting, and only through the seduction of language (and the basic errors of reason petrified therein), which understands and misunderstands all effecting as conditioned by an effecting something, by a subject, can it appear otherwise. (GM I  13, KSA 5.279)

Elsewhere in the same book he stresses ‘the essential pre-​eminence of the spontaneous, attacking, infringing, reinterpreting, reordering and formative forces [Kräfte]’ (GM II 12, KSA 5.316). Nietzsche’s arguments here are perfectly

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consonant with his arguments in GS 112 (KSA 3.473), where he rejects the mechanical event model of causality in favour of understanding causality as a continuum and in BGE 22 (KSA 5.37), where he rejects the Humean appeal to general laws of nature based on observed correlations of events in favour of understanding causality as the operation of the will to power. But, in order to fully secure this anti-​Humean stance, my interpretation of Nietzsche’s response to Kant must be robust enough to resist a further objection. The fourth possible objection, if successful, would undermine my argument that Nietzsche appeals to intrinsically constituted causal powers by arguing that he is not fully committed to the will to power thesis. Nietzsche’s commitment to the thesis has been called into question by appealing to the suppositional manner in which he presents it in BGE 36. To this I should respond that the suppositional character of Nietzsche’s presentation in this passage is not, in itself, an objection. In fact, it fits nicely with his view that philosophical thinking must take the form of experiments that are afterwards supported by reasons (BGE 210, KSA 5.142–​ 3). This, however, brings us to the nub of the problem. That is, if it transpires that Nietzsche does not support the thesis with reasons, then we will fall prey to the objection that he does not seriously propose the will to power thesis. The supposition in BGE 36 is that the will is causal. From this Nietzsche purports to derive the conclusion that all things can be explained in causal terms. While it has been suggested by some that Nietzsche rejects the causal capacity of the will, this is, arguably, not always the case. For example, in BGE 19 (KSA 5.31–​3) he rejects not the causal power of the will but rather an argument that holds that its causal power has been misunderstood in terms of a simple relation between wills and deeds rather than a relation between, what he refers to as, strong and weak wills (BGE 21, KSA 5.36). In fact, rather than reject the causality of the will, Nietzsche suggests that it is supported by the demand for economy of principles (BGE 13, KSA 5.28). According to him, once the human mind has been translated back into nature (BGE 230, KSA 5.169), mind and nature must be understood as metaphysically continuous, such that explanations in the natural sciences must suffice as explanations in the human sciences, and vice versa. The appeal to the causality of the will, Nietzsche suggests, is supported by the fact that it has, in his view, such explanatory scope. In the natural sciences, it fits with Boscovich’s rejection of mechanical atomism’s account of causality as contact of material bodies in favour of understanding causality as action at a distance. And, in the human sciences it allows us to reconfigure the self as a non-​substantial bundle of drives contrary to the idea that the self is a non-​relational substance (BGE 12, KSA 5.27). Since Nietzsche can support the

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supposition with reasons he can derive the conclusion in favour of a genuine causal understanding of reality. Having disarmed the aforementioned objections, I am now in a position to reassert my claim that Nietzsche’s will to power thesis can be fruitfully understood as offering a naturalized version of Kantian synthesis and that Nietzsche’s reformulation appeals to empirically instantiated causal powers that are both relational and intrinsic. This allows him to describe the will to power as the causal ‘essence’ of the world (BGE 186, KSA 5.107). However, the real cash-​ value of my interpretation lies not in its ability to ward off potential interpretive threats but rather in its capacity to shed light on Nietzsche’s more practical concerns. Although I have insufficient scope to fully develop the issue here, it seems to me that an understanding of the will to power as a metaphysics of empirically instantiated intrinsic natures is important for making sense of Nietzsche’s philosophy of value. This can be seen in his response to the issues of nihilism and freedom. According to Nietzsche, the nihilist is ‘a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist’ (NL 1887 9[60], KSA 12.366). Appealing to his account of empirically instantiated intrinsic natures we find that the Nietzschean response to the crisis of values brought about by nihilism is ‘amor fati’. That is, genuine affirmation of life entails affirming that the world cannot be other than it is and that it is as it is by necessity. Rather than appealing to a non-​empirical noumenal realm to account for how things ‘ought’ to be, for Nietzsche we overcome nihilism when we come to realize that the world is as it ought to be. This has repercussions for his account of freedom. For Nietzsche, individuals can be described in terms of particular psycho-​physical types. Individuals, just like the natural world that they inhabit, can be understood in causal essentialist terms. But, for him, this realization does not preclude the possibility of freedom. Rather, genuine freedom does not entail acting contrary to our natures but rather it now entails the unimpeded expression of these natures. This is important for Nietzsche’s response to Christianity and the manner in which it has, in his view, shaped Western culture. According to him, the Christian character of Western culture, which is manifested even in its secular values and beliefs, has been responsible for the imposition of impediments to the expression of those natures that Nietzsche calls ‘noble’. It does this by appealing to the principle of equality that tells us that all human natures are alike and that a universal set of values applies to all. It is only by appealing to the idea of intrinsic natures that are irreducibly particular, as proposed in Nietzsche’s account of the will to power, that we can begin to reverse this cultural situation. Although it is beyond the remit of the

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current chapter to examine this issue further, we can nonetheless conclude that even if Nietzsche’s interpretation of Kant is philologically incorrect, it is significant in forming the necessary background for understanding his diagnosis of and existential response to problems of value and culture.

Notes 1 There is a distinct divergence of opinion on this issue. For example, R. Kevin Hill argues that Nietzsche read Kant’s texts directly. His evidence for this is the fact that Nietzsche cites all three of Kant’s Critiques in addition to a pre-​critical text, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, at various points throughout his writings (Hill 2003: 20). Thomas Brobjer (2008) makes a similar claim in relation to Nietzsche’s acquaintance with Kant’s third Critique. He contends that Nietzsche read Kant’s Critique of Judgement in 1868 in preparation for a dissertation On the Concept of the Organic Since Kant (36–​9, 48, 195, 202, 226–​7). Tom Bailey (2013: 134–​59), however, pointing to the fact that Nietzsche seems never to have owned or borrowed a copy of any of Kant’s texts, suggests that Nietzsche’s acquaintance with Kant was mediated through secondary sources, such as Kuno Fischer’s commentary on Kant, Immanuel Kant und seine Lehre. Thus, the fact that Nietzsche quotes from Kant’s texts does not support the view that Nietzsche actually read those texts directly. However, since my aim is to examine how Nietzsche’s understanding of Kant influences his proposal of the metaphysics of the will to power, my argument does not rest on whether Nietzsche’s acquaintance with Kant’s texts is first-​hand or second-​hand. 2 Nietzsche, Letter to Mushacke, November 1866 (KSB 2.184). 3 He writes that his aim is never to ‘attack persons’, but rather to use those persons ‘as a strong magnifying glass with which one can make visible a general but furtive state of distress which is hard to get hold of ’ (EH Wise 7, KSA 6.274). 4 In BT 4, KSA 1.38 Nietzsche refers to ‘that mysterious ground of our being of which we are an appearance’ and in BT 5, KSA 1.48 he writes of ‘that original artist of the world’. 5 It is to be noted that Nietzsche does not consistently endorse Kant’s idealistically informed distinction between appearance and reality. For example, in early unpublished notes On Schopenhauer (Zu Schopenhauer) (NL 1867–​8, 57[55], KGW I/​4: 421–​7), he is critical of the idea of the thing in itself, and in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (PTG, KSA 1.801–​72) his endorsement of Kant’s critical writings pertains to the latter’s rejection of philosophical dogmatism rather than being an endorsement of his idealism.

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6 See also BGE 209, 210 and 252, KSA 5.140–​2; 142–​4; 195–​6. It is to be noticed that in GS 346, KSA 3.598, Nietzsche speaks of Hegel in approving terms suggesting perhaps that he thinks that Hegel’s answer to the relationship between self and world is more satisfactory than Kant’s. However, Nietzsche thinks that neither the Kantian approach nor the Hegelian is ultimately satisfactory. Thus Nietzsche writes, alluding to Hegel, that ‘[w]‌e have become cold, hard, and tough in the realization that the way of the world is anything but divine; even by human standards it is not rational, merciful, or just’ (GS 346, KSA 3.580). 7 In BGE 21, KSA 5.36, Nietzsche contends that recent attempts to establish the necessity of causal laws have revealed more about the psychology and preference of the author than the world. In BGE 22 he indicates that necessity does not entail conformity to extrinsic nomological impositions. That Kant’s transcendental account of our knowledge is concerned with origins can be seen from his claim that ‘what can alone be entitled transcendental is the knowledge that these representations are not of empirical origin’ (Kant, KrV A56/​B81). 8 One might object here and hold that it is the a priori character of concepts of the understanding that rationally constrains our judgements rather than transcendental apperception per se. However, Nietzsche’s criticism of apperception, if correct, would arguably apply to the application of the concepts because Kant writes in a footnote to KrV B134 that ‘[i]‌ndeed this faculty of apperception is the understanding itself ’. 9 See Wolff (1973: 168–​70). 10 Ibid. 11 For example, Nietzsche describes the status of Kant’s empirical world as a ball tossed about in the heads of men (NL 1872 19[153], KSA 7.467). 12 Schopenhauer (1966: 418). Nietzsche’s thinking on idealism was also influenced by Lange. For discussions of Lange and Nietzsche, see, for example, Stack (1983); Crawford (1988: chapter 6); Hill (2003: 13–​19; 80–​4). 13 This is Peter Poellner’s term as used in Poellner (2001: 111). 14 Han-​Pile (2009) interprets Nietzsche’s early writings in this way. 15 In GS 54, KSA 3.417, Nietzsche contends that our empirical experience may be compared to a uniform and coherent dream but denies that this experience may legitimately be contrasted with the notion of a thing in itself. 16 Kant writes: ‘What it is that is present in this or that location, or what it is that is operative in the things themselves apart from change of location, is not given through intuition’ (KrV B67). 17 That Nietzsche understands the Kantian thing in itself in this way is evident from TI Fable, KSA 6.80–​1, where Nietzsche includes the Kantian thing in itself in his history of metaphysical dualism.

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18 Indifference also proves to be impossible for Nietzsche because Kant’s reference to the thing in itself is not just employed negatively but it also plays a positive role in acting as a basis for universal and, in Nietzsche’s view, life-​denying moral values. See, for example, BGE 215, KSA 5.152. 19 GSK §§ 1–​11 and 114–​15 17–​25 and 139–​40. 20 This has the consequence for Kant that ‘matter has no absolutely internal determinations and grounds of determination’ (MAN 543). 21 Nietzsche praises Kant’s argument in NTH in PTG, KSA 1.801–​72, in 1873, the same year in which he subscribes to Kantian idealism, interpreted as subjective idealism, in TL. Yet, in PTG, Nietzsche is critical of the mature Kant’s idealism as a result of, what he takes to be, its dualistic distinction between Becoming and Being. Although Nietzsche praises the mature Kant’s criticism of dogmatism and the idea that pure thought can access a sphere of non-​empirical reality independently of sense-​experience (PTG 11, KSA 1.846–​7), he nevertheless doesn’t subscribe to what he takes to be Kant’s appeal to the mind-​dependency of reality, and he is also critical of Kant’s appeal to a featureless and indeterminate concept of the thing in itself. The latter criticism is evident in his discussion of Anaximander’s appeal to Being as the ‘indefinite’, which Nietzsche compares to Kant’s thing in itself (PTG 4, KSA 1.819) and, which, he argues, can be defined only negatively. Moreover, Nietzsche argues in this text that such a reference to the thing in itself serves to undermine the ontological status of the empirical world of our experience, which is rendered a semblance and ontologically unreal (PTG 15, KSA 1.857). In response, Nietzsche traces the arguments of the pre-​Socratics as far as Anaxagoras to assess how we might intelligibly go about establishing the reality of the empirical world and avoid ontological dualism generally by domesticating the thing in itself and instantiating intrinsic natures at the level of empirical relations. It is in relation to this project that Nietzsche finds Kant’s pre-​critical argument in NTH more satisfactory than his mature position. Although Nietzsche doesn’t develop a detailed discussion of Kant’s pre-​critical writings but rather embeds it in a discussion of Anaxagoras’s account of the source of motion, there is nonetheless sufficient evidence in the text to suggest that Nietzsche sees Kant’s pre-​critical position in NTH as more satisfactory than his critical position. Nevertheless, one might wonder why Nietzsche presents a position in PTG that is seemingly at odds with and critical of his own endorsement of Kant’s idealism in TL, written in the same year as PTG. Although a definite answer cannot be given to this question, it should be noted that it is not unusual to find multiple and sometimes conflicting positions in Nietzsche’s early unpublished thought, especially in relation to his appropriation of Kant. For example, despite his references to the Kantian distinction between appearances and things in themselves in both TL and BT, in On Schopenhauer, dated 1868, Nietzsche levies a criticism of the notion of the thing in itself that closely resembles his negative appraisal of the

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idea in PTG. Similarly to the latter text, Nietzsche argues in On Schopenhauer that the notion of the thing in itself can be defined only negatively in terms of what it cannot be known to be (NL 1867–​8, 57[55], KGW I/​4: 423). Although Nietzsche’s mature criticism of Kant is prefigured in PTG, the text was never completed. Consequently, I will focus on Nietzsche’s criticisms of Kant as they are articulated in his mature writings and mention PTG only to the extent that it sheds light on Nietzsche’s praise for Kant’s pre-​critical thought. This strategy is consonant with my aim to focus on the logic of Nietzsche’s arguments rather than to engage in textual exegesis. For an account of how Nietzsche thinks that the critical Kant reduces intrinsic natures to the purposive intentions of a supersensible designer, see Doyle (2009: 150–​61). It is to be noted that Kant stresses that although our knowledge is restricted to mind-​dependent appearances, appearances are not illusions (KrV B67). Of course Nietzsche equates delusion here with mind-​dependency. It may be argued that Nietzsche’s argument in BGE 15, KSA 5.29, is directed at Schopenhauer rather than at Kant. The passage in question is certainly a response to those that Nietzsche calls the ‘sensualists’. But, although Nietzsche’s claim in BGE 11, KSA 5.26, that Kantian philosophy and German idealism in general ‘offered an antidote to the still overpowering sensualism pouring into this century from the previous one’ indicates that he does not count Kant among the sensualists, the argument of BGE 15, KSA 5.29, can still be understood as a response to Kant. This is because the argument is that idealism is a coherent philosophical position only if we presuppose an extra-​natural and substantial ‘I’. Nietzsche indicates that he targets here not just Berkeley and Schopenhauer but also Kant when in BGE 17, KSA 5.31, he rehearses an argument similar to Kant’s in the Paralogisms against the traditionalist substantialist account of the self. Nietzsche proposes a version of this view in his early unpublished notes (NL 1872 19[153], KSA 7.467). For a discussion of the development of Nietzsche’s thought on the issue of space and time, see Hill (2003: 123–​41). According to Hill, Nietzsche’s naturalism entails that all things that exist do so in space and time. Hill’s Nietzsche distinguishes between phenomenal and physical space: the space produced by our minds when organizing sense-​data and space as described by our best empirical theories. It should be noted that Nietzsche’s appeal to an inner world or will is quite different from Schopenhauer’s view that the body can be known both as an object among other objects in the empirical world and as will or thing in itself. First, Nietzsche rejects Schopenhauer’s empirical idealist account of the status of empirical objects when he states that ‘I do not mean the material world as a delusion, as “appearance” or “representation” (in the Berkeleian or Schopenhauerian sense)’ (BGE 36,

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KSA 5.54). Second, he rejects the Schopenhauerian idea that the will is simple and immediately known (BGE 16, KSA 5.29–​30). Third, he rejects what he calls Schopenhauer’s ‘denial of will as an “efficient force” [die Leugnung des Willens als ‘wirkende Ursache’]’ (NL 1887 9[178], KSA 12.442) when he identifies force with efficient causality at BGE 36, KSA 5.55. For further discussion on this latter issue, see Doyle (2012). Nietzsche’s description of the forms of our cognition as emerging from interaction with reality is compatible with his description of these forms as provisional assumptions. Their emergence through interaction with reality entails that the forms of our cognition also belong to the structure of reality. However, since he does not mean that the latter is reducible to the former in an existential sense, he leaves room for the development and refinement of our knowledge. Thus, for Nietzsche, we might have to, by virtue of the interactionist account of mind, think of the world in causal terms. However, what we mean by causality is subject to change. In BGE 12 KSA 5.26, he suggests that the mechanical atomist account is a simple abbreviated understanding of causal relations that, while having a ‘handy everyday usefulness’ can be replaced with the more refined account of action at a distance. This latter account is arrived at, he contends, by interpreting the senses rather than taking them at face value. See also GS 112, KSA 3.473. Nietzsche praises the anti-​sceptical import of Hegel’s notion of the development of species concepts in GS 357, KSA 3.598. See, for example, TI Errors 3, KSA 6.90–​1. Rational thinking, for Nietzsche, entails relations between the multiple drives that constitute the self (GS 333, KSA 3.559). Rational justification thus entails, for him, the consideration of multiple perspectives –​reasons for and against –​an issue (GS 2, 319, KSA 3.373, 551). The criteria of rational acceptability for Nietzsche are aesthetic and include frugality and simplicity of explanatory principles (BGE 13, KSA 5.27–​8) in addition to comprehensiveness and ease of fit with our other judgements (GM III 12, KSA 5.364–​5). See GM I 13, KSA 5.279, for Nietzsche’s denial that force is grounded in a property-​ less substrate. Molnar (2006: 175–​9). See also NL 1885 36[25], KSA 11.561, where Nietzsche describes space as the ‘substratum’ of force while also rejecting the notion of space ‘in itself ’. Peter Poellner (1995: 283) diagnoses this problem. An interpretation put forward by Mattia Riccardi (2010) argues that Nietzsche understands the reality of relations to entail their reciprocal dependence on one another. Although he does not propose this interpretation to circumvent Poellner’s diagnosis, it might nonetheless be interpreted to do so by holding that the dependence of powers on one another is a conceptual–​formal dependence rather than an existential one (333–​51). However,

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even interpreted thus, Riccardi’s proposal succumbs to a number of difficulties. First, even if appeal to reciprocity is an appeal to the formal or logical structure of relations, it, as such, arguably fails to capture the actual causal efficacy of force. This criticism is suggested by Nietzsche in BGE 21, KSA 5.36, where he dismisses the notion of reciprocal causation as a formal imposition and a fiction. Nietzsche’s dismissal of reciprocal causality may have been influenced by Schopenhauer (1966: 459 ff.) who contended that its incoherency resides in the fact that A, for example, is simultaneously held to be both cause and effect of B. 35 The relational character of powers for Nietzsche, unlike Kant, is not defined by their spatial location. While spatial location must be the mark of their existential independence –​of each other and human minds –​their relational character emanates from their active striving to overcome resistance to the expression of their intrinsic natures. If they were to be defined by spatial location, it follows from the terms of the vis viva debate that genuine causal power cannot be empirically instantiated. Kant holds that the ‘causality of their cause’ (KrV A544/​B572) belongs to a thing’s intrinsic character but is not spatially located. By holding that spatial location is an extrinsic property of powers my interpretation of Nietzsche allows him to combine the empirical instantiation of powers with their causal potency. 36 See TI Errors 5, KSA 6.93. Here Nietzsche tells us that it is the most ‘common explanations’ that he rejects.

References Bailey, T. (2013), ‘Nietzsche the Kantian’, in Ken Gemes and John Richardson (eds), The Oxford Handbook to Nietzsche, 134–​59, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brobjer, T. H. (2008), Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Crawford, C. (1988), The Beginnings of Nietzsche’s Theory of Language, New York: De Gruyter. Doyle, T. (2009), Nietzsche on Epistemology and Metaphysics: The World in View, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Doyle, T. (2012), ‘The Kantian Background to Nietzsche’s Views on Causality’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 43 (1): 44–​56. Foster, J. (1982), The Case for Idealism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Han-​Pile, B. (2009) ‘Transcendental Aspects: Naturalistic Elements and Ontological Commitments in Nietzsche’s Thought’, Inquiry 52 (2): 179–​214. Hill, K. R. (2003), Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Thought, Oxford; Clarendon Press. Molnar, G. (2006), Powers: A Study in Metaphysics, ed. Stephen Mumford, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Poellner, P. (1995), Nietzsche and Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Poellner, P. (2001). ‘Perspectival Truth’, in John Richardson and Brian Leiter (eds), Nietzsche, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Riccardi, M. (2010), ‘Nietzsche’s Critique of Kant’s Thing in Itself ’, Nietzsche-​Studien 39 (1): 333–​51. Schopenhauer, A. (1966), The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, trans. E. F. J. Payne, New York: Dover. Stack, G. J. (1983), Lange and Nietzsche, New York: De Gruyter. Wolff, R. P. (1973), Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.

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‘Kant: or cant as intelligible character’: Meaning and Function of the Type ‘Kant’ and his Philosophy in Twilight of the Idols* Axel Pichler

1.  Text and intertext The starting point of this chapter is a single text by Nietzsche, which he1 as well as his readers attributed the status of a ‘work’. I am talking here about Twilight of the Idols, which, although it was first made available for a wider public after Nietzsche’s breakdown, was completed and sent to print by the author himself. Such a text –​perceived as a work –​differs in its linguistic character from everyday conversation on the one hand by its literacy, that is to say, its specific linguistic materiality, and on the other hand by its ‘abstraction from a given situation’ or –​as Siegfried J. Schmidt called it –​its ‘Situationsabstraktheit’,2 that is to say, its spatio-​temporal separation from any disambiguating context. At the same time, texts that are considered as works raise –​at least since the beginning of the eighteenth century –​a strong claim to autonomy. As a result, works constitute their content primarily from themselves, which precludes attributing the content to an author’s intentions.3 Rather, the content is created out of the interplay of the semantic options given by the text itself and the contextual options introduced by its reader, whereby the semantic options offered by the text itself have to be prioritized over extra-​textual alternatives. The latter include –​in addition to the historical horizon, that is, the episteme, in which the text is embedded and which at the same time is co-​constituted by this text –​different ‘inter-​’ and ‘hypotexts’. In the case of Nietzsche, this means the content of the books he read and partly integrated into his own writings.4

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This is not the place to give a detailed account of the existing and highly divergent concepts of intratextuality. From the above, however, it should be clear that I am following a conception of intertextuality that emanates from the understanding of a single text as a structural unit (entity), and thereby follows the tradition of literary scholars such as Gerard Genette and Manfred Pfister. Genette distinguishes five types of so-​called transtextual relationships, of which only ‘hypertextuality’ is of interest here. Genette considers as a hypertext ‘any text derived from a previous text, either through simple transformation [. . .], or through indirect transformation, which [. . . Genette  –​AP] label[s]‌imitation’.5 These previous texts are termed ‘hypotexts’. In the case of Twilight of the Idols, among such hypotexts rank –​besides the already clarified source texts by authors such as Victor Brochard, Desprez, Féré, Galton, Goncourt, Höffding, Rolph and Arnobius6  –​the preliminary stages of the finally published text, which can now be found in KGW IX’s diplomatic transcription of Nietzsche’s later notebooks.7 With regard to hypertextuality, one has to pay particular attention to the following two points. The first point involves a more general problem. As the historiography of the methods of literary theory has rightly pointed out, the concept of ‘hypertext’ has not yet resolved ‘what [. . .] the boundaries [are] in which the presence of an intertext in a text actually becomes manifest, that is, where a structural latency becomes an interpretative valence’.8 The second point is more Nietzsche-​specific: As the work on the Nietzsche Dictionary (Nietzsche-​ Wörterbuch) has brought to light, his writing practices are characterized in particular by the creation of a plurality of meanings: ‘Not only does the meaning of certain words change with the development of his thought; more than most philosophers, he consciously works with the possibility of ascribing different meanings to the same words through differing contextualizations and the deployment of various optics.’9 Because of these problems I will henceforth only consider those passages of TI as a reference to Kant in which his name or any of his key terms are directly mentioned. Based on these methodological reflections, the approach of this chapter will be as follows: In a first step, I will turn to those passages in TI where Nietzsche mentions Kant directly; from this, I will render a first sketch of Kant’s appearance in the text, attempting hereby to determine the ‘intensity’ of the intertextual references to Kant. In a second step, this sketch will be fleshed out in more detail by analyzing a specific chapter of TI: ‘ “Reason” in Philosophy.’ In a third and final step, I will then provide a brief summary of the results of this analysis.

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2.  Philosophy as ‘symptomatology’: ‘Kant’ in Twilight of the Idols If one casts a first glance at TI, equipped with the recently developed tools, and looks for passages that mention Kant, one sees that the number of these passages is relatively low compared to other important personalities: while the ever-​ present Socrates is mentioned thirty-​four times, his pupil Plato is mentioned only twenty-​three times, Goethe as well as Christianity are mentioned sixteen times and Kant only adds up to seven entries (cf. TI Reason 6, KSA 6.79; TI Errors 8, KSA 6.96; TI Germans 7, KSA 6.110; TI Skirmishes 1, 29, 49, KSA 6.111, 6.130, 6.151). Hence Kant is mentioned more often than Wagner, who appears twice, but is still less mentioned than Schopenhauer, whose name can be found thirteen times in TI. Leaving a potential analysis of these quantities aside and turning to the passages themselves, the following picture is revealed: Already in the first appearance of Kant in TI Reason 6, the direct confrontation with Kant himself is limited to one single sentence. Since I will deal later in more detail with TI Reason, it suffices initially only to quote this sentence, a sentence that marks the beginning of the final of the four theses presented at the end of TI Reason. It reads: To divide the world into a ‘true’ half and an ‘illusory’ [scheinbare] one, whether in the manner of Christianity or in the manner of Kant (an underhanded Christian, at the end of the day), is just a sign of décadence, –​it is a symptom of life in decline . . . (TI Reason 6, KSA 6.79)

Here a rather general ontological problem is interpreted as a consequence of ‘décadence’ –​the original German text speaks of a ‘Suggestion der décadence’ –​ and is thus understood as a symptom. According to TI Reason 6, this symptom is not only exhibited by Kant, but also by Christianity. What does it mean that Kant’s thought is marked as a ‘symptom’? According to TI Morality 2 (KSA 6.83), such ‘symptoms’ allow for ‘conjectures about the overall state’ (Vermuthungen über den Gesammt-​Zustand) of a person. According to TI Socrates 2 such ‘symptoms’ can particularly be found in ‘value judgements on life’, which ‘can ultimately never be true’.10 As symptoms, such judgements are at the same time the subject of a specific practice of investigation, which is articulated in TI Improvers: [M]‌oral judgements should never be taken literally:  on their own, they are just absurdities. But semiotically, they are invaluable: if you know what to look for, moral judgements reveal the most valuable realities of the cultures and

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interiorities that did not know enough to ‘understand’ themselves. Morality is just a sign language, just a symptomatology: you have to know what it means in order to take advantage of it. (TI Improvers 2, KSA 6.98)

The understanding of philosophy as a symptom and a mere sum of moral judgements, suggested here, as well as the reduction of such judgements to the ‘reality’ of a certain cultural era, raises the question whether TI reduces not only Kant’s, but the whole of philosophy to an expression of the moral status of a certain person in a certain historical period, thereby inverting the traditional structure of justification in philosophy. Without going into this question here, the given junction of symptomatology and semiotics gives a first hint as to how TI deals with Kant. Already the first time Kant is mentioned in the book, his philosophy is seen as a sign and symptom, thereby stripped of its unconditional nature and so removed from its original context. The richly faceted thought of this German philosopher is hereby reduced to the expression of a certain way of life and attention is shifted away from the actual content of Kant’s thought to its potential causes: not the alleged intertext –​Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason –​ but rather, the philosopher and his conditionality themselves are made into the focus of interest. In this literary manoeuver, one can recognize a widespread practice in Nietzsche’s (late) writings of turning personalities he is dealing with into types (characterizations). As Andrea Bertino has recently shown, Nietzsche seeks ‘by outlining types (characters) [. . .] an alternative to the traditionally generalizing form of philosophizing’.11 These types are characterized in particular by the fact that they are not timeless, ‘but arise and change [. . .] in the course of cultural processes’.12 This tendency to typify also becomes obvious in another passage of TI, in which Kant plays an important role:  TI Skirmishes 16, which questions the German’s capacity for dealing with such characterizations in a psychologically adequate way. The relevant first half of this text, in which Kant is characterized ex negativo as a certain type, reads: The psychological tact of the Germans seems to be called into question by a whole range of cases that I am too modest to list. I won’t miss a great opportunity for defending my thesis in one case. I hold it against the Germans that they were wrong about Kant and his ‘backdoor philosophy’ [Philosophie der Hinterthüren], as I call it, –​this was not a type of intellectual integrity [Rechtschaffenheit]. –​ (TI Skirmishes 16, KSA 6.121)

The lack of intellectual integrity of the type Kant is thus revealed through his ‘backdoor philosophy’. A  philosopher’s ‘backdoor’, as Nietzsche understands

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it –​as can be shown through comparison with other passages in his writings (cf. VM 33)13 –​is her tendentious solution to complex philosophical problems such as the question of the free will by allegedly resorting to sophistry. TI presents us with Kant as exactly such a ‘backdoor’-​thinker and philosopher of ‘hinterworlds’ (‘Hinterwelten’) on three further occasions, the most famous one being probably TI Skirmishes 1. In this text, entitled ‘My Impossible Ones’, one finds the following description of Kant: ‘Kant: or cant as intelligible character’ (TI Skirmishes 1, KSA 6.111). ‘Cant’, which in English stands for ‘hypocrisy’, ‘dissimulation’ and ‘false virtue’, is used preferentially by Nietzsche to denote the nature and thinking of contemporary Englishmen, as can be shown by parallel passages from his published (cf. TI Skirmishes 12, KSA 6.119) and unpublished writings (cf. NL 1884 25[225], KSA 11.73). It is more clearly characterized as ‘moral tartufferie’ in two further instances (cf. BGE 228, KSA 5.163–​5 and KGW IX/​4, W I 3.110–​13 = NL 1885 35[34], KSA 11.523–​6). This last dimension of meaning (dishonesty, pretence), which shares much of its semantic content with ‘hypocrisy’, also seems to be the one which stands out in TI Skirmishes 1. Accordingly, the concise comparison given there of Kant’s ‘intelligible character’ with the British ‘cant’ can be understood as an attempt to unmask Kant’s thought, as well as a refutation of the concept of an ‘intelligible character’. As the earlier versions of TI Skirmishes 1 shows (to be found in the notebook W II 7 in KGW IX/​9), this equation of ‘cant’ with the ‘intelligible character’ emerged in the process of the final revision of at least three versions. Preliminary drafts in W II 7 offer three different readings, which differ from the finally published version by not mentioning any terms of Kant’s critical philosophy. They are, in order of their revisions: ‘Kant: or the most hidden “cant” ’ (‘Kant: oder der verborgenste “cant” ’) –​‘Kant: or the virtuous “cant” ’ (‘Kant: oder der tugendhafte “cant” ’) –​ ‘Kant: or the unnoticed “cant” ’ (‘Kant: oder der unvermerkte “cant” ’; KGW IX/​ 9, W II 7.13). These three readings show that the semantic field of a hypocritically presented dissimulation was shaping Nietzsche’s poetic picture from the beginning. Yet, the actual positioning of this hypocrisy in Kant’s philosophy is clearly revealed as ‘intelligible character’ only in the final, published version. This process of revision, as much as the continuity it shows of the semantic dimension of ‘hypocrisy’ attributed to Kant, corresponds to TI’s tendency to characterize (typify) the philosophers dealt within the book by recontextualizing them, instead of actually dealing with the content of their thought. While this characterization tendency is also shown in the mention of Kant in TI Germans 7, in which the philosopher

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from Königsberg is maligned as a ‘deformed concept-​cripple’ (TI Germans 7, KSA 6.110), TI Errors 8 seems to offer a different view. This passage, which also opens the final part of the chapter ‘The Four Great Errors’, reads as follows: What can our teaching [Lehre] be simply? –​That no one gives people their qualities, not God or society, parents or ancestors, not even people themselves (–​this final bit of nonsense was circulated by Kant –​and maybe even by Plato –​under the rubric of ‘intelligible freedom’). Nobody is responsible for people existing in the first place, or for the state or circumstances or environment they are in. The fatality of human existence cannot be extricated from the fatality of everything that was and will be. (TI Errors 8, KSA 6. 96)

The ubiquitous theme of free will and the mention of Kant at the beginning of this text, which acts as the conclusion of the entire chapter, both seem to suggest that this has to be understood as a direct response to Kant’s dissolution of the Third Antinomy of Reason in his Critique of Pure Reason. If one reads more closely, though, one sees that, except for the allusion to Kant in parenthesis, there is no phrase in the entire passage that refers directly to Kant’s own terminology. This even applies to the term ‘intelligible freedom’, which is not used by Kant in this specific linguistic form: as an attributively determined noun. This conspicuous terminological distance to the assumed interlocutor Kant goes so far, that on the basis of TI Errors 8, it is difficult to determine if Nietzsche read Kant’s differentiation between ‘appearance’ and ‘thing-​in-​itself ’ ontologically –​in the sense of a doctrine of ‘two-​worlds’ –​or ‘transcendentally’, as two different aspects.14 Although the general tendency of the text suggests the first option,15 this assumption cannot be grounded in the text itself. Considering TI Errors 8, the potential astonishment about this fact quickly dissolves if one examines the earlier versions of this paragraph, which Nietzsche ‘took from an extensive text in the notebook W II 6’ (KSA 14.418) and copied onto a still blank ‘page of the notebook W II 3, which he already used in winter 1887/​88’ (KSA 14.418) and then revised it (cf. KSA 14.418). One possible reading of the final version of this annotation, following the diplomatic transcription of KGW IX, reads as follows: see figures 10.1–10.3. In this draft, one looks in vain for Kant and ‘intelligible freedom’. Instead, one is confronted with an allusion to a well-​known narrative from On the Genealogy of Morals on the important role priests and theologians played in the development of certain ideas about guilt and justice. In this version, freedom is clearly linked to the ascetic ideal of the priest, as well as the resulting necessity to develop out of such an instance the right ‘to take revenge’ (‘Rache zu nehmen’, KGW IX/​7,

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Figure 10.116 W II 3.129). Against this text-​genetic background, it seems that Nietzsche projected the idea of freedom developed here into the ‘Kantian’-​coloured term ‘intelligible freedom’, which would mean its complete decontextualization. From this it follows that TI makes use of ‘intelligible freedom’/‘intelligible character’ as

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Figure 10.2  This figure is reprinted with the permission of De Gruyter.

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Figure 10.3  This figure is reprinted with the permission of De Gruyter.

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a re-​semantized catchphrase, whose original meaning in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is, for strategic reasons, not substantiated in a philologically adequate examination of the original text, but serves, in accordance with TI’s general personalizing and characterizing tendencies, as a vessel for a certain thinking practice  –​that of the ascetic ideal  –​and its leading moral propositions. Such a re-​semanticized use also supports the hypothesis that the explicitly Kantian terminology was only added very late to TI Skirmishes 1 and TI Errors 8. This assumption is further substantiated by the fact that the nomination of Kant in TI Errors 8 is placed in parentheses. If the very nature of the insertion of Kant and his terminology in Twilight of the Idols is merely a caricature of the philosopher and his thinking, this would mean from an intertextual perspective that for any interpretation, Nietzsche’s text should always take precedence over the potential inter-​or hypo-​text –​in this case, the Critique of Pure Reason. Under this assumption, Nietzsche’s book –​at least in the passages alluding to Kant –​should be self-​explanatory without constant reference to the hypotext, because in these passages, Kantian vessels were filled with Nietzschean wine. Accordingly, these have to be interpreted according to their new ‘filling’, meaning their immediate context. If you follow these contexts, the ‘intelligible character’ becomes without any further substantive determination the epitome of a certain philosophical way of thinking, which, guided by certain moral and metaphysical needs –​that is to say, secretly driven by an ‘instinct for revenge’ (see earlier) –​attempts to salvage moral responsibility and holiness. It is exactly in this underlying moral fanaticism that its hypocrisy lies. This hypothesis is also substantiated by the fact that Nietzsche’s last documented intensive study of Kant, from mid-​May to June 1887, was only carried out indirectly, namely, by reading Kuno Fischer’s Immanuel Kant und seine Lehre at the library in Chur.17 Even the records and commentaries written in the same autumn for the book project, ‘Will to Power’, which are located in the notebook W II 2, already show many of the previously described characterizations (typifications).18 In what follows, the hypothesis just proposed will be tested through a close reading of TI’s ‘ “Reason” in Philosophy’.19

3.  ‘Reason’ in philosophy TI Reason, which is readily understood as a synopsis of Nietzsche’s late epistemological views,20 opens with the following sentence: ‘You ask me, what are

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the philosophers’ idiosyncrasies?’ (‘Sie fragen mich, was Alles Idiosynkrasie bei den Philosophen ist? . . .’; TI Reason 1, KSA 6.74). This opening question, at first sight quite inconspicuous, already embodies the radical break with theories of knowledge at that time, which runs through the entire chapter, and backs up the preceding considerations: Instead of asking the traditional transcendental question of the conditions of possibility of knowledge, TI Reason presents in this question a dialog between the voice of an intratextual ‘I’, which will dominate the entire chapter, and a plural ‘you’, which is not further specified. The topic of this dialogue, which almost immediately turns into an inner monologue, is the idiosyncrasies of philosophers. Both the coupling of responses to a question raised by an intratextual ‘I’ and the question itself, with its focus on philosophers’ highly individual modes of thinking and responding, runs counter to the usual writing and communicative practices of Nietzsche’s contemporaries, who sought the universal and objective conditions of knowledge. By replacing the traditional epistemological question with the genealogical question about the idiosyncrasies of philosophers, this passage also pursues TI’s general mode of investigation, which has already been described as ‘symptomatological’. As has been shown, such a strategy of investigation always interprets the philosophers’ propositions as symptoms and signs of a person’s general condition. The resulting personification of the argumentation leads to the characterization (typification) already described earlier here21:  no longer universally valid propositions and arguments based on these, but rather symptomatological readings of philosophers who become characterized through these readings by an intratextual ‘I’, which itself might be as idiosyncratic as its subjects of interest; such readings define the rest of the chapter.22 In this way, the subsequent critique of the traditional conception of reason is already integrated into TI Reason’s manner of presentation from its very first sentence, which complicates the task –​if not making it impossible –​of reintegrating the critique given there into more traditional forms of interpretation and argumentation.23 In this context it is important to notice that by looking at the genesis of TI Reason, one can demonstrate that these literary practices are not purely arbitrary, but obviously follow an ‘aesthetic calculus’.24 An earlier stage of TI Reason 1 can be found on the pages 72–​3 of the notebook W II 5, which Nietzsche used during spring 1888 and filled from back to front, which was not unusual for him. The first relevant page is entitled:  ‘the true world and the apparent world’ (‘die wahre Welt und die scheinbare Welt’: KGW IX/​8, W II 5.72). After this text, whose double framing indicates its status as a title, a short paragraph

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follows which deals with Heraclitus and the Eleatics. This passage is crossed out and parts of it can be found in a revised version in TI Reason 2.  Above this paragraph one can see four different lines, which are underlined as well and therefore can be understood as titles or headlines. They read as follows: ‘The idiosyncrasy of the philosophers –​they even have two. The first one is their’ (‘Die Idiosynkrasie der Philosophen  –​sie haben sogar zwei. Die erste ist ihr’). The next line, which is underlined and crossed out reads: ‘The philosophers = idiosyncrasy’ (‘Die Philosophen = Idiosynkrasie’); the line below this one, which this time is not underlined but is also crossed out:  ‘Cardinal mistakes of the philosophers’ (‘Cardinalfehler der Philosophen’); and finally the fourth line  –​ underlined but not crossed out:  ‘What are the philosophers’ idiosyncrasies’ (‘Was Alles Idiosynkrasie bei den Philosophen ist’). Only after these four lines does the actual running text of the note begin, which also can be found in a slightly revised version in TI Reason 1: ‘Above all, their lack of historical sense’ (‘Vor allem ihr Mangel an historischem Sinn’). The cited passages show that the earlier version and its four title revisions speak more generally, and without any refraction through a narrative ‘I’, of the idiosyncrasies of the philosophers. This general way of speaking applies to the entire page 72 of the notebook. Unless one makes the absurd assumption that the revisions made in the finally published version were a mere whim of the author, the differences between the previous text stages found in the notebook and the published version have to be of semantic value for understanding the ‘final’ text. As has already been shown at the beginning of this section, the meaning of the opening question of TI Reason, which is not contained in the previous versions, lies in the connection of everything that follows to a highly individual intratextual ‘I’, which reveals its own idiosyncrasies. Because of these linguistic features in the text, it seems problematic to read this text –​as it has been done for example by Kevin Hill in his book Nietzsche’s Critique –​as if it were Nietzsche’s final epistemological position: not ‘rational’ metaphysics, but the almost ‘irrational’ belief in reason on the part of these philosophers is the central subject of the text. Under these conditions, a reading of the entire chapter of TI Reason has to follow the very specific perspective of the questioning intratextual ‘I’. This intratextual voice dedicates itself in the first three sections of the ­chapter –​TI Reason 1, 2 and 3 –​to the first idiosyncrasy of the philosophers, ‘[t]‌heir lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming, their Egypticity’ (‘ihr[em] Mangel an historischem Sinn, ihr[em] Hass gegen die Vorstellung selbst des Werdens, ihr[em] Ägypticismus’; TI Reason 1, KSA 6.74). The topic is thereby

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outlined in three obvious steps:  While TI Reason 1 in part deals in a highly ironic way with the disguised morality of ‘monotono-​theism’ and its predominant practice of creating ‘mummified concepts’, TI Reason 2, through the mention of the starkly characterized Heraclitus, makes an alternative proposal for how one could deal with the problems discussed, and sets up the sensualistic antithesis which is then articulated in TI Reason 3. TI Reason 2 closes with the famous sentences: ‘ “Reason” makes us falsify the testimony of the senses. The senses are not lying when they show becoming, passing away, and change . . . But Heraclitus will always be right in thinking that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only world: the “true world” is just a lie added on to it . . .’ (TI Reason 2, KSA 6.75). Here the text arrives at a clear confrontation between the senses and reason, which is preferred by the idiosyncratic philosophers and is made responsible for the falsification of sensations. Exactly how this conflict can be resolved, and particularly how the senses, which indicate change, can convey it, is not explained. This is not unimportant, given what the chapter goes on to discuss. TI Reason 3 then grants –​continuing the inner monologue of the intratextual ‘I’ –​praise to the senses, and so finally places the intratextual voice in irrevocable opposition to contemporary philosophy: We possess science these days precisely to the extent that we have decided to accept the testimony of the senses,  –​to the extent that we have learned to sharpen them, arm them, and think them through to the end. Everything else is a deformity and pre-​science: I mean metaphysics, theology, psychology, epistemology. Or formal science, semiotics: such as logic and the application of logic, mathematics. (TI Reason 3, KSA 6.76)

In this passage, the intratextual ‘I’ denigrates epistemology while it is simultaneously speaking epistemologically, propagating a sensualism, which –​as has been claimed by recent Nietzsche scholars  –​should neither be read as ‘naturalistic non-​cognitivism,’ particularly as it was catalyzed by Afrikan Spir in books as HH, nor as Kantian idealism.25 Apart from that, one has to ask how one should deal with the obviously paradoxical way this perspective is presented by the intratextual ‘I’. One can find a potential answer to this important question in TI Reason 5.  After TI Reason 4 disclosed the second idiosyncrasy of the philosophers, which is ‘to confuse what comes first with what comes last’ (TI Reason 4, KSA 6.76), TI Reason 5 sums up the discussion of the chapter and in that respect can be understood as its centrepiece.

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In its first sentence, TI Reason 5 once again emphasizes the ‘point of view’ of the intratextual ‘I’, which dominates the entire chapter. The sentence reads: ‘(–​Finally, let us contrast this with the very different way that we (–​I say “we” to be polite) envisage the problem of error and illusory appearances’ (‘(–​Stellen wir endlich dagegen, auf welche verschiedne Art wir (–​ich sage höflicher Weise wir. . .) das Problem des Irrthums und der Scheinbarkeit in’s Auge fassen’; TI Reason 5, KSA 6.77). The following sentence offers a micro-​genealogy of this problem: People used to consider change, variation, and becoming in general as proof that appearances where illusory, as a sign that something must be misleading us. These days, conversely, we see ourselves mired in error, drawn necessarily into error, precisely to the extent that the prejudice of reason forces us to make use of unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, objectification, being; we have checked this through rigorously and are sure that this is where the error lies. This is no different than the movement of the sun; there, our eye is a constant advocate for error, here it is language. (TI Reason 5, KSA 6.77)

In this passage, which is of central importance for the entire chapter, one is once again confronted –​now bluntly and unambiguously –​with the problem of the self-​referential status of the views endorsed by the intratextual ‘I’: if one is ‘drawn necessarily’ into error by our given language, as is claimed here, one is obliged to ask what the logical status of this claim itself is. Since the intratextual ‘I’ that is articulating this perspective does so through language, does this mean that this perspective is itself erroneous and false? In a short methodological paper concerning the question of what has to be considered as Nietzsche’s ‘true philosophy’ Jakob Dellinger has outlined a way out of this dilemma: As the discourse on ‘reason’ in language and the necessity of reason’s prejudice is shown to be ‘reasonable’ and full of prejudices itself, this very thesis is not only being broken, leading to absurd outcomes, but rather in the same moment ‘corresponded to’. [Accordingly] Nietzsche’s thoughts have to be understood as explicitly ‘reasonable’ thoughts on ‘reason’ in language in a double sense, because they are about ‘reason’ and follow ‘reason’ at the same time. So these thoughts do not represent in the simple way of ‘it is the fact that’, but rather prove themselves by designating themselves as being ‘reasonable’ (mistaken, wrong, interpretative and so on) and show, so to speak, this very ‘reason’ in the language at work.26

Following these reflections it can be stated that in the place of ‘breaking out’ of the web of language’s metaphysics, one has to perform the insight into this

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very condition by utilizing a highly reflective and partially different way of writing. Such a way of writing seems to be staged and exhibited by Nietzsche’s text due to the connection of all of its claims to an intratextual ‘I’. As this intratextual ‘I’ points out its own potentially idiosyncratic status by talking about the idiosyncrasies of other philosophers, the ‘views’ of this ‘I’ can also be understood as a purely affect-​driven way of ‘speaking’. This speech, conditioned by its own affective charge and despite its own conditionality due to its reflection upon itself, would indicate a potential way out of the otherwise omnipresent blindness to one’s own linguistic determinism, without being able to escape from it entirely. This attempt to employ a way of speaking that performs the major assumptions of TI Reason is evident in the use of a variety of images in the text, which boost the idiosyncrasy of the intratextual ‘I’  –​its sensualism  –​to an almost hypertrophic state: TI Reason 3, for example, opens with an ode to ‘this nose [. . .] which no philosopher has ever mentioned with admiration and gratitude’ (‘[d]‌iese Nase [. . .], von der noch kein Philosoph mit Verehrung und Dankbarkeit gesprochen hat’; TI Reason 3, KSA 6.75); TI Reason 4 speaks of the ‘brain diseases of sick cobweb-​weavers’ (‘Gehirnleiden kranker Spinnweber’; TI Reason 4, KSA 6.76); and TI Reason 5 starts by announcing how ‘we envisage the problem of error and illusory appearances [Scheinbarkeit]’ (TI Reason 5, KSA 6.77). At the same time, such a physiologically charged way of ‘speaking’ does not, due to its auto-​deictic character, lead to a de-​personalized, easily employable epistemological position, but remains bound to this ‘speaker’s’ perspective and her limitations. Such a speaker can potentially be faced at any time with another person’s perspective, which is as affect-​laden as his own, and so could also be ‘sounded out’ with his hammer. Such a manner of consciously orchestrated philosophical thinking, bound to a highly individualized speaker’s position, certainly goes beyond the boundaries of the epistemology of Nietzsche’s times. There are therefore reasons to fear that we do violence to the individuality of this text if we isolate positions or opinions and compare them with those of other thinkers, following classical academic practice. As this short example proves, Nietzsche’s text is endowed with semantic dimensions that are obscured, more than revealed if we compare it right from the start with Kant and his successors. Such readings, based on research into philosophical positions and opinions, are usually oblivious to the specific linguistic and grammatical structure of Nietzsche’s text, and thereby overlook the fundamental semantic potential of this text. The interpretation put forward here should have shown that TI Reason leaves the cosmos of (neo-​)Kantian thought due to its very specific linguistic and literary practices. Interpretations that rush into a comparison of alleged content overlook such differences at their peril.

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As a consequence of this rather fragmentary analysis of TI Reason, one can also determine more precisely the central point of the quote from TI Skirmishes 1 that gave this chapter its title. By talking about ‘Kant:  or cant as intelligible character’, the text, in a way typical of Nietzsche’s late writings, turns the actual meaning of Kant’s ‘intelligible character’ on its head. This is shown to be absurd and counter to its original meaning as a consequence of the idiosyncrasy of the philosophical character ‘Kant’, which means, as a consequence of this type’s hypertrophic morality. Precisely in this idiosyncratic restriction of Kant’s concept of ‘intelligible character’, which stands for absolute unconditionality in his Critique of Pure Reason, lies its hypocrisy, the ‘cant’. For this reason, the concept is no longer convincing and is therefore abused parodically. So the ‘character’ (Typus) ‘Kant’ and its concept of ‘intelligible character’ have turned into a representative symbol of TI’s (ab)use of the philosophical tradition, from which Nietzsche’s text deviates, particularly through its linguistic–​ literary form. Under these conditions I doubt that it is useful to attempt desperately to reduce Nietzsche’s adoption and adaptation of Kant and his concepts in TI to their meaning in the original Kantian context and to relate them back to this context again.

Notes * This work is part of a wider research project that I carried out in 2012 thanks to the support of the Fritz-​Thyssen-​Stiftung. For further outcome of this project, see Pichler (2013; 2014), where I examine the meaning and function of textuality and the aesthetic form of presentation in philosophy based on a close reading of selected passages from TI. 1 Cf. Nietzsche’s letter from 7 September 1888 to his editor Constantin Georg Naumann, KGB III/5, Bf. 1103. 2 Cf. Schmidt (1972). Schmidt claims that because of this ‘Situationsabstraktheit’ literary texts are ‘not (uniquely) devised as pragmatic concepts of action’ (66; translated by A.P.). 3 The most famous literary parable of this complex problem –​the tension between the uniquely individual and so highly context-​dependent text-​production on the one side, and the abstractness of the finished vis-​à-​vis its author’s intentions on the other –​has probably been written by Jorge Luis Borges with his Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote. The project of its protagonist, which finally fails because of the aforementioned problems, is to rewrite this classic of world literature: ‘No quería componer otro Quijote –​lo cual es fácil –​sino el Quijote. Inútil agregar que no

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encaró nunca una transcripción mecánica del original; no se proponía copiarlo. Su admirable ambición era producir unas páginas que coincidieran –​palabra por palabra y línea por línea –​con las de Miguel de Cervantes’ (‘He did not want to compose another Quixote –​which is easy –​but the Quixote. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original, he did not mean to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce pages that would coincide –​word for word and line by line –​with those of Miguel de Cervantes’; Borges 2006: 90). 4 For a listing of the books Nietzsche possessed and his readings, cf. Campioni et al. (2003) and Brobjer (2008). 5 Genette (1997: 7). 6 The currently most extensive compilation of such hypotexts is supplied in Sommer (2012). 7 For the reasons for re-​editing Nietzsche’s posthumous writings in KGW IX, the editorial principles of this edition and its consequences for Nietzsche scholarship, see Endres and Pichler (2013). 8 Lindemann 2009: 271. 9 Siemens and van Tongeren 2012: 452. 10 The entire sentence reads as follows: ‘Judgements, value judgements on life, for or against, can ultimately never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they can be taken seriously only as symptoms, –​in themselves, judgements like these are stupidities’ (TI Socrates 2, KSA 6.68). 11 ‘[m]‌it dem Umreißen von Typen [. . .] eine Alternative zur traditionell verallgemeinernden Form des Philosophierens’ (Bertino 2011: 209). 12 Bertino 2011: 209. 13 The German original of this passage reads: ‘Freilich muss noch manche Hinterthür, welche sich die “philosophischen Köpfe”, gleich Schopenhauern selbst, gelassen haben, als nutzlos erkannt werden: keine führt in’s Freie, in die Luft des freien Willens; jede, durch welche man bisher geschlüpft ist, zeigte dahinter wieder die ehern blinkende Mauer des Fatums: wir sind im Gefängniss, frei können wir uns nur träumen, nicht machen. Dass dieser Erkenntniss nicht lange mehr widerstrebt werden kann, das zeigen die verzweifelten und unglaublichen Stellungen und Verzerrungen Derer an, welche gegen sie andringen, mit ihr noch den Ringkampf fortsetzen’ (AOM 33, KSA 2.395f.). 14 ‘[T]‌he basic issue is whether the appearance –​thing in itself distinction is to be understood as holding between two kinds of thing (the “two-​world” view) or between two ways of considering the same thing (the “two-​aspect” view)’ (Allison 2006: 413). 15 In favour of this reading, which was advanced in German Nietzsche scholarship by Günter Abel (1998: 102ff.), is the following passage from GM III 12: ‘(By the way: even in the Kantian concept of “the intelligible character of things”, something of this

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lewd ascetic conflict still lingers, which likes to set reason against reason: “intelligible character” means, in Kant, a sort of quality of things about which all that the intellect can comprehend is that it is, for the intellect –​completely incomprehensible)’ (GM III 12, KSA 5.364). A challenge to this reading can be found in Riccardi (2009). 16 This figure is a translation of KGW IX’s diplomatic transcription of Nietzsche’s handwriting into English. From a philological point of view such a translation is highly problematic because it suggests that handwritten drafts can be transposed into another language. This is not the case, as a comparison of Figure 10.1 with the German transcription (Figure 10.2) and the facsimile (Figure 10.3) shows: Due to the different syntactical structures of German and English such a transposition has to forego the highly individual topography of the original handwriting. By doing so it breaks with the feature responsible for the individuality of a handwritten draft –​ its spatio-​semantic arrangement. Figure 10.1 should therefore only be seen as a tool to help non-​German-​speaking readers to decipher the facsimile. I would like to thank René Stockmar and Beat Röllin, who are members of the KGW IX’s editorial staff at University of Basel – https://germa.unibas.ch/abteilungen/neuere-deutscheliteraturwissenschaft/forschungsprojekte/nietzsche-projekt/ –, for providing me the KGW IX templates. 17 Cf. NL 1886/​87 7[4]‌, KSA 12.264: ‘Das theologische Vorurtheil bei Kant, sein unbewußter Dogmatismus, seine moralistische Perspektive als herrschend, lenkend, befehlend’. Also cf. Brobjer (2001: 421). 18 The text critical symbols used in the following quotations are to be read as follows: {} = text inserted by Nietzsche; xxx = words crossed out by Nietzsche; xxx = words underlined by Nietzsche. There one can find the following passages: ‘To assert the existence {as a whole} of things of which we know nothing whatever, {exactly because there is an advantage in not being able to know anything of them} was a naiveté of Kant, resulting from needs, namely moral-​metaphysical ones . . .’ (‘Das Dasein {im Ganzen} von Dingen behaupten, von denen wir gar nichts wissen, {exakt weil ein Vortheil darin liegt, nichts von ihnen wissen zu können} war eine Naivetät Kants, Folge eines Nachschlags von Bedürfnissen, namentlich moralisch-​metaphysischen . . .’; KGW IX/​6, W II 2.2; cf. NL 1887 10[205], KSA 12.582); ‘Kant had {seemed to have} need of {the hypothesis of} “intelligible freedom”, in order to acquit the ens perfectum of the responsibility for this world’s being such-​a-​such’ ‘(Kant hatte jene {schien die Hypothese der} “intelligible Freiheit” nöthig, um das ens perfectum von der Verantwortlichkeit für das So-​u-​So sein dieser Welt zu entlasten’; KGW IX/​6, W II 2.41; cf. NL 1887 10[150], KSA 12.540); ‘Beside Schop. I want to characterize Kant (Goethe’s passage on radical evil): nothing Greek, absolutely anti-​historical (passage on the French Revolution) a. moral fanatic. Saintliness in the background in his case too’ (‘neben Schop. will ich Kant charakterisiren (Goethes Stelle über das Radikal –​Böse): nichts Griechisches,

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absolut Wider-​historisch (Stelle über die franz. Revolut.) u. Moral –​Fanatiker. Auch bei ihm im Hintergrund der Heiligkeit . . .’; KGW IX/​6, W II 2.58; cf. NL 1887 10[118], KSA 12.524f.); ‘type: Kant as a fanatic of the formal concept “thou shalt”)’ (‘Typus: Kant als Fanatiker des Formalbegriffs “du sollst” ’; KGW IX/​6, W II 2.134). For a close reading of this entire chapter, cf. Pichler (2014: 195–​266). A paradigmatic version of such an understanding of TI Reason can be found in Kevin Hill’s study Nietzsche’s Critique. There Hill (2003: 175) –​after lamenting the ambiguity of Nietzsche’s late epistemological writings –​states: ‘Fortunately, he crafted what appears to be a synopsis of his final view in Twilight of the Idols, which has the advantage of being clear, concise, very late (1888), and published.’ Hill’s study follows linguistic assumptions that are at odds with the ones applied in this chapter. He seems to assume that neither the ‘abstraction from a given situation’ (‘Situationsabstraktheit’) of a text, nor the option of written language to recontextualize, and thereby re-​semanticize a given word or sentence, might stand in the way of a monosemic reconstruction of their intentional and argumentative significance. He thus follows the antiquated notion of a text as a transparent medium, which has had a highly successful career in Western intellectual history since Thomas Aquinas’s mistranslation of Aristotle’s term ‘Periechon’. This is also reflected in his opening remarks on how to deal with Nietzsche’s strongly differentiated and highly aestheticized text-​corpus. There Hill (2003: 3) writes: ‘I will attempt to reconstruct what I take to be the skeletal structure of Nietzsche’s thought, stripped of its literary and rhetorical surface.’ Within the scope of this chapter it is not possible to provide a critique of Hill’s book. Such has already been delivered by Tom Bailey (cf. Bailey 2006). For Nietzsche’s literary strategy of personification, also see Stegmaier (2011: 107f.) and Benne and Müller (2014). In Pichler (2014) I argue that Nietzsche’s literary strategies of personification in TI lead to an innovative form of ‘typology’: The main characters of the book –​such as the omnipresent intratextual ‘I’ or Socrates –​are presented in a way that oscillates between showing them as highly individual characters and representative ‘types’. Therefore the way in which they are presented can also be described as a form of Prosopopeia. The huge difference between the common use of this rhetorical device and its use in TI is that in the latter its use is the result of a critique of abstract concepts: Because TI considers abstract concepts as highly problematic it switches from using such concepts to just showing them (see Pichler 2014: 364, fn 807). As Robert C. Solomon has shown among others, this form of thinking leads to the high frequency of ‘ad hominem’ arguments that can be found in Nietzsche’s writings. Cf. Solomon (2007: 180–​222). Enrico Müller has already outlined how Nietzsche’s form of philosophical writing leads to this consequence. In a paper entitled ‘Von der “Umwerthung” zur

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Autogenealogie’ Müller convincingly reconstructs the development of Nietzsche’s thought and style in his late writings in order to characterize the publications from 1888 as a step from the already accomplished negative-​destructive work in Z, BGE and GM towards ‘autogenealogy’ and its form of ‘autodeictical’ writing. According to Müller (2009), the latter is a consequence of the proof of the conditionality of all philosophical projects given in the more destructive books, which implies that Nietzsche’s own project also has to be considered as conditional. This makes a ‘view from nowhere’ ultimately impossible: ‘Wenn dem so ist, tritt an die Stelle apophantischer, überzeugen wollender, Sätze notwendig die stilistische Auto-​Deixis, der performative Selbstverweis. [. . .] Der Autor “erleichtert” sich hier durch gezielt pathologisierende Interventionen gegen thematische Interpretation; so erschwert er willentlich den unvoreingenommenen, sachlichen Zugang des Lesers’ (146). For the self-​referential scope of ‘autodeixis’ and its epistemological consequences, see Pichler (2014: 281–​7). 24 This term was coined by Claus Zittel (2011: 12) ‘to designate the meaning-​ constituting interactions and engagement of different but in themselves stringent and coherent aesthetic procedures’. As the analysis of the previous stages of TI’s final text has shown, this practice of writings also seems to apply to TI. 25 Cf. Bailey 2006: 248–​50. 26 Dellinger 2009, p. 188 –​translated by A. P. The original reads: ‘Indem sich die Rede über die “Vernunft” in der Sprache und die Nezessität des Vernunft–​Vorurteils selbst als “vernünftig”, selbst als vorurteilshaft erweist, ist diese ihre These nicht nur gebrochen und ad absurdum geführt, sondern vielmehr wird ihr “in” diesem Bruch zugleich “entsprochen”. [Dem] gemäß müssen Nietzsches Gedanken als explizit “vernünftige” Gedanken von der “Vernunft” in der Sprache im doppelten Sinn, d.h. über sie und von ihr her, begriffen werden, die nicht einfach nach der Art des “das ist” bezeichnen, sondern sich in diesem Bezeichnen als “vernünftig” (irrtümlich, falsch, interpretativ, zurechtmachend usw.) erweisen und so die “Vernunft” in der Sprache gleichsam am Werk zeigen.’

References Abel, G. (1998), Nietzsche. Die Dynamik der Willen zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr, 2nd ed., Berlin/​New York: De Gruyter. Allison, H. E. (2006), ‘Kant on Freedom of the Will’, in Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, 381–​415, Cambridge/​ New York: Cambridge University Press. Bailey, T. (2006), ‘After Kant: Green and Hill on Nietzsche’s Kantianism’, Nietzsche-​ Studien 35: 228–​62.

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Benne, C., and Müller, E. (2014), ‘Das Persönliche und seine Figurationen bei Nietzsche’, in: Christian Benne and Enrico Müller (eds), Ohnmacht des Subjekts –​ Macht der Persönlichkeit, 15–67, Basel: Schwabe. Bertino, A. C. (2011), ‘Vernatürlichung’. Berlin/​Boston: De Gruyter. Borges, J. L. (2006), ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’, in M. R. Barnatán, Borges: Narraciones, 85–​96, Madrid: Catedra. Brobjer, T. H. (2001), ‘Nachweise aus Höffding, Harald: Psychologie in Umrissen u.a.’, Nietzsche-​Studien 30: 418–​21. Brobjer, T. H. (2008), Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context. An Intellectual Biography, Urbana/​Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Campioni, G., D’Iorio, P., Fornari, M. C., Fronterotta, F. and Orsucci, A. (eds) (2003), Nietzsches persönliche Bibliothek, Berlin/​New York: De Gruyter. Dellinger, J. (2009), ‘ “Vernünftige” Gedanken von der “Vernunft” in der Sprache. Oder: Drei Stellungen des Gedankens zur “Objektivität” des Nietzscheschen Textes’, Nietzscheforschung 16: 183–​9. Endres, M., and Pichler, A. (2013), ‘ “warum ich diesen mißrathenen Satz schuf.” Ways of Reading Nietzsche in the Light of KGW IX’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 44 (1): 90–​109. Genette, G. (1997), Palimpsests. Literature in the Second Degree, trans. C. Newman and C. Doubinsky. University of Nebraska Press. Hill, R. K. (2003), Nietzsche’s Critiques. The Kantian Foundations of His Thought, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lindemann, U. (2009), ‘Intertextualitätsforschung’, in J. Schneider (ed.), Methodengeschichte der Germanistik, 269–​87, Berlin/​New York: De Gruyter. Müller, E. (2009), ‘Von der “Umwerthung” zur Autogenealogie. Die Götzen-​ Dämmerung im Kontext des Spätwerks’, Nietzscheforschung 16: 141–​50. Pichler, A. (2013), ‘ “Den Irrtum erzählen”: Eine Lektüre von “Wie die ‘wahre Welt’ endlich zur Fabel wurde”’, Nietzscheforschung 20: 193–​210. Pichler, A. (2014), Philosophie als Text –​Zur Darstellungsform der ‘Götzen-​Dämmerung’, Berlin/​Boston: De Gruyter. Riccardi, M. (2009), ‘Der faule Fleck des Kantischen Kriticismus’. Erscheinung und Ding an sich bei Nietzsche, Basel: Schwabe. Schmidt, S. J. (1972), ‘Ist “Fiktionalität” eine linguistische oder eine texttheoretische Kategorie?’, in E Güllich and W. Raible (eds),Textsorten: Differenzierungskriterien aus linguistischer Sicht, 59–71, Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum. Siemens, H., and Tongeren, P. van (2012), ‘Das Nietzsche-​Wörterbuch: Anatomy of a “großes Projekt”’, in V. Caysa and K. Schwarzwald (eds), Nietzsche –​ Macht –​Größe, 451–​66, Berlin/​Boston: De Gruyter. Solomon, R. C. (2007), ‘Nietzsche ad hominem. Perspectivism, Personality, and Ressentiment Revisited’, in B. Magnus and K. B. Higgins (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, 223–​51, New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Sommer, A. U. (2012), Kommentar zu Nietzsches Der Fall Wagner, Götzen-​Dämmerung. Historischer und kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken Bd. 6.1, ed. The Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin/​Boston: De Gruyter. Stegmaier, W. (2011), Friedrich Nitzsche zur Einführung, Hamburg: Junius. Zittel, C. (2011), Das ästhetische Kalkül von Friedrich Nietzsches ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’, 2nd rev. ed., Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.

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Nietzsche, Kant and Self-​Observation: Dealing with the Risk of ‘Landing in Anticyra’ Luca Lupo

1.  Kant on self-​observation Self-​observation is the subject of paragraph 4 of Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology. Kant defines ‘self-​observation’ as a ‘methodical compilation [eine methodische Zusammenstellung] of the perceptions [Wahrnehmungen] formed in us’, a compilation ‘which delivers material for a diary [Tagebuch] of an observer of oneself [eines Beobachters seiner selbst] and easily leads to enthusiasm [Schwärmerei] and madness [Wahnsinn]’.1 Kant clearly formulates a negative judgement on the practice of self-​observation and clearly indicates its risks. Enthusiasm and madness are the dangers of self-​observation that Kant indicates, and significantly, he feels the need to dwell on these dangers three times, at the beginning of the paragraph, as we have seen, and twice shortly thereafter, at the end of it. To observe the various acts of representative power in myself, when I summon them, is indeed worth reflection; it is necessary and useful for logic and metaphysics. –​But to wish to eavesdrop on oneself when they come into the mind unbidden and on their own (this happens through the play of the power of imagination when it is unintentionally meditating) constitutes a reversal [Verkehrung] of the natural order in the faculty of knowledge, because then the principles of thought do not lead the way (as they should), but rather follow behind. This eavesdropping on oneself is either already a disease of the mind (melancholy), or leads to one and to the madhouse. He who knows how to describe a great deal about his inner experiences (of grace, of temptations) may, with his voyage of discovery in the exploration of himself, land only in Anticyra.2

This emphasis appears more remarkable when we consider that the paragraph on self-​observation consists of little more than three pages. In epistemological

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terms, Kant points out how the knowledge derived from self-​observation is unstable by nature. Considering that self-​observation, from a transcendental point of view, is based on inner sense, and ‘inner sense sees the relations of its determinations only in time, hence in a flux’, we can find ‘no stability in observation [Betrachtung], which is necessary for experience’,3 Kant concludes. Hence, we have the unreliability of knowledge in the form of self-​observation. The firmness of the faith in the rational subject is the paradoxical precondition for the Kantian suspicion towards self-​observation in which it takes root. The words used by Kant are very eloquent and sound like a true manifesto of such modern illuminist faith, emphasized by the use of italics: ‘To observe the various acts of representative power in myself, when I summon them, is indeed worth reflection; it is necessary and useful for logic and metaphysics.’ As long as it is the I that leads the way, all is well, and rationality is safe: but, as soon as something else –​let’s call it Non-​I –​manifests itself coming into play, then such event opens the paths towards mental illness, towards madness. What Kant opposes to the I, comes, at least, in a dual role: as the wish to spy on something that is basically elusive, on the one hand, and as a plurality, a dynamic, unintentional multiplicity of the ‘object’ ‘spied on’, that is, ‘the various acts of representative power’ on the other. While the I is one, the characteristic of the Non-​I is instead that of being plural. The acts of which such plurality consists are described as living a life of their own, as being autonomous with respect to the I: they ‘come into the mind unbidden and on their own’, and they are the effects of a game, different from the one that reason plays. To let the (power of) imagination replace the I, that is, the principles that govern rational thought, is tantamount to subverting ‘the natural order in the faculty of knowledge’. In affirming such ‘natural order’, the Kantian discourse admits, at the same time, the existence of a different ‘order’, an order of the otherness, or rather, the existence of a force. However, and this is the trouble spot, as well as being multiple and dynamic, this force is not represented by anything external; it is present in the I although it is not the I. Facing the potential occurrence of such force, the only thing that the Kantian discourse can do here is to say that things should not go this way, that the principles of thought should (sollen) counteract this force. In the face of the unintentional creative power of imagination, Kant seems in fact merely to warn us, rather than debating the subject. He declares that ‘the warning’ (Warnung) is exactly ‘the real purpose of this section’. To follow the involuntary course of one’s thoughts and feelings is a path of ‘confusion in the mind of supposed higher inspirations and powers flowing into us, without our

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help, who knows from where’.4 Referring to such ‘supposed higher inspirations and powers’, Kant performs a sort of exorcism: he projects outwards the danger of a multiplicity that is already within the subject, and threatens it from within.5 The need for such exorcism stems from a fear –​it is noteworthy how, once again, the sphere of the irrational exerts its influence in the field of the I, in this case in Kant’s very I –​a fear and a concern which touches him personally. It is the fear of ‘landing in Anticyra’,6 a metaphor with which Kant alludes to the risk of the descent into madness, a danger that all men whose work concerns thinking often face (especially when they take themselves as objects of observation). Nietzsche also expresses a critical attitude towards self-​observation as a form of knowledge. In his critique of self-​observation he agrees with Kant.7 However, as we shall see, Nietzsche’s distrust of self-​observation takes off from completely different assumptions:  indeed, it results from the radical renunciation of the claim that the subject should be a unique and stable reference point. Nietzsche assumes what Kant rejects, namely, the fact that feeling, willing, thinking are not based on a firm, transcendental point of origin. If one wonders where thoughts, feelings, volitions come from, the only possible answer for Nietzsche is ‘I do not know’.8

2.  Nietzsche on self-​observation The most problematic aspect of surveying human consciousness is the fact that such an investigation is performed in a condition, the ‘state of consciousness’, which is also the object of the survey. We are inside our object of investigation, inside our question and therefore too close to it to see it. Moreover, we ourselves are in question and we are the question itself. The difficulty of being able to have it as object of inquiry is what leads our consciousness to be unconscious. It is familiar to us, being the starting point of our questioning, and at the same time alien to us, for we do not know how it could be possible. For this reason, consciousness can be identified with the unconscious and paradoxically becomes one with it. Consciousness is ‘unconscious’ to the extent that we do not know all aspects of the processes and dynamics that shape our manner of creating the world and experiencing it. What is unconscious? What is the unconscious par excellence? It is just the fact that we can have experience of the world, that is, our consciousness. The investigation of consciousness is a form of self-​observation that Nietzsche regards with extreme scepticism. The main problem with this survey is that the ‘subject’, as an observed object, coincides with the point of

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observation. Self-​observation is therefore manifested as an inherently paradoxical form of knowledge. In general, it would perhaps be inappropriate and not entirely correct to consider observation as a form of knowledge. Observation can be thought of, rather, as a preparatory practice/​process in order to attain knowledge, but it cannot yet be considered proper knowledge. It is something that can precede and prepare for it, that can make knowledge possible, but it is not certain that it will succeed in this task. What self-​observation can do rather, precisely because of its peculiarity as a reflexive act, is to allow the empirical subject to have a direct experience of the concept of the limits of knowledge. The object of the search in this case, the self to be observed, is constitutively unattainable, because it is not a stable entity: it is constantly changing and can be grasped only at the limits of language. Already at the stage of Human, All Too Human Nietzsche shows a critical attitude towards the cognitive possibilities related to a practice of self-​observation. Self-​observation is originally defective because the standard by which we measure, our own being [Wesen], is not an unalterable magnitude, we are subject to moods and fluctuations, and yet we would have to know ourselves as a fixed standard to be justly able to assess the relation between ourselves and anything whatever else.9

The subject is therefore something in oscillation, whose centre of gravity is elusive and continuously shifting. If it is true that the subject is a plural entity of variable geometry which ‘continuously increases or decreases –​the centre of the system continually shifting’,10 self-​observation will necessarily be problematic. As a consequence, ‘it is doubtful that “the subject” can prove itself –​to this end, it would have to have a firm foothold outside [itself], and this is lacking’.11 Hence, we need to decline self-​observation in the sense of a ‘phenomenalism’ that tries to ‘gain’ access to the subject ‘from the outside’. Still, we find a ‘dominant prejudice that you know the ego, that it does not fail to make itself continually felt; but hardly any work or intelligence are applied to it –​as if, for self-​knowledge, we were relieved of research by an intuition [Intuition]!’12 Self-​observation is problematic because the object of observation is moving, changing, difficult to circumscribe and define and is subject to transformations of time. In aphorism 223 of ‘Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche’,13 Nietzsche argues that self-​observation mainly passes through observation and knowledge of the circumstances determining the subject, and it is resolved in the knowledge of their history.14 Knowledge of the self is only possible as a ‘universal knowledge

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with regard to all that is past’, and history is the set of ‘adventurous travels’ of an ego ‘in the process of becoming and transformation’: the past continues to flow within us in a hundred waves, we ourselves are, indeed, nothing but that which at every moment we experience of this continued flowing. It may even be said that here too, when we desire to descend into the river of what seems to be our own most intimate and personal being, the dictum of Heraclitus applies: we cannot step into the same river twice.15

For Nietzsche, as indeed also for Kant, man is the point of observation of the world, but he is also a phenomenon like the others, being subject to the same conditions of investigation as other phenomena. The relativization of the human point of view depends on the recognition of its changing and unstable nature. Observation of the self is connected with the dissolution of the idea of the subject as the foundation of knowledge. Cognition of the self, taken as a phenomenon among other phenomena, rather than an unconditioned subject of knowledge, gives rise to a different cognitive attitude that could be defined as an ‘epistemology of moderation’, according to which [w]‌e learn to think less of all that is conscious:  we unlearn to hold ourselves responsible for our self, because we, as conscious purposive [zwecksetzende] beings, are just the smallest part [of occurrence as a whole –​LL]. Of the numberless effects [Einwirkungen] at every moment, for example, of air and electricity, we hardly sense anything: there might be enough forces which continuously influence us, without ever entering our sensation [Empfindung].16

The faith in the subject implies the need to postulate the subject itself as something stable with a mysterious, original nucleus that must be examined and known, but is not questioned as such. In the observation of self as phenomenon proposed by Nietzsche, the idea of a stable core of the observer fades away. As a phenomenon among phenomena, the individual, the subject, the I  is constituted by the external world; it builds itself, redefines itself from time to time, starting out from the constellations of things, people and experiences it actively deals with. These elements allow it to know itself: ‘Man is very well defended against himself, against being reconnoitred and besieged by himself ’, Nietzsche writes in an aphorism called Self-​observation and adds that ‘he is usually able to perceive of himself only his outer walls. The actual fortress is inaccessible, even invisible to him, unless his friends and enemies play the traitor and conduct him in by a secret path’.17 Self-​observation in a Nietzschean sense is therefore only possible through the observation of the world,18 and then in fact it ceases to be ‘self-​observation’: a

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never-​ending task, since the object–​subject, the object–​I and the object–​world, finally coincide, as do also the limits of each of them. In this overlapping of the I and world, the limits of the I dilate out of proportion: the I is as wide as the part of the world that constitutes it, and it is therefore as unknown as is the world. It is to this Heraclitean expansion of the boundaries of the I that Nietzsche seems to allude when he states that ‘[h]‌owever far a man may go in self-​knowledge, nothing however can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of drives that constitute his being’.19 In the absence of what can be called a ‘passage from outside’ (i.e. in the absence of an observation of the I conceived as observation of the external world), self-​observation has proved to be a sterile cognitive practice in human history: in fact, despite all efforts, the world of the subject remains an unknown world and the ‘‘ignorance of self ’ remains substantially unaltered. This is particularly demonstrated by the fallacy of the ‘primeval delusion’ that ‘still lives on that one knows, and knows quite precisely in every case, how human action is brought about’.20 An illusion that has long prevented us from seeing that actually ‘all actions are essentially unknown’21; indeed, ‘no amount of knowledge about an act ever suffices to ensure its performance’.22 The faith in a personal will and the voluntary nature of the action ‘results from a false self-​observation’.23 In a list of topics dated in the summer of 1883, Nietzsche speaks of the ‘essentially erroneous self-​observation of each agent’,24 but a really emblematic step in the theme of self-​observation is to be found in the unused material for the drafting of Zarathustra. Here Nietzsche begins to question the nature of what is external (our neighbour: der Nächste) and concludes that what is inside is also known as something external, and it is, like that which is external, only an image (or sign). Listen to me a moment, Oh Zarathustra –​one day a disciple said –​I have something whirling in my mind, and indeed I  would almost believe that my head whirls around something so as to turn in a circle. What is that, our neighbour? Something of us, changes in us of which we have become aware [bewuβt]: our neighbour is an image [ein Bild]. But what are we ourselves? Are not we ourselves but an image [Bild]? Something of us, changes in us of which we have become aware? Our self, about which we know: is that also no more than an image [Bild], something outside of us, outer, outward [ein Bild ein Außer-​uns, Äußeres, Äußerliches]? We only ever get in touch with the image, and not with us ourselves [wir rühren immer nur an das Bild und nicht selber an uns].

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Are we not just as far and close to ourselves in the same measure as [we are to] the neighbour? Indeed we have an image of the human [ein Bild vom Menschen]  –​we did it drawing it out of ourselves. And now we apply it to ourselves, –​to understand [verstehen] ourselves! Ah yes, to understand [verstehen]! It is going badly, to the very worst, with our self-​understanding [with unsrem Selbst-​Verständniß]! Our strongest feelings:  insofar as they are feelings, they are something outer, outward, imagistic: they are similes [Gleichnisse]. And what we used to call inner world [innere Welt]: alas, it is poor and misleading and empty and contrived [dichterisch] to the highest degree!25

In the winter of the same year, meditating on the birth of science from the natural ‘aversion to intellectual chaos’, Nietzsche observes: This same aversion grips me when I  consider myself [bei Betrachtung meiner selber]: I would like to represent the inner world [innere Welt] to myself imagistically [mir bildlich vorstellen] through a scheme [Schema] and rise above the intellectual confusion. Morality was such a simplification:  with its doctrines, it regarded the human as something known [erkannt], as something familiar [bekannt].  –​Now we have destroyed morality  –​we have once again become completely obscure to ourselves! I know that I know nothing of myself. (NL 1883–​ 4 24[18], KSA 10.656)

The Nietzschean suspicion towards self-​observation is coupled with the attempt to establish an epistemology based on the primacy of the body. Relying on the observation of the body allows you to correct the natural tendency of the mind (which is nothing more than ‘a testimony of the intensified senses’) to deception: When we directly ask the subject about the subject, and every time the mind [Geist] is mirrored in itself, we risk the danger that it may be useful and important to its activity to interpret itself falsely. Therefore, we ask the body and reject the testimony of the intensified senses.26

Even in the mid-​1880s, Nietzsche continues to be wary of the combination of theory of knowledge and self-​observation without significant changes. The philosopher quips about this combination, considering in particular as absurd the claim that an act of self-​observation can be foundational for philosophical research. Here the target is again Kant:

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It is almost comical that our philosophers require that philosophy should begin with a critique of the cognitive faculty: is it not highly unlikely that the organ of knowledge can ‘criticize’ itself [sich selber ‘kritisiren’ kann], once we have become suspicious of the results of knowledge until now? The reduction of philosophy to ‘the will of a theory of knowledge’ is comical. It is as if security could thereby be found! (NL 1885–​6 61[60], KSA 12.26)

According to Nietzsche, ‘a criticism of the faculty of knowledge is senseless: how should a tool be able to criticize itself, if it can only use itself for the criticism? It cannot even define itself ’.27 Further on: ‘an instrument cannot criticize its own validity [seine eigene Tauglichkeit]: the intellect itself cannot determine its own limits [Grenze], not even [determine] its own success or lack of success’.28 In a previous brief remark, Nietzsche had already dwelt on the strangeness of ‘a cognitive apparatus that wants to know itself!!’ (Ein Erkenntniß-​Apparat, der sich selber erkennen will!!). ‘We should be beyond this absurdity of a task! (The stomach that consumes itself –​)’.29 The main mistake of modern philosophy consists in having believed in ‘facts of consciousness’ (Thatsachen des Bewusstseins) and in failing to recognize that self-​observation is also based on phenomenalism: I hold fast to the phenomenality of the inner world:  everything of which we become aware [bewuβt] is thoroughly fashioned [zurechtgemacht], simplified, schematized, interpreted –​the real process [Vorgang] of inner ‘perception’, the causal unification of thoughts, feelings, desires, such as between subject and object, are absolutely hidden for us –​and perhaps they are pure imagination. This ‘apparent inner world’ is treated with the same forms and processes of the ‘outer’ world.30

Again, ‘nothing is more phenomenal, (or clearer) nothing is more deceptive [Täuschung] than this inner world we observe through the famous “inner sense” ’.31 During the period 1887–​88, Nietzsche radicalized the criticism of self-​ observation, questioning the very figure of the psychologist. The difference between the old psychology and psychology of the future is grounded in the attribution of value to self-​observation: Psychologists, as they have first become possible from the nineteenth century: no longer those nerds who cannot see farther than three or four steps forward, and are almost satisfied to dig deep inside themselves. We psychologists of the future, we have not much goodwill towards self-​observation: we almost consider a sign of degeneration [Entartung] that an instrument would seek to

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‘know itself ’: we are instruments of knowledge and would like to have all the naivety and precision of an instrument; therefore, we are not permitted to analyze, to understand ourselves. First sign of an instinct of self-​preservation of the great psychologist: he never seeks himself, he has no eyes, no interest, no curiosity about himself . . .32

In the next note Nietzsche adds: ‘[W]‌e distrust all the navel-​gazers, for self-​ observation for us is equivalent to a form of degeneration of psychological genius.’33

2.1 Getting closer to Anticyra In the pragmatic field, Kant criticizes self-​observation, but Nietzsche seems to want to expose (unmask) that critical enterprise itself as based on assumptions derived from self-​observation. The operation carried out by Kant in the context of his critical philosophy does not in Nietzsche’s opinion differ significantly from that criticized by Kant himself in his Anthropology: from Nietzsche’s point of view, even the critical inquiry becomes Schwärmerei. Nietzsche’s critique of knowledge as self-​observation constitutes just a stage in a more general and more radical critique of the metaphysical tradition in Descartes and Kant. In particular, Nietzsche writes ironically:  ‘[T]‌he theory of knowledge is the favourite occupation of those keen minds that have not learned enough and come to argue that, at least here, everyone could start all over again and “self-​observation” would be sufficient.’34 Instead, the knower must avoid self-​ knowledge and leave ‘his roots planted in the earth’35; in other words, putting aside the Zarathustrian metaphorical language in favour of the phenomenalism supported by the late (and not only by the late) Nietzsche, it is necessary to leave the introspective attitude and look beyond ourselves, out of ourselves into the world, in order to know ourselves. However, the survey of the texts that we have presented should have made clear how Nietzsche tends to confuse and overlap the epistemological and anthropological level, in fact progressively reducing the former to the latter and Kantian criticism to a form of self-​observation. Nietzsche therefore misunderstands criticism but such misunderstanding will not be unfruitful, as we shall see later on. Nietzsche shows a critical stance towards self-​observation, yet at the same time he also practices it, in a form that is not far from the self-​observation targeted by Kant’s criticism, as is evident, for example, from the many autobiographical

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attempts that culminate in Ecce Homo. In this sense, despite his radical criticism of the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche can be ascribed in this particular respect to the established, centuries-​old tradition of men of knowledge who devote themselves to the practice of what Michel Foucault called ‘technologies of the self ’.36 We might think that Nietzsche’s philosophy is a permanent meditation by Nietzsche on himself,37 even when his research is directed towards the outside world: a meditation on himself through the ‘outer’ path of the world. The access to the self through such outer path prevents Nietzschean self-​observation from taking a sterile narcissistic drift,38 but at the very moment when Nietzsche reaches the extreme limit of self-​observation, with Ecce Homo, he materializes the risks evoked by Kant.

3.  Landing in Anticyra: A lucky shipwreck? It is noteworthy that an Introduction to Immanuel Kant’s Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, ‘constituted Foucault’s secondary doctoral thesis39 (the principal thesis being Madness and Civilization [sic]), which was supervised by Jean Hyppolite and submitted to the University of Paris, Sorbonne on May 20, 1961’.40 No less noteworthy is what Jean Hyppolite wrote on Foucault’s minor thesis, namely, that it was inspired ‘more by Nietzsche than Kant’.41 In any case, both represent the background, the fundamental theoretical and methodological reference points that guide Foucault’s research, in which a critical–​anthropological perspective and genealogical enquiry merge, generating a completely new point of view. Prima facie the main and the secondary thesis seem unrelated, but a closer look shows the link between them, which lies in the attention that Kant dedicates in his work to the question of mental illness, genealogically investigated by Foucault in his main thesis. In his Introduction, Michel Foucault makes two important points concerning the relationship between Kant and Nietzsche with a significant bearing on the reference to Nietzsche at the end of the History of Madness. In the conclusion of this chapter, we will focus on these texts and try to shed light on them: they are in fact particularly difficult to interpret, but they show at least one thing clearly, namely, that in the relationship between Kant and Nietzsche the very destiny and meaning of the adventure of Western thought is at stake. On the first point, Foucault makes clear reference to Nietzsche, without naming him, and underscores the importance of the link between Nietzsche and

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Kant, the thread connecting them and the urgent need to deepen the analysis of this underestimated link, an analysis that is presented as a crucial task for contemporary thought. Foucault shows here that he absorbed the Nietzschean lesson42 either through the practice of a refined rhetoric of reticence particularly resistant to a hasty reading or using the concept of Eternal Return to clarify the relationship between the two thinkers. What form of blindness prevents us from seeing that the authentic articulation of the Philosophieren was once again present, and in a far more restrictive form, in a thinking that was perhaps not itself aware of what it owed in terms of filiation and fidelity to the old ‘Chinaman of Königsberg’? We would probably have to know what ‘to philosophize with a hammer’ means, take a preliminary look at what the Morgenrot [sic] is, to understand what comes back to us in the Eternal Return to see there the authentic repetition, in a world that is our own, of what was, for an already distant culture, reflection on the a priori, the originary and finitude. For it is there, in that thinking which thought the end of philosophy, that the possibility of continuing to philosophize, and the injunction of a new austerity, resides.43

The history of philosophy is marked by repetition:  fundamental questions return, over and over again. Their repetition is hidden by the fact that they come up in configurations which are only apparently new. What returns in a manner identical to itself is ‘the authentic articulation of the Philosophieren’, the act of philosophizing itself. The past must be investigated moving from the present:  this is what the genealogical method teaches, and this is what Foucault learned following in Nietzsche’s footsteps. According to this epistemological principle, Nietzsche is in Foucault’s view the key to understanding Kant’s thought, with which he is linked by a relationship of ‘filiation and fidelity’ –​despite the sarcastic expression ‘Chinaman of Königsberg’ that Nietzsche himself uses to refer to Kant. By using it he seems to hide from himself (and from us) the relevance of this relationship, perhaps without even realizing its repression. From a genealogical point of view, our understanding of the present (i.e. of Nietzsche and his thought, understood as events of the present times: ‘to philosophize with a hammer’, ‘Morgenrot’ and ‘Eternal return’) is needed in order to rethink the fundamental and recurring questions which Kant had already posed (on the a priori, the originary and finitude), in order to continue performing the act of thinking effectively. In the second text that significantly closes the Introduction, Foucault considers Nietzsche’s negative anthropology to be almost the necessary result of

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Kantian thought: the Übermensch is the answer to the impossibility and the dissolution of the Kantian question ‘Was ist der Mensch?’ The Nietzschean enterprise can be understood as at last bringing that proliferation of the questioning of man to an end. For is not the death of God in effect manifested in a doubly murderous gesture which, by putting an end to the absolute, is at the same time the cause of the death of man himself? For man, in his finitude, is not distinguishable from the infinite of which he is both the negation and the harbinger; it is in the death of man that the death of God is realized. Is it not possible to conceive of a critique of finitude which would be as liberating with regard to man as it would be with regard to the infinite, and which would show that finitude is not an end but rather that camber and knot in time when the end is in fact a beginning? The trajectory of the question Was ist der Mensch? in the field of philosophy reaches its end in the response which both challenges and disarms it:  der Übermensch.44

Here Nietzsche’s filiation and fidelity to Kant concerns a further question, a crucial and recurring question for Kant himself and for philosophy in general (as are the questions of the a priori, the originary and finitude). It is the question that summarizes all other philosophical questions, namely, the question of man: Was ist der Mensch? For Foucault, Nietzsche’s answer brings ‘the proliferation of the questioning of man to an end’. In this case too, as in the previous quotation, Foucault uses an argumentative strategy marked by finesse and scientific ‘audacious prudence’: the interrogative movement of the text reveals both. He also refers to the crucial categories of Nietzschean thought, connecting them to each other and using them as tools to show the primacy of immanence: the death of God, the Übermensch and, again, the Eternal Return. Furthermore, Foucault here uses the same argument that Nietzsche had already used in the Twilight of the Idols, in the section entitled ‘How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable’.45 Here, as is well known, Nietzsche concludes that abolishing the ‘true world’ entails abolishing the ‘illusory world’ along with it. As a result, the ontological dualism fades away. In Foucault’s text we can see the same argumentative structure at work (if a polarity falls, then the other term also loses its sense) to explain the evolution of the relationship between God and man and to show how the introduction of the concept of the Übermensch entails a liberation ‘with regard to man as it would be with regard to the infinite’, a liberation ‘which would show

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that finitude is not an end but rather that camber and knot in time when the end is in fact a beginning’. Once again temporality is the key here: thanks to the concept of the Eternal Return, Nietzsche’s answer to the question of man appears as a paradoxical opening rather than a closing. Thanks to this opening, the question of man is renewed and asked again and again, even though the subject of this question might not in fact be called ‘man’ anymore because it has disappeared with God, who made man possible but who was also a constraint and a bond. As mentioned, the introduction, translation and notes to Kant’s Anthropology represent the complementary thesis to Foucault’s History of Madness (1959–​60), which is actually the main work. In the last chapter of this work, entitled ‘the anthropological circle’, Foucault focuses on the importance of the relationship between madness and work, and how Nietzsche’s madness deeply belongs to his work. Shifting our attention now from the Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology to the conclusion of the History of Madness, we can close the circle we opened by reading the pages in which Kant warned us against the dangerous consequences of the self-​observation, and the risks of madness breaking into the sphere of rationality. Here Foucault seems not only to capture the thread binding Kant to Nietzsche, but also to recover the positive and generative aspects of Nietzsche’s (and not only Nietzsche’s) drift into madness: that same madness Kant had seen as a danger arising from the very practice of self-​observation and that Nietzsche had lived and expressed throughout his work, becomes for Foucault an heuristic and epistemological opportunity: Nietzsche’s madness, i.e. the collapse of his thought, is the way in which that thought opens onto the modern world. It is that which made it impossible that makes it present to us: we are offered it by all that wrenched it from his grasp. That is not to say that madness is the only language common to an œuvre and the modern world [. . .] but it does mean that through madness, an œuvre that seems to sink into the world and reveal there its non-​sense, and to acquire these purely pathological features, ultimately engages with the time of the world, mastering it and taking the lead. By the madness that interrupts it, an œuvre opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without an answer, opening an unhealable wound that the world is forced to address. By it everything that is necessarily blasphemous in an œuvre is reversed and, in the time of the œuvre that has slumped into madness, the world is made aware of its guilt. Henceforth and through the mediation of madness, it is the world that becomes guilty (for the

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first time in the history of the West) in relation to the œuvre: it is now arraigned by the œuvre, constrained to speak its language, and obliged to take part in a process of recognition and reparation, to find an explanation for this unreason and explain itself before it. The madness where an œuvre plunges into a void is the space of our work, the infinite path to understanding it at last, our confused vocation as apostles and interpreters. For that reason it matters little when the voice of madness first whispered within Nietzsche’s pride or Van Gogh’s humility. There is only madness as the last instant of the œuvre –​for the œuvre indefinitely repels madness to its outer limits. Where there is an œuvre, there is no madness: and yet madness is contemporaneous with the œuvre, as it is harbinger of the time of its truth. The instant in which, together, madness and an œuvre come into being and rich fulfilment is the beginning of the time when the world first finds itself summoned by the œuvre, and is responsible for all that it is in the face of it.46

Consigned to the limits of the world by modern thought, madness returns in the works and lives of men of knowledge and arts of our times, like Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Artaud. When madness manifests itself in the gap that lies between their work and the world, the work becomes a wound that ‘the world is forced to address’. Madness turns the work into a mirror in which the image of the world is reflected. The world would not want to see what this image represents, namely, the repressed, irrational side of the world itself and of reason. Reflecting itself in the void that madness has opened, the world feels responsible and guilty for it recognizes itself, precisely the repressed part of itself, in such a void. The world finds itself constrained to seek the meaning of its own madness. However, the wound does not allude to the misery alone, but also to an opening of the work to the world. It is thus not just a traumatic opening, for it allows the world to go beyond the surface of the work and look inside it grasping its very truth. Deprived of such wound, the world would not be able to investigate itself and the truth could not manifest itself. If on the one hand Foucault insists that ‘[w]‌here there is an œuvre, there is no madness’, on the other he describes the latter as ‘the harbinger’ of a time in which the very truth of the former will be revealed. Indeed, thanks to Nietzsche’s key role Foucault is able to bring to an end the repression of madness, conceived by the modern age, from Descartes to Kant, as the irrational shadow of philosophical rationality. Furthermore, he shows how looking fearlessly into the breakdown of reason makes possible an opportunity for self-​understanding that cannot be missed. The Kantian fear of landing in Anticyra paves the way for the Nietzschean serendipitous shipwreck: Naufragium feci, bene navigavi.47

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Notes My special thanks to Niccolò Maria Bonifati and to Vincenzo Continanza for their helpful linguistic revision of the text and to Regina Greber for her kind suggestions for the choice of the title. 1 Anth § 4 132. If, on the one hand, in Kant’s view, self-​observation may lead to madness, on the other, its practice represents, for example, according to Goethe ([1811–​33] 1948: 7), a hallmark, a sign of distinction between ‘ordinary men’ (gewöhnliche Menschen) and the ‘most excellent spirits’ (vorzüglichsten Geister): while the former do not observe themselves, the latter do it acutely and in detail, recording carefully their own thoughts and feelings in writings, letters and journals. However, in his Commentary to Kant’s Anthropology, section four, Brandt also refers to a Goethean critique of self-​observation (über seine Constitution Betrachtungen machen) as a symptom of sickness; healthy men rarely observe themselves (see Brandt 1999: 131). Furthermore, Kant’s definition of self-​ observation can be traced back to those sets of ascetic practices and principles aimed at shaping the lives and actions of philosophers and men of faith, which Foucault called ‘Technologies of the Self ’ (see later, Foucault (1988)). 2 Anth §4 134. 3 Anth §4 134. 4 Anth §4 133; italics added. 5 See Mark 5.1–​13, ‘http://​www.vatican.va/​archive/​ENG0839/​_​PW7.HTM’ \l ‘61’. 6 ‘Anticyra was an ancient coastal city on the Gulf of Corinth, in Phocis. The medicinal plant hellebore alleged to cure madness grew there. See Horace, Satires 2. 3 165–​166; De arte poetica 360. Külpe surmises that Kant borrowed the allusion from an article in the Teutsche Merkur 2 (1784) entitled “über das Reisen und jemand, der nach Anticyra reisen sollte” (p. 151)’ (Kant ([1798] 2006: 22, note 17). For further details, see also Brandt’s (1999: 136) commentary. 7 My chapter focuses specifically on some aspects of self-​observation in Kant and Nietzsche, a topic that is just a part of the more general problem of self-​knowledge. For a detailed survey of the concept in a comparative perspective in both the philosophers, see Katsafanas (2015). More specifically about self-​knowledge in Nietzsche, see also Stellino (2015). More generally, see Constâncio, Branco and Ryan (2015) and here in particular: Branco (2015); Constâncio (2015); Jensen (2015); Stegmaier (2015); Zavatta (2015). 8 Cf. NL 1884 26 [92], KSA 11.174, and Lupo 2006: 112. 9 MA 32, KSA 2.51. 10 NL 1887 9[98], KSA 12.391. 11 NL 1885 40[20], KSA 11.638. 12 NL 1881 11[226], KSA 9.528.

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13 VM 223, KSA 2.477–​8. 14 On the relationship between self-​knowledge and genealogy, see again Stellino (2015) and Lupo (2011). 15 VM 223, KSA 2.477. 16 NL 1883–​4 24[16], KSA 10.654. 17 MA 491, KSA 2.319. 18 Goethe and his autobiography, Truth and Fiction, is a fundamental reference point for Nietzsche and an example of the practice of self-​observation as a phenomenalism, a looking into oneself ‘from outside’. 19 M 119, KSA 3.111. 20 M 116, KSA 3.108. 21 M 116, KSA 3.109. 22 M 116, KSA 3.109. 23 NL 1885 34[243], KSA 11.502. 24 NL 1883 7[268], KSA 10.323. 25 NL 1883 12[40], KSA 10.408. 26 NL 1885 40[21], KSA 11.639. 27 NL 1885–​6 2[87], KSA 12.105. 28 NL 1885–​6 2[132], KSA 12.133. 29 NL 1884 26[18], KSA 11.154. 30 NL 1887–​8 11[113] (358), KSA 13.53. 31 NL 1888 14[152], KSA, 13.335. 32 NL 1888 14[27], KSA 13.230. 33 NL 1888 14[28], KSA 13.231. 34 NL 1880 3[57], KSA 9.63. 35 NL 1882 3[1]‌295, KSA 10.88. 36 According to Foucault (1988: 18), such technologies ‘permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’. For some introductory remark on the technologies of the self in Nietzsche and Foucault, see Pellegrini (2015). 37 In the framework of his interpretation from an existential perspective, Jaspers still remains a reference point on the topic of self-​observation in Nietzsche, especially Jaspers ([1936] 1979, ­chapter 3 part 1 entitled ‘How Nietzsche understands himself and his own thought’, 383ff.). Among other things Jaspers writes: ‘When Nietzsche acknowledges that he has “few good intentions towards self-​observation”, he means that he is not a psychologist in the sense of an empirical investigator who merely observes, seeking to grasp his facts experimentally, casuistically, and statistically,

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40 41 42

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with a view to causal explanation; rather his psychology consists in a philosophical illumination of Existenz. The psychology that practices self-​observation differs from that which illumines Existenz through self-​understanding: self-​observation relates to empirical existence (including one’s own); self-​understanding relates to possible Existenz. Certain aspects of my existence, with their endless special ramifications, are indeed knowable through observation, and it is reasonable to concern oneself with them insofar as technical aids are applicable (thus Nietzsche observes the dependence of his psychic states upon diet and climate) and phenomena are discoverable in or to which possible Existenz speaks (extensive parts of his psychological works are of this nature: illuminations that appeal to Existenz, even when they deal with facts). But it is fatuous for the observer to gyrate around the empirical factuality of his own existence as though, by applying self-​observation psychologically, he might therein find himself as Existenz’ (383–​4). Later on Jaspers adds: ‘Thus Nietzsche opposes self-​observation and self-​reflection (although he practices both) with a view to limiting them and finding the proper way to the kind of self-​understanding that has its roots and its goal elsewhere’ (384). See Jaspers ([1936] 1979) and Lupo (2011). For further information about the complex editorial history of the Foucauldian Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology by Nigro and Briggs, see Foucault (2008); for an overview on this Foucault’s early work, see Terra (1997). Foucault 2008: 127. Foucault 2008: 128–​9. For helpful remarks on Foucault’s debt to Nietzsche on the relationships among reason, unreason and madness, see: LaCapra (1992), Megill (1992), Gordon (1992), passim. Foucault 2008: 107–​108. Foucault 2008: 124. In commenting this translation of Foucault’s text we will follow the mistranslation therein of the gender-​neutral term ‘Mensch’ as ‘man’. See GD Fabel, KSA 6.81; Lupo (2006: 38 ff.) Foucault ([1961] 2006: 537). For brief but illuminating remarks on the topics of this quote, see Palombi (2014: 69–​72). ‘When I suffer shipwreck, I have navigated well.’ Nietzsche borrows the motto from Diogenes Laertius and Schopenhauer. He refers to it in three passages in the published works and in the posthumous notes: in WA 4, KSA 6.20; NL 1875 3[19], KSA 8.20; and NL 1888 16 [44], KSA 13.501. The original Laertian version recounts how, because of a shipwreck, the stoic philosopher Zeno of Citius was forced to flee to Athens and that this serendipitous, even though traumatic event made his encounter with his master, the Cynic Crates of Thebes, possible (see Diogenes Laertius VII, 4; (Diogenes L. 1925)).

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Name Index Abel, Günter 48, 100, 249 Adickes, Erich 148, 149, 249 Albrecht, Jörn 54, 65 Allison, Henry E. 148, 249 Anaxagoras 85, 228 Anaximander 228 Ansell-​Pearson, Keith 20, 107, 174 Anselm (of Canterbury) 4 Anticyra 18, 255, 257, 263, 264, 268, 269 Aristotelian 188, 189 Aristotle 52, 181, 188, 251 Arnobius 234 Artaud, Antonin 268 Athens 271 Baer, Karl Ernst von 94 Bailey, Tom 19, 21, 22, 226, 251, 252 Barbera, Sandro 21, 23 Basel 2, 3, 8–​10, 19, 24, 55, 59, 62, 65, 66, 105, 250 Baumannshöhle 10 Baur, Ferdinand Christian 20 Beiser, Frederick 21, 111, 133, 134 Benders, Raymond 19 Beneke, Friedrich Eduard 133 Benne, Christian 251 Berkeleian 210, 215 Berkeley 229 Bertino, Andrea 65, 196, 236, 249 Böhning, Thomas 63 Bonn 4, 5, 9 Borges, Jorge Luis 248, 249 Bornedal, Peter 67 Boscovich, Roger Joseph 94, 220, 223, 224 Boscovichean 217 Brandt, Reinhard 269 Brobjer, Thomas 19, 20, 21, 22, 132, 133, 183, 226, 249, 250 Brochard, Victor 234 Broese, Konstantin 19, 20 Brusotti, Marco 22, 23, 97 Burckhardt, Jacob 9

Cabanis, Pierre Jean Georges 23 Caesar 86 Campioni, Giuliano 19, 21, 64, 249 Cartesian (see also Descartes) 27, 87, 91, 212, 213 Cassirer, Ernst 9 Cervantes, Miguel de 249 Chignell, Andrew 155, 156 Chur 3, 19, 242 Clark, Maudemarie 16, 36, 76, 109, 121, 122, 128, 133, 134, 141, 149, 153, 154, 158, 161, 163–​5 Cohen, Hermann 9, 12 Constâncio, João 14, 15, 42, 58, 63, 66, 133–​5, 269 Copernican 28, 106, 186 Copernicus 183–​5 Corinth (Gulf of), Phocis 269 Crates of Thebes 271 Crawford, Claudia 8, 20, 22, 133, 227 Crescenzi, Luca 19 Cynic 271 D’Iorio, Paolo 24, 47, 49, 50, 52, 57, 83, 99, 133, 134 Darwin, Charles Robert 17, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 178, 182 Darwinian 32, 168 Darwinism 7, 170, 175, 177 Darwinist 7 Dellinger, Jacob 132, 202, 246, 252 Descartes, René 29, 86, 87, 91, 94, 212, 263, 268 Desprez, Louis 234 Deussen, Paul 6, 7, 9, 62, 177 Diogenes Laertius 271 Dionysian 110 Doyle, Tsarina 17, 46, 62, 229, 230 Drossbach, Maximilian 9, 23, 65, 161 Dudrick, David 16, 36, 76, 153, 154, 158, 161, 163–​5 Dühring, Eugen 11, 203

290

290

Name Index

Eco, Umberto 55, 66, 68 Eleatic, Eleatics 91, 244 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 3 Endres, Martin 249 Euclidean 42 Féré, Charles 234 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 8 Figl, Johann 5, 19, 20 Finland 67 Fischer, Kuno 3, 6, 7, 12, 14, 19, 21, 103, 111, 119, 124, 125, 134, 149, 168, 226, 242 Fortlage, Karl 19, 20 Foucault, Michel 18, 132, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271 French Revolution 250 Fries, Jakob Friedrich 133 Galton, Francis 234 Gardner, Sebastian 42 Gemes, Ken 129, 133 Genette, Gerard 234, 249 Gerber, Gustav 9, 56, 66, 70, 79, 80, 97, 112 Germans (the) 13, 236 Germany 12, 71, 76, 80 Gerratana, Federico 8, 20, 21, 22, 69 Gersdorff, Carl von 5, 12, 19, 20, 133, 165 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 4, 235, 250, 269, 270 Goethean 269 Goncourt, Edmond de 234 Gori, Pietro 134 Grady, Joseph Edward 64 Greeks 3, 77, 83, 95, 97, 110, 158, 194, 213, 226, 250 Green, Michael Steven 74, 81, 93–​9 Guyer, Paul 126, 148 Hamann, Johann Georg 9, 52–​4, 64 Hartmann, Eduard von 3, 8, 9, 11, 22 Haym, Rudolf 6, 21, 23 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 71, 182, 227, 230 Helmholtz, Hermann von 3, 13, 55–​7, 61, 62, 66, 72, 73, 80 Heraclitean 97, 260 Heraclitus 77, 97, 244, 245, 259 Herbart, Johann Friedrich 133

Herder, Johann Gottfried von 8, 52–​4, 65 Hill, Kevin 34, 35, 226, 227, 229, 244, 251 Himmelmann, Beatrix 6, 14, 16, 46, 146, 164, 177 Höffding, Harald 234 Horace 269 Houlgate, Stephen 148, 149 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 9, 53, 54, 65 Hume, David 17, 27–​30, 206, 207, 208, 212, 214, 220, 222 Humean 42, 104, 212, 220, 222–​4 Hussain, Nadeem 23 Hyppolite, Jean 264 Itaparica, André Luís Mota 16 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 148 Janz, Curt Paul 21 Jaspers, Karl Theodor 270, 271 Johnson, Mark 64 Kantianism 1, 2, 6, 14, 18, 72, 103, 105, 107–​11, 114, 128, 129, 130, 133, 183 Kaulbach, Friedrich 199 Kletschke, Hermann 19 Kofman, Sarah 23 Kohl, Otto 3, 19 Köhnke, Klaus 23, 97 Königsberg 238, 265 Königsberg, University of 172 Königsbergian 123, 131, 146 Kraus, Karl 12 Külpe, Oswald 269 Lakoff, George 64 Lamarck, Jean-​Baptiste de 64 Langbehn, Claus 20 Lange, Friedrich Albert 2, 3, 5–​8, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 20, 21, 23, 58, 62, 66, 70, 72, 73, 80, 97, 103–​7, 111, 114–​16, 119, 130, 132, 134, 144, 149, 156–​9, 161–​4, 168, 169, 170, 174, 177, 205, 227 Langean 110, 114, 115, 150, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164 Langeanism 21, 163, 164 Langton, Rae 124, 148, 150 Lehmann, Gerhard 3, 19 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von 150, 199, 212, 214, 219

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Name Index

291

Leibnizean 212, 213 Leipzig 5, 6, 8–​10, 20 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 9, 11, 65 Liebmann, Otto 3, 12, 13, 21, 23, 103, 118, 134, 149 Lindemann, Uwe 249 Lockean 48 Loukidelis, Nikolaos 22, 23 Lupo, Luca 18, 63, 65, 68, 99, 100, 134, 269, 271

Platonic 123, 128, 131, 146 post-​Kantian 7, 9, 18, 20, 71, 103, 104, 132 post-​Kantianism 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 110, 112, 118, 120, 121, 123, 134 pre-​Platonics/​pre-​Platonic philosophy 85, 97, 105 pre-​Socratics/​pre-​Socratic philosophers 77, 83, 97, 228

Marburg school 111 Mattioli, William 14, 22, 81, 97–​100 Meijers, Anthonie 66, 97, 133 Menard, Pierre 248 Metterhausen, Wilhelm 20 Meyer, Jürgen Bona 9 Molnar, George 219, 220, 230 Montaigne, Michel de 3 Müller, Enrico 251, 252 Müller, Max 13, 58, 59, 61, 67, 69, 70 Müller-​Buck, Renate 20 Müller-​Lauter, Wolfgang 175 Mushacke, Hermann 19, 226

Rée, Paul 10 Reuter, Sören 21, 22, 76, 97 Riccardi, Mattia 14, 16, 20–​2, 83, 97, 124–​6, 134, 148, 149, 165, 230, 231, 250 Richardson, John 15, 23, 42, 100, 135 Rohde, Erwin 9, 10, 19, 22, 177 Rohn (bookstore in Leipzig) 5, 20 Röllin, Beat 250 Rolph, William 234 Romundt, Heinrich 3, 9, 10, 19, 22, 62, 64–​6 Rorty, Richard 55 Rosch, Eleanor 67 Rosenkranz, Karl 7, 19 Roth, Friedrick 65, 177 Roux, Wilhelm 94, 175

Natorp, Paul 9 Naumann, Constantin Georg 248 Naumburg 22 neo-​Kantians/​neo-​Kantianism 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13, 17, 18, 23, 25, 36, 37, 46, 55, 62, 103, 109, 111, 118, 119, 133, 156, 161, 247 Newton, Isaac 213 Niese, Karl Eduard 4 Orsucci, Andrea 21, 65, 66, 97 Ottermann, Stephan 19 Overbeck, Friedrich 9, 10, 21 Oxford 58 Palombi, Fabrizio 271 Parmenidean 83, 84, 91, 182 Parmenides 14, 77, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 95, 181 Pascal, Blaise 3 Petri, Moritz 65 Pfister, Manfred 234 Pichler, Axel 11, 14, 248, 249, 251, 252 Plato 145, 156, 181, 193, 235, 238

Quijote (Quixote) 248, 249

Salaquarda, Jörg 20, 58, 133, 148, 165 Sanskrit 58 Sanskritist 67 Schaarschmidt, Carl 4, 5, 9 Schacht, Richard 42, 133 Schiller, Friedrich 4, 157 Schlechta, Karl 21 Schlimgen, Erwin 99, 100 Schmidt, Siegfried 233, 248 Schopenhauer, Arthur 2–​6, 8, 9, 12, 14, 19–​ 24, 46, 47, 61–​4, 69, 72, 87, 92, 96, 99, 100, 103, 110–​14, 119, 124, 125, 128, 133, 144, 149, 159, 182, 192, 205, 206, 210, 215, 235, 249, 271 Schopenhauerian 5, 7, 8, 22, 63, 72, 110, 113, 114, 120, 215, 226, 227, 229, 230 Schopenhauerianism 8, 10 Schulpforta 3, 4 Siemens, Herman 48, 50, 63, 97, 174, 203, 249 Silenus 110, 193

292

292

Name Index

Simon, Josef 199, 201, 203 Socrates 86, 87, 159, 167, 190, 193, 194, 235, 249, 251 Socratic 7, 46, 190, 193, 194 Solomon, Robert C. 251 Sommer, Andreas Urs 178, 249 Sorbonne, University of Paris 264 Spencer, Herbert 11 Sphinx 116 Spinoza 169, 177 Spir, Afrikan Aleksandrovič 3, 9, 11, 14, 22, 47, 48, 57, 61, 62, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, 134, 149, 161, 245 Stack, George J. 20, 58, 116, 132–​4, 148, 165, 227 Stegmaier, Werner 17, 100, 135, 182–​4, 186, 188, 190, 196, 197, 200–​3, 251 Steinthal, Heymann 53, 54, 65 Stingelin, Martin 65, 66, 97 Stockmar, René 250 Stoic 271 Stroud, Barry 30, 33 Taylor, John 67 Teichmüller, Gustav 9, 161 Thales 184 Thomas Aquinas 251 Thüring, Hubert 22 Timms, Edward 12 Tongeren, Paul van 117, 134, 249

Trabant, Jürgen 65 Treiber, Hubert 10, 19, 21, 55, 62, 65 Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf 65 Tübinger Schule 20 Ueberweg, Friedrich 3, 6, 21 Ural-​Altaic (languages) 54, 66 Vaihinger, Hans 132 Van Gogh, Vincent 268 Vedanta 216 Vischer-​Bilfinger, Wilhelm 3, 18 Wagner, Richard 7, 8, 9, 235 Wagnerism 8, 9 Wallace, Alfred Russel 172 Weimar 4 Wenkel, Friedrich August 22 Western 4, 46, 225, 251, 264, 268 Wilcox, John 133 Winckler, Hugo 66 Wolff, Christian 199 Wood, Allen William 150 Zarathustra 118, 162, 178, 195, 197, 260 Zarathustrian 263 Zavatta, Benedetta 9, 13, 22, 23, 53, 59, 66, 67, 269 Zeno of Citius 271 Zittel, Claus 252 Zöllner, Karl Friedrich 22, 66

  293

Subject Index a priori 4, 6, 14, 16, 29, 31–​4, 38, 45, 49, 72–​7, 80, 81–​3, 89, 90, 93, 98, 104, 113–​14, 119–​22, 132, 142, 155–​8, 164–​5, 167, 171, 185, 188, 200, 207–​10, 227, 233, 265–​6affect 37, 39, 48, 62, 95–​6, 182, 197, 209, 247 affection 46, 48, 141, 143, 182, 187 self-​affection 86 affirmation of life 107–​8, 198, 225 agency 1, 165, 169, 189, 201–​2 agent 27–​8, 96, 146, 156, 157, 163–​4, 260 analysis 52, 61, 71–​2, 80, 263 analytic judgements 57, 149 Analytic, Transcendental 82 animal 32, 37–​8, 42, 59, 163, 173–​4, 197 animal rationale/​animal rationabile 172 appearance(s), (See also phenomenon, semblance (schein)) 5, 12, 17, 20, 36, 39, 52, 58, 60, 84, 86–​7, 108, 110, 117, 119–​20, 123–​5, 127–​8, 140–​5, 147–​50, 171, 175, 184, 210, 213–​14, 226, 229, 234–​5, 238, 246–​7, 249 apperception, unity of apperception 28–​30, 34–​5, 37, 39, 40, 59, 209, 227 apprehension 74–​5, 78, 98, 208 auto-​deixis/​autodeixis 252 autonomy 75, 171, 192, 196, 233, 256 becoming 14, 34, 47, 59, 60, 63, 84, 91–​8, 122, 190, 228, 244–​5, 246, 259 Begriffsdichtung (conceptual poetry) 6, 7, 21–​2 belief 16, 27–​8, 30–​1, 33–​4, 36–​7, 39, 41–​2, 45, 49–​50, 57, 74, 93–​4, 108–​9, 117, 149–​50, 153–​63, 165, 190, 193, 207–​9, 225, 244 bifurcation 36–​7 body 12, 31, 40–​1, 43, 49, 54–​7, 62, 64, 78–​9, 143, 187, 195, 197–​8, 202, 213, 229, 261

categorical imperative 12–​13, 117, 187 categories 2, 6, 15, 28, 29, 31, 33–​4, 36, 42, 46–​53, 63–​4, 75, 77, 78, 80, 104–​5, 111–​12, 114–​16, 120, 121–​3, 125–​6, 128–​9, 134, 141–​5, 147, 150, 165, 189 categorization, linguistic 46, 54, 55–​7, 67–​8, 133 causa sui 12 causality, cause 12, 17, 29, 30, 31–​4, 47–​9, 55–​7, 60, 63, 66, 73–​6, 79, 80–​1, 92, 110–​14, 116–​17, 119–​22, 125, 140–​3, 145, 147–​9, 169, 196–​7, 206–​8, 212, 214–​17, 219–​25, 227, 230–​1, 236, 246, 262, 266, 271 cause, final (see also teleology) 167 causes, space of/​reasons, space of 16, 76, 164–​5 causes vs. reasons/​causal vs. logical conditions 29, 31 chance 17, 38, 169, 191–​2, 203 cognition, cognitive 15, 21, 28, 42, 47, 48, 71–​3, 75–​7, 79–​81, 83, 84, 87, 89, 91–​9, 104–​5, 110–​12, 114–​16, 124–​6, 129, 132–​3, 150, 168, 200, 207–​9, 212, 215–​18, 230, 258–​60, 262 cognitive interests 36 cognitive linguistics 64, 67–​8 cognitivism see noncognitivism coincidence 169 comparative linguistics 52–​4 comparative mythology 58 concept-​word (Wort-Begriff) 58 condition (of experience, of possibility, of knowability/​epistemic, of life/​ existence) (see also life-condition) 15, 28, 29–​35, 37–​9, 42–​3, 48–​50, 54–​5, 59, 61, 64, 71–​2, 78, 83, 93, 104, 116–​ 17, 119–​22, 129, 134, 140, 142, 148–​9, 153, 156, 165, 173, 189, 192–​3, 198, 210, 214, 216, 243, 259

294

294

Subject Index

conditioned –​unconditioned (bedingt –​ unbedingt/​das Unbedingte) 5, 14–​15, 34, 47, 60, 74–​6, 78, 82–​6, 90, 91–​3, 97, 99, 104–​5, 115, 121, 129, 132, 149, 183–​4, 186, 188–​90, 192, 194, 200, 206, 216, 223, 236, 247–​8, 252, 259 conscious, consciousness (see also self-​consciousness) 8, 13, 22, 27, 30–​1, 35, 37–​40, 54, 59, 61, 63, 65, 74–​6, 83, 85–​9, 120, 191, 198, 257, 259, 262 construction, constructivism 31, 66, 80, 122, 129, 184–​9, 191, 199 contingency, contingent 33, 50–​1, 81, 129, 156–​7, 168, 176, 185, 191, 194, 200, 209 Copernican revolution (reversal, turn) 28, 106, 186 Critique of the Power of Judgement (see also judgement, power of) 8, 47, 167, 168, 226 Critique of Practical Reason (see also reason, practical) 146 death of God (see God, death of) determining judgements (see judgements) diplomatic edition (KGW IX) 234, 238, 250 discord 173 dogmatic, dogmatism 140, 142, 144, 156–​7, 167, 199, 206, 214, 218, 226, 228, 250 drives (see also affect, instinct) 2, 32, 37–​41, 61, 63, 66, 93, 95–​6, 100, 130, 158–​9, 160, 162–​3, 173, 196–​7, 209, 223–​4, 230, 260 empirical knowledge 84, 97–​8, 153–​4, 156–​7, 161, 165, 168, 211 error 27–​8, 33, 38, 43, 52, 64, 77, 83, 90, 92–​8, 109, 112–​17, 119, 120–​2, 127–​8, 130, 150, 169, 191–​2, 223, 246–​7 error theory (see also falsification thesis) 77, 92–​4, 96, 97–​8 eternal recurrence, eternal return 43, 99, 168, 265, 266–​7 eternal truths (aeternae veritates) 110–​12, 206 ethics 8, 22, 117, 158–​9, 165, 173 evolution (see also Darwinism) 14, 17, 32, 50, 52, 92–​3, 111, 114–​16, 120–​1, 127, 160, 167, 172–​5, 177–​8, 182–​3, 188–​9, 191–​3, 196

experience 4, 15, 27–​32, 39, 42, 46–​7, 49–​50, 55, 60–​1, 67, 68, 72, 74–​5, 77–​8, 82, 84–​6, 89, 91, 98–​9, 104, 112, 114–​16, 120–​2, 124–​5, 127, 140–​3, 147, 149, 156, 163, 176, 185–​6, 194, 200, 207, 209, 211, 216–​17, 227–​8, 255–​9 experiment 37–​9, 41, 73, 170–​2, 176–​7, 185–​6, 201, 224, 270 faculty (power) 21, 122, 126, 142–​3, 171, 173–​4, 182, 188–​9, 200, 207–​9, 227, 255–​7, 262 falsification thesis (see also error theory) 15, 36, 103, 109, 110, 112, 114, 116, 119, 121–​3, 127–​32, 134 final cause (see cause, final) force 17, 40, 96, 157, 168, 175, 191, 212–​15, 217–​19, 223, 230, 234, 256, 259 formative forces 17, 175 freedom 117–​18, 146–​7, 150, 167, 171, 173–​5, 192, 194–​6, 203, 225, 237–​9, 250 functionalization 17, 189, 199 God 4, 19, 37, 110 (Silenus), 117–​18, 146, 149, 154–​6, 159, 161–​2, 190, 195–​6, 202, 238, 266–​7 death of 117–​18, 131–​2, 266 machine-​god 213 heautonomy 171 historical philosophizing 14, 45, 46–​9, 77, 92–​3, 94, 97, 111, 113, 170 horizon 199–​200, 233 human nature (see nature) I (see also subject, apperception) 28, 30–​1, 34, 40–​2, 197, 216, 229 intratextual ‘I’, narrative ‘I’ 243–​7, 251 idealism 5, 7, 8, 12, 14–​15, 22, 30, 71–​2, 76, 85–​6, 88–​9, 95, 98, 103, 113, 118, 142–​6, 150, 190–​1, 207, 210–​11, 214, 216, 226–​9, 245 identical (things) 60, 63–​4, 100 identity, principle of 14, 66, 73–​9, 81–​4, 91–​2, 99, 121–​2, 246 self-​identical 34, 74, 78, 81–​2, 86, 93, 99, 129, 217, 265 ignorabimus 114

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Subject Index imagination 2, 207–​10, 255–​6, 262 incorporation 31, 37–​9, 41–​3, 96, 98, 120, 127, 175 instinct 8, 14, 22, 38, 43, 45, 48–​9, 51, 54, 61, 63–​5, 68, 96, 120, 123, 134, 163, 170, 190, 196, 197, 198, 242, 263 intellect (see understanding) intention, intentionality 91, 93, 95, 96, 99–​100, 169, 200, 213, 229, 233, 248, 251 intrinsic nature, property (see also relational) 17, 124–​6, 140, 143–​4, 148, 150, 156, 206–​7, 211, 213–​15, 217–​19, 221, 223–​5, 228–​9, 231 intuition(s) 2, 28, 47, 55, 63, 72–​5, 90, 119–​20, 126, 142, 146, 148–​9, 188, 208, 214, 227, 258 irrational (see rational)

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life/​living 17, 28, 32–​6, 38–​9, 43, 47, 49, 51, 63, 65, 87, 92, 96, 107, 117–​19, 120, 123, 129, 130, 155, 159, 161, 170–​1, 173–​6, 181, 188, 190, 192–​4, 196, 198, 200, 202, 225, 228, 235, 249 life-​condition (see also condition of life) 15, 31–​4, 37, 42, 64, 116–​17, 119, 129, 134, 173 limits 7, 21, 39, 46, 87, 95, 112, 140, 143–​4, 146, 153, 155, 157, 159, 161, 185, 192, 207, 258, 260, 262, 268 literary forms 14 logic/​logical 6, 29, 31–​2, 34, 52–​3, 56, 73–​4, 95–​6, 98, 109, 111–​12, 120, 128, 140, 142–​4, 146, 148, 150, 161, 165, 181, 183, 189, 192, 199–​201, 206, 216–​17, 221, 231, 245–​6, 255–​6

judgement(s) 13, 31, 47–​8, 50, 53–​5, 61, 63, 65, 80, 93, 97, 104, 115–​16, 121, 134, 142, 155, 189, 201, 207, 227, 230 aesthetic 2 analytic 14, 57, 78, 149 determining 171 evaluative, moral 66, 75, 107, 130, 235, 236, 249 instinctive 68, 120, 134, 196 power of (see also Critique of the Power of Judgement) 171, 200 reflective 171 synthetic 4, 33–​4, 45, 56–​7, 77–​9, 81–​2, 84, 119–​22, 208 teleological (see also teleology) 16, 167–​8, 171, 189

madness 18, 51, 255–​7, 267–​71 materialism 7, 71–​2, 105, 158 materialistic conceptions 168 mathematics/​mathematical 112, 116, 140, 155, 165, 185, 212–​13, 219–​20, 245 meaning 14, 17, 50, 60, 64, 93, 110, 112, 117, 123–​4, 139–​41, 144–​6, 167, 172, 175–​6, 182, 188, 201, 233–​4, 237, 242, 244, 248, 252, 264, 268 meaningless(ness)/​meaningfulness 118, 132, 145, 154, 163, 170, 209 metaphysics 2, 5–​8, 15–​16, 18, 21–​2, 42, 46, 56, 63, 77, 79, 92, 96, 106–​8, 113–​14, 140, 147, 149, 156, 159, 165, 168, 181, 183, 188, 190, 192, 205, 220, 225–​6, 244–​6, 255–​6 morality 37, 45, 117–​18, 135, 155, 174, 176, 184, 236, 245, 248, 261

language 2, 8–​9, 14, 36, 42, 52–​4, 57–​60, 65–​7, 112, 122–​3, 133, 156, 165, 170, 184, 190, 192, 198, 223, 236, 246, 250, 251, 258, 263, 267–​8 linguistic/​linguistics 13, 46, 53–​4, 57, 59–​60, 61, 64, 67, 112, 120, 233, 238, 244, 247–​8, 251, 269 laws (of nature, universal laws) 14, 47, 50, 55, 75, 80–​2, 104, 110–​12, 115, 163, 167, 169, 171, 174–​6, 182, 184, 206–​7, 224

natural selection 59, 168–​9, 172 naturalism/​naturalistic/​naturalization/​ naturalize 6, 14, 17, 31, 38, 47, 72, 76, 79–​80, 93, 106, 110–​11, 114, 133, 153, 158, 165, 168–​9, 177, 182, 196, 206, 217, 221–​2, 225, 229, 245 nature 5, 8, 16–​17, 49, 58, 76, 83, 98, 104–​5, 111–​12, 115–​16, 121, 128–​9, 150, 163, 167–​75, 181–​96, 199, 201, 206, 212–​13, 217–​18, 224 human nature 1, 18, 53, 156–​7, 170, 184, 192–​3, 225

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neo-​Kantianism/​Kantianism/​post-​ Kantianism 1–​2, 6, 8–​9, 14, 18, 72, 103–​11, 114, 118–​21, 123, 128–​30, 133–​4, 183 nihilism 37, 106, 118, 132, 135, 225 noncognitivism 93, 95, 97, 99, 245 normativity/​normative 1, 14, 16, 77, 84, 93, 103, 110, 117–​18, 121, 123, 131–​2, 153–​4, 156–​8, 161–​5 noumenon 99, 140–​1, 144–​50 thing in itself 2, 5–​6, 15–​16, 21, 36, 47, 82–​3, 85, 88, 91–​2, 103–​29, 134, 139–​50, 192, 208, 211–​12, 221, 226–​9, 238, 249

pluralistic/​plurality/​pluralization/​pluralize 13, 17, 78, 82, 86, 92, 95, 97, 105, 116, 130, 135, 189, 197, 199, 234, 256 poetry (see also Begriffsdichtung) 6–​8, 21, 156–​7, 165 power of imagination 255–​6 power of judgement (see judgement) power of orientation 185, 198 purpose/​purposive(ness)/​telos/​ends 8, 16–​17, 31, 47, 59, 118, 131, 167–​76, 186, 189, 191, 195, 198, 200, 213, 229, 259 purposeless/​goalless(ness) 110, 118, 132

objectivity 17, 31, 54, 62, 75, 77, 106, 113, 130, 135, 182, 189, 201, 208, 210–​11, 214, 222 ontology/​ontological 14, 51, 61, 75–​7, 83–​5, 91, 94–​6, 105, 126, 140, 142, 144, 148–​50, 199, 211–​13, 217, 228, 235, 238, 266 organic 48–​9, 51, 61, 65, 75, 91–​3, 115, 167, 171, 175 inorganic 171 organism 7, 32, 48–​9, 93, 120, 169–​72, 175 organization (F. A. Lange) 5, 12, 73, 104, 111, 115–​16 orientation 17, 157, 182–​9, 197–​8, 201–​3 overman (see Übermensch)

rational (being)/​rationality 65, 79, 83, 112, 117, 149, 155–​8, 168, 172–​3, 191–​6, 198–​200, 203, 230, 244, 256, 267 irrational 191–​6, 244, 257, 268 reality 14, 31, 34–​5, 39, 41, 45, 48, 51, 58–​60, 64, 66, 74, 82–​92, 94–​9, 105, 109–​12, 121–​3, 126–​8, 143–​4, 147, 150, 181–​2, 187, 189–​90, 199, 206, 215–​18, 225–​26, 228, 230, 236 empirical reality 85, 127, 212, 228 metaphysical reality 212–​13, 219 reason(s)(see also rational (being)/​ rationality) 13–​14, 16, 17, 27, 31, 33, 42, 48, 52, 54–​5, 61–​2, 65, 76, 79–​80, 82, 87, 110, 112, 120, 122–​3, 128–​9, 135, 140, 145, 147, 155–​7, 161, 163, 167, 171–​4, 181–​203, 223–​4, 238, 242–​8, 250, 256, 268, 271 practical reason (see also Critique of Practical Reason) 147, 172 pure reason 14, 52, 61–​2, 122, 146, 155, 161, 184, 187, 189, 196 reasons, space of see causes, space of /​ reasons, space of unreason 169, 268, 271 reflection 16, 37, 72, 100, 140, 156–​7, 171–​2, 247, 258, 268, 271 regulative (principle, belief, use of reason, fiction) 12, 45, 62, 91–​3, 199 relation(s) 2, 32, 34, 36, 40, 49, 54–​6, 60, 63, 75, 78–​9, 81–​2, 92, 94–​8, 112–​14, 124–​7, 130, 133, 142, 144–​5, 148, 171–​2, 192, 195–​7, 201, 207, 209, 211, 214–​15, 217, 219–​20, 222–​4, 228, 230–​1, 256, 258, 270–​1

paradox 15–​16, 28–​9, 94, 103, 131–​2, 135, 188, 192–​5, 204, 245, 256–​8, 267, 285 part (/​whole) 43, 171, 259 perception 47, 49–​50, 52, 54–​8, 60, 62, 64, 66, 72–​5, 78, 80–​1, 84, 92, 99, 183–​4, 256, 262 perspective(s) 18, 27, 33, 35–​6, 40, 72–​3, 100, 143–​4, 150, 182–​5, 194, 217, 230, 242, 244–​7, 264, 269–​70 perspectivism/​perspectival 15, 35–​6, 43, 62, 109, 131, 135, 143–​4, 149–​50, 161, 181–​2, 189, 199, 201–​3 phenomenon (see also appearance(s)) 2, 5, 16, 59, 66, 80, 86, 88, 91, 108, 124–​5, 128, 140, 148–​9, 164, 197, 223, 259 physiology 1, 5–​6, 12–​13, 20–​1, 23, 43, 45, 49–​50, 52, 54–​5, 61–​2, 72–​3 of the senses 55, 61–​2

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Subject Index relational 17, 114, 124–​6, 148, 150, 206, 213–​15, 217–​25, 231 religion 4, 18, 21, 22, 131, 158–​9, 174, 192 representation(s) 14, 30, 48–​9, 52, 56, 58, 60, 64, 67–​8, 73, 75, 77–​8, 83, 85–​96, 99–​100, 109, 112–​15, 120, 126–​8, 140, 142–​3, 148–​9, 163, 210, 216, 227, 229 reversal 17, 28, 181–​2, 184–​7, 255 revolution (see Copernican revolution) scepticism 17, 27–​8, 30, 42, 115, 123, 131, 143, 146, 157, 160, 167, 206, 207, 210, 211, 212, 222, 223, 257 science(s) 3, 6–​7, 17, 20, 45, 47, 71–​2, 75–​7, 80, 92–​5, 97, 105–​6, 109, 113–​15, 119–​21, 128, 130, 135, 153, 156, 159, 165, 170, 171, 174, 184–​5, 187–​9, 200, 215, 224, 245, 261 self 34–​5, 38, 41, 61, 197–​8, 209–​11, 216, 223–​ 4, 227, 229–​30, 258–​60, 264, 269–​70 self-​consciousness 2, 86, 215 self-​identity/​self-​identical (see identity) self-​knowledge 134, 167, 187, 258, 260, 269, 270 self-​observation 2, 18, 255–71 self-​organization 172, 197–8 self-​relation 195–7 semblance (Schein) 52, 64, 113, 161, 191, 228 sensation 14, 47–51, 56–7, 60, 64–5, 73, 75, 77–8, 80, 82, 98, 134, 245, 259 Sinnesphysiologie (see physiology of the senses) space, time, causality (see also time and causality) 110, 116 space of reasons (see causes, space of/​ reasons, space of) Spielraum 194 struggle for life 173–​4, 176 subject, subjectivity 4, 15, 17, 27–​31, 34–​7, 39–​43, 46, 48, 51–​4, 57, 66, 72, 74–​5, 78, 86–​7, 89–​93, 105, 108, 114, 133, 142, 147, 150, 155, 200, 211, 216–​17, 223, 230, 235, 256–​62 intersubjective/​intersubjectivity 121, 211 substance 28–​9, 31, 40–​1, 48–​9, 53, 59–​60, 63–​4, 73–​5, 77–​8, 82, 88, 92–​3, 119–​122, 140, 144, 148–​50, 190, 212, 214, 216, 219, 222–​4, 246

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survival of the fittest 175 synthesis 17, 35, 40–​1, 52, 78, 97, 186, 205–​ 12, 214–​21, 225 synthetic judgement (see judgement) teleology 6, 8, 16, 167–​8, 170, 173–​4, 176, 178 thing 7, 27–​8, 30–​1, 35, 38, 41–​2, 46, 48, 49–​50, 52, 55–​60, 62, 64, 66, 74, 78–​9, 81–​3, 85, 90, 97, 105, 109, 112, 118, 122, 124–​7, 140, 142–​5, 148–​50, 154–​5, 171, 175, 177, 183, 192, 214, 217–​18, 220–​2, 224–​5, 229, 231, 249–​50, 256 thing in itself (see noumenon) time 2, 14, 28, 31, 42, 47, 51, 59, 63–​4, 68, 73, 84–​6, 88–​91, 94–​5, 98–​9, 110–​14, 116, 120, 125, 148–​9, 189, 194–​5, 200, 206, 211, 217, 229, 258, 266–​8 timeless/​timelessness 62, 84–​5, 184–​6, 188, 194, 236 transcendental argument 15, 27–​31, 33, 41 transcendental idealism 14–​15, 76, 103, 118, 142–​6, 150, 210 truth 7, 15–​16, 21, 31–​40, 42–​3, 50, 55, 60, 64, 71, 83–​4, 93–​6, 98, 103–​10, 112, 114–​18, 123–​4, 127–​35, 157, 165, 170, 181, 184, 189–​90, 192, 200, 268 untruth 34, 114, 184 Übermensch 38, 266 unbedingt, das Unbedingte (see conditioned) unconditional/​ unconditioned (see conditioned) unconscious 8, 14, 48, 50, 54, 61, 63, 95, 96, 99–​100, 120, 190, 196, 257 unconscious inferences 20, 56, 66, 72, 73, 74, 75, 79, 80, 81 unconscious tropes 21, 66, 79, 80, 81 understanding 63, 73, 79, 84, 89, 111–​12, 125–​6, 128, 140, 142–​3, 149, 169–​71, 187–​9, 199–​201, 208, 210, 214, 227 laws of 47, 50, 80, 104, 110, 112, 184, 206 unity 28–​30, 34–​7, 39–​41, 43, 77–​8, 81–​2, 85, 109, 121–​2, 146, 189–​90, 201, 246 unsocial sociability 174

298

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values 32, 37, 38, 95, 107, 113, 117, 119, 130–​2, 157, 162–​5, 176, 186, 198, 225, 228 Christian values 162 variation 14, 38, 116, 168–​70, 217, 246

viewpoint 31, 36, 39, 59, 187, 194, 201 vis viva 206, 212, 231 will to power 12, 17, 63, 91, 96, 126, 168, 172, 198, 205–​6, 212, 215, 217–​26, 242

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Nietzsche and Kantian Ethics

ii

Nietzsche’s Engagements with Kant and the Kantian Legacy Edited by Marco Brusotti, Herman Siemens, João Constâncio, Tom Bailey Nietzsche has often been considered a thinker independent of the philosophy of his time and radically opposed to the concerns and concepts of modern and contemporary philosophy. But there is an increasing awareness of his sophisticated engagements with his contemporaries and of his philosophy’s rich potential for debates with modern and contemporary thinkers. Nietzsche’s Engagements with Kant and the Kantian Legacy explores a significant field for such engagements, Kant and Kantianism. Bringing together an international team of established Nietzsche-​scholars who have done extensive work in Kant, contributors include both senior scholars and young, upcoming researchers from a broad range of countries and traditions. Working from the basis that Nietzsche is better understood as thinking ‘with and against’ Kant and the Kantian legacy, they examine Nietzsche’s explicit and implicit treatments of Kant, Kantians, and Kantian concepts, as well as the philosophical issues that they raise for both Nietzschean and Kantian philosophy. Volume I: Nietzsche, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics Edited by Marco Brusotti and Herman Siemens Volume II: Nietzsche and Kantian Ethics Edited by João Constâncio and Tom Bailey Volume III: Nietzsche and Kant on Aesthetics and Anthropology Edited by Maria João Mayer Branco and Katia Hay

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Nietzsche’s Engagements with Kant and the Kantian Legacy Volume II Nietzsche and Kantian Ethics Edited by João Constâncio and Tom Bailey

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © João Constâncio, Tom Bailey and Contributors, 2017 João Constâncio and Tom Bailey have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the editors. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: Pack: 978-1-4742-7603-0 HB: 978-​1-​4742-​7595-​8 ePDF: 978-1-3500-3557-7 ePub: 978-1-3500-3558-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Brusotti, Marco, editor. Title: Nietzsche’s engagements with Kant and the Kantian legacy / edited by Marco Brusotti, Herman Siemens, João Constâncio, Tom Bailey. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017 – | Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Volume 1. Nietzsche, Kant, and the problemof metaphysics / edited by Marco Brusotti and Herman Siemens – Volume 2. Nietzsche and Kantian ethics / edited by João Constâncio and Tom Bailey – Volume 3. Nietzsche and Kant on aesthetics and anthropology / edited by Maria Branco and Katia Hay. Identifiers: LCCN 2016040856 | ISBN 9781474274777 (volume 1: hb) | ISBN 9781474274791 (volume 1: epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. | Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804. Classification: LCC B3317 .N5424 2017 | DDC 193–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040856 Cover design: Catherine Wood Cover image © Getty Images Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

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Contents Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant Translations of Nietzsche’s and Kant’s Writings Introduction  João Constâncio and Tom Bailey 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

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The Problem of Normative Authority in Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche  Paul Katsafanas

19

Normativity and Moral Psychology: Nietzsche’s Critique of Kantian Universality  Simon Robertson

51

Kant, Nietzsche and the Discursive Availability of Action  Robert Guay

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Kant’s ‘Respect for the Law’ as the ‘Feeling of Power’: On (the Illusion of) Sovereignty  Herman Siemens

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Freedom as Independence: Kant and Nietzsche on Non-Domination, Self-​Love and the Rivalrous Emotions  David Owen

137

Autonomy, Spiritual Illness and Theodicy in Kant and Nietzsche  Frederick Neuhouser

159

Phantom Duty? Nietzsche versus Königsbergian Chinadom  Robert B. Louden

193

Spontaneity and Sovereignty: Nietzsche’s Concepts and Kant’s Philosophy  Marco Brusotti

219

Contra Kant: Experimental Ethics in Guyau and Nietzsche  Keith Ansell-​Pearson and Michael Ure

257

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10 Question or Answer? Kant, Nietzsche and the Practical Commitment of Philosophy  Paul van Tongeren Complete Bibliography Index

291 313 325

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Notes on Contributors Editors Tom Bailey is associate professor of philosophy at John Cabot University in Rome. He works in moral and political philosophy, and his research on Nietzsche has focused on Nietzsche’s relations to Kant and Kantian themes. His recent publications include ‘Nietzsche’s Modest Theory of Agency’, in P.  Katsafanas (ed.), Routledge Philosophy Minds: Nietzsche (Routledge, 2017); ‘Nietzsche the Kantian?’, in K. Gemes and J. Richardson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (Oxford University Press, 2013); and ‘Vulnerabilities of Agency: Kant and Nietzsche on Political Community’, in M.  J. Branco and J.  Constâncio (eds), As the Spider Spins: Essays on Nietzsche’s Critique and Use of Language (De Gruyter, 2012). João Constâncio is associate professor of philosophy at Nova University of Lisbon (UNL/​FCSH). He earned his PhD there with a dissertation on Plato. He also does research at IFILNOVA/​FCSH, where he directs the research group, ‘Nietzsche International Lab’ (NIL) and co-​directs a research group in aesthetics. He is the author of Arte e niilismo: Nietzsche e o enigma do mundo (2013) and co-​editor of four books on Nietzsche, including Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity (De Gruyter, 2015). He has also published many articles on Nietzsche, including ‘On Consciousness:  Nietzsche’s Departure from Schopenhauer’, in Nietzsche-​Studien 40 (2011).

Contributors Keith Ansell-​Pearson holds a personal chair in philosophy at the University of Warwick, a position he has held since 1998. He is the author and editor of books on Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze. He is the founder of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society (UK) and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Nietzsche Studies and Nietzsche-​Studien. He is currently researching a book on Nietzsche and Foucault on the Care of the Self. With Daniel W. Conway, he is the

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editor of the new series ‘The Edinburgh Guides to Nietzsche’ to be launched by Edinburgh University Press in 2018. Marco Brusotti is professor of history of philosophy at the University of Salento (Lecce, Italy) and lecturer in philosophy at the Technische Universität, Berlin. He is president of the Nietzsche-​Gesellschaft, a member of the academic board of the Friedrich-​Nietzsche-​Stiftung, the director of the section of the ‘Colli Montinari’ Center for Nietzsche Studies in Lecce and a member of the editorial board of the database Nietzsche Online (De Gruyter). He has published widely on Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and is the author of Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis. Philosophie und ästhetische Lebensgestaltung von Morgenröthe bis Also sprach Zarathustra (De Gruyter, 1997). He has also edited, with R. Reschke, ‘Einige werden posthum geboren.’ Friedrich Nietzsches Wirkungen (De Gruyter, 2012) and, with H. Heit and G. Abel, Nietzsches Wissenschaftsphilosophie: Hinte rgründe, Wirkungen und Aktualität (De Gruyter, 2011). Robert Guay is associate professor of philosophy at Binghamton University, State University of New York, where he has taught since 2006. He works primarily on nineteenth-​century European philosophy, especially as it relates to issues of agency, history and ethics. His work has appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, the Journal of Nietzsche Studies, the Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth Century Philosophy and many other venues. He is currently working on a book on Nietzsche’s ethical thought and on an edited collection on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Paul Katsafanas is associate professor of philosophy at Boston University. He works on Kant and post-​Kantian philosophy, and particularly on issues in ethics and the philosophy of mind. He is the author of Agency and the Foundations of Ethics:  Nietzschean Constitutivism (Oxford University Press, 2013)  and The Nietzschean Self:  Moral Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious (Oxford University Press, 2016), as well as of various articles on Nietzsche and on Nietzsche’s relation to Kant. Robert B.  Louden is distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. His publications include Kant’s Human Being (Oxford University Press, 2011), The World We Want (Oxford University Press, 2007), Kant’s Impure Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2000)  and Morality and Moral Theory (Oxford University Press, 1992). A  former president of the North

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American Kant Society (NAKS), Louden is also co-​editor and translator of two volumes in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Frederick Neuhouser is professor of philosophy at Barnard College, Columbia University (New York), specializing in German idealism and social and political philosophy. He is the author of four books: Rousseau’s Critique of Inequality (Cambridge, 2014), Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-​Love (Oxford, 2008), Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory (Harvard University Press, 2000) and Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge, 1990). His recent work has focused on recognition and amour-​propre, but he is currently working on social pathology in eighteenth-​, nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century thought. Other interests include psychoanalysis and film. David Owen is professor of social and political philosophy at the University of Southampton. His research focuses on Nietzsche and post-​Kantian critical theory and on contemporary political philosophy. His books include Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (Acumen, 2007), Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity (Sage, 1995)  and Maturity and Modernity:  Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault, and the Ambivalence of Reason (Routledge, 1994). He is a founder member of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society and a past editor of the Journal of Nietzsche Studies. He is currently working on book manuscripts on Nietzsche for the ‘Founders of Social and Political Thought’ series at Oxford University Press and the ‘Modernity and Political Theory’ series at Rowman and Littlefield. Simon Robertson is lecturer in philosophy at Cardiff University. His recent work specializes mainly in ethics and in Nietzsche. As well as publishing various articles in these fields, he has edited two collections: Spheres of Reason (Oxford University Press, 2009)  and Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity (with C. Janaway, Oxford University Press, 2012). He is currently completing a monograph entitled Nietzsche and Contemporary Ethics. Herman Siemens is associate professor of modern philosophy at Leiden University, adjunct professor at the Universidad Diego Portales (Chile) and research associate of the University of Pretoria (South Africa) and the Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal). He is president of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society, and, with P. van Tongeren, director of the Nietzsche-​Wörterbuch (De Gruyter). He specializes in Nietzsche and post-​Nietzschean philosophy, political philosophy and aesthetics, and has published widely in these areas, including

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the book, co-​edited, with V.  Roodt, Nietzsche, Power and Politics:  Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought (De Gruyter, 2008). He currently leads a research programme on Nietzsche and Kant as ancestors of contemporary agonistic and deliberative theories of democracy. Michael Ure is a senior lecturer in politics at Monash University. He is the author of Nietzsche’s Therapy: Self-​Cultivation in the Middle Works (Lexington, 2008) and many articles and book chapters on Nietzsche. He is currently writing a CUP guidebook to The Gay Science and he is also the chief investigator of the Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’ and co-​editor of a Bloomsbury Press book series of the same title. Paul van Tongeren is professor emeritus of Radboud University, Nijmegen, and KU Leuven, associate researcher of the University of Pretoria, and, with H. Siemens, director of the Nietzsche-​Wörterbuch. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Nietzsche, including Reinterpreting Modern Culture: An Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Philosophy (Purdue University Press, 2000). His recent Dutch book on nihilism (Het Europese nihilisme. Fr. Nietzsche over een dreiging die niemand schijnt te deren (Vantilt, 2012)) will soon be published in English. Further information is available at www.paulvantongeren.nl.

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Acknowledgements Paul Katsafanas’s chapter incorporates material drawn from ­chapter  9 of The Nietzschean Self: Agency, Moral Psychology, and the Unconscious (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. Fredrick Neuhouser’s chapter incorporates material drawn from his paper published in the Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 45, No. 3, 2014, pages 293–​314. Reproduced by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press. Paul van Tongeren’s chapter incorporates material drawn from his paper published in Kriterion  –​Revista de Filosofia. Reproduced by permission of Kriterion –​Revista de Filosofia.

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Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Writings All mentions of Nietzsche’s writings refer to the following editions: BAW Nietzsche, F. (1933–40), Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, Hans Joachim Mette/Carl Koch/Karl Schlechta (eds), Munich:  C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Reprinted as:  Frühe Schriften 1854–1869, Munich: DTV 1994. KGB Nietzsche, F.  (1975–), Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, established by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, continued by Norbert Miller and Annemarie Pieper, Berlin/New  York:  De Gruyter. KGW Nietzsche, F. (1967–), Werke Kritische Gesamtausgabe, established by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, continued by Wolfgang Müller-Lauter and Karl Pestalozzi (eds), Berlin/New  York:  De Gruyter. KSA Nietzsche, F.  (1980), Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, Giorgio Colli/Mazzino Montinari (eds), Munich/ Berlin/New York: DTV/De Gruyter. KSB Nietzsche, F. (1986), Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe in 8 Bänden, Giorgio Colli/Mazzino Montinari (eds), Munich/Berlin/ New York: DTV/De Gruyter.

Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Writings in German AC CV 1 CV 5 EH FW

Der Antichrist. Fluch auf das Christenthum Ueber das Pathos der Wahrheit Homer’s Wettkampf Ecce homo. Wie man wird, was man ist Die fröhliche Wissenschaft

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GD GM GT JGB M MA NL UB VM WB WS Z

Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant

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Götzen-Dämmerung oder Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt Zur Genealogie der Moral. Eine Streitschrift Die Geburt der Tragödie Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft Morgenröthe. Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freie Geister Nachgelassene Fragmente/Notate/Aufzeichnungen Nietzsches Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (MA II) Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche Richard Wagner in Bayreuth Der Wanderer und sein Schatten Also Sprach Zarathustra. Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen

Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Writings in English A AOM BGE

The Antichrist (HH II) Assorted Opinions and Maxims Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future BT The Birth of Tragedy D Daybreak DS (UM I) David Strauss EH Ecce Homo. How One Becomes What One Is   EH Books Why I Write Such Good Books   EH Clever Why I Am So Clever   EH Destiny Warum I Am a Destiny   EH Wise Why I Am So Wise GM On the Genealogy of Morals. A Polemic GS The Gay Science HC Homer’s Contest/ Homer on Competition HH Human, All Too Human HL (UM II) On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life NB Nietzsche’s Library/Nietzsche-Bibliothek NL Nietzsche’s Posthumous Notebooks

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PT PTAG SE TI   TI Arrows   TI Errors   TI Fable   TI ‘Improving’   TI Morality   TI Reason   TI Skirmishes UM WB WS Z

On the Pathos of Truth Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (UM III) Schopenhauer as Educator Twilight of the Idols. How to Philosophize with a Hammer Arrows and Epigrams The Four Great Errors How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable ‘Improving Humanity’ Morality as Anti-Nature ‘Reason’ in Philosophy Skirmishes of an Untimely Man Untimely Meditations (UM IV) Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (HH II) The Wanderer and His Shadow Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Abbreviations of Kant’s Writings All mentions of Kant’s writings refer to the Akademie Ausgabe: AA Kant, I.  (1900–), Gesammelte Schriften, ed. the Royal Prussian (later German, then Berlin-Brandenburg), Academy of Sciences, Berlin:  Reimer, later De Gruyter, 29 vols.

Abbreviations of Kant’s Writings with Indication of the Corresponding AA Volume Anth Br GMS HN IaG

Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht/Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (AA 07) Briefe/Correspondence (AA 10–13) Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten/Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (AA 04) Handschriftlicher Nachlass/Unpublished Notes (AA 14–23) Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht/Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (AA 08)

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Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant

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KpV

Kritik der praktischen Vernunft/Critique of Practical Reason (AA 05) KrV Kritik der reinen Vernunft/Critique of Pure Reason KU Kritik der Urteilskraft/Critique of the Power of Judgement (AA 05) Log Logik/Logic (AA 09) MAM Muthmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte/Conjectural Beginning of Human History (AA 08) MS Die Metaphysik der Sitten/The Metaphysics of Morals (AA 06) OP Opus Postumum (AA 21 u. 22) Prol Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik/Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (AA 04) Refl Reflexion (AA 14–19) RGV Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft/Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (AA 06) TP Über den Gemeinspruch:  Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis/On the Common Saying: That May be Correct in Theory, But It Is of No Use in Practice (AA 08) V- Immanuel Kant:  Vorlesung zur Moralphilosophie/Lectures on Moral Philosophy WA Beantwortung der Frage:  Was ist Aufklärung?/An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (AA 08) WDO Was heißt sich im Denken orientiren?/What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? (AA 08) Additional abbreviations are provided by the authors.

References Nietzsche’s writings Emphases in Nietzsche’s writings:  normal emphases (= ‘gesperrt’ in KSA) are rendered in italics. Further emphases (‘halbfett’ in KSA for the Nachlass) are rendered in bold italics. Interventions/omissions: any interventions in citations by the author, including insertions of original German words, are indicated by square brackets: []. Any omissions by the author are also inserted in square brackets […] in order to distinguish them from Nietzsche’s own ellipses.

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Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant

References to Nietzsche’s published/titled texts: follow the standard abbreviations given in Nietzsche-Studien under ‘Siglen’ and are listed here. Authors have used either German or English abbreviations, followed by the section/aphorism number (e.g. JGB 12 or BGE 12, M 54 or D 54, GM I 13). For sections/chapters that are not numbered but named, the abbreviations from Nietzsche-Studien have been used or otherwise devised for easy identification when necessary, for example: Twilight of the Idols, ‘What the Germans Lack’, section 3 = TI Germans 3 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Book I, ‘On the Three Transformations’  =  Z I Transformations. Page references, where given, are to the relevant passage in the Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA), not to any translations used. The format is as follows: BGE 12, KSA 5.76 (= Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 12, KSA volume 5, page 76); M 95, KSA 3.86–7 (Morgenröthe, aphorism 95, KSA volume 3, pages 86 and 87). References to the Nachlass: follow the notation in KSA, followed by volume and page and preceded by NL and the year, for example: NL 1883 15[44], KSA 10.491 = note 15[71] in KSA volume 10, page 491. NL 1885-86 2[15], KSA 12.74 = note 2[15] in KSA volume 12, page 74. References to the Nachlass material in Kaufmann’s The Will to Power (=WP) are given as references to the equivalent notes in KSA. References to Nietzsche’s letters:  include addressee, date, volume and page number in KSB (Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe) or KGB (Nietzsche Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe).

Kant’s writings Emphases and interventions/omissions are rendered as earlier. References to Kant’s texts: follow the standard German abbreviations given in Kant-Studien; these are listed here. The abbreviations are followed by the page number(s) in the ‘Akademie Ausgabe’ (AA), for example, KU 238 (= AA vol. 5, p. 238), Anth 315–16 (= AA vol. 7, pp. 315–16). The relevant volume of the AA for each work is given in the list of abbreviations. Where relevant, the standard A and/or B version for first and second editions of Kant’s works are given, for example, KrV B150, KrV A743/B771. References to numbered sections/paragraphs are also sometimes given by the author, for example, KrV §25 B157, KU §1 204 (= AA vol. V, p. 204).

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Translations of Nietzsche’s and Kant’s Writings Next to their own translations, authors and editors have drawn on a broad range of available translations of Nietzsche’s and Kant’s writings, modifying and combining them as they considered appropriate. Translations used:

Nietzsche The Antichrist, trans. W.  Kaufmann, New  York:  Viking (1954); Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. W.  Kaufmann, New  York:  Viking (1954); Twilight of the Idols, trans. W.  Kaufmann, New  York:  Viking (1954); Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W.  Kaufmann, New  York:  Modern Library (1968); Ecce Homo, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Modern Library (1968); On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W.  Kaufmann, New  York:  Modern Library (1968); The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage (1968); Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books (1969); The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage (1974); Daybreak, ed. and trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1982); Human, All Too Human, trans. M.  Faber and S.  Lehmann, London:  Penguin Books (1984); Human, All Too Human, ed. and trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1986); Untimely Meditations, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, Cambridge/​London/​New  York/​New Rochelle/​Melbourne/​ Sydney:  Cambridge University Press (1983); Human, All Too Human, trans. M.  Faber and S.  Lehmann, London:  Penguin Books (1984); Human, All Too Human, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1986); Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books (1990); Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, London:  Penguin Books (1990); The Antichrist, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, London:  Penguin Books (1990); The Antichrist, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, London:  Penguin Books (1990); On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. K.  Ansell Pearson, trans. C.  Diethe, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1994); The Greek State, in F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 176–​86, ed. K. Ansell Pearson, trans. C.  Diethe, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1994); Dawn,

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trans. B. Smith, Stanford: Stanford University Press (1995); On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. D. Smith, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1996); Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, ed. D. Breazeale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1997); Daybreak, eds Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1997); On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J.  Swensen, Indianapolis:  Hackett Publishing Company (1998); Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marion Faber, Oxford:  Oxford University Press (1998); Twilight of the Idols, trans. Duncan Large, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1998); The Gay Science, ed. B. Williams, trans. J. Nauckhoff, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2001); Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Horstmann, R.-​P., and J. Norman, trans. J.  Norman, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (2002); Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. R. Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2003); Thus Spoke Zarathustra, eds A. Del Caro and R. Pippin, trans. A. Del Caro, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2006); Ecce Homo, trans. D. Large, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2007).

Kant Most authors have cited from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, general editors: Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 16 vols. (1992–​); Kant’s Introduction to Logic, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, London:  Longmans, Green & Co (1885); Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H.  J. Paton as The Moral Law:  Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, London: Routledge (1948); Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Paul Carus, Chicago/​London:  The Open Court Publishing Company (1949); Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton, New York: Harper and Row (1964); The Doctrine of Virtue: Part II of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor, New York: Harper and Row (1964); ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, in Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss, 41–​53, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1970); ‘Lecture on Friendship’, in Michael Pakaluk (ed.), Other Selves. Philosophers on Friendship, 208–​17, Indianapolis/​Cambridge:  Hackett (1991); Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. M.  Gregor, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1998); Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1998); Opus postumum, trans. Eckart

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Förster and Michael Rosen, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1993); Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Werner S.  Pluhar. Indianapolis:  Hackett Publishing Company (2002); Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. and ed. Robert B.  Louden, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2006).

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  1

Introduction João Constâncio and Tom Bailey

Kantian ethics is the articulation of autonomy.1 It holds that practical reasoning ‘self-​legislates’ the basic principles of ethical goodness in abstraction from anything beyond it –​thus, in abstraction not only from divine commands and metaphysical values, but also from social conventions and rewards, from considerations of human nature, happiness and perfection, and from individuals’ own desires and preferences. In the terms of Kant’s famous formulas, the ‘will’ is to be considered an ‘end in itself ’, of such value that it may not be used merely as a ‘thing’ or as a ‘means’ to other ends; it achieves ‘autonomy’ by acting for reasons provided by itself, rather than for other, contingent reasons; and its reasons are thus ‘universal laws’, binding on all wills as if they were the laws of a ‘kingdom of ends’. In light of this basic conception, Kant proceeds to articulate autonomy in a sophisticated system of more specific ethical ideas: a principle of equal political freedoms or rights; a notion of the ‘virtues’ of perfection and beneficence; the postulation of God as the cause of deserved happiness, or the ‘highest good’; a notion of the obscure grounds of ‘evil’; and a hope that humans’ ‘unsociable sociability’ will lead, gradually and unintentionally, to social progress. Invoking his idealist metaphysics, he also claims that autonomy reveals a freedom and dignity that transcend nature. For in acting according to ‘self-​legislated’ principles, he argues, the will must be conceived of as causing actions in a way other than that of antecedent natural causes, and therefore as something more than a natural object. Kant’s articulation of autonomy is perhaps the single most influential theory in philosophical ethics. His immediate idealist and romantic successors –​ such as Hegel and Fichte, Schiller and Schopenhauer –​provided sophisticated critical revisions and developments of it, while the later ‘neo-​Kantians’ –​such as Friedrich Lange and Kuno Fischer  –​further promoted and elaborated his concerns. Kantian themes also remain extremely influential in contemporary ethics:  emphasizing practical reasoning and normativity, respect for autonomous choices and agency, the significance of universality and equality, and the

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‘deontological’ independence of principles from consequences or flourishing, the Kantian approach competes forcefully with Humean, Aristotelian, Hegelian and other alternatives. Indeed, these concerns have also motivated sophisticated new Kantian theories that undertake to ‘construct’ moral principles out of a conception of rationality (think of John Rawls or Onora O’Neill), agency (Christine Korsgaard) or deliberation (Jürgen Habermas). Much recent commentary on Friedrich Nietzsche’s ethics has been driven by the concerns of the history of philosophy and contemporary ethics, and Kantian ethics was as influential in his time as it is in ours. But surprisingly little attention has been given to Nietzsche’s critical relations to Kantian ethics.2 This perhaps reflects his own, rather contemptuous dismissals of Kantian ethics. In The Gay Science, for example, he insists against Kant that ‘it is selfish to consider one’s own judgement a universal law, and this selfishness is blind, petty, and simple’. Rather than engage in such moral judgements, he suggests, we should ‘want to become who we are,  –​the new, the unique, the incomparable, those who give themselves laws, those who create themselves!’ In this passage he also alleges that by appealing to a transcendent reality –​in the form of ‘ “God”, “soul”, “freedom”, “immortality” ’  –​despite his own strictures on metaphysics, Kant acted ‘like a fox who strays back into his cage. Yet it had been his strength and cleverness that had broken open the cage!’ (GS 335, KSA 3.562). In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche similarly mocks ‘the stiff yet demure tartuffery used by the old Kant to lure us along the clandestine, dialectical path that leads the way (or rather: astray) to his “categorical imperative” –​this spectacle provides no small amusement for discriminating spectators like us, who keep a close eye on the cunning tricks of the old moralists and preachers of morals’ (BGE 5, KSA 3.19). And in The Anti-​Christ, he writes of Kant that ‘ “[v]‌irtue”, “duty”, “goodness in itself ”, goodness stamped with the character of the impersonal and universally valid –​these are fantasies and manifestations of decline, of the final exhaustion of life [. . .]. The most basic laws of preservation and growth require the opposite: that everyone should invent his own virtues, his own categorical imperatives’ (A 11, KSA 6.177; cf. GM II 6, KSA 5.300, and A 10, KSA 6.176–​7). However, while such passages clearly express Nietzsche’s opposition to Kantian ethics, exactly what he objects to is not entirely clear. He accuses Kantian ethics of a variety of failings: petty self-​centredness and indifference to individuality, obsession with moral motivation and insensitive abstraction, harmfulness to ‘life’ and hostility to creativity. His objections also seem to rest on uncharitable interpretations of the Kantian sense of universality –​as either an overly weak requirement that a moral reason hold for all in the same circumstances or an

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overly strong requirement that needs and wants be entirely excluded from moral consideration –​as well as on a neglect of Kant’s own appreciation of the obscurities of moral motivation and the illegitimacy of metaphysical speculation. The ‘life’, creativity and virtues of one’s ‘own’ that Nietzsche opposes to Kantian ethics also appear quite extraneous to the Kantian concern with autonomy. Nonetheless, closer inspection suggests that beneath such dismissals and misrepresentations –​which, of course, also mark his engagements with other important ­ figures  –​Nietzsche’s ethics offers a sustained engagement with Kantian themes. One main theme is precisely that of autonomy:  at least in a few important passages (most notably, GS 335, KSA 3.560–​4 and GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4), Nietzsche seems to conceive of freedom as autonomy and to affirm such autonomy as strongly as Kant does. Admittedly, this affirmation of autonomy has been subject to much exegetical and philosophical controversy, particularly in relation to Nietzsche’s criticism of morality, his positive ideals and his naturalism. Some have simply dismissed it as insincere or unfounded, and many have distanced it from the Kantian conception by interpreting it in individualist terms –​that is, as expressing an ideal of an individual’s acting according to his or her particular drives or qualities or creativity.3 But, however far Nietzsche diverges from the Kantian conception and however difficult it may be to square with other elements of his philosophy, it is hard to deny that he endorses key elements of the Kantian conception in these and other passages. In particular, Nietzsche’s sense of autonomy invokes self-​assessment and self-​determination in ways that echo Kant’s own sense of the ‘self-​legislation’ by which an agent determines her action by her ‘own’ considerations, rather than ‘external’, ‘heteronomous’ ones. Kant himself emphasizes that the literal sense of ‘autonomy’ is ‘giving oneself one’s own law’ or, simply, ‘self-​legislation’, and he conceives of autonomy as a process of assessing the rationality of possible principles, so as to determine for oneself which principles should guide one’s action, rather than being determined to action by any pregiven influences or principles. Albeit in his own terminology of ‘values’ and ‘revaluation of values’, Nietzsche conceives of autonomy in a similar way. For example, in On the Genealogy of Morality, he describes the ‘sovereign individual’ as free ‘from the morality of custom’ –​that is, from blind obedience to the values given by society –​because he sets and acts according to ‘his own standard of value’. Indeed, Nietzsche emphasizes that, in becoming free or autonomous, the sovereign individual also becomes ‘supramoral’ (literally, ‘beyond custom’, übersittlich): he writes that the sovereign individual is ‘autonomous and supramoral’ because ‘ “autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293). Furthermore, in The Gay Science,

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Nietzsche explicitly formulates his views on value and revaluation in terms of ‘autonomy’: those who ‘create themselves’ and ‘become who they are’, he writes, are only able to do so because they ‘give themselves laws’, or give themselves ‘tables of what is good that are new and all [their] own’ (GS 335, KSA 3.563, cf. GS 290, 382, KSA 3.530–​1, 635–​7). At the same time, however, these passages also indicate that Nietzsche diverges significantly from the Kantian conception of autonomy. Most obviously, he denies that autonomous values are universal or unconditional. Rather than ‘laws’ valid for all, in The Gay Science he describes autonomous values as the ‘ideals’ of ‘the new, the unique, the incomparable’ (GS 335, KSA 3.563), and in the Genealogy he describes the ‘sovereign individual’ as creating a ‘standard of value’ that marks his ‘superiority’ over others (GM II 2, KSA 5.294). Similarly, when he writes in The Anti-​Christ that ‘everyone should invent his own virtues, his own categorical imperatives’, he opposes such virtues and imperatives to their ‘impersonal and universally valid’ Kantian counterparts (A 11, KSA 6.177). By emphasizing the individual, and even individualizing, nature of autonomous values, these remarks might seem to support some commentators’ suspicion that Nietzsche simply replaces the Kantian conception of autonomy with an anti-​Kantian, individualist one. It is arguable, however, that Nietzsche rather radicalizes the Kantian conception. For his insistence on ‘self-​legislation’ suggests that he does not reject that conception outright, but instead envisions a more thoroughgoing exclusion of ‘external’, ‘heteronomous’ considerations than the Kantian conception does. In support of this suggestion, consider two other aspects of his affirmation of autonomy:  its emphasis on responsibility and its concern with intersubjective respect. The first aspect has been explored by Volker Gerhardt, who claims that Nietzsche radicalizes a sense of individual responsibility which is already implicit in Kant’s conception of autonomy.4 On Gerhardt’s account, the formal emptiness of Kant’s categorical imperative means that an agent must always work out for herself –​that is, autonomously and individually –​which duty she is supposed to obey in a particular situation. Thus, for Kant too, autonomy individuates. There is no external law or authority, no custom or habit, no ‘natural’ instinct or tendency that an agent who exercises genuine self-​assessment and self-​determination can consider as responsible for her action. The responsibility is wholly hers, as an individual. Gerhardt’s interpretation of Kant here is controversial, but it arguably captures a crucial aspect of Nietzsche’s engagement with the Kantian sense of autonomy. For Nietzsche often presents figures such as the ‘sovereign individual’, the

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‘free spirit’ and the ‘higher type’ as establishing their own values in processes of self-​assessment and self-​determination which distinguish them from the ‘herd’ (e.g. D 9, 14, 16, GS 2, 116, KSA 3.21–​2, 26–​8, 29, 373–​4, 474–​5; GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4, TI Skirmishes 38, KSA 6.139–​40). His claim that the sovereign individual must be ‘supramoral’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293) can also be read in this way, insofar as it implies that the sovereign individual takes responsibility for his actions without passively, ‘heteronomously’ accepting the moral customs of his society. Indeed, in that passage Nietzsche even describes this autonomy in terms of ‘free will’ and ‘conscience’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.294). While others follow the ‘morality of custom’ (D 9, KSA 3.21–​2; GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4) and live as ‘functions of the herd’ (GS 116, KSA 3.475), then, the autonomous individual ‘invents’ his or her own values –​he or she becomes ‘supramoral’ by creating his or her own ‘standard of value’ beyond the values of society. That this understanding of the autonomous individual represents a radicalization of the sense of individual responsibility involved in Kantian autonomy –​ and not a simple rejection of it –​is further suggested by the fact that Nietzsche criticizes the Kantian conception of moral duty on the grounds of autonomy. For him, moral duties that purport to be universal are in fact relative and conditioned, for they are always embedded in social and historical practices and institutions. As he puts it in Daybreak, ‘morality is nothing other (therefore no more!) than obedience to customs’ (D 9, KSA 3.21–​2). For Nietzsche, even if an agent might seem to derive her moral duty by a Kantian process of self-​assessment and self-​determination, such reasoning is still internal to and motivated by an instinctual obedience to existing, pregiven customs, and only custom gives content to the assumptions from which any duty is ‘derived’.5 His criticism of the Kantian conception of moral duty thus rests on a radicalized sense of autonomy –​as he puts it in the Genealogy, ‘ “autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive’. In this respect, his criticism of Kantian ethics is itself Kantian. For Nietzsche, then, Kantian autonomy is not yet true autonomy:  stricter requirements than the ones envisioned by Kant have to be met for a person to genuinely ‘self-​legislate’, or ‘give herself her own law’. Truly autonomous individuals reshape their own goals by breaking away from customs, revaluing the values embedded in them and creating new ones. Like the philosophers described in Beyond Good and Evil, they are ‘commanders and legislators’: ‘they say “That is how it should be!”, they are the ones who first determine the “where to?” and “what for?” of people’ (BGE 211, KSA 5.145). If a person ‘creates’ or self-​legislates in this radical way, then she is indeed ‘supramoral’ and, most importantly, only then can she be said to be fully responsible for her values, her

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practical judgements and her actions. In this sense, for Nietzsche, only responsibility makes an individual autonomous, and only autonomy makes an individual responsible. The second aspect of Nietzsche’s sense of autonomy that suggests its Kantian, rather than individualist, nature is his emphasis on respect for others’ agency. Nietzsche claims that a sovereign individual has ‘reverence’ or ‘respect’ (Ehrfurcht) for his ‘equals’ in autonomy, extending his own ‘self-​affirmation’ to the affirmation of other agents (GM II 2, 3, KSA 5.293–​7).6 Of course, this extension is also at the heart of Kant’s conception of autonomy: for Kant, a will cannot consistently –​that is, rationally –​consider itself an ‘end in itself ’, not to be treated as a ‘thing’ or a ‘means’, without also considering every other will as an ‘end in itself ’ too (see GMS 428–​33). Thus, for both Nietzsche and Kant, Kantian autonomy entails respect for agency as such, in oneself and in others. Where, again, Nietzsche diverges from Kant is in not holding that autonomy either presupposes or implies universal ‘laws’ in Kant’s sense. This appears to reflect the fact that, unlike Kant, Nietzsche holds that agents can possess agency to varying degrees.7 For he describes autonomy as a sovereign individual’s ‘privilege’, and he writes that, while respecting his ‘equals’, a sovereign individual will also ‘despise’ those who are not as autonomous as he is (GM II 2, KSA 5.294). This sense of the variability of agency explains why, whereas for Kant rights and duties hold equally for all agents, Nietzsche emphasizes the need to ‘measure’ agents’ agency itself and to determine rights and duties accordingly. In Daybreak, for instance, he claims that rights and duties are determined by relative ‘spheres of power’, symmetrical and asymmetrical, such that ‘my rights –​are that part of my power which others have not merely conceded me, but which they want me to preserve’ (D 112, KSA 3.100–​1). Indeed, Nietzsche’s sweeping critique of moral equality can be understood to rest, at least in part, on this combination of Kantian respect for agency with an un-​Kantian sense of agency’s variability. Another indication of this combination can be found in Nietzsche’s sense of ethical ‘community’. Kant claims that an attitude of respect for agency implies the concept of ‘a kingdom of ends’, or ‘a systematic association of various rational beings through common laws’ (GMS 433; see also GMS 436). His brief discussion indicates that this concept is intended to show that, given a plurality of agents, the attitude of respect for agency must not concern merely the agency of an agent or some agents, to the exclusion of others, but rather be an attitude of respect for the agency of every agent. Similarly, and despite requiring freedom from the ‘herd’, Nietzsche’s conception of autonomy involves a ‘community of equals’ whose members recognize and respect each other as equals

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in agency –​their interactions are marked by ‘mutually refraining from injury, violence, and exploitation, [and] placing [one’s] will on a par with the other’s’ (BGE 259, KSA 5.207; cf. e.g. BGE 259, 260, GM I 10, GM II 2, KSA 5.207–​12, 273, 294).8 Unlike Kant, Nietzsche typically conceives of this community in terms of ‘power-​relations’ and ‘equilibria’ of ‘recognized and guaranteed degrees of power’ (WS 22, KSA 2.555–​7; D 112, KSA 3.100–​2). Still, rather than brute force among atomized individuals, he presents degrees of agency as ‘recognized and guaranteed’ in a multiplicity of symbolically mediated forms, including rights, duties and other norms.9 And rather than conceiving them in terms of social power or hierarchy, he envisions these forms as primarily spiritual or cultural in nature: the ‘equal’ members of such a community ‘measure’ each other’s achievements or ‘greatness’ in terms of their own spiritual or cultural standards.10 Thus while this community is certainly agonistic –​its members are moved by a drive to excel as individuals and engage in reciprocal relations of competition among themselves –​it is regulated by relations of mutual respect and shared standards of achievement. Indeed, Nietzsche points out that agonism can foster respect, reverence, friendship and social ties, rather than undermining them –​he even writes that respect for one’s enemy can be ‘a bridge to love’ (GM I 10). Moreover, his description of a sovereign individual’s freedom suggests that such freedom depends precisely on these social affects within a social space of agonism.11 Rather than simply dismissing Kantian ethics, then, Nietzsche engages critically with it, sustaining its emphasis on autonomy, responsibility and respect while also challenging and revising its egalitarianism. Arguably, it is in this light that one should consider another challenge that Nietzsche poses to Kantian ethics –​and, indeed, another possible reason for doubting his affinity with it –​ namely, his rejection of the ‘nihilistic’ metaphysics to which Kant appeals. When objecting to Kantian ethics for its metaphysical appeals to ‘freedom’ and ‘God’, Nietzsche’s ultimate concern is often with what he calls the ‘death of God’ and the need to engage in a ‘struggle against nihilism’ (NL 1886 5[50], KSA 12.201–​204, NL 1886 7[31], KSA 12.306). Thus, in the passage of The Anti-​Christ in which he associates Kantian morality with ‘the final exhaustion of life’, Nietzsche calls Kant a ‘nihilist with the intestines of a Christian dogmatist’ (A 11, KSA 6.177). In the preceding section, he identifies this nihilism in Kant’s appeal to a transcendent reality: with Kant, he writes, ‘the concept of a “true world”, the concept of morality as the essence of the world (–​the two most vicious errors in existence!) were once again (thanks to an exceedingly canny scepticism), if not provable, then at least no longer refutable’ (A 10, KSA 6.176). Similarly, in Twilight of the Idols, he accuses Kant of making transcendent reality ‘unattainable, unprovable,

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unpromisable’ while making the ‘mere thought’ of it ‘a consolation, an obligation, an imperative’ (TI Fable, KSA 6.80–​1; cf. TI Reason 6, KSA 6.78–​9). For Nietzsche, then, Kant’s metaphysical division between the ‘apparent’ world in which we live and the ‘true’, transcendent one in which our true freedom and dignity reside expresses a nihilistic denial of life, while also protecting that morality and nihilism against criticism (cf. D Preface 3, KSA 3.12–​15).12 This poses a challenge not only to Kantian metaphysics, but also for the interpretation of Nietzsche’s own ethical ‘naturalism’. It is generally supposed that his ethics is ‘naturalist’ in that it treats ethical norms and agency in ways that are consistent with the understanding of nature, and thus without appeal to ‘supernatural’, metaphysical entities. However, interpretations of his understanding of ‘nature’ range from the reductive to the permissive, and its implications for the character, grounds and authority of normative claims are equally controversial.13 In particular, the meaning, implications and success of his naturalistic explanations of ‘moral’ phenomena such as duty, conscience and free will are debatable. So too are the form, scope and authority of his own ethical judgements: there is little consensus over whether they provide reasons for action or simply normative evaluations, which moral psychology of reasoning, feeling and willing they presuppose, and how objective or universal they are.14 Exploring how Nietzsche upholds a Kantian conception of autonomy while rejecting Kantian metaphysics and, in particular, how he explains and criticizes Kantian conceptions of reasoning and duties, universality and equality, freedom and responsibility therefore promises also to illuminate his naturalism and to test it against Kantian alternatives.

Contributions The contributions to this volume elaborate and evaluate Nietzsche’s critical response to Kantian ethics, and undertake to illuminate both Kantian and Nietzschean ethics in doing so. Their focus is on the issues of autonomy and naturalism that we have introduced, and on both the nature of Nietzsche’s ‘Kantianism’ and the doubts that can be raised about it. The first chapter, Paul Katsafanas’s ‘The Problem of Normative Authority in Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche’, argues that Nietzsche provides a persuasive solution to the debate between Kantians and Hegelians over the autonomous grounds of normative claims. For Katsafanas, Nietzsche shares with Kantians and Hegelians the fundamental idea that normative claims are binding or

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authoritative only insofar as they are self-​imposed or autonomous. Katsafanas argues that Nietzsche agrees with Hegel that to attempt to derive norms from a formal procedure, as Kant does, is fruitless; norms can be assessed, not derived, and they can be assessed only if they are embodied in society. Yet Katsafanas claims that Nietzsche nonetheless agrees with Kant that a normative principle can be derived from the formal principle of autonomy. On Katsafanas’s reading, for Nietzsche this normative principle is ‘will to power’, understood as a criterion of freedom to be used in assessing the values and norms embodied in our social institutions and practices. Thus, Katsafanas maintains, Nietzsche’s sense of ‘will to power’ succeeds in upholding the fundamental Kantian concern for normative autonomy while accepting the standard Hegelian objection to Kant’s own account. In the following chapter, ‘Normativity and Moral Psychology:  Nietzsche’s Critique of Kantian Universality’, Simon Robertson pursues Nietzsche’s criticism of Kantian universality in terms of a more individualist sense of Nietzschean autonomy. On Robertson’s account, a Nietzschean higher type sets, pursues and realizes great projects in the light of his or her own motives and capacities and independently of others, and thus also achieves a particularly high degree of psychological and practical integrity. Crucially, Robertson argues that such projects and the more specific ends that constitute them are ‘laws’ that are ‘self-​ legislated’, and yet are not universal  –​that is, they systematically regulate the relevant agent’s conduct and involve practical commitments and necessity, but their scope is limited to the relevant agent. Robertson points out that this autonomy serves to show only that some normative requirements are not universal, not that, pace Kant, no such requirements are universal. To support the stronger claim Robertson turns to Kant’s attempt to justify the universal moral ‘law’ and argues that it is undermined by Nietzsche’s ‘sentimentalist’ moral psychology, according to which no practical deliberation or evaluation is ‘pure’ in Kant’s sense since it is inevitably shaped by our motivations. Robertson concludes by considering how this moral psychology might tell even against contemporary Kantians’ ‘first-​personal’, or ‘practical’, attempts to derive universal principles from a ‘pure’ conception of agency without requiring its theoretical truth. Robert Guay’s chapter, ‘Kant, Nietzsche and the Discursive Availability of Action’, undertakes to show that Nietzsche’s account of action aligns more closely with some other elements of the Kantian account. In particular, Guay argues that a distinctive feature of Nietzsche’s account is the Kantian idea that the phenomenon of action is only ‘discursively available’. This idea is found not in Kant’s conceptions of deliberation and causality, but in his treatment of agency as rational

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and thus principled, and the description of actions as therefore internal to what actions are. Guay attributes a similar view to Nietzsche on the basis of his treatment of (responsible) agency as somehow ‘necessary’ or ‘bound’ in relation to grounds and his characterization of psychological elements such as ‘wills’ and ‘drives’. Guay shows how the resulting position thus confutes a Humean position according to which the explanation of action depends on identifying motivational elements that fall outside of any discursive standpoint. He concludes by considering the implications of this account of action for the understanding of ethical considerations. Herman Siemens’s chapter, ‘Kant’s “Respect for the Law” as “Feeling of Power”: On (the Illusion of) Sovereignty’, further explores the motives of autonomous action as conceived by Kant and Nietzsche. Siemens begins with Kant’s attempt to demonstrate that pure reason can determine the will immediately and exclusively by appeal to a certain ‘Achtung’ (reverence or respect) for the law which, since it has its source in reason rather than feeling, is supposed to motivate without contaminating reason with sensible inclinations. Siemens argues that this presents a temporal and motivational incongruity: if, as Kant claims, Achtung comes after the successful motivation of the will by the moral law, as its effect, then it comes too late to do any motivational work. In this regard, Siemens argues that Nietzsche’s account of the ‘sovereign individual’ in the Genealogy is more persuasive. For the ‘memory of will’ on which such an individual’s ability to promise is based indicates the natural conditions and capacities needed to sustain Kantian Achtung over time, while the active ‘forgetting’ involved explains how consciousness can be cleared in acting in order to allow reason to determine the will freely. Siemens also shows how the comparison with Kantian Achtung throws light on Nietzsche’s account of the ‘Stolz’ (pride) involved in promising. For just as Achtung derives from the moral law’s overcoming our inclinations’ resistance, so Stolz derives from promising-​keeping’s overcoming resistances both within and without. Nonetheless, Siemens concludes by casting doubt on the sincerity of Nietzsche’s account of the ‘sovereign individual’. Siemens’s suspicion is that precisely because they treat freedom as advanced through the overcoming of resistances, Nietzsche must consider both Kantian Achtung and the sovereign individual’s ‘consciousness of power and freedom’ as involving a misunderstanding of the body, a form of self-​deception. For some of Nietzsche’s Nachlass notes on physiology suggest that the overcoming of resistances is illusory, and that the naturalist question of freedom must rather concern how the feeling of freedom or power ‘can be made ever more substantial and not illusory’ (NL 1880 4[216], KSA 9.154).

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David Owen’s chapter, ‘Freedom as Independence:  Kant and Nietzsche on Non-​domination, Self-​Love and the Rivalrous Emotions’, proposes that Nietzsche’s critical reformulation of Kantian autonomy and his understanding of the obstacles to it are best understood in different terms, those of the political contrast between freedom and servitude. Owen begins by drawing out Kant’s and Nietzsche’s respective conceptions of such freedom as independence, with particular reference to Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals and his essays on enlightenment and to Nietzsche’s account of ‘noble’ ethics. Owen proceeds to argue that Nietzsche’s conception succeeds in identifying and superseding a critical weakness in Kant’s –​namely, that Kant fails to distinguish and integrate independence understood as a legal status and independence conceived as an ethical status, a practical relationship to oneself. In particular, for Owen, Nietzsche effectively charges Kant with failing to acknowledge and resolve the problem that legal independence may be accompanied by ethical domination. Owen examines this charge as it is expressed in Nietzsche’s account of the ‘slave revolt’ in the Genealogy, and supports it with reference to Kant’s own claims. He concludes by considering Nietzsche’s treatment of the agon as an attempt to integrate both the legal and the ethical dimensions of freedom as independence. The following chapter, ‘Autonomy, Spiritual Illness and Theodicy in Kant and Nietzsche’ by Frederick Neuhouser, further explores Nietzsche’s concern with the realization of autonomy. In particular, Neuhouser claims that in the second essay of the Genealogy Nietzsche treats ‘bad conscience’ as a ‘spiritual illness’ that itself makes possible the spiritual health of autonomy. For, Neuhouser argues, if ‘life’ for Nietzsche is the increase of power through the imposition of order, then bad conscience makes life ‘spiritual’ by introducing the internal division, or reflexivity, that constitutes self-​legislation  –​along with the self-​ consciousness, use of concepts and language, normative evaluation and orientation to an overarching ‘ideal’ that self-​legislation requires. Moreover, while bad conscience clearly obstructs the healthy increase of power by imposing deceptions and sufferings on agents, Neuhouser suggests that the contrast with it is also necessary to envision the self-​consciousness and self-​affirmation of autonomy. Thus, Neuhouser argues, Nietzsche’s account of bad conscience constitutes a theodicy comparable to that offered by Kant in ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’. For just as Kant considers human beings’ ‘unsociable sociability’ to be justified by its making peaceful coexistence possible, so Nietzsche considers the bad conscience to be ‘justified’ by its making autonomy possible. Similarly to Owen, however, Neuhouser emphasizes that Nietzsche nonetheless differs from Kant in considering this development to be a matter

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not only of ‘external’ regulations, but also of ethics –​a difference that Neuhouser brings out by emphasizing Nietzsche’s sense of an ‘inner’ virtue of justice that is associated with autonomy and reflects the spiritual evolution involved. Robert B.  Louden undertakes a systematic defence of Kant’s conception of autonomy against such Nietzschean criticisms in the following chapter, ‘Phantom Duty? Nietzsche versus Königsbergian Chinadom’. Louden begins with the Kantian sense of unconditional and universal duty and the sceptical genealogy that Nietzsche’s account of ‘bad conscience’ provides of it. He argues that the contractual terms of the relationship between creditor and debtor that Nietzsche’s genealogy employs are inadequate not only because they presuppose the promise-​keeping that more readily explains contractual duties, but also because they neglect other relationships that might better explain the development of the sense of duty. Louden further argues that, as a role-​based duty, the duty to repay a debt can explain neither the unconditionality nor the qualifications of moral obligations and that, as a perfect positive obligation to others, it also cannot explain imperfect and negative obligations or obligations to oneself. Louden then turns to the sense of autonomy that Nietzsche proposes in opposition to the Kantian, ‘moral’ sense. Here Louden objects that to make ethical obligations conditional on ‘life-​enhancement’ and to limit their scope to one’s ‘equals’ would make the coordination of social life impossible in various ways, and would be inconsistent with Nietzsche’s own emphasis on the ‘creation’ of values. For Louden, then, not only does Nietzsche’s naturalistic scepticism about Kant’s account of autonomy miss its mark, revealing the greater sophistication of Kant’s account, but Nietzsche’s own conception of autonomy is an incoherent combination of individualism, ‘life’-​affirmation and creativity. The following chapter, Marco Brusotti’s ‘Spontaneity and Sovereignty: Nietzsche’s Concepts and Kant’s Philosophy’, raises further doubts about the plausibility of a Nietzschean conception of autonomy to rival Kant’s. Brusotti focuses on the metaphysical concept of spontaneity, crucial to Kant’s conception of the autonomous will, and he begins by showing that, in reaction to German idealism and in the wake of positivism, in the 1860s this concept had become problematic even for the early neo-​Kantians. He argues that, in this context, it is not surprising that Nietzsche too criticizes the ‘absolute’ or ‘free’ spontaneity invoked by the metaphysical tradition as well as by Kant. Brusotti proceeds to employ this context to consider the use of Kantian terms such as ‘responsibility’, ‘autonomy’ and ‘free will’ in Nietzsche’s description of the ‘sovereign individual’ in the Genealogy, and to consider whether this passage should be read as affirming, radicalizing or criticizing the Kantian conception. In particular,

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Brusotti argues that since the ‘freedom’ which the sovereign individual ascribes to himself and to his peers is not absolute spontaneity, this self-​ascription cannot have the same function as Kant’s postulate of absolute freedom. Rather, Brusotti claims, Nietzsche’s description of the sovereign individual is an implicit rejection of both Max Stirner’s and Eduard von Hartmann’s views about individuality and sovereignty, and the use of Kantian terms in the passage is an example of Nietzsche’s ability to use ‘a moral formula in a supramoral sense’ (BGE 257, KSA 5.205). Moreover, Brusotti argues, after the Genealogy Nietzsche seems to have abandoned even the ‘non-​metaphysical’ or ‘relative’ conception of spontaneity that he had developed from the early 1880s onwards, on the basis of his readings of anti-​Kantian authors such as Alexander Bain and Johann Julius Baumann. Thus, according to Brusotti, the sovereign individual’s ‘freedom’ is not really ‘freedom’ at all, but rather a form of self-​affirmation, and the main expression of a sovereign individual’s ‘pathos of distance’. Keith Ansell Pearson and Michael Ure’s chapter, ‘Contra Kant: Experimental Ethics in Guyau and Nietzsche’, pursues these doubts about Nietzsche’s Kantianism by arguing that he opposes Kantian ethics with a distinctively ‘experimental’ form of ethics. Ansell Pearson and Ure focus on Nietzsche’s critical treatment of Kant’s ethics in Daybreak and on his later response to the similarly critical treatment provided by the French moral philosopher Jean-​Marie Guyau. In particular, they argue that in rejecting Kant’s ethics for its universalism, asceticism and metaphysics, Nietzsche proposes an ethics of natural experiments to determine and promote the plural goods of individuals and the species. While sympathetic to this project, however, Ansell Pearson and Ure argue that in also rejecting Schopenhauer’s ethics of other-​regardingness, Nietzsche tends to conceive of these experiments and these goods in terms of an asocial, incommunicable individuality. This, Ansell Pearson and Ure claim, reflects a failure to appreciate that ethical experimentation requires an openness to others. In this respect, they consider Nietzsche’s ambivalent later response to Guyau to be significant. For although Guyau echoes much of Nietzsche’s critical treatment of Kant and his experimental alternative –​something that Nietzsche welcomes –​ he nonetheless conceives of experiments as promoting individuals’ sociability and the good of society  –​which Nietzsche criticizes. Ansell Pearson and Ure consequently propose that Nietzsche’s denial of this other-​regarding aspect can be remedied by the social aspect of Guyau’s account. In the final chapter, ‘Question or Answer? Kant, Nietzsche and the Practical Commitment of Philosophy’, Paul van Tongeren raises further doubts about the coherence of Nietzsche’s criticism of Kantian ethics by turning to Kant’s

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and Nietzsche’s respective conceptions of philosophical ethics. Van Tongeren proposes that although Kant and Nietzsche share the belief that philosophy is ultimately concerned with the question, ‘how to live?’, Nietzsche reformulates the question as ‘how to live under nihilism?’. For van Tongeren, this implies a fundamentally different approach to ethics and traditional moral concepts, according to which Kant’s ‘dream’ of an a priori solution to the problems of philosophy –​and especially that of morality –​is merely a ‘protective structure that was built to hide the absurdity of life and world’. Yet, crucially, van Tongeren insists that Nietzsche is aware of the fact that his attempted ‘revaluation of values’ itself presupposes such structures as its own point of departure, such that his attempt to escape nihilism is tortuously entangled with nihilism itself. Van Tongeren undertakes to demonstrate this in three ways, most extensively by exploring Kant’s and Nietzsche’s accounts of friendship and showing how Nietzsche’s critique of friendship inevitably reinstates the nihilistic structures evident in Kant’s own account.

Notes 1 The order of names here and on the cover of this volume is intended to indicate seniority, and not the editors’ relative contributions. 2 The most extensive discussions of Nietzsche’s relation to Kantian ethics are provided by Gerhardt (1992; 2011), Hill (2003), Anderson (2012) and Katsafanas (2013). Aspects of the relation are treated in parts of Knobe and Leiter (2007), Risse (2007), Gardner (2009), Gemes (2009), Janaway (2009), Owen (2009), Constâncio (2012), Bailey (2013) and Anderson (2013). Janaway (2007) and Clark and Dudrick (2012) also provide some relevant discussion. Kantian themes in Nietzsche’s politics are referred to in Ansell Pearson (1994; 2008), Owen (1995; 2008), Shaw (2007) and Allsobrook (2008). 3 For example, Acampora (2006) and Leiter (2011) argue that GM II 2 should not be taken as expressing Nietzsche’s own considered position and Owen (1995; 1999; 2009), Hill (2003), Ridley (1998; 2009), Janaway (2007; 2009) and Anderson (2012) interpret Nietzsche’s sense of freedom in individualist terms. 4 See Gerhardt (1992; 2011) and also Stegmaier (1994: 131–​138). 5 On Nietzsche’s critique of moral duty, see the chapters by Louden and Katsafanas, and in particular Katsafanas’s account of Nietzsche’s ‘Hegelian’ critique of the Kantian idea of a ‘pure’ derivation of duties. 6 On this, see Bailey (2012; 2013).

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7 On this difference, see Bailey (2012; 2013) and Constâncio (2012). 8 On this aspect, see Constâncio (2015). 9 As Gerhardt (1988: 104) has argued, Nietzsche treats power relations as mediated by perceptions, perspectives, interpretations, conceptualizations, communication signs, norms, rights, duties and so on, such that the equilibrium of power in a society always depends on some sort of ‘symbolic understanding’ or ‘agreement’ among its members –​that is, on a kind of ‘social contract’ or ‘compact’ (HH 446, KSA 2.290). See also Constâncio (2015: 89–​90). Of course, this does not prevent Nietzsche from rejecting social contract theory (see BGE 257 and GM II 17, KSA 5.205–​6, 324–​5) for, among other reasons, its assumption of asocial (or pre-​social) ‘selves’ or ‘subjects’. See Owen (1995; 2008) and Siemens (2015). 10 Rather than the social ‘pathos of distance’ of an aristocracy, then, what Nietzsche calls ‘higher culture’ involves ‘that other, more mysterious pathos’ which is ‘a demand for new expansions of distance within the soul itself, the development of states that are increasingly high, rare, distant, tautly drawn and comprehensive’, the spiritual pathos which fosters ‘the enhancement of the type “man”, the constant “self-​overcoming of man” ’ (BGE 257). On this, see Branco and Constâncio (forthcoming). 11 For another example of this, see Paul van Tongeren’s discussion of friendship in this volume. 12 See Constâncio (2017) and, on the nihilism of the ‘ascetic ideal’, Constâncio (2016). 13 On Nietzsche’s ‘naturalism’, compare Leiter (2002; 2013) with Williams (1995). 14 See Janaway and Robertson (2012b), and also Robertson’s chapter in this volume.

References Acampora, C. (2006), ‘On Sovereignty and Overhumanity: Why It Matters How We Read Nietzsche’s Genealogy II:2’, in C. Acampora (ed.), Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays, 147–​161, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Allsobrook, C. (2008), ‘Contingent Criticism: Bridging Ideology Critique and Genealogy’, in H. W. Siemens and V. Roodt (eds), Nietzsche, Power and Politics, 697–​717, Berlin: De Gruyter. Anderson, R. L. (2012), ‘What Is a Nietzschean Self?’, in C. Janaway and S. Robertson (eds), Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity, 202–​235, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anderson, R. L. (2013), ‘Nietzsche on Autonomy’, in K. Gemes and J. Richardson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, 432–​460, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Ansell Pearson, K. (1994), Nietzsche as a Political Thinker, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Ansell Pearson, K. (2008), ‘“Holding on to the Sublime”: Nietzsche on Philosophy’s Perception and Search for Greatness’, in H. W. Siemens and V. Roodt (eds), Nietzsche, Power and Politics, 767–​799, Berlin/​New York: De Gruyter. Bailey, T. (2012), ‘Vulnerabilities of Agency: Kant and Nietzsche on Political Community’, in J. Constâncio and M. J. M. Branco (eds), As the Spider Spins: Essays on Nietzsche’s Critique and Use of Language, 107–​127, Berlin/​Boston: De Gruyter. Bailey, T. (2013), ‘Nietzsche the Kantian?’, in K. Gemes and J. Richardson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, 134–​159, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Branco, M. J. M. and Constâncio, J. (forthcoming), ‘Philosophy as “Free-​ Spiritedness”: Philosophical Evaluative Judgments and Post-​Kantian Aesthetics in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil’, in P. Katsafanas (ed.), Routledge Philosophy Minds: Nietzsche, London/​New York: Routledge. Clark, M., and Dudrick, D. (2012), The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Constâncio, J. (2012), ‘“A Sort of Schema of Ourselves”: On Nietzsche’s “Ideal” and “Concept” of Freedom’, Nietzsche-​Studien 41: 127–​162. Constâncio, J. (2015), ‘Hegel and Nietzsche on Recognition and Power’, in K. Hay and L. R. Santos (eds), Nietzsche, German Idealism and Its Critics, 66–​99, Berlin/​ Boston: De Gruyter. Constâncio, J. (2016a), ‘The Consequences of Kant’s First Critique: Nietzsche on Truth and the Thing-​in-​Itself ’, in M. Brusotti and H. W. Siemens (eds), Nietzsche, Kant, and the Problem of Metaphysics, 103–108, London: Bloomsbury. Constâncio, J. (2016b), ‘Nietzsche on Nihilism (eine unersättliche Diskussion?)’, in A. Bertino, E. Poljakova, A. Rupschus, and B. Alberts (Hrsg.), Zur Philosophie der Orientierung, 83–​100, Berlin: De Gruyter. Gardner, S. (2009), ‘Nietzsche, the Self, and the Disunity of Philosophical Reason’, in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, 1–​31, Oxford/​ New York: Oxford University Press. Gemes, K. (2009), ‘Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy, and the Sovereign Individual’, in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, 33–​49, Oxford/​ New York: Oxford University Press. Gerhardt, V.(1988), ‘Das “Prinzip des Gleichgewichts”. Zum Verhältnis von Recht und Macht bei Nietzsche’, in V. Gerhardt, Pathos und Distanz. Studien zur Philosophie Friedrich Nietzsches, 98–​132, Stuttgart: Reclam. Gerhardt, V. (1992), ‘Selbstbegründung. Nietzsches Moral der Individualität’, Nietzsche-​ Studien 21: 28–​49. Gerhardt, V. (2011), Die Funken des freien Geistes: Neuere Aufsätze zu Nietzsches Philosophie der Zukunft, edited by J.-​C. Heilinger and N. Loukidelis, Berlin/​ Boston: De Gruyter.

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Hill, R. K. (2003), Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janaway, C. (2007), Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janaway, C. (2009), ‘Autonomy, Affect and the Self in Nietzsche’s Project of Genealogy’, in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, 51–​68, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janaway, C., and Robertson, S. (2012b), ‘Introduction: Nietzsche on Naturalism and Normativity’, in C. Janaway and S. Robertson (eds), Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity, 1–​19, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katsafanas, P. (2013), Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knobe, J., and Leiter, B. (2007), ‘The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology’, in B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu (eds), Nietzsche and Morality, 83–​109, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leiter, B. (2002), Nietzsche on Morality, London: Routledge. Leiter, B. (2011), ‘Who Is the “Sovereign Individual”? Nietzsche on Freedom’, in S. May (ed.), Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide, 101–​119, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leiter, B. (2013), ‘Nietzsche’s Naturalism Reconsidered’, in K. Gemes and J. Richardson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, 576–​598, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Owen, D. (1995), Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity: A Critique of Liberal Reason, London: Sage. Owen, D. (1999), ‘Nietzsche, Enlightenment and the Problem of Noble Ethics’, in J. Lippitt (ed.), Nietzsche’s Futures, 3–​29, London: Macmillan. Owen, D. (2008), ‘Nietzsche, Ethical Agency and the Problem of Democracy’, in H. W. Siemens and V. Roodt (eds), Nietzsche, Power and Politics, 143–​167, Berlin/​ New York: De Gruyter. Owen, D. (2009), ‘Autonomy, Self-​Respect and Self-​Love: Nietzsche on Ethical Agency’, in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, 197–​221, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ridley, A. (1998), Nietzsche’s Conscience: Six Character Studies from the ‘Genealogy’, London: Cornell University Press. Ridley, A. (2009), ‘Nietzsche’s Intentions: What the Sovereign Individual Promises’, in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, 181–​195, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Risse, M. (2007), ‘Nietzschean “Animal Psychology” versus Kantian Ethics’, in B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu (eds), Nietzsche and Morality, 57–​82, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shaw, T. (2007), Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Siemens, H. W. (2015), ‘Nietzsche’s Socio-​physiology of the Self ’, in J. Constâncio, M. J. M. Branco, and B. Ryan (eds), Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, 629–​653, Berlin/​Boston: De Gruyter. Stegmaier, W. (1994), Nietzsches ‘Genealogie der Moral’, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Williams, B. (1995), ‘Nietzsche’s Minimalist Moral Psychology’, in Making Sense of Humanity, 65–​76, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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The Problem of Normative Authority in Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche Paul Katsafanas

In quite different ways, Kant and Hegel argue that normative claims are justified only if they are manifestations of freedom. That is, claims such as ‘murder is wrong’, ‘you have reason not to lie’ or ‘you should take the means to your ends’ have authority over us only if these claims issue from or are preconditions for autonomous agency. Beyond this point of agreement, however, the differences between Kant and Hegel may seem enormous. Kant argues that autonomous agency yields a commitment to acting on the Categorical Imperative, which in turn generates specific claims about which actions are permissible and which are forbidden. Hegel rejects this idea, arguing that claims about what there is reason to do are inextricably linked to the practices and institutions of our historical milieu and that, in order to be justified, these practices and institutions must themselves be realizations of freedom. Proponents of each theory levy critiques at the other. Hegelians charge Kantians with relying on an excessively formal and ultimately contentless conception of autonomy, which is too attenuated to generate substantive normative conclusions. Kantians charge Hegelians with relying on an excessively substantive, concrete theory, which is so mired in the particularities of our current evaluative framework that it cannot make space for a comprehensive critique of this framework. While Kantians and Hegelians have developed sophisticated responses to these charges, I contend that there is an element of truth in each of the critiques, and one goal of this essay is to sketch them. However, my primary goal is to demonstrate that we can overcome these difficulties by turning to an unexpected source:  the work of Nietzsche. I  argue that Nietzsche provides an account of normative authority1 that incorporates seemingly incompatible elements of the

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Kantian and Hegelian accounts. In so doing, his work reveals the potential structure of a fully satisfying account of normative authority. Thus, attending to the dispute between Kant and Hegel and to the solution that I argue is offered by Nietzsche enables us to make progress on a central topic in ethics: the relationship between freedom and normative authority. The essay comprises four sections. Section 1 offers a brief review of Kant’s attempt to explain normative authority in terms of autonomy. Section 2 reconstructs Hegel’s critique of Kant and introduces Hegel’s alternative theory. Section 3 turns to Nietzsche, arguing that Nietzsche accepts the most appealing elements of the Kantian and Hegelian accounts. Unfortunately, though, these elements seem to be incompatible with one another. Accordingly, Section 4 explains how Nietzsche’s theory of normative authority resolves the tensions between these elements of the Kantian and Hegelian accounts. In particular, I will show that Nietzsche agrees with Hegel that we cannot derive a substantive ethic from the formal idea of autonomy. However, pace Hegel and with Kant, Nietzsche argues that we can extract one normative principle from this formal idea. This principle, which Nietzsche labels ‘will to power’, can then be used to critique the values and norms embodied in our social institutions and practices. Unlike Kant, however, Nietzsche denies that this principle extracted from the notion of autonomy can by itself generate any determinate content; on the contrary, it generates substantive normative conclusions only when brought to bear on the norms that are present in our social institutions and practices. I argue that the resultant theory overcomes both the charges that Hegelians level at Kantians and those that Kantians levy at Hegelians. In so doing, it yields a new and fruitful solution to the problem of normative authority.

1.  Kant on the problem of normative authority Normative claims invite the question of why they should hold sway over us. Kant proposed to answer this question by tying the authority of norms to our own activity: norms hold sway over us because we impose them on ourselves. Thus, Kant claims that the will must view itself ‘as the author of its principles independently of alien influences’ (GMS 448). If we consider a normative principle –​or, as Kant puts it, a ‘law’ –​that constrains the will, then the will must give itself this law: Hence the will is not merely subject to the law, but subject to it in such a way that it must be regarded as also giving law to itself and just because of this as first subject to the law (of which it can regard itself as the author). (GMS 431)

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Anything less would render the will heteronomous, or unfree: If the will seeks the law that is to determine it [. . .] in the character of any of its objects –​the result is always heteronomy. In that case the will does not give itself the law, but the object does so in virtue of its relation to the will. (GMS 441)

Thus, according to Kant, no external authority binds me to normative principles; rather, I  bind myself to principles, and therein arises their claim to authority over me. But how, exactly, is an appeal to self-​imposition supposed to answer the normative problem? It might seem that if you impose a principle on yourself, then its authority will have been legitimated  –​because, after all, you impose it on yourself. However, it might equally well seem that if you impose a principle on yourself, then its authority disappears –​because, after all, you can remove it as easily as you imposed it. There is thus a tension here. A normative principle is something that can constrain one’s will. However, if we attempt to explain the constraining authority of principles in terms of the will’s own operations, then it seems that the alleged constraint disappears: if I bind myself by a principle, then I can also unbind myself, in which case I was never really bound at all. This is a point that occupied a central position in nineteenth-​century discussions of value. Consider a passage from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in which Hegel considers the view that normative authority arises from the agent’s own acts of will: This implies that objective goodness is merely something constructed by my conviction, sustained by me alone, and that I, as lord and master, can make it come and go. As soon as I relate myself to something objective, it ceases to exist for me, and so I am poised above an immense void, conjuring up shapes and destroying them. (PR 140A)

Hegel here argues that if normative authority arose from an agent’s acts of will, then norms would not appear to the agent as objective constraints. Rather, the norms would appear as empty, ephemeral shapes –​for the agent could rescind the normative principle’s authority as easily as she could bestow it. The idea that we ‘create’ normative authority has no content, if the norms cannot constrain us. In sum, Kant’s idea seems to be that if you make a norm for yourself, then of course it binds you, for you are its author. But Hegel argues for the opposite conclusion: if you make a norm for yourself, then of course it cannot bind you, for its alleged authority is dependent on you. To the extent that norms are genuinely self-​imposed, they lose any authority to constrain us; they constrain us no more than our desires and whims do. Thus, the attempt to explain normative authority

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in terms of self-​imposition runs the risk of collapsing the distinction between norm and whim. Kant is, of course, aware of this potential problem and has a way of trying to solve it. He claims that although the authority of norms is explained by the fact that we impose them on ourselves, the content of these norms is not up to us: the injunction ‘be autonomous!’ imposes determinate constraints on what can be willed. The core idea is that in order to impose norms on ourselves at all, there are certain standards to which we become inescapably committed. The general form of Kant’s argument is familiar: we are committed to acting autonomously. Acting autonomously requires acting on a law or principle. The law cannot be hypothetical, i.e., tied to the realization of some goal or the satisfaction of some inclination, because the will would then be determined to action by something external to itself (i.e. an inclination or goal). Instead, the law must be categorical; it must be unconditionally valid. Kant states the content of this law as follows: ‘act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law’ (GMS 421). He argues that this law –​the Categorical Imperative –​rules out certain actions, thereby yielding determinate constraints on permissible actions. So, the commitment to autonomy entails certain constraints on our actions. This is why Kant, if his argument were successful, would have the resources to respond to the Hegelian objection. We cannot simply bind and unbind ourselves with any norms we happen to fancy; rather, although we impose norms on ourselves, these norms constrain us in a way that is not up to us –​for which norms we impose on ourselves is not fully up to us.

2.  Hegel on the problem of normative authority 2.1  Hegel’s objection to Kant Hegel claims that Kant’s view operates with an exceedingly ‘formal’ or ‘abstract’ conception of autonomy, which renders the theory an ‘empty formalism’ (PR 135). There is some controversy over how Hegel’s formalism objection should be interpreted, but on the most common interpretation, Hegel is claiming that Kant’s universalization procedure does not yield any determinate conclusions.2 To see what Hegel has in mind, consider one of Kant’s applications of the Categorical Imperative in the Critique of Practical Reason. Kant asks us to consider a case in which I have been given some money to hold as a deposit, the

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individual making the deposit has died and no record of the deposit exists. I ask myself whether I can keep this money for myself rather than reporting it to the deceased’s heirs. Kant claims that we can apply the Categorical Imperative by asking whether the following principle could be willed as a universal law: ‘that everyone may deny a deposit of which no one can produce a proof ’. He claims that it cannot, for ‘I at once become aware that such a principle, viewed as a law, would annihilate itself, because the result would be that there would be no deposits’ (KpV 27–​28). In other words, this maxim fails the universalization test, because if it were universalized then the institution of making deposits would disappear, and it would therefore no longer be possible to act on the maxim. Hegel objects by arguing that [t]‌he absence of property contains in itself just as little contradiction as the non-​existence of this or that nation, family, etc., or the death of the whole human race. But if it is already established on other grounds and presupposed that property and human life are to exist and be respected, then indeed it is a contradiction to commit theft or murder; a contradiction must be a contradiction of something, i.e. of some content presupposed from the start as a fixed principle. (PR 135R)

Thus Hegel agrees with Kant that if the maxim of stealing deposits –​or, more generally, property  –​in order to enrich oneself were universalized, the institution of deposit-​making would disappear. However, Hegel claims that unless we presuppose, as a fixed principle, that deposits (or, more generally, property) should exist, this generates no contradiction at all. The general point is well put in the Phenomenology: It would be strange, too, if tautology, the principle of contradiction, which is admitted to be only a formal principle for the cognition of theoretical truth, i.e., something which is quite indifferent to truth and falsehood, were supposed to be more than this for the cognition of practical truth. (PhG 431)

In other words, no one thinks that a contradiction test can tell us which theoretical beliefs are true. The beliefs ‘it is raining here’ and ‘it is not raining here’ are contradictory, so we know that they cannot both be true; but we cannot conclude, from the mere fact that they are contradictory, which one is true. Hegel’s central point is that it is odd to think that things would be different in the practical realm. As the property case illustrates, certain maxims will generate contradictions with the institution of property; but this does not tell us whether the maxim is immoral or the institution of property is immoral. To make that judgment –​to move from the idea that two propositions are contradictory to the idea

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that one of them is correct –​we need to appeal to some independent grounds for determining what is moral.3

2.2  Hegel’s alternative to the Kantian strategy These criticisms notwithstanding, Hegel does not think that Kantian morality should be completely abandoned. Rather, he characteristically argues that the failures of Kantian morality point us towards a more encompassing understanding of normativity –​an understanding that resolves the problems to which Kantian morality succumbs. Specifically, although Hegel agrees with Kant that normative considerations are authoritative only if they can be viewed as products of freedom, Hegel interprets this requirement in a different way than does Kant.4 To bring out the differences between Kant and Hegel, let’s focus on two questions: 1. What is the object of assessment? 2. How is the assessment conducted? Kant’s answers to the two questions are clear:  the agent assesses her maxims, and the assessment consists in determining whether the maxim passes the Categorical Imperative test. For Hegel, however, the answers are considerably more complex. First, the individual does not assess maxims, but social institutions and practices. Second, the individual does not attempt to show that these institutions and practices are consistent with or derivable from some additional, external standard. Rather, she attempts to show that they are institutions or practices that make freedom possible on their own, immanent terms. Let me explain. With regard to the first point, Hegel famously argues that the agent’s freedom can be achieved only within and through certain social institutions and practices. Simply put, I realize my freedom by conforming to the ethical practices or laws of my society –​or, as Hegel puts it, ‘only that will which obeys the law is free’ (VG 115/​97). However, not just any set of institutions and practices will enable individuals to realize their freedom. Consider a simple example: if the laws and institutions of my society condemn me to a life of slavery, I will not be able fully to realize my freedom by conforming to those laws and institutions. Thus, Hegel claims that we can ask, of any set of social institutions or practices, whether they enable all individuals to realize their freedom. The institutions count as ‘rational’, in Hegel’s terminology, or ‘justified’, in ours, if they meet this condition, making it possible for all individuals to realize themselves as self-​determined entities.5 Moreover, the institutions and practices must be such that subjects are not

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only in fact free, but are also capable of recognizing their own freedom. That is, individuals must be able to view these institutions and practices as expressions of their own wills, so that participation in them is conceived as free activity.6 In The Philosophy of Right, Hegel argues that three modern social institutions –​ the family, civil society and the liberal state  –​jointly fulfill these conditions (PR 157ff.).7 So, this is the first difference between Kant and Hegel:  rather than assessing individual maxims, Hegel assesses our social institutions and practices, asking whether they are realizations of freedom. This brings us to the second question:  how, exactly, is this Hegelian assessment to be conducted? Unlike Kant, Hegel does not offer an independent criterion (such as the Categorical Imperative) by means of which we can assess institutions and practices. Rather, he offers an immanent critique of the institutions and practices. Such a critique proceeds by showing that institutions or practices are inadequate not in light of some independent standard, but in light of their own standards. But what are these standards? As noted above, Hegel argues that the underlying standard implicit in modern social institutions is freedom. In assessing these social institutions, then, we ask whether they enable all individuals to realize their capacity for freedom. Hegel’s idea is that many institutions and practices are internally inconsistent or unstable, to the extent that once these tensions are revealed the institutions or practices can no longer be maintained. A Hegelian critique proceeds by uncovering these tensions; it shows that there is a disparity between the current social institutions and the ideals that they strive to realize. In other words, a Hegelian critique shows that existing social institutions may be imperfect realizations of their own principles. Given Hegel’s claim that the internal ideal of modern social institutions is freedom, this critique takes the form of revealing tensions between extant social institutions and freedom.8 This sketch of Hegel’s ethical theory, although exceedingly brief, will be sufficient to bring out two important ways in which the Hegelian view differs from the Kantian view. First, there is the well-​known difference in the theories’ starting points: Kant begins with the isolated individual who considers whether he can universalize his maxims, whereas Hegel begins with a socially situated individual who reflects on the laws and institutions of her own society. Second, there is a difference that may be less obvious: normative assessment is carried out in strikingly distinct ways. The Kantian proposes maxims and considers whether they can be willed as universal laws. In this sense, Kantianism has a foundationalist structure:  Kantians attempt to derive all particular normative claims from one formal principle, the Categorical Imperative.9 The Hegelian does not

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attempt to derive normative claims from a formal principle; rather, she begins with a determinate set of contingent principles, embodied in the social institutions of her society, and asks whether these principles are realizations of freedom. (Given Hegel’s argument that modern social institutions are designed to realize freedom, the question of whether institutions realize their own principles and the question of whether they realize freedom turn out to be one and the same.) So while Kant’s theory attempts to derive norms from a formal procedure, Hegel’s theory uses a formal criterion (the idea of freedom) not to derive, but to assess norms that are embodied in the society. Asking whether the normative claims embodied in these institutions and practices are justified does not involve showing that they can be derived from anything at all. Rather, justifying the norms requires showing that, although they are historically contingent, they actualize our freedom. Accordingly, Hegel’s theory has a non-​foundationalist structure.

3.  The relationship between the Nietzschean, Kantian and Hegelian theories of normative authority With these results at hand, we can examine the relationship between the Nietzschean, Kantian and Hegelian theories of normative authority. In this section, I show that Nietzsche’s theory incorporates the most appealing features of the Kantian and Hegelian accounts and also rejects certain problematic aspects of these accounts.10 Unfortunately, Nietzsche’s resultant theory seems incoherent –​in trying to be both Kantian and Hegelian, it runs the risk of collapsing into unintelligibility. However, Section 4 argues that what looks like a problem is actually Nietzsche’s deepest insight: we can, in fact, reconcile the most promising aspects of the Kantian and Hegelian theories, and thereby produce a satisfying account of normative authority.

3.1  Nietzsche agrees that freedom places determinate constraints on what can be willed One of the most prominent themes in Nietzsche’s work is the idea that we must critically assess our values. He famously calls for a ‘revaluation of all values’, writing, ‘[W]‌e need a critique of moral values, for once the value of these values must itself be called into question’ (GM Preface 6, KSA 5.253). To revalue a value is

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to ask whether it merits the status that we accord to it. For example, to revalue egalitarianism would be to engage in a critical assessment of the value that we place on egalitarianism. We might begin by asking whether egalitarianism is really valuable, or whether our valuation of egalitarianism is justified, or whether everyone has reason to value egalitarianism. Interestingly, Nietzsche associates revaluation with the achievement of freedom. Nietzsche’s account of freedom has received increased attention in the past decade. Brian Leiter (2002) and other interpreters have argued convincingly that Nietzsche rejects certain conceptions of freedom, such as the libertarian conception. However, a number of interpreters have shown that Nietzsche has another conception of freedom, as self-​determination or autonomy.11 Thus, while Nietzsche inveighs against the idea of freedom as an uncaused cause (BGE 21, KSA 5.35–​6), he praises those who possess the ‘power of self-​determination’ (GS 347, KSA 3.583), and he regularly speaks of ‘evaluating on one’s own’, being ‘sovereign’ and being ‘autonomous’ (HH Preface 3, KSA 2.15 ff., GM II.1–​2, KSA 5.291–​4). He writes that the free individual ‘is obliged to have recourse to his own law-​giving’ (BGE 262, KSA 5.216) and that free individuals enjoy a ‘constraint and perfection under a law [Gesetz] of their own’ (GS 290, KSA 3.530). In a strikingly Kantian moment, he even claims that free individuals are those who ‘give themselves laws [Sich-​selber-​Gesetzgebenden]’ (GS 335, KSA 3.563; cf. D 104, KSA 3.92; GS 117, KSA 3.475–​6; A 54, KSA 6.236–​7).12 As these passages indicate, Nietzsche links freedom to revaluation. In fact, Nietzsche often treats as interchangeable the ‘will to self-​determination’, ‘evaluating on one’s own account’ and the ‘will to free will’ (HH I Preface 3, KSA 2.17). He argues that if an agent remains under the sway of values that have not been subjected to this process of critical revaluation, then the agent is unfree: The fettered spirit takes up his position, not for reasons, but out of habit; he is a Christian, for example, not because he has knowledge of the various religions and has chosen between them [.  . .] he encountered Christianity [.  . .] and adopted it without reasons, as a man born in a wine-​producing country becomes a wine drinker. (HH I 226, KSA 2.190)13

So it is clear that Nietzsche has a conception of freedom as self-​determination, according to which an agent counts as self-​determining or autonomous if she acts on values that have been subjected to the process of ‘revaluation’. But how exactly does Nietzsche conceive of the relationship between freedom and revaluation? Kant thought we could derive specific normative claims from the idea of freedom; Hegel argued that while we cannot do that, we can

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use freedom to assess extant normative claims. If Nietzsche adopted a view of either kind, the link between freedom and revaluation would be clear: revaluation would consist of determining whether particular values conflict with the demands of freedom. Might Nietzsche embrace a view according to which freedom generates constraints on legitimate norms? It is natural to think that the answer is ‘no’, as it is common to interpret Nietzsche as a radical subjectivist who argues that there are no constraints on our values and norms. But this interpretation does not withstand scrutiny. In a number of passages, Nietzsche directly asserts that certain values are incompatible with freedom. He quite bluntly states that autonomy is incompatible with the acceptance of traditional moral values, writing that ‘ “autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293). This idea is present even in Nietzsche’s earlier works, where he claims that ‘what characterizes the free spirit is [. . .] that he has liberated himself from tradition’ (HH I 225, KSA 2.189). In these passages, Nietzsche makes it clear that the autonomous individual cannot accept the values of traditional morality.14 So the demand for autonomy rules out certain values. Aside from these textual problems with attributing subjectivism to Nietzsche, there is a deeper, philosophical problem. As I argued regarding Kant in the first section, if the demand for freedom did not impose any constraints on what could be valued, then the appeal to freedom could not explain normative authority. Rather than explaining the authority of norms, it would explain norms away: it would reduce norms to whims, for norms would constrain us no more than our whims do. This suggests that we should take Nietzsche’s claim at face value: freedom requires revaluation, and revaluation does indeed place constraints on what can be valued. How can we make sense of this claim? Nietzsche cannot be adopting Kant’s strategy, for he regards the Kantian arguments linking autonomy to the Categorical Imperative as highly dubious. He condemns the stiff and decorous Tartuffery of the old Kant as he lures on the dialectical bypaths that lead to his ‘categorical imperative’ –​really lead astray and seduce –​ this spectacle makes us smile, as we are fastidious and find it quite amusing to watch closely the subtle tricks of old moralists and preachers of morals. (BGE 5, KSA 5.19)

Here, Nietzsche openly rejects Kant’s argument for the Categorical Imperative. Why is this? In several passages, Nietzsche claims that the Categorical Imperative does not generate any content, but merely reiterates the provincial moral beliefs

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of Kant’s day (GS 335, KSA 3.563, A 12, KSA 6.178–​9). In other words, Nietzsche alleges that the CI simply enables post hoc rationalizations of existing moral beliefs (Hegel’s discussion of property is a perfect example: both the necessity and the abolition of property can be justified in terms of the CI). Moreover, Nietzsche criticizes the structure of the Kantian theory, denying that any moral theory could have the kind of foundationalist structure that Kant envisions.15 In this light, he writes that Kant and other moral philosophers ‘make one laugh’ with their quest for ‘a rational foundation for morality’. He claims that ‘seen clearly in the light of day’, their theories amount to nothing more than a ‘scholarly form of good faith in the dominant morality, a new way of expressing it’ (BGE 186, KSA 5.105–​6). Rather than attempting to derive morality from some foundational principle, Nietzsche suggests that any substantive moral inquiry will start with a deep scrutiny of the existing values and norms embodied implicitly or explicitly in our social institutions, philosophical theories and ways of life: One should, in all strictness, admit what will be needful here for a long time to come, what alone is provisionally justified here: assembly of material, conceptual comprehension and arrangement of a vast domain of delicate value-feelings and value-​distinctions which live, grow, beget and perish and perhaps attempts to display the more frequent and recurring forms of these living crystallizations as preparation of a typology of morals. To be sure: one has not been so modest hitherto. Philosophers one and all have, with a straightlaced seriousness that provokes laughter, demanded something much higher, more pretentious, more solemn of themselves as soon as they have concerned themselves with morality as a science: they wanted to furnish the rational ground of morality [. . .] How far from their clumsy pride was that apparently insignificant task left in dust and mildew, the task of description, although the most delicate hands and senses could hardly be delicate enough for it! (BGE 186, KSA 5.105–​6)

Mocking the (Kantian) project of furnishing a ‘rational ground’ for morality  –​a foundational principle from which we can derive a correct moral system  –​Nietzsche claims that the first task for philosophy is the collection of information about the system of value-​feelings and value-​distinctions that are present in society. I take it that part of what Nietzsche means to highlight, by using the unusual terms ‘value-​feelings and value-​distinction [Werthgefühle und Werthunterschiede]’ rather than ‘value’, is that our values are not simply manifest in our reflective, conscious judgments, but are ensconced in less reflective forms of relating to the world:  in our intuitive reactions, distinctions, ways of classifying or distinguishing actions, and indeed in our feelings. These unreflective

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manifestations of values, Nietzsche suggests, cannot simply be read off the surface of society, or discovered in armchair reflections about what is valuable; rather, Nietzsche claims, discovering our tacit normative commitments requires ‘the most delicate hands and senses’. The following sections of Beyond Good and Evil continue the discussion of this point and provide illustrations of it: BGE 189–​90, KSA 5.110–​11, for example, trace cultural norms and expectations to concealed, tacit evaluative judgments. BGE 212, KSA 5.145–​7, sums up this conception of evaluative inquiry; there, Nietzsche writes that philosophers’ task is to apply ‘the knife vivisectionally to the chest of the very virtues of their time’, revealing the hypocrisy, contradictions, hidden motives and defunct ideals at the heart of their society’s way of life. In these passages, then, we see that Nietzschean moral inquiry takes the form of an investigation of our cultural practices, expectations and institutions, bringing to light their implicit principles, motives and ideals. So Nietzsche rejects three core elements of the Kantian account: the argument linking autonomy to the Categorical Imperative, the claim that the Categorical Imperative generates determinate content and the foundationalist structure of Kant’s theory.16 Recall that in the second section I  established that Hegel objects to precisely these three aspects of Kant’s account. Is it possible, then, that Nietzsche endorses a Hegelian theory of normative authority? In the next section I argue that Nietzsche does, indeed, adopt certain elements of Hegel’s account. Yet Nietzsche’s theory is not fully Hegelian, since it departs from Hegel in two crucial ways.

3.2  How Hegelian could Nietzsche’s theory be? Hegel tells us that it is a mistake to think that we can derive a correct set of ethical norms from some formal principle, such as the Categorical Imperative. Rather, we must always begin with a historically situated set of norms. But rather than just accepting these norms as given, we must assess them to see whether they are conducive to the realization of freedom. They can fail by this criterion, and if they do, they must be modified or rejected. Nietzsche agrees with Hegel’s claim that we do not justify norms by deriving them from some formal principle. This is why he mocks the attempt to provide a ‘rational ground’ for morality (BGE 186, KSA 5.105). Moreover, Nietzsche’s critiques of our current values and practices often look quite similar to the Hegelian process of assessing extant norms and values to see whether they live up to their aspirations. To choose a simple example, Nietzsche repeatedly argues that our practice of compassion fails to live up to its own aims: while compassion

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aims to aid the object of the compassion, Nietzsche contends that attention to the psychology of compassion will reveal that it harms both the compassionate person and the object of her compassion.17 If this were correct, then we would have reason to reconsider the value placed on compassion. Many of Nietzsche’s critiques can profitably be read in this fashion, for they often proceed by bringing to light hidden contradictions and inconsistencies in our practices and our dominant values. In other words, many of Nietzsche’s critiques consist in showing, as he puts it, that ‘the motives of this morality stand opposed to its principle’ (GS 21, KSA 3.393). Nietzsche therefore seems to be in agreement with Hegel’s two departures from Kant: namely, Hegel’s claim that we assess norms embodied in social institutions and practices, and Hegel’s anti-​foundationalist method of critiquing norms. However, a closer examination reveals that Nietzsche and Hegel part company on the second point. Indeed, there are two important, and related, differences between them in this regard: Nietzsche and Hegel disagree on how far-​reaching the critique of modern norms will be, and they also disagree on whether the critique appeals to some principle that is external to the currently dominant set of norms.18 Let’s begin with the first difference. For Hegel, the critique is restricted to determining whether our social institutions and laws live up to their aspirations: while they aspire to be realizations of human freedom, they can fall short of that ideal, and therefore require modification. Nietzsche, however, pursues a far more radical critique: he wants to show that the very ideals to which these institutions aspire must be reassessed. As he puts it in the Genealogy, What if a symptom of regression were inherent in the ‘good’, likewise a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic, through which the present was possibly living at the expense of the future? [. . .] So that precisely morality would be to blame if the highest power and splendor actually possible to the type man were never in fact attained? So that precisely morality were the danger of dangers? (GM Preface 6, KSA 5.253)

In his own work, Nietzsche critiques some of our most cherished values. To choose just a few examples: he complains that the effects of ‘liberal institutions’ are ‘known well enough: they undermine the will to power’ (TI Skirmishes 38, KSA 6.139); he writes, ‘well-​being as you understand it –​that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible’ (BGE 225, KSA 5.161); what ‘has been called morality’, Nietzsche insists, will ‘deprive existence of its great character’ (EH Destiny 4, KSA 6.369); and he warns that ‘our weak,

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unmanly social concepts of good and evil and their tremendous ascendancy over body and soul have finally weakened all bodies and souls and snapped the self-​reliant, independent, unprejudiced men, the pillars of a strong civilization’ (D 163, KSA 3.146; cf. BGE 62, KSA 5.81–​83; A 5; KSA 6.171). Thus, Nietzsche clearly believes that modern values are fundamentally misguided. This brings us to the second difference. Hegel and Nietzsche’s disagreement on how extensive the critiques of modern norms will be reflects a deeper disagreement concerning the way in which the critique is conducted. Whereas Hegel engages in immanent critiques, showing that institutions fail to realize their own ideals, Nietzsche argues that in order to carry out an adequate critique of existing norms, we need to employ some evaluative standard external to the norms themselves. As Nietzsche puts it, ‘ “Thoughts about moral prejudices”, if they are not meant to be prejudices about prejudices, presuppose a position outside morality’ (GS 380, KSA 3.633). Unlike Hegel, Nietzsche thinks that we must do far more than simply locate the values to which our practices aspire, and assess their conformity to these values. We need to uncover a standard that can be used to evaluate the basic aspirations of these institutions.19 This marks a profound difference between the Hegelian and Nietzschean accounts of normative authority –​and it brings Nietzsche somewhat closer to the Kantian perspective.

3.3  A theory that is both Kantian and Hegelian? Just as Kant’s theory can seem too attenuated, too contentless, Hegel’s can seem too concrete, too anchored in the particularities of the current social situation. Whereas Hegel wants to show that the current set of social institutions is more or less correct, and strives towards an appropriate ideal, Nietzsche wants to levy a much more radical critique: he aims to show that the basic values informing these social institutions, the basic values that these institutions strive to realize, must be reassessed. And yet, like both Kant and Hegel, Nietzsche wants the authority of norms to be grounded in the fact that they are, in some sense, self-​imposed. So Nietzsche’s view seems to hover uneasily between Kant’s and Hegel’s, in that he endorses all of the following claims: 1. The demand for autonomy produces determinate constraints on what is to be valued. 2. However, we do not justify values by showing that they are derived from or entailed by the demand for autonomy.

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3. Rather, we use autonomy to assess our current values. 4. Yet autonomy somehow permits, and indeed requires, a radical critique of these current values. To recap: Kant and Hegel both endorse versions of (1). Kant denies (2), whereas Hegel accepts (2). Kant and Hegel both accept (3), but interpret the requirement in different ways. Kant and Hegel both deny (4). Is there a way of making sense of these claims, which might appear to be in conflict with one another? The next section argues that there is, and that Nietzsche himself shows us the way to it.

4.  Nietzsche’s solution to the problem of normative authority What looks like a problem is actually one of Nietzsche’s deepest insights:  the four claims mentioned above can be rendered consistent. The solution lies in recognizing that when Nietzsche speaks of revaluation and freedom, he often incorporates a third concept as well: ‘will to power [Wille zur Macht]’. This is the concept that enables Nietzsche to produce a novel account of normative authority, which reconciles the seemingly incompatible elements of the Kantian and Hegelian theories. Nietzsche draws two connections between will to power, autonomy and revaluation. First, he argues that our principle of assessment should be will to power. As he puts it, ‘[W]‌hat is good? Everything that heightens in human beings the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself ’ (A 2, KSA 6.170). Or again: the ‘principle of revaluation’ or the ‘standard by which the value of moral evaluation is to be determined’ is ‘will to power’ (NL 1885–​6 2[131], KSA 12.129–​32). In other words, revaluation is to be conducted in terms of will to power. Second, Nietzsche claims that we achieve freedom to the extent that we manifest will to power. For example, he identifies the ‘instinct for freedom’ with the ‘will to power’ (GM II 18, KSA 5.326), he claims that a free will is equivalent to a ‘strong’ will, i.e., a will that manifests will to power (BGE 21, KSA 5.35–​6)20 and, in a section entitled ‘my conception of freedom’, he claims that freedom is measured according to the degree of power expressed by an individual.21 Taking these claims into account, I  submit that the basic structure of Nietzsche’s theory is as follows: an agent is autonomous if she acts on values that

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have been ‘revalued’ or critically assessed; this critical assessment is conducted in terms of will to power; therefore, an agent is autonomous if she acts on values that are consistent with –​but not derived from –​will to power. This is what Nietzsche claims when he says that freedom should be understood in terms of will to power. The question, of course, is what all of this means. What is will to power? Why must revaluation be conducted in terms of will to power? The following sections address these two questions. This will enable us to see how Nietzsche’s theory manages to combine the most appealing features of the Kantian and Hegelian accounts of normative authority, while avoiding some of their potential problems.

4.1  What is will to power? To begin, we need to understand what Nietzsche means by will to power. It is important not to be misled by the surface connotations of the term ‘power [Macht]’. In ordinary discourse, the claim that people will power would suggest that they strive to dominate, tyrannize and subjugate others. But this is not what Nietzsche has in mind. Power is a term of art, for Nietzsche; he gives it a special sense. Nietzsche characterizes will to power in language that seems deliberately vague; he associates power with a family of terms, such as ‘giving form’, ‘expanding’, ‘imprinting’, ‘overcoming’, ‘mastering’ and ‘shaping’.22 He writes that will to power is ‘the will’s wanting to move forward and again and again become master over that which stands in its way’ (NL 1887–​8 11[75], KSA 13.37–​8/​WLN 213). Moreover, Nietzsche does not attribute a specific end to those who will power; he claims that the will to power is manifest in activities that are directed at disparate ends. For example, Nietzsche tells us that human beings will power by engaging in activities as diverse as pursuing knowledge, creating art, participating in athletic endeavors and writing novels (cf. GM II 17–​18, KSA 5.324–​7, et passim). In order to see exactly what will to power is, we will need to determine what these characterizations of will to power have in common. Although Nietzsche’s descriptions tend to be rather elliptical, he does repeatedly and insistently emphasize two points about will to power. First, he claims that will to power can be permanently satisfied, but instead involves perpetual striving. The wish to preserve oneself is the symptom of a condition of distress, of a limitation of the really fundamental instinct of life which aims at the expansion of

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power, and wishing for that frequently risks and even sacrifices self-​preservation. (GS 349, KSA 3.585–​6) A condition once achieved would seem to be obliged to preserve itself  –​ Spinoza’s law of ‘self-​preservation’ ought really to put a stop to change: but this law is false, the opposite is true. It can be shown most clearly that every living thing does everything it can not to preserve itself but to become more. (NL 1888 14[121], KSA 13.300-​1/​WLN 257)

In contrasting the desire to ‘preserve oneself ’ –​that is, the desire to abide in one’s current state –​with the will to power, Nietzsche emphasizes that will to power involves perpetual striving.23 Second, will to power manifests itself as a particular form of striving: striving for resistances or obstacles. Consider the following passages: The will to power can express itself only against resistances; therefore it seeks that which resists it. (NL 1887 9[151], KSA 12.424/​WLN 165) The will is never satisfied unless it has opponents and resistance. (NL 1887–​8 11[75], KSA 13.37–​8/​WLN 213)

When Nietzsche refers to ‘resistances’, he means impediments or challenges to one’s ends. The structure to which Nietzsche is drawing attention is clearest in the case of competitive or skillful endeavors, such as sports and games. Consider activities such as marathon running or chess playing. Part of the point of these activities is that they are challenging, introducing obstacles or difficulties that must be overcome. One tries to run twenty-​six miles, rather than twenty-​six feet, because the former is so difficult and the latter so easy; analogously, one plays chess (and other games) precisely because one wants to encounter a challenging task, which requires skill and ingenuity to complete successfully. In short, agents who choose to engage in marathon running and chess playing seem actively to seek obstacles or resistances, in order to surmount them. In the passages quoted above, Nietzsche makes it clear that willing power involves doing just this. Of course, one does not want these challenges or resistances to serve as permanent impediments to one’s ends; rather, one wants to overcome the impediments. As Nietzsche puts it, the agent seeks to ‘again and again [become] master over that which stands in its way’ (NL 1887–​8 11[75], KSA 13.37–​8/​WLN 213). For example, the marathoner does not want to confront the pain and difficulty of running twenty-​six miles, and find herself incapable of overcoming them, collapsing after five miles; rather, she wants to hold herself to the course of action despite the challenges involved in doing so. She wants to overcome these obstacles by completing the race. This is why the runner sets herself a goal that is

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achievable, albeit only with great difficulty. She does not set herself an impossible task such as running two hundred miles, nor does she set herself a less challenging task such as running five miles; she sets herself a challenging-​yet-​ achievable task. To return to the other example, chess players typically do the same thing: a typical chess player will seek to compete with players who are at similar or slightly superior levels of skill, rather than to play against opponents who are easily defeated or virtually undefeatable. In sum, Nietzsche seems to identify willing power with the activity of perpetually seeking and overcoming resistance to one’s ends. I therefore conclude that, as Bernard Reginster (2006: 127) puts it, ‘will to power, in the last analysis, is a will to the very activity of overcoming resistance’ (emphasis in the original).24 It is also important to notice that power is not a first-​order end; rather, an agent wills power in the course of pursuing some other, more determinate end, such as completing a race or finishing a game. We might express this point by saying that will to power is a higher-​order aim. In order to will power, one must aim at a determinate first-​order goal, such as running twenty-​six miles or checkmating one’s opponent. Will to power does not compete with these determinate goals; rather, it modifies the way in which these goals are pursued. As John Richardson (1996: 21) helpfully puts it, will to power is not a claim about what we will; it is a claim about how we will.

4.2  Will to power as a claim about the essential nature of willing Now we know what will to power is. But there is another central component to Nietzsche’s account, which we will need to understand in order to uncover the connection between will to power and freedom. This is Nietzsche’s claim that every action manifests will to power. He often expresses this point by claiming that will to power is the ‘essence [Wesen, Essenz]’ of willing or of life. There are a number of passages in the published works and unpublished notebooks that make this point. For example, Nietzsche argues that ‘the essence of life’ is simply ‘its will to power’ (GM II 12, KSA 5.314). He tells us that ‘life itself ’ is a striving for ‘power’ (A 6); ‘the will to power’ is ‘the will of life’ (BGE 259, KSA 5.207–​8); ‘life simply is will to power’ (BGE 259, KSA 5.208); ‘the genuinely basic drive of life [Lebens-​Grundtriebes] [. . .] aims at the expansion of power [. . .] the will to power [. . .] is just the will of life [Wille des Lebens]’ (GS 349, KSA 3.586). In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he gives this a more imagistic expression: ‘where there is life is there also will: not will to life but –​thus I teach you –​will to power’ (Z II On Self-​Overcoming, KSA 4.149). The point is even clearer in the notebooks,

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where he writes: ‘All “purposes”, “goals”, “meanings” are only modes of expression and metamorphoses of the single will that is inherent in all events: the will to power. To have purposes, aims, intentions, willing in general, is the same thing as willing to be stronger, willing to grow –​and, in addition, willing the means to this’ (NL 1887–​8 11[96], KSA 13.44–​5/​WLN 217); ‘Everything that happens out of intentions can be reduced to the intention of increasing power’ (NL 1885–​6 2[88], KSA 12.105); ‘Striving is nothing other than striving after power’ (NL 1888 14[81], KSA 13.260–​1). In these quotations, Nietzsche suggests that every episode of willing, or every action, aims at power. As noted in the previous section, will to power is a higher-​order aim: an agent pursues power in the course of pursuing some other, more determinate end. So Nietzsche’s claim that every action aims at power amounts to this: whenever a person wills an end, this episode of willing has a certain structure. It consists not only in the aim of achieving some end, but also in the aim of encountering and overcoming resistance in the pursuit of that end.25 The notion that we strive to encounter and overcome resistance is most plausible in relation to competitive or skillful actions, but Nietzsche argues that this striving is a feature of all human actions. He has several arguments for this claim, but, given their complexity, I lack the space to reconstruct them here. For present purposes, it will be sufficient to note that one of Nietzsche’s arguments takes the following form. First, he argues that all human actions are motivated by a distinctive kind of psychological state, the ‘drive [Trieb]’. Drives differ from desires in that while many desires are dispositions to realize some determinate end, drives are dispositions to engage in characteristic forms of activity. The aggressive drive, for example, does not motivate us to achieve any particular goal, but merely to engage in aggressive activity. For this reason, Nietzsche argues that any action that is motivated by a drive will have a higher-​order aim of encountering and overcoming resistance: the drive motivates us to engage in characteristic patterns of activity, and manifesting these patterns of activity involves continual overcoming of the resistances to that activity.26 If Nietzsche is correct that all human activities are drive-​motivated –​obviously, no small claim –​then it follows that all human actions have a higher-​order aim of encountering and overcoming resistance. In Nietzsche’s terminology, this is equivalent to the claim that all human actions manifest will to power.27 The claim that all human actions manifest will to power is initially counterintuitive. Let me mention three important qualifications, which may render the view somewhat more plausible.28 First, Nietzsche argues that we can aim

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at X without realizing that we aim at X, indeed without the possibility of aiming at X ever entering our conscious reflection. So his claim that every action aims at power is not contradicted by the obvious fact that many individuals do not understand their actions as having this aim. Second, Nietzsche contends that many actions manifest the aim of power only in a half-​hearted, conflicted or distorted fashion. Third, Nietzsche is not claiming that will to power is our strongest aim, nor is he claiming that it is typically decisive in determining what we will do. On the contrary, will to power has only a minor influence on most of our actions. It is not, so to speak, the strength of this motive that renders it important; it is the motive’s omnipresence, which shapes our actions in a gradual and aggregative fashion. Even with these qualifications in place, Nietzsche’s claim that every action aims at power is highly controversial. However, our task here is not to assess this aspect of Nietzsche’s account, but to determine the structure of Nietzsche’s theory of normative authority. Thus, for present purposes, we can grant the claim and ask whether Nietzsche can use it to generate a compelling account of normative authority.

4.3  Why does freedom require revaluation in terms of power? Given the premise that every action aims at power, Nietzsche is able to show that revaluation must be conducted in terms of will to power. His argument can be reconstructed as follows: i.

An agent is self-​determining iff she acts on values whose authority has been critically assessed. ii. In order to critically assess a value, one must determine whether the value minimizes conflicts with will to power. Those values that minimize these conflicts are acceptable, whereas those that do not are to be rejected. iii. Therefore, if an agent is self-​determining, then she acts on values that minimize conflict with will to power. Premise (i) was defended in Section 3.1. Explicating and defending the crucial premise (ii) is the task of this section. As I  mentioned at the beginning of Section 4, Nietzsche’s commitment to premise (ii) is clear; he repeatedly emphasizes that will to power is the ‘standard by which the value of moral evaluation is to be determined’ (NL 1885–​6 2[131], KSA 129–​32); cf. A 2, A 6, KSA 6.170, 172; NL 1887–​8 11[83], KSA 13.39–​40).

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He suggests that any value that conflicts with will to power should be rejected, and that values that promote or maximize will to power should be affirmed. But how does Nietzsche argue for this claim? I submit that there are several steps. First, Nietzsche seems to rely on the assumption that aims are reason-​ providing. More precisely:  if you have an aim, you have a (pro tanto) reason to fulfill it.29 This is a relatively uncontroversial claim; even the most minimal accounts of practical reason, including most variants of the Humean account, accept this claim.30 Second, it follows that if an aim is present in every episode of action, then whenever an agent acts she will have a pro tanto reason to fulfill this aim. So, given Nietzsche’s claim that all actions aim at power, whenever a human being acts, she will have a reason to seek power. Third, notice that these will-​to-​power-​derived reasons will sometimes conflict with the reasons springing from our other aims and values. Take a simple example: suppose an individual values a form of complacency. This individual believes that it is valuable to be content with what one already has; one should not seek further accomplishments. This value clearly conflicts with will to power.31 As the prior sections argued, to will power is to aim at resistances and challenges. So we have a straightforward conflict: valuing complacency involves judging that there is reason not to confront challenges, but aiming at power commits us to the claim that there is reason to confront challenges. If an agent accepts the value of complacency, then he will be committed to contradictory propositions about how to act. What does this tell us about the value of complacency? It is clear enough that, in presenting will to power as the standard of revaluation, Nietzsche wants us to reject any value that conflicts with will to power in this way. In making this claim, Nietzsche relies on the inescapability of will to power. If he is correct in arguing that will to power is an essential feature of action, then this aim cannot be reassessed or altered; the fact that every action aims at power generates an inescapable, pro tanto reason to seek power. However, other aims and values can be reassessed and altered. For example, we could –​and many do –​regard complacency as not valuable, or even as disvaluable. So Nietzsche’s point is simple: when there is a conflict between the will to power and some other value or aim, the only way in which we can alleviate the conflict is by modifying the other value or aim.32 Let me mention a complication, though. On Nietzsche’s account every action aims at power. Thus, even an agent who values complacency will be aiming at power, albeit in a conflicted, distorted or half-​hearted manner. Part of what it is

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to become free, on Nietzsche’s theory, is to render this aim of power less conflicted and distorted; to do this, one minimizes conflicts among one’s aims.33 I submit that Nietzsche takes these points to establish (ii). Given (ii), the conclusion (iii) follows: if an agent is self-​determining, then she acts on values that minimize conflict with will to power. In short: freedom requires critical assessment of one’s values, and this critical assessment consists in revaluing one’s values in light of power.

4.4  The structure of Nietzsche’s theory I have only been able to sketch the structure of Nietzsche’s theory here. Suppose, though, that the theory is defensible. We can then ask what the consequences would be:  what kind of explanation of normative authority would the theory generate? We saw that Nietzsche’s theory incorporates four central claims, which I will repeat here: 1. The demand for autonomy produces determinate constraints on what is to be valued. 2. However, we do not justify values by showing that they are derived from or entailed by the demand for autonomy. 3. Rather, we use autonomy to assess our current values. 4. Yet autonomy somehow permits, and indeed requires, a radical critique of these current values. The interpretation that I have proposed does, in fact, reconcile these claims. First, notice that the demand for autonomy entails that we must revalue our values in light of will to power. So the demand for autonomy does generate a determinate constraint on permissible values:  we are to adopt those values that minimize or eliminate conflict with will to power. Thus, condition (1) is fulfilled. Second, on Nietzsche’s view, we do not justify the authority of a value by showing that it derives from or is entailed by autonomy. Nietzsche does argue that one normative principle can be derived from the features of autonomous willing: the claim that we have reason to will power. But it should be clear that we are not going to be able to derive much additional content from this claim. For example, there is no way of moving from the idea that we aim to encounter and overcome resistance to the idea that we should not lie, or that we should not murder. On the contrary, lying and murdering are ways –​possibly quite good ways –​of

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willing power. Fortunately, Nietzsche’s will to power doctrine is not meant to function as a foundational principle from which we derive all other normative claims. Rather, as the prior sections explained, will to power is intended to serve as a ‘principle of revaluation’. That is, the will to power generates a standard in terms of which we are to assess all other values. So Nietzsche grounds one normative principle in facts about our agential nature, and uses this principle not to derive, but to assess, the other values that we embrace. In this respect, Nietzsche’s theory looks more Hegelian than Kantian: rather than attempting to derive our values from a formal principle, we use a formal principle to assess our current, historically contingent set of values. The resultant theory does not have a foundationalist structure, of the sort that Nietzsche clearly denounces; but it does give one value a privileged status, and it uses that value as a criterion or principle of revaluation. Thus, conditions (2) and (3) are fulfilled. Finally, the fact that power has a privileged status enables us to mount a radical critique of our current set of values and social institutions –​a critique that may reveal them not merely to fall short of their own ideals, but to be deeply misguided in the ideals they strive to realize. Power’s privileged status gives us, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘a position outside morality’, in terms of which we can reassess even our most basic values (GS 380, KSA 3.632–​3). Thus, condition (4) is fulfilled. So my proposed interpretation of Nietzsche’s theory fulfills the four conditions. Nietzsche’s theory incorporates the most appealing features of the Kantian and Hegelian views: it is a non-​foundationalist ethic, which nevertheless explains normative authority through an appeal to autonomy, and allows for a radical critique of our current values. And the importance of this result extends beyond questions of Nietzsche interpretation: if the argument is correct, then we can ground normativity in an ineluctable aim, assess other norms and values for consistency with this aim and thereby generate a non-​foundationalist, autonomy-​based ethical theory. Of course, in this essay I  have only sketched the structure of this theory; I have not explored the particular normative results that the theory generates. Nietzsche claims that these results are far-​reaching: he treats his theory as serving to indict many of our most cherished values, such as equality, democracy, compassion and the condemnation of suffering. Determining the precise ways in which these values conflict with power is no easy task; it requires subtle investigations of their cultural and psychological effects, as well as examinations of the forms of life that they foster, the ideals that they embody and the pictures of the self on which they rely. I cannot address these complex topics here. My

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hope, though, is that this essay’s analysis of the structure of Nietzsche’s theory of normative authority puts us in a position to address these fascinating normative questions.34

5.  Conclusion I have argued that will to power is the red thread linking Nietzsche’s claims about revaluation and freedom. Appreciating this point enables us to see how Nietzsche can reconcile seemingly incompatible elements of the Kantian and Hegelian accounts of normative authority. Let me summarize the results. First, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche share a common foundational idea: they believe that the authority of normative claims can be justified only by showing that these norms are, in some sense, self-​imposed or autonomous. In other words, no realist construal of norms would be satisfactory; any legitimate norm must have its source in us. However, this project gives rise to a problem: does the injunction ‘be autonomous!’ impose any substantive constraints on the content of norms? If not, we face the charge that Hegel levies against Kant: the injunction has no content, so nothing could count as not fulfilling the demand. Kant thinks he has a solution to this problem: he argues that autonomy yields commitment to the Categorical Imperative, and that the Categorical Imperative does, in fact, generate determinate normative content. Yet Hegel, and later Nietzsche, deny that Kant succeeds: they contend that the Categorical Imperative is just an empty formalism, which either merely reiterates the moral demands of Kant’s society, or generates no content whatsoever. This leads Hegel to his theory of Sittlichkeit, or ethical life. According to Hegel, we do not derive moral content from the formal idea of freedom. Rather, we use the idea of freedom to assess existing social institutions and practices, seeking to determine whether they are realizations of freedom. While there are many differences between Hegel and Nietzsche on this score, I have argued that Nietzsche’s theory incorporates the Hegelian claim that we use the idea of freedom to assess existing moral norms. However, unlike Hegel, Nietzsche believes that one norm can be extracted from the bare idea of freedom, independently of any facts about the particular system of values, practices and institutions that the individual inhabits. This norm is will to power. Its connection to freedom and its independence from

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extant social norms gives it a position outside of our current ethical norms, making possible a radical critique of these norms. Nietzsche’s theory therefore incorporates seemingly disparate elements of the Kantian and Hegelian accounts, generating a unique and, I believe, philosophically fruitful solution to the problem of normative authority. Indeed, if one can be forgiven for expressing it in Hegelian terms, Nietzsche’s larger project can be profitably viewed as an attempt to sublate the Kantian and Hegelian accounts of normative authority, showing that each is a partial and one-​sided truth that finds correct expression in Nietzsche’s own theory.35

Notes 1 I will use the phrase ‘account of normative authority’ to refer to an explanation of what makes normative claims legitimately binding for us. For example, ‘murder is wrong’ and ‘eating vegetables is wrong’ both purport to be claims according to which we should regulate our actions, but presumably the former is legitimate or justified in a way that the latter is not. A theory of normative authority explains why this is so. 2 Wood (1990) presents a helpful survey of several other possible readings. See also ‘Hegel’s Ethical Rationalism,’ in Pippin (1997). 3 Kantians argue that this objection is based on a misunderstanding: the contradiction does not depend on the idea that any particular institutions or practices should exist. Rather, it arises because the agent is attempting to act on a maxim that, once universalized, would no longer be efficacious for its intended purpose. For a reply of this kind, see Korsgaard (1996) and Wood (1990). 4 Hegel claims that the Philosophy of Right’s central task is to show how ‘the system of right is the realm of actualized freedom’ (PR 4). He emphasizes this point throughout the book, writing that ‘ethicality is the idea of freedom as the living good that has its knowing, willing, and, through its acting, its actuality, in self-​ consciousness’ (PR 142), and ‘the ethical is the system of these determinations of the idea; this is what constitutes its rationality. In this way it is freedom’ (PR 145). 5 Hegel writes, ‘Within the state, rationality consists concretely –​in terms of its content –​in the unity of objective freedom (i.e., of universal substantial willing) and subjective freedom (i.e., of the individual human’s knowing and willing, which seeks its particular ends)’ (PR 258). In several passages, he emphasizes that society must enable the freedom of all individuals. For example, he writes that society requires the ‘well-​being of all’ (PR 125; emphasis added), and he argues that it is necessary

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Paul Katsafanas that ‘every individual’s livelihood and well-​being be treated and actualized as rightful’ (PR 230). Thus, after writing, ‘only that will which obeys the law is free,’ Hegel continues, ‘for it obeys itself and is self-​sufficient and therefore free’ (VG 115/​97). Elsewhere, he puts the point as follows: ‘[T]‌he laws and powers of ethical substance are not something alien to the subject. Instead, the subject bears witness to them as to its own essence, within which it has its feelings of being a self, within which it lives as in its own element, an element it does not distinguish from itself ’ (PR 147; cf. PR 258). The full argument for these claims occupies PR 157–​360. See especially PR 157–​8, 181–​8 and 257–​9. Helpful secondary literature on these points includes Houlgate (1991), Neuhouser (2000), Pinkard (2002), Pippin (2008) and Wood (1990). Consider an example, which I will borrow from Frederick Neuhouser. Neuhouser (2000) asks us to consider the modern democratic system of electing political officials, wherein each citizen is given one vote. He writes, ‘The practice of “one person, one vote” embodies an ideal of political equality that is imperfectly realized so long as political campaigns are financed by the “donations” of a few wealthy individuals or corporations’ (258). In other words, we can see that the current practice of providing each adult citizen with one vote aspires to realize the ideal of political equality: each individual should have an equal say. However, we can also see that our social institutions do not fulfill this ideal perfectly, because wealthy individuals are able to exert more control over the political process than poor individuals. Thus, we can critique the current electoral system by showing that it is an imperfect realization of the ideal to which it aspires. This is an immanent critique, appealing not to some external standard, but to the standards internal to the practice itself. The term ‘foundationalist’ needs clarification. Typically, foundationalism is the view that there are two types of justified beliefs: mediately justified beliefs, whose justification depends on their relation to other beliefs; and immediately justified beliefs, whose justification does not depend on any other beliefs. A parallel version of foundationalism in ethics would be the view that certain ethical claims are immediately justified. Kant certainly is not a foundationalist in that sense; rather, the clearest examples of this type of ethical foundationalism would be ethical intuitionist accounts, such as that defended by W. D. Ross. However, there is a second sense of foundationalism. A philosopher counts as an ethical foundationalist in this second sense if he maintains both that there is one or more fundamental ethical principle from which all other, more specific ethical claims are derived, and that this fundamental ethical principle is not immediately justified. Kant is a foundationalist in this sense: the Categorical Imperative is the fundamental ethical principle, and it is justified by appeal to its connection to rationality or autonomy.

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(For a helpful discussion of ethical foundationalism, see Timmons (1987); my distinctions in this footnote largely follow his account.) 10 I do not aim to establish that Nietzsche self-​consciously envisioned his project as reconciling Kantian and Hegelian elements. Rather, my aim is simply to show that Nietzsche’s project does, in fact, reconcile these elements. However, my approach does invite a question: while it is well known that Nietzsche was deeply engaged with Kant, how thoroughly did he know Hegel’s works? There is evidence that he was familiar with Hegel’s work. In a letter of 1865, Nietzsche mentions that he is studying one of Hegel’s texts (he does not say which one), and in 1873 he reads Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Nietzsche also encountered extensive treatments of Hegel through secondary sources: he attended and thought highly of Jakob Burckhardt’s 1870 lectures, which discussed Hegel at length, and he studied F. A. Lange’s and Schopenhauer’s expositions of Hegel. Indeed, he had enough familiarity with Hegel to reject Schopenhauer’s reading, chiding Schopenhauer for his ‘unintelligent rage’ against Hegel (BGE 204, KSA 5.130), and in later works he praises Hegel, calling him a ‘genius’ and listing him as one of only three philosophers who produced a ‘great insight’ (BGE 252, KSA 5.195–​6, and GS 357, KSA 3.597 ff.). For discussions of Hegel’s influence on Nietzsche, see Brobjer (2008), Houlgate (2004) and Dudley (2007). For a very helpful discussion of Kant’s influence on Nietzsche, see Bailey (2013). 11 See Bailey (2003) and (2013), Gemes (2006), Guay (2002), Janaway (2006), Reginster (2003) and Richardson (2005). As Bailey (2013: 150) puts it, ‘Nietzsche’s account of the “sovereign individual” . . . echoes the Kantian conception of “autonomy” as an agent’s treating agency, or “will”, itself as the highest and unconditional value’. I address this topic in Katsafanas (2014). 12 In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche gives this an imagistic expression, claiming that the question of whether someone is free can be rephrased in the following way: ‘Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good and hang your own will over yourself as a law?’ (Z I On the Way of the Creator, KSA 4.80 ff.). 13 While this passage is from an early text, and therefore might be taken not to represent Nietzsche’s mature view, the passages from GS, GM and BGE quoted in the previous paragraph suggest the same claim: freedom requires revaluation. 14 See also GS 335, GS 347, KSA 3.560 ff., 581 ff.; A 9, A 54, KSA 6.175–​6, 236–​7 and the closing sections of the Genealogy. 15 For a discussion of the sense in which Kant is a foundationalist, see note 9, above. 16 This list is not exhaustive; Nietzsche objects to other aspects of Kant’s account as well. For example, Bailey (2013: 151) notes that Nietzsche also differs from Kant

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19

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Paul Katsafanas in ‘admitting different degrees of agency and therefore moral significance among agents and thus substantially modifying the egalitarianism or universality standard required by Kantian moral judgment’. And, of course, Nietzsche rejects Kant’s account of agency; see Katsafanas (2014) for a discussion. For a helpful discussion of this point, see Reginster (2006, 186ff.). An additional and very significant difference between Hegel and Nietzsche –​a difference that I lack the space to investigate here –​lies in the importance, for Hegel, of mutual recognition. While this notion plays a crucial role in Hegel’s account of selfhood and normativity, Nietzsche rarely mentions it. One exception is his talk of mutual recognition among restricted groups, such as the ancient nobility. Thus, in BGE 211, KSA 144–​5, Nietzsche claims that Kant and Hegel merely adopt the dominant values of their times, and ‘identify them and reduce them to formulas’. He contrasts this with the work of ‘real philosophers’. Nietzsche argues that real philosophers must do more than simply accept and codify the dominant value; they must ‘apply the knife of vivisection to the virtues of their time’ (BGE 212, KSA 5.145) and create new values. The surrounding context makes it clear that Nietzsche’s talk of strong and weak wills should be understood in terms of will to power, for the two sections following this remark discuss his notion of will to power: BGE 22, KSA 5.37, introduces the notion of will to power; BGE 23, KSA 5.38–​9, claims that psychology is the ‘path to the fundamental problems’ and that psychology should be understood in terms of ‘the doctrine of the development of the will to power’. In this passage, Nietzsche claims that freedom is measured ‘according to the resistance which must be overcome’. Below, I will argue that Nietzsche associates will to power with overcoming resistance; accordingly, this passage associates freedom with degree of will to power. See GM II 18, KSA 5.325–​7; GS 349, KSA 3.585–​6; BGE 259, KSA 5.207–​8; Z II On Self-​Overcoming, KSA 4.1469; NL 1887–​8 11[75], KSA 13.37–​8. Compare Alexander Nehamas’s (1985: 79) claim that ‘willing as an activity does not have an aim that is distinct from it; if it can be said to aim at anything at all, that can only be its own continuation. Willing is an activity that tends to perpetuate itself, and this tendency to the perpetuation of activity . . . is what Nietzsche tries to describe by the obscure and often misleading term “will to power” ’. Heidegger (1979 vol. I: 37) concurs: ‘will to power is will to will’. Reginster (2006) argues for this characterization at length. My analysis of will to power is indebted to his work. This is why Nietzsche says that ‘all “purposes”, “goals”, “meanings” are only modes of expression and metamorphoses of one will that is inherent in all events: the will to power’ (NL 1887–​8 11[96], KSA 13.44–​5/​WLN 217; emphasis added). He

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is not claiming that every goal is a means to power; rather, he is claiming that whenever we will any goal at all, we express will to power by also willing resistance to that goal. 26 More precisely, Nietzsche argues that what it is for something to aim at power is for it to be drive-​motivated. Will to power is not an independent drive, but a description of the structure of drive-​motivated actions. 27 I defend my interpretation of Nietzsche on will to power in Katsafanas (2013). 28 I discuss these qualifications at length in Katsafanas (2013). 29 A pro tanto reason is a reason that has some weight, but nonetheless may be outweighed by other reasons. For example, if I aim to get to my office within ten minutes, and if doing so requires driving at ninety miles per hour, I have a pro tanto reason to drive at this speed. Nevertheless, this reason is outweighed by reasons provided by my other aims, such as my aims of driving safely and minimizing potential harm to others. 30 There is a complication: some philosophers, reluctant to count seemingly immoral aims as generating reasons, argue that we should express the relevant normative claim differently. It is not that aims provide us with reasons; rather, if we have an aim, then we have reason either to fulfill the aim or to give up the aim. For an example of such an account, see Broome (1999). This point does not affect the argument given above, so I ignore it in what follows. 31 There is a complication, though: the complacent actions will themselves be manifestations of will to power. I address this below. 32 Above, I speak of minimizing conflicts with will to power. Why not, instead, speak of maximizing the expression of power? This is a difficult topic, which I address in c­ hapter 7 of Katsafanas (2013). Briefly, I interpret Nietzsche as suggesting that conflicts between will to power and other values are pervasive and ineradicable; although different sets of values conflict to greater and lesser extents with the values arising from our agential nature, there is no set of values that would completely eliminate conflict. In order to manage this conflict, we ought to embrace the sets of values that conflict as little as possible with will to power. 33 There is an alternative explanation here. Drawing on ideas from Müller-​L auter (1971), we could distinguish between actions that manifest growth or expansion of will to power, and actions that instead only aim at a form of self-​preservation. The complacent actions, though manifesting will to power, would manifest only the degenerate form of will to power that aims at self-​preservation. Thus, rather than analysing the complacency case in terms of conflicting aims (as I suggest above), we could analyse it in terms of degenerate manifestations of will to power. I think these suggestions are in fact perfectly compatible, for we can understand a degenerate manifestation

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of power as a manifestation that fails to fulfill the aim of power completely, or fulfills it only to a minimal degree. 34 I discuss some of the normative consequences of Nietzsche’s view in c­ hapters 7–​8 of Katsafanas (2013). 35 Many thanks to Tom Bailey and João Constâncio for their insightful comments on this essay.

References Bailey, T. (2003), ‘Nietzsche’s Kantian Ethics’, International Studies in Philosophy 35 (3): 5–​27. Bailey, T. (2013), ‘Nietzsche the Kantian?’, in K. Gemes and J. Richardson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, 134–​59, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brobjer, T. (2008), Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context, Urbana-​Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Broome, J. (1999), ‘Normative Requirements’, Ratio 12 (4): 398–​419. Dudley, W. (2007), Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy: Thinking Freedom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gemes, K. (2006), ‘Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy and the Sovereign Individual’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 80: 321–​38. Guay, R. (2002), ‘Nietzsche on Freedom’, European Journal of Philosophy 10 (3): 302–​27. Heidegger, M. (1979), Nietzsche, trans. D. F. Krell, New York: Harper and Row. Houlgate, S. (1991), Freedom, Truth and History: An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy, New York: Routledge. Houlgate, S. (2004), Nietzsche, Hegel, and the Criticism of Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Janaway, C. (2006), ‘Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy and the Sovereign Individual’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 80: 339–​57. Katsafanas, P. (2013), Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katsafanas, P. (2014), ‘Nietzsche and Kant on the Will: Two Models of Reflective Agency’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (1): 185–​216. Korsgaard, C. (1996), Creating the Kingdom of Ends, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leiter, B. (2002), Nietzsche on Morality, London: Routledge. Müller-​Lauter, W. (1971), Nietzsche. Seine Philosophie der Gegensätze und die Gegensätze seiner Philosophie, Berlin: De Gruyter. Nehamas, A. (1985), Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Neuhouser, F. (2000), Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pinkard, T. (2002), German Philosophy 1760–​1860: The Legacy of Idealism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Pippin, R. (1997), Idealism and Modernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, R. (2008), Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life, New York: Cambridge University Press. Reginster, B. (2003), ‘What Is a Free Spirit? Nietzsche on Fanaticism’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 85: 51–​85. Reginster, B. (2006), The Affirmation of Life, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Richardson, J. (1996), Nietzsche’s System, New York: Oxford University Press. Richardson, J. (2005), ‘Nietzschean and Kantian Freedoms’, International Studies in Philosophy 37: 149–​62. Timmons, M. (1987), ‘Foundationalism and the Structure of Ethical Justification’, Ethics 97 (3): 595–​609. Wood, A. (1990), Hegel’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Translations of Kant’s works Kant, I. (1998), Critique of Pure Reason, ed. P. Guyer and A. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1998), Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. M. Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (2002), Critique of Practical Reason, trans. W. Pluhar, Indianapolis/​ Cambridge: Hackett.

Translations and abbreviations of Hegel’s works PhG  Hegel, G. W. F. (1979), The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press. VG  Hegel, G. W. F. (1994), Vorlesung über die Philosophy des Geistes 1827–​8, ed. B. Tuschling, Felix Meiner: Hamburg. PR  Hegel, G. W. F. (2002), The Philosophy of Right, trans. A. White, Newburyport, MA: Focus.

Translations and editions of Nietzsche’s works Kaufmann, W. (1968), Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Kaufmann, W., trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Random House. Nietzsche, F. (1954), The Antichrist, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Viking. Nietzsche, F. (1954), Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Viking. Nietzsche, F. (1954), Twilight of the Idols, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Viking.

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Nietzsche, F. (1968), Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Modern Library. Nietzsche, F. (1968), Ecce Homo, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Modern Library. Nietzsche, F. (1968), On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Modern Library. Nietzsche, F. (1974), The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, F. (1982), Daybreak, ed. and trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1986), Human, All Too Human, ed. and trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2003), Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. R. Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (quoted as WLN).

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Normativity and Moral Psychology Nietzsche’s Critique of Kantian Universality Simon Robertson

That Nietzsche opposes Kant’s vision of morality should hardly be news. Peculiarly, though, rather little has been done to systematically set out even the broad character of this contretemps, let  alone pinpoint and evaluate its finer details.1 This chapter begins to redress that neglect, by reconstructing Nietzsche’s critical engagement with Kant’s assumption that practical normative laws must be universal in scope. This assumption is pivotal to at least two arguments central to Kant’s entire moral philosophy: his derivation of the Categorical Imperative2 from the concept and motive of duty, and his justification of morality via rational autonomy. My aim is to show that Nietzsche puts serious critical pressure on both arguments and thus on one of Kant’s most important conclusions:  the conclusion, namely, that morality represents an objectively justified normative standpoint because the moral laws an autonomous agent gives herself are binding on all rational agents. My argument is cumulative. Given the topic’s comparative neglect, Section 1 situates Nietzsche’s opposition to Kant within the context of their respective ethical projects. Section 2 introduces Kant’s derivation of the Categorical Imperative. Section 3 presents the initial Nietzschean challenge to it. This amounts to a well-​motivated denial of Kant’s assumption that practical normative laws, including those implicating moral duties, have to be universal across agents. Nietzsche also wants to show that no such laws are necessarily universal in Kant’s sense, however. Section 4 therefore explores his rationales for this stronger thesis and his critique of Kant’s attempted justification of morality via autonomy. One key conclusion is that Nietzsche’s challenge retains bite against

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‘first-​personal’ readings of Kant according to which an autonomous agent’s own practical standpoint commits her to morality.

1.  Scene setting Nietzsche’s overarching ethical program is his envisaged ‘revaluation of all values’. This is a multifaceted project, both critical and positive, that we can structure as follows. Negatively, it involves a critique of prevailing ‘morality’, in turn comprising two elements: one substantive, in which Nietzsche calls into question the value of morality, on grounds that it is antagonistic to the highest forms of human flourishing and excellence; the other metaethical, by which he challenges various foundational, objectivist presuppositions holding morality in place. The positive project then advances a demoralized perfectionist ideal valorizing the highest forms of flourishing and excellence.3 Kant is a paradigmatic representative of the enterprise ‘morality’ Nietzsche attacks. Consonant with his more general revaluative ambitions, Nietzsche’s opposition to Kant’s conception of morality has three principal foci: the disvalue of the normative ideals it propagates; the conceptual apparatus via which Kant seeks to explicate and justify it as normatively authoritative; and the attending conceptions of free will and autonomy this justificatory endeavour rests on. To set the scene, it will be useful to briefly outline each. Morality’s disvalue. Nietzsche’s animating critical concern is a substantive, normative–​evaluative one. He thinks that morality is overall disvaluable because inimical to the highest forms of human flourishing and excellence –​ goods that at least some people, notably ‘free spirits’ or ‘higher types’, have reason to pursue and realize.4 Thus, he suggests, morality is ‘detrimental precisely to [those] higher men’ (BGE 228, KSA 5.165) representative of the ‘highest human type’ (GM Preface 6, KSA 5.253) –​to ‘men of great creativity, the really great men according to my understanding’ (NL 1885 37[8]‌, KSA 11.580–​3). Indeed, ‘nothing stands more malignantly in the way of their rise and evolution . . . than what in Europe is today called simply “morality” ’ (ibid.) (cf. BGE 62, KSA 5.81–​3; GM III 14, KSA 5.367–​72; A 5, 24, KSA 6.171, 191–​3; EH Destiny 4, KSA 6.367–​9). Although it is typically assumed that morality ‘promot[es] the progress of human existence’, Nietzsche asks:  ‘What . . . if the opposite were the case? . . . So that none other than morality itself would be the culprit if the highest power and splendour of the human type, in itself a possibility, were never to be reached? So that morality would constitute the danger of all

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dangers?’ (GM Preface 6, KSA 5.253). He is not desisting from the implicature here: he does think morality disvaluable.5 Regarding Kant specifically, he urges that both the content of Kantian morality and the theoretical apparatus Kant deploys in its service are ‘expressions of decline, of the final exhaustion of life’; indeed, they are antagonistic to the ‘profoundest laws of preservation and growth’ and ‘should have been felt as mortally dangerous’ (A 11, KSA 6.177–​8; cf. GM Preface 3, KSA 5.249–​50). The implication is clear:  Kant’s moralized vision of ethical life must be resisted.6 Morality’s authority. Importantly, Nietzsche also opposes various manifestations of morality’s claims to objectivity. This includes, in particular, a denial of morality’s normative authority. The notion of normative authority is notoriously complex. For present purposes, it can be characterized by saying that if morality is normatively authoritative, then one ought categorically to comply with it. Compliance can here be understood broadly to include doing whatever is required by, or appropriate in light of, moral considerations, norms, values, duties and ideals. And we can explicate categoricity thus: if one ought categorically to comply with morality, one ought to so comply irrespective of whether doing so serves or conflicts with one’s subjective motives (very roughly for now: one’s desires, aims, ends, interests, evaluative commitments and the like; I  offer a little more detail in Section 4). It would then follow that morality is universal in scope or jurisdiction in the sense, and to the extent, that one does not escape it merely if or because compliance isn’t ancillary to one’s motives. Denying morality’s authority is crucial to Nietzsche’s critique. For if, as he thinks, complying with morality can conflict with and be inimical to the highest forms of human excellence and flourishing, then those higher types whose excellence and flourishing morality systematically thwarts ought not to comply with it. Yet that would not be possible if morality were normatively authoritative. So he needs to deny that it is.7 And, indeed, many of Nietzsche’s discussions of Kant show that he does deny it. For Kant, moral duties are requirements of rationality. Such duties are both categorical and universal in scope: they specify actions one ought to perform irrespective of whether doing so serves one’s subjective motives; and, because these duties are demands of rationality, the ‘oughts’ they present are binding on any rational agent. Such requirements are revealed through, as the conclusions of, rational deliberation (or practical reasoning) that is pure: ‘pure’ in the sense that the content of one’s deliberative processes need neither start from, nor otherwise involve recourse to or be influenced by, one’s subjective motives. And, since any rational agent is capable of such deliberation, any rational agent

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is capable of recognizing the demands of morality. For Kant, then, morality is normatively authoritative because the categorical duties it presents are requirements of rationality binding on all rational agents. Nietzsche, though, denies a whole gamut of conceptual presuppositions underpinning Kant’s moral rationalism. He suggests that the good will, as ‘good in itself ’, along with the ‘impersonal and universal’ conception of ‘duty’ supposedly derived from it, are ‘phantoms’ (A 11, KSA 6.177–​8). A recurring theme is that moralities ‘are only a sign-​language of the emotions’ (BGE 187, KSA 5.107), neither the result of pure impersonal, rational deliberation, nor binding independent of one’s deep-​seated motives (I return to this in Section 4). Kant’s conception of morality and its supreme principle are thus disregarded as a ‘Moloch of abstraction’ (A 11, KSA 6.177) –​little more than an abstract representation of Kant’s own ‘innermost drives’ (BGE 6, KSA 5.20) –​which, Nietzsche thinks, should be discarded along with the entire range of synthetic (putatively) a priori judgements Kant aligns them with (BGE 11, KSA 5.24–​6). He often expresses this via resistance to the idea that ‘oughts’ and ‘ought’-​judgements are unconditioned by an individual’s or group’s drives and driving interests –​and hence resists the conclusion that ‘oughts’ are unconditionally binding because authorized by one’s purely rational nature or some higher external authority (GS 345, 347, KSA 3.577–​9, 581–​3; BGE 46, 199, KSA 5.66–​7, 119–​20). (He connects the supposed unconditionality of duty directly to categoricity at GS 5, KSA 3.377–​8, BGE 187, KSA 5.107 and EH Destiny 7, KSA 6.371–​3.) Thus, when he suggests that ‘each one of us should devise . . . his own Categorical Imperative’ (A 11, KSA 6.177–​8; cp. GM Preface 3, KSA 5.249–​50), the partly parodic phrasing conceals a more serious point. Although Nietzsche agrees with Kant that ‘oughts’ can be ‘self-​legislated’, he thinks that all normative judgements are shaped and influenced by the judger’s own psychological particularities, whereby neither the judgements themselves nor the normative verdicts they express are pure in Kant’s sense. Free will and autonomy. Nietzsche also objects on various grounds, metaphysical and ideological, to a range of conceptions of free will. Free will is of course especially important for Kant’s moral project. Ultimately, morality is justified only if we as rational agents possess a will that is not solely determined by natural causes (including our subjective motives) but that can freely determine itself as autonomous by setting its own laws and ends. One may not be able to decisively prove via canons of theoretical reason that we are free. However, Kant thinks that we cannot help but regard ourselves as free from a practical point of view. Indeed, agency itself, understood from

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a first-​personal perspective, is only possible under a presupposition of freedom, whereby free will is a necessary postulate for agency –​including the kinds of moral agency and practical reasoning implicated by Kant’s moral system. Much recent commentary has explored Nietzsche’s views of the will and freedom. Although considerable disagreement persists as to his decided position,8 it clearly opposes Kant’s. In this essay, though, I remain neutral over both the metaphysical status of the will as Nietzsche conceives of it and scholarly disputes concerning what sort of freedom (if any) this licenses. The strategy in Section 4 will instead be to show how Nietzsche presents a view of human psychology the veracity of which would serve not only to undermine Kant’s purist conception of autonomy from a theoretical standpoint, but also to destabilize the idea that conceiving of ourselves as autonomous self-​legislating agents thereby commits us to morality from a first-​personal perspective.9 First, though, we need to attend to an earlier stage in Kant’s argument, concerning the nature of moral duty as categorical and universal in scope.

2.  Kant’s derivation In Chapter I of the Groundwork, Kant argues that acting from the motive of duty guarantees doing one’s duty, since it involves acting in accordance with rational laws. In doing so, he presents an argument designed to derive the supreme principle of morality, the Categorical Imperative, from the motive and concept of duty. Let’s call this the ‘Derivation’. It proceeds as follows10: [D1] (a)  The concept of moral duty involves the idea of a rule or practical law –​such that (b) if there are moral duties, these instantiate laws specifying actions people can and ought to perform. (GMS 389, 400; see also 427) [D2] Laws apply to everyone: in particular, just as laws of nature apply to all objects, practical laws apply to everyone. (GMS 400–​2; see also 412)11 [D3] So, (a) the concept of moral duty involves the idea of a practical law that applies to everyone –​such that (b) if there are moral duties, these instantiate laws applying to everyone. (GMS 400–​2) [D4] Different people have different subjective motives for action, however. (GMS 397–​9) [D5] In which case, if there are moral duties (instantiating practical laws applying to everyone), they cannot hold in virtue of any particular person’s (subjective) motives. (GMS 399–​400)12

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Simon Robertson [D6] If there are moral duties, these duties must instead hold in virtue of what it would be rational to do irrespective of one’s (subjective) motives. (GMS 401–​2; see also 425, 427)13 [D7] Doing what it is rational to do irrespective of one’s subjective motives involves acting according to a law that could apply to everyone whatever their subjective motives (GMS 401–​2; see also 425, 427)

From here Kant argues that this implies acting in accordance with the Categorical Imperative –​his first formulation of which is ‘I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law’ (GMS 402)  –​whereby acting from the motive of duty is acting in accordance with, and with reverence for, the moral–​rational law embodied in the Categorical Imperative (GMS 402–​3). Nietzsche straightforwardly accepts the empirical thesis D4. He may also accept each or any of D1, D3, D5 and D6, insofar as these are understood as conceptual theses rather than substantive truths –​theses, that is, about the concept of moral duty. However, he denies the consequents of D6 and D3b on substantive grounds –​and hence denies that there are moral duties, thus understood. He must also therefore deny D2.14 It is this assumption D2, concerning the claim that practical laws (including those implying moral duties) apply to everyone, which forms the primary focus here on in. Denying it may then allow Nietzsche to deny that there really are moral duties in the senses enumerated through each of D1, D3, D5 and D6 –​which, in turn, would put serious pressure on the conclusion D7 and hence Kant’s passage towards the Categorical Imperative. The intended conclusion of the Derivation (through D6 and on) is of course conditional: if there are moral duties, this is what they are like. Kant seeks to establish that there are moral duties later in the Groundwork through his discussion of rational autonomy. There, he again invokes D2 and something akin to D3. I return to these issues in Section 4. First, though, the focus is D2 as it figures in the Derivation, at this stage relatively unencumbered by Kant’s fuller rationalist garb.

3.  Nietzsche’s basic challenge Nietzsche seeks to reject Kant’s assumption that practical normative laws are universally binding. However, to be clear on the nature of this challenge, it is important to emphasize (as I will show in the rest of this section) that Nietzsche

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and Kant agree on each of the following points: first, agents can be governed by, and can govern themselves through, laws; second, such laws are or can be normative, in that they specify things agents ought (or ought not) to do; and, third, practical normative laws can be self-​legislated:  (at least some) agents legislate these laws to and for themselves, thereby governing themselves through laws they ‘give themselves’. As will become clear, though, Kant and Nietzsche have crucially different conceptions of self-​legislation. So, Nietzsche is not denying that there are or can be self-​legislated practical normative laws, concerning what one ought to do. His challenge instead focuses on the idea that such laws are universal in the sense that they must apply to everyone. Kant of course suggests in the Derivation that this just is part of the very concept of a law: just as laws of nature apply to all objects, part of what it is for something to be a practical law is that it applies to all human agents.15 In which case, Kant might maintain, if an ‘ought’ does not apply to all agents it does not instantiate a law. It is this assumption, however, that Nietzsche is challenging. This section examines why he thinks that a law does not have to be universal. To do so, it will be useful to break the discussion into three stages. First, we need to show that in opposing Kant’s vision of morality Nietzsche is nonetheless operating within a normative perspective (Section 3.1). Second, we need to show that he follows Kant by framing this perspective in terms of laws –​indeed, laws one gives oneself (Section 3.2). Third, we need to show how such laws, although not universal, can still be both normative and indeed laws (Section 3.3).

3.1  Nietzsche and normativity? My later argument assumes that Nietzschean laws have a legitimate claim to being normative. We can characterize the normative sphere as a region of thought and practice centred around the paradigmatically normative concepts ought and a reason. This is often contrasted to the evaluative realm, as picked out by more narrowly valoric concepts such as good and bad. The normative–​ evaluative distinction can be important –​and, for Nietzsche, I think it is.16 Some commentators deny, or at least doubt, that Nietzsche’s perfectionist ideal represents a normative standpoint, one involving claims appropriately couched in terms of what people ought or have reason to do.17 However, to suppose that Nietzsche jettisons normativity not only misconceives the nature of his own positive ideal but, in the present context, misrepresents his criticisms of Kant. So it is important to understand how these criticisms are embedded in a perfectionist ideal that is indeed normative. It is not clear what exactly motivates the

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suggestion that Nietzsche discards normativity. But I’ll show that two rationales which might inform that suggestion fail and then raise exegetical qualms about the suggestion itself. First, it may be argued, even though the conceptual vocabulary that survives Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values includes a range of narrowly valoric concepts such as good and bad (see GM I 17, KSA 5.288–​9), his positive ideal has no place for traditional deontic notions such as duty (and perhaps ought). For, the thought goes, these are merely remnants of the very conception of morality –​a ‘law-​conception’ inherited from an outmoded and otherwise faulty theistic worldview –​that Nietzsche opposes and from which he seeks to disinfect us. However, this suggestion rests on a non sequitur: even if Nietzsche were to desist from deploying deontic concepts such as duty (perhaps ought), this does not show that he thereby renounces normative thought or talk per se. For one thing, the concept of a normative reason is not in and of itself deontic. Indeed, many reasons fall on the evaluative side of traditional deontic–​evaluative distinctions, in that they are reasons to do things it would be good (best, etc.), but not obligatory, to do. Thus, even if Nietzsche were to desist from framing his positive ideal in deontic vocabulary, this would not commit him to jettisoning such value-​oriented normative reasons.18 Furthermore, if we understand ‘oughts’ as a function of reasons for and against actions, and if ‘oughts’ can be generated by value-​oriented reasons, the thought that Nietzsche jettisons normativity wrongly presupposes that ‘oughts’ cannot be value-​oriented. Perhaps the underlying doubt might be articulated a second way, though. Given that morality has come to dominate much of our normative topography in ways to which Nietzsche does indeed object, normative concepts such as ought have themselves acquired certain moralized and heavyweight connotations –​by specifying duties and prohibitions, often of great moral importance, which serve to regulate interpersonal relations and that apply to most people in most circumstances irrespective of their contingent motives and tastes –​whereby such concepts should be discarded entirely. The problem with this suggestion, however, is that we need not understand all normative concepts, nor even all oughts, in such moralized or heavyweight ways. For not all ‘oughts’ are moral in character or concern interpersonal relations; and some conceptions of ought do depend on agential motives and tastes. Indeed, my subsequent argument suggests that this is exactly how normativity works in Nietzsche’s positive ideal.19 Denying that Nietzsche makes normative claims also faces a serious interpretative problem:  he does quite often make them. Sometimes these are couched explicitly as ‘oughts’ and ‘shoulds’. In one often-​cited passage,

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as a rejoinder to some error theoretic claims in which he likens morality to alchemy, Nietzsche nonetheless tells us that he does ‘not deny [. . .] that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged’; indeed, it’s just that ‘the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto’ (D 103, KSA 3.91–​2; my emphases). To return to a passage already cited, he suggests that ‘[t]‌he profoundest laws of preservation and growth demand [.  . .] that each one of us should devise [. . .] his own categorical imperative’ (A 11, KSA 6. 6.177–​8; my emphases). Doing what one should is here presented as a way of satisfying a demand of law; and, since the Kantian conception of a categorical imperative to which Nietzsche alludes implicates ‘oughts’,20 the implication is that one should devise one’s own ‘oughts’. Furthermore, much of the time Nietzsche frames matters via the traditionally deontic vocabulary of thou shalts and duties (each of which, it is plausible to suppose, represent or entail oughts). To take just a small sample: [T]‌he free spirit knows which ‘thou shalt’ he has obeyed, and also now what he can do, what he only now is permitted to do. (HH Preface 6, KSA 2.27–​8) Signs of nobility: never to think of degrading our duties into duties for everybody; not to want to relinquish or share our own responsibilities; to count our privileges and the exercising of them among our duties. (BGE 272, KSA 5.227) When an exceptional human being handles the mediocre more gently than he does himself or his equals, this is not merely politeness of the heart –​it is simply his duty. (A 57, KSA 6.241–​4)

Finally, although Nietzsche does often present his positive ideal in terms of various valoric and virtue concepts, even if such concepts do not uniformly entail practical oughts or reasons, it would be surprising if he intended them to have no connection whatsoever to what (at least some) people ought and have reason to do. (For one thing, it would be very peculiar for Nietzsche to maintain that nobody ever has any reason to relinquish morality, or to do what it would be good for her to do, or to pursue excellence, etc.) On the assumption that he makes and endorses normative claims, I’ll now turn to his conception of law-​giving.

3.2  Nietzschean self-​legislation Nietzsche connects his normative claims to laws quite explicitly, saying, for example, that ‘there is no doubt that a “thou shalt” speaks to us too, that we too

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still obey a stern law’ (D Preface 4, KSA 3.16). Moreover, those free-​spirited higher types representative of his perfectionist ideal give themselves laws: It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own. (GS 290, KSA 3.530–​1) We, however, want to become those we are –​human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. (GS 335, KSA 3.560–​4)

He typically suggests that giving oneself laws, as opposed to merely following pre-​established mores, is something only some people do and perhaps can do; as these two passages suggest, it is, in particular, a hallmark of a free-​spirited higher type. Although he offers little by way of sustained explication as to what exactly such self-​legislation involves, we can piece together a number of otherwise disparate looking remarks that together shape up into a cohesive picture. Since free-​spirited higher types are Nietzsche’s example par excellence of people who give themselves laws, the discussion focuses on them. The first thing to do is briefly outline some things that are involved in being a Nietzschean free-​spirited higher type21; the rest of the subsection connects this back to giving oneself laws. Free-​spirited higher types play the central role in Nietzsche’s perfectionism:  only they represent the highest forms of human perfection. Nietzsche indicates two distinct forms of excellence such types embody (both of which, plausibly, are necessary constituents of being a fully fledged ideal type). On the one hand, free-​spirited higher types flourish22 to a high degree, where this involves achieving a high degree of psychological integration and acting in ways that effectively express who they are. On the other hand, they realize projects marking truly great or excellent external achievements (by producing great artworks, say, to take one of Nietzsche’s stock cases). These two facets, though distinct, are related in various ways. In particular, both require creative activity; and it is through creative activity that a free-​spirited higher type both realizes his potential by becoming who he is (thereby creating his own unique identity; GS 335, KSA 3.560–​4) and produces externally recognizable excellences. Before turning to the further details and their connection to self-​legislation, it will be useful to distinguish three levels of goal-​directed activity. Nietzsche implicitly separates long-​term overarching goals (one’s life or ground projects, say) from more proximal ends. I’ll use the term ‘project’ to denote overarching goals and reserve ‘end’ for more specific short-​term goals, where such ends may be coordinated with reference to, and either instrumental to or partially constitutive of, one’s overarching projects. (I’ll use ‘goals’

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unqualified when it doesn’t matter whether these are projects or ends.) And I’ll use ‘means’ somewhat narrowly to cover only means to one’s subsidiary ends (and not, therefore, to also include ends that are instrumental to one’s projects). So, for instance, you might set yourself the project of being an artist; you might then set yourself various subsidiary ends, such as producing artworks; and you might take relevant means to realizing those ends, such as acquiring paint. As ever, more fine-​grained distinctions can be drawn; but this threefold distinction will suffice for immediate purposes. Central to Nietzsche’s conception of a higher type is that such an agent sets, pursues and realizes his own projects and ends. Take these three goal-​directed elements in turn. How does a free-​spirited higher type set his own projects and ends? This is intimately bound up with becoming who one is, and involves two main (sets of) elements. First, a higher type engages in uncompromisingly honest self-​scrutiny (GS 335, KSA 3.560–​4; BGE 39, KSA 5.56–​7; A  50, KSA 6.229–​30):  veridical assessment of the kind of person one already is  –​‘surveying all the strengths and weakness of [his] nature’ (GS 290; cf. GS 335, KSA 3.530–​1, 560–​4) –​which in turn yields enhanced self-​understanding. For Nietzsche, a significant part of what constitutes a person, as the particular individual one is, is one’s drives and motives –​one’s desires, evaluative commitments, dispositions of character and so on. Different people also have different abilities, which they can possess to different degrees. Self-​understanding requires understanding the particularities of who one is, as embodied in one’s motives and abilities. For Nietzsche, though, self-​understanding is valuable not (or not just) for its own sake, but also because it connects to what one can become. Indeed, self-​understanding involves realistic appraisal of what one can make or create of oneself. This must be ‘realistic’ in that one’s assessment of what counts as a genuine practical possibility must be sensitive to facts about the person one already is, since those facts shape and constrain one’s potentialities and hence what one is able to become. It is in light of this veridical self-​assessment and the self-​understanding it yields that a free spirit sets himself the projects and ends he does  –​goals that represent real practical possibilities, given both the motives that partly constitute who he is and his abilities.23 Second, Nietzsche repeatedly emphasizes that free-​ spirited higher types are marked by great independence of thought and action. They think ‘otherwise than would be expected’ (HH 225, KSA 2.189–​90); they stand apart from the moral herd-​like majority (HH 225, KSA 2.189–​90; GS 55, KSA 3.417–​18; BGE 44, 212, 260, 274, 284, KSA 5.60–​3, 145–​7, 208–​12, 227–​ 8, 231–​2); and, rather than submitting to pre-​established externally legislated

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authorities (morality supposedly included24), they possess an independent self-​ determining will the exercise of which involves setting their own goals (HH 225, KSA 2.189–​90; GS 290, 335, 347, KSA 3.530–​1, 560–​4, 581–​3; Z ‘Of the Thousand and One Goals’, KSA 4.74–​6; BGE 29, 60, 187, 260, 272, KSA 5.47–​8, 79, 107, 208–​12, 227; A 11, KSA 6.177–​8).25 Since the goals a free-​spirited higher type sets himself in light of veridical self-​understanding reflect the particularities (including motives) of what makes him the particular individual he is, these are truly his own goals. Besides setting their own ends, free-​spirited higher types also pursue the goals they set themselves. Nietzsche says conspicuously little about which determinate projects and ends they do (or ought to) pursue, or therefore what exactly a great person’s life and activities involve. This reflects his emphasis on its being a self-​styled life (GS 290, KSA 3.530–​1) lived by individuals who think and feel ‘otherwise than would be expected’ (HH 225, KSA 2.189–​90). Nonetheless, he does offer more on the structure of such a life, when he likens it to the effective pursuit of an artist’s plan: ‘To “give style” to one’s character –​a great and rare art! It is practised by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and fit them into an artistic plan’  –​immediately adding that it is ‘the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own’ (GS 290, KSA 3.530–​1). Developing the analogy, just as an artist creates a vision of his intended artwork and then sets about actualizing it, a person can forge a plan of (parts of) his life and set himself subsidiary ends whose achievement is instrumental to or constitutive of realizing that plan. The overall plan or project shapes and constrains the nature of the more specific activities. Nonetheless, both may be revised in light of changes to the other. (Realistically, one cannot fully determine how exactly to execute one’s life project in advance of actually pursuing it; see BGE 188, KSA 5.108–​10, for a further artistic analogy here.) Two further points can be made. First, fitting one’s life into an artistic plan in the ways needed to effectively pursue and realize one’s projects requires an ‘enduring will’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4): an ‘ongoing willing of what was once willed [. . .] so that between the original “I will”, “I shall do”, and the actual realization of the will, its enactment, a world of new and strange things, circumstances, even other acts of will may safely intervene, without causing this long chain of the will to break’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.292). This, as Nietzsche intimates elsewhere, is not just the common ability to intend the means to one’s proximal ends, but an ability to do so on a grander scale. Indeed, he writes, a ‘great man [has] a long logic in all his activity . . . he has the ability to extend his will across great stretches of his life’ (NL 1885 34[96], KSA 11.451–​2). Second,

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creative higher types are characterized by a multiplicity of conflicting drives. Effectively pursuing and realizing their goals therefore requires self-​mastery –​ a capacity to order and direct these drives into an integrated whole (see esp. BGE 200, KSA 5.120–​1; TI, ‘Skirmishes’ 49, KSA 6.151–​2; NL 1884 27[59], KSA 11.289). Finally, it is constitutive of being a higher type that such a person actually realizes the goals he sets himself and pursues (GS 335, KSA 3.563). Given that a higher type realizes the highest excellences, this is an exceptionally demanding requirement, in at least three respects. First, realizing the highest excellences is intrinsically difficult and requires exceptional talent for one’s chosen project. Second, realizing the highest excellences requires a variety of self-​oriented qualities which Nietzsche frequently extols, but whose cultivation, to the degree needed to realize the highest excellences, is exceptionally difficult:  an independent, self-​determining will (BGE 29, 60, KSA 5. 47–​8, 79; GS 290, 347, KSA 3.530–​1, 581–​3); self-​sufficiency with which to execute one’s projects for oneself (GS 55, KSA 3.417–​18; BGE 44, 212, 260, 274, 284, KSA 5.60–​3, 145–​7, 208–​12, 227–​8, 231–​2); the self-​reverence and self-​assurance needed to persevere in the face of opposition to one’s (often novel and creative) projects (GS 287, 290, 334, KSA 3.528, 530–​1, 559–​60; BGE 212, 225, 260, 270, 287, KSA 5. 145–​7, 208–​ 12, 225–​6, 232–​3); and the self-​discipline needed to overcome the challenges one sets oneself and to endure whatever suffering that involves (BGE 212, 225, 260, 270, KSA 5.145–​7, 160–​1, 225–​6). Third, realizing Nietzschean excellence involves a near-​exclusive focus on, and commitment to, one’s goals, to which everything else is subordinated. Indeed, a higher type pursues his goal with a single-​mindedness un-​distracted by anything not conducive to its realization. When discussing how artists ‘obey thousandfold laws’, Nietzsche emphasizes that ‘[t]‌he essential thing [. . .] seems, to say it again, to be a protracted obedience in one direction’ (BGE 188, KSA 5.108–​10) –​or, as he puts it elsewhere, ‘a straight line, a goal’ (A 1, KSA 6.169–​70) (see also GS 290, KSA 3.530–​1; BGE 212, KSA 5.145–​6; GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4; TI ‘Arrows’ 44, ‘Morality’ 2, ‘Skirmishes’ 49, KSA 6.66, 83–​5, 151–​2; A 2; EH Clever 9, KSA 6.293–​5). We now need to connect these ideas back to giving oneself laws. There are, I suggest, two types of Nietzschean law. First, the projects and ends a higher type sets himself function as laws. When he sets himself a project, such as a life project to be a great artist, this is a law he might express to himself in imperatival form thus: I will do what is needed (or most conducive) to achieving my artistic projects. Furthermore, insofar as he views and treats his projects and subsidiary ends as expressing an essential part

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of who he is, he may experience them as representing a certain form of ‘practical necessity’, which he may articulate in terms of the law-​like formulation I must do such and such. (Think of someone who says ‘I must do this  –​otherwise, I wouldn’t be being me’.)26 Such laws, as expressed by these ‘I will’ and ‘I must’ locutions, both govern and guide his activities. They are likely to be or become deeply internalized, given that they already reflect who he is and what he desires to become.27 Indeed, a higher type wholeheartedly commits himself to doing whatever is involved in realizing his projects and ends.28 Governing himself through these law-​like commitments, he remains un-​distracted by anything not conducive to their realization, including other activities and drives he may be tempted to indulge. He may therein require great self-​discipline and self-​mastery. Moreover, since life projects are indeed long-​term endeavours, to successfully execute them he requires an ‘enduring will’. Second, a higher type may give himself laws by imposing constraints on how he pursues his goals. The content of such constraints may be independent of the content of the projects and ends he pursues; yet they are also partly constitutive of his realizing those goals in good style (see again GS 290, KSA 3.530–​1). To take just one example, Nietzsche extols the virtue of self-​sufficiency. The more self-​sufficiently a higher type achieves his ends, without the help of others, say, or without using others as means, the more excellent he is. Perhaps, sometimes, he does need to use others as a means (see, e.g. BGE 273, KSA 5.227; Z II ‘The Pitiful’, KSA 4.113–​16; NL 1885 34[96], KSA 11.451–​2); but doing so stains his character by showing him as being suboptimally self-​sufficient and hence less excellent (it reveals him as ‘lacking power’ (GS 13, KSA 3.385). We can thus understand self-​sufficiency as a quality partially constitutive of what it is to be an excellent individual; and it is by imposing onto himself constraints of self-​ sufficiency that such an individual manifests an excellence. Self-​sufficiency thus functions as a (perhaps defeasible) law-​like constraint on how a higher type pursues his goal-​embodying laws. This, then, is the basic account of what Nietzsche might mean by ‘laws’ and ‘giving oneself laws’. They are ‘I wills’ that guide and constrain action, often across great stretches of life, which an agent imposes upon himself by committing himself to them. We now also have the beginnings of a case for thinking that such laws do not have to be universal across agents. Insofar as a law reflects the psychological particularities of the person who sets it (including the motivational particularities that form part of his identity as the person he is), and insofar as different people can have different psychological profiles (as Kant agrees they can –​see again D4), the laws different people set themselves can differ. In

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which case, at least some laws need not be universal across agents. However, before elaborating on this it is worth warding off two doubts about the account presented so far; responding to these will also serve to further clarify Nietzsche’s challenge.

3.3  Two objections First, it may be objected that there is little to suggest that Nietzschean laws, as connected to the projects and ends a higher type pursues, deliver genuinely normative (as opposed to merely descriptive) claims –​claims concerning what one ought to do, rather than just what some people do do. For anyone might set themselves goals, but that doesn’t show that the goals one sets oneself are goals one ought, or has any reason, to pursue. Indeed, it is entirely conceivable that one ought not pursue some goals one sets oneself.29 It is therefore not yet clear whether Nietzsche supplies an alternative model to Kant’s conception of giving oneself a normative law. If it does not, then Nietzsche has failed to show that either D2 or the consequent of D3b is false. In which case, Kant’s Derivation remains intact. There are two ways to respond. One would be to show that Nietzschean laws deliver true normative claims. That, of course, would be a large task  –​just as it would be a significant achievement to justify any normative standpoint.30 A  more modest approach is to show that there is a plausible sense in which Nietzschean laws at least deliver normative claims, in ways that go beyond the merely descriptive thesis that higher types set and pursue goals; and this we can indeed do. We have seen that a Nietzschean higher type realizes Nietzschean excellences. This is a constitutive thesis: part of what it is to be a fully fledged higher type just is to be someone who realizes Nietzschean excellence. Note, though, that there is also an implicit normativity here, relativized at least to what it is to meet the substantive requirements of Nietzsche’s perfectionism. The basic idea runs as follows: doing what is required of Nietzschean perfection requires realizing the highest values (i.e. Nietzschean excellences); higher types realize the highest values and therein do what is required of Nietzschean perfection; thus, higher types who realize the highest values do what they are required, or ought, to do in this respect –​relative, that is, to the requirements of Nietzschean perfectionism. Although such normativity is relativized to an evaluative perspective, Nietzsche thinks this is true of all normative claims (there is no Archimedean bird’s eye view on value). Whether or not one agrees with him on that, there is another

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important point: since, for Nietzsche, the excellences a higher type realizes represent the highest values and are therefore valuable, and since a higher type realizes these values by realizing the goals he sets himself, his realizing these goals is valuable. Thus, according to Nietzsche, higher types realize what actually is valuable and, in so doing, do what they ought. (This should obviate the worry that, if the goal one pursues is not valuable in any respect, then one ought not pursue that goal –​for the goals a higher type pursues are valuable, since they embody the highest excellences.) In which case, insofar as the ‘laws’ a higher type gives himself specify Nietzschean ‘oughts’ and ‘reasons’, they too can be understood as normative.31 Now for a second objection:  Kantians may instead suggest that these Nietzschean ‘laws’ are not really laws –​because, for instance, they do not represent universal requirements applicable to all agents –​and to suppose they are laws merely begs the question. As for the question-​begging charge, just assuming that laws do have to be universal returns the complement.32 In which case, we may have a stand-​off: Kant claims that part of what it is to be a law is for the ‘oughts’ it generates to apply universally across all agents, whereas Nietzsche denies this. This may seem to mark a terminological disagreement. However, it is not merely terminological: it also reveals a substantive dispute as to whether laws really do have to be universal across agents. The question, then, is whether the competing conception of a law Nietzsche presents is a legitimate conception of that concept. Here are three sets of reasons for thinking it is, each of which Kantians should agree with. First, Nietzschean laws can govern and constrain conduct in a systemic and systematic way. They are not momentary or fleeting whims or inclinations but structure the projects one pursues, and how one pursues them, across great stretches of one’s life. Second, these demands represent deep-​seated, whole-​hearted commitments. Higher types commit themselves to projects and ends; they do not eschew their goals or shirk from them when the going gets tough. From their own first-​ personal perspective, these goals, once committed to, are not readily escapable but must –​as a matter of personal honour –​be, well, honoured. In that respect, such commitments function as laws. Furthermore, as noted, one may experience the pull of one’s commitments with the force of practical necessity. Kant himself suggests that rational agents experience the demands of the moral law as practically necessary, since they comprise rational demands that rational agents recognize as such. The Nietzschean counterpart is that a higher type experiences

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his goals and laws as practically necessary, given that these are constitutive of his own identity as the agent he is and represent demands to perfect himself. Nonetheless, since the goals and laws a higher type experiences as practically necessary emerge from his own unique identity, such laws need have no universal character. Third, although Nietzschean laws are not universal across agents, they can be universal in another sense. There is nothing in the Nietzschean conception presented that precludes what is often labelled the universality or universalizability of ‘oughts’ (or ‘reasons’), such that: (U) If the fact that p makes it the case that A  ought to φ in circumstance C, then: for any agent x, if x were in C, that p would make it the case that x ought to φ.

Similarly: (L) If L is a law specifying that A ought to φ in C, then: for any x, if x were in C, L specifies that x ought to φ.33

(U) and (L) are purely formal theses. The domain of ‘x’ could be empty, or it could include just A, or it could include others too –​depending on how we specify ‘x’ and ‘C’. Plausibly, though, if being in C involves being in a position to φ, where few people are or could be in that position (because, say, φing involves realizing some project embodying excellence that few are able to realize), then, although such laws and ‘oughts’ are universal across the agents to whom they apply, they need not apply to all agents. In other words, there is nothing to preclude the form of Nietzschean laws being universal –​even if their scope or jurisdiction is restricted to higher types. As a result, Nietzsche need not deny the thesis that practical normative laws are universal in form –​a thesis Kant not only accepts but that he may conflate with (or erroneously take to entail) the rather different idea that such laws are universal in scope.34 So what they disagree on is how universal the domain of agents to whom practical normative laws apply actually is. I’ll explore this disagreement further in the next section. But let’s first take stock by summarizing the arguments of Section 3. We now have a case for thinking that there can be practical normative laws that do not have to be universal across all agents. Only higher types are capable of realizing the highest excellences. It is therefore only higher types who ought to realize the highest excellences (given an ‘ought implies can’ thesis). Higher types set their own goals. Pursuing these goals involves giving themselves laws. But the ‘oughts’ which these goals and laws specify, as connected to realizing the

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highest excellences, apply only to higher types. In which case, these laws are not universal across agents. This completes the initial Nietzschean case for thinking that practical normative laws do not have to be universal across all agents. The immediate implications are twofold. First, by denying D2 Nietzsche can block the arguments Kant supplies in his Derivation for the conclusion that all practical normative laws necessarily apply to (by entailing ‘oughts’ for) everyone.35 Second, granting that there can be non-​universal practical normative laws, the important question now arises as to whether any practical normative laws are universal across agents. Kant of course wants to say there are such laws –​and that these specify moral duties applying to all rational agents, including Nietzschean higher types, irrespective of their motives. So even if Nietzsche has shown that some practical normative laws are not universal across agents, he still needs a convincing argument for denying the further thesis that there are also some laws (specifying moral duties) which are universal across agents. This is the topic of Section 4.

4.  Nietzsche versus Kant on moral psychology We can separate two general lines of Kantian argument for the conclusion that moral duties are both categorical and universal across agents. The first general argument draws on what it is to be a rational agent. Moral duties, according to Kant, are requirements of rationality. Since it is constitutive of being a rational agent that any such agent is capable of recognizing the demands of rationality, any rational agent is capable of recognizing moral duties. Furthermore, rational agents are capable of recognizing moral duties whatever their contingent subjective motives. That is because requirements of rationality can be revealed through, as the conclusions of, rational deliberation (or practical reasoning) which is pure: the content of such deliberations does not depend on (it need neither start from, nor otherwise engage or be influenced by) one’s contingent subjective motives. Since it is constitutive of being a rational agent that any such agent is capable of recognizing rational–​moral requirements, any such agent must be capable of the kinds of (pure) rational deliberation this involves. In that case, if Nietzschean higher types are rational agents, they are capable of recognizing the demands of morality as demands and are therefore bound by them.

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Much more can be said about how precisely this line of thought might work. But one important point is that Nietzsche provides various resources that may help systematically block it. Consider two common approaches to filling it out. One approach (see, e.g. Korsgaard 1986) begins with Kant’s suggestion (e.g. GMS 401) that it is constitutive of being a rational agent that one reveres what is rational. It then claims that, since the Categorical Imperative is the supreme law of practical rationality, reverence for the Categorical Imperative is (necessarily) a motive every rational agent possesses. Hence, any rational agent is capable of recognizing and being moved by the Categorical Imperative –​which, for Kant at least, implies that every rational agent is capable of recognizing and being moved by morality’s demands. Nietzscheans, in response, might urge that this presupposes a very particular, substantive conception of rational agency –​one that cannot be merely assumed.36 They might argue that it is just one conception of rationality among others –​and then, perhaps drawing upon Nietzsche’s claim that ‘the noble soul has reverence for itself ’ (BGE 287, KSA 5.232–​3; cf. GS 287, 290, 334, KSA 3.528, 530–​1, 559–​60), urge that the rationality involved in being a higher type involves revering oneself as someone whose agency is effective in realizing the perfectionist goals constitutively bound up with the particular motives that represent his own individuality. In which case, Nietzscheans may conclude, the thesis that every ‘rational’ agent reveres the Categorical Imperative and/​or Kantian moral law is false. A  second approach (to filling in the first general Kantian argument) is to show that anyone capable of instrumentally rational deliberation is either capable of, or otherwise committed to, the sorts of deliberative process that yield the demands of morality –​because, for instance, instrumentally rational deliberation delivers conclusions one can recognize as normative only insofar as the ends it prescribes are normatively permissible by some independent criterion, that is, the Categorical Imperative (see Korsgaard 1997). The Nietzschean retort would again be to question why, even if instrumental rationality were to commit one to a wider non-​instrumental normative picture, that normative picture must be the Kantian moral one, rather than, say, a Nietzschean perfectionist one. Thus Nietzscheans can make structurally similar moves to the moves Kantians make when pressing the conception of rationality they do. The success of these strategies, both for and against the Kantian approach, will of course turn on the details of specific arguments. Such details are too wide-​ranging to address adequately here. So, in the remainder of the chapter I’ll instead focus on a second general Kantian line of argument that Nietzsche opposes: that concerning autonomy.

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In the second and third chapters of the Groundwork, Kant seeks to justify morality by showing that we are all committed to there being moral duties of the form assumed in the Derivation. I’ll call this Kant’s ‘Justification’. Similar claims to D2 and D3 feature in it, but they are now supported by a range of additional conceptual resources  –​concerning, most notably, what is involved in being a rationally autonomous agent: someone whose will ‘has the property [. . .] of being a law to itself ’ by giving itself laws. This Justification via rational autonomy can be partially reconstructed as follows (see esp. GMS 446–​8, also 440; and KpV 20–​50, 57–​66): [J1] (a) An autonomous agent is capable of freely willing how to act, such that (b) if A is autonomous, A is capable of freely willing how to act. [J2] All occurrences, acts included, are governed by laws. [J3] (a) A free act exemplifying autonomous agency must therefore be governed by laws  –​such that (b)  if there are free acts exemplifying autonomous agency, these are governed by laws. [J4] Acts governed by laws of nature are determined by causes prior, and external, to one’s will (for example, by one’s contingent subjective motives). [J5] So, free acts exemplifying autonomous agency must be governed, not by laws of nature, but by laws one gives oneself –​that is, by one’s own will, which is pure and stands apart from the natural order. [J6] Therefore, insofar as we are free we act on laws that we freely will –​and that we freely give ourselves, which is what autonomy consists in. [J7] Laws apply universally. [J8] So, a practical law must apply universally. [J9] A  universally applicable practical law applies to every rational agent capable of willing, by being a law that every rational agent could and ought to act in accordance with –​a law represented by the Categorical Imperative. [J10] Thus, the Categorical Imperative is a law we give to and legislate for ourselves, but a law which applies to every rational agent.37

Kant’s conclusion rests, ultimately, on the assumptions that as autonomous agents we are indeed free and that such freedom involves a capacity to determine ourselves by willing in ways that are not solely determined by natural causes. Theoretical reason may not be able to decisively prove that we are, or are not, free. It may therefore appear that morality rests on something we cannot definitively prove, at least from the third-​person perspective of theoretical reason. Nevertheless, if we are free then (given further theses about autonomy) morality is justified. Moreover, and crucially, from a first-​personal perspective we do implicitly regard ourselves as free –​and, qua agents, cannot

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but do so. Thus, from a practical point of view at least, morality follows (GMS 448). J8 and its particular application through J9 are corollaries to D2 and D3, respectively, but now set within the wider context of Kant’s conceptual system. Whereas the Nietzschean arguments of Section 3 may have purchase against the assumption represented through D2 and D3 that all practical normative laws are universal across agents, once these claims about autonomy are in place the Kantian project as represented now through J8 and J9 gathers additional muster. So Nietzsche needs to tackle these wider claims about autonomy. I won’t be able to show here that he does decisively dismiss the Kantian picture; but I’ll instead try to show, more modestly, how he opposes it, and thus where this battle between Kant and Nietzsche lies. To do so, I’ll turn to Nietzsche’s views in and about moral psychology. In short, Nietzsche denies that practical deliberation can be pure (which Kant thinks it must be if a person is to govern himself autonomously). He thereby denies Kant’s conception of autonomy and thus Kant’s path to the conclusion that autonomy involves giving or setting oneself a law that applies universally across all rational agents (i.e. the Categorical Imperative).38 Nietzsche’s opposition to the purity of reason is palpable. To cite just one passage, he writes: ‘Let us beware of the dangerous old conceptual fable which posited a “pure, will-​less, painless, knowing subject”, let us beware of the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason” . . . to eliminate the will completely, to suspend the feelings altogether, even assuming that we could do so: what? Would this not amount to the castration of the intellect?’ (GM III 12, KSA 5.365). Here and elsewhere, Nietzsche suggests that reasoning and its conclusions (both practical and theoretical) cannot be pure, in part because reasoning itself depends on (among other things, and in various ways I’ll return to) our affects or feelings.39 In fact, he often suggests that what we label ‘the will’ is really just a composite of, and no more than, a range of affective and motivational items and the relations between them (see, e.g. D 109, KSA 3.96–​9; BGE 6, 12, 17, 19, 36, KSA 5.19–​21, 26–​7, 30–​4, 54–​5; TI ‘Reason in Philosophy’ 5, KSA 6.77–​8). Here, though, I am going to put to one side the many questions, interpretative and philosophical, that arise concerning the exact nature of ‘the will’ as Nietzsche conceives of it and its relation to the more particular psychological items that wholly or partly compose it.40 For the view I shall attribute to Nietzsche can run independently of these big metaphysical issues –​granting at least, as Nietzsche does, that there is no will separate from the natural order.

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The view I have in mind is that there is an intimate connection between the contents of a person’s normative–​evaluative judgements and his motives. Let’s start with some textual markers: In the philosopher, on the contrary, there is nothing impersonal; and above all, his morality bears decided testimony to who he is –​that is to say, to the order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand in. (BGE 6, KSA 5.20) [M]‌ oralities too are only a sign-​ language of the emotions. (BGE 187, KSA 5.107) Exactly which group of sensations are awakened, begin to speak, issue commands most quickly within a soul, is decisive for the whole order of rank of its values and ultimately determines its table of desiderata. (BGE 268, KSA 5.221; my emphasis) Your judgement ‘this is right’ has a pre-​history in your instincts, likes, dislikes, experiences . . . Your understanding of the manner in which your moral judgements have originated would spoil these grand words for you. –​And don’t cite the categorical imperative, my friend. (GS 335, KSA 5.562) Passion is degraded . . . as if it were only in unseemly cases, and not necessarily and always, the motive force . . . The misunderstanding of passion and reason, as if the latter were an independent entity and not rather a system of relations between various passions and desires. (NL 1888 11[310], KSA 13.131; my emphases)

There are many questions concerning how exactly to interpret such passages.41 Nonetheless, taken together they mount a collective case for attributing to Nietzsche what we might call a ‘sentimentalist’ view about the ways in which our affective-​cum-​motivational repertoire antecedently shapes, constrains and influences our normative–​evaluative commitments and judgements (a view attributable to a range of British sentimentalists, including Hume, but also to Schopenhauer, whose anti-​Kantian moral psychology, it is plausible to maintain, deeply influenced Nietzsche). Thus stated, the view is rather inexact. But we can work it up into something a little more precise by way of three sets of points. First, Nietzsche invokes a wide range of items that contribute to a person’s affective-​cum-​motivational repertoire –​including what he variously labels ‘drives’ (Triebe), ‘affects’ (Affekte), ‘desires’ (Begierden), ‘instincts’ (Instinkte), ‘passions’ (Leidenschaften), ‘feelings’ (Gefühlen) and ‘tastes’ (Geschmäcker), all of which he thinks may be conscious or unconscious. For ease of exposition, I’ll use the blanket term ‘motive’ to cover all, or any, of these. A motive, thus construed, can be understood as any such psychological item that either motivates an agent or that could contribute to the agent’s being motivated to act. As well as the items already listed,

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these can include whatever aims, ends, interests and evaluative commitments the agent has –​including (a) occurrently motivating states; (b) background or standing motivations, that is, items that can motivate even if not doing so occurrently; and (c) any dispositions of character, evaluation and emotion that shape the kind of person one is and how one could be motivated to act.42 Second, according to the sentimentalist view the contents of the normative judgements we do make, and that we are able to make, are shaped, constrained and necessarily influenced by our existing motives. Third, since we are concerned with Kant let’s focus on the normative judgements we make as conclusions of practical deliberation or reasoning. We can here construe practical deliberation broadly to encompass deliberation about what to do and what one ought (or has reason) to do, and just assume that the outcome of practical deliberation, when it yields a definite action-​directed conclusion, is or involves some disposition to act. This could be a sincere normative judgement, pro-​attitude, intention or motivating state. According to the sentimentalist view, first-​personal practical deliberation –​those processes that constitutively aim at, or at least conclude in, a verdict about what to do or what one ought (or has reason) to do, where that conclusion-​state involves some disposition to act –​must either start from or otherwise engage something the agent already cares about, given his antecedent motives. The thought, roughly expressed, is that an agent’s normative judgements and motivations do not arise ex nihilo, but rather emerge from (what Kant would regard as) the agent’s (contingent, subjective) motives. The actions such conclusions recommend must speak to or serve the agent’s antecedent motives if they are to dispose him to act. In turn, the considerations an agent is able to recognize as reasons and be moved by are shaped and constrained by his (contingent, subjective) motives. One implication is that if A lacks any such motive that would be served by φing, A will be unable to recognize any reason to φ. As ever, there are complications, but they need not detain us here. We can summarize this sentimentalist thesis thus: (Sentimentalist Thesis) The contents of the normative conclusions A is able to reach and be motivated by are shaped, constrained and influenced by A’s antecedent motives –​such that: A is able to recognise that p gives him a reason (or makes it the case that he ought) to φ only if A has some motive which would be served by his φing for the reason that p.43

The immediate import of this Sentimentalist Thesis is twofold. First, it entails the denial of Kant’s moral psychological picture. For, if practical deliberation really is to conclude in something that could motivate us to act,

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its premises must start from or otherwise engage our (contingent, subjective) motives, i.e., they must speak to, and hence be influenced by, some antecedent disposition to so act. It follows that the conclusions of practical deliberation are not pure –​and that nobody is capable of the kind of autonomy upon which the Justification depends. Second, the Sentimentalist Thesis implies that who is able to recognize and be moved by the demands of morality will depend on who has suitably moral motives. For Kant, being able to recognize the demands of morality as demands is a necessary condition of having moral duties. Yet, according to the Sentimentalist Thesis, those lacking suitably moral motives –​Nietzsche’s higher types perhaps included –​will be unable to appreciate relevant moral considerations and will thereby fall outside the scope of the moral duties these supposedly generate. Thus, suppose (as Kant himself maintains) that an agent ought to do what he has a moral duty to do only if he is able to recognize that he ought to do it. Combining that thought with the Sentimentalist Thesis implies that moral duties are not categorical –​since one ought to do what morality demands only if one has some motive which would be served by so acting. Note, though, that we can say all this, and hence frame Nietzsche’s opposition to Kant, without having to first resolve ongoing interpretative (or attending philosophical) controversies regarding Nietzsche’s conception of the metaphysical status of either the self or free will. (For the Sentimentalist Thesis, as far as I see, is compatible with all the main readings of Nietzsche on both scores.) And that, I think, is a virtue of the account, given the perennial difficulties wrought by those wider issues. All this is of course conditional on the Sentimentalist Thesis itself being defensible. Here I  have only been teasing out some if its implications, rather than arguing for it.44 However, even if the Sentimentalist Thesis is plausible, Kantians may object to the way I’ve used it. For, they may observe, it provides a theoretical or third-​personal account of the way practical deliberation works. As such, it does not touch on the phenomenology of practical deliberation or agency more generally –​that is to say, the actual experience, from a first-​person perspective, of ourselves as agents. They may then insist that not only might the Sentimentalist Thesis ring false phenomenologically, it fails to address the important point that, qua agents, we cannot but help regard ourselves as capable of the sorts of willing constitutive of autonomy or freedom in Kant’s sense. And since it is from this first-​personal perspective that we are committed to morality, even if the Sentimentalist Thesis were true it does nothing to undermine our commitment to morality qua the kind of agents we are committed to viewing ourselves as.

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One line of response, drawing upon ideas Nietzsche himself indicates (e.g. D 109, 116, 119, KSA 3.96–​9, 108–​9, 111–​14; BGE 19, KSA 5.31–​34; TI Errors, KSA 6.88–​97), is to say that our experience of willing is not a reliable guide to what willing actually involves –​and, moreover, that conceiving of ourselves in the ways we do leads us to misunderstand ourselves as agents, where this misunderstanding is both caused by and perpetuates a range of the errors Nietzsche thinks are involved in morality. This, however, might just beg the question against the Kantian objection. For the claim that our experience of willing is an unreliable guide to what willing actually involves relies on a third-​person perspective as to what willing actually involves.45 There is, however, a dialectically less contentious strategy –​namely, to question whether we (or at least whether free-​spirited higher types), even if committed to regarding ourselves (or themselves) as free and autonomous (in some sense), are also therein committed to willing laws to which all agents are subject. Two thoughts are particularly salient. First, a free-​spirited higher type would regard himself as free –​but free to set the laws and goals he sets himself with no further commitment to thinking these are also laws or goals for others. In fact, many of Nietzsche’s descriptions of such types are couched within the first-​personal perspective of agents who do just this. To offer just two prime examples (note throughout the first-​and second-​personal conjugations): Signs of nobility: never to think of degrading our duties into duties for everybody; not to want to relinquish or share our own responsibilities; to count our privileges and the exercising of them among our duties. (BGE 272, KSA 5.227) For it is selfish to experience one’s own judgement as a universal law . . . it betrays that you have not yet discovered yourself nor created yourself an ideal of your own, your very own . . . Anyone who still judges ‘in this case everybody would have to act like this’ has not yet taken five steps towards self-​knowledge . . . Let us therefore limit ourselves to the purification of our opinions and valuations and to the creation of our new tables of what is good . . . We, however, want to become those we are –​human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. (GS 335, KSA 3.563)

Second, recall the notion of practical necessity, as conveyed by locutions like ‘I must’. In contrast to Kant’s conception (focused on the rational necessity of doing one’s moral duty), the Nietzschean counterpart springs from the particular motives constitutive of and essential to one’s identity as the specific individual one is. These ‘I musts’ represent identity-​conferring commitments, even laws. Indeed, the agent may experience them as laws in ways analogous to how Kant

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claims that rational agents experience the demands of morality as demands upon their rational agency as such, that is, in a first-​personal way. Yet, because these Nietzschean ‘I musts’ are inextricably bound up with the motives constitutive of and essential to one’s being the person one is, where such motives certainly need not be motives others have, there need be no hint of the kinds of universality Kant attributes to (experience of) the moral law.46 Indeed, it is precisely this form of practical necessity that I earlier suggested characterizes the activities of Nietzsche’s free-​spirited higher types. Putting these two points together puts serious pressure on the Kantian suggestion that free-​spirited higher types are committed to morality by dint of regarding themselves as autonomous agents. For they can and do regard themselves as agents, governed by laws they give themselves. Yet since the laws a free-​spirited higher type gives himself may be experienced by him as laws for himself and only himself, where these are in turn bound up with the motives he experiences as constitutive of his identity, experiencing himself as an agent in no way commits him to willing laws for all (or even for any other) agents. In short, then, according to the Nietzschean picture: experiencing oneself as an autonomous agent who gives oneself laws does not commit one to morality or to experiencing morality’s supposed laws as binding. If this Nietzschean picture is plausible, the thesis central to Kant’s first-​personal justification of morality  –​that regarding oneself as autonomous thereby commits one to morality –​ fails.

5.  Concluding remarks The main arguments of this chapter have been, firstly, that Nietzsche has a well-​ motivated case for denying that all practical normative laws are universal across agents (Section 3) and, secondly, that if he can deny the purity of practical reason then he has a strong case for denying that any practical normative laws are binding on all rationally autonomous beings (Section 4). This second conclusion is conditional. Nonetheless, I’ve shown how we can oppose Kantian purity without having to first resolve ongoing disputes concerning Nietzsche’s views about the metaphysical status of the will and freedom. Furthermore, I’ve shown that Nietzsche’s denial of Kantian purity can be defended without begging the question against first-​personal readings of Kant. By way of conclusion, I’ll briefly tease out one final implication.

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I’ve suggested that (1) a higher type sets his own goals, (2) he ought to pursue the goals he sets himself and (3) one’s normative judgements are necessarily shaped and constrained by one’s motives (the Sentimentalist Thesis). From these three theses we can deduce the following claim: that what a higher type ought to do is shaped and constrained by his motives –​such that a higher type ought (or has a reason) to φ only if he has some motive which would be served by his φing. This is an application of a view that in contemporary jargon is often labelled reasons internalism.47 And it sits rather nicely with a wide range of things Nietzsche wants to say: ll

ll

ll

ll

ll

It opposes Kant’s (as well as any other) view according to which moral ‘oughts’ are categorical and universal, and hence normatively authoritative. It thereby allows Nietzsche to be an error theorist about any conception of morality committed to there being categorical universal moral duties, whilst also advancing positive normative claims of his own (namely, those satisfying the internalist condition). It suits his broadly naturalistic approach to normativity, as underpinned by the sentimentalist moral psychology. Insofar as (1)–​(3) apply to people generally and not just higher types, it accommodates interpersonal variation in reasons in accordance with variations in people’s motives. As a result, it licenses the idea that many people ought to comply with morality, insofar as they have suitably moral motives, even though higher types have rather different reasons. It also allows that those of Nietzsche’s readers unable to recognize the value of alternative ideals to morality will be unable, given the sentimentalist thesis, to appreciate any reason to do so and may therefore have no reason to engage in a process of revaluating their values.

Finally, and more positively, it sits nicely with various aspects of Nietzsche’s perfectionism: ll

ll

It offers a way to make sense of Nietzsche’s claim that ‘each one of us should devise his own categorical imperatives’ (A 11, KSA 6.177). Insofar as the ‘us’ is restricted in scope to those capable of doing so, it calls upon a higher type to determine and set his own goals in light of the kind of person he is as embodied in his motives. Furthermore, higher types, because not categorically required to comply with morality, are at liberty to pursue the projects embodying excellence they set themselves.

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And it is in virtue of having the excellence-​directed motives they do that higher types, who undertake the self-​assessments necessary for understanding themselves, may flourish by realizing the excellences they set themselves in light of their motives.

This, of course, is neither an argument for internalism nor a detailed argument for an internalist reading of Nietzsche.48 Nonetheless, in the context of Nietzsche’s engagement with Kant on the topic of normativity, it suggests a further and important point of contrast.49

Notes 1 Extant treatments, covering some points of contact, include Williams (1999), Hill (2003: ­chapter 7), Risse (2007), Owen (2009) and Katsafanas (2014). 2 Capitalizations pick out Kant’s supreme principle of morality; lower case variants denote oughts that are putatively categorical in a sense explained shortly. 3 For more detail on the structure and content of Nietzsche’s ethical revaluation, plus attending interpretative and philosophical issues, see Robertson (2009a). 4 Nietzsche has a number of epithets for his ‘ideal type’ (EH Books 1, KSA 6.300): ‘free spirit’ (e.g. HH Preface 2–​7, 225, KSA 2.15–​22; GS 347, KSA 3.581–​3; BGE c­ hapter 2, KSA 5.41–​63), ‘higher type’ (e.g. BGE 62, KSA 5.81–​3; A 4, KSA 6.172; EH Books 1, Destiny 4, KSA 6.298–​301, 367–​9), ‘noble’ person (GS 55, KSA 3.417–​18; BGE ­chapter 9, 287, KSA 5.205 ff., 232–​3), ‘great’ individual (BGE 72, 212, 269, KSA 5.86, 145–​6, 224), arguably also ‘Übermensch’ (Z Preface 3, KSA 4.14–​16; AC 4, KSA 6.172; EH Destiny 5, KSA 6.369–​70). It is unclear whether he uses these labels to represent one generic ideal type. However, any differences between them will not affect the arguments to follow; and I will just speak interchangeably of ‘free spirits’ and ‘higher types’. For further detail on higher types and normativity, see Sections 2–​4 and Robertson (2011a). Translations from the Nachlass (KSA) are partly my own, though I have consulted the translations in Kaufmann (1967) when these are available. 5 On how Nietzsche’s objection might run, see Leiter (2001); Robertson (2011b). 6 Nietzsche’s goal is ultimately practical: to liberate higher types from morality. Some commentators (e.g. Leiter 2001) suggest that his critical target is primarily, or even only, the moralized culture we actually inhabit, rather than moral theory as such. But this is misconceived. First, Nietzsche does explicitly target particular moral theories –​at least in part because he views these theories, Kant’s included, as attempts to systematize and justify the moral norms, values, duties and ideals we ordinarily take as givens in the moralized culture we

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inhabit. Second, if moral theory were to exonerate the ideals Nietzsche objects to –​by showing, for instance, that they do possess the value and justification traditionally claimed for them –​there would remain little vindication for the tirades he launches against morality or the cultural ethos it informs. Nietzsche must therefore engage with moral theory if his practical goal is to withstand critical scrutiny. For extended defence of this interpretative claim, see Robertson (2012). See the essays in Gemes and May (2009), and also Anderson (2012). Contemporary Kantians disagree over whether to prioritize the third- or firstperson perspective in Kant’s justification of morality. Those who prioritize the former see transcendental freedom as an indispensable commitment without which the justification of morality fails (as did Kant in the Critique of Practical Reason, as well, arguably, as in the Groundwork; see e.g. Allison 1996). Firstpersonal Kantians instead reconstruct Kant’s moral project without it (e.g. Hill 1985; Korsgaard, 1996, 1997, 2009; Brink 1997). My main target in Section 4 is ‘first-personal Kant’, in part to avoid wide-ranging issues about transcendental freedom (and Nietzsche’s denial of it), but also to engage with contemporary neo-Kantians who believe that morality can be justified without it. This focus is reflected in my presentation of the Derivation and Justification in Sections 2 and 4. (a) The many nuances lying beneath the argument as reconstructed here remain matters of interpretative dispute (cf. e.g. Allison 1996; Korsgaard 1996; Potter 1998; Wood 1999: 42–​59; Timmermann 2007: 25–​46). Nonetheless, the following should suffice for the dual purposes of outlining the overall shape of the Derivation and locating Nietzsche’s contention with it. (Note also that different commentators use ‘derivation’ to refer to different arguments Kant presents in GMS I and/​or II, including (though not only) the one outlined here.) (b) A similarly structured argument containing the same basic ingredients occurs in KpV (Book I, part I, chapter I: 19–​58: ‘The analytic of pure practical reason’), a work Nietzsche may have been more familiar with. I here refer to GMS, however, in part for the expository purpose of avoiding the dialectical complications introduced by the way the Critique embeds pure practical reason into the argument from the outset –​complications it will be easier to deal with separately (in Section 4). As Wiggins (1995: 298) notes, the term ‘apply’ is remarkably slippery. Here, to say that a practical normative law or duty applies to you implies that you ought to comply with it (e.g. by doing what it specifies). Kant’s fuller story here emerges from his ‘second proposition’ about the motive of duty, according to which an ‘action done from duty has its moral worth, not in the purpose to be attained by it, but in the maxim according to which it is decided

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upon’ (GMS 399). He argues: A good will is good in itself, not in virtue of the ends external to it at which it aims (GMS 393–​4; 397; 401); the good will must therefore be determined by some internal principle (GMS 400). The will acts on maxims (subjective principles) it gives itself (GMS 400). Acting from duty does not consist in acting on subjective motives but, rather, consists in acting on objective principles–​–i​ .e. laws. Maxims represent objective laws insofar as everyone could act on them (GMS 400n); and objective laws apply to all agents, irrespective of any particular agent’s subjective motives. 13 The fuller story: A rational agent acts on (is motivated by) a rational law; such a law is an object of reverence, since a rational agent reveres what is rational (GMS 400, 401); thus the motive of duty involves acting out of reverence for the law (this is Kant’s ‘third proposition’ about the motive of duty) (GMS 400). And a rational law is a law that could be rationally willed, i.e. without contradiction or otherwise undermining rational agency. 14 As noted in Section 1, Nietzsche must deny D2 in order to allow that free-​ spirited higher types whose excellence and flourishing morality thwarts ought not comply with morality. One way he sometimes denies it is by denying that there really are laws of nature (e.g. BGE 21, 22. KSA 5.35–​9; GS 109, KSA 3.467–​ 9). The argument I reconstruct, concerning practical normative laws, does not rely on this. 15 Or at least all rational beings. That practical laws apply to, and only to, rational agents is of course crucial in Kant’s moral theory. For the purposes of this section, however, I assume a rather more minimal conception of rational agency than Kant’s, to the effect that agents (free-​spirited higher types included) are (a) sensitive to a range of normatively significant features of their situations, and (b) instrumentally rational (this can go beyond a narrow means-​end satisfaction model). Since Kant would accept both conditions, this does not beg the question. Nonetheless, Kant (or at least some neo-​Kantians, e.g. Korsgaard 1997) thinks that anyone satisfying both conditions must be rational in a stronger sense, namely, that one is thereby capable of appreciating the demands of morality. I postpone discussion of these wider issues until Section 4, for the initial aim is to cast doubt on an earlier step in Kant’s Derivation (at which point, arguably, he cannot in GMS just assume this stronger notion of rationality): the presumption that all practical normative laws are universal. 16 I do not mean to siphon off the normative from the evaluative completely. There are many controversies about how they connect (see Robertson 2009b: 5–​12); but it is necessary to make some preliminary stipulations. First, I’ve introduced the normative realm via the normative concepts ought and a reason. I’ll be focusing mostly on ‘oughts’, though will sometimes have recourse to ‘reasons’. ‘Oughts’ can here be understood as specifying conclusive or overriding requirements on action,

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whereas ‘reasons’ (in the pro tanto sense) can favour actions to some (though not necessarily conclusive) degree. I’ll nonetheless assume that oughts entail reasons, such that ‘if A ought to φ, there is a reason for A to φ’. Second, value claims don’t uniformly entail (atomic, non-​counterfactual) practical normative claims: it does not follow from the fact that A’s φing would be good that A has any reason to φ. To take one Nietzschean thought: even if A’s φing would be extremely valuable in virtue of realizing some excellence, if A is incapable of φing, there may be no reason for A to φ. Nevertheless, and third, I do not rule out the possibility that ‘oughts’ and ‘reasons’ are partly value-​dependent (see below and Robertson forthcoming: ­chapter 11). 17 Versions of this doubt have been put to me in conversation by Chris Janaway, Alexander Nehamas and Henry Staten; see also Railton (2012). 18 It is contestable whether ‘a reason’, denoting a normative item, has an exact German equivalent –​which may tell against the idea that Nietzsche has a view about ‘reasons’. Perhaps the closest German expression is ‘Grunde’, which, like ‘reason’, exhibits considerable fluidity. Nonetheless, Nietzsche does employ a concept rather like that of a pro tanto normative reason. He agrees, for instance, that there can simultaneously be various ‘Fors’ and ‘Againsts’, and that one can have ‘one’s pros and contra in one’s power’ and impose a ‘rank ordering’ on them (HH Preface 6, KSA 2.20–​1; GM III 12, KSA 5.363–​5). So I see scant textual evidence to think that he would deny the currency of reasons, given that he appears to accept that a person can simultaneously have many reasons favouring different actions, not all of which need be conclusively favoured. 19 See again Robertson (2011a) for extended articulation and defence. 20 Kant himself claims that ‘all imperatives are expressed [or are at least expressible] by an “ought” ’ (GMS 413). It is a matter of dispute whether he thinks that hypothetical imperatives really are normative; but I’ll assume that, insofar as the ends they are directed to are ends worth realizing, they can be. 21 The following is only a partial sketch. I offer significantly more detail elsewhere: Robertson (2011b) focuses on external achievements embodying excellence, whereas Robertson (2011a) connects realizing one’s ends to Nietzsche’s conception of flourishing and becoming what one is. Robertson (forthcoming: ­chapters 10–​11) shows how the two connect: a higher type flourishes by realizing the goals embodying excellence he sets himself. 22 There are several German words aptly translated ‘flourishing’, including ‘Gedeihen’ and ‘Aufblühen’. Although Nietzsche uses these terms relatively sparingly in his published works (salient passages include WB 11, KSA 1.506–​10; GS 1, 347, KSA 3.369–​72; GM Preface 3, II 10, II 12, III 11, III 19, KSA 5.249–​50, 308–​9, 313–​16, 361–​3, 384–​7; EH Preface 2, Destiny 7, KSA 6.257–​8, 371–​3), his frequent discussions of health [Gesundheit] accord with what we may

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Simon Robertson more ordinarily think of as flourishing. For more detail, see Robertson (forthcoming: ­chapter 10). (a) This is important when it comes to giving oneself laws. Kantians may urge that the laws a Nietzschean higher type gives himself are in a sense arbitrary, since they depend on contingent elements in his psychological makeup rather than on features of rational agency as such. However, as Williams (e.g. 1981a) amongst others argues, insofar as our ground projects emerge from and serve deep psychological facts about ourselves (including those desires constitutive of our identity as the particular individuals we are), the ends we ought to pursue depend on facts about who we are (see also Section 3.3 and Section 4). And, because these facts form part of our very identity qua the particular persons we are, the project-​related ‘oughts’ we set in light of them can be rather less arbitrary than some Kantians sometimes allege. (b) Appealing to agential motives here does not beg the question against Kant. For, firstly, although Kant may think that one’s true self consists in a rational self aside from one’s subjective desires, he does accept that an individual is partly comprised by a range of desirous elements. Thus, someone who understands himself would understand the role these play in his own psychological economy. Plus, secondly, the discussion in this section is not denying that there could be laws given by a rational self common to all rational beings; rather, it is making a case for thinking there could be at least some laws not like this. At D 9 Nietzsche suggests that modern morality, even in its Kantian incarnation, is little more than a refined version of the ethic of custom (Sittlichkeit) that the herd-​ like continue to obey. See also BGE 187, KSA 5.107. Deploying a distinctively Kantian phrase in a distinctively non-​Kantian way, Nietzsche notoriously describes as ‘autonomous’ a person who (i) possesses ‘his own independent, enduring will’ and (ii) ‘resembles no one but himself ’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4).The passage this occurs in remains subject to intense scholarly dispute, so I don’t want to read too much into it here. What I say is consistent with the fairly minimal assumption that the autonomous ‘sovereign individual’ Nietzsche discusses at GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4 need not represent his fully fledged view of agency, even if conditions (i) and (ii) represent two of its central (perhaps necessary) features. On practical necessity, see esp. Williams (1981c), (1993), and, in the context of Nietzsche, Clark (2001) and Owen (2007). David Owen has been pressing on me its significance for some time, and I return to it at several points later. The internalization of various laws or I wills plays a significant role in the naturalized accounts of moral formation Nietzsche gives in GM (e.g. Essay II 1, 3, KSA 5.291–​4). It also plays a central role in many contemporary deontological, consequentialist and Aristotelian views, according to which agents ought to cultivate relevant practical dispositions by internalizing salient motives, norms and/​ or virtues.

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28 On commitment in Nietzsche, see Ridley (2009); for a Kantian account of commitment to discretionary ends, see Reath (2009). 29 On these points, see, e.g. Korsgaard (1997); Broome (1999). 30 Note, nonetheless, that to just assume they are not true would beg the question against Nietzsche. Kant might himself suggest that one ought to pursue one’s ends only if those ends are at the same time sanctioned by the Categorical Imperative. There are two Nietzschean responses to this: first, since the Derivation is intended to derive the Categorical Imperative from the concept of duty as law, it would be dialectically illegitimate to appeal to the Categorical Imperative at this juncture; second, it is plausible to suppose that (at least some of) the goals a higher type pursues are permissible by morality’s lights. 31 This response of course assumes that the goals a higher type realizes are indeed valuable. Korsgaard (2009: ­chapters 3 and 7) argues that only formal principles for action are directly normative, whereby any substantive principles delivering normative truths must be derivable from formal principles (the Categorical Imperative being one of the principles they must be derivable from). One response to Korsgaard’s argument is to justify a substantive conception of value without recourse to the Categorical Imperative (I seek to do this in Robertson (forthcoming: ­chapter 10)). 32 Kantians might supplement their case by appealing to the analogy with laws of nature: just as these apply to all the objects they concern, practical laws apply to all the agents they concern. However, this is unconvincing. On the one hand, one of the issues just is which agents practical laws concern and apply to. On the other hand, two significant points put pressure on the Kantian analogy: first, the practical laws we are concerned with are normative, whereas laws of nature are not, so it remains an open question whether they function in relevantly similar ways; second, laws of nature are now commonly regarded as defeasible (and subject to a range of ceteris paribus conditions), whereas for Kant practical normative laws are not. 33 In both (U) and (L), occurrences of ‘A’ in ‘p’ and ‘C’ can be replaced by ‘x’ so to allow for agent-​relativity. 34 Korsgaard (1996: 99) observes a similar conflation to which Kant is subject. She has subsequently developed several arguments designed to show that every rational agent (e.g. every agent capable instrumentally rational deliberation) is committed to the Categorical Imperative (see her 1986, 1997, 2009). One of her most recent versions trades on the idea that it is partially constitutive of being an autonomous agent that one exemplifies diachronic unity with respect to one’s ends and that this commits one to some version of the Categorical Imperative (2009: ­chapter 4). Nietzscheans can agree with the claim about diachronic unity, though it is far from clear how this commits one to willing ends that others could (or ought to) act on. In that respect, it does not commit one to universality across agents or to Kant’s

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Simon Robertson Categorical Imperative and the moral law. (For Korsgaard’s most recent arguments for why we are also committed to morality, see Korsgaard (2009: ­chapter 9); for some generic doubts about Kantian strategies, see my Section 4.) What if a requirement of a Nietzschean law that a higher type sets himself conflicts with a verdict generated by the Categorical Imperative? Kantians will likely argue that the Categorical Imperative takes priority and/​or overrides apparently conflicting ‘oughts’. The arguments of Section 4 put critical pressure on that view (see also Brink (1997) for an argument that, even if Kant can justify morality’s normative authority, he fails to justify its overriding supremacy). Williams’s (1995: 37) laconic riposte to this Kantian suggestion is that ‘there has to be an argument for that conclusion. Someone who claims the constraints of morality are themselves built into the notion of what it is to be a rational deliberator cannot get that conclusion for nothing’. For attempts to deliver the relevant argument(s), see, e.g. Korsgaard (1989), (1996), (1997), (2009). The rest of the present section raises some general difficulties for such arguments. The Justification as presented here is a reconstruction that glosses over many of the intricacies underlying the moves Kant makes. Nonetheless, the key point is the uncontroversial one that Kantian autonomy rests on a conception of practical reason that is pure; it is this commitment to purity that Nietzsche objects to and via which he denies the move to universality. For sake of completeness, Nietzsche might accept J1 and J3 as formal theses; if so, he must reject the Kantian interpretation of freedom and autonomy given by J5 and J6. Although the language of GM III 12, KSA 5.363–​5, might seem to focus on theoretical reason, Nietzsche rejects any clear distinction between the operations of theoretical and practical reason. They might have different formal objects (belief and action, say); but both are essentially active with their contents guided ultimately by our practical interests and needs. Hence, what he says about the ‘will’ applies equally to its practical as to its theoretical operations. Although defending this interpretative claim requires more detail than is possible here, see BGE 4 and 11, KSA 5.18, 24–​6, plus the passages cited below regarding the ‘Sentimentalist Thesis’. Some (see esp. Leiter (2002: 91ff; and 2009)) attribute to Nietzsche the view that there is no will standing as the locus of volition –​and that conscious mental life, including the processes and contents of conscious evaluative reflection, is therefore not under the causal control of any such will, but is instead a series of type-​epiphenomenal events manifesting and controlled by deeper facts about our physiological and unconscious psychological makeup. Others afford Nietzsche a view according to which the will, although not entirely separable from the conscious and unconscious first-​order psychological states its obtaining depends on, does nonetheless possess some degree of unity over and above those states, in

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ways that license our having at least a modicum of volitional and reflective control over our decisions. This now seems the more common interpretative line and it would, I think, be more interesting for accounts of normativity if Nietzsche could be entitled to it. For a variety of (often competing) views on how it might be developed, see the essays by Clark and Dudrick, Gardner, Gemes, Janaway, Pippin, Poellner and Ridley, all in Gemes and May (2009), plus Anderson (2012). 41 See Robertson (2011a: 596–​9) for some further detail on how they may fit together. Other relevant passages include HH 39, 56, 57, KSA 2.62–​4, 75–​6; D 34, 99, 119, KSA 3.4389, 111–​14; GS 5, 57, 301, 347, KSA 3.377–​8, 421–​2, 539–​40, 581–​3; Z ‘Of the Sublime Men’, ‘Of the Thousand and One Goals’, KSA 4.150–​2, 74–​6; BGE 11, 186, KSA 5.24–​6, 105–​7; GM III 12, KSA 5.263–​5; NL 1885–​6 2[77], KSA 12.97–​8, NL 1885–​6 2[189–​190], KSA 12.160–​1, NL 1886–​7 7[60], KSA 12.315. 42 Many commentators attribute to Nietzsche a ‘drive psychology’ (e.g. Janaway 2007; Katsafanas 2013b and forthcoming). Although controversial how exactly to unpack the conceptual structure of a Nietzschean ‘drive’, it is uniformly treated as a psychological item (conscious or otherwise) that disposes to action; it is therefore a species of motive. 43 A full account and defence of this requires extensive analysis. But I take the following to represent the spirit of Nietzsche’s views: Normative judgements can be cognitive, i.e. express beliefs (e.g. HH 32, KSA 2.51–​2; D 103, KSA 91–​2; TI ‘Improving’ 1, KSA 6.98); and they can be true (e.g. D 103, KSA 3.91–​2). But a true normative judgement is not a representation of a world constituted by metaphysically robust normative properties, since there are no such properties (GS 301, KSA 3.539–​40; TI ‘Improving’ 1, KSA 6.98). Rather, normative judgements are essentially interpretative (GS 301, KSA 3.539–​40; BGE 108, KSA 5.92; see also HH 39, 40, 56, KSA 2.62–​4, 75; D 3, 119, KSA 3.19–​20, 111–​14; Z I ‘Of a thousand and one goals’, KSA 4.74–​6; GM P 3, KSA 5.249–​50; TI Errors 3, KSA 6.88–​97). Indeed, we interpret the world normatively, e.g. in terms of what there is reason to do in light of it; and we judge of certain features that they are, i.e. interpret them as, reason-​giving. How we do and are able to interpret things normatively is shaped and constrained by our affective-​cum-​motivational repertoire, as the Sentimentalist Thesis implies. (This can be a partly cognitive and reflective, rather than a purely hydraulic, process. As Katsafanas (2013a: ­chapter 5) articulates things, although our subjective motives incline us and although we can never suspend the influence of all our motives, this does not show that we are thereby determined by any particular motive.) Thus the features a person is sensitive to as reason-​giving depends on that person’s motives; and this may vary across persons. For excellent accounts of the relation between sentiment and judgement in Nietzsche, see Poellner (2007), Katsafanas (2013a: ­chapter 5).

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44 Katsafanas (2013a: 115–​32) deploys a combination of philosophical analysis and psychology data to argue against the Kantian idea that agents can suspend the influence of their motives, thereby motivating a view closely related to the Sentimentalist Thesis. For some further implications, see Robertson and Owen (2013) and Robertson (2011a). 45 A similar objection is pressed by Sieriol Morgan (‘Naturalism and the First-​ Personal Foundations of Kantian Ethics’, unpublished) in response to various Nietzschean critiques (e.g. Knobe and Leiter 2007; Risse 2007) that end up objecting on third-​personal grounds to first-​personal readings of Kant. It is difficult to know what to make of this first-​personal Kantian response dialectically. For Kantians agree that there can (and must) be some distance between how a person actually and ideally experiences herself as a willing agent; yet if that distance allows that we can be mistaken about what willing actually involves, part of the explanation for our being mistaken may itself come from third-​personal materials. At any rate, I agree that the first-​personal is important in Nietzsche; see also Pippin (2010). 46 Korsgaard (1996: ­chapter 4; 2009: ­chapter 9) attempts to show how rational agents committed to the Categorical Imperative are committed to ‘public reasons’ and hence to morality. Although I cannot go into the details here, I do find it unconvincing (relevant to this are GS 354, KSA 3.590–​3, and GM II, KSA 5.291 ff.). At any rate, the Nietzschean objection is designed to block an earlier stage in the progress towards those neo-​Kantian moves –​namely, the idea that a rational autonomous agent is committed to the kinds of universal law laid out by the Categorical Imperative. 47 Reasons internalism is a view again associated with Bernard Williams (e.g. 1981b, 1995), who was of course one of Nietzsche’s pioneering analytic readers. On how Nietzsche influenced Williams, see Clark (2001); Robertson and Owen (2013); the latter includes a case for thinking that Williams’s internalism was itself partly a product of his engagement with Nietzsche. 48 I develop a textual case for it in Robertson (2011a). 49 This chapter was originally written for a workshop, ‘Nietzsche the Kantian?’, hosted and funded by the Institute for Philosophy, Leiden University (February 2011), organized by Tom Bailey and Herman Siemens. I also presented it in research seminars at the University of Essex and Cardiff University. Many thanks to all three audiences for extremely useful discussion and comments –​particularly Matthew Bennett, João Constancio, Dharmender Dhillon, Fabian Freyenhagen, Béatrice Han-​Pile, Paul Katsafanas, David McNeill, Tom O’Shea, Markus Schlosser, Alessandra Tanesini and Jon Webber. Special thanks to the editors of this volume: to João for his support; and to Tom for his thorough comments on the penultimate version, which have helped me to improve the paper’s clarity and to avoid some mistakes.

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References Allison, H. E. (1996), ‘On the Presumed Gap in the Derivation of the Categorical Imperative’, reprinted in his Idealism and Freedom: Essays on Kant’s Theoretical and Practical Philosophy, 143–​4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anderson, L. (2012), ‘What Is a Nietzschean Self?’, in C. Janaway and S. Robertson (eds), Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity, 202–​35, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brink, D. O. (1997), ‘Kantian Rationalism: Inescapability, Authority, and Supremacy’, in G. Cullity and B. Gaut (eds), Ethics and Practical Reason, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Broome, J. (1999), ‘Normative Requirements’, Ratio 12 (3): 398–​419. Clark, M. (2001), ‘On the Rejection of Morality: Bernard Williams’ Debt to Nietzsche’, in R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche’s Postmoralism, 100–​22, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gemes, K., and May, S. (eds) (2009), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hill, K. (2003), Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hill, T. E. Jnr (1985), ‘Kant’s Argument for the Rationality of Moral Conduct’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 66 (1–​2): 3–​23. Janaway, C. (2007), Beyond Selflessness. Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katsafanas, P. (2013a), Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katsafanas, P. (2013b), ‘Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology’, in J. Richardson and K. Gemes (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, 727–​55, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katsafanas, P. (2014), ‘Nietzsche and Kant on the Will: Two Models of Reflective Agency’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (1): 185–​216. Kaufmann, W. (1967), Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage. Knobe, J., and Leiter, B. (2007), ‘The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology’, in B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu (eds), Nietzsche and Morality, 83–​109, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Korsgaard, C. M. (1986), ‘Skepticism about Practical Reason’, Journal of Philosophy 83 (1): 5–​25. Korsgaard, C. M. (1989), ‘Kant’s Analysis of Obligation: The Argument of Groundwork I’, The Monist 72 (3): 311–​39. Korsgaard, C M. (1996), The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Korsgaard, C. M. (1997), ‘The Normativity of Instrumental Reasoning’, in G. Cullity and B. Gaut (eds), Ethics and Practical Reason, 215–​54, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Korsgaard, C. M. (2009), Self-​Constitution, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Leiter, B. (2001), ‘Nietzsche and the Morality Critics’, reprinted in J. Richardson and B. Leiter (eds), Nietzsche, 221–​54, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leiter, B. (2002), Nietzsche on Morality, London: Routledge. Leiter, B. (2009), ‘Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will’, in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, 107–​26, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Owen, D. (2007), Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, Stocksfield: Acumen Press. Owen, D. (2009), ‘Autonomy, Self-​Respect, and Self-​Love: Nietzsche on Ethical Agency’, in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, 197–​222, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pippin, R. B. (2010), Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy, Chicago/​London: The University of Chicago Press. Poellner, P. (2007), ‘Affect, Value, and Objectivity’, in B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu (eds), Nietzsche and Morality, 227–​61, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Potter, N. (1998), ‘The Argument of Kant’s Groundwork, Chapter I’, in P. Guyer (ed.), Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: Critical Essays, 29–​50, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Railton, P. (2012), ‘Nietzsche’s Normative Theory? –​The Art and Skill of Living Well’, in C. Janaway and S. Robertson (eds), Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity, 20–​51, Oxford University Press. Reath, A. (2009), ‘Setting Ends for Oneself Through Reason’, in S. Robertson (ed.), Spheres of Reason, 199–​220, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ridley, A. (2009), ‘Nietzsche’s Intentions: What the Sovereign Individual Promises’, in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, 181–​96, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Risse, M. (2007), ‘Nietzschean “Animal Psychology” versus Kantian Ethics’, in B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu (eds), Nietzsche and Morality, 57–​82, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Robertson, S. (2009a), ‘Nietzsche’s Ethical Revaluation’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 37 (Spring): 66–​90. Robertson, S. (2009b), ‘Introduction: Normativity, Reasons, Rationality’, in S. Robertson (ed.), Spheres of Reason, 1–​28, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robertson, S. (2011a), ‘Normativity for Nietzschean Free Spirits’, Inquiry 54 (6): 591–​613. Robertson, S. (2011b), ‘A Nietzschean Critique of Obligation-​Centred Moral Theory’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19 (4): 563–​91. Robertson, S. (2012), ‘The Scope Problem –​Nietzsche, the Moral, Ethical, and Quasi-​Aesthetic’, in C. Janaway and S. Robertson (eds), Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity, 81–​110, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robertson, S. (forthcoming), Nietzsche and Contemporary Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robertson, S., and Owen, D. (2013), ‘Nietzsche’s Influence on Analytic Philosophy’, in K. Gemes and J. Richardson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, 185–​206, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Timmermann, J. (2007), Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiggins, D. (1995), ‘Categorical Requirements: Hume and Kant on the Idea of Duty’, in R. Hursthouse, G. Lawrence and W Quinn (eds), Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, 297–​330, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Williams, B. (1981a), ‘Persons, Character and Morality’, reprinted in his Moral Luck, 1–​19, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1981b), ‘Internal and External Reasons’, reprinted in his Moral Luck, 101–​13, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1981c), ‘Practical Necessity’, reprinted in his Moral Luck, 124–​31, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1993), Shame and Necessity, Berkely: University of California Press. Williams, B. (1995), ‘Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame’, reprinted in his Making Sense of Humanity, 35–​45, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, G. D. (1999), ‘Nietzsche’s Response to Kant’s Morality’, Philosophical Forum 30 (3): 201–​16. Wood, A. E. (1999), Kant’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Translations of Nietzsche’s works The Antichrist, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books, 1990. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books, 1990. Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, ed. M. Clark and B. Leiter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Ecce Homo, trans. D. Large, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Human, All-​Too Human, trans. M. Faber and S. Lehmann, London: Penguin Books, 1984. On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. D. Smith, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, ed. D. Breazeale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books, 1969. Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books, 1990.

Translations of Kant’s works Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton as The Moral Law: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, London: Routledge, 1948. Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

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Kant, Nietzsche and the Discursive Availability of Action Robert Guay

Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche are often thought to have polar opposite ways of thinking about agency. Kant, the story goes, thinks about agency in terms of the ‘metaphysics of transcendental idealism’,1 so that actions are precisely events that somehow, inexplicably, stand outside of the natural order of things. Nietzsche, by contrast, accords actions no special place in the order of causes and effects. Actions, for him, fit perhaps most properly in the sphere of the biological: they are the result of organic processes, and not distinctive occasions of originality or self-​governance. There is some truth to this story: the two make room for radically different forms of explanation, and locate the importance of the biological very differently. But to see them as opposites, metaphysics versus nature, is a superficial and short-​sighted way of thinking about their views on agency. At least I shall contend that their similarities are more important than their differences. Kant and Nietzsche, I shall argue, share the view that agency is only available discursively. That is, for both of them, to act only becomes possible through the ability to represent what one is doing discursively. This is not to say that acting is a process that begins by representing to oneself what one is going to do.2 Neither philosopher sees the mind in that way, as a container of inner representations, and neither one characterizes agency primarily in terms of its causal processes. Indeed, they have genuine and substantial differences on how to think about the causal mechanisms that underlie action. But even though action takes place within a causal background, neither of them takes this to be what makes an action what it is. What distinguishes agency as such, rather, is its relationship to language.3 One might say, then, that they have opposed views of causality, but share a conception of practical reason. It takes a lot of abstraction from

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particulars to see that they share the same conception, but for both of them practical reason involves relating to the proper description of what one is doing, and without any ability to sustain such a relationship there is no action per se. In the first section I  present Kant’s views, leaving aside most of the details about practical reason and causality to focus on the discursive availability of action. I  contrast that picture of action with some elements of Hume’s views. Then, in Section 2, I offer three sets of arguments for aligning Nietzsche’s views with Kant’s. First, I  argue that Nietzsche characterizes agency as historical, reflexive and goal-​oriented, and as ‘commanding’ in ways that require discursive abilities. Second, I analyse Nietzsche’s critique of free will. I argue that although this critique is usually taken to involve the replacement of a false metaphysical cause of action with an accurate naturalistic one, it actually involves distinguishing three separate elements and identifying action with telic descriptions rather than antecedent causes. Third, I argue that Nietzsche’s treatment of actions as somehow ‘necessary’ in relation to grounds and his characterization of psychological elements such as ‘will’ and ‘drives’ show that he treats agency as a discursive phenomenon. In Section 3 I  discuss some the differences between Kant’s and Nietzsche’s positions and their importance for ethical understanding.

1.  Kant and the discursive availability of action The reason why one might take Kant to have a fundamentally different picture of agency from Nietzsche is that Kant takes agency to be supersensible. That is, for Kant actions as such cannot be empirically determined: if they were empirically determined, then they would be passively determined by causes outside the will rather than being spontaneous acts. If it exists, then, agency must lie outside of natural laws. Furthermore, since our experience is limited to what we can perceive as falling under natural laws, agency lies outside the bounds of our experience. Agency as such does not fit with the conditions under which we gain our knowledge of the empirical world, so it must belong elsewhere. It requires a different, merely intelligible kind of causality that must remain inexplicable to us. Kant does not, however, offer a theory of supersensible agency that explains the non-​natural causes that induce actions. This aspect of Kant’s account functions rather as an empty placeholder to mark out the conceptual space for something that cannot be understood empirically, but cannot be understood in an alternative, non-​empirical way either. Rather than providing a substantive account of suprasensible causality, then, Kant is pointing out that even

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though his account of agency does not fit within his account of experience, we can nevertheless appeal to an understanding of agency in order to make sense of further things that are dependent on it  –​or at any rate our conception of ourselves as rational agents. So Kant does not make ontological claims and then derive the conception of agency from those; rather, he specifies his conception of agency and then leaves a blank space for its ontological status. As Henry Allison (1990:  45)  puts it, ‘[T]‌he transcendental idea of freedom, which provides the content to the otherwise empty thought of an intelligible character, has a merely regulative, explanatory function’. Kant is committed to some kind of metaphysical claim about human agency, but what is primary for him –​the way that it makes sense to us –​is in terms of how it functions in making sense of ourselves and our practical deliberations. Kant’s picture of agency proceeds, then, not from an unknowable metaphysics but from an analysis of what it would mean to act and, in particular, to act on a reason. What makes actions distinctive from other kinds of events is that they are done for reasons. Accordingly, they need to be accounted for not just from a standpoint external to the action, but in their very performance. One grasps the performance of an action, that is, by conceptualizing it in the agent’s own terms rather than in terms of movements that could be impersonally described; what one takes oneself to be doing is relevant to what sort of an action it is (cf. KpV 81). All this is complicated in Kant’s position by the unknowability of our ultimate grounds of acting. But the fundamental element is that discursive capacities are made effective in the performance of actions. In particular, Kant insists, ‘The will is thought as a faculty of determining oneself to acting according to the representation of certain laws’ (GMS 427). To act, then, requires not only that one’s activity must make sense in terms of articulable content  –​for Kant, the representation of laws –​but this discursive content even serves as the ground of action. From Nietzsche’s perspective, Kant commits himself to leaving a metaphysical space for freedom because he sees no other way to put his picture of agency into the world. That is, Kant posits a kind of ‘anti-​natural causality’ (A 25, KSA 6.194) because he takes that to be a requirement for fitting agency into a world of experience. Kant takes nature to be a ‘connection of appearances . . . according to necessary laws’ (KrV A216/​B263), so understanding actions as natural events requires treating them as ‘the relation of the subject of causality to the effect’ (KrV A205/​B250) in order to fit them into nature. What Nietzsche objects to, however, is the causal framework into which actions are fit rather than the picture of agency. Nietzsche sometimes conflates the framework of law-​governed

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causality and the distinctiveness of actions as grounded in agents’ reasons, for example, in his discussion of ‘mental causes’ (TI Four Great Errors 3, KSA 6.90–​ 1). However, it is important to see that the primary dispute with Kant is not about agency but in thinking that one has to accommodate agency into a ‘mythologically’ (BGE 21, KSA 5.36) derived picture of law-​like causal connection. Nietzsche’s disagreement, that is, is not just with the idea of fitting reasons into a causal picture, but with the very idea that nature is causally structured. He takes the idea of events following laws to be an unforgivable anthropomorphism, and in general he takes causality to be a projection of order that is convenient for the purposes of manipulating the world and discussing it with others, but that does not reflect how the world actually is. He writes, ‘One should not mistakenly reify “cause” and “effect”, as the natural scientists do [. . .]. One should make use of “cause” and “effect” only [. . .] as fictions for the purpose of designation, of communication, not of explanation’ (BGE 21, KSA 5.35–​6). In Nietzsche’s view, then, Kant’s conception of intelligible causality is just an artefact of a view about nature that Nietzsche rejects. Kant’s picture of agency does not stem from the view of nature that Nietzsche finds wrong-​headed, however, but from his conception of practical reason. The fundamental feature of agency, or ‘will’, involves self-​determination rather than letting oneself be passively determined by external factors. There are other elements of Kant’s account of agency: how the determinations of the will engage with motives and desires, for example. But the distinctiveness of action lies in its active and reflexive character, and what counts as active and reflexive is determination in accordance with reasons. When someone determines a course of action, she does so by representing a law to herself. That is, she takes a reason into consideration in the form of a representation of the appropriate principle. Furthermore, this representation serves as the determining ground of action; she acts on that basis. The distinguishing feature of agents is therefore that they act according to the reasons that they take up. For Kant, the only reasons that truly count as self-​determined are moral ones. Action in the fullest sense requires that one is determined by a law that one gives oneself, and only the moral law can play that role since only the moral law is unconditioned by any external incentives. The conditions for acting autonomously are the same as the conditions for acting morally; ‘a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same’ (GMS 447), according to Kant. Of course, not all actions are moral actions, but for Kant that just provides insight as to why non-​moral action is defective. Action in general is a form of legislation made effective, articulating the principled ground of action and carrying it

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out. In failing to set ends morally, one takes up the task of legislation but fails at it, either by subordinating one’s will to laws borrowed from elsewhere or by neglecting one’s law-​giving capacities more profoundly by failing to adopt reasons at all. We can leave aside Kant’s insistence that freedom and moral autonomy are ‘reciprocal concepts’ (GMS 447), however, and still retain his account of actions as events that fall under a rational description. To understand an action, then, one has to understand it in terms of the reason for which it is done. Understanding a reason for an action, in turn, is a matter of considering the description on the basis of which it was adopted. All events can be described, but for actions the descriptions are internal to what they are. Helping someone in need is more than bringing it about that someone badly off becomes better off, and keeping a promise is not just the absence of another’s disappointment. There is no way to account for these kinds of performances except by seeing them under the appropriate descriptions. Seeing the why of an action is needed merely to identify what is being done in its performance. This, then, is the discursive availability of action. Most animals behave in various and complex ways, but only concept-​using creatures who are capable of responding to the world in discursively mediated ways can act. Agents must be able to represent reasons to themselves and to adopt some of these reasons. They must, furthermore, be able to make them effective in the world, in the sense of having reasons explain why an agent does something. This is not to say that every action starts from the conscious presence of a reason, or that particular inner states determine the course of action that they represent. The causal picture could be quite complex, and there is room for considerable dispute on what it means to have a reason. Agents, however, have abilities that are best characterized in discursive terms, and explanations of the exercise of these abilities appeal to the reasons that agents adopt. Action is only possible through discursive capacities because agency is an intrinsically discursive phenomenon. One can turn to Hume’s views on motivation and action for an illustration of a contrary view. For Hume (1992), actions, like all other events, follow from regularities in nature. Actions are distinct from other natural events only in that they stem from persons’ ‘motives’ and ‘tempers’ (400). Hume distinguishes sharply between representational perceptions of the mind and motivational ones, and keeps their roles entirely separate. Representational perceptions cannot by themselves result in action. Purely non-​representational impressions, that is, ‘passions’, are what do that work. Hume explains his conception of passion as follows:  ‘A passion is an original existence, or, if you will, modification of

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existence, and contains not any representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification’ (415; emphasis added). Our reason employs ideas to show us how the world is, but passion moves to action without being about anything at all. This view of motivating perceptions threatens to render the connection between distinctively mental states and actions unintelligible. On this view, a desire for ice cream, a passion for gardening or joy at one’s good news has no real connection with its object. A desire for ice cream, for example, could just be a blind urge that happens to be satisfied in some way by ice cream, but that particular means of satisfaction is incidental to the desire itself. Even if we could make sense of desire, passion, emotion and so on as directionless urges in this way, it is hard to see how they could count as mental states. Indeed, Hume (1992: 415) suggests as much when he compares passions to being ‘more than five feet tall’, a state which is of course not about anything. Passions resemble other ‘modifications’ of body such as being pushed or heated more than they do representational states. The soundness of this view is not the topic of this chapter, however. My aim is to show that Nietzsche did not share this view, but rather agreed with Kant on the discursive availability of action.

2.  Nietzsche and the discursive availability of action At times it might seem as if Nietzsche rejects the Kantian view of the discursive availability of action. In particular, when he rejects ‘free will’, he seems to do so in favour of a Humean account in which the only explanantia of actions are non-​discursive mental states and processes. Nietzsche’s rejection of ‘the error of free will’ (HH 39, KSA 2.63) is in fact one of the few features of his thought that extends throughout his work, from early to late. In making this error one fails to recognize the necessary basis by which all events occur, and this basis might be better explained in terms of chemistry (HH 1, KSA 2.23) or physics (GS 335, KSA 3.563–​4). To be sure, Nietzsche’s thought changes over time, but in general it might seem as if he is committed to a form of naturalism in which there is no room for human beings’ discursive capacities to play a distinctive role. Of course such capacities would themselves have a causal explanation and they would interact with their environment, but they would do so in ways that could in turn be explained in deeper, non-​discursive naturalistic terms. Discursive capacities could be explained, but would do no explanatory work themselves.

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At the same time, however, Nietzsche makes a number of claims that seem to endorse the Kantian view of the discursive availability of agency. That is, Nietzsche does not explicitly endorse or even formulate a position on the discursive availability of agency, but in his typical discussions of agency he characterizes it in ways that have it depend on discursive abilities. There are four basic ways in which Nietzsche does this: he characterizes agency as involving the past and memory, as involving reflexive attitudes, as involving goals and as involving a form of commanding. First, Nietzsche frequently characterizes agency as historical. For example, he writes that ‘we need [history] for acting’ (HL Preface, KSA 1.245) and that acting requires ‘a real memory of the will’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.292). This suggests that the past influences human behaviour not merely causally, but as it were ‘ideologically’:  the possibility of agency depends on how one represents oneself in relation to the past, or on how the past is retained in memory. This, too, could perhaps be thought in causal terms. For example, memory might function to trigger a behaviour, or the prevalence of a historically given tradition might generate certain outcomes. However, this would still have to work through discursive representation: there cannot be historical memory without an articulation of the past. A purely causal picture would also have trouble accounting for the role that Nietzsche assigns to forgetting (HL 1, KSA 1.248 ff.; GM II 1, KSA 5.291 ff.). ‘Forgetting’, Nietzsche writes, ‘belongs to all acting’ (HL 1, KSA 1.250). Forgetting, that is, itself has a pervasive substantial role; it does not merely counteract the effects of memory, but changes the representation of acting. Nietzsche’s idea of history is not just of states of affairs that are no longer, or old causal antecedents, but a selectively remembered past that continues to furnish possibilities for the description of action. So insofar as agency requires historical memory, it requires discursive capacities. Second, agency involves reflexive abilities. There does not seem to be a specific or stable set of reflexive attitudes that Nietzsche associates with agency, but there are a lot of them. The simplest account appears in ‘On the Use and Abuse of History for Life’: ‘Every agent loves his deed infinitely more than it deserves to be loved’ (HL 1, KSA 1.254). The claim is universal, about all agents, and offers a primarily axiological point about actions. Nietzsche is not explicit, but he seems to be identifying a motivational requirement on acting, that it demands ‘love’ for what one is doing that is unmerited from an objective perspective. In any case, it requires the agent to love his deed, and for an agent to love his deed, he must at least be able to represent it to himself. Agency involves having available some description of what one is doing as one is doing it. Nietzsche does not, I think,

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make such a general claim elsewhere, but he frequently discusses activity in other reflexive terms, as maintaining a relationship to oneself in doing what one is doing. For example, he discusses self-​possession (HL 10, KSA 1.324 ff.), self-​ organization (HL 10, KSA 1.324 ff.), self-​liberation (WB 11, KSA 1.506 ff.), self-​ cultivation (D 560, KSA 3.296), self-​conquest (HH 55, KSA 2.74–​5; A 57, KSA 6.241–​4), self-​transformation (GS 291, KSA 3.531–​2), self-​overcoming (GM III 16, KSA 5.375–​7), self-​enhancement (BGE 262, KSA 5.214–​17) and self-​mastery (A 38, KSA 6.209–​11). Most if not all of these would require the agent to make use of her discursive capacities to represent herself and her activity to herself. Third, agency involves having goals, and having a goal seems to require having the discursive capacity to represent a desired state of affairs. This point is prominent in the third essay of the Genealogy, for example, where Nietzsche writes, ‘The fundamental fact of the human will [. . .] it needs a goal –​and it would rather will nothingness than not will’ (GM III 1, KSA 5.339). I  take Nietzsche’s use of ‘will’ here to mean what I am referring to as ‘agency’. It must mean something less like Arthur Schopenhauer’s notion of impersonal striving and more like Kant’s notion of practical reason giving ends to itself for the simple reason that ‘will’ involves goals. The story of the third essay is about the ends that human beings adopt, how those ends are taken to be valuable and how human beings come to see themselves in light of these ends; it is not about an impersonal force that underlies appearance. The will’s goals, furthermore, furnish discursive content. In the Genealogy, for example, the ascetic ideal, in providing a goal for the human will, offers ‘meaning’ (GM III 28, KSA 5.411) and an ‘interpretation’ (GM III 23, KSA 5.395–​6) of human existence. The fourth basic way in which Nietzsche characterizes agency as depending on discursive abilities is that it involves relationships of ‘commanding and obeying’ (BGE 19) among the agent’s psychic elements. Nietzsche writes, ‘[I]‌n every act of the will there is a ruling thought’ (BGE 19, KSA 5.32–​3), and elsewhere he attributes competition for authority to other psychic elements such as drives (D 109, KSA 3.96–​9) and affects (BGE 117, KSA 5.93). He has little to remark about the functioning of the process other than to say it is ‘something complicated’ (BGE 19, KSA 5.32), but it would seem to require discursive capacities. At any rate, commanding and obeying require commands and the recognition of those commands; ruling thoughts must be discursive in nature. Of course, these four ways in which Nietzsche characterizes agency as only discursively available could all be misleading. Nietzsche could be writing loosely, in ways that depart from his considered position; he could be employing metaphors that are not meant to be taken too literally; or he could be invoking

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processes and phenomena that are themselves to be explained by appeal to a deeper causal level. If we look at what Nietzsche rejects in the idea of ‘free will’ that he polemicizes against, however, then Nietzsche’s view on the discursive availability of action becomes clearer. A simplistic way of understanding Nietzsche’s critique of free will would be this. In the traditional picture, the agent forms intentions that are immediately available within consciousness, and these intentions are causally productive of actions independent of any other factors. But the traditional picture is wrong because something non-​rational, other than conscious intention, is productive of action. So the critique would consist in replacing a false causal factor with the actual one. That is not Nietzsche’s approach, however. Nietzsche takes the position that there are three things that are typically conflated, and understanding agency requires distinguishing them. Nietzsche’s terminology varies, and he is not always consistent in his conceptions of them, but these three things are the ‘driving force’ (GS 360, KSA 3.607), the ‘directing force’ (GS 360, KSA 3.607) and the ‘intention’ (BGE 32, KSA 5.51).4 The ‘driving’ force comes from the machinery of the body, as it were, that operates when actions are performed. So to discuss the driving force involves identifying the ‘antecedents of deeds’ (TI Four Great Errors 3, KSA 6.90–​1), what ‘prompts’ (GS 44, KSA 3.410) action and ‘how human action is brought about’ (D 116, KSA 3.108–​9). The ‘directing’ force pertains to ‘acting in such a way, in a particular direction’ (GS 360, KSA 3.607). That is to say, this relates to the character of the action as performed. Nietzsche is typically concerned to say that it does not fit into a larger story about natural regularities –​one’s purposiveness is not an element in an explanation of the machinery of the body –​and that it always differs from avowed motives. ‘Intention’, as Nietzsche conceives of it, is an object of immediate conscious awareness: it is a representation of a course of action that is ‘seen, known, “conscious” ’ (BGE 32, KSA 5.51). Nietzsche’s critique, then, is to deny that these three things coincide: there is no object of consciousness that is productive of actions in ways that match its discursive content. The critique is not meant to replace an immediately known cause that does not exist with an unknown one that does. Each of the three elements remains independently interesting to Nietzsche, and none of them is interesting solely or even primarily as it fits into a causal description. Both driving force and directing force are part of our ‘spiritual workings’ (GS 333, KSA 3.559) and thus are to be considered in psychological terms. Nietzsche certainly wants to distinguish the driving force from intention: ‘[T]‌hinking that the origin of every action lies within consciousness’ (TI Four Great Errors 7, KSA

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6.95–​6) is a fundamental mistake. The intention remains interesting, however, as a ‘sign and symptom’ that ‘betrays something’ (BGE 32, KSA 5.51); even ‘fictitious and fanciful motives’ (GS 44, KSA 3.410), although not to be taken at face value, reveal something about human action. Nietzsche also wants to distinguish the ‘origin’ of the action from acting itself.5 Actions are not self-​transparent in Nietzsche’s view: they are ‘never what they appear to be’ (D 116, KSA 3.109), and thus cannot be identified with what Nietzsche calls ‘intentions’. But they are still to be characterized in terms of goals and purposes, even if unconscious ones. For understanding action as such, then, what precedes the action is not primarily important, nor what occurs in consciousness, but the purposive character of the action performed. What occurs in consciousness bears only the loosest relationship to what one is doing, and although the causal story is closely related, Nietzsche insists that understanding agency in causal terms is a mistake. This is his point when he writes that ‘ “unfree will” is a mythology’ and ‘amounts to a misuse of cause and effect’ (BGE 21, KSA 5.35). Just as it is a mistake to think of agency as free will, and thus in terms of a peculiar kind of unconditioned causality, so it is also a mistake to think of it as causally conditioned unfree will. The common mistake is looking to the sequence of causes that lead up to an action rather than the acting itself, so any account of ‘will’ that locates action in antecedent events is mistaken. Nietzsche declares that he prefers to think in terms of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ wills (BGE 21, KSA 5.36), that is, in terms of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness in pursuing ends rather than the causal conditions.6 Nietzsche’s critique of free will is compatible, then, with his endorsement of the Kantian view of the discursive availability of action. Nietzsche characterizes action primarily in terms of goals and aims rather than as the result of non-​ purposive, non-​discursive factors. There is no need to explain action in terms other than those that are internal to actions. Of course, there are cognitive ends that might be served by explaining action in terms of causal antecedents. It might help to anticipate the effect of an intervention or recognize the patterns in seemingly disconnected phenomena, for example. But having a causal story about action is different from understanding what actions are. Actions are best understood in terms of their purposiveness, as long as one does not conceive of purposes as causally effective objects of consciousness. This attention to purposiveness is why action is only discursively available for Nietzsche. Other animals lack language and discursive memory and thus, however sophisticated their behaviour, there is nothing for it to be about. Language and memory allow our behaviour to be about whatever might be thought and remembered. So rather than simply serving as responses to the

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immediate environment or as established dispositions, actions can, for example, reaffirm long-​standing commitments, manifest the character of an ongoing relationship or express the development of someone’s outlook on life. This in turn allows behaviour to count as selected rather than passively determined. Activity that is about something, by fitting into patterns of commitments and ends, can thereby meet the rational requirements of agents. Nietzsche’s account of action focuses on the character of activity itself, not what is temporally prior to activity or what predictably produces it. Activity takes on its distinctive character in relation to its point or purpose, and discursive abilities are what enable our behaviour to be goal-​directed and meaningful. This is further confirmed in Nietzsche’s discussions of drives and of grounds. Nietzsche’s most basic form of explanation is by appeal to drives. For him, psychological phenomena, if not all natural phenomena, can be explained as the product of various drives –​or sometimes ‘wills’ or ‘instincts’ –​competing with each other in particular environments; outcomes are expressions of this interaction. Although he seems less interested in the ontological claim, Nietzsche even insists that a ‘totality of drives’ is what ‘constitutes [one’s] being’ (D 119, KSA 3.111). Making sense of Nietzsche’s account requires distinguishing among separate drives, and what individuates a particular drive is its end. This is not a conscious end or even a personal one:  the drives move towards their ends regardless of whether anyone considers them or even whether they belong to anyone in particular. All the same, the drives have intentional content: a drive is distinguished by what it is directed to. They also stand in semantically complex relationships to each other. For example, Nietzsche writes about one drive ‘complaining about another’ (D 109, KSA 3.98; cf. GS 333, KSA 5.558–​9). One might think that these drives could be like Humean desires. That is, like Humean desires, they might just be directionless forces without intentional content, but capable of being characterized indirectly in terms of their objects, according to what happens to satisfy them. The idea of what satisfies or perhaps realizes a drive is, I think, more opaque than the idea of what satisfies a desire. But the more serious problem with trying to see drives as content-​less in this way is that in this case there is nothing else that could have content. The Humean view depends on a division of labour between content-​full representations that do not motivate and motivating perceptions that lack content. But Nietzsche cannot endorse such a split because representing, in his view, is inherently motivated, and because there is no non-​motivating mental entity to contrast with drives. The former point comes out when he writes of the ‘pathos of having truth’ (HH 633, KSA 2.359) or that ‘to eliminate the will altogether [. . .] would mean to

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castrate the intellect’ (GM III 12, KSA 5.365). The latter point comes out when, for example, Nietzsche writes, ‘The will to overcome an affect is ultimately only the will of another or several other affects’ (BGE 117, KSA 5.93). Nietzsche’s picture of agency cannot be that of representational thought interacting with non-​representational motives because there is no such dichotomy. There are not two separate kinds of mental things carrying out such a division of labour. Every element of the human psyche is discursively structured, and there is no split between what represents and what motivates. One other point at which to see that agency, for Nietzsche, is only discursively available is in his treatment of grounds and necessity. Nietzsche’s account of grounds is difficult to pick out from the texts, especially in translation: the German ‘Grund’ is sometimes rendered ‘ground’, sometimes ‘reason’ and sometimes even ‘foundation’. And Nietzsche sometimes discusses grounds as that which is ‘furnished’ (BGE 289, KSA 5.234) to try to prove or justify a claim to others, and sometimes reserves the term for the deeper basis of a claim or viewpoint. Nevertheless, grounds become an especially prominent topic when moral psychology meets history. Nietzsche’s story of Socratism and the ascetic ideal revolve around attempts to furnish grounds for ways of life. These attempts fail to provide ultimate or conclusive justifications for any ideal, but they have a psychological effect: ‘grounds relieve’ (GM III 20, KSA 5.389). In producing this effect, furthermore, they produce deeper transformations, by making human beings into the kinds of creatures who recognize grounds, have ‘abysmally deep’ (BGE 289, KSA 5.234) grounds and alter their relationship to their grounds and adopt novel grounds. Other animals have grounds in some sense, but as agents we are susceptible to the ‘bindingness of reason’ (D 453, KSA 3.274). Nietzsche accordingly accounts for this development in terms of the ‘prerogative of making promises’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.291). In making promises we take on discursive commitments and these commitments impose a kind of necessity that is not causal. These commitments can thereby come to serve as grounds for action. Kant’s discussion of this issue fits well here:  ‘Reason does not . . . follow the order of things as they exhibit themselves in appearance, but spontaneously makes for itself an order of its own . . . according to which it declares actions to be necessary, even though they have never taken place and perhaps never will take place’ (KrV A548/​B576). There is a distinct kind of necessity that is both practical and rational. For Nietzsche, ‘this is precisely the long story of how responsibility originated’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293), while for Kant there is no story about this to be told –​our recognition of rational demands is simply a brute fact. But for both Kant and Nietzsche, the

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ability to make discursive commitments and thereby subject oneself to necessity allows a person to stand in a distinctive relationship to her behaviour. Through discursive commitments one can take on responsibility and become the agent of one’s deeds. For Nietzsche, to act is to make use of discursive capacities. This is not to say that actions begin with a monologue inside private mental space, or that he treats actions as an exemption from the normal causal order. Rather, action as such needs to be accounted for on its own goal-​directed terms; to act is to have reasons and to undertake commitments. The capacity to act is fully part of nature: it is the result of a historical process of development and embodied in drives and instincts. This natural capacity is nevertheless discursive.

3.  Differences between Kant and Nietzsche The many deep disagreements between Kant and Nietzsche about agency conceal the fundamental way in which Nietzsche adopts Kant’s approach. Although Nietzsche could have taken on a more mechanistic view of action, he treats agency as something available only to concept-​using creatures who set ends. This basis of agreement nevertheless allows Kant and Nietzsche to differ in innumerable ways, and attending to some of these differences can help show how they stem from a common basis. So in this section I  shall discuss three of the main disagreements between Kant and Nietzsche on agency:  on the nature of the discursivity that underwrites agency, on the connection between acting and “the inner” and on the nature of our self-​ knowledge as agents. The first main difference is the nature of the discursivity. For Kant there is a single general form of description under which all action falls. Actions take the form of conformity to a principle of volition and action in the fullest sense, freed from extrinsic interests, the form of a ‘bare conformity to law in general’ (GMS 420; cf. KpV 27). There are of course infinitely many ways for actions to fall under this description and thereby to satisfy the requirements of moral autonomy. This descriptive form is not only common to action as such, however, but also what makes it what it is. For Nietzsche, by contrast, the descriptions that constitute action as such are historically available. As historical, they come in a diversity of forms without a single underlying structure and are hermeneutically complex. For Kant the demands of autonomous action seem to be relatively unambiguous: the proper description of actions and the content of the

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moral law, once derived, are uncontroversial. But for Nietzsche the historicity of actions leaves deep questions about the basic terms by which we can make sense of our activity, about the meanings of those terms and about whether the vocabulary of our self-​descriptions is suitable to account for what we do. Nietzsche does not give a general account of the hermeneutic complexity of acting, but we can find elements of it if we recall his discussion of history and memory. Whereas for Kant our concepts gain their content through what is given in intuition, for Nietzsche our concepts gain their content through the social and historical phenomenon of language. Language retains a kind of memory of old practices so that one can act on descriptions that connect what one is doing in the present to the activities of the past. Nietzsche’s most elaborate example of this is the concept of punishment, which he claims contains ‘a whole synthesis of “meanings” ’ (GM II 13, KSA 5.317) so as to make it ‘impossible to say determinately why anyone is actually punished’ (GM II 13, KSA 5.317). And as Nietzsche points out, this kind of memory extends forward as well as backward. Just as promising allows one to ‘vouch for oneself as future’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.292), the meaning of present discourse depends on the extension of practices beyond what can now be foreseen. This dependence on memory is also what makes the discursive availability of action historically variable in Nietzsche’s case. The discursive resources available to a particular agent to make sense of her own action are different from those available to her or to others at different times. Nietzsche does not have a story about which standpoint to privilege in understanding an action; at least sometimes an agent only understands her actions retrospectively, and sometimes it takes an entirely separate point of view to understand what someone else has done. There might indeed be no stable privileged position on action. And even if there were a privileged standpoint, to make sense of it would require a historical understanding of the concepts it employs. The language of agency is ‘semiotically concentrated’ (GM II 13, KSA 5.317) in a way that takes history to engage with. Nietzsche’s famous example is the concept of punishment, but he intends his point generally. Our concepts synthesize ideas and processes that cannot be disentangled and articulated separately; our actions accordingly require a diachronic account to make sense of their meanings. The second main difference between Kant’s and Nietzsche’s discussions of agency is in how they characterize the relationship between acting and ‘the inner’. For Kant, the source of agency has to be internally represented principles: what counts is the ability to give a law to oneself. As such an internal law-​giving, it is not accessible to empirical understanding, and so can be deceived about the

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ground of our behaviour. But ‘the agent’s internal principle’ is what ‘determines the proper description of the action’ (Uleman 2010: 35). For Nietzsche, by contrast, there seems to be no clear sense in which action proceeds from inner to outer. That is, there is no independent inner content that subsequently becomes somehow externalized. Although action is characterized in terms of aims, goals and reasons, these are all features of actions as performed; there is no way to separate the discursive characteristics of actions from the ways that they manifest themselves. This difference in views on the inner does not depend on views about consciousness: neither of them take conscious awareness to play an important role in agency. For Kant, what we are aware of is mediated through our faculties of representation. Our conscious experience depends on forming judgements, so the scope of the mental extends beyond objects of inner awareness. Even in our thinking about our own thinking, we can only know how we appear to ourselves and not how we really are.7 For Nietzsche, however, there is not simply an epistemic issue about self-​awareness. There seems to be a radically diminished role for a unified subject: ‘there is no substratum; there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; the “doer” is merely poeticized after the fact’ (GM I 13, KSA 5.279).8 Nietzsche is not rejecting the subject altogether, but only the idea of the subject as a ‘neutral substratum’ (GM I 13, KSA 5.279) that supports a privileged inner space. He wants to exclude the idea that we understand actions by understanding something separate that takes place within agents. On the contrary, he insists that we understand agents, if at all, by considering actions. The third main difference concerns their conceptions of agents’ self-​ knowledge. Kant and Nietzsche share the idea that we are ‘unknown to ourselves’ (GM Preface 1, KSA 5.247) and that ‘the real morality of actions . . . remains entirely hidden from us’ (KrV A551/​B579; cf. GMS 406). But the reasons for their views are fundamentally different. For Kant, there is a determinate answer to what the ultimate ground and thus the merit of any of our actions is, but it remains permanently inaccessible to us because it falls outside the empirical conditions of our understanding. So there is something determinate about ourselves that we would like to know, but it transcends our cognitive powers. Nietzsche also concedes something analogous to Kant’s view, that ‘actions are never what they appear to us to be’ (D 116, KSA 3.109) because their source is inaccessible. But for Nietzsche this epistemic challenge is not the last word. For him, self-​knowledge is not a matter of gaining access to something hidden, but of finding oneself in what one has done. ‘Action pulls us away from ourselves’ (D 549, KSA 3.319), writes Nietzsche: it creates a difficulty in reconciling what one

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is with the public significance of the performed deed. However mysterious the source of action might be, this still leaves the hermeneutic and pragmatic challenge of making sense of actions in relation to the person who performs them. An agent’s self-​knowledge is primarily about what her actions mean. In any case, this reinforces Kant and Nietzsche’s view on the discursive availability of action. Their shared position on the inaccessibility of the ultimate source of action shows that neither one thought that such access was required for the ordinary ways that we make sense of agency. Deliberating, offering reasons, assigning responsibility, interpreting motives and so on can all be carried out without recourse to ultimate sources because these are all familiar discursive activities. To be sure, Kant and Nietzsche have different understandings of discourse and its place in nature and self-​knowledge, but they share the view that action is a fundamentally discursive phenomenon.

4.  Conclusion One of Kant’s great innovations was to provide a novel synthesis of two traditions in thinking about agency. For Kant, understanding action is both a question of understanding its source and understanding its rational and discursive character. But since the source is irremediably mysterious, it was the discursive character that was primary: principles are what make actions possible as such. Nietzsche was able to differ with Kant on so many different philosophical issues –​ nature, causality, language, philosophical method –​and still maintain a critical engagement with him because he appropriated this most basic element of Kant’s account of agency. To act involves having aims, goals and reasons; action is only discursively available. For Kant his own synthesis raises a metaphysical question about how it could be that rational, discursive content could serve as the determining ground of natural events. For Nietzsche, by contrast, the discursive availability of action raises social and historical questions about how the possibilities of agency have been established in human communities. But for both of them, the description of actions as such is internal to their possibility. For both Kant and Nietzsche, furthermore, understanding agency is central to ethical assessment. To understand an action’s merit requires having the proper description and understanding what it means. Kant takes this to be a relatively straightforward matter. To assess an action one does not need to

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know its outcome, but only situate it under a principle of will and that principle under the supreme law of morality. For Nietzsche, the hermeneutic demands are more acute. On the one hand, an individual action is open to description from countless different, endlessly revisable perspectives. On the other hand, the very authority of the language of agency is in doubt. Meaningful reasons for action and the ability to make sense of ourselves as responsible depend on a context and commitments that might be lost; nothing might count as agency anymore. Nietzsche’s interest in the ethical is not in a single dimension of morality, but in opening up meaningful possibilities of action and engaging in them.9

Notes 1 Strawson (2006: 38–​42 and part four). For an example of a reading of Nietzsche that sees him as retaining Kantian positions without the questionable metaphysics, see Clark (1990). For an example of a reading of Nietzsche that sees him as focusing his criticism on Kant’s model of agency, see Katsafanas (2012). 2 Nietzsche criticizes this idea specifically at WS 236 and WS 297, KSA 2.659 and 687, inter alia. 3 Kant prefers to discuss the conceptual as a mental phenomenon rather than language as such, but this makes no difference for thinking about the importance of discourse. 4 An example of Nietzsche’s terminological inconsistency is that ‘motive’ is sometimes equivalent to one of the first two, as in GS 44, KSA 3.410–​11, and sometimes to the third, as when it is ‘merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness’ (TI Four Great Errors 3, KSA 6.84–​5). 5 See Robert Pippin’s (2006: 134) treatment of this issue in terms of the ‘determinate factors . . . “behind” and “before” the deed’. 6 This association of agency with the notion of strength rather than causality is echoed in GM II 12, KSA 5.313–​16, where Nietzsche complains about the ‘modern misarchism’ which robs life of the ‘fundamental concept of acting’ in favour of the ‘mechanistic senselessness of all events’. 7 For discussions of the limits of self-​knowledge, see Keller (1999: 102) on the ‘idealist interpretation of self-​knowledge’ and Ameriks (1982: 257) on the ‘ideality of our self-​knowledge’. 8 For extended discussion of this point, see Pippin (2006). 9 I am greatly indebted to Tom Bailey, Jenn Dum, Randall Havas, Edgar Valdez and Melissa Zinkin for their valuable suggestions and criticisms.

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References Allison, H. E. (1990), Kant’s Theory of Freedom, New York: Cambridge University Press. Ameriks, K. (1982), Kant’s Theory of Mind, New York: Oxford University Press. Clark, M. (1990), Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, New York: Cambridge University Press. Hume, D. (1992), A Treatise of Human Nature, New York: Oxford University Press. Katsafanas, P. (2012), ‘Nietzsche on Agency and Self-​Ignorance’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 43 (1): 5–​17. Keller, P. (1999), Kant and the Demands of Self-​Consciousness, New York: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, R. B. (2006), ‘Lightning and Flash, Agent and Deed (GM I:6–​17)’, in C. D. Acampora (ed.), Nietzsche’s on the Genealogy of Morals, 131–​45, New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Strawson, P. F. (2006), The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, New York: Routledge. Uleman, J. K. (2010), An Introduction to Kant’s Moral Philosophy, New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Kant’s ‘Respect for the Law’ as the ‘Feeling of Power’ On (the Illusion of) Sovereignty Herman Siemens

This chapter revisits the figure of the ‘sovereign individual’ in GM II 2 and the controversy in Nietzsche scholarship surrounding its status  –​whether it describes Nietzsche’s ideal of autonomous agency, or the moral ideal of modernity against which his critique of morality in GM and elsewhere is ranged. The first interpretation invites a comparison with Kant’s ideal of moral autonomy, but raises the question of why Nietzsche should align himself with Kant’s morality here, when he is otherwise one of its fiercest critics. In avoiding this problem the second interpretation must, however, address Nietzsche’s emphatic use of moral vocabulary both here (‘sovereign’, ‘responsibility’, ‘conscience’) and throughout GM. Indeed, any interpretation of this figure must confront the question: What are we to make of Nietzsche’s emphatic, apparently affirmative use of moral terms in GM, given his call for a ‘critique of moral values’ (GM Preface 6, KSA 5.253) and his project to translate moral values back into their ‘natural “immorality” ’?1 This question will be approached through a comparative analysis of GM II 2 focused on ‘the sovereign individual’ and chapter III of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (KpV): ‘Of the Motives of Pure Practical Reason’. For obvious reasons, it is normal to interpret the sovereign individual in connection with the themes of autonomy, promising and commitment. Yet this leaves out a crucial question:  How to account for the act itself by which the sovereign individual finally redeems its promise? What is the motive or Triebfeder for this promised act to occur in the moment it does? In order to address this

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question, I begin (Section 1) with an analysis of ‘respect for the law’ (Achtung fürs Gesetz) as the motive for moral action in Kant’s KpV chapter III, arguing that there is a difficulty, a temporal knot, in his account. After sketching a possible solution (in the Interlude), I  then fill it out (Section 2) with reference to Nietzsche’s account of the sovereign individual in GM II 1–​2. My thesis is that the dynamics of memory and forgetting in Nietzsche’s account help to disentangle the temporal knot in Kant’s story, while on the other hand Kant’s account of Achtung helps to explain the motive for the redeeming act in Nietzsche’s story. The guiding intuition behind this comparative analysis is that Kantian Achtung and the sovereign individual’s ‘consciousness of power and freedom’ are both based on the same judgement: that freedom is advanced through the overcoming of resistances. In Nietzsche’s Nachlass notes on physiology, however, this judgement is exposed as a misunderstanding of the body, a form of self-​deception. Yet it does not follow that the concepts of freedom and will are emptied of value by Nietzsche. In the end, I argue, the question of freedom is naturalized by Nietzsche as the question: How to make the feeling of power more substantial and less illusory?

1.  Kant on the motives of pure practical reason (KpV chapter III) Most broadly, the problem faced by Kant in chapter III of KpV, ‘Of the Motives (Triebfeder) of Pure Practical Reason’, is how pure practical reason can be a motive for action at all. For Kant, the moral worth of actions requires that pure practical reason be the sole and immediate motive for action; for only if the moral law determines the will immediately can the will be said to be free (free of influence by other sensible motives). In concrete terms, it means that every action that is morally worthy is determined by the ‘universalisability test’, in which reason tests the ‘adaptability [Tauglichkeit] of our maxims to universal legislation’ (KpV 74); in this sense, every moral action is, in Geiger’s words, ‘a first’2 . This is problematic for at least two reasons. First, as the young Hegel already noted, we all know that it is the passions or inclinations that move us to act; practical reason, in its Kantian discursive purity stripped of all force or power (Kraft), simply cannot be practical (cf. Geiger 2007: 28). It is problematic, secondly, on the Kantian grounds that ‘we cannot know [. . .] the force [Kraft] of the pure

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practical law as motive’ (KpV 78), since we are in the realm of the noumenal. As Kant puts the problem: For as to how a law can be of itself and immediately a determining ground of the will (which is the essence of all morality), this is, for human reason, an insoluble problem and identical with the question: how a free will is possible. (KpV 72)

In a sense the first problem is a consequence of the all-​too-​sharp division or diremption (Entzweiung), as the young Hegel put it, between reason and the inclinations in Kant’s thought. In these terms, what Kant needs is a mediating third (analogous to the problem of schematism in KrV) that can make plausible his claim that pure reason can be practical by involving some kind of passionate element or feeling in the motivational story of moral action. Only, it must be very peculiar kind of feeling or passion, one that plays into the motivation of moral action as a sensible, passionate mobile without however impinging on or interfering in the immediate determination of the will by the moral law: a feeling that somehow ‘promotes [beförderlich ist] the influence of the law on the will’ (KpV 75) without preceding the law, without tainting the purity of practical reason or the freedom of the will with ‘sensible feeling’; without mediating the immediate relation between the law and the will. In short, it must be a motive for moral action, without really being a motive. The candidate chosen by Kant for this impossible task is, of course, the notion of respect for the law, ‘Achtung fürs Gesetz’. Unsurprisingly, Kant’s account of Achtung culminates in the claims that Achtung ‘is not a motive to morality’ (KpV 76), but also that it ‘serves as a motive to make it [the moral law] of itself a maxim’ (KpV 76). But this is too rough and ready to be fair to Kant, so we should see how he builds up his argument. Kant begins by reiterating two principles already established: (1) that ‘what is essential in the moral worth of actions is that the moral law should immediately determine the will’ (KpV 71) and (2) that ‘what is essential in every determination of the will by the moral law is that being a free will it is determined by the moral law alone [blos]’ (KpV 72). In order to secure the first principle, Kant resolves not to investigate ‘the ground whence the moral law of itself provides a motive’, lest the intellectual sources or ‘spirit of the law’ be compromised by a feeling for the law. Instead he will ask how the moral law can be a motive by focusing on the effect it produces on our faculty of desire, our disposition (Gemueth), our feelings (KpV 72). It will, in other words, be assumed that the moral law can motivate the will, and the investigation will begin ‘after the event’, so to speak. The second principle brings Kant face to face with the second, epistemological problem that we cannot have knowledge of free will. How then can

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the freedom of the will in its determination by the moral law alone be exhibited? Kant’s solution is to leave out cases where our sensible impulses might concur (einstimmen) and cooperate (mitwirken) with the moral law, and to consider only the effect of the moral law on feeling where it conflicts with our inclinations and sensible impulses (sinnliche Antriebe). This gives Kant his first result:  in cases where the determination of the will by the moral law requires rejecting (Abweisung) all sensible impulses, and ‘breaking’ or ‘checking’ (Abbruch) ‘all inclinations so far as they might be opposed to that law’ (KpV 72), the very real, ‘empirical’ effect on our feeling is negative: the pain of frustrated desires or inclinations. All feelings that precede the moral law are affected, whether natural (self-​love  –​ Selbstliebe) or not (self-​conceit  –​Eigendünkel):  self-​love is broken or interrupted (Abbruch) by being limited (eingeschraenkt) to rational self-​love (that is in agreement –​Einstimmung –​with the law); self-​conceit is struck down (niedergschlagen) (KpV 73). This move enables Kant to connect the moral law with feeling across the supersensible–​sensible divide in a compelling way –​we all are familiar with cases where our (perceived) duties conflict with our desires  –​without having to posit a feeling for the law that precedes it and fights on its behalf, so to speak.3 For, ‘the negative effect produced on feeling (by the check on the inclinations) is itself feeling’ (KpV 73). And although we cannot have knowledge of ‘the force of pure practical reason as a motive’, we certainly can know this negative feeling and by it, ‘the resistance’ the law offers ‘to motives of sensibility’.4 To the extent that we falsely identify our affective or ‘pathologically determinable self ’ with our entire self (KpV 74), this negative feeling is tantamount to humiliation (Demüthigung) or what Kant also calls intellectual (self-​)contempt (intellektuelle Verachtung) (KpV 75): Thus the moral law inevitably humiliates every man when he compares with it the sensible propensities [sinnlichen Hang] of his nature. (KpV 195)

On its own, however, this is unsatisfactory, since it gives the moral law a purely negative signature in our affective life. Enter respect or Achtung, the term Kant reserves for the positive feeling evoked by the moral law as motive: But as this law is something positive in itself, namely, the form of an intellectual causality, that is, of freedom, it must be an object of respect; for, by opposing the subjective antagonism [Widerspiele] of the inclinations, it weakens self-​conceit; and since it even breaks down [niederschlägt], that is,

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humiliates [demüthigt], this conceit, it is an object of the highest respect and, consequently, is the ground of a positive feeling which is not of empirical origin, but is known a priori. Therefore respect for the moral law is a feeling which is produced by an intellectual cause, and this feeling is the only one that we know quite a priori and the necessity of which we can perceive [einsehen]. (KpV 73)

I would like to draw attention to three things in this passage. It is important to note, first, that Achtung is real feeling; for only then can it be enlisted to strengthen Kant’s claim that pure reason can be practical.5 Kant thus writes that ‘the sensible feeling [das sinnliche Gefühl], which lies at the basis of all our inclinations, is indeed the condition [Bedingung] of that feeling [Empfindung] which we call respect’ (KpV 75). But a condition is not a cause, and Kant goes on: ‘But the cause that determines it lies in the pure practical reason; and this feeling [Empfindung] therefore, on account of its origin, must be called, not a pathological but practically-​effected [praktisch-​gewirkt]’ (KpV 75). It is important, secondly, that this positive feeling have an intellectual, and not an empirical source or cause, so that we need not posit a moral feeling for the law that precedes the law, jeopardizing its exclusive and immediate determination of the will. But how exactly are we to understand the intellectual source of this positive feeling, given that we cannot know the moral law or freedom, let alone feel them? In the passage cited above, Kant says that since the law, as the form of intellectual causality or freedom, is something positive, it must be the ground of a positive feeling; yet he also says, and must say, in order to secure this freedom from sensible influence, that ‘there is no feeling for this law’ (KpV 75). A clue is given in the above-​ cited passage, where it is important to note, thirdly, that the positive feeling of Achtung is bound up with the subjective antagonism of the inclinations and the prior negative feeling of humiliation or intellectual Verachtung. The feeling of Achtung for the law may be positive, but it seems to be predicated on or mediated by a negative feeling of Verachtung for our sensible nature. It is, Kant says, ‘an indirect effect’ of the moral law ‘on feeling, inasmuch as it [the moral law –​ HS] weakens the impeding influence of inclinations by humiliating self-​conceit’ (KpV 79; HS). Yet on its own, this tells us nothing about the intellectual source of Achtung. We come closer when we see that the positive feeling for freedom is tied to the resistance offered by the law to the antagonism of our inclinations. For this connection: freedom and resistance is a judgement or interpretation of reason. This is made clear at a number of points in Kant’s text6; I will consider one of them.

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After describing the negative effect of the moral law on feeling as humiliation or intellectual contempt (Verachtung), Kant writes: There is indeed no feeling for this law; but inasmuch as it removes the resistance out of the way, this removal of an obstacle is, in the judgement of reason, esteemed equivalent to a positive help to its causality.7

Here it is clear that the intellectual source of respect or Achtung is reason’s judgement that (1)  the painful feeling of self-​contempt or Verachtung is an effect of the motivational activity of the moral law on our will (against inclinations); (2) the success of the motivational activity of the moral law, signalled by Verachtung, is a sign that the moral law has overcome the resistance offered by our inclinations (our pathological self); and (3) the overcoming of this resistance or obstacle to the moral law as motive is equivalent to (gleichgeschaetzt), an advancement of the causality of freedom. Further on, Kant clarifies this third moment in reason’s judgement with reference to the quasi-​mechanistic principle: ‘Whatever reduces the obstacles to an activity advances this activity itself.’8 This principle, Kant argues, occasions a juxtaposition or transformation –​the text is not clear on this –​of feelings: the painful humiliation (Demüthigung) or feeling of contempt (Verachtung) for our sensible side, when judged by reason to be a sign that the resistance of our inclinations has been overcome by the motivational activity of the moral law (step 2), thereby advancing the causality or activity of freedom (step 3), gives rise to a positive9 feeling of elevation (Erhebung) in our esteem for the law on our intellectual side. This Erhebung is, in other words, Achtung fürs Gesetz. Yet it is clear that if we are to feel this Erhebung, a last step in the judgement of reason is needed, namely, (4) that we, who make the judgement of reason, are not just (or not at all) the sensible or pathological selves that feel humiliated by the moral law, but also (or rather) the intellectual selves or subjects of pure practical reason that feel elevated by the advancement of freedom. The very least one can say is that what Kant calls the judgement of reason (Urteile der Vernunft) is highly interpretative; or, to go one step further, that it should really be called the interpretation of reason or even a reinterpretation of the feeling of self-​contempt in the light of our consciousness of the moral law, a reinterpretation that reidentifies our self with the moral law over sensibility and so gives rise to a positive feeling of elevation or respect for the law in us. As the intellectual ground of the feeling of respect, this judgement or interpretation of reason is of crucial importance for Kant’s solution to the problem he is tackling in chapter III of the KpV. On the one hand, by producing a

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positive feeling or elevation or respect, it allows him to introduce a sensible, emotional dimension into his motivational story of morally worthy action, thereby lending greater strength to his claim that pure reason can be practical. Kant can therefore say that this ‘feeling [. . .] promotes the influence of the law on the will’ or even that ‘Achtung for the law is not a motive for morality, but it is morality itself, considered subjectively as motive [. . .]’ (KpV 75). On the other hand, as an intellectual source or ground of this feeling (itself the effect of a judgement or interpretation of reason), it leaves Kant’s key principle intact, that it is pure reason and reason alone that is the motive for morally worthy action. Since respect is the effect of a judgement of reason, not a prior feeling, it dispenses with the need to posit a moral feeling for the law that precedes it, as the ground of respect. And since respect is an effect of the motivational activity of the moral law, judged through the lense of reason, it does not meddle in the causal story of whence the moral law itself provides a motive, and so does not impinge on the key principle that ‘the moral law should immediately determine the will’ (KpV 71)  for our action to be morally worthy. However, we can ask whether this move, ingenious as it is, does not vitiate Kant’s solution, making the victory of the moral law no more than a Pyrrhic victory. Kant’s problem, we should recall, was ‘how a law can be of itself and immediately a determining ground of the will’ (KpV 72), yet his story simply assumes that the moral law can motivate the will, and begins ‘after the event’, as a story about the effect of the moral law’s action on the will. Here it is important to be clear about something that Kant himself –​perhaps not the best philosophical raconteur –​is not very clear on: the temporal sequence of events. The first ‘effect’ of the moral law’s determination of the will is the negative feeling of pain, self-​contempt or humiliation; this is then judged by reason, whose judgement or interpretation then gives rise to the positive feeling of respect or elevation. The very coherence of Kant’s account hinges on this sequence. It is only the painful feeling of Verachtung that prompts reason to interpret it as a victory achieved by the moral law over the resistance of our unruly selfish inclinations; and it is only this victory or successful overcoming that can be equated with the advancement of freedom, giving rise to the positive feeling of respect. But if the feeling of respect necessarily comes after the motivational success of the moral law in the face of resistance, it comes too late to be a motive and to address Kant’s problem of how pure reason can be practical. How then can respect be a motive? How can it do the work Kant wants it to do, namely: to ‘promote[.]‌the influence of the law on the will’ (KpV 75)?

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Interlude: An attenuated version of Kant’s account of Achtung There is perhaps one way to spin Kant’s story that unravels this temporal knot while remaining true to his key principles that (1) the moral law must determine the will exclusively and immediately, so as (2) to secure the freedom of the will. The problem is how the positive feeling of Achtung can possibly be a motive if it is a reaction (mediated by reason’s judgement) to the successful motivation of the will by the moral law, against the resistance of inclinations. Achtung must be genuinely motivational if it is to help address Kant’s problem of ‘how a law can be of itself and immediately a determining ground of the will’. But for this, it seems, we must violate Kant’s position that this feeling must not precede the law. Perhaps a clue lies in Kant’s formulation of the motivational force of Achtung, when he writes that it ‘promotes the influence of the law on the will’ (KpV 75). This formulation seems to abstract from individual actions and to attenuate or stretch the motivational force of Achtung out over time. My suggestion is that what Kant means here is not a specific feeling that motivates a specific action, but something more like a habituation over time, an enduring disposition to attend to the moral law. As an enduring disposition, Achtung would then precede any specific action and be genuinely motivational without, however, displacing the motivational work of pure reason and reason alone; for ‘promoting’ or ‘advancing’ (befördern, beförderlich sein) the influence of the law on the will is not the same as determining (bestimmen) the law or the will itself, and a disposition to attend to the law does not amount to determining the law, much less the will itself. This difference between disposition and determination suggests a way to address the problem raised by our violation of Kant’s ban on antecedent feelings; namely, how to ensure that the moral law will determine the will exclusively and immediately if it is preceded by a feeling? If the notion of a habitual disposition to attend to the law is strong enough to do some motivational work (in support of pure practical reason) but too weak to determine the law or the will itself, there is no reason to think that it will displace or even threaten the work of pure practical reason to exclusively and immediately determine the will, when a specific action is called for. In other words, this disposition leaves space for reason to perform the universalizability test in each and every case of action, ensuring that every action has been determined by a process of rational reflection and is in this sense a ‘first’, not a consequence of mere habituation.

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No doubt, Kant would squirm uncomfortably under this very un-​Kantian, all too Humean solution to the temporal knot of motivation in his account. In riding roughshod over the clean separation of the effects of the moral law on feeling from its causes, it falls far short of the guarantee he is after that the moral law determines the will without mediation or assistance from feeling. But perhaps, a more relaxed Kant might concede this much: ‘The very least I require is that you come up with some sort of switch, a way to at least explain how our disposition to attend to the law, once it has done its work and we are receptive to the moral law, can be switched off in the event that action is called for, so as to clear the way for pure practical reason to do its work directly and without interference.’

2.  Nietzsche on remembering and forgetting At this point in our unlikely conversation, we could turn to Nietzsche, and his human (not Humean), all-​too-​human account of the sovereign individual in the Genealogy of Morals. Putting aside –​for the time being –​the many un-​Kantian and anti-​Kantian things that need to be said about this passage, I would suggest that it has the ingredients to make the attenuated version of Kant’s motivational story work to the satisfaction of our relaxed Kant. The key ingredients, I would suggest, are memory and forgetting. The kind of Achtung fürs Gesetz that can ‘promote [beförderlich ist] the influence of the law on the will’ (KpV 75) must be strong enough to do sustained motivational work over time. It must, in specific, endure as a conscious feeling but with the practical force of a ‘long chain’ that withstands being broken by the ‘world of strange new things, circumstances and even acts of will’ that will intervene between one significant moral act and another. It must, in other words amount to a ‘mastery over oneself, and also a mastery over circumstance, [even] over nature’ in order to be ‘sustained in the face of mishaps, or even “in the face of fate” ’.10 What is required, in other words, is not just a passive or involuntary habit, ‘no mere passive incapacity to get rid of something’, but something supremely active, a ‘long, unbreakable will’, what Nietzsche calls a futural ‘memory of the will’: [. . .] an active not-​willing-​to-​let-​go-​again, a will to keep on willing that which has been willed once before, an actual memory of the will [. . .]11

The context for this notion is, of course, the much-​commented discussion of promising and the animal with the right to promise at the beginning of GM II. My suggestion is that there is an analogy between promising and

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the kind of Achtung that can do sustained motivational work over time, and that Nietzsche’s account of the futural memory of the will needed to keep one’s promise over time helps us understand better the natural conditions or capacity (Vermögen) needed to sustain an Achtung as a disposition over time. The discussion of promising in GM II 2 needs to be considered together with the preceding discussion of forgetting that opens GM II. Polemicizing again against reactive moral psychologists, Nietzsche insists that forgetting is no mere passive inability, inertia or inactivity, but an active Hemmungsvermögen, a ‘positive capacity to suppress’ sensory input and so regulate conscious experience. Active forgetting is introduced by Nietzsche as a necessity for human life, so that conscious experience can perform the interactional tasks needed for social life, and it is against this force (Kraft) that active memory –​the futural memory of the will –​must be cultivated ‘as a counter-​capacity [Gegenvermögen] [. . .] with whose help forgetting can be suspended for certain cases  –​namely for those cases where a promise ought to be made [dass versprochen werden soll]’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.292). From this it follows that the sovereign individual is characterized not just by promising, or the self-​given right to promise. Being a social animal, he is characterized by the counter-​capacities of forgetting and remembering, by the tension or conflict between these two active forces, and has the task of regulating this tension: What is the right balance between forgetting and remembering? What is the right time to forget, the right time to remember? Returning with this question to my attenuated version of Kant’s motivational story of moral action, I  propose that the right time to forget is Kant’s moment of action. For Kant, the moral law must determine the will exclusively and immediately for the ensuing action to be morally worthy. In our imaginary conversation with a relaxed Kant, he asked for an explanation of how Achtung, understood as disposition to attend to the law that precedes action, can be switched off so as to allow pure practical reason to determine the will without interference. The answer provided by Nietzsche’s text is that the switch is a moment of active forgetting that suppresses the emotional disposition to attend to the law, clearing the way for conscious rational reflection (Kant’s universalizability test). For if we ask: What is required for pure practical reason to determine the will? the Nietzschean answer is: suppression of all things physiological, including our emotional dispositions; a moment of ‘presence’ or presence of mind to take in the conditions under which we must act –​all functions of active forgetting. But what we need above all –​the supreme function of the capacity to forget –​ is:

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To shut the doors and windows of consciousness for a while; not to be bothered by the noise and struggle with which our underworld of serviceable organs work for and against one another; a bit of quiet, a bit of tabula rasa of consciousness, so that room is made again for something new, above all for the nobler functions and functionaries, for ruling, anticipating, pre-​determining [Regieren, Voraussehn, Vorausbestimmen]. (GM II 1, KSA 5.291)

For Kantian reason to do its work and determine (Bestimmen. Nietzsche: ‘pre-​ determine’: Vorausbestimmen) the will, what is needed above all is a moment of forgetting that allows the noble functions of ruling, anticipating, predetermining to do their work undisturbed. My suggestion, then, is that Nietzsche’s account of the sovereign individual, by thematizing and drawing out the dimension of time, and by introducing the dynamics of memory and forgetting, helps to make sense of Kant’s account of the motives for moral action: to disentangle the temporal knot in Kant’s story and to clarify from a naturalistic point of view the conditions or capacities that are required for the account to be credible. None of this is, however, to suggest that Nietzsche subscribes to Kant’s normative–​transcendental aims, to his Enlightenment concept of autonomous Reason as the ground of morally worthy action, to the universal law, or even –​ as we shall see –​to the will as such. Before turning to these substantive disagreements and dis-​analogies between them, I would like to pursue further the analogies between the two texts, starting with the hermeneutic objection that the analogy I have drawn is misplaced. Nietzsche’s text (GM II, 1 & 2) has, it seems, nothing to do with motives, let alone Kant’s account of the motives for moral action. If, as I have argued, Kant’s text (KpV Ch III) begins too late to be an account of the motives for action –​after the motivational success of the moral law in determining the will, and considering only its effects on feeling –​this goes even more so for Nietzsche’s text: his account of promising, it seems quite clear, begins with the ‘original “I will” “I will do” ’ –​skipping out its motives in the preceding act of promising –​and concerns the ‘long chain of the will’ that links the original ‘I will’ over time with the eventual ‘discharge of the will, its act’ that fulfils the promise. Promising is [. . .] an active not-​willing-​to-​let-​go-​again, a will to keep on willing that which has been willed once before, an actual memory of the will: so that between the original ‘I will’ ‘I will do’ and the actual discharge of the will, its act, a world of new strange things, circumstances, even acts of will may be placed without breaking the long chain of the will.12

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Nietzsche gives us a great deal in the way of socio-​anthropological prehistory and presuppositions for the sovereign individual’s right to promise, but the story itself takes place between the already motivated ‘I will’ and the act, and so tells us nothing about motives. But this story of the ‘long unbroken chain of the will’ is misleading if taken too literally. It is a kind of shorthand for a much more complex account, which Kant’s text can help us to reconstruct. One clue lies in the expression ‘Fort-​und Fortwollen des ein Mal Gewollten’ used by Nietzsche to describe the ‘long chain of the will’: literally, a ‘further and further-​willing of what was once willed’, it indicates not a static, iron-​bound link between two different events –​willing (as cause) and acting (as effect), but rather the active repeating of an original event. This means that the event that redeems the promise is not simply an ‘act’ that follows quasi-​mechanically as an effect (‘discharge’) from an original cause in ‘willing’ by way of an unbroken linkage between cause and effect, but rather that the event that redeems the promise requires a repetition of the original willing that can now discharge itself in an act. If so, this raises the question of the motives for this final willing, both in the moment of willing (What moves this final act of willing to discharge itself in action?) and in the preceding stretch of time (What enables the original promise to be sustained over time, so as to motivate the final act of willing to discharge itself in action?). With regard to this last question, I believe Kant’s Achtung fürs Gesetz, as that which ‘promotes the influence of the moral law on the will’ (KpV 75), can help us. Whatever the exact nature of the original promise, for it to motivate the final act of willing that redeems it, the promise must be respected over time, such that it outweighs the intervening multitude of drives, impulses and desires that conflict with it and seek to outweigh the promise in demanding satisfaction. What is needed, in other words, is a sustained disposition to attend to the original promise and so ‘promote the influence of the promise on the eventual act of willing that redeems it’ –​in the face of what Nietzsche variously calls ‘a world of new strange things, circumstances, even acts of will placed in between’ (unbedenklich eine Welt von neuen fremden Dingen, Umständen, selbst Willensakten dazwischengelegt), ‘even against mishaps, even “against fate” ’ (selbst gegen Unfälle, selbst ‘gegen das Schicksal’).13 This disposition is firmly rooted in ‘the will’ by Nietzsche –​whatever he means exactly by this –​as the ‘memory of the will’. And as an emotional or affective disposition to attend not to the universal moral law, but to a singular, freely made promise, it is described not as respect (Achtung), but as pride (Stolz):

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The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and over destiny has dug itself into his lowest depths and has become instinct, his dominant instinct [. . .]14

For Kant, Achtung derives from a judgement of reason that the moral law, in determining the will, has overcome the resistance of conflicting inclinations and thereby advanced the causality of freedom. What, then, about Nietzsche’s Stolz? What are its sources, and how far does the analogy with Kantian Achtung go? On the basis of the above passage, we can say: Nietzschean Stolz derives from a judgement that one’s promise, in determining the will in the act of redeeming it, has overpowered (‘Macht über’) resistances both within (‘über sich’: conflicting inclinations) and without (‘das Geschick’ or fate), thereby advancing a consciousness of one’s (unique) freedom. This formulation brings Nietzsche as close to Kant as the text allows. What is most striking is the connection or equivalence made by both between the overcoming of resistance, and the advancement of freedom. The overcoming or mastery over resistance is repeated several times in Nietzsche’s account of the sovereign individual, as is the connection between Stolz and freedom, as when he describes the sovereign individual as [. . .] the man of his own independent long will who is permitted to promise –​ and in him a proud consciousness, quivering in every muscle, of what has finally been achieved there and become body in him, an actual consciousness of power and freedom [eigentliches Macht-​und Freiheits-​Bewusstsein], a feeling that the human as such has reached completion.15

But what is the status of the ‘consciousness of this rare freedom’, this ‘power-​ and freedom-​consciousness’ for Nietzsche? How far does the analogy with Kant really go? For Kant, as we saw, the connection between the overcoming of resistance and freedom, giving rise to the feeling of elevation or respect (Erhebung, Achtung), is a judgement of reason. This is important for his transcendental–​normative aims in the KpV since, as an intellectual source or ground of this feeling, it leaves pure reason and reason alone to determine morally worthy action without interference from prior feelings. Nietzsche’s text, by contrast, is marked by a radical shift in its philosophical centre of gravity away from the transcendental–​normative to a socio-​physiological naturalism. In the above-​cited texts, this shift takes place when the ‘consciousness of freedom’ is described as an ‘instinct’, a ‘dominating instinct’, or as a bodily (leibhaft geworden) feeling, ‘quivering in every muscle’. In order to pursue this profound dis-​analogy with Kant, and to really grasp the status of

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the ‘consciousness of freedom and power’ from a physiological point of view, we need to move from the text to the subtexts in the Nachlass. In doing so, we are confronted with the problem of how to take Nietzsche’s physiological interpretations of the moral categories he employs in GM. Do they, as part of the project to ‘translate moral values back into their natural “immorality”’, serve not only to naturalize them, but to deflate their value, robbing them of normative power and credibility? Or does Nietzsche’s physiological turn leave the question of their value and normativity open? The status of Nietzsche’s emphatic, apparently affirmative use of moral terms in GM, and the figure of the sovereign individual itself, depends on how one responds to these questions.

3.  Nietzsche’s physiology of freedom I turn first to note NL 1884 27[24] (KSA 11.281), which I will then comment on paragraph by paragraph: Freedom and feeling of power. The feeling of play in the overcoming of great difficulties, e.g. of the virtuoso; self-​certainty that upon the will the precisely corresponding action follows –​a kind of affect of supremacy [hubris] is there, highest sovereignty of one who commands. There must also be the feeling of resistance, pressure. –​But with this goes a deception concerning the will: it is not the will that overcomes the resistance –​we make a synthesis between 2 simultaneous states and place a unity therein.   The will as poetization [or condensation: Erdichtung]. 1. one believes that it itself moves (while it is only a stimulus upon which a movement begins) 2.  one believes that it overcomes resistances 3. one believes that it is free and sovereign, because its origin remains concealed from us and because the affect of commanding accompanies it 4. because in by far the most cases one only wills when success can be expected, the ‘necessity’ of success is ascribed to the will as force16

Paragraph 1:  The reference to sovereignty here and in the second paragraph (‘Souveränität’, ‘souverän’) in relation to the consciousness or feeling of power (‘Machtgefühl’), of supremacy (‘Übermuth’) and a sense of control or command (‘Befehlenden’) connects clearly with Nietzsche’s use of  ‘sovereign’ in GM II 2. At the same time, sovereignty in this text also connects with Kant’s judgement of

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reason insofar as the consciousness of freedom and power is bound up with the overcoming of great difficulties (‘Überwindung großer Schwierigkeiten’) and the simultaneous feeling of resistance or pressure (‘Gefühl des Widerstandes, Druckes’). However, Nietzsche goes on to call this a ‘deception concerning the will’ (‘Täuschung über den Willen’) and argues that Kant’s judgement of reason is a misinterpretation of actual power relations, a misunderstanding of the physiology of agency. This argument instantiates an important feature of Nietzsche’s philosophy of power, which is the need to distinguish actual relations of power from our interpretations/​consciousness/​feelings of power. This distinction is needed for those cases, such as sovereignty, where there is a radical disjunction between them: for, as Patton, Saar and others have shown, the feeling of power is not always simply the consequence of greater power.17 What, then, according to Nietzsche, is the nature of the misinterpretation or illusion at play in sovereignty? When he writes that we make a ‘synthesis between 2 simultaneous states and place a unity therein’, we can take him to mean that a state of power, play, supremacy, commanding (Macht/​ Spiel/​Uebermuth/​Befehlen) on one side, and a state of resistance, pressure, difficulty (Schwierigkeiten/​Widerstand/​Druck) on the other are (falsely) synthesized into the unified concept of the will. Paragraph 2 helps to fill out this picture: When the two stimuli or feelings, that of power and command and that of resistance or pressure, are accompanied by movement (the beginning of action), this is (mis)interpreted by us as the will overcoming resistance to cause our action, which in turn is (mis)interpreted by us as the sovereignty or freedom of our will to cause action. In this last step we can recognize clearly the equivalence drawn by Kant’s judgement of reason between the overcoming of resistance and the advancement of the causality of freedom. Only it is judged by Nietzsche to be not the effect of the moral law motivating the will, but a deception or illusion, a misinterpretation of the physiological processes he describes here and elsewhere. Another note throws more light on these processes in a way that invokes and explains (away) the two key feelings linked by Kant’s judgement of reason: painful humiliation or self-​contempt (Demütigung, Verachtung) and elevation or respect (Erhebung, Achtung): All physiological processes are the same insofar as they are explosions of force, which, when they land in the sensorium commune, bring with them a certain heightening and strengthening:  these, measured against the oppressive, burdened states of constraint, are interpreted as a feeling of ‘freedom’.18

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Here Kant’s Erhebung is recast as a feeling of Erhöhung und Verstärkung that derives from all physiological processes, understood as discharges or explosions of force.19 Whereas in Kant’s account, Erhebung follows from reason’s judgement or interpretation that freedom is advanced, in Nietzsche’s version, the feeling of Erhebung or Erhöhung comes before the judgement or feeling of freedom. The feeling of freedom is a result or rather interpretation of the feeling of Erhöhung, when it is measured against states of pressure, constraint, restriction. In Kant’s terminology we might say: the painful feeling of humiliation that comes from the restriction of our inclinations, when juxtaposed with the feeling of Erhebung that accompanies all physiological processes, is (mis)interpreted by us as the-​ will-​overcoming-​resistance-​of-​the-​inclinations, giving rise to the feeling of freedom. Here the juxtaposition of painful Demütigung and positive Erhebung, so central to Kant’s account of Achtung, is redescribed physiologically in a way that makes nonsense of reason’s judgement. In Kant’s account, the feeling of painful humiliation is judged by reason to be the effect of the law motivating the will against conflicting inclinations. In Nietzsche’s account, the sources of the states of pressure, constraint, restriction are less clear, but we can assume they refer to the resistances intrinsic to all relations of power.20 In the next note I will consider, these states of constraint are identified with what Nietzsche called the ‘stimulus’ (Reiz) or ‘feeling of resistance and pressure’ (Widerstand, Druck) in the first note (NL 1884 27[24], KSA 11.281 ff.). The present note makes it clear that the feeling of freedom is the result of a physiological process that begins when one drive stimulates a feeling of pressure or constraint on another, provoking that other into an activity of mastering the first: The human has, in opposition to animal, nurtured a wealth of opposed drives and impulses: by virtue of this synthesis he has become master of the earth. –​ moralities are the expression of locally confined hierarchies in this multi-​faceted world of drives: so that the human does not go to ground because of its contradictions. So, one drive as master, its counter-​drive weakened, refined, as an impulse, which gives the stimulus for the activity of the main drive. The highest human would have the greatest multiplicity of drives, and also in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured. Indeed:  where the plant human shows itself to be strong one finds the instincts powerfully driving against one another (e.g. Shakespeare) but contained [lit. tamed].21

Clearly, we are squarely in the domain of Nietzsche’s homo natura as a multiplicity of competing drives –​and about as far as possible from Kant’s ghostly

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homo noumenon. The unified concept of the will is hereby dissolved and in these terms, the feeling of freedom is relativized to any drive that gains relative supremacy over others in an ongoing struggle of drives. The critical force of Nietzsche’s physiological discourse is to expose the key Kantian concepts of will and (the causality of) freedom as errors,22 illusions that condense or hypostasize infinitely complex, multiple processes and tensions into unities. Nietzsche’s physiological discourse does this through genealogies that seek to describe the physiological conditions under which concepts like these emerge, a discourse that undermines completely the transcendental-​normative aims of Kant’s moral philosophy. Yet, to displace homo noumenon with homo natura, to expose Kant’s key concepts of freedom and the will and as illusions, to expose the sovereign individual’s self-​understanding as sovereign, as a misunderstanding of the multiplicity of bodily struggles that he is, is not for Nietzsche to empty them of value. Pace those who accuse him of the genetic fallacy, Nietzsche is quite clear: Whoever has gained insight into the conditions under which a moral evaluation has arisen, has not thereby touched upon its value: there are many useful things, and also important insights that have been found in a faulty and unmethodical way; and every quality [Qualität] remains still unknown, even if one has understood under which conditions it arises.23

While Nietzsche’s physiological discourse certainly undermines the transcendental–​normative aims of Kant’s moral philosophy, it does not collapse the normative question driving Kant’s moral thought. As this note makes clear, it leaves the value, or more precisely the qualitative evaluation (cf. ‘Qualität’ above), of his key moral concepts or values –​freedom or sovereignty, the will  –​untouched. An indication of what Nietzsche means by ‘quality’ is given in the previous note (NL 1884 27[59], KSA 11.289), which suggests that the quality of human life is greatest (‘Der höchste Mensch’) where the conflictual multiplicity of drives that is the hallmark of homo natura is maximized in a way that can still be synthesized (‘Synthesis’) or contained (‘gebändigt’) within the bounds of a unified existence. And if the normative question is focused on the quality or worth (for Kant: moral worth) of actions, Nietzsche’s position is diametrically  –​not to say polemically  –​opposed to Kant’s. For Nietzsche locates the quality or value of actions not in the universalizability of their maxims, but in their capacity to individuate, to actualize the radical particularity of their agents –​where these are understood as unique multiplicities:

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The value of an action depends upon who performs it and whether it stems from their depths or from their surface: i.e. how deeply individual it is.24

As long as our moral values or concepts are bound up with such individuating actions  –​as their motives, or as part of the agent’s self-​understanding  –​they could be considered as ‘useful’ for qualitatively valuable agency and therefore as valuable, even if they falsify the physiology of action. Yet, illusions such as the Kantian concepts of the will and the causality of freedom are not without their dangers. In a series of posthumous notes from 1880 (notebook 4, KSA 9),  in which Nietzsche first reflects systematically on ‘the feeling of power’, the dangers of such illusory bubbles are very much in mind25: The bubble of imagined power bursts:  this is the cardinal event in life. The human then withdraws angrily or falls apart or becomes stupid. Death of the most beloved, collapse of a dynasty, infidelity of the friend, untenability of a philosophy, a party –​One then wants comfort, i.e. a new bubble.26

If the ‘untenability of a philosophy’ evokes the extreme rigours of Kant’s pure practical reason, this goes equally for the ‘extreme moralities’ discussed in another note that deals with the dangers of those illusions of power that mask actual impotence: These wars, these religions, the extreme moralities, these fanatic arts, this party-​ hatred –​that is the great melodrama of impotence that lies itself into a feeling of power and for once wants to signify power –​always with the relapse into pessimism and misery! What you lack is power over yourselves!27

In these culture-​critical comments, Nietzsche warns of the dangers of war-​ mongering and fanaticism pursued for the illusory feeling of power they create. But he also decries ‘untenable philosophies’ and ‘extreme moralities’ when they are used to create an illusion of power that masks an actual lack of power over oneself. No doubt Nietzsche has Schopenhauer in mind, but these expressions apply even more to Kantian morality, built as it is around an illusory consciousness of freedom and power. The danger comes when the illusory bubble of power, masking an actual lack of power, bursts –​with consequences in isolationism, pessimism, self-​denial28 or disintegration. In view of these dangers, the question becomes: How to strip the feeling of power of its illusory character? or as Nietzsche puts it: How can the feeling of power 1) be made ever more substantial and not illusory? 2) be stripped of its effects which injure, oppress, devalue etc.?29

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The response, one would think, lies in grounding the feeling of power in values or actions that are recognized as valuable by others and do not depend on denigrating, injuring or oppressing others for the feeling of power this gives us. Such values might be generally acknowledged virtues30 or Kantian moral law. This response is considered, but rejected by Nietzsche on the grounds that others are prey to the illusory feelings of power, no less than one is oneself: The cleverest thing to do is to restrict oneself to the things where we can acquire a feeling of power, [things] that are recognised [anerkannt] by others. But the lack of knowledge of themselves is so great: they are thrown by fear and reverence onto areas where they can only have a feeling of power through illusion [Illusion]. (NL 1880 4[195], KSA 9.148 ff.)

To seek the feeling of power from the recognition of others can only break the illusion of power on the assumption that they have self-​knowledge sufficient to see through their own illusions of power –​which Nietzsche denies: The value of an action can be determined if the human being itself can be known: which in general will have to be denied. (NL 1884 27[33], KSA 11.283)

For Nietzsche the greatest danger comes when the feeling of power is sought in recognition ‘from the outside’ (von außen her), because it cannot be derived ‘from within’ (von innen her) –​that is to say: when the feeling of power is sought from a position of impotence, fear, subjection31: To have your power demonstrated from the outside, while you do not believe in it yourself –​that is, through the fear of being subordinated under the judgement of the others –​a detour for vain people. (NL 1880 4[196], KSA 9.149)

In the end, for Nietzsche, the individual is thrown back on itself to ‘substantiate’ its feeling of power ‘from within’ through individuating actions that actualize its particularity (or unique multiplicity), a task that requires the virtually impossible self-​knowledge that he calls ‘die individuelle Wissenschaft’: Knowledge of one’s forces, the law of their order and discharge, the distribution [of forces] without using some too much, others too little, the sign of unpleasure as an unfailing hint that a mistake, an excess etc. has been committed –​all with a view towards one goal: how difficult this individual science [individuelle Wissenschaft] is! And in its absence, one reaches out for the folk-​superstition of morality: because here, the prescriptions are already prepared. But look at the results –​we are the victims of this superstitious medicine; it is not the individual, but the community that was supposed to remain preserved through its prescriptions! (NL 1880 4[118], KSA 9.130)

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4.  Conclusion In my closing remarks I  would like to return to the question of the status of the moral concepts used by Nietzsche in GM and especially the quasi-​Kantian language of freedom, autonomy and the will associated with the ‘sovereign individual’. What light do Nietzsche’s physiological and culture-​critical thoughts on freedom and the feeling of power from the Nachlass throw on his use of moral categories in GM? On the one hand, Nietzsche’s philosophical physiology clearly exposes the moral categories that inform our pre-​philosophical self-​understanding and have been taken up by the philosophical tradition as illusions, as crude misinterpretations of the infinitely complex physiology of agency. In this regard moral philosophy, including Kant’s, is situated squarely within Nietzsche’s grand narrative of the history of philosophy as a ‘misunderstanding of the body’, and it is hard not to read transcendental idealism between the lines when Nietzsche speaks of the ‘unconscious disguise [Verkleidung] of physiological needs under the mantle of the objective, ideal, purely spiritual’.32 From a perspective in Nietzsche’s physiology, however, illusion or error, being life-​enabling or ‘the father of living beings’33 is not an objection as such to beliefs or interpretations. But in the case of the feeling of freedom or power that is bound up with our belief in the erroneous moral concepts of the will and freedom, Nietzsche is acutely sensitive to the dangers these errors house. In order to strip the illusory feeling of power of its moral and political consequences in oppression, denigration and injury, he calls on us to revise our moral categories by asking how the feeling of freedom or power ‘can be made ever more substantial and not illusory’ (NL 1880 4[216], KSA 9.154). This shows clearly that Nietzsche’s physiology, and the kind of ‘naturalisation of morality’ (Vernatürlichung der Moral: NL 1887 9[8]‌, KSA 12.342) it intends, does not collapse the normative questions of the value of our agency or the moral values that subtend it. But it does transform the terms of these questions quite radically, as questions of ‘quality’ (Qualität: NL 1884 27[5], KSA 11.276); that is, the qualitative evaluation of our agency, our values and the forms of life they exhibit. And here, as we saw, Nietzsche takes the polemically anti-​Kantian position that the quality or value of actions lies, not in the universalizability of their maxims, but in their capacity to individuate, to actualize the radical particularity or unique multiplicity of their agent or ‘person’.34 While it is clear that Nietzsche gives no credence to recognition (Anerkennung) by others (NL 1880 4[195], KSA 9.148 ff. above), much less to a Kantian kingdom of ends, as ways

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to ‘substantiate’ the feeling of power, his particularism should not be taken to imply a privatistic isolationism. Nietzsche is a thoroughly relational thinker, and his moral particularism is no exception. The individual has deeply social origins for Nietzsche, and in the early 1880s he develops a ‘socio-​physiology’ to describe the formation of the individual through the internalization of social relations, mores and prohibitions, but also a naturalistic ideal of sovereignty that hinges on our treatment of others.35 The key to making the feeling of power ‘ever more substantial’ can only lie in ever better knowledge of our body and its energetic economy, the distribution, order and discharge of its forces, as well as those of others with whom we interact. These considerations give us a clue to Nietzsche’s use of moral vocabulary in GM. As noted at the end of Section 2, this text effects a shift towards a socio-​ physiological naturalism, as when, e.g. the ‘consciousness of freedom’ is described as an ‘instinct’. This is best understood as part of a sustained effort on Nietzsche’s part to ascribe new, unfamiliar meanings from the socio-​physiological register to established moral terms. In GM II 2, this is most striking when this consciousness-​of-​freedom-​as-​instinct is then dubbed ‘conscience’ (Gewissen) in the closing line, a move that gives the term ‘conscience’ an entirely new, physiological meaning. If, as I suggest, this move is repeated throughout the GM in a variety of forms, it can be seen as part of a sustained effort on Nietzsche’s part to reorient philosophical reflection on moral values from the autonomous domain claimed by morality and moral philosophy –​what he calls ‘ignorance of physics or in contradiction with it’ (GS 335, KSA 3.564), or simply ‘anti-​nature’ (Widernatur) –​towards their socio-​physiological conditions in the body (politic). Reinterpreting our moral vocabulary in physiological terms is clearly the precondition for making our feeling of freedom or power ‘more substantial’. At the same time, it also opens the possibility of a broader qualitative re-​evaluation of values and the forms of life they exhibit in naturalistic terms. On the other hand, Nietzsche is committed not just to a naturalization of morality, but also to a radical re-​evaluation or transvaluation (Umwertung) of all our values. As a complete transformation of morality, there is no reason to think that this does not require a rejection –​not just a physiological reinterpretation –​of our moral terms, in favour of new vocabularies of agency and qualitative evaluation. This, however, only raises the problem of how to formulate these transvalued values, how to communicate them and make them effective. As Nietzsche writes in Nachlass of JGB, even a transvaluation or reversal of values (Umkehrung der Werthe) cannot simply dispense with established moral terms:

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That a morality with such reversed intentions could only be taught and implanted by connecting it with the ruling moral law and under its words and pompous vocabulary, so that many transitional forms and deceptive must be found [. . .]36

In this case, however, the moral language of GM is to be understood not as an attempt to naturalize existing morality, but as essentially deceptive: ‘transitional and deceptive-​forms’ of expression that point towards something that cannot yet be given linguistic form. These, it seems to me, are our best clues for making sense of Nietzsche’s use of moral terms in GM. None of this, however, addresses the fundamental normative question of the standard by which to evaluate the quality of given acts, values and forms of life. While impressing upon us the need, indeed the urgency, of engaging in a differential evaluation of the quality of values and the forms of life they sustain, Nietzsche does not have any prepared rules or formulae to offer. To be sure, his naturalism, or better, anti-​antinaturalism, reorients the practice of evaluation towards a radically immanent standpoint in life as/​or Will to Power, and he himself makes numerous attempts to sketch (the conditions for) naturalistic ideals or desiderata. Whether these are best understood as naturalistic reinterpretations of traditional ideals, or as deceptive ‘transitional forms’ for a counter-​ morality that defies articulation, they cannot in either case be taken as any more than attempts (Versuche), as temptations (Versuchungen) or invitations to his ‘unknown friends’ (GM III 27, KSA 5.410) or readers to engage in this task. Taking the radicality of a ‘transvaluation of all values’ seriously means taking on its open-​endedness. The absence of a pregiven standard of evaluation does not, however, obviate the urgent need for us to engage in a qualitative evaluation of actions, values and forms of life; it requires instead that we bring to our evaluative practice a sustained reflection on the fundamental normative question: What standard of evaluation does physis, as the one and only reality, afford? This task, to my mind, is one of Nietzsche’s most important legacies to philosophy.

Notes 1 ‘[M]‌y task is to translate the apparently emancipated moral values that have become nature-​less back into their nature –​i.e., into their natural “immorality” ’ ([M]eine

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Aufgabe ist, die scheinbar emancipirten und naturlos gewordenen Moralwerthe in ihre Natur zurückzuübersetzen –​d.h. in ihre natürliche ‘Immoralität’: NL 1887 9[86], KSA 12.380). See Geiger (2007: ­chapter 2, esp. 36–​8). As Geiger makes clear, Hegel takes Kant to claim that ‘the only moral motive is reflective recognition of the formal university of law and that acting on our inclinations is never of true moral worth’ (10). ‘No special kind of feeling need be assumed for this under the name of a practical or moral feeling as antecedent to the moral law and serving as its foundation’ (KpV 75). ‘Since it is so far only a negative effect which, arising from the influence of pure practical reason, checks the activity of the subject, so far as it is determined by inclinations, and hence checks the opinion of his personal worth (which, in the absence of agreement with the moral law, is reduced to nothing); hence, the effect of this law on feeling is merely humiliation. We can, therefore, perceive [einsehen] this a priori, but cannot know by it the force of the pure practical law as a motive, but only the resistance to motives of the sensibility’ (KpV 78 ff.; HS). As ‘a feeling that promotes the influence of the law on the will’ (KpV 75). See also Kant’s quasi-​mechanistic or hydraulic metaphor for the impact of this judgement or interpretation of reason: ‘For by the fact that the representation of the moral law deprives self-​love of its influence, and self-​conceit of its illusion [Wahn], it reduces the obstacle [vermindert das Hindernis] to pure practical reason and produces the representation of the superiority of its objective law to the impulses of the sensibility; and thus, by removing the counterweight [Wegschaffung des Gegengewichts], it gives relatively greater weight to the law in the judgement of reason (in the case of a will affected by the aforesaid impulses)’ (KpV 75 ff.). Note the slippage from ‘reducing’ (vermindert) the obstacle to pure practical reason to ‘removing’ the counterweight to the moral law (should be: reducing), allowing Kant to draw the stronger conclusion that respect is morality: ‘Thus the respect for the law is not a motive to morality, but is morality itself subjectively considered as a motive [. . .]’ (KpV 75 ff.). This slippage, I would suggest, lends weight to the Nietzschean counterposition, as we will see, that this judgement or interpretation of reason is in fact a misinterpretation or illusion (Wahn). ‘[. . .] für welches Gesetz gar kein Gefühl stattfindet, sondern im Urtheile der Vernunft, indem es den Widerstand aus dem Wege schafft, die Wegräumung eines Hindernisses einer positiven Beförderung der Causalität gleichgeschätzt wird’ (KpV 75; HS). ‘Denn eine jede Verminderung der Hindernisse einer Thätigkeit ist Beförderung dieser Thätigkeit selbst’ (KpV 79). It is tempting to call it ‘pleasurable’ –​for what else could ‘positive feeling’ mean? –​ but Kant carefully avoids this term in his account, indeed denies and displaces it with the concept of interest: ‘If this feeling of respect were pathological, and therefore were a feeling of pleasure based on the inner sense, it would be in vain

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to try to discover a connection of it with any idea a priori. But [it] is a feeling that applies merely to what is practical, and depends on the conception of a law, simply as to its form, not on account of any object, and therefore cannot be reckoned either as pleasure or pain, and yet produces an interest in obedience to the law, which we call the moral interest, just as the capacity of taking such an interest in the law (or respect for the moral law itself) is properly the moral feeling’ (KpV 80). 10 The expressions quoted above are all drawn from GM II 2, KSA 5.294. 11 ‘[. . .] ein aktives Nicht-​wieder-​los-​werden-​wollen, ein Fort-​und Fortwollen des ein Mal Gewollten, ein eigentliches Gedächtniss des Willens [. . .]’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.292). 12 ‘[. . .] ein aktives Nicht-​wieder-​los-​werden-​wollen, ein Fort-​und Fortwollen des ein Mal Gewollten, ein eigentliches Gedächtniss des Willens: so dass zwischen das ursprüngliche “ich will” “ich werde thun” und die eigentliche Entladung des Willens, seinen Akt, unbedenklich eine Welt von neuen fremden Dingen, Umständen, selbst Willensakten dazwischengelegt werden darf, ohne dass diese lange Kette des Willens springt.’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.292). 13 GM II 2, KSA 5.292. 14 ‘Das stolze Wissen um das ausserordentliche Privilegium der Verantwortlichkeit, das Bewusstsein dieser seltenen Freiheit, dieser Macht über sich und das Geschick hat sich bei ihm bis in seine unterste Tiefe hinabgesenkt und ist zum Instinkt geworden, zum dominirenden Instinkt [. . .]’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.292). 15 ‘[. . .] den Menschen des eignen unabhängigen langen Willens, der versprechen darf –​und in ihm ein stolzes, in allen Muskeln zuckendes Bewusstsein davon, was da endlich errungen und in ihm leibhaft geworden ist, ein, ein Vollendungs-​Gefühl des Menschen überhaupt.’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.292). 16   ‘Freiheit und Machtgefühl. Das Gefühl des Spiels bei der Überwindung großer Schwierigkeiten, z.B. vom Virtuosen; Gewißheit seiner selber, daß auf den Willen die genau entsprechende Aktion folgt –​eine Art Affekt des Übermuthes ist dabei, höchste Souveränität des Befehlenden. Es muß das Gefühl des Widerstandes, Druckes dabei sein. –​Dabei ist aber eine Täuschung über den Willen: nicht der Wille überwindet den Widerstand –​wir machen eine Synthese zwischen 2 gleichzeitigen Zuständen und legen eine Einheit hinein.   Der Wille als Erdichtung. 1) man glaubt, daß er selber bewegt (während er nur ein Reiz ist, bei dessen Eintritt eine Bewegung beginnt 2) man glaubt, daß er Widerstände überwindet 3) man glaubt, daß er frei und souverän ist, weil sein Ursprung uns verborgen bleibt und weil der Affekt des Befehlenden ihn begleitet

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4) weil man in den allermeisten Fällen nur will, wenn der Erfolg erwartet werden kann, wird die ‘Nothwendigkeit’ des Erfolgs dem Willen als Kraft zugerechnet.’ (NL 1884 27[24], KSA 11.281f.) 17 See Patton (2008) and Saar (2008), both in Siemens and Roodt (2008). 18 ‘Alle physiologischen Vorgänge sind darin gleich, daß sie Kraftauslösungen sind, welche, wenn sie in das sensorium commune gelangen, eine gewisse Erhöhung und Verstärkung mit sich führen: diese, gemessen an drückenden, lastenden Zuständen des Zwangs, werden als Gefühl der “Freiheit” ausgedeutet’ (NL 1884 27[3]‌, KSA 11.275). 19 The concept of Auslösung is taken from Robert Mayer. In 1867 Mayer published a collection of papers with the title Mechanik der Wärme, which contains, among others, his groundbreaking book Bemerkungen über die Kräfte der unbelebten Natur from 1842 as well as a new article Über Auslösung. For a discussion of Mayer’s concept of discharge, see Mittasch (1952: 114 ff.), and Aydin (2003: 157–​63). 20 See e.g. NL 1881 11[303], KSA 9.558: ‘Das Widerstreben ist die Form der Kraft –​ im Frieden wie im Kriege, folglich müssen verschiedene Kräfte und nicht gleiche dasein, denn diese würden sich das Gleichgewicht halten!’ 21     ‘Der Mensch hat, im Gegensatz zum Thier, eine Fülle gegensätzlicher Triebe und Impulse in sich groß gezüchtet: vermöge dieser Synthesis ist er der Herr der Erde. –​ Moralen sind der Ausdruck lokal beschränkter Rangordnungen in dieser vielfachen Welt der Triebe: so daß an ihren Widersprüchen der Mensch nicht zu Grunde geht. Also ein Trieb als Herr, sein Gegentrieb geschwächt, verfeinert, als Impuls, der den Reiz für die Thätigkeit des Haupttriebes abgiebt.   Der höchste Mensch würde die größte Vielheit der Triebe haben, und auch in der relativ größten Stärke, die sich noch ertragen läßt. In der That: wo die Pflanze Mensch sich stark zeigt, findet man die mächtig gegen einander treibenden Instinkte (z.B. Shakespeare), aber gebändigt.’ (NL 1884 27[59], KSA 11.289). 22 See NL 1884 27[65], KSA 11.291: ‘Die gewöhnlichen Irrthümer: wir trauen dem Willen zu, was zahlreiche und complicirte eingeübte Bewegungen ermöglichen. Der Befehlende verwechselt sich mit seinen gehorsamen Werkzeugen (und deren Willen).’ 23     ‘Wer die Bedingungen eingesehn hat, unter denen eine moralische Schätzung entstanden ist, hat ihren Werth damit noch nicht berührt: es sind viele nützliche Dinge, und ebenso wichtige Einsichten auf fehlerhafte und unmethodische Weise gefunden worden; und jede Qualität ist noch unbekannt, auch wenn man begriffen hat, unter welchen Bedingungen sie entsteht.’ (NL 1884 27[5]‌, KSA 11.276).

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24     ‘Der Werth einer Handlung hängt davon ab, wer sie thut und ob sie aus seinem Grunde oder aus seiner Oberfläche stammt: d.h. wie tief sie individuell ist.’ (NL 1884 27[32], KSA 11.283). 25 The following discussion owes much to the fascinating analysis of Stolz and Eitelkeit in Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche by Wolfgang Müller Lauter (1999): ‘Über Stolz und Eitelkeit bei Kant, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche’. 26     ‘Die Blase der eingebildeten Macht platzt: dies ist das Cardinalereigniß im Leben. Da zieht sich der Mensch böse zurück oder zerschmettert oder verdummt. Tod der Geliebtesten, Sturz einer Dynastie, Untreue des Freundes, Unhaltbarkeit einer Philosophie, einer Partei. –​Dann will man Trost d.h. eine neue Blase.’ (NL 1880 4[199], KSA 9.149). 27     ‘Diese Kriege, diese Religionen, die extremen Moralen, diese fanatischen Künste, dieser Parteihaß –​das ist die große Schauspielerei der Ohnmacht, die sich selber Machtgefühl anlügt und einmal Kraft bedeuten will –​immer mit dem Rückfall in den Pessimismus und den Jammer! Es fehlt euch an Macht über euch!’ (NL 1880 4[202], KSA 9.150). 28 ‘Wenn die Don Quixoterie unseres Gefühls von Macht einmal uns zum Bewußtsein kommt und wir aufwachen –​dann kriechen wir zu Kreuze wie Don Quixote, –​entsetzliches Ende! Die Menschheit ist immer bedroht von dieser schmählichen Sich-​selbst-​Verleugnung am Ende ihres Strebens.’ (NL 1880 4[222], KSA 9.156). 29     ‘Wie kann das Gefühl von Macht 1) immer mehr substantiell und nicht illusionär gemacht werden? 2) seiner Wirkungen, welche schädigen, unterdrücken, geringschätzen usw. entkleidet werden?’ (NL 1880 [216], KSA 9.154). 30 See, e.g. NL 1880 4[245], KSA 9.160: ‘Die großen Fürsten und Eroberer sprechen die pathetische Sprache der Tugend, zum Zeichen, daß diese vermöge des Gefühls von Macht, welches sie giebt, unter den Menschen anerkannt ist. Die Unehrlichkeit jeder Politik liegt darin, daß die großen Worte, welche jeder im Munde führen muß, um sich als im Besitz der M zu kennzeichnen, nicht sich mit den wahren Zuständen und Motiven decken können.’ 31 The most detailed analysis of the quest for the feeling of power from a position of weakness, and the dangers it houses, is of course to be found in the account of the slave-​revolt of morality in GM I 7–​10. 32 ‘Die unbewusste Verkleidung physiologischer Bedürfnisse unter die Mäntel des Objektiven, Ideellen, Rein-​Geistigen geht bis zum Erschrecken weit, –​und oft genug habe ich mich gefragt, ob nicht, im Grossen gerechnet, Philosophie bisher überhaupt nur eine Auslegung des Leibes und ein Missverständniss des

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Leibes gewesen ist. Hinter den höchsten Werthurtheilen, von denen bisher die Geschichte des Gedankens geleitet wurde, liegen Missverständnisse der leiblichen Beschaffenheit verborgen, sei es von Einzelnen, sei es von Ständen oder ganzen Rassen.’ (FW Vorrede 2, KSA 3.348). 33 ‘It is in the way the first organic forms [Bildungen] sensed stimuli and judged the outside that the life-​preserving principle must be sought: that belief prevailed, preserved itself, through which continued existence became possible; not the most true belief, but the most useful. “Subject” is the condition of life for organic existence, hence not “true”; rather, subject-​feeling [Subjekt-​Empfindung] can be essentially false, but as the only means of survival. Error [is] the father of living beings [. . .]’ (NL 1881–​2 11[270], KSA 9. 545; cf. NL 1881–​2 11[268], KSA 9. 543f.). 34 On Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘person’ (Person), as that which gives value to its actions, see Müller Lauter (1999: 166ff.). Also Siemens (2008: 247f., 258f.). 35 On this, see Siemens (2015a,b; and 2016). 36   ‘Daß eine Moral mit solchen umgekehrten Absichten nur in Anknüpfung an das beherrschende Sittengesetz und unter dessen Worten und Prunkworten gelehrt werden könne und angepflanzt werden könne, daß also viele Übergangs-​und Täuschungsformen zu erfinden sind [. . .]’ (NL 1885 34[176], KSA 11.479).

References Aydin, C. (2003), Zijn en Worden. Nietzsches omduiding van het substantiebegrip, Maastricht: Shaker. Geiger, I. (2007), The Founding Act of Modern Ethical Life: Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Moral and Political Philosophy, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mittasch, A. (1952), Nietzsche als Naturphilosoph, Stuttgart: Kröner Verlag. Müller Lauter, W. (1999), ‘Über Stolz und Eitelkeit bei Kant, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche’, in W. Müller Lauter, Über Werden und Wille zur Macht. Nietzsche-​ Interpretationen I, 141–​72, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Patton, P. (2008), ‘Nietzsche on Rights, Power and the Feeling of Power’, in H. W. Siemens and V. Roodt (eds), Nietzsche, Power and Politics. Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought, 471–​8 8, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Saar, M. (2008), ‘Forces and Powers in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals’, in H. W. Siemens and V. Roodt (eds), Nietzsche, Power and Politics. Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought, 453–​69, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Siemens, H. W. (2008), ‘Yes, No, Maybe So . . . Nietzsche’s Equivocations on the Relation between Democracy and “Grosse Politik” ’, in H. W. Siemens and V. Roodt (eds),

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Nietzsche, Power and Politics. Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought, 231–​68, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Siemens, H. W (2015a), ‘ “Punishment by Fate” as a Cypher for Genealogy: Hegel and Nietzsche on Immanent Law’, in K. Hay and L. R. dos Santos (eds), Nietzsche, German Idealism and its Critics, 35–​65, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Siemens, H. W (2015b), ‘Nietzsche’s Socio-​Physiology of the Self ’, in J. Constâncio, M. J. M. Branco and B. Ryan (eds), Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, 629–​53, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Siemens, H. W. (2016), ‘Nietzsches Sozio-​Physiologie des Selbst und das Problem der Souveräntität’, in H. Heidt und S. Thorgeirsdottir (eds), Nietzsche als Kritiker und Denker der Transformation, 167–182, Berlin and Boston: De Gryuter. Siemens, H. W., and Roodt, V. (eds) (2008), Nietzsche, Power and Politics. Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.

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Freedom as Independence Kant and Nietzsche on Non-​Domination, Self-​Love and the Rivalrous Emotions David Owen

Both Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche are centrally concerned with freedom as independence, where the contrasting term is that of servitude, and with working out the conditions that enable such freedom. But their respective approaches to this topic exhibit significant differences. One way of putting the contrast between them is that whereas Kant is focused on an ideal in which no one can legitimately exercise mastery over another, Nietzsche is focused on the forms of government that enable individuals to exercise mastery over themselves. Another is that whereas Kant is concerned with the effective suppression of rivalrous dispositions, Nietzsche is engaged in seeking to channel them. In this chapter, I reconstruct their accounts in order to draw out these differences. I conclude by considering the roots of these differences and, specifically, Nietzsche’s reasons for holding that Kant’s account offers an insufficient basis for securing conditions of freedom.

1.  Kant on freedom, self-​love and maturity Kant’s Universal Principle of Right declares that ‘an action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with universal law’ (MS 230). In its individualized form this principle can be expressed as the one basic innate right of humanity: ‘Freedom (independence from being constrained by another’s choice), insofar as it can coexist with the

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freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law, is the only original right belonging to every human being by virtue of his humanity’ (MS 237). Kant’s concept of freedom is drawn from Roman Law and shaped by the distinction between master and slave which receives its most systematic legal expression in the opening discussion of Justinian’s Digest. Under the title, De statu hominis, we are told that slavery is ‘an institution of the ius gentium by which someone is, contrary to nature, subjected to the dominium of someone else’. As Quentin Skinner (2002: 313) notes, This [definition of slavery] in turn is said to yield a definition of individual liberty. If everyone in a civil association is either bond or free, then a civis or free subject must be someone who is not under the dominion of anyone else, but is sui iuris, capable of acting in their own right. It likewise follows that what it means for someone to lack the status of a free subject must be for that person not to be sui iuris but instead to be sub potestate, under the power or subject to the will of someone else.

It is crucial to note that the status of sevitus does not imply that a slave’s lack of liberty consists in being subject to coercion, but rather in the fact that while slaves ‘may as a matter of fact be able to act at will, they remain at all times in potestate domini, within the power of their masters’ (Skinner, 1998: 41). The crucial point for Kant, in the context of legal and political philosophy, is that persons are free insofar as they are sui iuris, entitled to set their own ends (purposiveness) using their own means (their body, property, etc.) subject only to the general and reciprocal laws that flow from the fact that other persons are equally so entitled. By contrast, a person is dominated, that is, in a condition of servitude, if their ends are, or may be, determined by another person. As Arthur Ripstein (2009: 36) has nicely put it, The right to be your own master is neither a right to have things go well for you nor a right to have a wide range of options. Instead it is explicitly contrastive and interpersonal: to be your own master is to have no other [emphasis in the original] master. . . . The right to equal freedom, then, is just the right that no person be the master of another.

Notice that, on this account, I do not dominate you if I buy the last copy of the book you were going to buy for your holiday, since here I have simply changed the environment in which your choices are made; I do dominate you, however, if I censor what you can read. In other words, while some purpose of yours may be frustrated by the effects of an action of mine, that does not compromise your freedom.1

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Kant’s conception of independence is the basis of his systematic working out of a legal order in which no right of mastery or duty of servitude can exist. Notice that this explains the place in Kant’s legal reflections of the duty of ‘rightful honor’, a duty to respect the innate right to freedom of humanity in your own person. Kant’s point here is that you have a legal duty not to, for example, sell yourself into slavery or debt bondage even if it seems advantageous for you to do so –​and consequently that any contract that you wrongly make that purports to place you in such a condition cannot generate a right on the part of the other party, where the notion of a right is something that can legitimately be legally enforced. Thus Kant’s legal philosophy and its development from private right to public right to international rights of states and finally cosmopolitan right can be understood as the systematic unfolding of the conditions needed for a legal order in which the basic right of persons to equal freedom is fully established. I  will not work through Kant’s development of this argument in the Doctrine of Right since, for current purposes, this is not required. But I do note, in passing, that this legal order is necessarily also an institutionalized structure of recognition such that Kant posits that persons situated within it will develop dispositions of rightful honour towards themselves and of (recognition) respect toward others as legal subjects. We can deepen our account of this ideal by attending to the dynamics that Kant presents as supporting its realization. Here we should distinguish two accounts that Kant offers. The first and most general account, sketched out most prominently in his essay ‘Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’ (IaG 15), pivots around the notion of ‘unsociable sociability’ as a basic feature of human beings. Central to this argument is Kant’s appropriation of Rousseau’s analysis of amour propre as a practical relationship to oneself that can support relations of inequality and domination, but that can also take a productive form. As Sankar Muthu (2014: 71) remarks, Kant’s analysis mirrors Rousseau’s argument that while amour propre routinely generates and sustains inequality and oppression, particularly in agrarian societies, it does not necessarily have such effects. . . . Moreover, it is precisely the fact that amour propre need not be exploitative that allows for the possibility that in the future, if humans are ever to overcome the injustices of civil societies and to foster conditions of equal freedom, it could be cultivated in the morally appropriate way  –​that is, in a way not inflamed by the desire for superiority over others.

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Thus, for example, in his reflections on religion, Kant makes the following remarks. The predispositions to humanity can be brought under the general title of a self-​ love that . . . involves comparison . . . that is, only in comparison with others does one judge oneself happy or unhappy. Out of this self-​love originates the inclination to gain worth in the opinion of others, originally, of course, merely equal worth: not allowing anyone superiority over oneself, bound up with the constant anxiety that others might be striving for ascendancy. (RGV 27, cited in Muthu 2014: 70)

Although it is not entirely clear why Kant thinks that ‘originally’ this self-​love was directed at ‘merely equal worth’, the key point is that his argument partially accommodates self-​love or, rather, it accommodates a form of self-​love that is subject to the discipline of practical reason. Such a form of rational self-​love, Kant argues, is generative of relations of equality, motivating people to develop and exhibit the disposition of rightful honour towards themselves and hence to resist forms of oppression that sustain relationships of dominion. What is central to the rational disciplining of self-​love is the suppression of the rivalrous emotions (for example, jealousy, envy and spite) such that the self-​love is focused solely on the assertion and protection of one’s own innate dignity and, hence, equality with others. The second, and more specific, account focuses on ways in which the disposition to freedom may itself be blocked and the requirements for overcoming this condition. This account is developed most notably in the essay, ‘Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ (WA 35), which fundamentally concerns the issue of the disposition to freedom, or what Kant here calls ‘maturity’. Kant begins this essay by defining enlightenment as ‘man’s emergence from his self-​incurred immaturity (Unmündigkeit)’ (WA 35) where ‘self-​incurred immaturity’ refers to the fact that the Unmündige (immature ones) lack the resolution to rely on their own understanding and, thus, rely on a guardian (Vormund) to judge on their behalf.2 Although Kant initially refers to this immaturity as self-​incurred –​a product of laziness and cowardice: ‘It is so convenient to be immature! . . . I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me’ (WA 35) –​he quickly qualifies this judgement in specifying the mechanisms which obstruct the achievement of enlightenment: The guardians who have so kindly taken upon themselves the work of supervision will soon see to it that by far the largest part of mankind (including the entire fair sex) should consider the step towards maturity not only as difficult

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but also as highly dangerous. Having first infatuated their domesticated animals, and carefully prevented the docile creatures from daring to take a single step without the leading strings to which they are tied, they next show them the danger which threatens them if they try to walk unaided. Now this danger is not in fact so very great, for they could certainly learn to walk eventually after a few falls. But an example of this kind is intimidating, and usually frightens them off from further attempts. Thus it is very difficult for each separate individual to work his way out of the immaturity which has become almost second nature to him. He has even grown fond of it and is really incapable for the time being of using his own understanding, because he was never allowed to make the attempt. Dogmas and formulas, those mechanical instruments for rational use (or rather misuse) of his natural endowments, are the ball and chain of his permanent immaturity. (WA 35–​6)

This qualification is significant because it specifies two aspects of this ‘self-​ incurred’ immaturity. Kant’s claim is that the laziness and cowardice characteristic of the mass of humanity could be overcome if it were not reinforced by the deployment on the part of the guardians of both ‘dogmas and formulas’ and intimidating examples. The propagation of ‘dogmas and formulas’ reinforces the typical laziness of human beings by blocking the development and exercise of their capacity for freedom of thought. This point is clarified in the essay ‘What Is Orientation in Thinking’ (1786, WDO 133) where Kant writes that freedom of thought is also used to denote the opposite of that moral constraint whereby some citizens, without the use of external force, set themselves up as the guardians of others in religious matters, and succeed in outlawing all rational enquiry –​not by argument, but by prescribing articles of faith backed up by a nervous fear of the dangers of independent investigation, impressing these articles from an early age on the minds of those concerned. (WDO 145)

Thus, Kant’s argument is simply that the prescription of certain doctrines combined with an effective ban on rational reflection on these doctrines undermines the conditions of the exercise of (and thus the capacity for) freedom of thought. The use of intimidating examples reinforces the typical cowardice of human beings by heightening their sense of the dangerousness of attempting to stand security for themselves and, thus, deepening their willingness to rely on the ‘dogmas and formulas’ provided by the guardians (such as, for example, the common saying, ‘This may be true in theory, but it does not apply in practice’).

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What, then, is the mechanism by which enlightenment as the emergence from immaturity can be achieved? Although Kant deems it difficult for individuals to achieve maturity, that is, to assume the responsibility for speaking on their own behalf, he argues that [t]‌here is more chance of an entire public enlightening itself. This is indeed almost inevitable, if only the public concerned is left in freedom. For there will always be a few who think for themselves, even among those appointed as guardians of the common mass. Such guardians, once they have thrown off the yoke of immaturity, will disseminate the spirit of rational respect for personal value and for the duty of all to think for themselves. . . . For enlightenment of this kind, all that is needed is freedom. And the freedom in question is the most innocuous form of all –​freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters. (WA 36)

This is a difficult passage.3 However, a route into Kant’s argument is provided by the following remarks in ‘What Is Orientation in Thinking?’. Opposition to freedom of thought comes firstly from civil coercion. We do admittedly say that, whereas a higher authority may deprive us of freedom of speech or of writing, it cannot deprive us of freedom of thought. But how much and how accurately would we think if we did not think, so to speak, in community with others to whom we communicate our thoughts and who communicate their thoughts to us! We may therefore conclude that the same external constraint which deprives people of the freedom to communicate their thoughts in public also removes their freedom of thought, the one treasure which remains to us amidst all the burdens of civil life, and which alone offers us a means of overcoming all the evils of this condition. (WDO 144)

These comments suggest that the possibility of freedom of thought, which is a necessary condition of enlightenment, depends on the freedom to use one’s reason publicly. However, by itself, the freedom to use one’s reason publicly is not a sufficient condition for the development of enlightenment because it does not encourage –​let alone make ‘almost inevitable’ –​the overcoming of the laziness and cowardice which have almost become second nature under the aegis of the guardians. The additional condition required is the existence of some few mature individuals who ‘by cultivating their own minds, have succeeded in freeing themselves from immaturity and in continuing boldly on their way’ (WA 36).4 Such exceptional individuals play two significant roles. On the one hand, they act as critics who, having freed themselves from ‘dogmas and formulas’, seek to break the rule of such ‘mechanical instruments’ by disseminating ‘the spirit of rational respect for personal value and the duty of all men to think for

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themselves’ (WA 36). In this regard, such individuals both undermine the effectiveness of the guardian’s mechanism for reinforcing laziness and encourage the overcoming of natural inclinations to laziness. On the other hand, they acts as exemplars of maturity and, thus, of the possibility of walking unaided, to return to Kant’s metaphor. In this regard, such individuals act as counterexamples to the intimidating examples deployed by the guardians and, thus, encourage ‘the largest part of mankind’ to overcome their fear of attempting to stand  –​and walk –​on their own. Thus, Kant argues, freedom to make public use of one’s reason together with a few exemplars of enlightenment are sufficient conditions to secure public enlightenment. However, in ‘What Is Orientation in Thinking?’, Kant also points to a third threat to enlightenment as the exercise of freedom of thought, a threat distinct from ‘civil’ and ‘moral’ constraints: [F]‌reedom of thought also signifies the subjection of reason to no laws other than those which it imposes on itself; and its opposite is the maxim of the lawless use of reason . . . the inevitable result of self-​confessed lawlessness in thinking (i.e., of emancipation from the restrictions of reason) is this: freedom of thought is thereby ultimately forfeited and, since the fault lies not with misfortune, for example, but with genuine presumption, this freedom is in the true sense of the word thrown away. (WDO 145)5

Are the conditions of publicity and the exemplars of enlightenment sufficient to deal with this threat? We have good reason to believe that Kant holds them to be so with respect to the public. This becomes clear when we consider the relationship between Kant’s argument thus far and the three maxims requisite for the lawful use of reason which he specifies in the Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790): They are these: (1) to think for oneself; (2) to think from the standpoint of everyone else; (3) always to think consistently. The first is the maxim of unprejudiced thought, the second that of enlarged thought, the third that of consistent thought. (KU 294)

The first of these maxims is that principle of enlightenment which Kant argues is facilitated qua the public by the freedom to make public use of one’s reason and the example of a few exceptional enlightened men. However, precisely because thinking for oneself can only be achieved through the public use of reason, the capacity for thinking from the standpoint of others and, eventually, the capacity for consistent thought are also developed through that engagement in the public

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arena of argument and counterargument which is the condition of thinking for oneself. It is in this context that Kant specifies the relationship of his present to the conditions of the rule of reason: If it is asked whether we at present live in an enlightened age, the answer is: No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment. As things are at present, we still have a long way to go before men as a whole can be in a position (or can even be put in a position) of using their own understanding confidently and well in religious matters, without outside guidance. But we do have distinct indications that the way is now being cleared for them to work freely in this direction, and that the obstacles to universal enlightenment, to man’s emergence from his self-​incurred immaturity are gradually becoming fewer. In this respect our age is the age of enlightenment, the century of Frederick. (WA 40)

Precisely because Frederick the Great ‘is himself enlightened’ and ‘has at hand a well-​disciplined and numerous army to guarantee public security’, he is able to say ‘what no republic would dare to say’: ‘Argue as much as you like and about whatever you like, but obey!’ (WA 41).6 The restriction on civil freedom imposed by Frederick II is acceptable to Kant for two related reasons: first, because Frederick allows the most significant civil freedom (i.e. ‘intellectual freedom’: the freedom to make public use of one’s reason all matters); and, second, because it is important that the capacity and disposition to use reason lawfully be cultivated in the public before certain, strictly speaking, illegitimate constraints on civil freedom are relaxed, if the threat posed by civil freedom without maturity (i.e. the lawless use of reason) is to be minimized. As Kant puts it, A high degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people’s intellectual freedom, yet it also sets up insuperable barriers to it. Conversely, a lesser degree of civil freedom gives intellectual freedom enough room to expand to its fullest extent. Thus once the germ on which nature has lavished most care –​man’s inclination and vocation to think freely –​has developed within this hard shell, it gradually reacts upon the mentality of the people, who thus gradually become increasing able to act freely. Eventually, it even influences the principles of governments, which find that they can themselves profit by treating man, who is more than a machine, in a manner appropriate to his dignity. (WA 41–​2)

Thus, Kant concludes this essay by re-​emphasizing the relationship of enlightenment to maturity, as the disposition of freedom, and to the rightful condition, as explained in his legal philosophy.

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It is important that Kant’s account of freedom as independence not only sketches the legal conditions required to secure external freedom as the juridical status of being sui iuris, but also provides a general framework within which to understand the dynamics of human history as directed towards this end and a specific analysis of how his own present stands in relation to it. Kant thus demonstrates an awareness of human psychology and its salience for the cogency of his political ideal, and how central considerations of social theory are to his philosophical project. It is on this psychological ground that Nietzsche’s challenge to Kant most clearly emerges. Before we turn to that challenge, however, we need to elaborate Nietzsche’s own account of freedom as independence.

2.  Nietzsche on freedom and ethical pathologies The claim that Nietzsche is a psychologist centrally concerned with issues of power is not, perhaps, a surprising one. But in this section I will argue that reading Nietzsche in this light has implications that have often been overlooked by commentators. In particular, I  propose that Nietzsche is centrally concerned with the ways in which power relations structure ethical outlooks and the practical relationship to self that these engender.7 As a way into this topic, consider the following passage: As I  was wandering through the many subtle and crude moralities that have been dominant or that still dominate over the face of the earth, I found certain traits regularly recurring together and linked to each other. In the end, two basic types became apparent to me and a fundamental distinction leapt out. There is a master morality and a slave morality;  –​I  will immediately add that in all higher and more mixed cultures, attempts to negotiate between these moralities also appear, although more frequently the two are confused and there are mutual misunderstandings. . . . Moral value distinctions have arisen within either a dominating type that, with a feeling of well-​being, was conscious of the difference between itself and those who were dominated –​or alternatively, these distinctions arose among the dominated people themselves, the slaves and dependents of every rank. (BGE 260, KSA 5.208–​9)

Let me begin by noting three things about this passage. The first is the phrase ‘the dominated people themselves, the slaves and dependents of every rank’, which makes clear that by ‘dominated people’ Nietzsche is referring to those who are within the power of another in the sense of being subject to their

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legal dominion.8 The second is that in holding that it is the classical distinction between those who are free (masters) and those who are not (slaves and dependents of every rank) that is at stake, Nietzsche is claiming that these distinct statuses find expression in distinct ethical outlooks and forms of practical reasoning. The third, and most general, thing to note about this passage is that Nietzsche is proposing that distinct styles of ethical reasoning are shaped by the different types of relation of power in which persons stand. In light of these premises, I  will be concerned to address three aspects of Nietzsche’s concern with freedom and servitude. I begin with the moral psychology of freedom and servitude in contexts of legal dominion, before turning to Nietzsche’s treatment of asymmetric dependency more generally and, finally, to his focus on the role of the agon. Let me begin by offering a reading of the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality from the standpoint of a concern with freedom. It is widely recognized that in this essay Nietzsche is offering an account of forms of ethical outlook that emerge under conditions structured by the relation of masters and slaves, each of whom is taken to be characterized by ‘the instinct of freedom’ or ‘will to power’, that is, the practical necessity of experiencing themselves as free agents. In the focus on master–​slave relations, Nietzsche’s attention is directed specifically at legal dominion and its effects. First consider the slave. What distinguishes Nietzsche’s treatment is not that he offers a distinct account of the slave as the classic exemplar of unfreedom, but rather that he develops this account in unexpected yet powerful ways. Consider that, on this account, the slave is, like the master, characterized by the will to experience himself as a free agent; but whereas the master straightforwardly enjoys this experience of free agency, the slave cannot do so within the legal and political condition that he inhabits. One outcome of this situation in slave-​owning societies –​and note that although Nietzsche has ancient Greece and Rome in mind, the point does appear to be generalizable, and thus to support his universal claim about the instinct for freedom –​is that they are characterized by exercises of resistance from the slaves, up to and including slave revolts. (The example of the revolt led by Spartacus is the best known, but there were numerous other examples.) But Nietzsche’s insight is to see that exactly the same interest in experiencing themselves as free agents is given expression through imaginary revolts in which the slaves redescribe the terms of ethical recognition and thus self-​understanding, precisely so as to experience themselves as free agents. Notably Nietzsche (re)constructs the scenario under which this redescription occurs with considerable precision. The re-​evaluation of noble values begins,

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Nietzsche tells us, ‘when ressentiment becomes creative and ordains values: the ressentiment of creatures to whom the real reaction, that of the deed, is denied and who find compensation in an imaginary revenge’ (GM I  10, KSA 5.270). Nietzsche’s claim is thus that it is under conditions of legal dominion in which there is no possibility of effective resistance to the rule to which they are subject that the slave’s natural sense of ressentiment ‘becomes creative and ordains values’. The creativity in question takes the form of constructing (from materials already conceptually available)9 a perspective in which two principles of judgement combine. The first is comprised of a picture of the subject as characterized by voluntarism, the ability to choose freely when and how to act: Bound to do so by his instinct for self-​preservation and self-​affirmation, an instinct that habitually sanctifies every lie, this kind of man discovered his faith in the indifferent, freely choosing ‘subject’. The subject (or, to adopt a more popular idiom, the soul) has, therefore, been perhaps the best article of faith on earth so far, since it enables the majority of mortals, the weak and down-​trodden of all sorts, to practise that sublime self-​deception –​the interpretation of weakness itself as freedom, of the way they simply are, as merit. (GM I 13, KSA 5.280–​1)

This picture allows the slave, on the one hand, to hold the nobles responsible for their actions on the grounds that they could have freely chosen not to act as they do and, on the other hand, to construe their own inability to act as the nobles act as the product of a free choice on their part. This picture thus allows the slaves to experience themselves as agents but also, crucially, to evaluate the nobles as evil for choosing to act as they do and, hence, to evaluate themselves as good for choosing not to act in this way.10 Consequently, the slaves are able to construct a second principle of judgement according to which it is the typical traits of the slave class that comprise the virtues and the typical traits of the noble class that are vices. Approached from this perspective, it is clear that what Nietzsche takes to be a form of ethical pathology –​the slave-​revolt in morals –​is a product of being subject to legal dominium.11 Nietzsche’s concern with relationships of radical dependency in which the subordinate partner is in a condition of servitude finds earlier expression in The Gay Science. A passage entitled ‘On the problem of the actor’ takes up the expanded dimension of this republican account of freedom, namely, the forms of radical asymmetric dependency that may obtain even between persons who are legally free in that they are not subject to the dominion of another or others. For our immediate purposes, the salient features of Nietzsche’s discussion of the

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figure of the actor are twofold. First, he argues that the features of the actor are cultivated under conditions of radical dependency: Such an instinct will have developed most easily in lower-​class families who had to survive under fluctuating pressures and coercions, in deep dependency; who had nimbly to cut their coats according to their cloth, always readapting to new circumstances, always having to act and pose differently until they slowly learned to turn their coats with every wind and thus almost turned into coats themselves. (GS 361, KSA 3.608)

Second, Nietzsche holds that becoming an actor in social life is exemplary of a failure of agency that consists in ‘the loss of any strong identification with particular values, motives or reasons for acting’ (Patton 2000: 181). The actor in social life, in other words, is one whose words do not express his mind but rather his view of what his audience wish to hear; his apparent commitments are not whole-​hearted but are simply the postures he strikes for the benefit of their effects on his audience. When in this passage Nietzsche argues that the position of Jews in Europe is ‘a veritable breading for actors’ (in the sense of stage actors) and that considering the history of women, one asks, ‘Mustn’t they be actresses first and foremost?’, his point is neither anti-​Semitic nor misogynist, but rather an acknowledgement of the fact that Jews in Europe and women throughout European history have been subject to conditions of radical asymmetric dependency even in the absence of the legal dominion of a master, and that this leads to their ‘always having to act and pose differently until they slowly learned to turn their coats with every wind and thus almost turned into coats themselves’. Nietzsche’s insight is that to live under conditions where one cannot simply speak one’s mind or act on one’s commitments without exposing oneself to the dominating power of another or others is itself likely to lead, as in the case of the slave, to a particular view of ethical agency in which a sharp distinction is posited between the inner and the outer such that one’s doings are precisely not seen as criterial or constitutive of one’s intentions, beliefs, values, etc; rather one’s intentions are seen as prior to, and causally responsible for, one’s actions. On the contrary, it is central to the ethical self-​understanding of one who is constrained to live their life as an actor that, unless they become their role (a possibility that Nietzsche considers), they distinguish between their true or real selves and the fictional or apparent selves disclosed in their actions. As in the case of the slave, Nietzsche’s purpose is not to blame or condemn the radically dependent, but rather to illustrate and explain how such forms of non-​legal dependency support an ethical pathology in which the expressive character of human agency

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is systematically obscured and values such as obedience and humility come to predominate over values such as boldness, courage and independence of mind. Thus far, what has emerged is that Nietzsche considers it to be a necessary condition of free agency that one is not within the power of another either in the legal sense of dominium or in the expanded sense of deep dependency, and, further, that he sees that ethical outlooks structured by significant inequalities of freedom will reflect (be distorted by) such inequalities in their conceptions of ethical agency and/​or their values. Furthermore, it seems clear from Nietzsche’s critique of modernity (see, e.g. TI Expeditions 39, KSA 6.140–​2) that he holds that not being within the power of another or others, while necessary, is not sufficient for the cultivation of free agency. This is so since this condition is compatible with decadence, that is, standing in a practical relationship to oneself of laisser aller in which all constraint is viewed as imposition (e.g. TI Expeditions 41, KSA 6.143). This is Nietzsche’s objection to the liberal view of freedom as non-​interference. In effect, Nietzsche’s claim is that while the legal and political institutions of a society can be arranged in such a way as to address the problem of domination, the issue of forming a free subject further requires an ethical culture that supports a certain kind of practical relation to self that embraces the will to be responsible for oneself, a practical relation to self that Nietzsche’s characterizes as ‘that other more mysterious pathos . . . that demand for new expansions of distance within the soul itself, the development of states that are increasingly high, rare, distant, tautly drawn and comprehensive’ (BGE 257, KSA 5.205). The cultivation of such a pathos requires, Nietzsche argues, an agonal culture. Nietzsche presents the ancient agon as a medial institution in and through which participants contest with each other and rework the standards of the practice. Think, for example, of the way that tragedians rework the standards of tragedy –​ from Aeschylus to Sophocles, for instance. An agonal culture such as ancient Athens, on Nietzsche’s account, cultivates just that will to self-​overcoming which is the disposition of freedom. Nietzsche takes certain passions –​in particular, desires for respect, honour and glory –​to be channelled by the agon in ways that serve culture, society and polity both by cultivating the appropriate practical relation to self in participants and by developing the excellences of practices (art, politics, etc.). To be more precise, the importance that the institution of the agon has, for Nietzsche, is that it cultivates will to power (the instinct for freedom) in such a way that the feeling of power (the feeling of effective agency) tracks power (effective agency) and, at the same time, supports a practical relationship to self

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in which the power to engage in the self-​directed development of one’s powers (and hence the dispositions of self-​responsibility and of self-​overcoming) is central to one’s ethical outlook. To see this relationship between will to power and the agon, it is worth recalling, as Bernard Reginster (2006) has cogently argued, that will to power involves overcoming resistances and, hence, that willing a goal means also willing resistance to achieving this goal. The appearance of paradox here is dissolved once we consider that such a view simply takes willing a goal to have the structure of taking up a challenge. Consider that it is of the nature of challenges that, first, they involve overcoming resistances (if there is no resistance, then there is no challenge); second, they must be realizable (if there is no practical possibility of you achieving X, then X is not a challenge for you); third, their value is at least partially related to their difficulty (given two relevantly similar challenges distinguished only by their degree of difficulty, the more challenging option is the more valuable); and, fourth, once a challenge is met, it is no longer valuable as a challenge. As the early essay Homer’s Contest makes vividly clear, it is precisely such a view of human agency as directed to taking up and overcoming challenges that is cultivated by the institution of the agon in which participants contest with one another to be the best at a given practice.12 However, for such an agonal culture to avoid precisely the problems that confronted the slave societies of antiquity, it must be characterized by a general condition of non-​domination, so as to avoid the distortions or pathologies of ethical outlooks that Nietzsche diagnoses as arising from relations of domination.13

3.  Nietzsche’s criticism of Kant Having elucidated Kant’s and Nietzsche’s respective accounts of freedom as independence, we are now in a position to address them in relation to one another. We can begin by reflecting on their respective relations to the issues of domination and of self-​love, which will help to then identify Nietzsche’s reasons for being sceptical of Kant’s account. Kant’s legal philosophy focuses on securing conditions in which all persons are free from dominion in the sense of a legal relationship of mastery, namely, the entitlement of another to set one’s ends. However, it is considerably less clear that Kant’s view is well-​suited to address the wider, economic and social forms of radical dependency to which Nietzsche draws attention. In a narrow construal, the issue here concerns the formal distinction that Kant draws between an agent

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choosing one’s ends and an agent changing the environment within which one chooses one’s own ends. The problem with this distinction is that it is not difficult to imagine circumstances in which A changes B’s environment such that any choice other than X has very high costs attached to it and, hence, de facto, A chooses B’s end. While it is true that, formally, B can still choose their own ends and hence is not subject to the dominion of A, there is little, if any, practical difference between A choosing B’s ends and A changing B’s environment in such circumstances. Nietzsche’s sensitivity to such forms of non-​legal domination leads him to the view that these forms of domination are threats to freedom as independence.14 Hence, he is sceptical of whether even a culture of enlightenment, in which a Kantian order of right is instituted as a legal structure of recognition, is sufficient to sustain each person’s sense of ‘rightful honour’ in the face of asymmetrical relationships of social, cultural or economic dependency that are liable to shape the ethical outlooks and dispositions of those so dominated. Turning from the issue of domination to that of self-​love, we can note that Kant acknowledges that self-​love is an ineliminable feature of such finite creatures as human beings are, and that he seeks to at once mobilize and discipline self-​love through what we may call a subordination and suppression strategy. With this, self-​love is subordinated to the demands of practical reason, being allowed expression only in the limited forms compatible with these demands, and the rivalrous emotions are suppressed. By contrast, Nietzsche pursues what we may refer to as a channelling strategy in which the desire for distinction is directed in ways that serve both individual and collective development. Nietzsche is clear that his project of re-​evaluation involves a re-​evaluation of self-​ love or, as he refers to it in his contemporary vocabulary, egoism. Thus, in Daybreak, he presents his project of re-​evaluation as, in part, oriented to the following task: ‘we shall restore to men their goodwill towards the actions decried as egoistic and restore to these actions their value –​ we shall deprive them of their bad conscience!’ (D 148, KSA 3.140). A rather more diagnostic stance on this topic is adopted in the first essay of the Genealogy, when Nietzsche argues that it is only with the decline of aristocratic value-​judgements that ‘this whole antithesis between “egoistic” and “unegoistic” forces itself more and more on man’s conscience’ (GM I 2, KSA 5.260). Here he is first concerned with articulating and defending an ethical outlook that is eudaemonistic in the sense that Kant condemns as a form of egoism.15 But Nietzsche’s revaluation of egoism goes beyond this in seeking also to revalue the ‘rivalrous emotions’ central to an agonal culture. In such agonistic cultures, rivalrous emotions may be viewed as virtuous or defective. Thus, in ancient Greek thought, the rivalrous emotions form a relatively distinct subset

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of emotional responses, demarcated from relationships of friendship and enmity and focusing on ‘the pain induced in us by the possession of good things by other people’ (Gill 2003: 34). The main emotions in question are ‘indignation (nemesis), envy (or being ‘grudging’) (phthonos) and emulation (zēlos)’, and Aristotle distinguishes them from each other broadly as follows: Indignation is pain at the undeserved possession of good things by other people. Envy (grudge) is the pain directed specifically at those who are our equals in status or character, and is centered on the fact that other people have good things rather than that we do not. Emulation is close to envy in other respects, but is centered on the fact that we do not have good things rather than that others do have them. (34)

Nietzsche’s view of these emotions appears to differ in certain respects from Aristotle’s. So, for example, commenting in Daybreak on the loss of the idea of innocent misfortune in Christianity, he notes that ‘[t]‌he Greeks have a word for indignation at another’s unhappiness:  this affect was inadmissible among Christian people and failed to develop, so they lack a name for this more manly brother of pity’ (D 78, KSA 3.77). The contrast between nemesis and mitleid drawn here is directed against what Nietzsche sees as the Christian identification of misfortune with guilt, but the salient point for us is that he clearly sees indignation as an emotional response also to the undeserved misfortune of another, and not simply to undeserved good fortune. We may also note that in his early essay ‘Homer’s Contest’, Nietzsche links a range of rivalrous emotions under the aegis of the ‘good’ Eris ‘who as jealousy, spite, envy, incites men to activity but not to the action of war to the knife but the action of competition’ (HC, KSA 1.785–​6). What motivates this concern with revaluing the very rivalrous emotions that Kant is concerned to denigrate and suppress?16 Nietzsche’s scepticism towards Kant’s subordination and suppression strategy reflects his more general scepticism towards Kant’s picture of the self as able to step back from or suspend any motive and evaluate it on the basis of reason alone. On Nietzsche’s own naturalistic account of the self in terms of drive psychology, Kant’s subordination and suppression strategy is unlikely to be effective because it fails to recognize that the drive to self-​love manifest in the rivalrous emotions actively seeks expression. The best available interpretation of this feature of Nietzsche’s argument explains it in the following way: A drive is a disposition that induces an evaluation orientation. Drives manifest themselves by structuring the agent’s perceptions, affects, and reflective thought. Moreover, drives do not simply arise in response to external stimuli: they actively seek opportunities for expression, sometimes distorting the agent’s perception

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of the environment in order to incline the agent to act in ways that give the drive expression. (Katsafanas 2013: 752)

The salience of this account is that it requires a recasting of our view of reflective agency: An agent who deliberates seems to enjoy a certain detachment from her motivational states. The deliberating agent experiences herself as capable of suspending the effects of her motivational states, and determining her action by choice. While it may be true that the agent who deliberates is not immediately compelled to act by her motivational states, her drives and other motives do continue to operate, in a subterranean fashion, even as the agent reflects on them. In many cases, the drives appear to decisively guide the agent’s reflective choice in ways that she does not recognize. (732)

On this view, the plausibility of Kant’s subordination strategy with respect to self-​ love and his suppression strategy with regard to the rivalrous emotions is dependent on inflating the claims of deliberative agency and failing to acknowledge the subterranean operation of the drives. A channeling strategy –​which necessarily requires a re-​evaluation of self-​love and the rivalrous emotions –​looks like a more realistic alternative. However, this raises a problem for Nietzsche’s account that Kant’s account of morality is designed to avoid. For both Kant and Nietzsche concur that teleological views of nature (including human nature) of the kind that grounded substantive eudaemonistic conceptions of the good life are no longer credible. How then can Nietzsche propose a project of re-​evaluation that reintroduces an eudaemonist view of ethics? An adequate response to this question is beyond the reach of this chapter, but it should be noted that Nietzsche, like Kant, sees the bindingness of norms as grounded in autonomy but, in contrast to Kant, takes the achievement of autonomy to be the ongoing achievement of standing in a relationship of self-​ responsibility and self-​overcoming to oneself, such that the practice of certain virtues is integral to developing and sustaining this relationship. These virtues include those cultivated by an agonal culture as integral to identifying, taking up and overcoming challenges, such as courage and independence of mind. This is, of course, only to indicate one possible route towards addressing this central issue.

4.  Conclusion My concern in this essay has been to address Kant and Nietzsche in terms of their understanding of freedom as independence. Although I  have been concerned to highlight the differences between their views, it is important to

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emphasize that Nietzsche can endorse Kant’s stress on the importance of a legal condition in which no one stands in a relationship of mastery (legal dominion) to another. But I  have tried to show that Nietzsche’s position is more radical than Kant’s in two respects. First, Nietzsche takes the condition of freedom as independence to be more demanding than Kant does in that it needs to address a range of forms of domination that extend beyond Kant’s focus on a person’s being able to determine one’s choices directly. Second, Nietzsche does not take freedom from domination to be sufficient to secure freedom as independence. Rather, on his account, freedom as independence also requires the practice of a practical relation to self composed of the disposition of self-​responsibility and self-​overcoming. Admittedly, Kant too holds that the mere fact of freedom from domination is not sufficient for freedom as independence –​he notes that one must also stand to oneself in a relation of ‘rightful honour’. But while Kant’s account goes beyond the specification of legal conditions that secure relations of non-​mastery to encompass psychological and social dimensions of human agency such as ‘unsociable sociability’, ‘maturity’ and institutionalized structures of recognition supporting the practical self-​relation of rightful honour, I have offered some reasons for Nietzsche’s scepticism towards Kant’s account both in terms of the sufficiency of the conditions that Kant proposes and in terms of the plausibility of Kant’s strategy for dealing with the drive to self-​love. I have also highlighted a challenge that confronts Nietzsche’s project. Without pretending to offer any definitive conclusions, I hope to have opened up a field of enquiry regarding Nietzsche’s relationship to Kant’s ethics that extends beyond the narrow focus on Kant’s conception of morality.17

Notes 1 As Ripstein (2009: 39) rightly puts it: ‘Kant’s account of independence does not aspire to isolate people from the effects of other people’s choices. Instead my independence of your choice must be understood in terms of my right that you do not choose for me.’ 2 As Green (1996: 292) notes: ‘The common root [of Vormund and Unmündig] –​ Mund (mouth) –​indicates that the underlying meaning of unmündig is being unable to speak on one’s own behalf. For that purpose one has need of a Vormund, a legally sanctioned “mouthpiece” to stand in front of (vor) him –​or her –​as official spokesman.’

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3 Not the least of the difficulties here is Kant’s clear implication that the mass of guardians are immature. I take his point to be that the ‘dogmas and formulas’ which enchain the common mass also enchain most of the guardians. The relation of this point to the discussion of the freedom to use one’s public reason which follows is made clear later in the essay, when Kant remarks that ‘a clergyman is bound to instruct his pupils and his congregation in accordance with the doctrines of the church he serves, for he was employed by it on that condition. . . . [However], as a scholar addressing the real public (i.e., the world at large) through his writings, the clergyman making public use of his reason enjoys unlimited freedom to use his own reason and to speak in his own person. For to maintain that the guardians of the people in spiritual matters should themselves be immature, is an absurdity which amounts to making absurdities permanent’ (WA 37). 4 We should note here that this reference to the few as ‘cultivating their own minds’ does not entail solitary activity but most probably membership of a secret society. As Kant notes: ‘Obedience without the spirit of freedom is the effective cause of all secret societies. For it is a natural vocation of man to communicate with his fellows, especially in matters affecting mankind as a whole. Thus secret societies would disappear if freedom of this kind were encouraged’ (TP 305). In this passage, the ‘spirit of freedom’ refers to the exercise of the freedom to use one’s public reason. 5 While the contemporary philosophical target of these remarks may be Johann Gottfried Herder, whose Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind had been reviewed with some hostility by Kant in the previous year (1795), this passage is also consonant with Kant’s long-​standing antagonism to self-​proclaimed visionaries such as Emanuel Swedenborg. 6 This claim was somewhat optimistic on Kant’s part. In the same year, Frederick stated that a ‘private person has no right to pass public and perhaps even disapproving judgement on the actions, procedures, laws, regulations, and ordinances of sovereigns and courts, their officials, assemblies, and courts of law, or to promulgate or publish in print pertinent reports which he manages to obtain. For a private person is not at all capable of making such a judgement, because he lacks complete knowledge of circumstances and motives’ (cited in Habermas 1989: 25). 7 This section draws from Owen (2005). 8 Note in particular that the reference to dependents ‘of every rank’ highlights the fact that in the ancient Greek and, particularly, Roman worlds the wives and children of citizens were subject to the legal dominion of the paterfamilias. 9 See GM II 10, KSA 5.270–​4, in which Nietzsche notes that as communities become more powerful, they come to isolate the criminal from his act. This separation provides the basic resources needed for the thought that agents and their acts can be taken as distinct which is, then, exploited by the slaves.

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10 Cf. GM I 11, KSA 5.274–​7. 11 It should also be noted, however, that the ethics of the masters also exhibits what Nietzsche takes to be a distorted form of valuing. While ‘master morality’ does not need to avail itself of a picture of moral agency that engages in fictitious double-​ counting, its own valuations are distorted by the asymmetries of freedom in which it is embedded. Thus Nietzsche notes that this morality combines a synthesis of the inhuman (monstrous) and the overhuman (GM I 13, KSA 5.278–​81). The fact that the ‘pathos of distance’ experienced by the masters is the condition required for their experience of that more mysterious pathos of inner distance that Nietzsche celebrates (BGE 257, KSA 5.205) does not prevent him from acknowledging that some of their values are barbaric and are so precisely because their formation is structured by the distinctions between the free man and the slave and between the citizen and the stranger –​where these distinctions are linked practically in that it is the conquest of strangers that produces slaves (GM II 17, KSA 5.324–​5). Notice further that the issue of freedom also structures relationships within the noble class, albeit here we shift from legal structures to political rule. Nietzsche’s account of the different moral psychologies of the priest and the knight is structured by the former’s collective political subordination to the latter. The moral outlook and values of the priest that come to articulation in the ascetic ideal begin in their experience of political servitude. 12 Note that it is also central to the functioning of the agon that no one wholly dominates the field of contest; should that occur, Nietzsche points in HC to ostracism as a mechanism for reinvigorating the agon. 13 Crucially, it is also the case for Nietzsche that the capacities for self-​discipline, self-​ surveillance and truthfulness developed under the aegis of the ascetic ideal entail that the pathos of inner distance no longer depends on the pathos of outer distance, that is, the relations of social and political hierarchy that gave birth to it. See Owen (1998) for a detailed argument for this point. 14 This worry was of course already a feature of classical reflection on servitude. Thus, for example, Sallust argues in his Bellum Catilinae that ‘ever since our republic submitted to the jurisdiction and control of a few powerful persons, the rest of us have been obnoxii, living in subservience to them’ (cited in Skinner 1998: 43). The point has been powerfully developed within the republican and radical traditions to highlight a range of forms of dependency –​economic, social, cultural –​that amount in practice to de facto servitude. 15 Kant’s view is stated succinctly in the section on ‘Egoism’ in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View: ‘[T]‌he moral egoist limits all purposes to himself; as a eudaemonist, he concentrates the highest motives of his will merely on profit and his own happiness, but not on the concept of duty. Because every other person has a different concept of what he counts as happiness, it is exactly egoism which causes

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him to have no touchstone of a genuine concept of duty which truly must be a universally valid principle. All eudaemonists are consequently egoists’ (Anth 161). 16 For a clear account of Kant’s view, see Muthu (2014). 17 I am grateful to audiences in Rome, Leiden and Montreal for critical discussion and feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. I owe particular thanks to Tom Bailey for incisive editorial guidance and for much needed patience.

References Gill, C. (2003), ‘Is Rivalry a Virtue or a Vice?’ in D. Konstan and N. K. Rutter (eds) Envy, Spite and Jealousy, 29–​52, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Green, G. (1996), ‘Modern Culture Comes of Age: Hamann versus Kant on the Root Metaphor of Enlightenment’, in J. Schmidt (ed.), What Is Enlightenment?, 368–​81, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Habermas, J. (1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge: Polity. Katsafanas, P. (2013), ‘Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology’, in K. Gemes and J. Richardson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, 727–​55, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Muthu, S. (2014), ‘Productive Resistance in Kant’s Political Thought’, in K. Flikschuh and L. Ypi (eds), Kant and Colonialism, 68–​98, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Owen, D. (1998), ‘Nietzsche, Enlightenment and the Problem of the Noble Ideal’, in J. Lippitt (ed.), Nietzsche’s Futures, 3–​29, Basingstoke: MacMillan. Owen, D. (2005), ‘Failing to be Agents’, Philosophical Topics 33 (2): 139–​59. Patton, P. (2000) ‘Nietzsche and the Problem of the Actor’, in A. D. Schrift (ed.), Why Nietzsche Still?, 170–​83, Berkeley: University of California Press. Reginster, B. (2006), The Affirmation of Life, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ripstein, A. (2009), Force and Freedom, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Skinner, Q. (1998), Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Q. (2002), ‘Classical Liberty, Renaissance Translation and the English Civil War’ in Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics (volume II): Renaissance Virtues, 308–​43, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Autonomy, Spiritual Illness and Theodicy in Kant and Nietzsche Frederick Neuhouser

If one wanted to locate the text of Kant’s that corresponded most closely to the Genealogy of Morals, one would not be too far off the mark in looking to his essay ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’.1 In that work Kant offers his own brand of a genealogy of morals –​a theodicy, really –​that purports to explain in naturalistic terms how two moral phenomena, justice and the capacity for autonomy, could have entered a world inhabited by human creatures in which those phenomena were previously absent. The story Kant tells bears striking resemblances to Nietzsche’s genealogy. In particular, it depicts how humans came to acquire capacities they originally lacked not through an awareness of the higher purposes those capacities might eventually serve, but through mundane struggles produced by the ‘unsocial’ aspect of human nature. The natural unsociability that Kant’s narrative depends on could even be seen as a species of will to power: the will to be exclusively one’s own master and to avoid subjection to others, and also to subjugate others if retaining one’s own sovereignty requires it.2 The individuals Kant describes as honing capacities in order to defend their sovereignty against their rivals are no more aware that they are creating the conditions that will make justice and morality possible than the slaves in Nietzsche’s account know in advance of the possibilities for spiritual greatness that their own deeds create. But the similarities between these works extend beyond the general idea that later generations can take over the legacy of earlier generations –​the development of new capacities –​and employ it in the service of ‘higher’ ends unimagined by those who created that legacy. For Nietzsche also provides genealogies of (close relatives of) the same phenomena as those explained by Kant. As is well known, the beginning of the Genealogy’s second essay characterizes its project

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in terms of showing how autonomy, reinterpreted as a ‘supramoral’ phenomenon, can be understood as having entered the world on the back of events and processes that in no way aimed at producing the results they did. It is less widely acknowledged that in section 11 of the same essay –​more or less the midpoint of the entire Genealogy –​Nietzsche reflects on the origins of justice, too, and, surprisingly perhaps, offers what can only be described as a paean to justice: in its highest manifestations justice ‘is a piece of perfection and supreme mastery on earth’ (GM II 11, KSA 5.311; throughout, translations are Walter Kaufmann’s). Even more surprisingly, Nietzsche’s genealogy, too –​and especially his account of the historical preconditions of autonomy –​retains traces of traditional theodicy. In this chapter I  will consider some aspects of Nietzsche’s treatments of autonomy and justice in the Genealogy of Morals that appear to respond to Kant’s accounts of the same topics in ‘Universal History’. While my main aim is to shed light on Nietzsche’s account of the preconditions of autonomy, situating that account in relation to Kant’s will help bring Nietzsche’s claims into better focus. In undertaking this project, one should bear in mind three dimensions along which the two genealogies can be compared. The first has to do with the content of the relevant concepts, for clearly the versions of autonomy and justice endorsed by Nietzsche are not identical to those defended by Kant. The second dimension concerns the respective roles that natural teleology plays in the two genealogies. Here, too, the two genealogies differ significantly, most notably because Kant’s relies heavily on the idea that justice and autonomy (or its preconditions) can be understood as moral ends that nature sets for the human species, the achievement of which is, if not strictly necessary, far from accidental. This issue has been widely discussed in the literature –​especially in comparisons of Nietzsche’s and Hegel’s ‘genealogies’ –​but I will argue that it is considerably more complex than is usually thought. The final dimension, not entirely separate from the second, concerns the respects in which Nietzsche’s and Kant’s genealogies can be read as theodicies, as well as how their theodicies differ. This is the dimension I will focus on most directly, and, of the three, it is the one that has received the least attention from commentators –​due in part no doubt to a reluctance to admit that Nietzsche might be engaged in anything so closely bound up with Christian theology. My discussion will proceed as follows:  after briefly discussing differences between Kant’s and Nietzsche’s conceptions of justice and autonomy, I will turn to the third dimension of comparison and attempt to clarify in what sense the two genealogies participate in the project of theodicy.

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1.  Conceptions of justice and autonomy It is easy to see that Kant and Nietzsche do not have precisely the same phenomena in mind when they refer to justice and autonomy, but it is more difficult to say precisely where the differences lie. One reason for this stems from a fundamental philosophical disagreement: whereas Kant operates with conceptions of justice and autonomy that he takes to be stable and universal, Nietzsche assumes that the content of our normative concepts changes over time, in response to more or less contingent historical events, such that it is impossible to specify what justice or autonomy ‘essentially’ is (as Kant does) or to understand the development of those concepts as a rational unfolding of their latent content (as Hegel does). For Nietzsche the history of our moral conceptions is instead ‘a continuous sign-​chain of ever new interpretations and adjustments whose causes . . . follow and replace one another according to mere chance’ (GM II 12, KSA 5.314). Or, as he also puts the point, ‘only what has no history can be defined’ (GM II 13, KSA 5.317). When Nietzsche speaks approvingly of justice in the Genealogy, his understanding of it has more in common with Kant’s conception of justice than do their accounts of autonomy. Both thinkers emphasize the importance of law to political justice, especially its role in ‘externally’ regulating individuals’ actions in accordance with some relatively formal criterion of what social members owe to one another. Although here, too, there are important differences, the version of political justice praised in the Genealogy is closer to Kant’s vision of justice than it is to those of, say, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx or Mill. Moreover, Nietzsche’s and Kant’s genealogies agree in regarding political justice as historically prior to autonomy, and for similar reasons: both see autonomy as depending on sophisticated subjective capacities whose development presupposes more complex historical processes than does the creation of a law-​governed state. More than this, however, the establishment of political justice (along with the practices of punishment that accompany it) plays for both a central role in explaining how the psychological capacities necessary for autonomy entered the world. Nietzsche’s view of justice nevertheless diverges from Kant’s in significant respects. Whereas for Kant justice is primarily a matter of establishing spheres of ‘external freedom’ for individuals within which they are able to act as they wish without interference from others, the core of justice3 for Nietzsche resides in some version of the primordial ‘establishing of equivalents’ (and discharging of debts) that is fundamental to human civilization and even to ‘thinking as

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such’ (GM II 8, KSA 5.306). That Nietzsche traces justice back to norms implicit in ancient practices of exchange makes his view closer to social contract theory than one might expect, but how he does so means that his conception of justice cannot ultimately be assimilated to Kant’s or to social contract theory more generally. For there remains a crucial difference between locating the core of justice in some version of a law of equivalents –​of which ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ is a primitive e­ xample –​and thinking of it as about respecting (refraining from intervening in) other individuals’ external spheres of freedom. A more interesting difference between the treatments of justice in the Genealogy and ‘Universal History’ is that the former treats justice not only as an external political condition, realized in the laws of a state, but also as a virtue of the soul: a subjective attitude of ‘exalted, clear objectivity, as penetrating as it is mild’, which is capable of judging equitably –​without ‘malice driving blood into the eyes’ –​even when it is the judger himself who is the victim of injustice (GM II 11, KSA 5.311). It is this condition of the soul –​justice as a virtue (as a kind of impartiality) –​that Nietzsche calls ‘a piece of perfection and supreme mastery on earth’, and, as that praise implies, he takes it to be a much rarer occurrence than political justice, which is a more primitive phenomenon established whenever a stronger power imposes on weaker beings a condition of law that ‘elevates certain equivalents . . . into norms’ and declares what, ‘beneath its eyes, is to count as allowed and prohibited, as right and wrong’ (GM II 11, KSA 5.312). Although Nietzsche does not emphasize this fact, his genealogy of political justice cannot by itself explain where the virtue of justice comes from. For this virtue is internal to subjects (in their ‘souls’) and so requires a more complex explanation than can be found in the merely external imposition of order on the weaker by the physically more powerful. Since Nietzsche does not say more about where the virtue of justice comes from, it is tempting to conclude that his genealogy is incomplete, that he has drawn our attention to a subjective phenomenon that cannot belong ‘naturally’ to human animals without explaining how it could have come about. Once Nietzsche distinguishes justice as an external political condition from justice as a state of the soul, he owes us a genealogy not only of the earlier phenomenon –​an explanation of how states came to be –​ but also of the later and more complex phenomenon, justice as a virtue. Given that both autonomy and the virtue of justice are possible only for souls that possess a complex internal structure, it seems reasonable to expect that the missing genealogy of the virtue of justice might be contained in, or intimately bound up with, the genealogy of autonomy that Nietzsche announces as his task at the beginning of the second essay. While I  believe this must be right,

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the suggestion is less helpful than it might seem for the simple reason that it is far from clear how his genealogy of autonomy is to be understood. Although Nietzsche makes clear that the essay should be read as explaining where autonomy comes from –​it is described as the late ‘fruit’ of a ‘tremendous process’ in which ‘society and its morality of mores (Sittlichkeit der Sitte) finally reveal what they have [. . .] been the means to’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293) –​he never explicitly returns to the topic, and by the end of that complex essay, it is unclear which of the many developments traced in it also play a role in his story of how autonomy might come into the world. I will have no more to say in this chapter about the genealogy of justice as a virtue, although, as I have suggested, the genealogy of autonomy I focus on below is surely relevant to reconstructing it. A more basic question, no less difficult to answer, is what the autonomy praised by Nietzsche in GM II 2, KSA 5.293-​4, consists in. Clearly, it is not moral autonomy of the Kantian sort. As is well known, Nietzsche rejected Kant’s vision of moral autonomy as a secular form of the ascetic ideal (GM III 5, KSA 5.262–​4) that is grounded in a repressed and especially virulent form of self-​directed cruelty (GM II 6, KSA 5.264–​6). Moreover, since ethical concepts evolve over time and are shaped by contingent circumstances, the conception of autonomy I will attribute to Nietzsche cannot be regarded as an account of what self-​determined agency ‘really’ is, sub specie aeternitatis. Rather, the conception of autonomy endorsed in GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4, should be understood as Nietzsche’s attempt to articulate a specific form of self-​determined agency that he takes to be available to (some of) us at a particular juncture in history, after long sequences of events, possessing varying degrees of contingency, have shaped us into the beings we currently are (or were in Europe in the late nineteenth century). In the remainder of this chapter I  will use ‘autonomy’ when discussing Nietzsche’s position, to refer to the specific version of self-​determined agency that he regards as the most complete form of freedom –​and spiritual health –​available to humans in his own time. For Nietzsche, autonomy in this sense seems to be equated with having the right to make promises, which is said to be a defining characteristic of the ‘sovereign individual’, the person who has ‘his own independent protracted will’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293) and is capable of following up his ‘I shall do this’ with the deed that fulfills the promise he has made (GM II 1, KSA 5.291–​2).4 (Once again, the differences between Kant and Nietzsche turn out to be less stark than one initially thinks: promise-​keeping, for example, is central to both of their accounts of autonomy.) If we stop at this description of the autonomous individual (as a person who can be depended on to keep his promises), it can seem as though

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Nietzsche’s account of how the long, harsh historical process associated with the morality of mores and the practice of punishment (and hence with justice in its political form) makes human beings ‘calculable’ and ‘regular’ might suffice to explain where autonomy comes from. However, that autonomy involves more than calculability and regularity is apparent both from Nietzsche’s text5 and from reflecting on the concept itself. If self-​given law is to designate a state of the soul rather than merely a political condition, then autonomy requires a soul that is sufficiently complex that one can distinguish within it a law-​giving part from a part that is subject to the laws it gives itself. Autonomy, in other words, requires an internally divided soul that cannot be explained by the morality of mores alone, and it is the origin of precisely such a soul that the second essay means to account for in showing how the bad conscience entered the world. That autonomy involves an internally divided soul is made clear by Nietzsche’s description of the sovereign individual as one for whom the obligation to fulfill one’s promises derives from and is enforced by some agency internal to the individual –​his ‘conscience’ –​rather than by the punishing power of an external authority such as the state. But this capacity of the autonomous soul –​its capacity for self-​enforcement –​does not exhaust its autonomy, which requires, in addition, that the law that is enforced be in some way self-​given. Nietzsche’s conception of autonomy interprets the idea of self-​legislation more loosely than Kant’s; what Nietzsche’s autonomous individual imposes on himself is not exactly a law, with the form of universality,6 but more like a supreme value. I take this to be Nietzsche’s point when he says that ‘the possessor of a protracted . . . will [i.e. the autonomous individual] also possesses his [own] measure of value’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.294). It is not immediately clear in what sense the autonomous individual’s measure of value is his own or on what kind of value his judgements rely. For reasons that will become clearer below, I believe Nietzsche means to offer relatively robust answers to both questions: the autonomous individual’s measure of value is his own in some sense that makes it count, in the words of German idealism, as a self-​posited value, and the value he posits for himself extends beyond merely affirming the goodness of keeping one’s promises or of being just in one’s external dealings with others. This means that Nietzsche’s ideal of autonomy is a more inclusive phenomenon than the virtue of justice (holding oneself to one’s impartial judgements as to what the principles of equivalence require of one), and for this reason his genealogy of the former cannot completely overlap with a genealogy of the latter. The virtue of justice may be part of autonomy, but it is not identical to it. For it operates in a narrower domain than autonomy –​only where principles of

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equivalence apply –​and it appears not to require the self-​positing of value that Nietzsche ascribes to full-​fledged autonomy. Before proceeding further, it is worth summarizing the already complex points I have made thus far in situating Nietzsche’s genealogy of justice and autonomy in relation to Kant’s. First, while ‘Universal History’ distinguishes political justice from moral autonomy, Nietzsche distinguishes three phenomena, political justice, the virtue of justice and ‘supramoral’ autonomy, which involves more than mere reliability as a promise keeper. Second, of these it is political justice and autonomy that are most prominent in Nietzsche’s genealogy; to the extent that he explains the origin of the virtue of justice, it must be reconstructed from his genealogy of autonomy, since that virtue seems to be part of, though not to exhaust, his conception of autonomy. Third, for both Nietzsche and Kant, political justice plays an important role in explaining how the more complex, internal phenomenon of autonomy becomes possible for humans. For Kant, it creates the conditions under which individuals make rules governing respect for other persons into genuine practical principles, obeyed not out of fear of punishment but because they are seen to be rational; for Nietzsche it is the source of the practices of punishment that, once enclosure within the walls of society is complete, bring about ‘the internalization of the human being’ and the creation of a ‘soul’ (GM II 16, KSA 5.322). Finally, full-​fledged autonomy for Nietzsche appears to include the following related but distinguishable phenomena: the ability actually to keep the promises one makes; an internally divided soul that makes self-​legislation and self-​enforcement –​or ‘conscience’ –​possible; and the possession of a single measure of value that is, in some robust sense, one’s own (or ‘self-​posited’); and the virtue of justice. In the rest of this chapter I will ignore Nietzsche’s account of the origins of both external justice and justice as a virtue, in order to concentrate on his genealogy of autonomy. Doing so will reveal at least one respect in which Nietzsche’s genealogy of autonomy improves on Kant’s. For Kant does a poor job of explaining how the external order imposed by political justice can give rise to the internal order required for moral autonomy; he fails to explain, in other words, how coercive external laws alone can form subjects in ways that make internal law-​giving and internal enforcement of laws possible. Kant might be read as acknowledging this point when he notes that political progress cannot by itself produce moral virtue but only establish conditions that make it more likely. But even this more modest claim is difficult to follow since, to use Nietzsche’s terms, political justice can make the behavior of individuals more calculable and regular but cannot by itself instill in them a conscience. In my view, then, Nietzsche’s

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account of what is required for the subjective formation of autonomous individuals is the most important genealogical advance his text makes with respect to Kant’s ‘Universal History’, and it is this that I will focus on in the rest of this chapter.

2.  Genealogy and theodicy Now that we have examined some differences between Kant’s and Nietzsche’s conceptions of justice and autonomy, it is time to ask how their genealogies incorporate elements of theodicy. That this is true of Kant’s ‘Universal History’ is hardly controversial. Its narrative can be seen as a form of theodicy insofar as one of its aims is to enable us to affirm an apparently senseless human history, replete with barbarism, misery and war –​the results of a tendency to conflict inscribed in human nature (our ‘unsocial sociability’) –​by showing how those evils create conditions that make a higher form of human existence possible. This higher existence includes the realization of both natural and moral ends:  in the first case, the full development of our natural faculties (including reason), and, in the second, conditions of political justice and even moral community.7 This account of the unintended consequences of our unsocial sociability enables those who accept it to look back on the course of history and to affirm it as good. Moreover, since both natural and spiritual ends are realized in a process that is driven by a natural force –​the unsocial sociability of human nature –​Kant’s genealogy makes our history appear to us as something a benevolent Creator, in designing nature, might have planned. The theodicy related in ‘Universal History’ not only enables us to affirm the basic conditions of human existence as good, thereby reconciling us to them; insofar as nature’s ends have not yet been fully achieved, it also provides rational grounding for hope in a redeeming future. Central to all of this is Kant’s hypothesis that nature, through its Creator’s design, not only sets ends for us but also provides its own mechanisms to ensure (or to make it probable) that those ends will be realized (or will come ever closer to being realized). Thus human history, which at first looks to be a cause for despair, shows itself instead to be the tool of both freedom and nature, the workshop within which human beings develop their natural capacities and at the same time prepare themselves to be politically and morally free.8

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As I have suggested, a good deal of light can be shed on Nietzsche’s account of the origins of autonomy by focusing on how he too offers a kind of theodicy, a genealogy that enables us to affirm, or ‘justify’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293), a ‘monstrous’ history by showing how it creates the conditions that make it possible for spiritually higher phenomena to come into being, a possibility that Nietzsche does not hesitate to describe as a kind of redemption (GM II 24, KSA 5.336). In making this claim I do not mean to deny that there are important differences between Nietzsche’s genealogy and Christian (or Kantian or Hegelian) theodicy. Yet Nietzsche’s language in the following passage makes clear that his genealogy remains within the theodicean tradition: [T]‌he monstrous labor of what I have called ‘the morality of mores’ –​the labor performed by humans on themselves during the greater part of the existence of the human race . . . finds in this [the breeding of an animal with the right to make promises] its meaning, its great justification, despite the severity, tyranny, stupidity, and idiocy involved in it. (GM II 2, KSA 5.293)

That Nietzsche does not intend to ‘justify’ only the harsh practices of the morality of mores is indicated at the beginning of GM II 4, where he remarks that, besides punishment, there is ‘another somber thing –​the consciousness of guilt, the “bad conscience” ’ –​that must be brought into the picture to explain how the conditions that make autonomy possible entered the world. That this part of his account will also have a theodicean cast finds expression in Nietzsche’s later remark that the bad conscience is an illness of the sort that pregnancy is (GM II 19, KSA 5.327): an illness ‘full of a future’ (ein Zukunftsvolles) (GM II 16, KSA 5.323). Given the importance of an internally divided soul for autonomy (and the fact that Nietzsche even calls it ‘conscience’), it is not difficult to anticipate the general role the bad conscience will play in this theodicy, for it is precisely this –​the possibility of a ‘soul turned back against itself ’ (GM II 16, KSA 5.322-​ 3) –​that the bad conscience explains. Like Kant’s theodicy, Nietzsche’s aims to inspire both hope and reconciliation. In pointing out the potential for spiritual greatness that our current condition contains, the Genealogy gives its readers hope that the ills of that condition can be transformed into its opposite, spiritual greatness. It is this argument that justifies the unmistakably hopeful tone with which the second essay ends: after hinting at how the dangers inherent in contemporary culture also harbor a potential for redemption, Nietzsche admits his own inability actually to erect the new ideal that is required to restore human beings to health but nonetheless concludes with

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what can only be described as a hopeful faith: ‘this victor over [. . .] nothingness –​ he must come one day’ (GM II 24, KSA 5.336). Reconciliation, too, is an end of Nietzsche’s theodicy: to affirm the basic conditions of what initially appears to be a ‘monstrous’ existence is to be reconciled to it, where (as for Hegel, too) ‘reconciliation’ does not imply a cessation of practical engagement in the world but precisely its opposite: seeing the basic conditions of existence as accommodating rather than thwarting human freedom serves to incite activity, not to still it. Another similarity between Kant’s and Nietzsche’s theodicies concerns the perspective from which they are offered. In contrast to Hegel, neither philosopher claims that his theodicean claims constitute knowledge. For Kant, the project of ‘Universal History’ belongs neither to the domain of theoretical reason nor to that of practical reason. It is carried out, rather, from the perspective articulated in the third Critique, where reflection on how nature and the demands of freedom (or morality) might be synthesized into a coherent whole responds to the question, ‘What may we hope for?’, rather than ‘What can we know?’ or ‘What ought we to do?’ Nietzsche’s Genealogy –​or the aspects of it responsible for inspiring hope and reconciliation9  –​can be thought of as a work of neo-​ Kantianism insofar as it, too, is carried out from a perspective that does not aspire to provide knowledge of history in any straightforward sense, but derives its legitimacy from, as Hegel would say, our ‘speculative’ interest in finding our world coherent, affirmable and hope-​inspiring, rather than a cause for despair. While it is difficult to articulate precisely what this perspective consists in for Nietzsche –​let us call it the perspective of great spiritual health –​there should be no doubt that the Genealogy is told from a point of view that, like that of Kant’s ‘Universal History’, is self-​consciously informed by an ethical purpose bound up with an ideal of self-​determined agency, even if there remains a large distance between how the respective purposes are conceived more specifically: as great spiritual health, on the one hand, and as rationality and morality, on the other. Where, then, do the differences between the two theodicies lie? For reasons that will become clear below (when I  consider his conception of ‘life’), Nietzsche’s theodicy envisions a form of reconciliation that forgoes any ideal of a completed, fully satisfying end point of history, including even the Kantian version of that ideal, where the posited end point remains, in this life, an ideal to be approximated but not fully achieved. Not only is it impossible for Nietzsche to give a determinate sketch of what such an end point would look like in advance of our actual history, the very idea of satisfying completion is out of place once the underlying conditions of human existence –​the nature of ‘life’ itself –​are conceived of as they are by Nietzsche. The absence of even the concept of such

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an end point makes it impossible for him to speak, as Kant does, of history as proceeding according to a ‘plan’ of nature or Providence.10 To the extent that nature is the moving force behind a purposive human history for Nietzsche, it is not a nature that points beyond itself to an intelligence that designed it with a plan for human redemption in mind. However nature for Nietzsche is to be further characterized, it is not nature as delivered from the hands of a Creator but simply nature as it happens to be. Another (related) difference between the two theodicies concerns the degree of contingency that enters into each. Nietzsche’s genealogy clearly ascribes a large role to chance in its account of how we arrived at where we are today, such that when he claims to find redemptive possibilities in our current condition, he is asserting merely that such possibilities are in fact there, not that they must, or were likely to, have developed.11 The large role played by contingency in the Genealogy is connected to the fact that, unlike Kant’s theodicy, it does not posit a ‘mechanism’ of nature (such as that of unsocial sociability) that pushes our development in a certain direction, ensuring (or making probable) an affirmable outcome. For Nietzsche, stagnation, regression and even complete paralysis are possible courses of human history; like Schopenhauer, he takes seriously the possibility that ‘life’ could simply wear itself out and cease to stimulate further activity. Still, while it is tempting to say that the principal difference between the two theodicies is that Kant’s relies on a natural teleology, whereas Nietzsche’s does not, once again the point is more complex than it initially seems. Consider, for example, Nietzsche’s perplexing statement: ‘To breed an animal with the right to make promises [das versprechen darf] –​is not this precisely the paradoxical task that nature has set for itself in the case of the human being?’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.291; emphases modified). The suggestion that human autonomy can be regarded as a task that nature has set for itself must appear shocking to readers accustomed to hearing that Nietzsche eschews all traces of the teleology that Kant’s (and Hegel’s) philosophies of history rely on. What I have said here about the absence of a natural mechanism that pushes history in a specific direction makes it difficult to see how Nietzsche’s talk of a self-​set task of nature can be made sense of. Yet clearly Nietzsche intends with this claim to draw his genealogy closer than one would have thought possible to traditional theodicies, such as Kant’s, that aim to ‘justify’ not merely history but nature itself. I will put this puzzling issue aside for now and return to it at the end of this chapter, once we have examined in more detail Nietzsche’s conception of nature –​or, more precisely, his conception of ‘life’.

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Finally, Nietzsche’s comparison of the bad conscience with pregnancy and his characterization of the latter as an illness point to one important respect in which his theodicy works with categories different from those of Christian and Kantian theodicies. Although all these versions of theodicy attribute great importance to finding a meaning for suffering that enables us to affirm a world in which suffering is ubiquitous and ineliminable, there is for Nietzsche a further type of evil that plays a central role in his justification of existence, namely, illness –​or, more precisely, spiritual illness. (As I argue below, illness for Nietzsche typically includes suffering but cannot be reduced to it.) One might say that for Nietzsche spiritual illness plays the role that sin played in Christian theodicy, and in this respect he can be seen as endorsing Kierkegaard’s equation of sin, despair and sickness (the ‘sickness unto death’). What gives a theodicean cast to Nietzsche’s genealogy is the thought, inherited from Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, that spiritual illness introduces into the world the very conditions from which a cure for that illness can be drawn,12 conditions that, beyond merely restoring the diseased to a state of health, also have the potential for elevating human existence –​making it higher or nobler than it could have been if we had never fallen ill in the first place. Whatever exactly autonomy consists in for Nietzsche, it is surely part of the great spiritual health that he thinks may be available to us now as a result of the great spiritual illnesses we have endured. This raises two questions that will guide the rest of this chapter: what about the bad conscience makes it an illness? and which aspects of that illness play a redemptive role in the genealogy of autonomy? The latter question could also be formulated as: which aspects of our illness are, from the perspective of great spiritual health, potentially fruitful and therefore affirmable features of our collective history?13

3.  Spiritual illness and the bad conscience Why does Nietzsche regard the bad conscience as an illness and, more precisely, as an illness of the spirit? In answering this question I will first say something about the idea of illness in general and then ask what the qualification ‘spiritual’ adds to that idea. This requires a brief examination of Nietzsche’s concept of life, including what the health of a living organism consists in. Life, Nietzsche tells us, is a goal-​directed process, a series of activities that aims not at mere self-​reproduction, but at power –​ever ‘greater units of

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power’  –​and that pursues this aim through various kinds of forceful, pain-​ inducing activity: ‘injuring, violating, exploiting, destroying’ (GM II 11, KSA 5.312). Students of Kant and Hegel might conclude from this definition of vital activity that life is a teleological process, but having an aim is not the same as having a telos. If ‘teleological’ implies that the process in question has a determinate end at which it aims, the character of which determines the course the process takes and the achievement of which brings the process to a satisfying completion, then life for Nietzsche has an aim but no telos (GM II 12, KSA 5.313–​16) and hence no foreseeable end point at which the process is complete and ‘satisfaction’ is achieved. As I suggested above, this difference is crucial to distinguishing the kind of theodicy Nietzsche is engaged in from those of Kant and Hegel.14 Nietzsche’s claim that life seeks the creation of ever greater units of power is indeed meant to imply that Hegelian notions of completion and satisfaction are out of place in understanding vital processes and that those processes are open-​ended and undetermined in ways the acorn’s transformation into an oak is not. Moreover, the absence of a telos implies that in themselves the discrete activities of life lack the kind of meaning that can be ascribed to the stages in an oak’s development, where the specific features of each stage are explicable by the end towards which that development tends, an end that ‘determines’ how the development normally proceeds. In Nietzsche’s conception there is nothing about the aim of vital processes that determines the specific steps of those processes, which for that reason are not, strictly speaking, ‘developments’, but random, unorganized, intrinsically meaningless events, a ‘sequence of . . . more or less independent . . . processes’ (GM II 12, KSA 5.314). When Nietzsche says that life seeks ever greater units of power, it can sound like its aim is definable in purely quantitative terms. But life for Nietzsche seeks something beyond merely quantitative increases in power; it also has a qualitative aim in that it seeks to impose, retrospectively, a coherent order on what first are merely random, unrelated events. It is easy to overlook this aspect of Nietzsche’s conception of life, in part because it seems to anthropomorphize nature, ascribing to all living organisms the capacity to ‘interpret’ past events, to impose an order on occurrences that of themselves possess no such order. But it is clearly Nietzsche’s intention to ascribe an order-​imposing function of this kind to life itself, in all its forms: [E]‌very happening in the organic world is an overpowering, a mastering, and every overpowering and mastering is itself a re-​interpreting, a fitting into

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place (ein Zurechtmachen), in which previous ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ must be obscured or completely extinguished. (GM II 12, KSA 5.313–​14)

According to this passage, processes of life are acts of overpowering in which the assertion of power consists in changing the meaning, or purpose, of that which is overpowered. To change the meaning or purpose of something is to reinterpret it, which in its broadest sense refers to the ordering (Einordnung) of ‘something present  –​something that has somehow come to be’  –​‘into a system of purposes’ (GM II 12, KSA 5.313). To interpret –​to give something a meaning –​is to impose a function on what is at first merely ‘there’ by incorporating it into a system of purposeful activities with which it then cooperates in order to serve a purpose of the organism as a whole.15 Life strives, then, not merely for greater quantities of power but, more specifically, for increases in power that result from the imposition of organic order on a given material that acquires significance only after having been commandeered by a superior power and forced to play a certain function within that imposed order. Life is essentially interpretation because it assigns a meaning-​in-​relation-​to-​the-​whole to the intrinsically meaningless. Indeed, after Darwin, it is not difficult to see why life might be construed as essentially ‘interpretive’: if evolution is central to life, then living beings must be able to take up random variations in their constitution and employ them for their own vital purposes by assigning them new functions within an already established, but now ‘readjusted’,16 organic unity. It is for this reason that Nietzsche describes life as striving not only for increases in power but also for ‘perfection’ (Vollkommenheit) (GM II 12, KSA 5.315). With this claim he reintroduces into his conception of life a version of teleological organization that Kant regards as life’s constitutive feature. For ‘perfection’ refers to a kind of hierarchical organization, where higher, ‘nobler’ functions rule over (‘dominate’) lower functions (GM II 1, KSA 5.291–​2), making the living being into a purposefully ordered whole in which specialized functions work together to further its vital ends. Yet Nietzsche’s understanding of the purposeful order characteristic of life has two features that distinguish it from more familiar accounts. The first is that, as we have seen, the governing aim of the organism is not self-​ preservation or reproduction, but increasing power. The second is that teleological organization is not prescribed to the living being in advance, written into its DNA, as it were; instead, it is an organization the living being must actively produce and that, once produced, must continually be re-​produced, and not merely in the same form but in ever evolving, higher forms which are necessary if increasing power rather than static self-​maintenance is the aim to be realized.

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We are now in a position to describe, from what Nietzsche calls the ‘biological perspective’ (GM II 11, KSA 5.310), what health and illness consist in. If we restrict ourselves to individual organisms,17 then ‘health’ refers to an unimpeded carrying out of the life process: the animal’s ongoing imposition of organic order on itself in order to create ever greater units of power for the purpose of discharging ever greater quanta of energy through its activity. Biological health is equated with an organism’s vitality: a ‘flourishing, rich, self-​overflowing’ condition, manifested in ‘powerful physicality’ and in ‘strong, free, cheerful activity’ (GM I 7, KSA 5.266) that springs from ‘plenitude, force, the will of life’ (GM Preface 3, KSA 5.250). By the same logic, ‘illness’ refers to a disruption of the life process, including mere repetitions of it in which energy is expended and renewed but sluggishly and at more or less constant levels. Its characteristics are powerlessness, passivity, leadenness and, most important, the incapacity to impose order, or meaning, on newly encountered ‘facts’. It is important to see that the conception of illness articulated thus far, from the biological perspective, is insufficient to capture the distinctively human, or spiritual, illnesses that we must understand if Nietzsche’s genealogy of autonomy is to come into view. In order to comprehend what spiritual illness is, we need to take up a perspective beyond life that allows us to grasp spiritual, and not merely animal, phenomena. The sense in which the spiritual perspective is ‘beyond’ life must not, however, be misunderstood. ‘Beyond’ does not mean one abandons life and takes up a wholly different standpoint, that of spirit; instead, one supplements the standpoint of (mere) life so as to take account of the fundamental ways spiritual beings differ from mere animals. That is, one introduces into the perspective of life an understanding of what distinguishes spiritual phenomena from purely animal processes –​the most important difference is reflexivity, or internal division, the hallmarks of what I will call subjectivity18 –​and one arrives at the idea of spirit by merging the two concepts, life and subjectivity, into one. One asks, in other words, what life ‘turned back against itself ’ (GM II 16, KSA 5.322) would look like, and how life thus configured would amount to something more than (mere) life. Of course, whatever characteristics of subjectivity are introduced into life in order to yield spirit must themselves be continuous with life. What distinguishes spirit from mere life cannot be such that it divides the two into radically different orders of being, such as nature, on the one hand, and freedom, on the other. Instead, the distinguishing feature of subjectivity is but a more complex organization of the living that develops out of the processes of life themselves; the main event in Nietzsche’s naturalistic genealogy of spirit

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is the acquisition of a ‘soul’ whose chief characteristic is internal division, being ‘turned back against itself ’ (GM II 16, KSA 5.322). The central claim of the second essay of the Genealogy, then, is that the mark of spirituality is an internal organization that allows for a more-​than-​ animal form of life, a subjectivity or ‘taking sides against oneself ’ (GM II 16, KSA 5.322) the source of which is the instinct of cruelty that, in response to external restraints, has turned back on itself. It is important to distinguish the bare instinct of cruelty turned back against itself from the more concrete phenomenon that Nietzsche calls the ‘bad conscience’. The development of an instinct that is turned back on itself is crucial to explaining the origin of the bad conscience, but the two are not identical.19 The main difference is that the former is merely a drive or instinct, a physiological disposition to discharge built-​up energy of a certain type (cruelty) in a certain direction (against oneself). The bad conscience, in contrast, also involves an interpretive apparatus that ‘hooks onto’ this bare disposition and imbues it with meaning (GM III 20). The simplest example of interpretation joining with the disposition to inflict cruelty on oneself to yield the bad conscience is when that instinct latches onto an already present concept –​‘debt’ –​and uses it to give a specific meaning –​guilt –​to action that serves as an outlet for its pent-​up energy. The distinction between interpreted and un-​interpreted instincts points to a feature of human subjectivity that plays an important role in higher spirituality, the capacity for a kind of interpretation that goes beyond that of merely living beings. As I have indicated, Nietzsche regards interpretation in a broad sense as a basic activity of life in all its forms, both human and non-​human. In non-​human forms, I said that interpretation consists in imposing a function on something –​incorporating it into a larger system of purposeful activities that together serve an organism’s vital ends. It is not correct, then, to say that interpretation is distinctive to humans. But there is enough of a difference between human and non-​human interpretive activity to regard the former as distinctive to human subjectivity. Let me note three important differences without attempting to articulate how they are related: first, human interpretive activity is self-​ conscious (or potentially so); second, it is mediated by concepts (and hence by language); and finally, it is evaluative in that it assigns, measures and compares the values of things, employing some version of the concepts ‘good’ and ‘bad’. That the last of these is especially important is clear from the emphasis Nietzsche places on ‘the measuring of values, the thinking up of equivalences’ as fundamental to civilization, to human existence and to thought itself, going so far

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as to call the human being ‘the creature that measures values, that values and measures –​ das “abschätzende Tier an sich”’ (GM II 8). Taking note of the distinctive features of subjectivity, we can formulate a rough conception of spiritual illness: it is a state of the soul in which interpretation and reflexivity join together to produce effects that thwart rather than promote life’s defining aim –​that of creating ever greater units of power by imposing organic form on what is initially formless. A spiritually ill being has an internally divided soul where one part, making use of concepts that interpret and evaluate, ‘takes sides’ against the other in a way that impedes the external discharge of instinctual energy. A soul divided in this way –​between, roughly, consciousness and instinct –​qualifies as the bad conscience, that uniquely human illness that makes existence both interesting and dangerous. There are two directions in which this description of the bad conscience needs to be fleshed out, and which will bring into view two concepts I  have not yet discussed, namely, repression20 and affirmation. The first of these comes into view in thinking about why it is inaccurate to describe the two parts of the divided soul as consciousness, on the one hand, and instinct, on the other. What is misleading here is the implication that consciousness is something distinct from instinct, whereas Nietzsche understands consciousness as both fueled by instinct’s energy and shaped by its aims. Consciousness, far from being governed by its own principles and ends, is the human’s ‘weakest and most fallible organ’ (GM II 16, KSA 5.322), a servant of ends that come from foreign (instinctual) sources and that remain for the most part opaque to it. This aspect of Nietzsche’s view of human consciousness finds expression in his description of the bad conscience as originating in the instinct of freedom being ‘repressed, pushed back, imprisoned within’ until, having been ‘banished from sight and violently made latent’, it is compelled to ‘discharge and release itself on itself ’ (GM II 17, KSA 5.325), while the functions of consciousness accompanying these events remain ignorant of their instinctual underpinnings, including the instinctual ends they serve. Nietzsche’s assumption is that an instinct that finds no outward discharge and is compelled to turn inward is distorted in a way that makes it nearly impossible for the end it seeks to achieve to be recognized as such by the bearer of that instinct. It follows that the conditions under which the human soul develops and first acquires depth more or less guarantee that in most cases humans will be in the dark about the content of their own souls. This basic feature of human subjectivity accounts for part of what makes the bad conscience an illness, as well as for the ubiquity in the Genealogy of the theme of humans being necessarily foreign to themselves (GM Preface 1, KSA 5.247).

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The second concept needed to fill out Nietzsche’s picture is affirmation, which appears in two forms: affirmation of self and affirmation of life (GM Preface 5, KSA 5.252).21 This concept is relevant to understanding the reflexivity that plays a crucial role in spiritual illness and health. There can be no doubt that the inability to affirm both oneself and life more generally occupies a prominent place in Nietzsche’s description of the especially virulent form of sickness that he takes the bad conscience to have assumed in his own time. Whatever else great spiritual health consists in, a conscious affirmation of self and life is surely central to it. The claim that affirmation plays a key role in Nietzsche’s understanding of the reflexivity that is the hallmark of subjectivity (and hence of spirituality) may seem puzzling at first. For the Genealogy contains examples of humans –​ the nobles of the first essay –​who say ‘yes’ to themselves (if not also to life as a whole) spontaneously (GM I 10, KSA 5.270–​1) and so, presumably, without the reflexivity associated with spirituality. Insofar as affirmation plays a role in spirituality, it involves a subject ‘turning around’ and making itself the object of its own evaluative gaze. In making reflexive affirmation central to spirituality, Nietzsche might be seen as following Genesis, which locates God’s first reflexive deed in his turning around, after six days of Creation, to behold himself and his own goodness as exhibited in his worldly activity: ‘God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was . . . good.’22 To step momentarily outside one’s practical engagement in the world, to look back at oneself and at what one has done, and to find what one encounters good –​these are the constitutive moments of spiritually affirming one’s own being. Nietzsche makes clear that affirmation in all its forms is a valuing activity that operates with evaluative concepts such as good and bad. In order for affirmation to be reflexive, however, it must take place from a position in which immediate self-​affirmation has been somehow disrupted. Reflexive affirmation involves stepping outside one’s immediate position in order to make oneself into the object of one’s own ‘value-​positing gaze’ (GM I 10, KSA 5.271), where ‘value-​positing’ seems to imply that in reflexive affirmation the values in terms of which one assesses oneself are in some sense the product of one’s own activity. At the very least, in reflexive evaluation a space is opened up between the subject and its values that makes the subject responsible for them (or able to become responsible for them) in a way that the immediately self-​affirming nobles are not. That affirmation in its higher forms is a reflexive phenomenon is suggested by the connection Nietzsche draws between it and the source of all reflexivity, the bad conscience: part of what the conscience of autonomous individuals consists in is ‘the right to say with pride Yes to oneself ’

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(GM II 2–​3, KSA 5.293–​5).23 And, similarly, when discussing the most dangerous form of spiritual illness that threatens to descend on late-​nineteenth-​ century Europe, Nietzsche uses strongly reflexive language to describe the incapacity for affirmation at the heart of that ‘final illness’: the will turns back against itself in a final act of nihilistic self-​denial (GM Preface 5, KSA 5.252). This reflexive denial of self is described as a valuation (Werthung) (GM III 11, KSA 5.362) of oneself and of life that is recognizable both as a form of bad conscience (where cruelty, informed by interpretation, is directed against itself) and as an illness. It is a condition of exhaustion, depression and disgust with life grounded in ‘the human’s shame at being human’ in which ‘the animal human [has learned] to be ashamed of all his instincts’ (GM II 7, KSA 5.302) and which produces a world of ‘disgruntled, arrogant, and repulsive creatures who cannot be rid of their deep disgust at themselves, at the earth, and at all of life and who, out of pleasure in inflicting pain (probably their only pleasure), inflict as much pain on themselves as they possibly can’ (GM III 11, KSA 5.362). I will now summarize the points made about spiritual illness by distinguishing four features of the bad conscience relevant to understanding it as an illness. In its ‘most horrifying’ form, the bad conscience incorporates all four of these features, but there are also less acute, though still pathological, versions of that phenomenon in which some features are present but not others. The first feature –​what could be called the ‘measureless’ (maßlose) drive to make oneself suffer –​is evident in the following description of the version of the bad conscience associated with Christianity: [The bearer] of the bad conscience has seized on the presupposition of religion so as to drive his self-​torture to its most horrible severity . . . Guilt before God: this thought becomes an instrument of torture for him. . . . This is a . . . cruelty of the soul without equal: the human will to find oneself guilty and reprehensible beyond atonement. (GM II 22, KSA 5.332)

It is more difficult than one might think to say why a ceaseless, unquenchable longing for pain should count as pathological for Nietzsche, since suffering –​ even self-​inflicted suffering –​is a normal part of life. It is tempting to think that what makes Christian suffering pathological is not that the sufferer is the source of his pain but that he actively seeks it out, and in ever greater quantities.24 But even this cannot be the full story since, as I understand the ideal of autonomy Nietzsche means to be pointing us towards, the person of great spiritual health also welcomes, even seeks out, his own suffering.25 It is

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important that the self-​inflicted suffering described in this passage is, like all real manifestations of the bad conscience, interpreted self-​inflicted suffering. This suggests that the extent to which an unending thirst for pain counts as illness depends on how that suffering is interpreted, which is to say, on what function that pain is made to serve in the sufferer’s life and in what relation it stands to the aims of life. Presumably, the aims implicit in the function one assigns to one’s suffering provide a measure for one’s suffering, that is, not merely an interpretation of what its point is but also a criterion for its appropriate limits. A second feature of the Christian form of the bad conscience is its mendaciousness, or dishonesty (Verlogenheit) (GM III 19, KSA 5.369). As I have discussed it here, mendaciousness consists in a self-​imposed self-​opacity –​ a motivated ignorance, achieved through repression, of the underlying instinctual motives of one’s deeds and attitudes. If it is correct to see mendaciousness as an aspect of spiritual illness, then one component of autonomous health will be conscious self-​transparency. It is important to be clear, however, about the status of this aspect of Nietzsche’s conception of spiritual health. Self-​opacity is never the most important part of what makes the various versions of the bad conscience illnesses. This is because repression, together with the ignorance of self that accompanies it, is often compatible with significant degrees of vitality, as defined by Nietzsche’s conception of life. Still, other things being equal, self-​transparency is, for a spiritual being endowed with consciousness, superior to self-​opacity. Or, to put the point in terms that make clear the proximity of Nietzsche’s view to philosophies for which alienation is a central category: self-​knowledge –​an undistorted awareness of who one is and what one wants –​is more appropriate to self-​ conscious beings than the necessary ‘foreignness to self ’ that Nietzsche attributes to ‘us knowers’ in the first paragraph of his inquiry into the origin of morality (GM Preface 1, KSA 5.247). The third feature of the bad conscience in its most acute form that is indicative of illness also concerns a spiritual trait of the human being, the capacity for self-​affirmation. A person who is spiritually ill in this respect says No to himself (and to life more generally), a No that expresses a ‘disgust with life’ grounded in a general ‘shame at being human’ (GM II 7, KSA 5.302). Self-​denial, then, is bound up with an inability to take pride in oneself as one is, undistorted by the mendacious gaze produced by repression. This may suffice to explain why self-​denial is an illness, but its perversity becomes even more glaring when one brings into the picture the more general denial of life that accompanies it. This

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can be seen in Nietzsche’s description of ‘the valuation of . . . life’ underlying the ascetic priest’s self-​denial: our life (along with what pertains to it: ‘nature’, ‘world’, the entire sphere of becoming and transience) is set [. . .] in relation to a wholly different mode of existence that it opposes and excludes unless it turn against itself, deny itself; in that case [. . .] life counts as a bridge to another existence. (GM III 11, KSA 5.362)

Another way of putting this point is to say that in self-​denial, what should be sought for its own sake (life activity in the only world we have) is valued only as a means to something outside it, existence in a ‘higher’ but purely illusory world. As such, self-​denial (as well as its opposite, the self-​affirmation of great health) is possible only for a reflexive being capable of taking up a perspective on itself and making itself into the object of its own evaluative gaze. One might infer from these descriptions of ascetic self-​denial that this configuration of measureless suffering, self-​opacity and denial of life is the most acute form of spiritual illness to be encountered among human beings. Nietzsche acknowledges the plausibility of this inference but immediately rejects it. For he takes the ubiquity of ascetic self-​denial throughout human history to indicate that it has a hidden life-​promoting function –​that even this life-​denying attitude par excellence must, in a highly paradoxical and dangerous manner, be able to be employed by life so as to serve, in however twisted a fashion, its own ends. Nietzsche’s thought is that for all the hostility to life expressed in its valuations, the ascetic ideal is still an ideal, and as such it is able to serve –​and for large portions of human history actually has served –​as a potent stimulus to forceful, world-​ordering activity. As he argues in the third essay, Christianity at the height of its power was capable of truly awesome world-​constituting activity, drawing not least on its ability to assign a meaning to suffering that allowed for an affirmation of self and world (even if, in the latter case, only as a bridge to a world beyond it) and motivated sustained, passionate activity in the very world it disvalued. Even if the values in the name of which Christianity acted are ultimately life-​denying, its ordering the world in accordance with those values was an expression of vitality. As Nietzsche famously puts it, to will nothingness is still to will (GM III 1, III 14, KSA 5.339, 367–​72). In addition to its measureless thirst for suffering, its self-​opacity and its denial of life, there is a final feature of the ascetic ideal that makes it an illness (and points to the possibility of an even more acute form of illness than Christianity represents). This feature is bound up with what Nietzsche calls its great danger, a danger revealed in the self-​undermining dynamic on which the ascetic

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ideal feeds. Midway into the third essay Nietzsche claims that there resides at the heart of the ascetic ideal an insatiable instinct and will to power (Machtwille) that wants to become master not over something in life but over life itself, over its [. . .] basic conditions; here an attempt is made to use force (Kraft) to stop up the wells of force. [. . .] We see here a being-​divided-​into-​two that wills itself as divided, that enjoys itself in this suffering and grows even more triumphant and certain of itself the more its own presupposition, the physiological capacity for life, decreases. (GM III 11, KSA 5.363)

In other words, even when the ascetic ideal functions as a stimulus to activity (and hence as a stimulus to life), the activity it stimulates ultimately results in a stopping up of the sources of its own vitality. In this form the ascetic ideal is a manifestation of vitality that, in expressing itself through action, undermines the conditions of all vitality. This self-​undermining dynamic represents the ascetic ideal’s greatest danger, as well as the most important respect in which Christianity at the height of its power is a spiritual illness. Moreover, this danger points to the possibility of an even graver condition that threatens to obtain once the ascetic ideal has exhausted the wells of its own energy. This extreme of spiritual sickness  –​nihilism in its most noxious form  –​may not have yet been reached by contemporary European culture, but Nietzsche senses it lurking on the horizon, the probable if not strictly necessary consequence of the final demise of the no longer credible beliefs of Christianity that made its unique vitality possible. For presumably that post-​Christian aftermath of the ascetic ideal, where the will ceases to will at all, is an even graver violation of life’s nature than the paradoxical but still vital will that, fueled by the ascetic ideal, wills nothingness.

4.  The redemptive potential of spiritual illness I now want to return to the question raised at the beginning of this chapter: how can spiritual illness be understood as introducing into the world conditions that, in making autonomy (and hence also the virtue of justice) possible, have the potential to ennoble human existence? What, in other words, lies behind Nietzsche’s suggestion that spiritual illness might be ‘full of a future’, bringing with it the ‘preconditions of higher spirituality’ (GM III 1, KSA 5.339)? This, it turns out, is a very difficult question, and what I offer here is only the beginning of an attempt to reconstruct Nietzsche’s answer to it.

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The place to begin is with the idea of conscience that Nietzsche associates with both ‘responsibility’ and ‘the right [. . .] to say with pride Yes to oneself ’ (GM II 3, KSA 5.294–​5). Clearly this form of conscience, a part of the higher spirituality Nietzsche sees as a possibility for us moderns, has some genealogical relation to the bad (and not yet autonomous) conscience and hence to spiritual illness. At the core of autonomous conscience is a self-​discipline that makes possible both self-​mastery and, as a response to that power-​enhancing trait, self-​affirmation. It is not difficult to imagine how the basic psychological configuration of the bad conscience, the instinct of cruelty turned inward, can be employed in the service of a self-​mastery that increases the power –​over self, circumstances, nature and others (GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4) –​of the being that possesses it. Yet the instinct of cruelty turned back on itself is not the source only of self-​ discipline; it is the psychological precondition of spiritual reflexivity in all its forms. The defining feature of subjectivity in general, the ability to make oneself into one’s own object, requires precisely the kind of internal division –​between observer and observed, censor and censored, lawgiver and the subject of law –​ that the bad conscience introduces into the human soul. This ‘internalization of the human being’ (GM II 16, KSA 5.322) makes it possible to make oneself into the object not only of one’s consciousness and knowledge, but also of one’s own form-​imposing activity. Whatever possibilities humans acquire for self-​ consciousness, self-​knowledge, and self-​fashioning depend on the subject’s ability to take up a relation to itself that the internally divided bad conscience first makes possible.26 As suggested above, one form of relating-​to-​self that is especially important for autonomy is reflexive self-​affirmation, where one makes oneself into the object of one’s own ‘value-​positing gaze’ (GM I 10, KSA 5.271) and says Yes, or ‘this is good’, to what one finds there. It is not implausible to think that the ability to take up an evaluative perspective on oneself that is more than immediate self-​contentment requires as its precondition a state of ‘illness’ in which the innocent health of its purely spontaneous self-​affirmation has been disrupted. Yet the self-​affirmation intrinsic to full-​fledged autonomy consists in something more as well: the value in accordance with which the autonomous individual affirms himself is supposed to be self-​posited, a value that is ‘his own’ in some sense that goes beyond the mere fact that it is the value he happens to hold or to have inherited from his culture. Although it is not obvious precisely what Nietzsche has in mind here, it seems clear that his genealogy of the bad conscience means to uncover one historical source of that value-​positing capacity. For the Genealogy provides a stunning example

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of a creation of a new value-​positing perspective, namely, the slaves’ transformation of ‘good-​bad’ into ‘good-​evil’ by means of the repressed hatred and ressentiment that, as Nietzsche makes clear, belong to their illness (GM I 10–​ 11, KSA 5.270–​7). There must be some sense in which the autonomous individual’s act of positing values is meant to imitate, and to be made possible by, the very revaluation of values that helped make us ill. Given the importance of the ability to take up different perspectives for Nietzsche’s ideal of great spiritual health, it is reasonable to suspect that the capacity of illness to generate changes of perspective in those who are ill is part of what makes spiritual illness ‘full of a future’. The problem with this line of thought –​that healthy forms of conscience are made possible by unhealthy aspects of the bad conscience –​is not that it is incorrect but that it does not go far enough. The suggestions made thus far may help us to see how the bad conscience might make autonomy and the virtue of justice possible, but it does not explain how the most acute versions of the bad conscience –​those associated with Christianity and its aftermath –​ offer possibilities for great spiritual health that milder versions of the bad conscience do not. Of course, it may be that Nietzsche does not intend to make this claim for the sickest configurations of the bad conscience  –​perhaps Christianity is simply a regrettable part of history with no redeeming potential  –​but I  believe that Nietzsche does sense a potential, though by no means a guarantee, for great spiritual health even in the lowest depths of human illness. If this is so, the question to be asked is, what ‘preconditions of higher spirituality’ are brought about when the most extreme form of the bad conscience –​that consisting of ‘maximal guilt’ before ‘the maximal God’, where this guilt is also construed as irredeemable by anything humans could possibly do (GM II 20–​1, KSA 5.329–​31)27 –​is joined together with the ascetic ideal? This is the most challenging question regarding Nietzsche’s position on the positive potential of spiritual illness, and I  will offer only two suggestions as to how it might be answered. The first has to do with the kind of perspective Christianity trains us to take on things and on ourselves, as reflected in the fact that that perspective is informed by an ideal (the ascetic ideal). The term ‘ideal’ should be understood in the specific sense Nietzsche gives it when he claims that the ascetic ideal has been thus far the only ideal available to humans (GM III 28, KSA 5.411–​12), and two features are relevant to figuring out how the ascetic ideal, though an illness of extreme gravity, might also carry spiritual promise. The first is the normative structure of ideals, and the second is the totalizing

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character of the interpretive apparatus it employs in imposing meaning on the world. Both features appear in the following passage: The ascetic ideal has a goal –​a goal so universal that, measured by it, all other interests of human existence appear petty and narrow. It stubbornly interprets epochs, peoples, human beings in relation to this one goal; it permits no other interpretation, no other goal; it casts aside, denies, affirms, sanctions only in accordance with its interpretation . . . The ascetic ideal believes that there is nothing powerful on earth that has not first received from it a meaning, a right to exist, a value, as a tool to its work, as a path . . . to its . . . one goal. (GM III 23, KSA 5.395–​6)

What makes understanding Nietzsche’s position difficult is distinguishing what is specific to (and pathological in) the ascetic ideal from the more general characteristics of any ideal, including one that might serve as the basis for spiritual health. There are, of course, aspects of the ascetic ideal that Nietzsche wants to have nothing to do with, but this does not imply that he is against ideals in general. On the contrary, he takes the future prospects for great spiritual health to depend on the creation of a new ideal –​a combination of valuation and interpretation –​that measures and orders all subordinate values, and everything that is, according to a single, overriding28 ‘goal’ or, one could also say, a single fundamental value. For immediately following the passage cited above, Nietzsche goes on to ask, ‘Where is the counterpart to this closed system of will, goal, and interpretation? [. . .] Where is the other “one goal”?’ (GM III 23, KSA 5.396).29 What Nietzsche hopes to point the way towards, presumably, is an ideal –​a supreme value informed by the myths of eternal recurrence and the will to power30  –​ with the capacity to inspire in its adherents ‘the passion of a great faith’ (GM III 23, KSA 5.397), instilling in them a love, an ardor, even a thirst for suffering that rivals in intensity the passion of ascetic priests but functions so as to promote rather than undermine human vitality. Such an ideal, not unlike the great ‘machinery’ of Christian metaphysics, strives not to interpret bits and pieces of reality but to provide a meaning for the totality of what is –​for the world as a whole, for human existence in particular, and above all for the ubiquity of suffering. In other words, this revitalizing ideal must provide an alternative to the no longer credible tenets of Christianity by furnishing an equally compelling answer to the questions, ‘wozu leiden?’, ‘wozu Mensch überhaupt?’ (GM III 28, KSA 5.411) –​questions that, I take Nietzsche to be saying, need to find some answer if spiritualized animals like ourselves are to avoid depression, despair and meaninglessness  –​in short, nihilism. Christianity, with its version of the

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ascetic ideal and its value-​positing interpretation of all that is, has, besides having made us ill, trained us in the erecting of ideals and instilled in us a spiritual capacity that, once the ascetic ideal has been undermined, could in principle be employed to promote the great spiritual health that Nietzsche hopes may now be an option for us. My second suggestion as to how extreme illness might bear spiritual fruit that milder illnesses cannot is even more provisional than the first. It is based on a striking formal similarity in Nietzsche’s characterizations of the ascetic ideal at its severest, on the one hand, and of great spiritual health, on the other. The former, he says, is marked by a ‘being-​divided-​into-​two’ (eine Zwiespältigkeit) that ‘wills itself as divided, enjoys itself in this suffering’, and ‘in the most paradoxical manner’ ‘becomes more certain of itself and more triumphant’ the more it seeks out the suffering that comes from being internally divided –​or, more accurately, at war with oneself (GM III 11, KSA 5.363). A more concrete picture of what it is for a subject to will and take pleasure in its own self-​imposed internal division is suggested in Nietzsche’s description of ‘the most horrifying’ form of the bad conscience, where, in language reminiscent of Ludwig Feuerbach’s account of religious alienation, he portrays the Christian as driven by a ferocious, insatiable will to ‘apprehend in “God” the ultimate antithesis of his own real, ineliminable animal instincts’ and to ‘reinterpret these animal instincts as guilt before God’, thereby ‘stretching himself on the contradiction “God” and “devil” ’ and becoming ‘palpably certain of his own absolute unworthiness’ (GM II 22, KSA 5.332). The main respect in which Nietzsche’s account of Christian spirituality goes beyond Feuerbach’s is the decisive point here, namely, that the subject of religious alienation actively seeks out, enjoys, and feels himself confirmed in the absolute opposition he posits between himself and his own ideal, the ‘holy God’, and thus in the idea of a being shorn of all the properties he despises in himself, especially those bound up with his own creatureliness. That great spirituality is to be located in a subject’s dividing itself into two and then enduring the very contradiction it has created was maintained already by Hegel. It is clear, I believe, that Nietzsche means to incorporate this vision of the fundamental mark of subjectivity into his picture of great spiritual health, even if it is not so clear what that is supposed to look like. Rather than try to spell out how Nietzsche envisions this feature of great health, I must content myself with pointing out two passages where this intention is made clear. The first is the initially surprising remark made in relation to the opposing valuations ‘good-​bad’ and ‘good-​evil’ ‘that today there is perhaps no more decisive mark of a “higher nature”, a more spiritual nature, than that of being divided into two . . . and of

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being a genuine battleground of these opposed values’ (GM I 16, KSA 5.286). The second passage, located within a discussion of the various meanings the ascetic ideal can have, follows on the observation that ‘the opposition between chastity and sensuality’ need not be a tragic one: ‘At least this holds true for all well-​constituted, joyful mortals who are far from regarding their unstable equilibrium between “animal and angel” as necessarily an argument against existence –​the subtlest and brightest among them . . . have even found in it one more stimulus to life. It is precisely such “contradictions” that seduce one to existence’ (GM III 2, KSA 5.341). Exactly what it would mean to exist as a battleground for opposing values and self-​conceptions is an important question I  cannot say much about here. But these passages make clear that in the exaggerated forms of being-​split-​into-​ two that Christianity introduces into subjects Nietzsche senses the possibility of a great spiritual health, including an affirmation of self and world, that feeds on a love for self-​division that, far from being ‘natural’ to animal life, comes into the world only through an illness as extreme as the great, as yet indeterminate, forms of autonomous health it makes possible.

5.  Coda: Justifying nature It is time now to return to the issue I left unresolved above: that of how to make sense of Nietzsche’s perplexing claim that breeding an animal with the right to make promises can be regarded  –​from a perspective that corresponds roughly to Kant’s question ‘what may we hope for?’ –​as a task that nature sets for itself. It is noteworthy that Nietzsche speaks of nature as setting itself a task rather than an end. On a first hearing this choice of terms only increases our puzzlement, however. It is difficult enough to understand how nature could ‘set for itself ’ an end (or anything else, for that matter), but it is even more difficult to see what it could mean to ascribe to nature a ‘task’. Natural processes might be describable as aiming at certain ends (reproduction or self-​preservation) or as carrying out certain functions (the digestion of food), but nature is not normally thought to undertake tasks, where this term implies standing before a problem that is to be solved but for which no solution is yet given. It is odd to say, for example, that our digestive system undertakes the task of breaking down what we have consumed into nutrients that our bodies can make use of, whereas it is less strange to say that our digestive system performs this function or serves this

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end. Once processes of evolution have produced a functioning digestive system, there are functions for it to serve but no further ‘tasks’ to be faced, until, of course, environmental changes pose new problems for evolutionary forces to solve. To propose that nature sets itself the task of breeding an animal with the right to make promises implies, then, that there is no already given ‘mechanism’ in nature that can respond to this challenge and no guarantee that it will be successfully met. If we think of life, as Nietzsche does, as engaged not only in reproducing itself but also in evolving over time in response to environmental challenges, it seems less odd to describe it as facing tasks, or problems to which it must find a solution, if it is to accomplish even its narrowest of biological ends, reproduction. There is a straightforward sense in which environmental changes impose tasks on life, tasks that only life itself can meet (unconsciously, of course), by generating alterations internal to itself and then ‘interpreting’ its new characteristics by imposing on them a function and integrating them into its own re-​ordered constitution. Life not only reproduces itself; it also responds ‘creatively’ to new challenges that nature continually throws in its way. We have seen, however, that Nietzsche’s conception of life goes beyond this more or less Darwinian picture and ascribes to it, beyond the end of survival, the aim of creating ever ‘greater units of power’ by means of increasing complexity and order that it itself produces. When Nietzsche says that nature sets itself the task of breeding an animal with the right to make promises, he is thinking of nature as life that is constantly engaged in transforming and reordering itself in the service of its own increased power. This aspect of his conception of life is not, however, taken over from Darwin. To view the whole of life in this way is to regard it from a perspective that cannot be confirmed by natural science but that derives its legitimacy from our interest in spiritual health and its requirement that we find our world coherent, affirmable and capable of inspiring hope. It would not be going too far to say that this vision of life has the status of a self-​conscious myth (and belongs, as such, to what Nietzsche calls an ideal). A myth of this sort, while not contradicting natural science, imposes a meaning on the whole of a type that natural science cannot provide and that serves an interest other than that of theoretical reason. In ascribing meaning to the world in this manner Nietzsche is engaged in a highly spiritualized form of the activity he takes to be fundamental to life, interpretation. Understanding our history as a project, or task, that nature undertakes with the purpose of breeding an animal that possesses the right

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to make promises is Nietzsche’s attempt to interpret the whole of existence, not in order to know the world but to bestow on it a meaning such that it can serve as a stimulus to new, more powerful activities. Ascribing a task to nature that aims at the enhancement of life’s power is the answer Nietzsche proposes to the questions ‘wozu leiden?’, ‘wozu Mensch überhaupt?’. Since natural science cannot answer these questions, Nietzsche can be seen as engaging in his own version of Kant’s project of acknowledging the limits to our knowledge in order to make room for faith (or belief). Finally, a myth of this sort furnishes Nietzsche’s genealogical inquiries with a kind of regulative principle that might be formulated as the imperative:  ‘in the interest of great spiritual health, look at the world before you with an eye to discovering how, in the absence of human knowledge or foresight, the forces of nature might be understood as working to accomplish a single goal:  self-​ transformation and self-​ordering in the name of increasing power!’ The myth that undergirds this principle  –​what Nietzsche calls ‘the law of life’  –​could also be expressed as the view that all of nature is a striving for self-​overcoming (Selbstaufhebung or Selbstüberwindung) (GM III 27, KSA 5.410). Viewing nature as purposively oriented in this sense is distinct from positing, as Kant does (from the perspective of ‘reflective’ judgement), a determinate ‘mechanism’ internal to nature that makes the achievement of its specific aim necessary or probable. For Nietzsche, nature is more active and resourceful than is implied by Kant’s doctrine of unsocial sociability, which ascribes to human nature a determinate set of given passions, the working out of which pushes us in the direction of certain specifiable ends. Life, as Nietzsche conceives it, is not subject to a dynamic that has a determinable course or end-​point imposed on it by nature (or by nature’s Creator). Rather, to the extent that it is created, life creates itself. Its ‘nature’ cannot be captured by enumerating the various drives that move it, but only by thinking of it as continually facing a task –​to take what is given and interpret it so as to serve the end of increasing power –​and as possessing a nearly unlimited resourcefulness with which to accomplish that task.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Tom Bailey, João Constâncio, Scott Jenkins, Wayne Proudfoot, Herman Siemens and the participants at four conferences and meetings –​Nietzsche and Kantian Politics (John Cabot University, Rome), Nietzsche e o Idealismo Alemão (Universidade de Lisboa), Friedrich Nietzsche Society (Queen Mary,

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London), and the North American Nietzsche Society (Washington, D. C., APA) –​for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. I do not mean to suggest that for Nietzsche the will to power necessarily takes this form; it would qualify for him as a species of the will to power, but it is by no means the only, or even the most common, form the will to power can take. Presumably the claim that one can point to a (very general) ‘core’ of justice can be made compatible with my earlier claim that for Nietzsche our moral concepts have no fixed, determinate ‘essence.’ I believe that Nietzsche’s position depends on bringing together two ideas: first, the Hegelian claim that the ‘abstract essence’ of any concept, in the absence of historical attempts to realize it, remains highly indeterminate and gains determinacy only through such historical experience; and, second, the claim, articulated in GM II 12–​14, KSA 5.313–​20, according to which the larger significance, or ‘point,’ of any moral practice varies depending on the specific ‘purposes’ it is made to serve. In other words, I am claiming that Nietzsche is committed to there being a ‘relatively enduring’ core of justice as well as a much larger, ‘fluid’ element that changes over time and is subject to great variability. I would suggest, for example, that even ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ is a more determinate version of justice’s core, the ‘establishing of equivalents’ (GM II 8, KSA 5.306). To be clear: my view is that Nietzsche equates autonomy with the ‘right to make promises’ but that he takes the latter to include much more than regularly following up one’s promises with the deeds that fulfill them. A careful reading of GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4, confirms this. Nietzsche says explicitly that making humans regular and calculable, an achievement of the morality of mores, is a ‘preparatory task’ that is part of, but not the whole of, the historical process through which ‘responsible,’ autonomous humans who possess the right to promise are formed (GM II 2, KSA 5.293). This fact is obscured in Kaufmann’s translation, which omits a crucial dagegen (‘in contrast’) when moving (at the paragraph break, present only in the English) from the morality of mores to ‘the end of this tremendous process, where the tree at last brings forth fruit’. This dagegen makes clear that autonomy consists in something more than dependability and that its genealogy will need to include phenomena beyond the morality of mores. In other words, I take Nietzsche to be distinguishing the individual who can be relied on to keep his promises from ‘the ripest fruit’ of the historical process described in the second essay, the latter of which he equates with the sovereign, or autonomous, individual (and further describes in the last half of GM II 2, KSA 5.294). Though presumably universal principles will be involved here, too, for example, ‘Keep your promises’ and ‘Give to each his due’. Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’. It might be thought that ‘Universal History’ makes no claims about the conditions of

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moral autonomy but only about those of external, political justice. Yet the Fourth Proposition speaks of ‘a pathologically enforced social union’ (eine pathologisch-​ abgedrungene Zusammenstimmung zu einer Gesellschaft) being transformed into ‘a moral whole’ (IaG 21), in which, presumably, its members follow practical principles for internal reasons, without the threat of external punishment. That moral maturity and not merely legal propriety is Kant’s concern can be seen also in the Seventh Proposition, which distinguishes among processes of cultivation, civilization and moralization and makes clear that ‘Universal History’ investigates the conditions of all three (IaG 24). (The use of the concept ‘moralization’ marks another notable similarity between Kant’s and Nietzsche’s genealogies (GM II 21, KSA 5.330).) Moreover, the historical processes described by Kant play an important role in developing humans’ capacity for rationality; in this respect, too, they secure an important condition of autonomy. It is worth noting that Kant does not take human happiness to be among nature’s ends; this is another respect in which he and Nietzsche agree, and diverge from Hegel. Other aspects, it seems to me, are supposed to be true in an ordinary sense, for example, Nietzsche’s thesis about the conditions under which the bad conscience is produced. Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (IaG 21). At the same time, there is less contingency –​and more ‘necessity’ –​in Nietzsche’s genealogy than commentators typically acknowledge. Many of the conditions that figure heavily in his explanations, while not strictly necessary developments, are far from being completely accidental. Consider, for example, the closing in of the ‘walls of society’ that plays a large role in explaining the instinct of cruelty’s turning back against itself (II.16). This aspect of Nietzsche’s genealogy reminds one of Civilization and Its Discontents (1961), where Freud appeals to the basic conditions of civilization in order to explain the origin of guilt. Rousseau (1997: 159). This suggests that Nietzsche arrives at his idea of which specific forms of health are available to us by a via negativa, that is, only after examining the specific forms of illness we have in fact contracted. Here, too, Nietzsche is closer to Kant than to Hegel since Kant’s theodicy does not presuppose that the aim to be achieved guides the development in question. ‘All purposes . . . are signs that a will to power has become master over something less powerful and impressed on it the meaning of a function’ (GM II 12, KSA 5.315). Hence Nietzsche’s claim that life activity is a Zurechtmachen, a ‘fitting into place,’ or ‘adjusting’ (GM II 12, KSA 5.314). Like Hegel and Darwin, Nietzsche regards the basic unit of life as the species, not living individuals (only the species, for example, evolves), but I abstract from this point here.

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18 One could also describe the hallmark of subjectivity as the presence of a distance within the soul (BGE 257, KSA 5.205), or as ‘depth’ in the soul’s ‘inner world’, a world that was ‘originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes’ but that has ‘expanded and extended itself ’ after ‘the internalization of the human being’ (GM II 16, KSA 5.322). 19 This may explain why Nietzsche refers here to the creation of an ‘animal soul’ (Thierseele) (GM II 16, KSA 5.323). At one point Nietzsche appears to equate the bad conscience with ‘cruelty turned backwards’, but he is careful to call this the animal bad conscience (GM III 20, KSA 5.329–​30). 20 For further discussion of this topic, see Reginster (1997: 289–​90). 21 ‘Affirmation of life’ means something like the affirmation of the totality of conditions of human existence, as opposed to an individual’s affirmation of her own life. Nietzsche is interested in both: Schopenhauer is said to have ‘said No to life and to himself ’ (GM Preface 5, KSA 5.252), and the individual who has the right to make promises is said ‘also to possess the right to say with pride Yes to oneself ’ (GM II 3, KSA 5.294–​5; see also GM II 22, KSA 5.331–​3). 22 Gen. 1.31, New Living Translation (2007). Or, as the more authoritative but (in this instance) less eloquent New Revised Standard Version (1989) puts it: ‘God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.’ 23 And later the healthy being’s conscience is identified as the agency that ‘heartfully says Yes’ to its own animal instincts (GM II 6, KSA 5.301). 24 As emphasized in the claim: ‘soon one ceased to protest against the pain, one thirsted for it instead: “more pain! more pain!” ’ (GM III 20, KSA 5.390). 25 See Reginster (2006: 229–​35, 243–​4). 26 It is easy to see that the virtue of justice requires this ability, too. For it consists in holding oneself accountable to strict standards of equivalence that often require one to subordinate one’s immediate desires and interests to what those standards demand. This requires not merely the ability to take up a judging perspective on one’s own deeds but also a psychological force, derived from the instinct to cruelty, that makes the appropriate attitude of severity with oneself possible. 27 In other words, I am construing the most acute form of the bad conscience considered by Nietzsche as the ‘moralization’ of the idea of ‘maximal guilt’ before a ‘maximal God’ (GM II 20, KSA 5.330), where no human possibility of discharging this debt exists: ‘God as the only being who can redeem the human being from what has become unredeemable for the human being himself ’ (GM II 21, KSA 5.331). I am grateful to Wayne Proudfoot for discussion of this issue. 28 Is this ‘overriding’ goal also unconditional, in the sense that it is taken to be also the condition of all other values such that, for example, happiness would possess no value of its own unless it were made consistent with a person’s supreme value? If so, then the ‘one goal’ that defines an ideal would have a normative status similar

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to that which Kant accords to the good will (although presumably, unlike Kant, Nietzsche would not regard its unconditional status as universal, i.e., as valid for every rational being). 29 That redemption lies in the creation of a new ideal is suggested also in GM II 24, KSA 5.335–​7. 30 This suggestion was made to me by Maudemarie Clark.

References Freud, S. (1961), Civilization and Its Discontents, New York: W. W. Norton. Kant, I. (1970), ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, in H. S. Reiss (ed.), Political Writings, 41–​53, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reginster, B. (1997), ‘Nietzsche on Ressentiment and Valuation’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (2): 289–​90. Reginster, B. (2006), The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rousseau, J.-​J. (1997), The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Phantom Duty? Nietzsche versus Königsbergian Chinadom Robert B. Louden

One more word against Kant as moralist. A virtue must be our invention [unsre Erfindung], our most personal defense and necessity: in any other sense it is merely a danger. What does not condition [bedingt] our life harms it: a virtue merely from a feeling of respect for the concept ‘virtue’, as Kant wanted it, is harmful. ‘Virtue’, ‘duty’, ‘good in itself ’, good with the character of impersonality and universal validity –​phantoms [Hirngespinnste], expressions of decline, of the final exhaustion of life, of Königsbergian Chinadom. The profoundest laws of preservation and growth demand the reverse of this: that each person invent [erfinde] his own virtue, his own categorical imperative. A people perishes if it mistakes its own duty for the concept of duty in general. Nothing ruins more deeply, more internally, than every ‘impersonal’ duty, every sacrifice to the Moloch of abstraction. –​Kant’s categorical imperative should have been felt as mortally dangerous! Nietzsche, The Anti-​Christ 11, KSA 6.177 Readers of Nietzsche’s critique of morality face at least four formidable challenges. First, there is the issue of the target or specific scope of the critique. Is it aimed at all moralities, or only some? And if the latter, which ones exactly? Second, there is the related problem of determining the stance that Nietzsche advocates. Is he rejecting certain moralities while defending others, or does he seek to replace all moralities with a non-​moral evaluative system of some sort? Third, there is the task of locating and assessing the arguments and evidence presented in support of the critique. What are the arguments for the various components of the critique? Do they form a consistent and coherent whole? And how plausible are they? Finally, there is the further challenge posed by his

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particular way of writing. For readers used to arguments, definitions, distinctions, systematic discussion and so on, his style raises the question, ‘Why doesn’t Nietzsche write like a philosopher?’ (Clark and Dudrick 2012: 1). Because of the enormous complexity of, and continuing lack of consensus on, these matters,1 and in an attempt to make headway on at least some of the challenges Nietzsche poses in this area, in what follows I propose to focus on one particular part of his critique of morality, –​viz. his critique of the related moral notions of ‘ought’ and ‘duty’. What does Nietzsche say about the history, meaning, and value of these specific moral concepts? With what does he propose to replace them? Are there oughts and duties in Nietzsche’s ‘higher morality’,2 and if so, how do they differ from the traditional moral oughts and duties that are the focus of his critique? Are the proposed replacements better or worse than what they are replacing? (As Nietzsche would put it, what is ‘the value of these values?’)3 As a step towards assessing the challenge that Nietzsche’s critique poses to modern moral philosophy, I will also occasionally compare and contrast Kantian and Nietzschean genealogies of morality. How does Kant’s theory of moral ought and duty fare in light of Nietzsche’s critique? To what extent is Kant able to respond convincingly to Nietzsche’s challenge?

1.  The origin of duty? For Kant and many other moralists, obligation  –​understood as acting under rational constraint –​is the central phenomenological feature of human moral experience. In Kant’s case, the priority of the moral ought or must stems from his realistic appraisal of human nature. If we had greater cognitive powers and a different psychology (e.g. if we were less selfish), then our relationship to moral principles might be different.4 But humans are fallible, finite rational beings who are disposed to act from self-​interest, and thus their relationship to moral principles is necessarily always one of constraint. They need to bring themselves to do what is morally right and they must constantly be on guard against backsliding. At the same time, Kant (like many other moralists) also holds that human beings possess certain basic powers of agency that he believes are necessary for moral action: humans can reflect on their motives, act on the basis of reasons, control their desires and make free choices between different alternatives. While none of these capacities is perfectly developed in any human being (no human successfully controls all of her desires all of the time), he assumes that all normal adult humans possess these capacities to a sufficient degree to be held responsible

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for their voluntary actions. Thus in Kant’s own speculations on the genealogy of morality in his Conjectural Beginnings of Human History, it is primarily our distant ancestors’ first awareness of a faculty of choosing for themselves ‘a way of living and not being bound to a single one, as other animals are’ that marks the beginning of human morality (MAM 112). Our ancestors’ realization that they were not tied to a single way of life placed them on ‘the brink of an abyss’ from which it was ‘wholly impossible to turn back’ (MAM 112), and their descendants have been confronting this abyss ever since. Of the many differences between Kant and Nietzsche’s moral conceptions, the place of the ought is particularly noteworthy. For Kant, the ought is the primary and fundamental fact of human moral experience. For Nietzsche, it is secondary and appears on the scene fairly late in our species’ moral history. In Beyond Good and Evil he writes: ‘It is obvious that moral value-​designations were everywhere first applied to human beings, and only later and derivatively to actions’ (BGE 260, KSA 5.209).5 His title –​‘ “Good and Evil”, “Good and Bad” ’ –​and focus for the First Treatise in the Genealogy also reflect his conviction that ‘ought’ and ‘duty’ arrive late on the scene. And several contemporary philosophers and classicists, some writing under Nietzsche’s influence, have echoed his claim that we find aretaic but not deontic moral concepts in the ancient world.6 But we should still expect to hear something about the origins of duty in any genealogy of morals, even one written by someone who does not share Kant’s conviction about the primacy of duty in human moral experience.7 In keeping with his conviction that deontic judgements are secondary to aretaic judgements, in the First Treatise of the Genealogy Nietzsche presents his account of the origin of human judgements about moral traits and qualities of persons. It is not until the Second Treatise that ought, duty and obligation make an appearance in Nietzsche’s genealogy, and even here they are not his dominant focus. They are almost eclipsed by his concern to offer readers what he calls ‘the psychology of conscience’ (EH GM, KSA 6.352), a psychology in which consciousness of guilt is the primary phenomenon, along with a genealogical account of how it has ‘come into the world’ (GM II 4, KSA 5.297).8 Duty and related deontic concepts enter his discussion not because he believes that they are necessary presuppositions for guilt and the bad conscience, but rather because he believes that, historically speaking, they are vehicles that have helped bring about the development of guilt and the bad conscience.9 What does Nietzsche say about the origins of these concepts, particularly in the Genealogy and related late works? Nietzsche’s interest in them is clearly indicated in the famous opening sentence of the Second Treatise of the Genealogy,

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when he poses the following question: ‘To breed an animal that is able to make promises [das versprechen darf]10 –​isn’t this precisely the paradoxical task that nature has set itself with regard to man?’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.291). An animal that is able to make promises must first possess at least two other capacities: first, a developed faculty of memory (GM II 1, KSA 5.291–​2), since promisees must be able to remember who has promised what to them and promisers need to be able to remember to whom they have promised what; and, second, a certain regularity of behavior (‘Man must first of all have become calculable, regular, necessary, . . . if he is to vouch for himself as future, as one who promises does!’, GM II 1, KSA 5.292; cf. GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4). In view of his commitments to both naturalism and determinism,11 one might think that Nietzsche would hold that human behavior –​like the behavior of everything else in the universe, at least according to determinists –​has always been ‘calculable, regular, necessary’. However, he attributes these features of human behavior not simply to natural causation but rather to ‘the morality of custom [Sittlichkeit der Sitte] and the social straightjacket’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293), a type of proto-​morality in which ‘morality is nothing other (therefore nothing more!) than obedience to customs, of whatever kind they may be’ (D 9, KSA 3.21–​2; cf. D 14, 16, KSA 5.26–​8, 29), and which Nietzsche analyses at greater length in Daybreak. Regardless of whether Nietzsche has offered the most plausible explanation for human behavioral regularity, and regardless of whether he has succeeded in giving a complete set of necessary and sufficient conditions for promise-​ keeping,12 he is surely correct in asserting that at some point in the distant past our ancestors did become promise-​making animals, that the ability to make and honor promises does sharply distinguish humans from other animals and that this development marked a crucial turning point in the history of morality. For all voluntarily incurred moral duties and obligations13 presuppose the practice of promise-​keeping.14 Nietzsche’s main inquiry into the origins of the concept of moral duty in the Second Treatise involves his analysis of the creditor–​debtor relation, a discussion that follows the opening remarks about promise-​keeping. As he states in section 8: the feeling ‘of personal obligation [persönliche Verpflichtung] had its origin [Ursprung] . . . in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship there is, in the relationship between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor’. The creditor–​debtor relationship is a legal relationship backed up by sanctions  –​ debtors with overdue debts are subject to various penalties and punishments, some of which, as Nietzsche notes, have until fairly recently involved a great deal of cruelty and pain (see GM II 5, KSA 5.298–​300).15 It also presupposes the

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ability to make and keep promises –​debtors make promises to creditors to pay back their debts.16 After asserting that moral duty has its origin in the legal sphere of the creditor–​ debtor relationship, Nietzsche then hypothesizes, as David Owen notes, that this schema is gradually generalized ‘over two other forms of relationship’.17 First, in a quick nod to social contract theory, Nietzsche suggests that political communities are creditors to their individual members. As he writes in section 9: The community [das Gemeinwesen] also stands to its members in that important basic relationship, that of the creditor to his debtor. One lives in a community, one enjoys the advantages of a community . . . one lives protected, shielded in peace and trust, free from care with regard to certain injuries and hostilities18 to which the human outside, the ‘outlaw’ [der Friedlose –​literally, ‘the man without peace’], is exposed . . . since one has pledged and obligated [verpfändet und verpflichtet] oneself to the community precisely in view of these injuries and hostilities. What happens in the other case? The community [Die Gemeinschaft], the deceived creditor, will exact payment as best it can, one can count on that. (GM II 9, KSA 5.307)

The second generalization of the creditor–​ debtor relationship occurs, Nietzsche argues, between ancestors and the present generation. In section 19 he writes: The civil-​law relationship [das privatrechtliche Verhältniß] of the debtor to his creditor . . . was interpreted into . . . the relationship of those presently living to their ancestors. Within the original clan the living generation always acknowledges a juridical obligation [eine juristische Verpflichtung] to the earlier generation, and particularly to the earliest one which founded the clan . . . Here the conviction holds sway that it is only through the sacrifices and achievements of the ancestors that the clan exists at all –​and that one has to repay them through sacrifices and achievements. (GM II 19, KSA 5.327)

But a third development also occurs. The phenomenon of ancestor reverence eventually balloons into religious worship –​through a ‘crude [roh] kind of logic’ human forebears are transformed into gods: One thereby acknowledges a debt that is continually growing, since these ancestors, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, do not cease to use their strength to bestow on the clan new benefits and advances . . . Finally, through the imagination of growing fear the progenitors of the most powerful clans must have grown into enormous proportions and have been pushed back into the darkness of a divine uncanniness and unimaginability: –​in the end the progenitor is

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necessarily transfigured into a god. This may even be the origin of the gods, an origin, that is, out of fear! (GM II 19, KSA 5.327–​8)

At this point in humanity’s prehistory, the creditor–​debtor relationship, which has its beginnings in the legal sphere, and out of which, Nietzsche holds, all moral duties and oughts eventually emerge (see the opening of GM II 6, KSA 5.300, cited above) has also acquired fundamental political and religious dimensions. Specific individual debtors are conscious not only of their legal debts to human creditors, but all community members are also aware of their political debts to their communities and ‘of having debts to the deity’ (GM II 20, KSA 5.329). But even though Nietzsche has traced the concept of moral duty back to its pre-​moral roots in legal, political and above all ‘religious presuppositions’ (GM II 21, KSA 5.330), he also cautions that at this point duty has not yet been ‘moralized’19 –​duty has not yet been ‘pushed back into conscience’, into ‘the entanglement of bad conscience with the concept of god’ (GM II 21, KSA 5.330). For its eventual transformation into the purely moral ‘commands of a concept of unconditional duty with the “you ought” [Befehle eines absoluten Pflichtbegriff mit dem “du sollst”]’ (WS 44, KSA 2.57320 –​we know which philosopher Nietzsche has in mind here!),21 duty requires considerable help not only from law, politics and religion, but also from guilt and the bad conscience. How credible is Nietzsche’s claim that moral duty has its origin in the one specific legal relationship between creditor and debtor?22 I believe his account is problematic for several reasons. First, there is a failure to appreciate the implications of his own account. As we saw earlier, Nietzsche acknowledges that the creditor–​debtor relationship presupposes a capacity to make and keep promises. But when our ancestors became promise-​keeping animals, a moral ‘ought’ also came into being. (‘I ought to do x, because I  promised y that I  would do so.’)23 Nietzsche arguably has already found the origin of moral duty in the practice of promise-​keeping, a practice which itself precedes rather than follows the creditor–​debtor relationship. Why then does he insist that duty has its origin in the latter practice and not the former? The duty to repay one’s debts can be readily analysed as an instance of the duty to keep one’s promises.24 A second implausible feature in Nietzsche’s focus on the creditor–​debtor relationship and his hypothesis that we can generalize from it to an unconditional du sollst lies in its overreliance on social roles.25 The standard criticism of such accounts is that they beg the question with respect to moral justification. To assert, as Hegel does, that a man’s moral duty is simply to ‘do what is prescribed,

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expressly stated, and known to him in his relationships [was ihm in seinen Verhältnissen vorgezeichnet, ausgesprochen, und bekannt ist]’, or, as Bradley’s famous formulation would have it, to fulfill ‘my station and its duties’26 is poor advice, morally speaking. Yes, normally a father should protect his son. But if his son is a serial killer, no. Yes, normally a seaman should obey his captain’s orders. But if his captain is the tyrannical Ahab driven by a monomaniacal desire to kill Moby Dick, no. And likewise with individuals in Nietzsche’s creditor–​debtor relationship. Yes, normally debtors ought to repay creditors. But if, say, in the initial contract between debtor and creditor the creditor makes false statements that induce the creditor into the contract, or if the debtor enters the contract under duress or in a state of mental incapacitation, then no. No role-​relationship (Nietzsche’s creditor–​debtor relationship included) contains enough inherent normative force to generate an overriding moral ought. So, the sense that one is subject to a duty that is unconditional is not derivable from a role relationship, for there will always be cases where what one ought to do, morally speaking, is not adhere to one’s social role. And Nietzsche does not appear to acknowledge these limitations of social roles in his analysis of duty. A third weakness in Nietzsche’s account becomes apparent once we remind ourselves that most people occupy more than one social role. We are not just fathers or doctors, but sometimes both  –​in addition to being students, husbands, debtors, citizens, soldiers, jurymen and so on. Hegel’s allegedly concrete alternative of Sittlichkeit acknowledges this plurality of human roles, and its role-​pluralism is inherently more realistic and thus more plausible as an account of duty than is Nietzsche’s obsessive focus on the creditor–​debtor relationship. Why should we privilege this specific role-​relationship over all others? Granted, Nietzsche’s position is that over time the creditor–​debtor relationship has been generalized to other roles: it is the ‘genesis’ of all moral duties (GM II 6, KSA 5.300–​2). And granted too that in this relationship as in others ‘the form is fluid, the “meaning” [Sinn] even more so’ (GM II 12, KSA 5.315). But it is still not at all clear that the creditor–​debtor relationship can carry the heavy weight Nietzsche assigns to it. For each social role is different, and each one implies distinct obligations. The exclusivity implied in Nietzsche’s examination of only one particular role relationship points to a fourth weakness. Shakespeare’s advice, ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be, /​For loan oft loses both itself and friend, /​And borrowing dulleth edge of husbandry’ is well-​taken but, alas, seldom taken.27 Do not enter into a creditor–​debtor relationship if you can avoid doing so –​here is a prudent du sollst, but it is only a hypothetical rather than a categorical imperative. And

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this particular role-​relationship is more easily avoidable than many others that Nietzsche passes over in silence in presenting his genealogy of duty (e.g. child–​ parent, young person–​old person, friend–​enemy). But precisely because the creditor–​debtor relationship is more avoidable than many other role relationships, it is also a very questionable candidate for the title of ‘genesis of duty’ –​ particularly if one is trying to explain the feeling of unconditional duty. A related fifth weakness is that the creditor–​debtor relationship is clearly not ‘the oldest [dem ältesten] and most primitive personal relationship there is’ (GM II 8, KSA 5.305). In the evolution of the human species there were certainly parents and children, young people and old people, and also friends and enemies long before moneylenders appeared on the scene. And the possibility that some of these more primeval personal relationships could also prove to be better candidates for examining the origins of duty than the creditor–​debtor relationship should also be examined in a genealogy of morality. Inexplicably, Nietzsche fails to do so. Finally, there are several fundamental types of duty that cannot be generated from the creditor–​debtor relationship. A debt owed to a creditor is a paradigm case of what is traditionally known as a perfect duty to others. A perfect duty to others implies that the other party has a correlative right in virtue of which they can demand performance of a specific act that is owed explicitly to them. As Nietzsche remarks elsewhere, ‘Our duties –​are the rights of others over us’ (D 112, KSA 3.100). The concept of a perfect duty to others is indeed indispensable (all duties of justice are located here), but no satisfactory moral code can be built on it alone. For nearly all human moral codes contain other fundamental kinds of duties as well. Some duties are ‘imperfect’: here there are no correlative rights, and what one is obligated to do is not to perform a specific act owed exclusively to well-​defined others, but rather to pursue a broad goal and then use one’s own judgement in applying it. A paradigm case here is the duty to help others. This duty does not tell us which others to help, nor does it tell us when, where or how much we must help. We must use our own judgement in deciding how best to fulfill this duty. But the duty to help others is a central duty in most human moral codes, and it is not explicable by means of the concept of a debt. A debt owed to creditors is also an example of a ‘positive’ rather than a ‘negative’ duty: It tells us what we ought to do, but not what we ought not to do. But negative duties (e.g. ‘do not harm others’) are also central to human morality. A negative duty does not appear to be derivable from, or explainable in terms of, a positive duty.

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Also, there is the self–​others distinction. The duty to repay one’s debts is an example of a duty to others, but we also have basic duties to ourselves, such as the duty to develop our own moral character. How can a duty to oneself be derived from a duty to others? Can one owe a debt to oneself? In such cases as in those of imperfect and negative duties, Nietzsche’s account clearly fails to achieve his goal of presenting ‘the actual [wirkliche] history of morality’ (GM Preface 7, KSA 5.254).28 For these reasons then, I find Nietzsche’s genealogy of moral duty implausible.29 There can be no doubt that a historical account of these core concepts must form a crucial component of any genealogy of morals, and Nietzsche performed pioneering work in this still underexplored territory. But his attempt to track all moral duties back to the creditor–​debtor relationship is a failure. This failure also points to a larger issue which I cannot pursue in detail here, that of whether Nietzschean genealogy, which demands that we trace the origins of moral concepts to their non-​moral roots, is itself plausible. Can we convincingly derive moral concepts from non-​moral ones, or is morality itself, as Kant argues in the second Critique, ‘a fact of reason because one cannot reason it out from antecedent data of reason’ (KpV 31); something, as Prichard holds, that is ‘absolutely underivative or immediate?’30 I myself tend to think the latter.

2.  Nietzschean duties Who would presume to call himself a philosopher, if he did not inculcate any lessons of duty? Cicero, De Officiis In the present section I wish to explore duty from the opposite side –​that is, not with an eye to its historical origin and development (‘duty drenched in guilt and bad conscience’, as Nietzsche puts it), but rather from the vantage point of an allegedly ‘new truth’ and ‘counter-​ideal [Gegen-​Ideal]’ (EH GM, KSA 6.353) that has managed to break free from this tragic narrative. In other words, what do Nietzschean duties look like? At first glance, one might think that the class of Nietzschean duties and oughts forms an empty set. For as one commentator notes, ‘[S]‌ome of Nietzsche’s harshest negative comments on morality have to do with the fact that its judgments

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are expressed as “oughts” ’ (Hunt 1991: 15). In Twilight of the Idols, for instance, he writes:  ‘[W]hat naiveté it is altogether to say:  “Man ought [sollte] to be such and such!” Reality shows us an enchanting wealth of types . . . And some wretched slouch of a moralist says concerning this: “No! Man ought [sollte] to be different!” (TI Morality as Anti-​Nature 6, KSA 6.86–​7).’ Part of Nietzsche’s point here is a simple corollary of his fatalism:  it does not make sense to tell individuals what they ought to be, because people cannot be other than they are. Each person’s life proceeds along a fixed path, as determined by natural facts –​hard ‘ises’ rather than idealistic ‘oughts’. As he writes in an 1888 entry in the Nachlaß:  ‘Today, when every “man ought [soll] to be thus and thus” is spoken with a grain of irony, when we are altogether convinced that, in spite of all, one will only become what one is (in spite of all: that means education, instruction, milieu, chance, and accident)’ (NL 1888 14[113], KSA 13.290); cf. GS 270, KSA 3.519, EH subtitle: ‘How One Becomes What One Is’, KSA 6. 255 ff. However, these passages speak only against one specific kind of ought, –​viz., physically impossible oughts that violate laws of natural causation. There are still plenty of other oughts remaining in the realm of physical possibility that fatalists can embrace without forfeiture of their core metaphysical commitments, and Nietzsche is no exception here. Nietzsche does explicitly acknowledge in many places that duty and ought are central concepts in his own system of values. For instance, in Beyond Good and Evil he writes: ‘We immoralists! . . . have been spun into a stern yarn and shirt of duties and cannot get out of it –​in this we are “men of duty” [Menschen der Pflicht], we too’ (BGE 226, KSA 5.162). As Clark notes, here Nietzsche ‘sees himself as motivated by duty’ and considers ‘himself a person of duty’.31 Nietzsche’s confession that he and his fellow immoralists ‘cannot get out of [können da nicht heraus]’ these stern duties is also noteworthy, for it implies that they are inescapable or non-​optional commands. Surprisingly, Nietzschean oughts share this core feature of inescapability with Kantian categorical imperatives, despite the fact that the categorical imperative is one of Nietzsche’s favorite targets of criticism.32 A second passage emphasizing the importance of Nietzschean oughts occurs in Twilight, where Nietzsche writes:  ‘[A]‌ll naturalism in morality, that is, all healthy morality, is dominated by an instinct of life –​some commandment of life is fulfilled through a certain canon of soll and soll nicht’ (TI Morality as Anti-​ Nature 4, KSA 6.85). Nietzsche’s brand of naturalistic ethics thus has its own distinct oughts and ought nots, although here he also implies that its duties are

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consequentialist (albeit non-​utilitarian).33 In his ‘healthy’ morality, duties and oughts are a function of life-​enhancement: one ought to do what enhances life.34 A third passage underscoring Nietzschean oughts occurs in the 1886 Preface to Daybreak in the context of a general attack on Kantian ethics, where, after informing readers that ‘in this book trust in morality is abandoned’, Nietzsche adds: ‘But there is no doubt that a “du sollst” still speaks to us too, that we too still obey a stern law [einem strengen Gesetze]  –​and this is the last morality [die letzte Moral] which still makes itself audible even to us’ (D Preface 4, KSA 3.15–​16). Here also (cf. BGE 226, KSA 5.162) the emphasis is on strong, non-​ optional oughts rather than on weak, hypothetical ones. Finally, in an important later section of Daybreak entitled ‘Toward a Natural History of Duty and Right’, Nietzsche begins by stating that ‘[o]‌ur duties –​are the rights of others over us’ (D 112, KSA 3.100). Nietzsche explicitly acknowledges here that he has duties to other human beings, and to the best of my knowledge he does not retract this statement in any of his later writings. But what exactly do Nietzschean duties look like? On what are they based, and to whom are they owed? As regards the latter question: as is well known, one of Nietzsche’s more provocative positions is his conviction that one has duties ‘only to one’s equals’. In Beyond Good and Evil, for instance, he defends the principle that one has duties only toward one’s equals [nur gegen Seinesgleichen]; that toward beings of a lower rank, toward everything foreign, one may act as one likes [nach Gutdünken . . . handeln dürfe] or ‘as the heart desires’ and in any case ‘beyond good and evil’ –​here pity and the like may [mag] belong. (BGE 260, KSA 5.210–​11)35

Any universal ethic that proclaims we have duties not just to our peers but to all human beings is morally wrong, Nietzsche holds, because it harms higher men. For example, in Beyond Good and Evil he asserts that any morality which addresses itself to everybody [an Jedermann wendet] sins not merely against taste:  it is a provocation to sins of omission, one more seduction under the mask of philanthropy  –​and precisely a seduction and injury for the higher, rarer, privileged [Schädigung der Höheren, Seltneren, Bevorrechteten]. One must force moralities to bow first of all before the order of rank [Rangordnung]; one must push their presumption into their conscience –​until they finally get things straight, that it is immoral [unmoralisch] to say: ‘what is right for one is fair for the other’. (BGE 221, KSA 5.156)

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But how and why does the fact that duties towards all constitute an ‘injury for the higher, rarer, privileged’ show that any ethics that includes such duties is unmoralisch? Granted, a nascent Goethe will have less time to work on his poetry if he is morally required to fulfill what Kant calls the ‘universal duty’ of each human being ‘to promote according to one’s means the happiness of others in need’ (MS 453; cf. GMS 398) than he will if he is released from such a duty. Granted, a budding Beethoven will have less time to compose music if he is morally obligated to express what Kant calls the duty of gratitude to all persons high and low who have rendered benefits to oneself (see MS 454–​6) than he will if he is released from such a duty. But the same is true for non-​geniuses as well. Everyone has less time for their personal projects once moral obligations become part of their lives. This is a necessary truth about duties, and to use it as an argument against there being duties is spurious. It is like saying you’re opposed to taxation because you do not like having to give some of your money to the government. This is just part of what ‘taxation’ means. But part of Nietzsche’s point is that higher men are injured by duties towards everyone in ways that the rest of us schlemiels are not, for their projects are inestimably more valuable than ours. No matter how much time we devote to our measly projects, we will never create anything that is remotely comparable to the artistic creations of a Goethe or a Beethoven. Nietzsche is no doubt right about this, but here we are talking about aesthetic rather than moral value. Why then does he claim that universal duties are unmoralisch? His remarks about higher men seem rather to be another example of what Philippa Foot calls Nietzsche’s defense of ‘a quasi-​aesthetic rather than a moral set of values’, or as Simon Robertson remarks in a more recent essay, of his ‘quasi-​aesthetic individualist perfectionism’.36 Nietzsche continues to use traditional deontic normative concepts of ‘duty’ and ‘ought’, but he is employing them in a demoralized form (cf. Janaway and Robertson 2012b: 8–​9). As regards the basis or ground of these duties, Nietzsche insists  –​contra Kant –​that all legitimate moral duties are conditional rather than unconditional. ‘The worst of all tastes’, he proclaims in Beyond Good and Evil, ‘is the taste for the unconditional [das Unbedingte]’ (BGE 31, KSA 5.49).37 Later in the same text he fumes yet again against moralities that ‘address themselves to “all” ’, calling them examples of ‘old-​woman wisdom’, ‘baroque and unreasonable’. But this time he also objects to their ‘speaking unconditionally [unbedingt redend] one and all, taking themselves for unconditional [sich unbedingt nehmend]’ (BGE 198, KSA 5.118). And at the end of an important section in The Gay Science entitled ‘Unconditional Duties [Unbedingte Pflichten]’, Nietzsche makes clear that Kant

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is his target when he states that those who ‘cling to the categorical imperative’ are ‘the mortal enemy of those who want to deprive duty of its unconditional character [unbedingte Charakter]’ (GS 5, KSA 3.377; cf. 335, KSA 3.560–​4). But what then conditions Nietzschean duties? On what are they based? He addresses this question in the section from The Antichrist that I have chosen as the epigraph for this essay: ‘what does not condition [bedingt] our life harms it’ (A 11, KSA 6.177). Duty, along with other core moral notions such as ‘virtue’ and ‘good’ must, Nietzsche holds, in any correct evaluative system, condition the agent’s life, viz., help bring it into the desired state, enhance it rather than detract from it. If an alleged duty doesn’t condition and enhance the agent’s life, then it is merely a phantom (ein Hirngespinst) –​and ditto with virtue and good as well (see A 11, KSA 6.177–​8). But if Nietzschean duties must condition and enhance the agent’s life, what then becomes of the non-​ optional Nietzschean oughts discussed earlier  –​ the ‘stern yarn and shirt of duties’ that he and his higher men ‘cannot get out of ’ (BGE 226, KSA 5.162)? Suddenly Nietzschean duties don’t look so stern. Granted, they are not completely arbitrary or capricious (if they enhance one’s life, then one must fulfill them), but they appear to be hypothetical rather than categorical: for if one doesn’t want to enhance one’s life, then one doesn’t need to fulfill them. So perhaps they can be gotten out of –​assuming one can choose whether to enhance one’s life or not. Could we really live with a system of obligation based on life-​enhancement? There are multiple problems with such an arrangement. First, it would allow agents to opt out of any and all alleged duties whenever they are not life-​ enhancing. (‘Sorry. I know that I promised to help you, but in thinking it over I realized that doing so wouldn’t enhance my own life.’) Are duties really this easy to get out of? Second, the life-​enhancement criterion would also enable agents to create new rights and duties on the spot, whenever they could show that an act is life-​enhancing for them. (‘Yes, ordinarily taking another person’s possessions is theft. But you’re an untalented dolt and I’m a higher man who is unfortunately very short on cash at present. So in this case, my taking your possessions will condition and enhance my life.’) Are rights and duties really this easy to create? A third problem lies in Nietzsche’s frequent reminder that what conditions or enhances one person’s life may well weaken or harm another’s. For instance, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra he writes: ‘chastity in some people is a virtue, but in many almost a vice’ (Z I On Chastity, KSA 4.69). Similarly, for some people humility is a virtue, but for others, –​viz., those who are ‘destined and made

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[bestimmt und gemacht] to command, self-​denial and modest withdrawal would not be a virtue but the waste of a virtue’ (BGE 221, KSA 5.156). ‘The question is always who he is and who the other is’ (BGE 221, KSA 5.156) –​viz. what type of person one is, as determined by psychological and physiological facts. And this is why he urges a radical change in the Stoic philosopher Ariston of Chios’s medical formulation of morality from ‘virtue is the health of the soul’ to ‘ “your virtue is the health of your soul”. For there is no health as such . . . there are innumerable healths of the body; and the more one allows the particular and incomparable to rear its head again, the more one unlearns the dogma of the “equality of men” ’ (GS 120, KSA 3.477). But the social coordination problems posed by such a code of conduct are enormous. Each agent, depending on ‘who he is’, will require his own distinct set of virtues and duties. And he will have no duties whatsoever towards those who are of a different type. If he is a higher man, he will have no duties towards a lower man, for this would be detrimental to the achievement of his own excellence. ‘To a being such as “we are” other beings must be subordinate by nature [von Natur unterthan sein müssen] and have to sacrifice themselves [sich . . . zu opfern haben]’ (BGE 265, KSA 5.220). Applying Nietzsche’s code will not be easy either, and this points to a fourth problem with duties based on life-​enhancement. For instance, does everyone really know ‘who he is?’ Suppose you’re a late bloomer: for many years society has pegged you a dimwit, and even you have half-​heartedly accepted this verdict. But finally in middle age your true genius begins to blossom. Accordingly, a new set of type-​appropriate obligations is now in order. You have numerous outstanding debts, contracts and promises that you owe to some bureaucratic blockheads, but now you are suddenly released from them all. Unfortunately, Nietzsche is also often prone to push his ‘different duties for different types of men’ theme to its outer subjectivist limit, and this leads to a fifth problem. For instance, in The Antichrist aphorism selected as an epigraph for this chapter, he claims that it is a law of preservation that ‘each person invent [Jeder. . . erfinde] his own virtue, his own categorical imperative’ (A 11, KSA 6.177). Not everyone is able to follow this difficult advice (and even those who do will certainly not end up with a categorical imperative), but Nietzsche’s higher men are defined, at least in part, precisely by their capacity to create values. We are told twice in Zarathustra that ‘the world revolves around the inventors [die Erfinder] of new values’ (Z I On the Flies of the Market Place,

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KSA 4.66; cf. Z II On Great Events, KSA 4167–​71). In Beyond Good and Evil the highest man is identified with the ‘genuine [wirklicher] philosopher’ (not to be confused with the mere philosophical laborer or man of science; i.e. the professor). The genuine philosopher is he who ‘creates values [Werthe schaffe]’ (BGE 211, KSA 5.144; cf. 260, KSA 5.209).38 But Nietzsche’s advice that each person create his own duties (see A  11, KSA 6.177–​8) is in tension with his position that duties are determined by the type of person one is. For it would seem that each individual is not truly free to create his or her own imperative. Rather, the appropriate imperative for each individual ‘is simply determined by the type-​facts about that person’ (Leiter 2002: 98) –​by how that person already is, irrespective of his or choices. In the end, Nietzsche’s strong commitment to what Danish author Georg Brandes called ‘aristocratic radicalism’  –​a label that Nietzsche himself deemed ‘very good’ and ‘the cleverest thing I have yet read about myself ’39 –​ may be the biggest impediment to the development of a coherent and plausible set of Nietzschean duties. For even aristocrats (at least the non-​radical, non-​Nietzschean kind) acknowledge that they have some duties to plebeians. Pegging duty merely to what enhances one’s life and improves one’s health is like trying to build a house on quicksand. Once one tries to shrink the sphere of duty to only one’s peers, the result is social chaos. And Nietzsche’s lack of concern with these fundamental social coordination problems is another sign that his own positive normative theory is very difficult to square with morality as traditionally understood. For morality is, at least in part, a social coordination scheme. The gap between Nietzscheans who hold that higher men have duties only to their equals and Kantians who subscribe to the equal worth of all persons (see GMS 429–​35) is likely as big a gap as exists anywhere in ethics, and there is no way to bridge it. But is ‘Königsbergian Chinadom’ (A 11, KSA 6.177; cf. BGE 210, KSA 5.144) really as easy to dismiss as Nietzsche claims? In an aphorism in The Gay Science entitled ‘Kant’s joke’ Nietzsche writes: ‘Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the “whole world” [“alle Welt”], that the “whole world” was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in favor of popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people’ (GS 193, KSA 3.504).40 But maybe the joke is on Nietzsche. Perhaps the whole world is right: we are all equal in dignity, even if Kant’s complicated effort to prove this popular modern conviction has dumbfounded many readers.41

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Notes 1 Despite the recent surge of writing devoted specifically to Nietzsche’s critique of morality, contemporary commentators still offer wildly different answers to each of these questions. For instance, according to Brain Leiter (2002: 74), ‘Nietzsche could not be a critic of all [emphasis in the original] morality’; while Maudmarie Clark (1994: 31, cf. 16) argues that ‘Nietzsche believed he was rejecting morality itself ’. Paul van Tongeren (Tongeren 2006: 389) even holds that Nietzsche’s critique of morality ‘is inspired and molded by the morality he criticizes’. 2 In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche writes: ‘Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality –​that is to say, as we understand the thing, merely one type of human morality beside which, before which, and after which many other types, above all higher moralities [höhere Moralen], are, or ought to be, possible’ (BGE 202, KSA 5.124). As Leiter (2002: 74) notes, the fact that Nietzsche ‘explicitly embraces the idea of a “higher morality” which would inform the lives of “higher men” ’ would seem to speak against his being ‘a critic of all [emphasis in the original] “morality” ’. However, there still remains the issue –​raised by Philippa Foot and others –​as to whether Nietzsche’s ‘higher morality’ should count as a morality. See Foot (1973: 156–​68; 1994: 3–​14). 3 Cf. GM Preface 6, KSA 5.253. 4 In the Groundwork, for instance, Kant briefly alludes to other (non-​human) types of rational beings and their different (non-​human) relationship to moral principles when he writes: ‘no imperatives hold for the divine will and in general for a holy will: the ought [das Sollen] is out of place here, because willing [das Wollen] already of itself necessarily agrees with the law’ (GMS 414). (When available, I use –​with occasional modifications –​the English translations in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (general editors Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood; Cambridge University Press, 1992–​), 16 vols. The traditional Academy volume and page numbers are reprinted in the margins of most recent editions and translations of Kant’s writings.) 5 This passage has often been used to attribute a virtue ethics to Nietzsche. Character judgements are primary in his moral scheme; ought and duty judgements about action are secondary. For discussion, see Hunt (1991: esp. 171) and Swanton (2006: 291–​303). 6 In moral philosophy, the most famous example is G. E. M. Anscombe, who suggests we ‘do ethics without . . . the notion “morally ought”, . . . as is shown by the example of Aristotle’ (Anscombe [1958] 1997: 33–​4) –​a statement which is often said to mark the beginning of the contemporary virtue ethics movement. Similarly, Bernard Williams (1993: 41; 1985: 16) holds that ‘duty in some abstract sense in largely unknown to the Greeks, in particular to archaic Greeks’, and that ‘there is no ancient

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Greek word for duty’, and Alasdair MacIntyre (1966: 84) claims that in ancient Greek ethics ‘the concepts of duty and responsibility in the modern sense appear only in germ or marginally; those of goodness, virtue, and prudence are central’. See also Adkins ([1960] 1975: 2–​3). However, there have also been some dissenting voices. See, e.g., ‘Aristotle’s Moral Ought’ in Louden (1992: 34–​9) and Korsgaard ([1996] 2008: 174–​206). 7 Cf. Lecky (1887: I: 5): ‘A theory of morals must explain not only what constitutes a duty, but also how we obtain the notion of there being such a thing as duty. It must tell us not merely what is the course of conduct we ought [emphasis in the original] to pursue, but also what is the meaning of this word “ought”, and from what source we derive the idea that it expresses.’ Like Nietzsche, Lecky too is inquiring into ‘the natural history of morals’ (I: 1). Leiter (2002: 197–​8) notes that ‘in the early 1880s, Nietzsche had been reading W. E. H. Lecky’s History of European Morals’, and according to Clark and Swensen, Nietzsche ([1887] 1998: 129n9) ‘had considerable praise’ for Lecky’s work. A copy of an 1879 German translation of Lecky’s book can be found in Nietzsche’s personal library (Benders and Oettermann 2000: 660). 8 It is plausible to think that the concepts of guilt and duty are only contingently connected to each other. Of course, we normally do feel guilty when we fail to fulfill a moral obligation and cannot justify the transgression. For instance, most people feel guilty when they violate a friend’s trust for no good reason. But when they successfully fulfill an obligation, they do not typically feel guilty as a result of having done so. And, some people may feel guilty when no moral duties are involved at all. For example, someone may feel guilty over her moral luck of having been born into a wealthy family in a prosperous country with a beautiful climate, even if she faithfully fulfills all of her moral obligations. This is an example of what Mathias Risse (2005: 46) calls ‘existential guilt’, or guilt ‘that shapes one’s whole existence’, but it is not necessarily an existential guilt that is tied to belief in the Christian God. Risse argues that Nietzsche is concerned only with existential guilt that requires the Christian God, but this is an overly restrictive reading. As Christopher Janaway (2007: 141n.27) notes, Nietzsche’s account of guilt ‘is best read as explaining the origins of locally reactive guilt in internalization and the debtor–​creditor relation, and the subsequent intensification of locally reactive guilt into existential guilt by means of the Christian metaphysical picture’. 9 However, they are not the only such vehicles: religion and belief in the Christian God also played a major role, although commentators disagree over whether their contribution is contingent or necessary. For discussion, see the exchange between Ridley (2005: 35–​45) and Risse (2005: 46–​53). Ridley argues that guilt comes before God; Risse, that God comes before guilt.

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10 In recent years a substantial amount of ink has been spilled over how best to render this phrase (especially the verb darf, from dürfen) into English. See, e.g., Clark and Swensen (Nietzsche 1998: 139 n.35), Acampora (2006a: 147–​8) and Owen (2007: 168 n.1). I agree with Clark and Swenson that nature’s task as Nietzsche conceives it is to breed a normative animal, ‘an animal that accepts and lives up to norms’ (Nietzsche 1998: 139), but I do not think their choice of ‘is permitted to’ is the best way to get this point across. At bottom, Nietzsche is talking about the historical development of a new kind of animal, one possessing new capacities. To my ears, ‘is able to’ better captures his point about the difficulty of acquiring these capacities. 11 Concerning naturalism, Nietzsche holds that we must ‘translate man back into nature’ and pay closer attention to ‘that eternal ground text [ewiger Grundtext] homo natura’ (BGE 230, KSA 5.169), and his commitment to determinism is evident when he states: ‘the causa sui is the best self-​contradiction that has been conceived thus far’ (BGE 21, KSA 5.35). For discussions of how best to interpret Nietzsche’s naturalism and determinism, see Acampora (2006b), Solomon (2006) and Pippin (2006). For recent challenges and qualifications to the naturalist reading, see Clark and Dudrick (2012) and Janaway and Robertson (2012b). 12 Additional capacities necessary for promise-​making which are not explicitly mentioned by Nietzsche, include the linguistic ability to articulate promises and communicate them to other animals, and the related cognitive ability to understand and evaluate promise-​claims made by others (‘What did this person say? Is he serious? Should I believe what he’s saying?’). 13 In the English language, the terms ‘duty’ and ‘obligation’ have sometimes been used in different senses. Obligations have been defined as voluntarily incurred, while duties are said to be a function of social roles or offices. See, e.g., the Oxford English Dictionary s.v. ‘duty’ (esp. fifth entry) and ‘obligation’ (first entry). For discussion, see Brandt (1964: esp. 387–​8). However, this distinction is not generally adhered to in contemporary moral philosophy, and in my own discussion I do not assume it. 14 Evolutionary biologists and primatologists are fond of emphasizing ‘continuity with animals even in the moral domain’, as Frans de Waal (2006: 14, 6) puts it (see also Darwin [1871] 1981: I: 71–​2, 97–​8). But Nietzsche’s naturalism –​a naturalism that emphasizes not only continuities but also sharp breaks between humans and other animals –​is surely the more accurate naturalism. Many contemporary primatologists and animal researchers also argue that non-​human animals transmit cultural traditions and habits across generations. See, e.g., Whiten et al. (1999), de Waal (2001) and McGrew (2004). When coupled with Nietzsche’s Daybreak conception of morality as ‘nothing other . . . than obedience to customs’ (9), this gives us a possible second argument (distinct from the ‘shared social instincts argument’) in defence of animal morality. However, Nietzsche rejects this simplistic

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definition of morality in later works such as the Genealogy of Morals. When he describes ‘the task of breeding an animal that is able to make promises’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293) as a necessary stage in the birth of morality, he implies that he does not believe that non-​human animals are moral creatures, since they are unable to make promises. 15 Nietzsche explicitly acknowledges the legal setting of the creditor–​debtor relationship at the beginning of GM II 6, KSA 5.300, when he writes: ‘In this sphere, in legal obligations [Obligationen-​Rechte] that is, the moral conceptual world . . . “duty” [Pflicht], “sacredness of duty” has its genesis [Entstehungsheerd].’ 16 This is noted at the beginning of GM II 5, KSA 5.298, when he states regarding these ‘contract relationships [Vertragsverhältnisse]:’ . . . ‘precisely here promises are made.’ 17 Owen (2007: 95). I am indebted to Owen’s analysis in the following discussion of this two-​step generalization process. 18 Cf. Socrates’ imaginary discussion with the laws in Plato’s Crito: ‘Then what if the laws said: . . . “Did we not, first, bring you to birth? . . . And after you were born and nurtured and educated, could you, in the first place, deny that you are our offspring and servant, both you and your forefathers? If that is so, do you think that we are on an equal footing as regards the right [to dikaion]?”  ’ (50d–​e). 19 Kant and Nietzsche both use the term ‘moralization [Moralisirung]’ (Nietzsche less frequently than Kant), but they attach very different meanings to it. For Kant, Moralisirung is a positive development and refers to an internalization and diffusion among all peoples of the norms expressed in the different formulas of the categorical imperative. As he remarks tersely in the Lectures on Pedagogy, in order to achieve moralization the human being must ‘acquire the disposition to choose nothing but good ends. Good ends are those which are necessarily approved by everyone and which can be the simultaneous ends of everyone’ (Päd 450). For discussion and additional references, see Louden (2000: 21, 101–​2, 159, 164, 181). For Nietzsche, on the other hand, Moralisirung is a negative development, and refers to the idea, as Simon May (1999: 70–​1) puts it, ‘that one’s human nature is essentially and undischargeably guilty and hence defective’. 20 In this passage, from a section entitled ‘Stages of Morality [Stufen der Moral]’, Nietzsche is describing the fourth stage of morality. But he also envisions a fifth step coming later. Eventually, humans will learn ‘to place their feet on narrower, more delicate steps. Then comes a morality [eine Moral] of inclination, of taste, finally that of insight –​which is above and beyond all illusionary motive forces of morality [illusionären Motive der Moral] but has a clear realization of why for long ages mankind could possess no other’ (WS 44, KSA 2.573). This is one of many

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Nietzschean texts that suggest that his basic goal is to replace one kind of morality with another. English translators tend to render Nietzsche’s ‘du sollst’ as ‘thou shallt’. But insofar as his target is Kant, and insofar as contemporary English translators of Kant tend to render Kant’s ‘du sollst’ as ‘you ought’, the latter is a preferable translation. Perhaps it is merely one of what Daniel Dennett (1995: 242, 464) calls (with apologies to Rudyard Kipling) ‘Nietzsche’s Just So Stories’ –​that is, an explanation that we needn’t bother to test ‘because it is too good a story, presumably, not to be true’ –​‘a mixture of brilliant and crazy, sublime and ignoble, devastatingly acute history and untrammeled fantasy’? Like many others (e.g. Richardson 2004), Dennett (1995: 464) sees strong similarities between Darwin and Nietzsche: ‘Both came up with dangerous ideas.’ ‘But’, he continues, ‘whereas Darwin was ultra-​ conscious in his expression, Nietzsche indulged in prose so overheated that it no doubt serves him right that his legion of devotees has included a disreputable gaggle of unspeakable and uncomprehending Nazis and other such fans whose perversions of his memes make Spencer’s perversions of Darwin’s seem almost innocent’ (464). Whether the moral ought of promising is absolute and overrides all competing oughts (as Kant is often interpreted as holding) is of course more controversial. Here I side with W. D. Ross (1930: 8): there do exist ‘exceptional cases in which the consequences of fulfilling a promise . . . would be so disastrous to others that we judge it right not to do so . . . If I have promised to meet a friend at a particular time for some trivial purpose, I should certainly think myself justified in breaking my engagement if by doing so I could prevent a serious accident or bring relief to the victims of one’. See, e.g., Fried (1981). In this respect Nietzsche’s is very similar to Hegel-​inspired historical accounts of duty. MacIntyre (1966: 86; cf. 236), for instance, argues that when we look historically at the concept of duty, we see ‘a gradual attenuation . . . in which there is a progress from a notion of duty as consisting in the requirement to fulfill a specific role, the fulfillment of which serves a purpose which is entirely intelligible as the expression of normal human desires (consider the duties of a father, seaman, or doctor as examples); the next step is perhaps the concept of duty as something to be done by the individual whatever his private desires; finally we reach the concept of duty as divorced from desire altogether’. Hegel (1970: §150); Bradley (1962: 168, 173–​4). Hegel, Bradley and MacIntyre all argue that unless moral duty is anchored firmly in social roles, it becomes incomprehensible. For a discussion to which I am indebted, see Donagan (1977: 9–​18). William Shakespeare, Hamlet Prince of Denmark I, iii, 75.

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28 In this paragraph I am expanding on Risse’s (2008: 50) observation that Nietzsche’s account of duties can only accommodate ‘positive duties that respond to beneficial actions of others. Negative duties (that is, duties to refrain from certain actions) cannot be accommodated by this account’. 29 Given these multiple problems with his account, why then does Nietzsche focus so intently on the creditor–​debtor relationship in his genealogy of duty? One hypothesis is that his interest in (and, alas, advocacy of) cruelty draws him to it. For instance, a notorious passage in The Antichrist reads: ‘The weak and the failures ought to perish [Die Schwachen und Mißrathnen sollen zu grunde gehen]: first principle of our philanthropy. And one ought to help them too [man soll ihnen noch dazu helfen]’ (A 2, KSA 6.170). In GM II 5, KSA 5.299, Nietzsche cites the following remark from the Twelve Tables legislation of ancient Rome (c. 450 bc, a prime source of ancient written law): ‘si plus minusve secuerunt, ne fraude esto [if they have secured more or less, let that be no crime].’ As he notes, according to Roman law, ‘it was of no consequence how much or how little the creditors cut off ’ –​i.e., how much of a debtor’s limb could legally be cut off in cases of non-​ payment. But it should also be noted that many different legal rights and duties are described in the Twelve Tables. E.g., in table I, the duty to appear in court when issued a summons is discussed. In table VII, the right to remove a neighbour’s tree if it hangs over one’s property is described. In table X, we read that no one may ‘burn or bury a corpse in the city’. Legal duties between creditors and debtors are only a small part of the Twelve Tables story (see table III), but this is the only part of the story that Nietzsche is interested in. He is convinced that the beginnings of duty, ‘like the beginnings of everything great on earth, were thoroughly and for a long time drenched in blood’ and that ‘the categorical imperative smells of cruelty [Grausamkeit]’ (GM II 6, KSA 5.300). But is the alleged duty–​cruelty connection only a contingent by-​product of the fixation on the creditor–​debtor relationship as practiced in ancient Rome? 30 Prichard (1968: 7). I thank Pablo Muchnik for discussion on this topic. 31 Nietzsche (1998: xviii, xix). Contemporary Kant translators normally render ‘Menschen’ as ‘human beings’, but in the case of Nietzsche, ‘men’ is preferable. 32 ‘The categorical imperative smells of cruelty’ (GM II 6); ‘Kant’s categorical imperative should have been felt as mortally dangerous!’ (A 11, KSA 5.177; cf. BGE 5, KSA 5.18–​19). 33 ‘Man does not strive after happiness, only the Englishman does that’ (T I Maxims 12, KSA 6.61). 34 Leiter (2002: 125) writes: ‘such an account is too vague: what exactly does “life” refer to here?’. Leiter’s answer: ‘The life for which things are valuable or disvaluable must be the life (or lives) that manifest human excellence –​i.e., the lives of “higher men” ’ (126).

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35 Walter Kaufmann (1968: 396 n.6), in a note to his translation of the text, remarks that Nietzsche ‘contradicts outright’ the latter part of this principle when he states in The Antichrist: ‘When the exceptional human being handles the mediocre more gently than he does himself and his equals, this is not mere politeness of the heart –​it is simply his duty [seine Pflicht]’ (A 57, KSA 6.244). I agree that the two texts contradict each other. However, I take Nietzsche’s ‘duties only to one’s equals’ position to be his considered view, for the simple reason that he asserts it repeatedly. To my knowledge, his ‘duties to the mediocre’ position is asserted only once. A passage virtually identical to BGE 260, KSA 5.210–​11, can be found in the 1885 Nachlaß, where, in addressing the question ‘What is noble?’, Nietzsche writes: ‘[T]‌he conviction that one has duties only toward one’s equals [nur gegen Seines-​Gleichen], toward the others one behaves as one likes [nach Gutdünken verhält]’ (NL 1885 35[76], KSA 11.543). 36 Foot (1973: 166); Robertson (2012: 108). In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche declares: ‘I am convinced that art [Kunst] represents the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life’ (Preface to Richard Wagner; see also Attempt at a Self-​Criticism 5). Does he ever renounce this early conviction? 37 See Geuss (1999: 171–​3) for helpful analysis of this particular aspect of Nietzsche’s theory of obligation. May (1999: 22–​3, 92, 105, 151, ­chapter 9, passim) also discusses Nietzsche’s opposition to unconditional values. But his main concern is with Nietzsche’s critique of the claim that truth is an unconditional value. See also Himmelmann (2006: 21–​9), where she argues that Nietzsche’s commitment to opposites that are essential to life is one reason why he argues against absolute principles. 38 In Ecce Homo Nietzsche adds: ‘How I understand the philosopher, as a terrible explosive [ein furchtbarer Explosionsstoff], before whom everything is in danger, how my concept “philosopher” is miles and miles removed from a concept that would include even a Kant, not to speak of the academic “ruminants” [Wiederkäuer] and other professors of philosophy’ (EH Books UM 3, KSA 6.320). Or, as he puts it in Beyond Good and Evil, ‘even the great Chinaman of Königsberg was merely a great critic’ (BGE 210, KSA 5.144). 39 Nietzsche to Brandes, 2 December 1887; reprinted in Brandes (1914: 64). The first chapter of Brandes’s book is entitled ‘An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889)’. He also published an essay with the title ‘Aristocratischer Radikalismus: Eine Abhandlung über Friedrich Nietzsche’ (see Brandes 1890). Cf. Theodor Adorno (2000: 173): ‘in reality these norms [of Nietzsche’s] are all feudal values . . . [,]‌ attempts to recapture lost values, would-​be revivals, a Romantic ideal’. 40 MacIntyre (1966: 224) and, more recently, Joshua D. Greene (2007), both make use of this aphorism, albeit in ways that shed little light on either Kant or Nietzsche. Kant insists repeatedly that the principle of morality he defends is one

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that ‘common human reason [gemeine Menschenvernunft] . . . agrees completely with’ (GMS 402; see also 389, 403), and he criticizes the hubris of the moral theorist who sets out ‘to introduce a new principle of morality and, as it were, first invent it . . . as if, before him, the world had been ignorant of what duty is or in thoroughgoing error about it’ (KpV 8n). Nietzsche is certainly right on this point. For discussion, see ‘Gemeine Menschenvernunft and Ta Endoxa’, in Louden (1992: 116–​20). 41 An earlier version of this essay was presented as an invited lecture at a conference on ‘Nietzsche and Approaches to Ethics’, held at the University of Southampton in July 2009. I would like to thank Christopher Janaway and Simon Robertson for their invitation to participate in the conference, and Jason Read, Kathleen Wininger, Sandra L. Shapshay, Pablo Muchnik, Julian Wuerth and Beatrix Himmelmann for helpful comments on the earlier version of the essay. Thanks also to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for its financial support in June–​July of 2009, during which time a draft of the earlier version was written in Berlin. Finally, I am very grateful to Tom Bailey and João Constancio for their detailed and helpful comments on a later version of the essay.

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Korsgaard, C. M. ([1996] 2008), ‘From Duty and for the Sake of the Noble: Kant and Aristotle on Morally Good Action’, in C. M. Korsgaard, The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology, 174–​206, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lecky, W. E. H. (1887), History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, 3rd edn, New York: D. Appleton and Company. Leiter, B. (2002), Nietzsche on Morality, London: Routledge. Louden, R. B. (1992), Morality and Moral Theory: A Reappraisal and Reaffirmation, New York: Oxford University Press. Louden, R. B. (2000), Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings, New York: Oxford University Press. MacIntyre, A. (1966), A Short History of Ethics, New York: Macmillan. May, S. (1999), Nietzsche’s Ethics and His War on ‘Morality’, Oxford: Clarendon Press. McGrew, W. C. (2004), The Cultured Chimpanzee, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. ([1887] 1998), On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. M. Clark and A. J. Swensen. Nietzsche, F. (2003), Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. R. Bittner, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Owen, D. (2007), Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press. Pippin, R. B. (2006), ‘Agent and Deed in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals’, in A. K. Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche, 371–​86, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Prichard, H. A. (1968), ‘Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?’ in H. A. Prichard, Moral Obligation and Duty and Interest: Essays and Lectures, 1–​18, London: Oxford University Press. Richardson, J. (2004), Nietzsche’s New Darwinism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ridley, A. (2005), ‘Guilt before God or God before Guilt? The Second Essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 29: 35–​45. Risse, M. (2005), ‘On God and Guilt: A Reply to Aaron Ripley’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 29: 46–​53. Risse, M. (2008), ‘Nietzsche on Selfishness, Justice, and the Duties of the Higher Men’, in P. Bloomfield (ed.), Morality and Self-​Interest, 31–​50, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robertson, S. (2012), ‘The Scope Problem –​Nietzsche, the Moral, Ethical, and Quasi-​ Aesthetic’, in C. Janaway and S. Robertson (eds), Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity, 81–​110, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ross, W. D. (1930), The Right and the Good, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Solomon, R. C. (2006), ‘Nietzsche’s Fatalism’, in A. K. Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche, 419–​34, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Swanton, C. (2006), ‘Nietzschean Virtue Ethics’, in C. D. Acampora (ed.), Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays, 291–​303, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

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van Tongeren, P. (2006), ‘Nietzsche and Ethics’, in K. A. Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche, 389–​403, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Whiten, A., Goodall, J., McGrew, W. C., Nishida, T., Reynolds, V., Sugiyama, Y. et al. (1999), ‘Cultures in Chimpanzees’, Nature 399: 682–​5. Williams, B. (1985), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williams, B. (1993), Shame and Necessity, Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Spontaneity and Sovereignty Nietzsche’s Concepts and Kant’s Philosophy Marco Brusotti

In his Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (Kant’s Theory of Experience), Hermann Cohen (1871:  160f.) complains that Kant’s ‘distinction between receptive sensuality and spontaneous intellect’ has been ‘quite universally criticized’. Cohen, who wanted to react against this widespread tendency, is referring explicitly to Jürgen Bona Meyer, but he could have directed a similar criticism against his own mentor, Friedrich Albert Lange. Spontaneity, a core concept in Kant’s conception of thought and agency, had been of fundamental importance for German Idealism; and in 1871, a few decades after Hegel’s death, the concept plays again a central role in Cohen’s reading of Kant. But in the 1860s, in reaction to German Idealism and in the wake of positivism, spontaneity had become a problematic concept even for the first generation of the new ‘back to Kant movement’. The first section of this chapter deals with the particular significance of psychology in the early neo-​Kantians’ dismissal of Kant’s conception of the spontaneity of thought and will. Against this historical background, it is not surprising that Nietzsche rejects the idea of an ‘absolute’ or ‘free’ spontaneity of the will. In 1880, a new conception of life as ‘spontaneous activity’ emerges in his manuscripts. This naturalistic view, which he picks up from a philosopher of minor importance, Johann Julius Baumann, goes back to Alexander Bain’s theory of the ‘beginnings of the will’. The difference between Kant’s absolute spontaneity of representation and Bainian spontaneity of involuntary movements and activities is explained in detail (Section 2). The conception of ‘spontaneous activity’, which Nietzsche adopts before Daybreak, has an enormous influence on his further philosophical development, although his last writings seem to give up even this relative concept of spontaneity, which in the Genealogy is still of paramount

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importance (Section 3). In Daybreak, Nietzsche, who had already rejected Kant’s ‘radical evil’ in the 1870s, revises the issue in the light of his new conception of ‘spontaneous activity’: in the Genealogy, this explanation of one of two very different forms of ‘evil’ is developed into a new argument against the freedom of the will, an argument which is, however, related to Lichtenberg’s criticism of Kant (Section 4). By analysing the use of Kantian terms in the Genealogy, I show that this criticism of freedom squares well with the description of the ‘sovereign individual’ as ‘responsible’, ‘autonomous’ and ‘free’. I reconstruct the context of the description –​an implicit rejection of Eduard von Hartmann’s criticism of the ‘absolute sovereignty [. . .] of the individual’. Against Hartmann, Nietzsche employs a specific textual strategy, which consists in taking Kantian terms in an ‘anti-​Kantian’ sense and systematically cultivating the art of using ‘a moral formula in a supramoral sense’. The agent’s self-​ascription of absolute freedom belongs essentially to Kant’s concept of moral agency, and the self-​ascription of ‘freedom’ to Nietzsche’s sovereign individuality. But the ‘freedom’ the sovereign individual ascribes to itself and to its peers is not absolute spontaneity, which for Nietzsche is a self-​contradictory concept; and this self-​ascription of a rare freedom does not have the same function as the postulate of absolute freedom in Kant’s practical philosophy. It is, rather, the main way in which the sovereign individual’s ‘pathos of distance’ is expressed, and hence a form of self-​ affirmation (Section 5).

1.  Early neo-​Kantianism and the inadequacy of Kant’s psychology Fries and Herbart deny that Kant’s ‘transcendental psychology’ is compatible with empirical results. But, in fact, the issue is foreign to Kant: empirical data, anthropological or psychological, are irrelevant at a level where something valid for all rational beings endowed with space-​temporal sensibility has to be established. However, the early ‘back to Kant movement’ inherited from philosophers such as Fries and Herbart the question of whether the critique of pure reason has a sound psychological basis; and early neo-​Kantians such as Meyer and Lange came to reject Kant’s ‘transcendental psychology’ as essentially metaphysical. More recent readings have questioned that transcendental psychology is really essential to Kant’s critical project or, pace Kant, even that transcendental psychology is an issue at all.1 Other scholars intend to naturalize it and claim that

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the ‘spontaneity’, which is at its core, is not absolute, but only relative spontaneity.2 Other recent readings propose that the spontaneity of thought be construed by analogy with the spontaneity of the will. This proposal does not necessarily imply that the spontaneity of thought and the spontaneity of agency –​the spontaneity of the intellect and the spontaneity of the will –​are essentially one and the same.3 The comparison concerns their respective status. According to Kant, theoretical reason can establish that besides the causality of nature there can be a causality with freedom (causa noumenon), but it cannot decide if there really is such an ‘absolute spontaneity of cause, which of itself originates a series of appearances that proceeds according to natural laws’ (KrV A446/​B 474). The absolute spontaneity of the will is a mere postulate of practical reason, but belongs as such to the necessary self-​understanding of a rational agent. The controversial exegetic question is how far can the spontaneity of thought be construed as internal to the concept of a thinker without a metaphysical commitment to its theoretical truth.4 Such exegetic options were not available to early neo-​Kantians. Lange (1880, vol. 2:  191, n.  23)  firmly rejected the independence of transcendental from empirical psychology: ‘The greatest portion of all the obscurities of the Critique of pure reason flow from the single circumstance that Kant undertakes what is, on the whole, a psychological investigation without any special psychological presuppositions’ (cf. Lange 1875 vol. 2: 124). In a similar mood, and aware that Kant saw things wholly differently, the author of Kant’s Psychologie, J.  B. Meyer (1870: 205), claimed that Kant did not grasp the psychological nature of his own analysis of consciousness.5 Like Lange, he focused on psychology, seeing in the lack of an empirical basis the core problem of Kant’s conception, and hence demanding a psychological integration of Kant’s theory (206). But even in the early ‘back to Kant movement’ the issue was controversial: while Meyer and Lange saw in the empirical inadequacy one (if not: the) main shortcoming in Kant’s theoretical as well as in his practical philosophy, Kuno Fischer and Liebmann argued that they were asking false questions.6 One main issue was whether Kant was right when he claimed that spontaneity distinguishes the understanding (pure apperception) from intuition (sensibility), which in itself is purely receptive.7 Herbart, whose scientific psychology rejected Kant’s ‘psychology of faculties’, had seen in the spontaneity of the intellect a radical mistake.8 Meyer’s and Lange’s criticism took the same direction. Sensibility –​Meyer objected to Kant –​is not less active than the understanding. In the first edition of Lange’s History of Materialism (1866) the concept of ‘spontaneity’ does not even surface; and the second edition (1875) abounds

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in criticism: ‘Only on the artificially imported supposition that all spontaneity belongs to “thought”, all receptivity to the sense, can the synthesis of impressions to things be at all connected with the understanding’ (Lange 1880, vol. 2: 197, n. 26; cf. Lange 1875 vol. 2: 128, n. 26).9 Against a similar objection by Meyer, Cohen argues that for Kant the perception of objects is not simply receptive, it does not involve sensibility only, but also the intellect and its synthetic activity. Clearly Lange does not grasp the architecture of the first Critique, the role of the transcendental imagination and the doctrine of schematism. The influence of Cohen’s interpretation of Kant in the second edition results rather in Lange becoming more aware of the theoretical distance between himself and Kant. However, already in the first edition Lange had not really been interested in an exegesis of the first Critique, but went in a wholly different direction, looking for a naturalistic solution. With Helmholtz, he thought that contemporary Sinnesphysiologie confirmed central Kantian insights, but also showed that sensibility is not simply receptive; the result is that ‘the synthesis of impressions to things’ is not the essential function of thought –​on the contrary, it has nothing to do with the intellect. Hence the intellect, that is, thought, is not spontaneous in Kant’s sense. Moreover, Lange, who places ‘thinking’ in quotation marks, criticizes the fact that Kant ‘allowed to continue at all an understanding free from any influence of the senses’ (Lange 1880, vol. 2: 197; cf. Lange 1875, vol. 2:  32). Hence, Lange, in denying that all spontaneity belongs to thought and all receptivity to sensuality, does not merely operate a new partition of ‘spontaneity’ between the senses and the ‘intellect’; he changes the concept of spontaneity itself, and his conclusion is in its effect (if not in its form) more of a dismissal than an adaptation of the Kantian concept, which in Lange’s History of Materialism, even in the second edition, does not play any role. For Lange, Kant’s absolute spontaneity must be rejected as incompatible with a naturalistic standpoint. In spite of Lange’s many exegetical shortcomings his conclusion has not lost its force. From his ‘psychological’ standpoint Lange is equally dismissive of the spontaneity of the will. He acknowledges that Kant’s claim from a theoretical point of view is only that the distinction between causa phaenomenon and causa noumenon is a possible one. But Lange rejects as a mere sophism the idea that, from a practical standpoint, the same distinction is a real one.10 Nietzsche, who from early on basically agrees with Lange –​and with the positivists –​on the inadequacy of Kant’s psychology, will later see in Kant’s claim that causality with freedom (absolute spontaneity) is only a postulate of practical reason, a further sign of Kant’s ‘obscurantism’.11

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2.  Nietzsche’s uses of ‘spontaneity’ In Nietzsche’s texts we find two opposite uses of ‘spontaneity’. 1. When Nietzsche intends to criticize what he takes to be a metaphysical conception, he speaks of ‘free spontaneity’ (NL Autumn 1887 10[57], KSA 12.486) or of ‘absolute spontaneity’ (GM II 7, KSA 5.305). He ascribes this concept of free or absolute ‘spontaneity’ of the will to a broad metaphysical and religious tradition, not only and not specifically to Kant. 2. In other cases, Nietzsche usually intends to advance an alternative conception. Sometimes he simply uses ‘spontaneity’ (or ‘spontaneous’) without further qualifications, sometimes he employs words which introduce a graduation, a more or less of ‘spontaneity’, speaking, for instance, of ‘strong spontaneity’ (NL 1883 9[25], KSA 10.353) or of a ‘deep weakening of spontaneity’ (NL 1887 10[18], KSA 12.464). It is clearly impossible to square such a graduation with absolute spontaneity; and Nietzsche understands his suggestion as a non-​or anti-​metaphysical concept of spontaneity. Before 1880, the substantive ‘spontaneity’ and the corresponding adjective ‘spontaneous’ do not seem to belong to Nietzsche’s vocabulary, neither as technical terms nor as words of common usage. I have been able to retrace only an occurrence, though marginal, possibly the result of a dictation. In the summer semester 1865, as a student of philology and theology in Bonn, Nietzsche heard Karl Schaarschmidt’s lecture on General History of Philosophy: Schaarschmidt taught that according to Aristotle ethics has its source in ‘spontaneity’.12 In the third part of Audience and Popularity (Publikum und Popularität, 1878), Richard Wagner, disappointed with Human, All Too Human, polemicized against the ‘historical school’ influenced by Darwin, complaining that ‘the concept of the spontaneous, of spontaneity [emphases in the original] as such (. . .) has been excluded from the new system of knowledge of the world’.13 In his plea for ‘spontaneity’, Wagner connects it with the genius, a concept sharply criticized in Human, All Too Human; and this criticism was obviously one main point of disagreement between Nietzsche and Wagner. But Wagner may also be referring to Nietzsche’s adamant denial of free will and his refusal of Kant’s absolute spontaneity and Schopenhauer’s alternative solution.14 As one would expect from Wagner, he does not elucidate and still less define ‘the concept of the spontaneous’ in any way. But even if his idealistic conception of ‘spontaneity’ is muddled, he is not wrong when he remarks that the philosophy

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of Human, All Too Human does not involve any concept of ‘spontaneity’. In this book, Nietzsche does not even use the term. Nietzsche’s new conception of ‘spontaneity’ emerges only at the beginning of 1880, in the notes for Daybreak. The late appearance of the terms ‘spontaneity’/​’spontaneous’ enables a rather straightforward answer to the question of the sources and roots of Nietzsche’s conception. His immediate source is beyond any doubt J. J. Baumann’s Handbook of Morals.15 This minor philosopher introduces Nietzsche to Alexander Bain’s theory of the ‘Beginnings of the Will’, and thereby to an influent conception of spontaneity which is very different from, indeed opposed to, the Kantian. According to Baumann (1879), a theory of the will has the task of analysing the will in its components; and only scientific psychology enables us to do this adequately. From this naturalistic standpoint, Kant’s ‘formal conception of the will’ (70) is even less plausible than the theory shared by the philosophical tradition. The received view of the will considers representation and sentiment of value –​‘clarity of representation and force of the sentiment of value’ –​the only components of the ‘efficacious will [effectiven Willen]’ (3). Baumann’s objection is that this received view ignores the fundamental role of the unintentional movements, that is, as we shall see, of (Alexander Bain’s) spontaneous activity. In Baumann’s eyes, Kant, who shares the mistake of the received view, stands for an even more reductive approach. For Kant’s definition of the will eliminates even the sentiments of value.16 Of the three moments of the will Kant acknowledges only one, the formal moment, Baumann’s ‘representation’. Baumann’s criticism betrays how different his approach is from Kant’s, whose investigation of pure practical reason and its postulates ignores, as a matter of principle, empirical, anthropological and psychological aspects. Baumann’s rejection of Kant’s method goes in the same direction as Lange’s and Meyer’s objections to absolute spontaneity. Like them and like many of his contemporaries, Baumann is after an empirically well-​founded theory. His goal is a physiologically and psychologically corroborated conception of ‘efficacious will’ and of the (physiological and psychological) laws of its formation. This is the first step in his ethics. For Baumann, there is no absolute spontaneity of representations, hence no free will in an absolute sense. But there is an efficacious will, which depends on pregiven spontaneous movements and on exercise. This conception of the will is deeply influenced by Bain, even if for Baumann his teacher Lotze, as well as Herbart and Johannes Müller, one of Bain’s own main physiological references, are also relevant.

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Nietzsche read Bain directly,17 but neither of the two books which Baumann (1879: 6 ff.) mentions –​The Senses and the Intellect and The Emotions and the Will –​was available in German. Taken together, they make up one of the two classical British treatises on psychology in the mid-​century, the other being Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Psychology (1870–​72).18 Since I have already dealt with Nietzsche’s immediate reception of Baumann’s theory of the will elsewhere,19 here I will sacrifice much detail and, in order to give an idea of the broader context in which Nietzsche’s position can be situated, take Bain into account, even if his and Baumann’s theories are not identical. My aim is to show that Nietzsche’s view of spontaneity stands in a tradition which was very influent in the nineteenth century and very different from, indeed opposed to, the Kantian. Bain incorporated Müller’s motor theory into his own associationist psychology. Until then, associationist psychology had focused on sensation in the epistemological tradition of British empiricism. Bain’s new emphasis on movements, the priority of movement on sensation, was in diametrical opposition to this received approach. According to Bain, spontaneity appears before there is a will at all; the will has its origin in spontaneous movements, ‘spontaneous activities’, which do not need to be conscious. Bain (1855: 289) defines ‘spontaneous activity’ as the fact ‘that our various organs are liable to be moved by a stimulus proceeding from the nervous centers, in the absence of any impression from without, or any antecedent state of feeling whatsoever’. This ‘spontaneous activity’ is ‘an essential prelude to voluntary power’ (289). Bain insists on the novelty of his theories, claiming to have been the first to notice (1) ‘the existence of spontaneous actions’ in this sense of the word, and (2) ‘the essential connection’ of these ‘spontaneous actions’ with ‘voluntary actions’.20 Bain’s spontaneous actions, which are not yet voluntary, are the ‘prelude’ to ‘voluntary actions’ (289). Kant’s spontaneity of representation and Bain’s spontaneity of involuntary movements and activities are worlds apart. Kant’s absolute spontaneity is the hallmark of thought and a special form of mental (noumenal, not empirical) causation. For Bain (1859: 552), ‘[t]‌he spontaneous beginnings of movement are a result of the physical mechanism under the stimulus of nutrition’. The key points of difference are:  (a)  Bain decouples ‘spontaneity’ and the ‘will’:  there is spontaneity (movements, instincts) before there is a will; (b)  he decouples ‘spontaneity’ and ‘consciousness’: at the beginning, there is unconscious spontaneity, spontaneity without consciousness; (c)  he disjoins ‘spontaneity’ and ‘freedom’: the will is spontaneous, but not free –​spontaneity is real, freedom

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illusory; d) Bainian spontaneity is graduated:  there is weaker and stronger spontaneity. Given this background, Nietzsche’s use of words which imply a graduation becomes transparent, for instance, when he claims that a ‘strong spontaneity’ (NL 1883 9[25], KSA 10.353) is a requirement of moral actions.21 This ‘strong spontaneity’, which belongs to the ‘highest sort of organic functions’ (NL 1883 9[25], KSA 10.353), is Bainian spontaneity, which can be stronger or weaker, not Kantian spontaneity, which is postulated to be absolute.22

3.  Spontaneity in the Nachlass of Daybreak Baumann focused on what was really new in Bain’s psychology: on the centrality of activity, spontaneity, on ‘the great fact’ of our spontaneous energy with its degrees and varieties. In 1880, Nietzsche takes up the elements of Bain’s conception of ‘spontaneity’ emphasized in Baumann’s Handbook: Bain’s theory of the primacy of the biological urge to move and to be busy and of the amount of spontaneous ‘energy’ that is discharged in spontaneous ‘movements’. Nietzsche, who in his private notes usually approves or criticizes contemporary authors without feeling the necessity of going into the details of their theories, at first does not make this new conception of ‘spontaneity’ wholly explicit. However, he begins to use the term ‘spontaneity’ accordingly: animal life is movement, activity, an urge to move for the sake of moving, an inescapable need to act for the sake of acting. Every living being moves, this ‘activity’ (Thätigkeit) is life itself.23 ‘Spontaneous movements and actions’ are random movements without a goal or purpose. Pleasure is inherent in moving, without being the purpose of these movements.24 This ‘spontaneity’ of movement is ‘the most essential’ (1[126]) trait even of voluntary action.25 The challenge for this naturalistic theory is to tell a compelling story that gradually leads from random movements to full-​fledged voluntary action. Without a pregiven organic basis of unconscious and involuntary dispositions to move, without ‘spontaneous activity’, the other two components of the ‘will’, representations and feelings, would not have any effect. Hence, for Baumann (1879), there is no free will in an absolute sense (no absolute spontaneity of representations), but there is an ‘efficacious will’, which has two preconditions: ‘spontaneous’ activity and exercise. Slowly, through repetition and exercise, the random or toddling, groping movements  –​the ‘beginnings of spontaneous activity [Betätigung]’ (38) –​are selected and coordinated; this process involves a reversal

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of the original association: representations and feelings, which at first were mere accompaniments and by-​products of the involuntary movements, become able to unleash the associated movements. In 1880, Nietzsche basically follows the solution outlined in the Handbuch. He promptly begins to conceive the animal urge to move in ‘energetic’ terms: Very early in life, the internal energy of the organism, ‘the spontaneous mass of energy’ (NL 1880 6[252], KSA 9.263), the ‘spontaneous force’ (NL 1883 7[254], KSA 10.320), discharges itself in random movements. Baumann’s two preconditions of an efficacious will  –​these pregiven spontaneous movements and e­xercise  –​become in Nietzsche’s ‘energetic’ theory the ‘spontane Masse von Energie’ [spontaneous mass of energy] and ‘die eingeübten Bewegungen dieser Masse’ [exercised movements of this mass] (NL 1880 6[252], KSA 9.263). Similarly, in 1883 these preconditions of an efficacious will also explain why we feel free: our sense of freedom is a function of ‘spontaneous force’ and of ‘exercise’ (NL 1883 7[254], KSA 10.320). However, these are in fact preconditions of the efficacious will and not evidence of absolute freedom. As Baumann’s Bainian theory explains, the received view neglects the pre-​exercised movements and ascribes to the ‘will’ causal powers it does not have, being only a ‘stimulus’ that merely unlooses the spontaneous force and the ‘numerous and complicated exercised movements’ (NL 1884, 27[65], KSA 11.291). Hence, Nietzsche sees a fundamental difference between the ‘free will’, which is an illusion, and what Baumann calls ‘the efficacious will’, which can be real. Baumann’s Bainian conception of spontaneity drives Nietzsche’s attention towards the concept of ‘force’, leading him to new investigations. In 1881, he integrates Julius Robert Mayer’s concept of ‘unloosing’ (Auslösung) in his Bainian view of spontaneity and exercise, and thus he tries to develop the conception of a ‘will’ which is not a cause, but only a stimulus that releases or unlooses spontaneous force.26 The theory of ‘spontaneous activity’ which Nietzsche adopts before Daybreak has an enormous influence on his further philosophical development. In 1880, he already conceives the animal urge to move and to act in ‘energetic’ terms: as a necessity to discharge force; and he claims that ‘activity’ (Thätigkeit), spontaneous movement, is life itself (NL 1880 1[45], KSA 9.16). A few years later, in Beyond Good and Evil, he uses the same Bainian view in order to qualify life as will to power: ‘Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength: life itself is will to power’ (BGE 13, KSA 5.27). While in 1880 Nietzsche basically agrees with Baumann’s naturalistic approach and still conceives of ‘spontaneous activity’ according to the biophysical paradigm of his age, that is, by taking forces to

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be mechanical forces, in On the Genealogy of Morality he gives a new twist to his proposal by developing a critical view of the mechanistic or ‘reactive’ tendencies in contemporary physiology. The Genealogy argues that without the fundamental concept of (spontaneous) activity we misunderstand nothing less than the ‘essence of life’, its ‘will to power’ (GM II 12, KSA 5.316): today ‘physiology and biology’ have lost ‘their basic concept, that of actual activity [Aktivität]’ by overlooking the primacy of the ‘spontaneous [. . .] forces’ (GM II 12, KSA 5.315–​16). Nietzsche’s objection against the worldview in which the fundamental concept of ‘activity’ –​and with it the concept of ‘spontaneity’ –​has been ‘spirited away’ sounds similar to the severe criticism that Wagner (1878) had formulated against Nietzsche himself, although without naming either him or Human, All Too Human. As mentioned above, the disappointed composer attacked the ‘historical school’ and complained ‘that the concept of the spontaneous, of spontaneity as such (. . .) has been excluded from the new system of knowledge of the world’ (145). Wagner’s criticism in Audience and Popularity and Nietzsche’s argument in On the Genealogy of Morality not only sound similar, but really take aim at a similar target. Wagner considered the philosophy of Human, All Too Human to be an expression of mechanism. In the Genealogy Nietzsche himself, now far from his previous views, rejects mechanical approaches. Does his criticism of the worldview that ‘spirits away’ (spontaneous) ‘activity’ betray a metaphysical tendency? Even if his new conception of ‘spontaneity’, which emerges only in 1880, has little to do with Wagner’s unclear view, the similarity of the two arguments may raise suspicions. On the whole, the Genealogy is built on the opposition between ‘active’ and ‘reactive’, ‘activity’ and ‘reactivity’. In his Handbook Baumann often translates Bain’s ‘activity’ as ‘Aktivität’. In 1880 Nietzsche prefers the more usual ‘Tätigkeit’. The distinction tends to get lost in translation: ‘Tätigkeit’ is a term of common language with a whole range of meanings, whereas the technical term ‘Activität’ stands for the property of ‘being active’. In the Genealogy, Nietzsche follows Baumann’s insightful choice and adopts ‘Activität’ for the property of ‘being active’. But in the works published after the Genealogy this term disappears, more precisely:  the whole conceptual field ‘active’/​‘activity’ (aktiv, Aktivität, not: Tätigkeit) disappears. The same is true for ‘spontaneous’/​’spontaneity’. The Genealogy is the only published work in which the terms ‘spontaneity’/​‘spontaneous’ occur. Although the new conception of ‘spontaneous activity’ had emerged in posthumous notes at the beginning of 1880, in Daybreak itself, as well as in the immediately subsequent writings, the terms ‘spontaneity’/​‘spontaneous’ do not even appear. After the Genealogy they swiftly disappear again. Perhaps Nietzsche

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came to agree with those of his contemporaries who, like Charles Féré, rejected Bainian ‘spontaneity’ as a metaphysical conception. Although he continued to express similar criticisms, he seems to have given up the project of reforming physiology.27

4.  Nietzsche, Goethe and Schopenhauer on Kant’s ‘radical evil’ In autumn 1887, Nietzsche declares that he intends to make use of ‘Goethe’s passage on radical evil’ in order to ‘characterize’ Kant ‘as a moral fanatic’ (NL 1887, 10[118], KSA 12.525).28 Nietzsche does not quote the passage, but he is undoubtedly referring to a contemptuous statement written by Goethe in the same year (1793) in which Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason was published. According to Goethe Kant ‘wantonly tainted’ his own ‘philosophical mantle’ ‘with the shameful stain [Schandfleck] of radical evil, in order that even Christians might be attracted to kiss its hem’.29 In Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason Kant had called radical evil the ‘putrid stain’ of the human race (‘den faulen Fleck unserer Gattung’). However, according to Goethe, it is not mankind that is stained, but Kant’s own philosophy –​and the stain is not radical evil, which does not exist, but the concept of radical evil, a superstitious sacrilege against philosophy. Goethe suggests that Kant introduced this concept in order to make his philosophy attractive to Christians, who would be glad if they could find in ‘radical evil’ the familiar concept of ‘original sin’. Goethe’s parody overstates the affinity between ‘radical evil’ and ‘original sin’. He is not interested in the conceptual differences between the two. Among Kant’s contemporaries, Goethe was not the only one who saw the concept of radical evil as continuous with a religious tradition dating from the middle ages. With his uncompromising attitude towards Christian ethics Goethe couldn’t be sympathetic with Kant’s attempt to distillate a rational core of religion. In this sense Goethe’s slating statement on ‘radical evil’ is a dismissal of Kant’s whole attempt. On another occasion, Nietzsche claims that the distinction between ‘phenomenon’ and ‘thing in itself ’ is ‘[t]‌he putrid stain [der faule Fleck] of Kantian criticism’ (NL 1886–​7 5[4], KSA 12.185). Here Nietzsche uses Kant’s term [fauler Fleck] and not Goethe’s [Schandfleck]. Is Nietzsche aware that he is turning Kant’s expression against Kant himself? Perhaps. But not necessarily. He might not even have noticed that Goethe’s text is a parody of Kant. In any case, Nietzsche agrees with Goethe and tends to assimilate Kant to Schopenhauer:  both, Kant too,

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have the idea of ‘sanctity in the background’ (NL 1887, 10[118], KSA 12.525). Nietzsche does not really explain how and why. But a good decade before he had already found the origin of both Schopenhauer’s ethics and Kant’s ‘radical evil’ in pessimistic religion: pessimistic religions invented the ‘metaphysical meaning’ of ‘radical evil’ (NL End 1876 –​Summer 1877 23[77], KSA 8.429).30 Here, Nietzsche’s jargon is a mélange of ‘metaphysical meaning’ (Schopenhauer) and ‘radical evil’ (Kant). What would Schopenhauer have thought of this strange synthesis? On the one hand, he himself may have suggested the assimilation of ‘radical evil’ to his view of the ‘will to life’. On the other hand, Schopenhauer denies Kant’s conception of ‘radical evil’ any true philosophical dignity:  the expression ‘radical evil’ satisfies only those ‘for whom a word can take the place of an explanation’; the real philosophical explanation of the corresponding facts is given only by Schopenhauer’s own concept of ‘will to life’.31 This notwithstanding, Nietzsche insists on the basic agreement, although less between Kant and Schopenhauer themselves than between both and the cultural background of pessimistic religion. In Nietzsche’s texts Goethe’s and Schopenhauer’s doubts, and not only theirs, resurface in a more radical form: Nietzsche sees in Kant’s conception of ‘radical evil’ a proof, perhaps the best one, of Kant’s ‘moral fanaticism’. However, even if Nietzsche is well acquainted with some of the common criticisms,32 his bold assimilation of Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s views suggests that he does not have a very exact idea of Kant’s conception of ‘radical evil’. It is even difficult to tell if he knows what it means, as he does not expose what it consists in. Does Nietzsche really use the word ‘radical’ in a Kantian sense –​that is, in the sense of ‘at the root’? Or does he understand it rather in the everyday sense of ‘extreme’? This would go against Kant’s clear distinction between ‘radical evil’ and a ‘devilish will’. Human beings do not have a ‘devilish will’, which would pursue evil for evil’s sake; ‘radical evil’ explains, rather, why man often acts against the moral law by adopting a maxim contrary to it even though he cannot avoid respecting the authority of the moral law.33 Nietzsche does not seem to have understood this point. Nietzsche reads Kant’s ‘radical evil’ symptomatically, seeking in this conception a definitive confirmation of his more general thesis of the continuity between Kant and the religious tradition. He is more interested in a diagnosis that traces the roots of Kant’s conception back to ‘pessimistic religion’ than in something like a sustained confutation. Nietzsche explicitly ascribes the concept ‘radical evil’ to Kant only in posthumous notes. The aphorism of Human, All Too Human, which foresees the ‘Victory of knowledge over radical evil’ (HH 56, KSA 2.75), does not even mention Kant.

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Here, the expression ‘radical evil’, which occurs only in the title, does not stand for a Kantian view, but simply for ‘the idea that man is fundamentally evil and corrupt’ (HH 56, KSA 2.75). Thus the ‘Victory of knowledge over radical evil’ has a twofold meaning. (1) Knowledge defeats a conception, the religious, moral and metaphysical view of evil. This is obviously a very un-​Kantian victory, as it implies the unreality of something like ‘evil’. (2) Knowledge defeats not merely a conception, but what according to religious tradition embodied evil, the violence and ‘wildness’ of the passions. The free spirit himself, as a form of life, stands for this victory. ‘He who desires little more of things than knowledge of them easily finds repose of soul’, he becomes ‘cool’ (HH 56, KSA 2.75). In tacit agreement with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche’s posthumous notes had proposed a reading of Kant’s ‘radical evil’ as affine to the phenomenology of Schopenhauer’s will to life. But a Schopenhauerian victory over ‘radical evil’ would be the negation of the will, and already the young Nietzsche saw in this negation an impossibility. In Human, All Too Human he does not claim that the drives can be suppressed, which is impossible, but that they can take on new, mitigated forms. Nevertheless, this conception of a victory over ‘radical evil’ as a ‘cooling down’ and a calming of the passions still owes a lot to Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche will abandon it after Human, All Too Human. Aphorism 103 of Human, All Too Human, ‘Das Harmlose an der Bosheit’, ‘The harmless element in evilness’ (HH 103, KSA 2.99–​100), intends to show that ‘evilness’ or ‘wickedness’ is ‘harmless’: ‘Even teasing demonstrates what pleasure it gives to vent our power on others and to produce in ourselves the pleasurable feeling of ascendancy’ (HH 103, KSA 2.99). In this sense, even evilness ‘does not have the suffering of another as such as its objective, but our own enjoyment’ (HH 103, KSA 2.100). Hence, evilness is ‘harmless’ not in the proper sense that it does not (or not intentionally) harm others, but only in a very restricted sense: it sees in the suffering of others only a means to an end. The final purpose is the ‘pleasure’ ‘to vent our power on others’. The harm to others, although intentional, is not a purpose in itself. In the later writings, the strive ‘to vent our power on others’ (HH 103, KSA 2.99) is even more important. In Daybreak, however, it does not denote ‘evilness’ as such, without further distinction, but only one of two very different sorts of evil. Nietzsche borrows the distinction between ‘evil of strength’ and ‘evil of weakness’ from Baumann, but he gives a new explanation of both. Now, the conception of evilness as ‘harmless’ reveals itself as too simple; the ‘evil of weakness’, which is close to ‘wickedness’, is not harmless, not even in the restricted sense of

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Human, All Too Human, for ‘the evil of weakness wants to harm others and to see the signs of the suffering it has caused’ (D 371, KSA 3.245).34 The explanation of the ‘evil of strength’ in Daybreak restates in a restricted form the earlier thesis that the last purpose of ‘evilness’ is the ‘pleasure’ ‘to vent our power on others [am Andern unsere Macht auszulassen]’ (HH 103, KSA 2.99). At the same time, the idea of an ‘evil of strength’ consisting in the urge of power to vent itself on others belongs together with Nietzsche’s new conception of ‘spontaneity’ and is a straightforward extension of Baumann’s and Bain’s insights into the primary urge to act and to move among animals and humans. ‘The evil of strength [. . .] has to discharge itself ’ or ‘must vent itself somehow’ (D 371, KSA 3.245).35 ‘When man possesses the feeling of power’, he has to ‘discharge his power’ or to ‘vent his power’ (D 189, KSA 3.162) on other people. Here, Daybreak somehow anticipates the well-​known idea from Beyond Good and Evil already mentioned above: ‘Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength: life itself is will to power’ (BGE 13, KSA 5.27). In the German original, these passages are even more similar than the English translations tend to suggest: The evil of strength ‘muss sich auslassen’ (M 371, KSA 3.245), the man who ‘possesses the feeling of power’ must ‘seine Macht auslassen’ (M 189 KSA 3.162), and what a living thing wants above all is ‘seine Kraft auslassen’ (JGB 13, KSA 5.27). Nietzsche agrees with Baumann’s Bainian view when he interprets the animal urge to move as a need to discharge force, but he departs from the Handbuch when he qualifies this need as will to power. The explanation of the ‘evil of strength’ in Daybreak had somehow anticipated this move. For Nietzsche, Baumann’s (and Bain’s) basic urge to act and to move is in the end an urge to master and submit; and the ‘evil of strength’ is simply the form this basic drive takes among the strong. Baumann, on the contrary, never thinks of explaining the drive to dominate, which corresponds to the ‘evil of strength’, with the primary urge to move. For him, only this urge is basic, not the drive to overwhelm and master. Nietzsche’s idea that, in the end, the two coincide is foreign to Baumann. In Daybreak, the fundamental need to discharge force, although a general characteristic of every human being, refers especially to the strong. It compels them to their particular form of evil. They cannot do otherwise. The ‘evil of strength’, even if it is far from being Nietzsche’s ideal, is judged mildly, almost positively. A few years later, in section 13 of the first essay of the Genealogy, Nietzsche reformulates the thesis concerning the ‘evil of strength’ as an argument against the freedom of will. ‘It is just as absurd to ask strength not to express itself as strength’ (GM I  13, KSA 5.279); it does not make sense to separate ‘strength

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from the manifestations of strength’; for ‘strength’ is only a name for these ‘manifestations’. Since these ‘manifestations’ are nothing else than what Daybreak called the ‘evil of strength’, the Genealogy just restates the previous thesis that the ‘evil of strength’ necessarily belongs to strength. The Genealogy tries to underpin this thesis with an analogy, boldly encompassing human and animal strength, as well as political power and ‘force’ in physics. For Nietzsche, ‘strength’ and the ‘force’ of physicists are liable to the same misunderstanding. We should not separate them from their ‘manifestations’, as if ‘force’ or ‘strength’ was something lying behind its ‘manifestations’. From Bain’s thesis of the urge to move and from Kirchhoff ’s and Mach’s thesis about the concept of force, Nietzsche draws, as a conclusion, his far less evident thesis of the ‘evil of strength’: ‘strength’ must ‘overthrow, crush, become master’ (cf. GM I 13, KSA 5.278–​81). Here, even more explicitly than in Daybreak, Nietzsche’s explanation ends up with a justification. This is not the only difference from Kant. According to GM I 13 (KSA 5.280), the ‘free subject’ and the ‘thing in itself ’ are related illusions. Human languages, especially Indo-​European languages (cf. BGE 20, KSA 5.34–​5), mislead philosophers (but not only philosophers) into reifying the grammatical subject and misreading it as a cause of actions. ‘The seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason petrified within it)’ is responsible for the concepts of ‘force’ and ‘will’, for it ‘construes and misconstrues all actions as conditioned by agency, by a “subject” ’ (GM I 13, KSA 5.280). The metaphysical subject is a by-​ product of the grammatical subject. Aphorism 17 of Beyond Good and Evil claims that, instead of saying ‘I think’, we should rather say ‘it thinks’ (BGE 17, KSA 5.31). The argument is reminiscent of Lichtenberg, who probably takes the formula ‘it thinks’ from Kant himself. In the first Critique Kant lists as alternative ways of speaking: ‘this I or He or It (the Thing) which Thinks’ [‘dieses Ich, oder Er, oder Es (das Ding), welches denkt’] (KrV A 345 f.f/​B 404).36 Lichtenberg compares his ‘it thinks’ with an impersonal construction such as ‘it thunders’, in which a pronoun functions as grammatical subject: ‘Es denkt, sollte man sagen, so wie man sagt: es blitzt’ [‘It thinks, should we say, so as we say: lightning strikes/​there is lightning.’].37 According to GM I 13, the analogy, with which Lichtenberg tries to justify his ‘it thinks’, is misleading. In the Genealogy, the sentence ‘der Blitz leuchtet’ [the lightning flashes]38 takes the place of Lichtenberg’s ‘es blitzt’ [there is lightning]: ‘Basically, the common people double a deed; when they see lightning flash, they make a doing-​a-​deed out of it:  they posit the same event, first as cause and then as its effect’ (GM I 13, KSA 5.279); ‘[. . .] the common people separates lightning from its flash and takes the latter to

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be a deed, something performed by a subject, which is called lightning [. . .]’ (GM I 13, KSA 5.279). The same seduction, which is already present in the case of Lichtenberg’s ‘es blitzt’, is even more tantalizing when the grammatical subject is a substantive such as ‘lightning’. In both cases, the grammatical subject ‘reduplicates’ the ‘verb’ and is misinterpreted as a ‘substratum’:  as a ‘doer’ ‘behind the deed’ (GM I 13, KSA 5.279). It seems to follow from this that the sentence ‘es blitzt’ [there is lightning] misled Lichtenberg into making precisely the same mistake which his ‘es denkt’ [it thinks] still shares with Kant’s ‘I think’, that is, the presupposition that ‘thinking is an activity’ and that ‘every activity requires an agent’ (BGE 17, KSA 5.31). Aphorism BGE 17 begins by accepting Lichtenberg’s proposal:  instead of ‘I think’, we should rather say ‘it thinks’. But, in the end, Nietzsche dismisses even the ‘it’ in Lichtenberg’s ‘it thinks’ as a final metaphysical residuum: As far as the superstitions of the logicians are concerned: I will not stop emphasizing a tiny little fact that these superstitious men are loath to admit:  that a thought comes when ‘it’ wants, and not when ‘I’ want. It is, therefore, a falsification of the facts to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think.’ It thinks: but to say the ‘it’ is just that famous old ‘I’ –​well that is just an assumption or opinion, to put it mildly, and by no means an ‘immediate certainty.’ In fact, there is already too much packed into the ‘it thinks’: even the ‘it’ contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. People are following grammatical habits here in drawing conclusions, reasoning that ‘thinking is an activity, behind every activity something is active, therefore –​.’ Following the same basic scheme, the older atomism looked behind every ‘force’ that produces effects for that little lump of matter in which the force resides, and out of which the effects are produced, which is to say: the atom. More rigorous minds finally learned how to make do without that bit of ‘residual earth,’ and perhaps one day even logicians will get used to making do without this little ‘it’ (into which the honest old I has disappeared). (BGE 17, KSA 5.30–​1)

The aphorism does not mention Lichtenberg –​or even Kant –​and its main target are contemporary ‘logicians’, who, when they do not stick to the ‘I think’, are still incapable to do without the ‘it’. (What Nietzsche writes about ‘condition’ or ‘immediate certainty’ suits some of these minor philosophers better than Kant.) In a sense Lichtenberg’s remark already implies the solution explicitly pointed out by Nietzsche. Lichtenberg implicitly compares the German ‘ich denke’ with the Latin ‘cogito’. Whereas in Latin one can simply say ‘cogito’ (instead of ‘ego cogito’), the German ‘ich denke’ (not unlike ‘I think’ in English –​or ‘je pense’ in French) necessarily involves the postulated ‘I’. Obviously this difference between

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languages does not correspond to the historical relation between Descartes’ ‘cogito’, which is a thinking thing, and Kant’s ‘I think’, which is not a substance. For Lichtenberg, however, philosophers are misled (1) by the first person (cogito) and (2) by the pronoun ‘I’ (‘I think’). The second is for Lichtenberg by far the main problem if we take his claim earnestly that replacing the Latin ‘cogito’ with the translation ‘Ich denke’ is ‘too much’. Now, if Lichtenberg finds cogito more acceptable than ‘I think’, should it not follow that ‘cogitat’ is preferable to ‘it thinks’? Should we not switch from the first to the third person without postulating something like an ‘it’? If this is Lichtenberg’s implicit suggestion, Nietzsche simply makes it explicit when he invites contemporary ‘logicians’ to do for once without the little word ‘it’ (‘das kleine Wörtchen “es” ’, JGB 17, KSA 5.31). This conclusion is rather a further development than a refutation of Lichtenberg’s remark.

5.  Nietzsche’s anti-​Kantian ‘categorical imperative’ and the autonomy of the sovereign individual In the preface of the Genealogy, Nietzsche ascribes to himself a ‘new, immoral, or at least immoralistic “a priori” ’ and an ‘oh-​so-​anti-​Kantian, so enigmatic “categorical imperative” ’ (GM Preface 3, KSA 5.249), which was what in the end led him to his critique of morality. This ‘a priori’ which speaks imperatively is an idiosyncratic tendency that appears early in Nietzsche’s life and causes his straightforward opposition to his social environment. Hence the preface plays with Kant’s terminology, using Kantian words, as Nietzsche says, in an ‘anti-​Kantian’ sense. The terms ‘a priori’ and ‘categorical imperative’ are both in quotation marks. In another passage, Nietzsche praises a ‘Philosophie der “Gänsefüßchen” ’ (NL 1885 37[5]‌, KSA 11.580), a philosophy of ‘quotation marks’, or ‘scare quotes’, and he nicely puts the expression ‘quotation marks’ itself in quotation marks. But in such a philosophy the quotation marks are not always literally there. The Genealogy employs a whole array of Kantian terms. Do they all belong to such a philosophy of ‘quotation marks’? Does Nietzsche put them in ‘scare quotes’ –​ even if these are not always literally there? While in the Preface Nietzsche attributes to himself an immoralistic ‘a priori’ and an anti-​Kantian ‘categorical imperative’, in the second chapter of the second essay he ascribes ‘responsibility’, ‘autonomy’ and ‘free will’ to the sovereign individual. In the Preface, Nietzsche clearly does not endorse Kant’s conception, but

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gives to ‘a priori’ and ‘categorical imperative’ a new, ‘immoralistic’ content. The second chapter of the second essay, even if it is not as clear a case of a parody as the Preface, displays the same subversive intention of giving Kantian terms a radically new meaning. One important point, which has been overseen in the debate, is that Nietzsche’s main opponent here, even if implicitly, is Eduard von Hartmann. In 1881 Nietzsche strives for ‘the everlasting dissimilarity and highest possible sovereignty of the individual [des Einzelnen]’ (NL 1881 11[40], KSA 9.455).39 Reading the Phenomenology of Ethical Consciousness, he is deeply irritated by Hartmann’s use of the formula: Hartmann attacks ‘the absolute sovereignty of the [. . .] individual’40; and Nietzsche complains that in Hartmann’s Phenomenology ‘the sovereignty of the individual [die Souveränität des Individuums] coincides [.  . .] with egoistic prudential considerations which restrict the arbitrary will’ (NL July 1882–​Winter 1883–​1884 7[10], KSA 10.241). Hartmann, who ontologizes ethics, holds that in metaphysical pluralism the individual is like an absolute sovereign, and if it is not always ruthless, then merely out of prudential considerations [egoistische Klugheitsrücksichten]; these egoistical considerations are the only restriction to the absolute arbitrariness of its will. (That these considerations do restrain the individual could be the reason why Nietzsche in his note does not excerpt ‘absolute’.) Here, Hartmann (1879: 768) is taking aim at the idea of the ‘sovereignty of the I’, whose theorist he sees in Max Stirner (the main practicians are the Russian nihilists). In this sense, one could say that Nietzsche, reinterpreting and transvaluing Kant’s moral terminology, aims to give an interpretation of individual sovereignty that is not only antithetical to Stirner’s, but also wholly at odds with Hartmann’s ethical views.41 Hence, the ‘sovereign individual’, which makes its only explicit appearance in this very much commented text, is neither Nietzsche’s ideal tout court nor does it stand for the quintessence of modern subjectivity Nietzsche intends to attack.42 Rather, the description of this ‘autonomous’, ‘free’ and ‘responsible’ man follows a specific textual strategy, systematically cultivating the art, ‘to use a moral formula in a supra-​moral sense’ (BGE 257, KSA 5.205). I will sketch the context only very briefly. The aim of the second essay is to show to what extent ‘the real problem of man’ was solved:  to what extent man became ‘the animal’ ‘das versprechen darf’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.291), that is, the animal ‘with the right to make promises’,43 the animal which is capable not only of making, but also of keeping promises. This capacity requires  –​according to the term Nietzsche borrowed from Baumann  –​a ‘memory of the will’

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(GM II 1, KSA 5.292), which should not be confounded with memory tout court. For ‘the will’s memory’ is ‘an active desire not to let go’ [ein aktives Nicht-​wieder-​los-​werden-​wollen] and as such –​according to one more distinction that Nietzsche owes to Baumann –​the opposite of ‘a passive inability to be rid of an impression’ [ein passivisches Nicht-​wieder-​los-​werden-​können] (GM II 1, KSA 5.292).44 This inability is an unpleasant consequence of memory, with which the active force of forgetfulness has to cope, whereas ‘the will’s memory’ is a positive ability, which makes possible ‘to keep on desiring what has been, on some occasion, desired’ [Fort-​und Fortwollen des ein Mal gewollten], so that the ‘long chain of the will’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.292) does not break. ‘How does this capability develop?’ is the problem Baumann’s Bainian theory was thought to solve. However, the second essay reformulates the question by giving a new answer. Hence, we should not jump to the conclusion that Nietzsche’s answer is Baumann’s Bainian will; but we can expect the ‘free will’, which is presented as the solution of this problem, not to be ‘free’ in the Kantian sense of absolute spontaneity. The sovereign individual is introduced as the late solution to this problem of man: it is the animal which has learned to make and keep promises. Before beginning to delve into the ‘long history and variety of forms’ of ‘the concept of “conscience” ’ (GM II 3), Nietzsche premises his own ‘supramoral’ concept of ‘conscience’, describing its ‘highest, almost disconcerting form’ (GM II 3, KSA 5.294). The second essay leaps directly to the ‘owner’ of this ‘conscience’, the ‘sovereign individual’, and the bold jump to this final accomplishment allows Nietzsche to do without a reconstruction of the whole genealogical process, thereby leaving it vague whether the ‘sovereign individual’ should be situated in a specific historical epoch and, if so, in which. There is an historical gap between the epoch of the ‘morality of mores’ and the ‘sovereign individual’. The ‘morality of mores’ has accomplished only ‘the preparatory task’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293) of making man calculable, but has not yet achieved the ultimate goal of making man the animal that can make and keep promises. This ‘sovereign individual’ is the fruit of the whole ‘tremendous process’, which merely begins with the ‘morality of mores’ and its preparatory task. Nietzsche –​I think, intentionally –​does not assign the sovereign individual’ to a specific epoch. He avoids saying something about the length of that historical gap and to specify if the final accomplishment of the encompassing process, the ‘sovereign individual’, lies in the past, the present or the future.45 Nietzsche does not commit himself either to excluding that there have already been ‘sovereign individuals’, for instance, in ancient Greece or in the Italian Renaissance, or to

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the opposite idea that some (even if only very few) current humans already are ‘sovereign individuals’. However, that every (present, ‘modern’) human being is a sovereign individual is a view Nietzsche clearly excludes. The ‘sovereign individual’ is a rare achievement. What is clearly implied and indeed explicitly asserted is that it is not the rule; on the contrary, its ‘responsibility’ is an ‘exceptional privilege’, its ‘freedom’ is a ‘rare’ (GM II 2, KSA 294) one, and so it is also its autonomy: the ‘sovereign individual’ is ‘free’, ‘responsible’ and ‘autonomous’ in a sense in which most human beings are not. The sovereign individual, ‘[t]‌he “free” man’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293) in scare quotes, was not ‘free’ from the beginning: he ‘has become free’, and is now finally the ‘master of a free will’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293). Here Nietzsche does not interpret, contradict or even just name Kant, but simply adopts the terms and ‘rewrites’ the concepts. Having a full-​fledged ‘memory of the will’ (GM II 1, KSA 5.292), being ‘the possessor of a durable [langen], unbreakable will’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.292), is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition of individual sovereignty. For one must be able not only to keep promises, but first and foremost to make them autonomously. Let us place ourselves [. . .] at the end of this immense process [. . .]: we then find the sovereign individual as the ripest fruit on its tree, like only to itself, having freed itself from the morality of custom, the autonomous, supra-​ethical individual (because ‘autonomous’ and ‘ethical’ are mutually exclusive), in short, the man who has his own, independent, enduring will, whose prerogative it is to promise –​and in him a proud consciousness quivering in every muscle of what has at length been achieved and become flesh in him, an actual consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling that man in general has reached completion. This emancipated man, who actually has the prerogative to promise, this master of the free will, this sovereign –​how should he not be aware of his superiority over everybody who does not have the prerogative to promise or stand as their own guarantors, of how much trust, fear and respect he arouses –​he ‘merits’ all three –​and of how with his self-​mastery he has necessarily been given mastery over circumstances, over nature and over all creatures with a less enduring and reliable will? (GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4)

Individual sovereignty is self-​legislation. And to be ‘autonomous’ means to be ‘supra-​ethical’ [übersittlich] because ‘autonomous’ and ‘ethical’ [sittlich] are ‘mutually exclusive’. With this, Nietzsche may intend to suggest that Kantian morality is the sort of thing which can only be foreign to the sovereign individual. But if to be ‘übersittlich’ meant just to be ‘beyond the customary’ in the

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sense of the ‘morality of mores’ [Sittlichkeit der Sitte], Nietzsche would then be missing his target, because, for Kant, making use of one’s own reason and merely following the customary are mutually exclusive. Kant’s conception of rational autonomy implies precisely the capacity to go beyond a merely conventional morality, and Nietzsche’s ‘morality of mores’ is conventional in a superlative sense. However, to be ‘übersittlich’ involves something more than having overcome such a hyper-​conventional morality; and, for Nietzsche, the fact that the modern subject is no longer constrained by it does not invalidate that even that subject is still constrained by a morality which consists in a set of universally valid prescriptions. The sovereign individual, by contrast, does not conceive its promises –​the individual ethical code it creates for itself –​as possible universal laws; an universalistic morality allegedly grounded in universal reason is not at issue. As a sovereign, the self-​legislating individual is constrained only by the promises it makes; and these are not likely to be less idiosyncratic than Nietzsche’s own ‘categorical imperative’. Nietzsche takes target not (only) at Kant, but at Hartmann, who squarely opposes the autonomous morality [autonome Sittlichkeit] that his Phenomenology intends to found to Stirner’s sovereignty of the individual: ‘the sovereign self-​will [der souveräne Eigenwille]’ (Hartmann 1879:  769; cf. 770)  that rebels against ‘the imposition to give up formally its sovereignty [gegen die Zumuthung des formellen Verzichtes auf seine Souveränität]’ (769) stands for radical evil and fights against autonomous morality. Nietzsche counteracts Hartmann’s description: he identifies ‘autonomous’ with ‘supra-​ethical’, dissolves the link between autonomy and ethics [Sittlichkeit], eliminates the opposition of autonomy and sovereignty and ascribes a supra-​moral autonomy to his sovereign individual. How does the ascription ‘of a free will’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293) to the sovereign individual square with GM I 13 and with the thesis of Beyond Good and Evil that there is neither ‘free’ nor ‘unfree’ will? Very well indeed. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche has definitely left behind the determinism he had endorsed in Human, All Too Human. According to aphorism 21 of BGE, the alternative between ‘free’ and ‘unfree will’ is flawed. There is no ‘free’ will because there is no special, ‘free’ causality, and there is no ‘unfree’ will because this concept too ‘leads to an abuse of cause and effect’ (BGE 21, KSA 5.35). Thus, Nietzsche points out, the whole issue depends on unwarranted conceptions of causality. The idea of ‘free will’ implies a superlative causality: there is no absolute spontaneity, and the will, as Nietzsche puts it, is not ‘causa sui’, a self-​ contradictory notion. On the other side, the advocates of the ‘unfree will’ ‘mistakenly reify “cause” and “effect” ’ (BGE 21, KSA 5.35). They misunderstand the

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function of causality in general, which is a conventional fiction allowing, at best, descriptions, not explanations.46 Both determinism and indeterminism involve, each in its own way, too strong, and indeed mythological, notions of causality. Both Nietzsche and Kant deny that the problem of free will has a theoretical solution. For Kant ‘freedom’ (and ‘responsibility’), a postulate of practical reason, is a necessary component of our identity as moral agents. Mechanic causality and ‘causality through freedom’ are compatible; determinism and freedom are no demonstrable philosophical theories, but both are coherent notions. This is exactly what Nietzsche denies: they are not simply indemonstrable, but rather nonsensical myths. Nietzsche disputes the sense of both alternatives and, thus, of the whole problem.47 ‘The unfree will’ is a myth: in real life, it’s merely a matter of strong and weak will’ (BGE 21, KSA 5.36). Nietzsche does not claim that there is a mental entity, the ‘will’, that, instead of being ‘free’ (or ‘unfree’), is ‘strong’ (or ‘weak’). He maintains only that the opposition between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ describes differences which matter ‘in real life’. The metaphysical controversy ‘free will’ versus ‘unfree will’ concerns philosophical claims about human will as such: as free or unfree, as a faculty or a fiction. The metaphysical question is if promise-​keepers and promise-​breakers are both ‘free’ or ‘unfree’:  at issue is the way every human being and every human action is to be interpreted. By contrast, the everyday distinction between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ presupposes only the practical ability to discriminate between different patterns of behavior: someone keeps her promises, others break them. Although ‘in real life it’s [. . .] a matter of strong and weak will’ (BGE 21, KSA 5.36), neither of the two, not even the ‘strong will’, needs to be a free will in any superlative sense –​or even a will at all. From the thesis that the will is no unit, a few posthumous notes conclude that there is actually no will, neither free nor unfree.48 Aphorism 19 of BGE refuses the simplicity and the unity of the will, but not directly its existence. The main thesis brings to mind Baumann’s very general methodological prescription that a theory of the will has the task of analysing it adequately into its components. ‘Willing strikes me as, above all, something complicated, something unified only in a word –​and this single word contains the popular prejudice that has overruled whatever minimal precautions philosophers might take’ (BGE 19, KSA 5.32). For Nietzsche, the ‘will’ is complicated in a twofold sense: (1) it has more than one ‘ingredient’ (feeling, thought, affect) and (2) it results from a plurality of drives, since every human being is a ‘society’ of ‘wills’ or ‘souls’. Nietzsche denies ‘that will and action are somehow one’ (BGE 19, KSA 5.32–​3). Willing is not only complicated, it has no ‘necessary effect’, as it

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is not ‘sufficient for action’ (BGE 19, KSA 5.33).49 Hence, the ‘will’ is not ‘free’ (or ‘unfree’). We should use ‘freedom of the will’ as a ‘word for’ (BGE 19, KSA 5.32) a complicated, and pleasurable, feeling of agency and power, without mistaking a mere complex of feelings for a special type of causality.50 Giving commands to oneself is part of what willing is, and a person who identifies herself with the ‘commander’ has a sentiment of power that is not imaginary, but one should not misunderstand this feeling of real power as one of absolute freedom. Aphorism 21 of BGE ends with what looks like a psychological analysis. Human beings may have a feeling of freedom or lack it. Many contemporary Europeans do not feel free; and this lack of the sense of one’s own freedom is rooted in their weak will. The contrary feeling of freedom may pertain to the strong will, but is not restricted to it: metaphysical freedom is a more general illusion. Nevertheless: to the sovereign individual Nietzsche ascribes a similar feeling of freedom, a consciousness of power, which it calls its ‘conscience’. Neither for Kant nor for Nietzsche the self-​ascription of freedom warrants a theory of freedom. For Kant, even if freedom is not a theoretical issue, a self-​ ascription of freedom and responsibility is internal to the self-​understanding of a moral agent: a moral agent simply is someone who acts as if she (and the other humans) were absolutely free and responsible. Nietzsche does not give a formal argument proving that a self-​ascription of ‘sovereignty’ is internal to ‘sovereignty’ and that the individual would not be ‘sovereign’ if it did not attribute sovereignty to itself. The Genealogy simply insists that the sovereign individual knows its freedom and is aware of its own sovereignty. In which exact sense it believes to be free is left open; however, the ‘freedom’ this individual is not wrong about is its capacity to keep promises, not its absolute spontaneity. The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom and power over oneself and over fate, has penetrated him to his lowest depths and become an instinct, his dominant instinct:  –​what will he call his dominant instinct, assuming that he needs a word for it? No doubt about the answer: this sovereign human being calls it his conscience. (GM II 2, KSA 5.294)

What has become the dominating instinct of the sovereign individual? What does it call its ‘conscience’? Taken literally, rather than ‘freedom’ and ‘responsibility’ itself, it is its ‘knowledge’ and ‘consciousness’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.294) of being ‘free’ and ‘responsible’. Rather than denying that the dominating instinct is the ‘free will’ itself, Nietzsche intends to point out that ‘pride’ belongs to ‘sovereignty’: the ‘conscience’ of the sovereign individual is ‘a proud consciousness’,

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a proud awareness, and to have such a ‘conscience’ means ‘[t]‌o possess the right to stand security for oneself and to do so with pride [my emphasis], and therefore to have the prerogative to say yes to oneself ’ (GM II 3, KSA 5.294–​5).51 This pride, which implies self-​affirmation, is the ‘pathos of distance’ of the first essay. For Nietzsche, this form of the pathos of distance is the last development in the history of ‘conscience’. However, he only claims that the sovereign individual may use the concept ‘conscience’. It is the sovereign individual itself who calls ‘conscience’ its self-​affirmative pride, ‘assuming that it needs a word for it’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.294). For the ‘word’ it may choose, if it chooses one at all, is less important than the very act of baptizing, which is one of the main ways in which the pathos of distance is expressed. The pathos of distance involves a characteristic way of looking at oneself and others: ‘noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying ‘yes’ to itself ’ (GM I 10, KSA 5.270); ‘the good’ ‘saw and judged themselves and their actions as good, I mean firstrate, in contrast to everything lowly, low-​minded, common and plebeian’ (GM I 2, KSA 5.259). ‘It was from this pathos of distance that they first claimed the right to create values and give these values names’ (GM I 2, KSA 5.259). The ‘good’ create the positive values by giving names to their own distinctive qualities. With these names they define themselves and their peers. Nietzsche describes the sovereign individual in just the same way: it says yes to itself and takes its distinctive achievement, the ‘free’ will, as its ‘measure of value’, which it applies to itself and to others: ‘The “free” man, the possessor of a protracted and unbreakable will, thus has his own standard of value:  in the possession of such a will: looking out upon others from himself, he honors or despises’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.294). Here, the viewer looks first at herself; only in a second moment does she look out upon others from herself. For the pathos of distance, the primary moment is self-​affirmation: the attribution of negative qualities to the opposite type is only a derivative expression of power. The first essay shows how ressentiment reverses this direction of the ‘evaluating glance’ (GM I 10, KSA 5.271) and begins not with self-​affirmation, but with the negation of others. This ‘essential orientation to the outside instead of back onto itself ’ (GM I 10, KSA 5.271) is typical of resentment: here, the primary moment is the attribution of negative qualities to the opposite type, whereas the attribution of positive qualities to itself is only secondary, derivative. The second chapter of the second essay, which begins by showing that the ‘free’, ‘autonomous’ and ‘responsible’ individual is ‘beyond morality’, concludes by dealing with its new ‘conscience’. But, as a new form of the pathos of distance, this ‘conscience’ is opposed to the now dominant morality of ressentiment. For

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this reason, the contradiction between GM I 13 and GM II 2 is merely apparent:  GM I  13 rejects the concept of absolute freedom which resentment uses as a tool; GM II 2 praises the noble ‘freedom’ one attributes to oneself out of one’s pathos of distance. Hence, the sovereign individual would really not be ‘sovereign’ if it did not attribute this sovereignty to itself. But the reason is not the same as for Kant: the proud self-​ascription of a ‘conscience’ and of ‘freedom’ is central in Nietzsche’s description of the sovereign individual because it is the main expression of its pathos of distance. Whereas Kant’s moral agent ascribes absolute spontaneity to every human, it belongs to the pathos of distance of Nietzsche’s sovereign individual that it is very restrictive in attributing this ‘sovereignty’ to others. The pathos of distance can employ different vocabularies, and the ‘good’ give themselves and their ‘virtues’ different names. There is only a difference of jargon between the ‘strong will’ of Beyond Good and Evil and the ‘free will’ of the sovereign individual. The conception of the will is basically the same even if Beyond Good and Evil breaks with traditional usage, whereas GM II 2 keeps the received vocabulary, putting it in scare quotes and giving it an ‘extra-​moral’ meaning. Why does the second essay of the Genealogy proceed so? In Hartmann’s (1879:  804)  Phenomenology, ‘Stirner’s absolutisation of the I [Stirner’s Verabsolutirung des Ich]’ –​‘the libertinage of the sovereign caprice of the individual who regards its life as the absolute life [die Libertinage der souveränen Laune des Individuums, dem sein Leben als das absolute Leben gilt]’ –​ stands for the impossibility of ethics. For Hartmann, individual sovereignty is a conception with an unsound ontological basis: if ontological pluralism were true, the individuals would indeed be sovereign and restrain their arbitrary will only through pragmatic considerations dictated by egoism. Ethics would evaporate. For Hartmann this does not happen, however, since ontological pluralism is false. For this reason, ‘the absolute sovereignty of the individual [die absolute Souveränität des Individuums]’ is not ‘the last word of practical philosophy [das letzte Wort der praktischen Philosophie]’ (776). In the Genealogy, the sovereign individual comes close to being just this final word. It appears as the culminating point of a millenary history of morals. This belongs to Nietzsche’s ironical reply to Hartmann. More essentially, the Genealogy appropriates the term used disparagingly by Hartmann, the ‘sovereignty of the individual’, connecting it with a wholly new conception. For Nietzsche is profoundly adverse to the Stirnerian view described in the Phenomenology as absolute sovereignty of the individual. He dislikes the petty uniformity of Stirner’s only apparently individual egos; and in Hartmann’s Phenomenology the

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sovereignty of the individual stands for an eliminative reduction of ethics to mere self-​interested prudence. Nietzsche was incensed by this reductive conception of individual sovereignty; and the second chapter of the second essay is an ironical answer to this provocation. This ironical relation to the Phenomenology throws light on some peculiarities of Nietzsche’s description, among them the exalted tone as well as the use and abuse of Kantian terms. Lexically, Nietzsche reverses the opposition of individual sovereignty and ‘autonomous morality [autonome Sittlichkeit]’ in the Phenomenology and ascribes a supra-​moral autonomy to his sovereign individual. More generally, the range of Kantian terms Nietzsche uses here should not be simply ascribed to him out of this polemical context. Rather than to stand for anything like Nietzsche’s general position, the specific use of Kantian terms in this passage is due to a polemical intention. Reinterpreting and transvaluing Kant’s moral terminology, Nietzsche aims to give an interpretation of individual sovereignty that is at the same time antithetical to Stirner’s and wholly at odds with Hartmann’s ethical views.

Notes 1 Cf. Strawson (1966). On Kant’s concept of spontaneity, cf. Heidemann (1956; 1958), Mittelstrass (1965), Finster (1982), Pippin (1987), Allison (1996a), Nakano (2011) and Klemme (2012). 2 Some scholars grant that Kant understands ‘spontaneity’ as absolute, but maintain that it is easily construable as relative. Among the naturalist readings which construe Kant’s intellectual spontaneity of thought as only relative, and thus see in Kant a predecessor of functionalism, the most influential are those of Wilfrid Sellars (1974) and Patricia Kitcher (1994). For criticism of these views, cf. Pippin (1987), Allison (1996a). 3 On the issue whether knowledge and will are expressive of one and the same spontaneity, cf. Klemme (2012: 215). 4 Cf. Allison (1996a: 133 ff.). 5 According to Klaus Christian Köhnke (1986: 159), J. B. Meyer is the author of the first ‘neo-​Kantian’ book (Zum Streit über Leib und Seele. Worte der Kritik. Sechs Vorlesungen [. . .], Hamburg, 1856; on Mayer, cf. also Beiser (2014: 328ff.)). Meyer, professor in Bonn since 1868, and Nietzsche, who began his studies there, were personally acquainted. The young student seems to have never had a high opinion of Meyer as a philosopher. Later, the main point of disagreement became Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The ‘Bonner Afterphilosoph Jürgen-​Bona Meyer [sic]’ (NL 1872–​3 19[201], KSA 7.481) was a sharp critic of Schopenhauer’s (and

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von Hartmann’s) pessimism. Hence, Nietzsche counts ‘Jürgen Bona-​Meyer [sic], Kuno Fischer, Lotze’ (NL 1872–​3 19[259], KSA 7.501) among the philosophers he wants to attack, seeing in ‘Jürgen Meyer in Bonn’ one of those German philosophy professors who wholeheartedly believe that ‘a political innovation’, the foundation of the new German state, ‘suffice[s]‌to turn men once and for all into contented inhabitants of the earth’ (UB 3, § 4, KSA 1.363). See Meyer’s (1870: 27 ff.) own summary in his Kant’s Psychologie; on Fischer’s and Liebmann’s doubts and more in generally on the ‘psychologism’ of neo-​Kantian thinkers in the 1860s, cf. Beiser (2014: 209ff.). ‘If we will call the receptivity of our mind to receive representations insofar as it is affected in some way sensibility, then on the contrary the faculty for bringing forth representations itself, or the spontaneity of cognition, is the understanding’ (KdrV A 51/​B 75). Cf. Johann Friedrich Herbart: Psychologie als Wissenschaft neu gegründet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik und Mathematik, 2 vols, Königsberg 1824 (vol. 1), 1825 (vol. 2), vol. 2, § 118: 166ff. There is no proof that Nietzsche ever read this footnote. The first edition (1866) of Lange’s History of Materialism, which Nietzsche owned as a young man and donated to Romundt in the 1870s, does not contain footnotes. In the 1880s, Nietzsche uses the ‘wohlfeile Ausgabe’, the ‘cheap edition’ (ed. H. Cohen), which gives the text of the second edition, but without the footnotes –​among them, Lange’s praise of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. In 1884, Nietzsche quotes from the ‘wohlfeile Ausgabe’ of 1882 (NL 1884 25[318], KSA 11.94; cf. Jörg Salaquarda 1978: 240, n. 20); and the ‘wohlfeile Ausgabe’ of 1887, identical with that of 1882, is conserved in his personal library. Besides Salaquarda’s article, see also Brobjer (2008a: 32–​6); on Nietzsche’s reading of and about Kant, see Brobjer (2008a: 36–​40) as well as the introduction to the first volume (Brusotti and Siemens 2017). Cf. Lange (1875 vol. 2: 508). According to Nietzsche, Kant was a reactionary rather than a revolutionary. Cf., for example, TI, ‘Reason’ in Philosophy 6 (on Kant as ‘in the end, an underhanded Christian’), TI, Skirmishes of an Untimely Man 16 (on Kant’s ‘backdoor philosophy’) and AC 10 (on Kant’s success as ‘merely theologian-​success’). On Nietzsche’s polemical remarks on Kant’s ‘radical evil’, see Section 4, p. 229 ff. F. Nietzsche: Kollegnachschrift ‘Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie nach dem Vortrag des Prof. Schaarschmidt’, Bestand: Nietzsche Kollegnachschriften, GSA 71/​ 41, C II 1: 26: ‘Die Ethik entspringt [. . .] aus der Spontaneität’ [‘Ethics stems [. . .] from spontaneity’]. The lecture notes do not pursue the issue further. They are still unpublished and conserved in the Goethe-​Schiller-​Archiv (GSA) in Weimar (for a schematic outline of the manuscript, cf. Figl 1989: 458f.). In the Kollegs of the time, the professor usually dictated the notes. Hoyer (2002: 158 ff.) describes this general

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teaching practice. Cf. also Hoedl (2009: 303 ff.). At first, Schaarschmidt seems to have been the professor in Bonn to whom Nietzsche (and Deussen) had the closest personal relationship: Nietzsche had been recommended to him as gifted for philosophy –​and as a Platonist. Wagner (1878: 145): ‘Diese Mängel scheinen mir sich im Hauptpunkte darin zu zeigen, daß der Begriff des Spontanen, der Spontaneität überhaupt, mit einem sonderbar überstürzenden Eifer, und mindestens etwas zu früh, aus dem neuen Welterkennungs-​ System hinausgeworfen worden ist. (. . .).’ See above in this chapter (p. 228). On the concept of ‘intelligible character’ in Kant and Schopenhauer as well as on Nietzsche’s criticism of both positions in Human, All Too Human, cf. Müller-​Lauter (1999a: 29 ff.). Baumann (1879). On Nietzsche’s reading of Baumann’s Handbuch, cf. Brusotti (1997: 33 ff.). For more detail on Nietzsche’s sources, cf. also my Erläuterungen to the Nachbericht of Daybreak in the Kritische Gesamtausgabe (together with Frank Götz): KGW V 3/​1: 659 ff. According to Baumann (1879: 70 ff.), since Kant denied the role of ‘pleasure’ and introduced respect as an intellectual sentiment, he can do without the sentiments of value only in the definition of the will, not in his ethics. For a more sophisticated discussion of Kant’s problem of the motives of pure practical reason than Baumann’s, cf. Chapter 4 (Section I) by Herman Siemens in this volume. Nietzsche owned the German translations of Alexander Bain’s two publications in the ‘International Scientific Series’: Mind and Body (1872) and Education as a Science (1879). They appeared in the ‘Internationale Wissenschaftliche Bibliothek’ (Brockhaus) respectively in 1874 and in 1880: Geist und Körper. Die Theorien über ihre gegenseitigen Beziehungen (Leipzig (Brockhaus) 1874, BN); Erziehung als Wissenschaft (Leipzig (Brockhaus) 1880, BN; most pages uncut, some reading marks). Nietzsche probably read Geist und Körper in the 1970s, hence some years before Baumann’s Handbook. In the section on ‘The Will’, Mind and Body gives a brief illustration of the theory Nietzsche will take from Baumann (cf. Geist und Körper 91f.; the passage is quoted in Brobjer (2008b: 61)). But Bain’s theory seems to have really caught Nietzsche’s attention only when he studied Baumann at the beginning of 1880: the posthumous notes about ‘spontaneous activity’ are beyond any doubt excerpts from his Handbuch. Bain’s Erziehung als Wissenschaft came out in 1880, probably only after Nietzsche had read Baumann at the beginning of the year. On Nietzsche’s direct reading of Bain, without mention of Baumann, cf. Brobjer (2008b: 58–​61). Bain (1855; 1859). Both Bain and Spencer were philosophers, and their treatises had a philosophical scope –​like William James’s Principles of Psychology (1890), a handbook that appeared too late for Nietzsche to read it. By 1876, Bain had started and financed Mind, the philosophical journal, and the first editor, George

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Croom Robertson, whom Nietzsche met in Rosenlauibad in the summer of 1877, was a former pupil of Bain. (On this meeting, cf. Brobjer (2008b: 59 ff.)) Bain was an important reference for early pragmatists. In 1907, looking back at the origins of pragmatism in the Metaphysical Club at Cambridge, Massachusetts, Charles Sanders Peirce (1931ff.: 5.12) claimed that pragmatism was ‘scarce more than a corollary’ of Bain’s definition of belief as ‘that upon which a man is prepared to act’. On the question as to whether Bain really was ‘the grandfather of pragmatism’, cf. Fisch (1954). 19 Cf. Brusotti (1997: 33 ff.). 20 Bain (1855: 289): ‘Neither the existence of spontaneous actions, nor the essential connection of these with voluntary actions, has been, so far as I am aware, advanced as a doctrine by any writer on the human mind. . . .’ 21 ‘Vieles muß zu einer moralischen Handlung zusammenkommen 1. eine starke Spontaneität 2. die äußerste Spannung des Ich-​willens es ist die höchste Gattung organischer Funktionen’ (NL 1883 9[25], KSA 10.353). 22 However, naturalistic readings, according to which Kantian spontaneity is in fact relative spontaneity, ascribe to it the same gradual nature. 23 ‘Alles, was lebt, bewegt sich; diese Thätigkeit ist nicht um bestimmter Zwecke willen da, es ist eben das Leben selber’ (NL 1880 1[70], KSA 9.21). 24 ‘Man ist thätig, weil alles was lebt sich bewegen muß –​nicht um der Freude willen, also ohne Zweck: obschon Freude dabei ist. Diese Bewegung ist nicht Nachahmung der zweckmässigen Bewegungen, es ist anders’ (NL 1880 1[45], KSA 9.16). 25 ‘Wir vergessen immer das Wesentlichste, weil es am nächsten liegt z.B. beim Spielen die Spontaneität, das fortwährende Tasten und Tappen der Bewegung. (. . .)’ (NL 1880 1[126], KSA 9.32–​3). The source is Baumann’s (1879: 12) Handbook: ‘. . . es hat zunächst ein mannichfaches Tasten und Tappen statt, aus dem sich allmälich eine Art als die werthvollste oder als die in diesem Individuum bleibende absetzt’ (Nietzsche: ‘NB’). Cf. Brusotti (1997: 38) and KGW V 3/1: 732. 26 The concept of Auslösung (unloosing), which goes back to the German physician and physicist Julius Robert Mayer, refers to apparent exceptions to the principle ‘causa aequat effectum’ (cause equals effect): stimuli are often insignificant in comparison with the forces they discharge and so with the effects they unleash, or unloose. The importance of Mayer’s concept for Nietzsche is well known. Less well known is that Baumann, too, employs it, and that Nietzsche’s first uses of the term are due to Baumann, not to Mayer, whom Nietzsche had not yet read in 1880. Cf. Brusotti 1997: 56 ff. In 1881, Nietzsche easily integrates Mayer’s concept of Auslösung in his Bainian view of ‘spontaneity’. The following posthumous note, which would be difficult to understand for someone who ascribes to Nietzsche a Kantian conception of

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‘spontaneity’, is a straightforward application of Baumann’s Bainian conception of the relationship between spontaneous force and exercise. ‘[. . .] Wohin die Kraft sich wendet? sicher nach dem Gewohnten: also wohin die Reize leiten, dahin wird auch die spontane Auslösung sich bewegen. Die häufigeren Reize erziehen auch die Richtung der spontanen Auslösung’ (NL 1881 11[139], KSA 9.493). Here Nietzsche follows Baumann and calls the Auslösung ‘spontaneous’. Elsewhere he calls the ‘energy’ ‘spontaneous’. ‘Energy’ is ‘spontaneous’, even if it can be ‘unloosed’ by external stimuli; for it does not necessarily need them. The ‘Auslösung’ without an external stimulus is ‘spontaneous’. Gradually, so the story goes, the recurrent stimuli which frequently ‘unloose’ the ‘spontaneous energy’ give place to spontaneous ‘unloosements’ of this energy, which follow the same direction. Nietzsche also speaks of judgements (representations) which are or become spontaneous in a similar sense. At first they need stimuli in order to get in action (or act themselves as external stimuli), but, in a gradual process Nietzsche dubs ‘incorporation’, they can change their role until they no longer need external stimuli. ‘Wie unkräftig war bisher alle physiologische Erkenntniß! während die alten physiologischen Irrthümer spontane Kraft bekommen haben! Lange lange Zeit können wir die neuen Erkenntnisse nur als Reize verwenden –​um die spontanen Kräfte zu entladen’ (NL 1881 11[173], KSA 9.507). ‘Ich rede von Instinkt, wenn irgend ein Urtheil (Geschmack in seiner untersten Stufe) einverleibt ist, so daß es jetzt selber spontan sich regt und nicht mehr auf Reize zu warten braucht . . .’ (NL 1881 11[164], KSA 9.505). On the disappearance of ‘activity’ and ‘spontaneity’ in the works of 1888, cf. Brusotti (2012). On Féré’s criticism of Bain, cf. Brusotti (2012: 112, n. 14). ‘Beside Schopenhauer I want to characterize Kant (Goethe’s passage on radical evil): nothing Greek, absolutely anti-​historical (passage on the French Revolution) and moral fanatic. Even in him saintliness in the background . . . [. . .] I need a critique of the saint. . .’ (NL Autumn 1887 10[118], KSA 12.524–​5; cf. KGW IX/​ 6: 58). ‘Dagegen hat aber auch Kant seinen philosophischen Mantel, nachdem er ein langes Menschenleben gebraucht hat, ihn von mancherlei sudelhaften Vorurteilen zu reinigen, freventlich mit dem Schandfleck des radikalen Bösen beschlabbert, damit doch auch Christen herbeigelockt werden, den Saum zu küssen’ (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Johann Gottfried and Caroline Herder, 7 June 1793, in Goethe (1988, vol. 2: 166)). ‘. . . Dagegen die Forderung des unegoistischen unpersönlichen Handelns, worin man gewöhnlich den Ursprung der Moralität sieht, gehört den pessimistischen Religionen an, insofern diese von der Verwerflichkeit des ego, der Person ausgehen, also die metaphysische Bedeutung des “Radikal-​Bösen” vorher in den Menschen gelegt haben müssen. Von der pessimistischen Religion her hat Kant sowohl

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das Radikal-​Böse als den Glauben dass das Unegoistische das Kennzeichen des Moralischen sei[. . .]’ (NL End 1876 –​Summer 1877 23[77], KSA 8.429). On radical evil, cf. also NL July–​August 1879 42[65], KSA 8.607–​8; cf. NL August 1879 44[3]‌, KSA 8.611. Cf. A. Schopenhauer: Parerga und Paralipomena II, Kapitel 8, Zur Ethik, § 115, in Schopenhauer (1977, vol. 9: 234). Less biased accounts of Kant’s ‘radical evil’ than Goethe’s or Schopenhauer’s were available already to the young Nietzsche –​f. i. the chapter ‘Das radicale Böse in der Menschennatur’, in Fischer (1860, vol. 2: 384 ff.). But there is no clue that Nietzsche kept in mind all the important distinctions he might have read about there or elsewhere. Cf. Allison (1996b). On the evil of weakness, which cannot be dealt with here, as well as on the evil of strength, cf. Brusotti (1997: 71 ff.). D 371, KSA 3.245–​6: ‘The evil of strength. –​The act of violence as a consequence of passion, of anger for example, is to be understood physiologically as an attempt to prevent a threatening attack of suffocation. Countless acts of arrogance vented on other people have been diversions of a sudden rush of blood through a vigorous action of the muscles: and perhaps the whole phenomenon of the “evil of strength” belongs in this domain. (The evil of strength harms others without giving thought to it –​it has to discharge itself; the evil of weakness wants to harm others and to see the signs of the suffering it has caused.)’ Cf. Loukidelis (2013: 51). As Loukidelis shows, this aphorism is not simply (or mainly) a tacit criticism of Descartes, Kant and Lichtenberg, but targets a range of contemporary philosophers: the ‘logicians’ (BGE 17, KSA 5.30, 31), critically mentioned at the beginning and at the end of the aphorism, include Teichmüller, Drossbach, Widemann and Spir. Here, I do not take them into account and focus only on Kant and Lichtenberg. See Sudelbücher, Heft K [76], in Lichtenberg (1968–​1992, vol. 2: 412): ‘Wir werden uns gewisser Vorstellungen bewußt, die nicht von uns abhängen; andere glauben, wir wenigstens hingen von uns ab[[//​andere, glauben wir wenigstens, hingen von uns ab]]; wo ist die Grenze? Wir kennen nur allein die Existenz unserer Empfindungen, Vorstellungen und Gedanken. Es denkt, sollte man sagen, so wie man sagt: es blitzt. Zu sagen cogito, ist schon zu viel, sobald man es durch Ich denke übersetzt. Das Ich anzunehmen, zu postulieren, ist praktisches Bedürfnis.’ Besides Loukidelis’s commentary, cf. also Stingelin (1996: 25) and Gasser (1997: 692). Nietzsche owes this sentence, used in Trendelenburg’s Logical Investigations (cf. Albrecht 1979: 239), to Drossbach (1884). Cf. Orsucci (2001: 221). Leiter (2011: 108) claims that Nietzsche speaks of ‘sovereign individual’ and the like exclusively in GM II 2. The posthumous notes I quote in the text show that

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this is not the case. Nietzsche often uses the adjective ‘sovereign’ as attribute, for example, of drives and instincts (NL Summer 1887 8[1]‌, KSA 12.323), the will (NL Autumn 1887 9[178], KSA 12.440) or the ‘great passion’ (AC 54, KSA 6.236). A note criticizes the ‘will’ as a ‘poetical fiction’ [Erdichtung]: ‘one believes that it [the will; MB] is free and sovereign because its origin remains concealed from us and because the affect of commanding accompanies it’ (NL 1884 27[24], KSA 11.282). 40 ‘Ist der Pluralismus das letzte Wort der Metaphysik, so ist die absolute Souveränität des (gleichviel ob metaphysisch einfachen, oder atomistisch zusammengesetzten) Individuums das letzte Wort der praktischen Philosophie, und nur egoistische Klugheitsrücksichten können es sein, welche der Willkür dieser Souveränität eine Beschränkung auferlegen; dann ist also keine ächte Moral, sondern nur egoistische Pseudomoral möglich, und selbst die heteronomen Gebote objectiver Autoritäten können nur aus Selbstsucht Beachtung finden (wenn nämlich ihre Nichtbefolgung dem eigenen Wohl mehr Schaden und weniger Nutzen bringt als ihre “Befolgung”) (Hartmann 1879: 776). Obviously, for Hartmann pluralism is not ‘the last word of metaphysics’. Nietzsche’s note explicitly refers to this page (776) (NL July 1882–​ Winter 1883–​1884 7[10], KSA 10.241). 41 There is irony in the whole story. In the 1890s Hartmann himself would start a heated debate in which he accuses Nietzsche of plagiarizing Stirner, whose views, Hartmann alleges, Nietzsche learned from the very pages of Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious that he vehemently attacked in the second Untimely Meditation (cf. Rahden 1984: 485; Gerratana 1988: 398). Now, the Genealogy really refers implicitly to Stirner and does it, in fact, via Hartmann (even if not via the Philosophy of the Unconscious), without mentioning either of the two thinkers; but, rather than falling back to Stirner’s standpoint, Nietzsche implicitly maintains distance from it. 42 Acampora (2004) and Hatab (2008) reject the view of the majority of scholars, according to which the ‘sovereign individual’ is Nietzsche’s ideal. The first of two alternative ‘deflationary readings’ proposed by Leiter (2011: 103) goes even further: ‘the ‘sovereign individual’ is wholly ironic, a mocking of the petit bourgeois’, and ‘this whole passage is little more than a parody of the contemporary bourgeois’ (108). But this reading does not find any support in the text: the ‘sovereign individual’ is not a parody in this sense, Nietzsche’s emphatic description aims to replace conceptions of this sovereignty to which Nietzsche is profoundly hostile (Hartmann, Stirner and possibly even Mill).Even if the ‘sovereign individual’ is meant earnestly, it is not Nietzsche’s ideal tout court: neither the ‘new philosophers’ of BGE nor the ‘sovereign individual’ of GM are ‘overmen’, and the ‘overman’ of Thus spoke Zarathustra is not what Nietzsche calls ‘overman’ in his last writings. It is wrong to speak as if there were one single Nietzschean ideal.Is a parodic aspect then wholly absent? Not at all. Nietzsche’s self-​description in the Preface involves

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a straightforward parody of Kant and of his terminology, and the description of the sovereign individual displays the same subversive intention, even if, giving Kantian terms a radically new meaning, Nietzsche does not take target only at Kant. The parody is not on what is described –​Nietzsche, the sovereign individual; the parodic moment consists in the implicit opposition to Hartmann’s Phenomenology and in the radical revision of Kantian concepts. The latter comes closer to the second ‘deflationary reading’, preferred by Leiter himself who sees in this passage an exercise in ‘persuasive definition’ of concepts such as ‘freedom’ or ‘free will’ (cf. Leiter 2011: 103). I agree that the description of the sovereign individual squares with Nietzsche’s criticism of the free will. But whereas for Leiter the chapter is compatible with fatalism, in my reading it is compatible with the dissolution of the whole problem of ‘free will’, thus with the refuse of the ‘unfree will’ as well. On the ‘sovereign individual’, see also Gemes and May (2009), Bailey (2013: 149ff.) and Chapter 4 by Herman Siemens in this volume. See Acampora (2004:128 ff.) for a critique of the English translation of this passage. Nietzsche owes Baumann not only the term, but also the opposition between ‘the will’s memory’ and one form of inability connected to ‘memory’ in the usual sense. Baumann opposes ‘the will’s memory’ and the ‘inability to get rid of a representation, a sentiment or an action’ as two contrary sorts of ‘stubbornness’: ‘Eigensinn ist in diesem Fall nicht Stärke, sondern Schwäche, Unfähigkeit von einem Vorstellen, Fühlen, Thun loszukommen. Eigensinn kann aber auch das sein, was Herbart Gedächtniss des Willens genannt hat, wo also unter gleichen Umständen derselbe Wille wiederkehrt’ (Baumann 1879: 51; Nietzsche’s underlinings). In the margin of his exemplar of Baumann’s Handbuch, Nietzsche has marked twice and commented with a ‘good’ [gut] this passage from the first chapter ‘Die Natur des Willens und die Gesetze der Willensbildung’ (Baumann 1879: 1–​73). Baumann gives Herbart as the source of the term ‘the will’s memory’, but without mentioning a specific work by him. Nietzsche’s metaphor of consciousness as a room which can be occupied by ideas or kept free from them stems from Herbart’s conception of ‘inhibition’ (in Psychologie als Wissenschaft, 1824), even if the Genealogy replaces Herbart’s ‘mechanical’ language (the inhibition of one idea by the other) through a ‘dynamical’ conceptuality (the active force of forgetfulness). On Baumann as a source of Nietzsche’s ‘memory of the will’, cf. Brusotti (1992: 90); on Baumann’s first chapter, cf. Brusotti (1997: 33 ff.). Zarathustra unmistakably assigned the ‘overman’ only to the future, explicitly claiming that there have not yet been ‘overmen’. (And even the ‘new philosophers’ of Beyond Good and Evil, which are no ‘overmen’, clearly belong to the future.) But the ‘sovereign individual’ is not the overman. Leiter (2009: 113 ff., n. 11) mistakes Nietzsche’s thesis that there are no explanations, but only (interpretative) descriptions (cf. also FW 127) for a variant of a

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neo-​Kantian position, as if Nietzsche were still stuck in the dichotomy between phenomenon and ‘an sich’. BGE 21, KSA 5.36, puts the ‘in itself ’ into scare quotes, precisely in order to avoid such Kantian misunderstandings. Müller-​Lauter (1999a) argues that Nietzsche achieves a ‘dissolution’ (Auf-​lösung) of the problem. Müller-​Lauter (1999a: 74 ff.). ‘Because in the vast majority of cases a person only wills something where he may expect his command to take effect in obedience and thus in action, the misleading appearance [Anschein] has translated itself into the feeling, as if there were some necessary effect’ (BGE 19, KSA 5.33). Nietzsche’s reconstruction of the origin of this illusion is similar to Baumann’s (1879: 14f.). In 1880, Nietzsche had learned from him that representations and feelings alone are not sufficient, if involuntary, unconscious movements, Bain’s ‘spontaneous activity’, are missing. According to Baumann, the error consists in mistaking the ‘efficacious will’, which involves these spontaneous involuntary actions, for a free will, which would do without them. According to Nietzsche we should not mistake strength of will for a free will or weakness for an ‘unfree will’. However, the analysis of the will given in BGE 19 differs from Baumann’s who counts the involuntary movements to the will as its third, or rather its central, moment.According to Brian Leiter’s naturalistic reading, BGE 19 claims that the ‘will’ is epiphenomenal (Leiter 2009: 107–​26), whereas according to Maudemarie Clark’s and David Dudrick’s normative reading BGE 19 ‘rejects something’, but ‘leaves the causality of the will intact’ (Clark and Dudrick 2009: 247–​68). I think that Nietzsche’s aphorism does neither of the two. Here, there is a convergence with Bain, even if he is not necessarily (or even probably) Nietzsche’s direct source. According to Bain (1859: 149), ‘the Sentiment or Pleasure of Power’ belongs to the pleasure of activity, even if only as a third, supplementary moment, as a ‘super-​added luxury’ (151). It is unlikely that Nietzsche got the term ‘Gefühl der Macht’ or ‘Machtgefühl’ (sentiment of power) directly from Bain. Nietzsche would not have come across this concept in Geist und Körper, the only work by Bain he could have read before he began to analyse the sentiment of power in the posthumous notes of Human, All Too Human. In comparison with these earlier texts, the notes of 1880 on the sentiment of power have, in some way, a new ‘Bainian’ touch, linked to Nietzsche’s new attention to spontaneous activity after reading Baumann’s Handbook at the beginning of 1880. Later in the same year, he could have come across the brief chapter of Education as Science on ‘The Feeling of Power’, where Bain distinguishes between ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ power (cf. Brobjer 2008b: 60 f.). For his part, Nietzsche analyses the different forms of ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ (or ‘illusory’) power and ‘sense of power’ (cf. Brusotti 1997: 64 ff.). However, the two distinctions, even if they sound similar, are not quite the same.

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51 On the concept of pride in Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, cf. Müller-​Lauter (1999b). On Nietzsche’s concept, cf. also Brusotti (1994).

References Acampora, C. (2004), ‘On Sovereignty and Overhumanity. Why It Matters How We Read Nietzsche’s Genealogy II:2’, in International Studies in Philosophy 36 (3): 127–​45. Albrecht, J. (1979), ‘Friedrich Nietzsche und das “sprachliche Relativitätsprinzip”’, Nietzsche-​Studien 8: 225–​44. Allison, H. E. (1996a), ‘Autonomy and Spontaneity in Kant’s Conception of the Self ’, in Idealism and Freedom. Essays on Kant’s Theoretical and Practical Philosophy, 129–​42, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Allison, H. E. (1996b), ‘Reflections on the Banality of (Radical) Evil: A Kantian Analysis’, in Idealism and Freedom. Essays on Kant’s Theoretical and Practical Philosophy, 169–​82, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bailey, T. (2013), ‘Nietzsche the Kantian’, in K. Gemes and J. Richardson, The Oxford Handbook to Nietzsche, 134–​59, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bain, A. (1855), The Senses and the Intellect, London: John W. Parker and Son. Bain, A. (1859), The Emotions and the Will, London: John W. Parker and Son. Bain, A. (1872), Mind and Body: The Theories of Their Relation, New York: D. Appleton & Company. Bain, A. (1874), Geist und Körper. Die Theorien über ihre gegenseitigen Beziehungen, Leipzig: Brockhaus. Bain, A. (1879), Education as a Science, New York: D. Appleton & Company. Bain, A. (1880), Erziehung als Wissenschaft, Leipzig, Brockhaus. Baumann, J. J. (1879), Handbuch der Moral nebst Abriss der Rechtsphilosophie, Leipzig: Hirzel. Beiser, F. C. (2014), The Genesis of Neo-​Kantianism, 1796–​1880, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brobjer, T. H. (2008a), Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Brobjer, T. H. (2008b), Nietzsche and the ‘English’: The Influence of British and American Thinking on His Philosophy, Amherst: Prometheus. Brusotti, M. (1992), ‘Die “Selbstverkleinerung des Menschen” in der Moderne. Studie zu Nietzsches “Zur Genealogie der Moral”’,Nietzsche-​Studien 21: 81–​136. Brusotti, M. (1994), ‘Verkehrte Welt und Redlichkeit gegen sich. Rückblicke Nietzsches auf seine frühere Wagneranhängerschaft in den Aufzeichnungen 1880–​1881’, in T. Borsche, F. Gerratana and A. Venturelli, ‘Centauren-​Geburten’. Wissenschaft, Kunst und Philosophie beim jungen Nietzsche, 435–​60, Berlin/​New York: De Gruyter.

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Brusotti, M. (1997), Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis. Philosophie und ästhetische Lebensgestaltung bei Nietzsche von Morgenröthe bis Also sprach Zarathustra, Berlin/​ New York: De Gruyter. Brusotti, M. (2012), ‘Reagieren, schwer reagieren, nicht reagieren. Zu Philosophie und Physiologie beim letzten Nietzsche’, Nietzsche-​Studien 41: 104–​26. Clark, M., and Dudrick, D. (2009), ‘Nietzsche on the Will. An Analysis of BGE 19’, in K. Gemes and S. May, Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, 247–​68, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cohen, H. (1871), Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, Berlin: Ferd. Dümmler’s Verlagsbuchhandlung. Drossbach, M. (1884), Ueber die scheinbaren und die wirklichen Ursachen des Geschehens in der Welt, Halle: Pfeffer. Figl, J. (1989), ‘Nietzsches frühe Begegnung mit dem Denken Indiens. Auf der Grundlage seiner unveröffentlichten Kollegnachschrift aus Philosophiegeschichte (1865)’, Nietzsche-​Studien 18: 455–​71. Finster, R. (1982), ‘Spontaneität, Freiheit und unbedingte Kausalität bei Leibniz, Crusius und Kant’, Studia Leibnitiana 14: 266–​77. Fisch, M. H. (1954), ‘Alexander Bain and the Genealogy of Pragmatism’, Journal of the History of Ideas 15 (3): 413–​44. Fischer, K. (1860), Immanuel Kant. Entwicklungsgeschichte und System der kritischen Philosophie. Erster Band: Entstehung und Begründung der kritischen Philosophie. Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Zweiter Band: Das Lehrgebäude der kritischen Philosophie. Das System der reinen Vernunft, 2 vols [= Geschichte der neuern Philosophie, vol. III, IV], Mannheim: Friedrich Bassermann. Gasser, R. (1997), Nietzsche und Freud, Berlin/​New York: De Gruyter. Gemes, K., and May, S. (2009), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gerratana, F. (1988), ‘Der Wahn jenseits des Menschen. Zur frühen E. v. Hartmann-​ Rezeption Nietzsches (1869–​1874)’, Nietzsche-​Studien 17: 391–​433. Goethe, J. W. (1988), Goethes Briefe und Briefe an Goethe. Hamburger Ausgabe in sechs Bänden, hrsg. v. Karl Robert Mandelkow, München: Beck. Hartmann, E. (1879), Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins. Prolegomena zu jeder künftigen Ethik, Berlin: C. Duncker’s Verlag (C. Heymons). Hatab, L. (2008), ‘Breaking the Contract Theory: The Individual and the Law in Nietzsche’s Genealogy’, in H. Siemens, Nietzsche, Power and Politics. Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought, 169–​88, Berlin/​New York: De Gruyter. Heidemann, I. (1956), ‘Der Begriff der Spontaneität in der Kritik der reinen Vernunft’, Kant-​Studien 47 (1–​4): 3–​30. Heidemann, I. (1958), Spontaneität und Zeitlichkeit, Köln: Kölner Universitäts-​Verlag. Herbart, J. F. (1824–​25), Psychologie als Wissenschaft neu gegründet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik und Mathematik, 2 vols, Königsberg: Unzer.

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Hoedl, H. G. (2009), Der letzte Jünger des Philosophen Dionysos: Studien zur systematischen Bedeutung von Nietzsches Selbstthematisierungen im Kontext seiner Religionskritik, Boston/​New York: De Gruyter. Hoyer, T. (2002), Nietzsche und die Pädagogik: Werk, Biografie und Rezeption, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Kitcher, P. (1994), Kant’s Transcendental Psychology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Klemme, H. F. (2012), ‘Spontaneität und Selbsterkenntnis: Kant über die ursprüngliche Einheit von Natur und Freiheit im Aktus des “Ich denke” (1785–​1787)’, in B. Ludwig, M. Brandhorst and A. Hahmann (eds), Sind wir Bürger zweier Welten? Freiheit und moralische Verantwortung im transzendentalen Idealismus, 195–​222, Hamburg: Meiner. Köhnke, K. C. (1986), Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus. Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus, Frankfurt/​ M.: Suhrkamp. Lange, F. A. (1873–​75), Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, 2. verb. u. verm. Aufl., 2 vols., Iserlohn: J. Baedeker. [First ed.: Iserlohn 1866.] Lange, F. A. (1880), History of Materialism and Criticism of its Present Importance, 3 vols, Boston: Houghton, Osgood, & Co. Leiter, B. (2009), ‘Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will’, in K. Gemes and J. Richardson, The Oxford Handbook to Nietzsche, 107–​26, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leiter, B. (2011), ‘Who Is the “Sovereign Individual”? Nietzsche on Freedom’, in S. May (ed.), Cambridge Critical Guide to Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, 101–​19, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lichtenberg, G. C. (1968–​92), Schriften und Briefe. Hrsg. und kommentiert v. Wolfgang Promies, 6 vols., München: Hanser. Loukidelis, N. (2013), Es denkt. Ein Kommentar zum Aphorismus 17 von Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Meyer, J. B. (1856), Zum Streit über Leib und Seele. Worte der Kritik. Sechs Vorlesungen [. . .], Hamburg: Perthes, Besser & Mauke. Meyer, J. B. (1870), Kant’s [sic] Psychologie. Dargestellt und erörtert von Jürgen Bona Meyer, Berlin: Hertz. Mittelstrass, J. (1965), ‘Spontaneität. Ein Beitrag im Blick auf Kant’, Kant-​Studien 56: 474–​84, also in G. Prauss (ed.), Kant. Zur Deutung seiner Theorie vom Erkennen und Handeln, 62–​73, Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1973. Müller-​Lauter, W. (1999a), ‘Freiheit und Wille bei Nietzsche’, in W. Müller-​Lauter, Über Freiheit und Chaos. Nietzsche-​Interpretationen II, 25–​129, Berlin/​New York: De Gruyter. Müller-​Lauter, W. (1999b), ‘Über Stolz und Eitelkeit bei Kant, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche’, in W. Müller-​Lauter, Über Werden und Wille zur Macht. Nietzsche-​ Interpretationen I, 141–​72, Berlin/​New York: De Gruyter.

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Nakano, H. (2011), ‘Selbstaffektion in der transzendentalen Deduktion’, Kant-​Studien 102: 213–​31. Orsucci, A. (2001), La genealogia della morale di Nietzsche, Roma: Carocci. Peirce, C. S. (1931–​35), Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 6 vols, Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Pippin, R. B. (1987), ‘Kant on the Spontaneity of Mind’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (2): 449–​75. Rahden, W. von (1884), ‘Eduard von Hartmann “und” Nietzsche. Zur Strategie der verzögerten Konterkritik Hartmanns an Nietzsche’, Nietzsche-​Studien 13: 481–​502. Salaquarda, J. (1978), ‘Nietzsche und Lange’, Nietzsche-​Studien 7: 236–​60. Schopenhauer, A. (1977), Zürcher Ausgabe. Werke in zehn Bänden, Zürich: Diogenes. Sellars, W. (1974), ‘This I or He or It (the Thing) which Thinks . . .’, in W. Sellars, Essays in Philosophy and Its History, 62–​90, Dordrecht: Reidel. Spencer, H. (1870–​72), Principles of Psychology, 2nd ed., 2 vols, London: Williams & Norgate. Stingelin, M. (1996), ‘Unsere ganze Philosophie ist Berichtigung des Sprachgebrauchs’: Friedrich Nietzsches Lichtenberg-​Rezeption im Spannungsfeld zwischen Sprachkritik (Rhetorik) und historischer Kritik (Genealogie), München: Fink. Strawson, P. (1966), The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, London: Methuen. Wagner, R. (1878) ‘Publikum und Popularität’, in R. Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 16 vols, 1911ff., vol. 10: 106–​55, Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.

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Contra Kant Experimental Ethics in Guyau and Nietzsche Keith Ansell-​Pearson and Michael Ure

1.  Introduction Powerful critiques of Kantian ethics are mounted towards the end of the nineteenth century by naturalistic-​minded philosophers such as Jean-​Marie Guyau (1854–​88) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–​1900). This chapter examines the basis of these critiques and what, if anything, they have in common. The aim of such critiques is to challenge the universalist assumptions of Kantian ethics and favour instead a genuinely experimental ethics, one that is premised on a commitment to moral variability and that seeks to promote heterodox forms of living. As Nietzsche puts it in his text of 1881, Dawn, the idea of ‘the human being’ is a ‘bloodless abstraction’ and ‘fiction’ (D 105, KSA 3.93). But on what precise grounds do figures such as Guyau and Nietzsche challenge universalism in ethics? And what kind of future for ethical life do they envisage? Here we are not so much concerned with whether these figures get Kant right, but with exploring the nature of their experimentalism and its grounds.

2. In the preface to On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) Nietzsche claims distinction for himself on account of voicing in his writings a new demand, ‘[W]‌e need a critique of moral values, the value of these values should itself for once, be

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examined’ (GM Preface 6, KSA 5.253). In a note for the preface to Dawn (1881) he writes of the need to think about morality without falling under its spell and the seductive character of its beautiful gestures and glances (NL 1885–​6 2[165], KSA 12.147–​9). He distinguishes himself from previous philosophy, notably German philosophy, such as Kant and Hegel, and what he regards as their half-​ hearted attempts at critique. In both cases, he contends, criticism is directed only at the problem (how morality is to be demonstrated, whether as noumenon or as self-​revealing spirit) but never at the ‘ideal’. In the actual preface to Dawn Nietzsche claims that morality is the greatest of all mistresses of seduction and that all philosophers have been building ‘majestic moral structures’ under its seduction (D Preface 3, KSA 3.13–​14). Nietzsche exaggerates his singularity, and this can be shown by bringing his critique of morality into rapport with the ideas of Guyau. Guyau is a neglected figure today but was read as making an important contribution to ethics in his own day by the likes of William James and Josiah Royce. His major work on ethics was published in 1885 (Nietzsche read it at this time) and is entitled in English Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction (Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation, ni sanction).1 Prior to this work, which Kropotkin described as ‘remarkable’ in his Ethics,2 Guyau had published, in 1875, 1878 and 1879, studies of ancient and modern ethics (especially English utilitarianism), being especially concerned with Epictetus and Epicurus with regards to the ancients and with Darwin and Spencer with regards to the moderns. He also published in 1887 a fascinating tome entitled The Non Religion of the Future, which Nietzsche also read and admired.3 We can note at the outset that Nietzsche’s attitude towards Guyau is ambivalent. On the one hand, he calls him ‘brave Guyau’, and regards him as a courageous thinker who has written one of the few genuinely interesting books on ethics of modern times (NL 1885 35[34], KSA 11.525).4 On the other hand, he thinks Guyau is caught up in the Christian-​moral ideal, and partly for this reason he is only a free thinker and not a genuine free spirit. Nietzsche does not refer to Guyau anywhere in his published writings. What can be certain of his thoughts about him, and his work, comes from a few unpublished notes and from the marginal remarks he makes in his copy of Guyau’s Sketch (Esquisse). As one commentator has noted, the richness and diversity of late-​nineteenth-​ century free thought is symbolized by the similarities and dissonances between these two thinkers.5 It is his novel and even daring approach to questions of morality that Nietzsche greatly admired and led him to describe Guyau as ‘brave’. An examination of the annotations he makes to his copy of Guyau’s text on morality makes it clear that

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he strongly empathized with core aspects of Guyau’s approach to morality. At one point Guyau (1896: 70; 1898: 59) compares morality to an art that charms and deludes us, against which Nietzsche writes ‘moi’ in the margin.6 We are confident that Nietzsche would have found his conception of a ‘self-​sublimation’ of morality prefigured and echoed in Guyau’s text. There are indications in the annotations he makes to the section in the book on ‘the morality of faith’ which strongly suggest this was the case. Guyau’s thinking takes its bearings from a number of influences. On the one hand he is strongly influenced by naturalist and positivist developments and on the other by an idealist legacy. He has respect for three works of modern moral philosophy: Spencer’s Data of Ethics; Hartmann’s The Phenomenology of the Moral Conscience; and Alfred Fouillée’s The Criticism of Contemporary Moral Systems.7 Naturalism offers, to its credit, no unchangeable principles either with regards to obligation or sanction; idealism can furnish at best only hypothetical and not categorical imperatives. As one commentator on Guyau has noted, his goal is to provide a satisfactory holistic approach to modern ethics since positivist and idealists consider only one aspect, either the factual or the ideal, at the expense of the other. Thus a proper account of the dynamics of moral life must account for both moral ideas and moral actions.8 For Guyau (1896: 6; 1898: 4) the reign of the absolute is over in the domain of ethics: ‘[W]‌hatever comes within the order of facts is not universal, and whatever is universal is a speculative hypothesis.’ For Guyau, a chief characteristic of the future conception of morality will be ‘moral variability’: ‘In many respects this conception will not only be autonomous but anomos’ (ibid.).9 According to Guyau, we are witnessing today the decline of religious faith, and this faith is being replaced by a dogmatic faith in morality. Although its fanaticism may be less dangerous than the religious sort it is equally menacing. The new voice is conscience and the new god is duty: The great Pan, the nature-​god, is dead; Jesus, the humanity-​god, is dead. There remains the inward and ideal god, Duty, whose destiny it is, perhaps, also to die some day. (Guyau 1896: 63; 1898: 54)

The belief in duty is so questionable because it is placed above the region in which both science and nature move (Guyau 1896: 64; 1898: 55). Guyau maintains that all philosophies of duty and of conscience are, in effect, philosophies of common sense and are thus unscientific, be it the Scottish school of ‘common sense’ derived from Thomas Reid or neo-​Kantianism with its assumption that the impulse of duty is of a different order to all other natural impulses. Phrases

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such as ‘conscience proclaims’, ‘evidence proves’ and ‘common sense requires’ are as unconvincing as ‘duty commands’ and ‘the moral law demands’. Guyau, by contrast, appeals to scientific truth, which he conceives not as brute fact but as a ‘bundle of facts’, a ‘synthesis’ not simply of the felt and the seen but of the explained and connected. What lies outside the range of our knowledge cannot have anything obligatory about it, and science needs to replace habituated faith. Like Nietzsche, Guyau recognizes the paradox –​we immoralists remain duty-​ bound and freely impose on ourselves a new, stern duty (BGE 226). Guyau calls this ‘the duty of being consistent to ourselves, of not blindly solving an uncertain problem, of not closing an open question’. In short, the new method of doubt is not without its obligations and cannot be (Guyau 1896:  68; 1898:  58). The extent to which Nietzsche empathized with Guyau on these issues cannot be underestimated. With respect to Kant, Guyau notes, like philosophical predecessors such as Hegel, the formalism of his ethics. With its stress on the absolute character of the imperative independent of the idea of its object and application, such an ethics makes appeal to natural or empirical facts virtually worthless since it is always possible to find an answer by appealing to the distinction between the alleged intention behind the act and the act itself: ‘If the act is practically harmful, the intention may have been morally disinterested, and that is all that the moral philosophy of Kant demands’ (Guyau 1896: 57; 1898: 48). Furthermore, the good intention of the feeling of obligation in Kant must make an appeal to a suprasensible and supraintelligible reality. Guyau (1896: 57; 1898: 48) corrects Kant on this point: The feeling of obligation, if exclusively considered from the point of view of mental dynamics, is brought back to a feeling of resistance . . . This resistance, being of such a nature as to be apprehended by the senses, cannot arise from our relation to a moral law, which hypothetically would be quite intelligible and independent of time. It arises from our relation to natural and empiric laws [emphases in the original].

Guyau points out that the feeling of obligation is not moral but sensible, that is, the moral sentiment is, as Kant himself concedes, pathological. Kant’s position is distinctive in holding this sentiment to be aroused by the mere form of the moral law and not its subject matter. This generates a mystery, as Kant fully acknowledges: an intelligible and supranatural law generates a pathological and natural sentiment, namely, respect. How does a pure idea that contains nothing sensible produce within us a sensation of pleasure and pain? Kant acknowledges

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that he cannot explain why and how the universality of a maxim, and consequently morality, interests us.10 Guyau cannot see any reason a priori why we should connect sensible pleasure or pain to a law that would, hypothetically, be suprasensible. Equally, can duty be detached from the character and qualities of the things we have do to and the actual people to whom we have obligations? Like Hegel, Guyau appeals to ‘social life’ (what Hegel calls ‘Sittlichkeit’) as the context in which duties and obligations find their sense. The ‘moral law’ can only be a ‘social law’; just as we are not free to get outside the universe, so we are not free (in our thinking) to get outside society (Guyau 1896: 232–​3; 1898: 198). Moreover, even if we were to suppose that the universal, qua universal, produces in us a logical satisfaction this itself remains ‘a satisfaction of the logical instinct in man’ and ‘is a natural [emphasis in the original] tendency’ because it is ‘an expression of life in its higher form . . . favourable to order, to symmetry, to similitude, to unity in variety’ (Guyau 1896: 59; 1898: 50). The will cannot be indifferent to the aims it is seeking to pursue or promote. Guyau contends that a purely formal practice of morality, as Kant’s ethics demands, would ironically prove demoralizing to an agent:  ‘it is the analogy of the labour which the prisoners in English prisons are obliged to do, and which is without aim –​to turn a handle for the sake of turning it!’ (ibid.; see also Guyau 1896: 218–​20; 1898: 186–​8). Nietzsche describes Kant’s ethics as a form of ‘refined servility’ (GS 5, KSA 3.377). Guyau makes the same criticism of Kant when he questions the performance of duty for the sake of duty, which he regards as pure tautology and a vicious circle. We might as well say be religious for the sake of religion, or be moral for the sake of morality (Guyau 1896: 67; 1898: 57). He then closely echoes Nietzsche in GS 335 when he argues, ‘While I believe it to be my sovereign and self-​governed liberty, commanding me to do such and such an act, what if it were hereditary instinct, habit, education, urging me to the pretended duty?’ (ibid.).11 As Nietzsche points out, one’s judgement that ‘this is right’ has a prehistory in one’s instincts, likes and dislikes, experiences (including the lack of them) and so on (GS 335, KSA 3.561). Guyau does not dispute that Kant’s thinking on ethics is without importance or merit; indeed, he holds the theory of the categorical imperative to be ‘psychologically exact and deep’ and the expression of a ‘fact of consciousness’. What cannot be upheld, however, is the attempt to develop it without the requisite naturalistic insight in which what we take to be a practical, internal necessity will be demonstrated to be an instinctive, even mechanical, necessity (Guyau 1896: 102–​3; 1898: 89).12 In short, Guyau holds that there is within us a primitive,

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impersonal impulse to obey that is prior to philosophical reasoning on ‘goodness’, but our understanding of this needs to be opened up to naturalistic and critical inquiry. For Guyau (1896: 117; 1898: 98) this inquiry into the sentiment of obligation is to take the form of a ‘dynamic genesis’ in which we come to appreciate that we do not follow our conscience but are driven by it and in terms of a ‘psycho-​mechanical power’. In addition questions of evolution –​the evolution of the species and of societies –​also need to be taken into account. What kind of ‘impulse’ is duty? How has it evolved? And why has it become for us a ‘sublime obsession’? (Guyau 1896: 121; 1898: 101). Ultimately, Kant’s ethics, Guyau argues, must be seen as belonging to an age that future humanity will outgrow. It is ‘a moral philosophy similar to ritualist religions, which count any failure in ceremonial as sacrilege; and which forget the essence for the sake of the form’; it is thus ‘a kind of moral despotism, creeping everywhere, wanting to rule everything’ (Guyau 1896: 170; 1898: 144). Guyau argues that a strict method is to be followed if we are to determine the nature of a moral philosophy to be founded exclusively on facts. The contrast to be made is with a metaphysical thesis that posits an a priori thesis and an a priori law. He asks, ‘[W]‌hat is the exact domain of science in moral philosophy (la morale)?’ (Guyau 1896: 83; 1898: 71). Metaphysical speculation beyond the empirically given and ascertainable can be permitted in moral philosophy, but the most important task is to work out how far an exclusively scientific conception of morality can go. Guyau enquires into the ends pursued by living creatures, including humankind. The unique and profound goal of action cannot, he argues, be ‘the good’ since this is a vague conception which, when opened up to analysis, dissolves into a metaphysical hypotheses. He also rules out duty and happiness: the former cannot be regarded as a primitive and irreducible principle, whilst the latter presupposes an advanced development of an intelligent being. Guyau is in search of a natural aim of human action. The principle of hedonism, which argues for a minimum of pain and a maximum of pleasure, can be explained in evolutionary terms in which conscious life is shown to follow the line of the least suffering. To a certain extent Guyau accepts this thesis but finds it too narrow as a definition since it applies only to conscious life and voluntary acts, not to unconscious and automatic acts. To believe that most of our movements spring from consciousness, and that a scientific analysis of the springs of conduct has only to reckon with conscious motives, would mean being the dupe of an illusion (Guyau 1896: 87; 1898: 74). Although he does not enter into the debate regarding the epiphenomenalism of consciousness, except to note

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it as a great debate in England (he refers to the likes of Henry Maudsley and T. H. Huxley), he holds that consciousness embraces a restricted portion of life and action; acts of consciousness have their origins in dumb instincts and reflex movements. Thus, the ‘constant end of action must primarily have been a constant cause of more or less unconscious movements. In reality, the ends are but habitual motive causes become conscious of themselves [emphases in the original]’ (ibid.). For Guyau (1896: 247; 1898: 210) the cause operating within us before any attraction of pleasure is ‘life’. Pleasure is but the consequence of an instinctive effort to maintain and enlarge life, and nature is to be regarded as self-​moving and self-​governing. Guyau (1896: 90; 1898: 77) writes: One does not always act with the view of seeking a particular pleasure –​ limited and exterior to the act itself. Sometimes we act for the pleasure of acting . . . There is in us an accumulated force which demands to be used. If its expenditure is impeded, this force becomes desire or aversion; if the desire is satisfied, there is pleasure; if it is opposed, there is pain. But it does not follow from this that the stored-​up activity unfolds itself solely for the sake of pleasure –​with pleasure as motive. Life unfolds and expresses itself in activity because it is life. In all creatures pleasure accompanies, much more than it provokes, the search after life.

For Guyau, Epicurus, along with his faulty thinking about evolution, in which pleasure is said to create an organ’s function, needs correcting on this point. In addition, he argues contra Bentham that ‘to live is not to calculate, it is to act’ (Guyau 1896: 247; 1898: 211). An essentially Spinozist position –​the tendency to persist in life is the necessary law of life –​is deduced: ‘The tendency of the creature to continue in existence is at the root of all desire, without forming in itself a determinate desire’ (Guyau 1898: 79). Guyau (1896: 88; 1898: 75) takes this tendency to be one that goes beyond and envelops conscious life, so it is ‘both the most radical of realities and the inevitable ideal’. Therefore, he reaches the conclusion that the part of morality that can be founded on positive facts can be defined as ‘the science which has for object all the means of preserving and enlarging material and intellectual life’ (ibid.). He acknowledges that with a scientific conception of morality living well is largely a matter of an enlarged hygiene. His ethics centre, then, on a desire to increase ‘the intensity of life’ which consists in enlarging the range of activity under all its forms and that is compatible with the renewal of force (Guyau 1896:  89; 1898:  76). Like Spinoza and Nietzsche, Guyau thinks that ‘becoming-​active’ is the cure to many of life’s ills and to passive pessimism (see also Guyau 1896:  175–​8; 1898:  148–​51).13 When Guyau

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(1896:  77; 1898:  66)  argues that all action is an ‘affirmation’, a kind of choice and election, this elicits from Nietzsche one of only four ‘bravos’ he makes in the margins of his copy of the book.14 A ‘superior being’ is one that practises a variety of action; thought itself is nothing other than condensed action and life at its maximum development. Guyau (1896: 42; 1898: 35) defines this superior being as one which ‘unites the most delicate sensibility with the strongest will’. This finds an echo in Nietzsche when he entertains the idea of a future superior human being as one composed of ‘the highest spirituality and strength of will’ (NL 1885 37[8]‌, KSA 11.582). As we shall see, however, Guyau’s conception of the future of morality differs from Nietzsche in placing the emphasis on an expansion of the social and sociability: ‘Develop your life in all directions, be an “individual” as rich as possible in intensive and extensive energy; therefore be the most social and sociable being’ (Guyau 1896: 140–​1; 1898: 117). Science, he argues, can only offer ‘excellent hypothetical advice’ and not anything that would purport to be categorical or absolute. If we wish to promote the highest intensity of life, then we have to experiment, that is, if we take the realm of the practical seriously, we must recognize that a scientific conception of morality cannot give a definite and complete solution of moral obligation (Guyau 1896: 160; 1898: 134). A mature humanity is one that will decide for itself what it wishes to obligate itself to and on the basis of the insights secured by scientific knowledge (for example, placing the stress on questions of hygiene) and in terms of an experimentation15: There is one unchangeable moral philosophy –​that of facts; and, to complete it, when it is not sufficient, there is a variable and individual moral philosophy –​ that of hypotheses. (Guyau 1896: 165; 1898: 139)

Morality in the future will move in the direction not simply of autonomy but of anomy in which the differences between individuals and temperaments are taken into account along with the absence of fixed and apodictic laws and rules. Although Kant begins a revolution in moral philosophy by seeking to make the will autonomous, as opposed to bowing before a law external to itself, he stops halfway with the constraint of universality of the law. This supposes ‘that everyone must conform to a fixed type; that the ideal “reign” of liberty would be a regular and methodical government’ (Guyau 1896: 165; 1898: 139). In contrast to this Guyau argues that true autonomy must produce individual originality and not universal uniformity. The future of intelligence demands that we allow for genuine pluralism of values and ideals freely chosen and rationally deliberated over, as opposed to a uniformity that can only annihilate intelligence.

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Guyau’s hope is that heterodoxy and non-​conventional living will become in the future the true and universal religion or way of life. He envisages an end to penal justice (Guyau 1896: 182; 1898: 154), which again brings him remarkably close to Nietzsche, who expresses the desire to restore innocence to becoming and purify psychology, morality, history and nature of the concepts of guilt and punishment (NL 1888 15[30], KSA 13.425). Moreover, his championing of a ‘truly scientific and philosophic mind’ as one which does not entitle itself to possession of ‘the whole truth’ and whose only faith is that of continual ‘searching’ brings Guyau (1896: 170; 1898: 143) close to the free spirit Nietzsche celebrates in GS 347 as the enemy of fanaticism. In effect, what Guyau has done is to put aside every law anterior or superior to the facts, anything a priori and categorical. Instead we need to start from reality and build up an ideal, extracting ‘a moral philosophy from nature’. Guyau wants to know what the essential and constitutive facts of human nature are. He has curtailed consciousness since unconscious or subconscious life is the real source of our activity. Ethics concerns itself with achieving harmony between the two spheres of existence, unconscious and conscious, and this may reside in living life in ‘the most intensive and extensive possible’ so as to increase the force of life (Guyau 1896: 245; 1898: 209). In the sphere of life we necessarily deal with ‘antinomies’ (conflicts, contestations, etc.); the moralist is always tempted to resolve them once and for all by appealing to a law superior to life: ‘an intelligible, eternal, supernatural law’ (ibid.). But we need to give up making this appeal to such a law. The only possible rule for an exclusively scientific moral philosophy is that it is a more complete and larger life that is able to regulate a less complete and smaller life. Again, we find this echoed in Nietzsche when he writes in the 1886 preface to volume one of HH that it is necessary ‘to grasp the necessary injustice in every for and against . . . life itself is conditioned by the sense of perspective and its injustice’. The greatest injustice is to be found in a state ‘where life has developed at its smallest, narrowest, and neediest’. Nietzsche wishes to aid the cause of what he calls the ‘higher, greater, and richer’ life.

3. Nietzsche was impressed by Guyau’s critique of Kant, his insights into the new dogmatic faith in morality and his claim that the reign of the absolute was now over to be replaced by a new pluralism. Nietzsche has, in fact, anticipated many

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of Guyau’s insights in the works of his middle period. For example, Nietzsche has argued that there is no single moral-​making morality (D 132, KSA 3.123–​5), that the moral law should not be beyond our likes and dislikes (D 108, KSA 3.95–​6) and that we are experiments and our task is to want to be such (D 453, KSA 3.274). Both Guyau and Nietzsche, as we shall see in the next section, move thinking in the direction of a commitment to an experimental ethics. Guyau’s conception of the future is one of new individuals, of individual difference, of the greater intensity of life and so on. These are all things we find promoted in Nietzsche, as when, for example, he argues, ‘Up to now morality has been, above all, the expression of a conservative will to breed the same species, with the imperative: “All variation is to be prevented; only the enjoyment of the species must remain” ’ (NL 1885 35[20], KSA 11.515). As we have seen, it is precisely ‘moral variability’ that Guyau posits as the most desirable future for morality. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche informs his readers that his ‘campaign’ against morality begins in earnest with Dawn, and he adds that we should not smell gunpowder at work here but, provided we have the necessary subtlety in our nostrils, more pleasant odours. Nietzsche is here drawing the reader’s attention to something important, namely, the fact that he wants to open up the possibility of plural ways of being, including plural ways of being moral or ethical. His act is not one of simple wanton destruction. Nietzsche directs his main criticism against what he takes to be the dogmatic view that there is single moral-​making morality. Nietzsche’s ‘campaign’ against morality centres largely on a critique of two modern tendencies:  the Kantian notion of practical reason and its categorical imperative and its Schopenhauerian opponent –​the idea that the mark of morality is living according to sympathetic affects, especially Mitleid, rather than according to the ‘a priori soap bubbles’ of practical reason. Significantly, however, Nietzsche carries forward one key aspect of the Stoic and Kantian conception of morality: viz., their rejection of ‘pathological’ emotions as the grounds of moral action. Kant rejects compassion as the basis of moral action primarily because, so he argues, it puts agents at the mercy of natural necessity. Moral autonomy, he argues, entails freedom from such necessities. While Nietzsche endorses Kant’s rejection of compassion and sympathy as motives of action he does so for different, anti-​Kantian reasons: viz., he believes these motives fundamentally and necessarily compromise individual (and species’) flourishing. Nietzsche claims that sympathetic affects are incompatible with eudaimonia. In this section we will first examine Nietzsche’s arguments against Kantian and Schopenhauerian morality before turning to his defence of the Stoic-​Kantian critique of the tender

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emotions. In the final section we will argue that Nietzsche’s ethical eudaimonism takes a wrong turn by incorporating Stoicism and Kantianism’s anti-​pity perspective. As we shall see, while Nietzsche shares and endorses Guyau’s attempt to formulate a post-​Kantian, naturalistic and experimental ethics, his critique of sympathetic affects puts him at odds with Guyau’s identification of flourishing with sociability. We will briefly assess Nietzsche’s divergence from Guyau’s positive conception of sociability in the final section. Nietzsche, we shall argue, was wrong to conceive sociability and compassion as incompatible with human flourishing. Many of Nietzsche’s claims against morality encompass problems he believes are common to the Kantian and Schopenhauerian perspectives. Nietzsche rejects both moralities first because they both wrongly presuppose that morality must have a universally binding character in which there is a single morality valid for all in all circumstances and for all occasions. Second, Nietzsche suggests that both Kantian and Schopenhauerian conflate morality with asceticism:  their moralities require a person to be dutiful, obedient, self-​sacrificing at all times. By contrast, Nietzsche own ethics harks back to and reinvents ancient ethical eudaimonism. Nietzsche conceives Kant’s moral insistence on ascetic self-​denial as a refinement and remnant of Sittlichkeit’s ancient cruelty (D 539, KSA 3.307–​8). He laments that Kant’s anti-​eudaimonistic morality demands that moral agents sacrifice their own natural interests and desires on the altar of practical reason and its categorical imperative and that Schopenhauerian morality requires that they sacrifice themselves in the name of others’ welfare. Third, Nietzsche rejects Kant and Schopenhauer’s supposition that morality provides us with insight into the true, metaphysical character of the world and existence. Following Darwin, Lamarck and Paul Rée, however, Nietzsche argues that ‘moral man stands no closer to the intelligible world than physical man’ (HH 37, KSA 2.61). Nietzsche argues that Kant and Schopenhauer’s metaphysical picture of morality fails to give us an adequate understanding of moral agency: it does not properly identify moral motives or locate the sources of moral agency. As a result of their focus on ascertaining the metaphysical groundwork of morality, he argues, we currently almost entirely lack scientific knowledge of moral motives and agency. Metaphysics cannot explain our moral motives; this is properly the domain of evolutionary, sociological and psychological thought. Nietzsche and Guyau’s naturalistic, empirical study of moral agency aims to overcome the deficit in our understanding of morality. Nietzsche believes such metaphysical accounts of morality wrongly locate the ‘good’ in the noumenal realm and ‘evil’ in the phenomenal realm. In sharp contrast Nietzsche maintains that we cannot clearly

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separate ‘good’ virtues and ‘evil’ vices: they are both explicable in purely naturalistic terms. For Nietzsche the two are reciprocally conditioning: all good things have arisen out of dark roots through sublimation and spiritualization, and they continue to feed off such roots. Yet even as Nietzsche rejects Kant and Schopenhauer’s metaphysical notion of morality and its anti-​eudaimonistic, ascetic, self-​sacrificing character, in formulating his alternative ethical eudaimonism he retains and defends one central Kantian and Stoic motif: viz., the claim that a fully flourishing life requires rejecting the pathological, ‘soft’ emotions as motives of action. For all its failings, Nietzsche believes that Kant’s conception of morality deserves our praise for standing outside the compassionate or sentimental undercurrent of the modern age. Nietzsche observes that Kant expressly teaches that ‘we must be insensible towards the suffering of others if our beneficence is to possess moral value’ (D 132, KSA 3.125).16 Nietzsche applauds Kant for making the value of other-​ regarding actions contingent on judgements or evaluations made independently of our sensitivity to others’ pain. On this account our beneficence has no value if it is motivated by our sensibility or sensitivity rather than our practical reason. Of course, Nietzsche does not thereby endorse Kant’s own principle or formula of moral judgement, but he does share the view that we ought not to measure the value of other-​regarding actions by our sensitivity to others’ pain. Why does Nietzsche applaud Kantian insensibility? Nietzsche’s fundamental objection is that pity is incompatible with eudaimonia. For this reason Nietzsche approvingly glosses Kant’s claim that by echoing others’ suffering through our pity (Mitleid) we increase the amount of suffering in the world (D 134, KSA 3.127–​8), and in doing so we rarely reduce or eliminate this original suffering (D 144, KSA 3.136–​7).17 We can see then that while Nietzsche rejects Kant’s a priori, anti-​eudaimonistic conception of the moral law, he nevertheless shares the Stoic’s and Kant’s suspicions about the value of pity (Mitleid), fellow-​feeling (Mitgefühl), ‘philanthropy’ (Menschenliebe) and love (Liebe). Pouring cold water on the Schopenhauerian and sentimentalist current of his age Nietzsche surmises that if its obsession with elevating compassion, altruism, philanthropy and love as the highest motivation really took root in practice our ‘poets would dream of nothing but the happy, loveless past, of divine selfishness, of how it was once possible to be alone, undisturbed, unloved, hated, despised on earth, and whatever else may characterise the utter baseness of the dear animal world in which we live’ (D 147, KSA 3.138–​9). The animal world in which Nietzsche’s free spirits live is devoid of tender passions. In Nietzsche’s estimation giving and receiving love and pity is deeply distressing

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and disturbing. He therefore conceives it as incompatible with his new ethical eudaimonism. Nietzsche argues then that a fully flourishing life excludes tender passions and motivations. He identifies at least two separate reasons why we can rightly consider them incompatible with happiness. First, as we have just seen, Nietzsche argues that as the object of these passions we are encumbered and disturbed by others’ demands, interests and motives. Second, he argues that as agents of such passions we are obliged to shape our aims and goals around others’ needs and interests. As compassionate agents we adapt ourselves to the need of our community and in doing so sacrifice ourselves. Regarding the effects of the morality of compassion and altruism he writes:  ‘It seems to do every single person good these days to hear that society is on the road to adapting the individual to fit the needs of the throng and that the individual’s happiness as well as his sacrifice consist in feeling himself to be a useful member of the whole’ (D 132, KSA 3.124). The morality of compassion, as Nietzsche sees it, makes individuals mere functions of the whole. We can, he thinks, explain the modern in terms of a movement towards managing more cheaply, safely, and uniformly individuals in terms of ‘large bodies and their limbs’. This, he says, is ‘the basic moral current of our age’: ‘Everything that in some way supports both this drive to form bodies and limbs and its abetting drives is felt to be good’ (ibid.). Nietzsche reasons that if we endorse Stoicism’s and Kant’s rejection of compassion we can limit this complete adaptation of the individual to the whole. It is on this basis that he applauds both the Stoics and Kant’s rejection of the ethical value of such motives. He conceives this ban on the soft emotions as a precept that will enable individuals to prioritize their own flourishing rather than functionalize themselves for the sake of their community.18 Following Schopenhauer Nietzsche conceives Stoicism as a doctrine of happiness (or the ‘blessed life’) rather than a doctrine of virtue or duty. If we measure Stoic morality and the morality of compassion according to this yardstick of flourishing or health, he argues, then we can judge the former as a higher morality. ‘You say that the morality of being compassionate is a higher morality (Moral) than that of Stoicism? Prove it! But remember that what is “higher” and “lower” in morality is not, in turn to be measured by a moral yardstick: for there is no absolute morality (Moral). So take your rule from somewhere else –​and now beware!’ (D 139, KSA 3.131). For our purposes the important point is that even though Nietzsche rejects the Kantian notion of moral autonomy he maintains that any viable alternative notion of self-​mastery and flourishing must also place a ban on tender

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sympathetic affects. Schopenhauer’s morality of compassion, he argues, gives our attempts at self-​mastery a bad conscience and infuses our self-​interested attempts to achieve ‘happiness’ with guilt. If we examine what is often taken to be the summit of the moral in philosophy –​the mastery of the affects –​Nietzsche argues that there is pleasure to be taken in this mastery: I can impress myself by what I  can deny, defer and resist. It is through this mastery that I  grow and develop. And yet morality as we moderns have come to understand it, in which it is tied to the unegoistic, would have to give such ethical self-​mastery a bad conscience. It is clear, we would contend, that in Dawn Nietzsche is not advocating the overcoming of all possible forms of morality. Nietzsche endeavours to formulate an ethical eudaimonism that requires ‘continual self-​command and self-​overcoming . . . in great things and in the smallest’ (WS 45, KSA 2.573–​ 4). Nietzsche, however, wants to ensure that we do not compromise individual flourishing by endorsing universal or unconditional imperatives (Kant) or compelling individuals to adapt themselves to the needs of the community (Schopenhauer). Nietzsche’s concern is that ‘morality’ in the forms it has assumed in the greater part of human history, right up to Kant’s moral law, has opened up an abundance of sources of displeasure and to the point that one can say that with every ‘refinement in morality’ (Sittlichkeit) human beings have grown ‘more and more dissatisfied with themselves, their neighbour, and their lot’ (D 106, KSA 3.94). Against the Kantian notion of morality as unconditional duty Nietzsche maintains that we cannot prescribe to individuals who wish to become their own lawgiver the path to happiness simply because individual happiness springs from one’s own unknown laws and external prescriptions only serve to obstruct and hinder it:  ‘The so-​called “moral” precepts are, in truth, directed against individuals and are in no way aimed at promoting their happiness’ (D 108, KSA 3.95). Indeed, Nietzsche himself does not intend to lay down precepts for everyone. As he writes, ‘One should seek out limited circles and seek and promote the morality appropriate to them’ (D 194, KSA 3.167). Against Schopenhauer and the entire sentimentalist tradition, Nietzsche argues that individual flourishing is incompatible with prioritizing the so-​called tender, soft, other-​regarding emotions. Against these moralities Nietzsche identifies and supports a kind of ethical and social experimentation that he thinks will facilitate individual flourishing and species diversification rather than the construction of uniform, fully adapted pseudo-​individualism that flows from the dogmatic, universalist models of morality. For Nietzsche it is necessary, for example, to contest the

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idea that there is a single moral-​making morality since every code of ethics that affirms itself in an exclusive manner ‘destroys too much valuable energy and costs humanity much too dearly’ (D 164, KSA 3.147). In the future, he hopes, the inventive and fructifying person shall no longer be sacrificed and ‘numerous novel experiments shall be made in ways of life and modes of society’ (ibid.). When this takes place we will find that an enormous load of guilty conscience has been purged from the world. Humanity has suffered for too long from teachers of morality who wanted too much all at once and sought to lay down precepts for everyone (D 194, KSA 3.167). In the future, care will need to be given to the most personal questions and create time for them (D 196, KSA 3.170–​1). Small individual questions and experiments are no longer to be viewed with contempt and impatience (D 547, KSA 3.317–​18). Contra morality, then, he holds that we ourselves are experiments and our task should be to want to be such. We are to build anew the laws of life and of behaviour by taking from the sciences of physiology, medicine, sociology and solitude the foundation stones for new ideals if not the new ideals themselves (D 453, KSA 3.274). As these sciences are not yet sure of themselves we find ourselves living in either a preliminary or a posterior existence, depending on our taste and talent, and in this interregnum the best strategy is for us to become our own reges (sovereigns) and establish small experimental states. As we shall see in the next section, Nietzsche dedicates his new free spirits to the practical task of bringing about a new epoch in human history centred on individual and social experimentation. This is Nietzsche’s dawn. To understand it fully we need to explore the notion of ethical experimentation he identifies as the key to facilitating individual flourishing and pluralization. What is this ethical experimentation he wants to supplant Kant and Schopenhauer’s anti-​eudaimonistic moralities and their bogus metaphysics? What is required of individuals when they move from a metaphysical to an experimental ethics?

4. We shall now examine Nietzsche’s experimentalism in more detail. Our focus will largely be on the middle period. Here Nietzsche can be seen to be carrying a kind of moral therapy in which the chief aim is to cure us of inflated conceptions of morality, including its imperial and universalist ambitions. Nietzsche does not take the view that there is any necessary conflict between his critique of universal

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morality and his philosophical therapy. Indeed, this is obvious from the fact that in the very same sections that Nietzsche criticizes universalist moralities he proceeds to offer general therapeutic recommendations. Nietzsche assumes that his moral anti-​universalism is compatible with his therapeutic ambitions. We need to examine how Nietzsche understands the relationship between his moral critique and his philosophical therapy. Let us consider first the reasons for Nietzsche’s rejection of universal moral laws before turning to its implications for his therapeutic ambitions. In Dawn Nietzsche opposes the idea of a universally binding moral law for at least two reasons. First, as an anti-​metaphysical naturalist Nietzsche assumes that we should only accept a universal moral law if it can be shown to have ‘natural’ foundations. In other words, he argues that we can legitimately prescribe a course of action as right  –​as something that everyone should or ought to do –​only if we can identify a universal goal or telos intrinsic to our species. Yet following the general Darwinian anti-​teleological principle he argues that we cannot find in nature any final species’ goals or ends. On the Darwinian view, evolution is a purposeless, mechanical process that ‘selects’ from the species’ random variations those that contingently happen to foster its self-​preservation. Second, Nietzsche argues that prescribing universal moral imperatives conflicts with his view that every individual has ‘the right to act arbitrarily (Willkürlicher) and foolishly according to the light, bright or dim, of [their] own reason’ (D 107, KSA 3.94–​5). In Dawn one of Nietzsche’s claims is that individuals and groups should be free to impose on themselves laws that they judge to be in their own interests or conducive to their own flourishing. Nietzsche implies that the legitimacy of moral claims depends on individuals endorsing it on the basis of their own reason. What implications does Nietzsche draw from his evolutionary insight into nature and his Enlightenment commitment to individual self-​legislation for the project of reinventing philosophical therapy? We should focus on Nietzsche’s evolutionary theses. ‘Only if mankind possessed a universally recognized goal’ he argues ‘would it be possible to propose “thus and thus is the right course of action”: for the present there exists no such goal. It is thus irrational and trivial to impose the demands of morality upon mankind’ (D 108, KSA 3.95–​6). It is irrational to impose universal moral demands, Nietzsche supposes, because no species has an intrinsic or fixed design or final purpose. From the perspective of natural history, he maintains, there is simply nothing that our species is intrinsically designed to achieve; our species has no essential telos. Rather species’ attributes, he maintains, emerge randomly and are mechanically selected,

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adapted and transformed or deselected if they prove disadvantageous in the struggle for existence. Nietzsche makes explicit his non-​teleological, evolutionary view of nature a few sections later. Nietzsche speculates that if an impartial investigator studied the evolution of the eye he ‘must arrive at the great conclusion that vision was not the intention behind the creation of the eye, but that vision appeared, rather, after chance has put the apparatus together’ (D 122, KSA 3.115). We can borrow Stephen Jay Gould’s example of non-​teleological evolution to illuminate Nietzsche’s point.19 Gould explains how the feather evolved as a consequence of its adaptive capacity to provide insulation and temperature regulation. Only after they had evolved to serve this function were feathers later ‘exapted’ for their aerodynamic properties. The feather was not designed for any given purpose, rather it was an accidental variation that natural selection mechanically transformed. Flight, in Nietzsche’s terms, was not the intention behind the creation of the feather, but flight appeared, rather, after chance had put the apparatus together. The original use of an organ, drive or practice, therefore, by no means exhausts its possible range of uses; bird’s feathers may have evolved as means of insulation, but they were subsequently co-​opted or exapted for another, altogether different purpose (see D 44, KSA 3.51–​2). Vision and flight are accidents of evolutionary history, not intrinsic purposes built into nature. ‘A single instance of this kind’, Nietzsche remarks, ‘and “purposes” fall away like scales from the eyes!’ (D 122, KSA 3.115).20 In the absence of such divine, intrinsic or essential purposes, Nietzsche argues, moral philosophers have no grounds for proposing that the human species must adopt a universal maxim of action or goal. The Christian and Kantian notion that there is universal goal or moral law that ought to constrain individual judgements of how and to what end to act is inconsistent with the evolutionary perspective. From the evolutionary perspective species’ and individual attributes and goals emerge by chance and they vary across the evolutionary timescale. In this context there simply are no a priori or timeless goals or purposes; there are rather accidents of natural history that have proven adaptive or maladaptive for the species in its struggle for existence. The evolutionary test is whether a given variation (or principle of conduct) gives the species a slight advantage in the struggle for existence. In this respect, evolution is ‘neutral’: any principle can be selected or deselected depending on whether it contributes to the species’ advantage, and what is productive of the species’ advantage changes as its environment changes. ‘Morality’ is simply the species’ condition of existence at

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any given time. ‘Morality’ has no metaphysical basis, only a natural basis that changes over time. Nietzsche’s evolutionary perspective rejects Christian and Kantian idea of universal, timeless moral imperatives. ‘For there is no longer any “ought”, as he explains . . . for morality insofar as it was an “ought”, has been annihilated by our way of thinking as has religion’ (HH 34, KSA 43). Yet Nietzsche does not thereby rule out the possibility or legitimacy of therapeutic recommendations offered as hypothetical or conditional imperatives of the form: if you wish to flourish pursue ‘thus and thus course of action’ or act according to ‘thus and thus judgement’. In other words, Nietzsche argues that philosophers can offer recommendations based not on metaphysical notions of the species’ intrinsic purposes or telos, but on their evaluation of what the species and individuals require to flourish in their given context. ‘To recommend a goal to mankind is something quite different’, as he explains, ‘the goal is then thought of as something which lies in its own discretion; supposing the recommendation appealed to mankind, it could in pursuit of it also impose upon itself a moral law, likewise at its own discretion’ (D 108, KSA 3.96). Nietzsche contrasts recommendations (Empfehlungen) and prescriptions (Vorschriften): the philosophical therapist can offer the former since these are conditional imperatives that allow their recipients to decide for themselves rather than categorical imperatives that by definition deny that the application of rules is a matter of choice or discretion. Here Nietzsche does not directly contest the metaphysical groundwork of a priori moral laws. Rather he offers an explanation of why moral preachers issue such universal moral commands and why these commands may find traction with those to whom they are directed. Nietzsche assumes that an explanation of the genesis of a metaphysical belief is sufficient to make the need for a direct counterargument superfluous. Historical refutation, as he puts it, is the definitive refutation (D 95, KSA 3.86–​7). Nietzsche claims that moral preachers present their prescriptions as categorical imperatives in order to maximize their power over others. They maximize this power by mobilizing an ‘obscure fear and awe’ of the moral law (D 107, KSA 3.94–​5).21 Nietzsche maintains that moral preachers have a deeply profane motive for inspiring this fear: protecting their own social and political power. It is not from ‘sacred’ motives of ensuring that others are set free or redeemed by obeying the moral law, but from the profane motive of ruling their followers that moral preachers issue categorical imperatives. Nietzsche treats the metaphysical notion of a categorical imperative as a rhetorical device moralists use to maximize their power by minimizing their followers’ autonomy. Kant’s metaphysical

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conception of a categorical imperative, he argues, merely enshrines a peculiarly German moral attitude:  to prioritize unconditionally obedience to authority over and above one’s own practical interests in flourishing. Unconditional obedience, he remarks, is ‘the basis of all German moral teaching’ (D 207, KSA 3.185–​7). ‘How different an impression’ Nietzsche observes ‘we receive from the whole morality of antiquity! All those Greek thinkers . . . seem as moralists like a gymnastics teacher who says to his pupil: “Come! Follow me! Submit to my discipline! Then perhaps you will succeed in carrying off the prize before all the Hellenes.” Personal distinction –​that is the antique virtue. To submit, to follow, openly or in secret –​that is German virtue’ (D 207, KSA 3.187–​8). By contrast Nietzsche suggests that philosophical physicians can develop therapeutic recommendations as experientially testable propositions. That is to say, he claims that philosophical physicians’ recommendations should be the result of and subject to a type of experimental testing. Once again Nietzsche’s draws directly on the Hellenistic model of ethics in developing this notion of ethical experimentation. ‘So far as praxis is concerned’, he observes, ‘I view the various moral schools as experimental laboratories in which a considerable number of recipes for the art of living have been thoroughly practised and lived to the hilt. The results of all their experiments belong to us, as our legitimate property’ (NL 1881 15[59], KSA 9.655–​6). In order to discover whether the various recipes for the art of living are conducive to health or sickness, Nietzsche suggests, we must put them into practice and observe whether they have a regular set of effects on our health. Nietzsche’s therapist draws heavily on therapeutic knowledge derived from ‘experience’ rather than mere ‘knowledge’. The Nietzschean physician, as he puts it, lives ‘with a head free of fever, equipped with a handful of knowledge and a bagful of experiences’ (D 449). Through such experimental testing, Nietzsche implies, the physician can develop reliable knowledge about what contributes to the species’ flourishing in its current context. Nietzsche’s therapist, in short, replaces metaphysically grounded moral laws with empirically tested health recommendations. Nietzsche then does not believe that his anti-​teleological evolutionary principle or his Enlightenment principle of legitimacy necessarily rules out the identification of successful therapies. Nietzsche’s evolutionary principle simply entails that the human species has no essential purpose or telos. In the Darwinian framework this means that the species’ attributes are chance occurrences mechanically selected, so to speak, because they give it a slight edge in the evolutionary struggle. The eye was not designed for vision, the feather for flight or the species for any particular purpose or ‘higher’ end –​be this conceived as

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reason, duty or happiness. ‘Evolution (Entwicklung)’, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘does not have happiness in view, but evolution and nothing else’ (D 108, KSA 3.96). Philosophers cannot therefore claim to have knowledge of such an essential telos and to use this knowledge as the basis of their therapies. If therapists recommend a certain type of medicine as generally or universally applicable, they can do so not on the grounds that they believe it coheres with a universal human telos, but because they believe it enables individuals to achieve their optimal flourishing at a certain stage of evolution. Nietzsche sees this as an important advance in our ‘meta-​ethical’ knowledge:  we can now see moral rules not as metaphysical or divine mandates, but rather as rules that may or may not serve our flourishing as natural creatures. He also identifies this as an important breakthrough in our method of evaluating moral principles. Nietzsche claims that since we cannot know in advance whether a new rule or principle will facilitate our flourishing the only way to evaluate this is by way of experiment. Experimentation, he claims, is a learning process. Nietzsche proposes experimentation as a means of ‘moral’ or ‘practical’ learning. We must put rules or norms into practice in order to determine their effects and evaluate their worth. Nietzsche argues that in order to determine the value or necessity of a traditional or new morality we must experiment with the form of life it prescribes. We can measure moralities, Nietzsche implies, by testing them in practice and comparing the results of such experiments in living (D 61, KSA 3.61–​2). This still leaves open the question of what these experiments test and the criteria Nietzsche proposes we use to evaluate their outcomes. Nietzsche suggests that these experiments test the effects of different types of ‘moralities’ or value structures on human life, in particular their effects on the possibilities for leading a ‘heroic’ life, or, in Guyau’s terms, on the ‘intensity of life’. In GS 7, KSA 3.378–​80, Nietzsche elucidates this point by drawing an analogy between moralities and climates: just as different climates enable different types of species to flourish so too different moralities allow different ways of life to flourish. By following universalist moral prescriptions, Nietzsche implies, it is as if the species had compelled itself to live in one particular climate zone while shunning the whole range of other possible climates and the forms of life that they allow to flourish. Since in this way universalist moralities proscribe experimentation with different climates or values, he argues, we remain ignorant of the full range of value perspectives that might act as conditions of existence and therefore also of the full scope of human diversity or what he calls ‘beauty’.

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Against this proscription Nietzsche imagines a millennia of ethical experimentation. Its outcome will be a comprehensive knowledge of how moralities contribute to growth of ‘the plant “man” ’ (BGE 44, KSA 5.61) and what value climates are optimal for the propagation of different types of plants. Nietzsche conceives his ethical experimentalism as a way of discovering this array of as yet unexplored climates and their forms of life. We may have completed our physical geography, but we have barely begun to map our moral geography. Our current map, he believes, identifies only a small portion of our moral geography. For this reason he conceives ethical experimentalism in terms of the promise of new dawns –​days that will reveal new, unexplored human possibilities.22 There are so many new days ahead of us, he implies, because we have barely begun to discover these new types of human flourishing. ‘As surely as the wicked (Bösen) enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling’, he writes, ‘so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty: and many of them have not yet been discovered’ (D 468, KSA 3.280–​1). Nietzsche’s experimentalism aims to discover the many different types of beauty that remain as yet undiscovered. In order to achieve this goal Nietzsche proposes that instead of following metaphysical moralists in contemplating allegedly eternal forms or seeking to identify the groundwork of morality we investigate moralities scientifically and experimentally: i.e. we investigate the genesis, evolution and outcomes of previous moralities and we test the outcomes of new values through experimentation. Nietzsche’s science of morals involves tracking historically all the many values and practices that have given life a certain shape, appearance and direction. Nietzsche conceives his experimentalism as an integral part of this science: it is analogous to a laboratory experiment where we can isolate a specific set of values by practising them in our own lives and observing their regular set of effects. We might ask, for example, ‘How has morality as a condition of existence, a so-​ called “moral climate”, nurtured or impeded the human drives, and what type of “plant” does it propagate?’ We can conceive previous moralities such as Stoicism and Epicureanism as experimental moralities that reveal how certain moralities act as conditions of existence, or we can experiment with other values to achieve the same end. Nietzsche’s metaphor implies that morality establishes the basic conditions that shape the human drives and that some moral climates might be more ‘favourable’ to some forms of life than others. In other words, Nietzsche’s idea of morality as a condition of existence opens up the possibility that we can measure the value of moralities in terms of the way in which they shape, nurture or develop human drives. Nietzsche emphasizes that human drives ‘still could

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grow’ in very different ways depending on the moral climates brought to bear on their development. Nietzsche suggests that his new scientific study of morality identifies the erroneousness ‘of moral judgements to date’. Nietzsche identifies at least three moral ‘errors’. The metaphysical error that consists in the belief that good and evil are objective, independent properties of actions or drives. Against this view, he holds that nothing is good/​evil in-​itself (D 210, KSA 3.189–​90). If we experience moral norms as objective or inescapable this is merely a contingent outcome of our contingent natural history (see HH 39, KSA 2.62–​4).23 Contra Kant Nietzsche identifies the value of moralities in terms of their natural effects on ‘life’ or the drives. Nietzsche conceives this post-​metaphysical conception of values as significant because it permits ethical experimentation. By definition the metaphysical view proscribes experiment by identifying one and only one set of value judgements as objective or permissible. By contrast, Nietzsche’s post-​ metaphysical, naturalist view, which conceives values as conditions of existence that promote certain types of ‘plants’ within the species allows that (1) the value of our values turns on which particular kind of plant/​s we wish to cultivate; and (2)  we may not yet have discovered the full range of variations our species is capable of producing and the values required to promote such as yet unrealized variations. Nietzsche identifies another type of ‘error’ in contemporary naturalists’ conception of morality as a naturally selected mechanism of adaptation. Nietzsche’s criticism of these naturalists provides us with clue about the measure he uses to establish an ‘order of rank’ among values. As with Guyau, Nietzsche claims that experimentation should not simply be aimed at multiplying the available number of climates and forms of life, but at identifying the values that facilitate the most ‘intense’ forms of life. Nietzsche argues that if we measure altruistic moral values by the Darwinian naturalist’s measure  –​the species’ adaptation to its environment –​we can conclude that they are ‘errors’: they do not facilitate species’ preservation. Against these contemporary naturalists Nietzsche argues that the contemporary altruistic morality of good and evil, which naturalists have inherited from earlier metaphysical systems, does not sum up what is useful for the species. In fact, he argues, the morality of good and evil is an evolutionary danger: if we were to allow this morality to operate as the species’ fundamental condition of existence, it would in fact perish (GS 1, KSA 3.345–​6). Nietzsche does not contest their evolutionary or genealogical explanation of morality, only their substantive claim that the cooperation altruism promotes is a necessary condition of existence. The ‘error’ here lies not in the metaphysical conception

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of values as eternal and objective but in the mistaken judgement that our current values accurately select the drives required to facilitate species’ flourishing and deselect those that impede its. Nietzsche then identifies two distinct kinds of error: the metaphysical error of value objectivity and the naturalist error of utility miscalculation. Nietzsche’s indictment of the naturalist’s moral ‘error’ is still only an immanent critique: it indicts the Darwinian naturalists according to their own criteria. It does not yet contest their measure of value (adaptation) or spell out an alternative measure of value. Nietzsche then takes the controversial step of contesting what he conceives as the Darwinians’ fundamental error, viz., measuring the value moralities in terms of the allegedly naturalistic principle of species’ adaptation. Nietzsche suggests his alternative naturalistic line of inquiry into moralities as conditions of existence culminate in ‘the most delicate question: “Can science not only eliminate morality as ‘error’, but also furnish (zu geben) goals of action?” ’ (GS 7, KSA 3.379). After proving that it can annihilate goals of action Nietzsche suggests that ethical experimentation can help address this question. In place of the Kantian search for the metaphysical ground of morality and the Darwinian search for the natural grounds of morality as a successful mechanism of adaptation, he envisages centuries of moral experimentation in which ‘every kind of heroism could find satisfaction’, an experimenting that would ‘eclipse all the great projects and sacrifices of history to date’ (GS 7, KSA 3.379–​80; our italics). Nietzsche conceives this great ethical experimentation as a means for ascertaining how different moralities or value regimes might cultivate or support different ‘heroisms’ and the structure of human drives on which they depend. Nietzsche’s target here is both the metaphysical picture of morality and his contemporaries’ naturalist picture of morality. Kantians and naturalists alike identify a single type of morality as legitimate, but unlike Kantians the naturalists justify this morality a posteriori as an evolutionary mechanism of self-​ preservation. Nietzsche’s ethical experimentation rejects the Kantian a priori claim that there is a single, unconditional morality and the naturalists’ a posteriori claim that value or measure of morality lies in its contribution to a species’ self-​preservation. Against Kantians he maintains that there are many moralities and their value lies in their effects, but against the Darwinians he uses a very different, non-​Darwinian measure of the value. Nietzsche insists that this non-​Darwinian measure in nonetheless true to nature. We should not conceive nature as a utility maximizer that ‘aims’ at self-​preservation, he claims, but as an absurd squanderer of life (GS 349).24 Moralities that structure the drives to make self-​preservation possible, he claims, are exceptions within

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nature; the rule is ‘heroic’ squandering of energy. Nietzsche’s allegedly naturalistic measure is implied by his choice of the word ‘heroism’. Heroic life, as Nietzsche conceives it, is the antithesis of self-​preservation: ‘What makes one heroic? To approach at the same time one’s highest suffering and one’s highest hope’ (GS 268).25 Nietzsche’s experimentation aims not at identifying moralities that establish secure conditions of life (self-​preservation via adaptation), but identifying the full range of moralities that make possible ‘heroic’ lives or lives that require enormous risks in the pursuit of ‘higher’ goals (see also GS 292 and 303, KSA 3.532–​3 and 541–​2). Nietzsche shares the Hellenistic view that the fundamental principle of ethics is to ‘live according to nature’, but this is not to live in serene, untroubled harmony with a providential order (Stoic), tranquilly through the satisfaction of natural and necessary pleasures (Epicurean), or through ‘modest’ adaptation to the environment (Darwinian), but to live heroically. Nietzsche’s concept of ethical experimentation challenges Kantian ethics (as he understood it) insofar as it defends a plurality of moral perspectives and identifies the natural origins of metaphysical morality. Nietzsche’s ethical experimentation also challenges Darwinian naturalism insofar as it rejects the view that nature ‘measures’ different moralities in terms of successful adaptation. Nietzsche replaces Kantian universalizabilty and Darwinian adaptation as measures of value, with the measure of ‘heroism’, or in Guyau’s terms ‘the intensity of living’. Nietzsche’s ethical experimentation aims to expand the scope for different kinds of heroism by identifying the climates or value conditions that enable them to flourish. Nietzsche ethical experimentation replaces universality and self-​preservation with ‘heroism’ as the measure of the value of values.

5. Although the late Nietzsche criticizes Guyau for remaining within the ambit of free thinking, in his middle period writings he too favours the kind of ethical experimentalism Guyau champions. Their criticism of Kant is strikingly similar. Both see Kant’s ethics as a mode of thinking that has been superseded by evolutionary theories’ insights into the origins of moral feelings or sensations. On the one hand, they investigate the historical sources of feelings of duty and obligation, and on the other they champion the ‘rights’ of free-​spirited individuals to engage in ethical experiments. They also both identify such ethical experimentation as a way of promoting moral variability and species’ diversification.

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As Guyau notes, although the ‘rigorous law’ of Kant’s philosophy still reigns in some minds, it is necessary to deviate from it practically. This moral philosophy is no longer the Jupiter whose frown was sufficient to move the world, but rather ‘the prince’ that can now be disobeyed without too much danger. Guyau (1896: 171; 1898: 144) asks: is there not something higher than this mock royalty, and must we not reject all ‘absolute sovereignty’ and in order to promote ‘individual speculation’? Similarly, in his middle period writings, such as Dawn, Nietzsche seeks to advance the cause of emerging individuals who no longer consider themselves to be bound by existing mores and laws and are thus making the first attempts to organize and create for themselves a right. Hitherto, he claims, such individuals have lived their lives under the jurisdiction of a guilty conscience, being decried and decrying themselves as criminals, freethinkers and immoralists (D 164, KSA 3.146–​7). Although Nietzsche thinks their experimentalism will make the coming century a precarious one (it may mean, as he notes, that a rifle hangs on each and every shoulder), it is one that he thinks we should support since it at least ensures that there will be opponents of any claims to a moral monopoly. Though on some occasions Nietzsche gives the impression that he wishes to see the abolition of morality tout court in truth he argues for something more specific and limited: namely, liberation from the narrow and superstitious, fear-​ ridden bonds of unconditional morality (NL 1887 10[164], KSA 12.551–​2). After Kant he thinks we need a new perspective on moral values, one that will enable us to discover how the type ‘man’ can be further strengthened and elevated (NL 1885–​6 2[131], KSA 129–​32). This requires, so he claims, that we extend the concept of ‘morality’ and recognize the need for a moral pluralism –​as he says, the values of the herd can be allowed to rule but in and for the herd (NL 1886–​7 7[6]‌, KSA 12.273–​83; see Schacht 1983: 463, 469; Conway 1997: 28–​34). Moreover, Nietzsche suggests that we should extend this pluralism to cater for constitutional differences between individuals and types. Different moralities, he argues, are warranted in different human contexts and in relation to different human types. We should also not conflate Nietzsche’s ‘experimental morality’ (NL 1883–​ 4 24[15], KSA 10.651–​2) in which one gives oneself a goal with a petty egoism that aims at identifying how to lead a life of minimal danger, risk or adversity. On the contrary, Nietzsche conceives this experimentalism as practices in the service of discovering how one might expand and ‘elevate’ the species’ capacities and powers. Nietzsche’s experimentalist ethic requires individuals to test various modes of living and maxims of action to determine which

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enable them to expand the scope of human flourishing. Nietzsche maintains that this experimentalism requires free spirits to overcome the suffering they necessarily experience when they jettison comforting horizons and moral codes, or ‘murder’ the law, as he puts it, and not give way to the pity they might feel over the distress their moral transgressions cause those settled spirits wedded to tradition (D 146, 562, KSA 3.137–​8, 327). Free spirits must, as he puts it, sojourn in the wilderness. Nietzsche therefore suggests that the key features of spiritual superiority include indifference to one’s own and others’ tender emotions and feelings for the sake of pursuing goals that go beyond the species’ current limits. The type of morality Nietzsche posits for the future, therefore, might best be described as ‘supra-​individualistic’ even if it is specific individuals who practise the experimental life and lead the way by offering themselves and their lives as sacrifices to knowledge. Here the goal is a new ‘ploughshare’ of potential universal benefit and enrichment, leading to a strengthening and elevation of the human feeling of power (D 146, KSA 3.137–​8). Finally, one cannot overlook the differences that ultimately separate Guyau and Nietzsche. Guyau’s philosophy of life departs from the core assumptions of Nietzsche’s thinking. For him, life is expansive in the sense of a need to share: ‘It is as impossible to shut up the intelligence as to shut up flame’ (Guyau 1896: 247; 1898: 210). For Guyau human nature is sociable and cannot be entirely selfish even if it wished to be: ‘We are open on all sides, on all side encroaching and encroached upon . . . Life is not only nutrition; it is production and fecundity’ (ibid.). It is this fecundity of life that reconciles egoism and altruism for Guyau. He thinks that an evolutionary growth can be located in the development of human nature in which from a growing fusion of sensibilities and the increasingly sociable character of elevated pleasures there arises a superior necessity, a kind of duty in fact, which moves us towards others and does so naturally and rationally: ‘We cannot enjoy ourselves in ourselves as on an isolated island . . . Pure selfishness . . . instead of being a real affirmation of self, is a mutilation of self’ (Guyau 1896: 249; 1898: 212). Guyau objects to any ethics of pure egoism: ‘We cannot mutilate ourselves, and pure egoism would be meaningless, an impossibility. In the same way that the ego is considered an illusion by contemporary psychology, that there is no personality, that we are composed of an infinite number of beings and tiny consciousnesses, in the same way we might say that egoist pleasure is an illusion:  my pleasure does not exist without the pleasure of others . . . My pleasure, in order to lose nothing of its intensity, must

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maintain all of its extension’. Guyau regards morality conceived as caritas as the great ‘flower of life’: There is a certain generosity which is inseparable from existence and without which we die –​we shrivel up internally. We must put forth blossoms . . . in reality, charity is but one with overflowing fecundity; it is like a maternity too large to be confined within the family. (Guyau 1896: 101; 1898: 87)

Nietzsche finds this aspect of Guyau’s thinking incredible. Like Guyau he wishes to push life in the direction of a maximization of individual difference or ‘individual speculation’. Yet in opposition to Guyau Nietzsche often seems to assume that this entails a radical form of self-​sufficiency, associability and incommunicability (NL 1880 6[158], KSA 9.  237). Nietzsche stresses that his model of individual experimentalism is incompatible with all or most forms of shared sentiment, especially shared suffering (Mitleid). In many ways Nietzsche’s ethical experimentalism would have benefitted from following Guyau in recognizing the value of shared sentiment for human flourishing. In this respect Guyau’s ethic helps to clarify an important philosophical and ethical inconsistency in Nietzsche’s perspective. In The Gay Science Nietzsche is acutely aware that the Stoic strategy of eliminating the passions, conceived as a capacity to be affected by external causes, significantly limits on our capacity to flourish (GS 12, 306, 326, KSA 3.383–​4, 544, 553–​4; see Ure and Ryan 2014). ‘In denying value to stimulation, suffering and passion’ as Armstrong (2013, 20)  explains ‘Stoicism also denies what, for Nietzsche, is a fundamental condition for growth in activity and joy; namely, openness to being affected. Insofar as Stoic ethics advocates withdrawal, endurance and indifference towards the world, it closes the door to valuable sources of stimulation and struggle, thus impeding rather than promoting human freedom and flourishing’. Yet Nietzsche follows just this course in rejecting Mitleid or shared suffering as a pathological affect that only leads to ill-​health (D 134, KSA 3.127–​8). If, as Nietzsche argues strongly elsewhere, overcoming one’s own suffering is a necessary condition of individual flourishing then prime facie there is good reason for supposing that receptivity to and overcoming others’ suffering can also contribute to one’s own and others’ flourishing. Indeed, on the score Nietzsche wants to have his cake and eat it too. In GS he declares that he wants to ‘teach . . . what is understood by so few today, least of all by those preachers of pity: Mitfreude!’ (GS 338, KSA 3.568). Nietzsche concedes that Mitfreude is an important part of those mutually beneficial friendships that contribute to both parties’ flourishing,

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but he draws the line at Mitleid. Mitfreude, he declares, not Mitleid, makes the friend (HH 499, KSA 2.320). Yet, the same judgements that motivate Mitfreude with friends must also motivate Mitleid: one cannot genuinely have one with the other, and in fact, if Nietzsche is correct, one must maximize the latter in order to maximize the former. In the first place, if we genuinely share in others’ joy, then we must also suffer with them when they experience misfortune or defeat. The condition of our joy in others’ success or good fortune is distress over their failure or misfortune. Second, Nietzsche argues that maximal suffering is a necessary condition of maximal joy. Nietzsche makes just this conceptual point in criticizing what he sees as Stoicism’s cowardly or prudent failure to embrace the conditions of human flourishing: ‘To this day you have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief . . . or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet’ (GS 12, KSA 3.383–​4). The same applies (mutatis mutandis) to our relations with others: if we wish to have as much pleasure or joy as possible in and through our relations with others (Mitfreude), then we must also be prepared to derive as much displeasure as possible through shared suffering (Mitleid). One cannot be a teacher of Mitfreude without being a teacher of Mitleid. No doubt Nietzsche had reason for his scepticism about whether Mitleid might contribute to one’s own and others’ joy in life. As he noted with a mixture of despair and contempt, Rousseau and Schopenhauer argued that those who suffer with others are also those who also envy their success (Ure 2006). However Nietzsche’s justified suspicion that in some cases ‘pity’ merely masks envy should have led him to criticize inauthentic pity and friendship, not mistakenly and inconsistently sever the ties between shared suffering and shared joy. Perhaps then even if we are destined to forget Guyau as an intellectual figure, we should not forget his warning that we mutilate ourselves without sharing others’ pleasures and pains. Guyau signposts the post-​Stoic, post-​Kantian road Nietzsche should have taken in formulating a new ethical eudaimonism.

Notes 1 Brobjer (2008: 91) notes that Nietzsche’s reading of the text ‘is likely to have been of major importance for his views on ethics’. For Guyau’s text we have consulted the fourth edition of the French from 1896 and the English translation of 1898 based on the second edition. The differences between the different editions are slight.

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2 Kropotkin (1924: 322). 3 For some details, see Brobjer (2008: 102, 235 n. 32). Guyau’s text was first translated into English in 1897. 4 This note is from May–​July of 1885. It begins with Nietzsche noting the deplorable condition of literature on morality in today’s Europe and then reviews contributions in the area from England, France and Germany. Nietzsche singles out Guyau’s book for special praise along with Rée’s The Origin of Moral Sensations (1877) and W. H. Rolph’s Biological Problems (1881). He regards these three texts as the strongest in contemporary ethics. 5 Glatzer (1962: 11). 6 Guyau’s Esquisse appears as part of a set of books listed by Nietzsche in a note from the beginning of 1885 (NL 1884–​5 29[67], KSA 11.352). His annotated copy of the book has been lost but his annotations can be found in the appendix to the German translation of Guyau’s text by Elisabeth Schwarz: see Guyau (1912: 279–​ 303). The marginal notes were copied from the original by Gast and obtained by Schwarz, supported by Fouillée, from the archive. For further insight see Fidler (1994: 77 n. 3) and Brobjer (2008: 234 n. 22). Nietzsche writes ‘Ja’ approximately ten times, ‘bravo’ four times, ‘ecco’ two times and ‘gut’ and ‘sehr gut’ approximately thirty times. 7 Nietzsche was, of course, very familiar with Spencer and Hartmann, including these particular works, and he critically engages with them in his notes. Although he did read Fouillée’s book on contemporary social science in 1887, we do not know if he was familiar with his book on moral systems though we think not. See Brobjer (2008: 102, 181 n. 67). Nietzsche refers to Fouillée in NL 1887 10[171], KSA 12.559 (along with Guyau), and NL 1887–​8 11[137] and 11[147], KSA 13.63 and 13.69. Fouillee was Guyau’s stepfather and wrote a book on Nietzsche after Guyau’s premature death, Nietzsche et l’immoralisme (1902). Nietzsche’s annotations to his copy of Guyau’s Esquisse are also discussed in it. NL 1887–​8 11[137], KSA 13.63, indicates that Nietzsche regarded him as another free thinker: ‘The “growing autonomy of the individual”: these Parisian philosophers such as Fouillée speak of this they ought to take a look at the race mountonnière [race of sheep] to which they belong! Open your eyes, you sociologists of the future! The individual has grown strong under opposite conditions; what you describe is the most extreme weakening and impoverishment of mankind; you even desire it and employ to that end the whole mendacious apparatus of the old ideal! You are so constituted that you actually regard your herd-​animal needs as an ideal! A complete lack of psychological integrity!’ 8 Orru (1983: 503–​4). 9 In the French original Guyau employs the Greek for both terms. Guyau’s conception of ‘anomos’ was of course taken up by Emile Durkheim and put to quite different

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ends in his well-​known theory of ‘pathological anomie’. For further insight, see Orru and Miller (1996). GMS 460. On this issue, see Ross (2009). In GS 335, KSA 3.560–​4, Nietzsche seeks to show that any attempt to truly know ourselves must have recourse to the intellectual conscience which works as a conscience behind our moral conscience and which may be little more than the product of habitually acquired opinions and valuations. Guyau’s insight seems to anticipate the approach to the categorical imperative Bergson (1979: 26) proposes in his Two Sources: ‘an absolutely categorical imperative is instinctive or somnambulistic, enacted as such in a normal state . . .’ . See also Nietzsche on ‘the automaton of duty’ in A 11, KSA 6.177. There is an extended treatment on pessimism by Guyau in his Non-​Religion of the Future, where he treats the same figures that occupy Nietzsche’s attention: Leopardi, Schopenhauer, and von Hartmann (Guyau 1962: 457–​66). For Nietzsche’s annotation, see Guyau (1912: 286). On the need for an ‘experimental morality’, compare Nietzsche, BGE 210, KSA 5.142–​4, NL 1883–​4 24[15], KSA 10.651–​2, and NL 1885–​6 1[136], KSA 12.42. Arguably, Nietzsche oversimplifies Kant’s analysis of pity (Mitleid). Drawing on his argument in the Doctrine of Virtue 34/​35 Gudrun von Tevenar plausibly argues that Kant in fact ‘rejects Mitleidenschaft, tolerates pity, and recommends compassion’; Tevenar (2001: 252). On Kant’s troubled reflections on the value of pity (Mitleid) as a motivation of moral action, see Tevenar (2001: 235–​54), Baxley (2010: 163–​71) and Fraser (2010: ­chapter 5). Nietzsche glosses Kant’s ‘Doctrine of Virtue’, MS §34 457. It is true that Nietzsche occasionally advocates a kind of ‘empathy’, but he does so for epistemic not social reasons. Indeed, he advocates empathy without sympathy. In GS 249, KSA 3.515, for example, he claims that we need to develop what we might call ‘empathy’ in order to appropriate others’ perspectives for ourselves, but he does not advocate that we ought to use this empathy to develop our concern about their fate. Indeed, as Nietzsche takes great pains to stress in this very section, his kind of empathy is motivated by a purely selfish greed to appropriate others’ eyes for the sake of expanding or refining one’s own vision. Nietzsche’s empathy is a greed for possession (see also GS 14, KSA 3.386–​7). Nietzsche goes on to explain in GS 338 that if what we might call our natural, ‘autonomic’ empathy begin to tilt over into sympathy, we need to shut it down by placing a layer of several centuries between ourselves and the cries of distress in the present that threaten to lure us down the path of sympathy or pity with our fellow citizens or friends. So Nietzsche endorses empathy as a way of expanding ourselves and appropriating others for ourselves, but he does not by any means endorse or support sympathy. In fact Nietzsche urges us to protect and immunize ourselves against this pathological love lest it lure us into helping others rather than following our own way.

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19 Gould (1991). 20 Nietzsche ironically alludes here to Paul’s famous conversion on the road to Damascus, Acts 9:1–​19. When the scales fall from Paul’s eye he is able to see that Jesus is the Son of God who can deliver believers from the via dolorosa. Paul’s conversion is by way of a religious epiphany. It converts him from Judaism’s defender to its attacker. By contrast, when the scales fall from the eyes of the Nietzschean he is able to see that there are no purposes or designs in nature, only the operations of blind chance. The Nietzschean conversion is by way of evolutionary history. 21 Nietzsche clearly alludes to Kant’s GMS and KpV, especially the chapter ‘Incentives of Pure Practical Reason’. ‘Two things fill the mind with ever-​increasing wonder and awe (Ehrfurcht), the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’ 22 Nietzsche prefaced Daybreak with a phrase from the Rig Veda: ‘There are so many days (Morgenröthen) that have not yet broken’ (D, KSA 3.9). 23 See also Joyce (2006). For a cogent analysis of the significance of such genealogical accounts for the epistemic standing of our moral judgements, see Hanfield (forthcoming). His analysis supports the Nietzschean claim that genealogical considerations suggest that ‘we are not justified in believing certain core [Kantian] claims about morals: claims about the inescapability of moral demands and the appropriateness of guilt’. 24 We do not have space here to examine the competing interpretations of Nietzsche’s concept of life as ‘will to power’. For an excellent summary and analysis of these interpretations, see Loeb (2015). 25 This heroic conception of Nietzsche’s ethics of experimentation is consistent with what we might call Bernard Reginster’s (2006) ‘Olympian’ conception of Nietzsche’s ethics. He argues that it ‘essentially rests on the view that the difficulty of an achievement contributes to its value’ (13).

References Armstrong, A. (2013), ‘Passions, Power, and Practical Philosophy: Spinoza and Nietzsche contra the Stoics’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 44: 6–​24. Baxley, A. M. (2010), Kant’s Theory of Virtue: The Value of Autocracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bergson, H. (1979), Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and C. Brereton, with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Brobjer, T. H. (2008), Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

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Conway, D. W. (1997), Nietzsche and the Political, London: Routledge. Fidler, C. G. (1994), ‘On Jean-​Marie Guyau, Immoraliste’, Journal of the History of Ideas 55: 75–​98. Fraser, M. (2010), The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Glatzer, N. N. (1962), ‘Introduction’, in J.-​M. Guyau, The Non-​religion of the Future: A Sociological Study, New York: Schocken Books. Gould, S. J. G. (1991), ‘Exaptation a Crucial Tool for an Evolutionary Psychology’, Journal of Social Issues 47 (3): 43–​65. Guyau, J.-​M. (1896), Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation, ni sanction, 4ième édition, Paris: Baillière/​Alcan. Guyau, J.-​M. (1898), A Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction, trans. Gertrude Kapteyne, London: Watts & Co. Guyau, J.-​M. (1912), Sittlichkeit ohne ‘Pflicht’, Ins Deutsche übersetzt von Elisabeth Schwarz. Mit einer für die deutsche Ausgabe verfassten biographischkritischen Einleitung von Alfred Fouillée und bisher unveröffentlichen Randbemerkungen Friedrich Nietzsches, Leipzig: W. Klinkhardt. Guyau, J.-​M. (1962), The Non-​religion of the Future: A Sociological Study, New York: Schocken Books. Hanfield, T. (forthcoming), ‘Genealogical Explanations of Chance and Morals’, in U. Leibowitz and N. Sinclair (eds), Explanation in Ethics and Mathematics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Joyce, R. (2006), The Evolution of Morality, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kropotkin, P. (1924), Ethics, Origin and Development, trans. L. S. Friedland and J. R. Piroshnikoff, New York: The Dial Press. Loeb, P. (2015), ‘Will to Power and Panpsychism: A New Exegesis of BGE 36’, in M. Dries and P. Kail (eds), Nietzsche on Mind and Nature, 57–​88, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orru, M. (1983), ‘The Ethics of Anomie: Jean-​Marie Guyau and Émile Durkheim’, The British Journal of Sociology 34 (4): 499–​518. Orru, M., and Miller, W. W. (1996), Durkheim, Morals, and Modernity, Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press. Reginster, B. (2006), The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ross, A. (2009), ‘What Is the Force of the Moral Law in Kant’s Practical Philosophy?’ Parallax 15(2): 27–​40. Schacht, R. (1983), Nietzsche, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Tevenar, G. T. (2001), Pity and Compassion, Birkbeck College, University of London (PhD). Ure, M. (2006), ‘The Irony of Pity: Nietzsche contra Schopenhauer and Rousseau’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 32: 68–​91.

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Ure, M., and Ryan, T. (2014), ‘Nietzsche’s Post-​Classical Therapy’, PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy 25: 91–​110.

Translations of Kant’s works Kant, I. (1964), Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton, New York: Harper and Row. Kant, I. (1964), The Doctrine of Virtue: Part II of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. by Mary J. Gregor, New York: Harper and Row.

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Question or Answer? Kant, Nietzsche and the Practical Commitment of Philosophy Paul van Tongeren

For Immanuel Kant as well as for Friedrich Nietzsche, it is only to some extent that ‘ethics’, or more generally ‘practical philosophy’, can be called a specific part of philosophy, next to ‘theoretical philosophy’. Of course, in Kant we find the distinction between (the critique of pure) theoretical and (the critique of pure) practical reason, and in several of Nietzsche’s books we recognize the same distinction –​for example, in the titles of book chapters such as ‘On the Prejudices of Philosophers’ or ‘Natural History of Morals’ (BGE I and V). At the same time, however, both philosophers are convinced that philosophy is as such a practical affair:  together with Socrates they hold that philosophy aims at some kind of improvement of the (individual as well as social and cultural) practice of life. Kant in his Introduction to Logic opposes ‘[t]‌he master of the art of reason, or as Socrates calls him, the philodoxus’ to ‘the true philosopher’, who is a ‘practical philosopher, [a] teacher of wisdom by doctrine and example’ (Log 24). Moreover, Nietzsche knows himself to be closely related to Socrates (cf. Nietzsche, NL 1875 6[3], KSA 8.97), whom he criticizes not because of the practical commitment of his philosophizing, but rather because of the way he implemented this commitment, or more precisely, because of the kind of life that committed itself in his philosophy. The philosopher’s practical commitment that I am referring to is not so much made explicit in declaratory statements, but rather expresses itself in the tone and the tendency of his philosophy. In this chapter I want to focus on one of the ways in which it articulates itself in Nietzsche’s writings, especially in contradistinction to what we find (or rather what Nietzsche finds) in Kant. It will be my

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contention that for Nietzsche, not only but most strongly in the writings of 1886/​ 1887,1 his practical commitment has the form of the effort to make himself and his selected readers incorporate a distressing question: how to live under conditions of nihilism? With help of three examples from Nietzsche’s writings –​each one related to Kant, though in different ways  –​I  will try to show how this commitment is performed, that is, how that question appears and is forced upon the reader. The first will be brief and concerns the presentation of an aphorism that explicitly criticizes Kant; the second is a bit more elaborate and gives an interpretation of a series of aphorisms in which Nietzsche summarizes his philosophy in a way in which we might recognize an (implicit) allusion to a well-​known passage in Kant’s writings; and the third example is a somewhat more extensive reconstruction of Nietzsche’s position in the history of thought about friendship in which Kant plays an important role.

1.  From answer to question (BGE 11, KSA 5.24–​6) Section 11 of the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, ‘one of the high points of this chapter’,2 might serve as a first introduction to the point I want to make. It is one out of many texts in which Nietzsche criticizes Kant and the way in which contemporary German philosophy deals with the Kantian heritage. Nietzsche quotes Kant’s revolutionary question ‘How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?’ and criticizes him for having given an answer (‘by virtue of a faculty’), which in fact was, according to Nietzsche, no real answer but ‘rather merely a repetition of the question’. Then he goes on to suggest what he deems a different and more appropriate question, namely, ‘Why is belief in such judgments necessary?’ But he immediately answers his own question, or suggests that he knew the answer already long before: ‘[I]‌t is high time [. . .] to comprehend that such judgments must be believed to be true, for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves.’ In the present framework I  am not interested in the question whether Nietzsche is correct in his criticism or whether he is honest and sincere at all.3 I rather want to point at a specific feature of the way in which he phrases his criticism here. At first sight, it seems that, while Kant gives an answer that according to Nietzsche only repeats (and thus maintains) the question, Nietzsche knows the answer almost before having asked the question (and

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thus doesn’t really ask a question). This is, however, a misleading impression, as we will see. The ‘development and rapid flourishing of German philosophy’ showed the impact of Kant’s manoeuver:  after Kant himself ‘discovered’ the possibility of real knowledge, and after he ‘further discovered a moral faculty in man’, his successors discovered all kind of further faculties, ‘[a]‌bove all, a faculty for the “suprasensible” ’. Along this way philosophy confirmed the possibility of true knowledge, as well of morality and religion, or rather it conformed itself to the prevalent belief in truth, morality and God instead of questioning these beliefs as it should do. The philosopher who confessed in his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics ‘that the suggestion of David Hume was the very thing, which many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber’ (Prol 13), in fact continued to dream according to Nietzsche: ‘One had been dreaming, and first and foremost –​old Kant’.4 Nietzsche on the contrary wants to really wake up: ‘But let us reflect; it is high time to do so.’ Reflection means putting the beliefs into question, but –​and this is according to Nietzsche the important difference between him and Kant –​this time with different questions: questions that cannot be answered at all. These are rather questions that we will have to learn to sustain, to incorporate, to live with; questions, therefore, that show the practical nature of philosophy, even of epistemology. These questions are hidden under the apparent answers that Nietzsche adds.5 For immediately after having given his ‘answer’, Nietzsche points to the problem that rises through that answer: ‘[S]‌ynthetic judgments a priori should not “be possible” at all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgments. Only, of course, the belief in their truth is necessary.’ The problem therefore is that we necessarily continue to believe in what we know is untrue. This problem is, as I will point out later, the core of what Nietzsche diagnoses as our ‘European nihilism’; it confronts us with the question how to incorporate this problem (cf. GS 110, KSA 3.471), and it transforms our situation and maybe even our selves into ‘a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks’ (BGE 1, KSA 5.15). Nietzsche criticizes Kant for having silenced and removed a question (by using the virtus dormitiva of his answer), whereas he himself tries to confront us with a question that will keep us awake, and possibly even bring us in despair. For whereas the type of answers such as Kant (and Molière’s doctor) give them ‘belong in comedy’, Nietzsche’s questions confront us with tragedy: it is here that tragedy begins: ‘incipit tragoedia’ (GS 342, KSA 3.571).6 For an elaboration of

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this distressing question I move on to the series of aphorisms, immediately following this ‘incipit’.

2.  A philosophy summarized in questions (GS 343–​6, KSA 5.573–​81) We have seen already that Kant distinguished ‘philodoxia’ or ‘[p]‌hilosophy, in the scholastic conception of it’ from true philosophy, or philosophy in the sense of ‘the science of the relation of all knowledge and every use of reason to the ultimate end of human reason, to which, as supreme, all other ends are subordinated’ (Log 24–​5). It is in this sense that philosophy is, as indicated, in principle a practical affair. Kant famously summarized this ‘true’ philosophy in the introduction to his Introduction to Logic in four questions (Log 25). Earlier he had already summarized ‘[t]he whole interest of reason, speculative as well as practical, [. . .] in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope? (KrV A804f/​ B832f) It is important to see that this passage comes at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason, immediately after Kant has expressed a certain ‘dissatisfaction’ with the results of his Critique, and after he has asked the question ‘whether pure reason is also to be found in practical use, whether in that use it leads us to the ideas that attain the highest ends of pure reason’; in other words: ‘whether from the point of view of its practical interest reason may not be able to guarantee that which in regard to its speculative interest it entirely refuses to us’ (ibid.). Just like, according to Kant, ‘[t]‌he first question [‘what can I  know?’] is answered by Metaphysics’, be it without ‘complete satisfaction’, so the other questions (‘what ought I to do?’ and ‘what may I hope?’) will be answered in his moral philosophy and his philosophy of religion: yes, we do know what we ought to do, and yes, we may hope for the unity of duty and happiness in the life to come. In his Introduction to Logic Kant summarizes these three questions in a fourth one:

‘4. What is man?’ (Log 26) As he writes, ‘[T]‌he first three questions refer to the last’. Though this fourth question is according to Kant ‘answered [.  . .] by anthropology’ (ibid.), it

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should –​I think –​rather be seen as the summarizing question for the whole of his philosophy. As such it is actually not a real question but rather an expression of wonder and respect for this human being that is able to indicate the limits of his or her own knowledge, that has an incontestable conscience of his or her moral duty and that may trust God’s ultimate justice. Understood in this way, the fourth question reminds us of psalm 8, verses 3–​5: When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, /​what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? /​Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.

Kant summarizes his philosophy in questions and these questions are being answered in his writings in such a way that the final summarizing question is hardly a question anymore, but shows his philosophy to be a reflection on the human being, which at the same time exemplifies its dignity and pays tribute to its Creator. I would like to suggest that Nietzsche varies on Kant’s four questions in the beginning of the fifth book of the (1886 edition of) The Gay Science; that is, immediately following the incipit tragoedia with which the fourth book (and the 1882 edition of the whole book) closes. Even if Nietzsche does not do so intentionally, it is my contention that this series of texts can be interpreted as a variation on Kant’s questions. The variation consists not only in Nietzsche’s implementing Kant’s questions in the framework of the death of God, but also in reversing the rhetorical force of the questions: whereas Kant asks three real questions, which he then answers and summarizes in a respectful wonder about the human being, Nietzsche hides his questions in statements or rhetorical questions, but ends up in a distressing presentation of the human being as a labyrinthic question.7 Although Nietzsche does not mention Kant’s first three questions in the same order, the three domains can still be recognized: knowledge, morality and religion are present in each of the first three sections of the fifth book. By collecting all three domains in each section, Nietzsche points already to their being intertwined stronger than Kant would have it. But also in Nietzsche’s version it is in each section a different domain that comes first: religion, knowledge and morality respectively. Section 343, ‘The meaning of our cheerfulness’, deals primarily with religion and the consequences of the death of God; section 344, KSA

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3.574–​7, ‘How we, too, are still pious’, is first and foremost about knowledge and the search for truth; and section 345, KSA 3.577–​9, ‘Morality as a problem’, deals obviously with morality in the first place. Neither of these sections has a question mark in their headings, but the texts are full of ever more pressing questions, even if under the guise of bold statements. Section 343 asserts that most of us still don’t know ‘what this event [i.e. the death of God] really means –​and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined’. ‘Even we’ seem not yet sufficiently aware of the meaning of this event ‘to be compelled to play the teacher and advance proclaimer of this monstrous logic of terror, the prophet of a gloom and an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth’. Section 344, KSA 3.574–​7, has relatively many (16) question marks. Here our will to truth as well as our morality are put into question: don’t they lean on the same old faith ‘that God is the truth, that truth is divine’? And once again Nietzsche suggests that ‘even we’ are not fully aware of what this means: ‘even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-​metaphysicians still take our fire’ from this faith. The text closes on a rhetorical question; rhetorical not because the answer is already given, but rather because it seems no real answer could be imagined: ‘what if this should become more and more incredible, if nothing should prove to be divine any more unless it were error, blindness, the lie  –​if God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie?’ Section 345, KSA 3.577–​9, problematizes morality in an extremely radical way: not only the possibility that ‘morality has grown out of an error’ should be acknowledged; but even the paradoxical question for ‘the value of that most famous of all medicines which is called morality’ must be asked. That means that one should take ‘morality as a problem, and this problem as [one’s] own personal distress, torment, voluptuousness, and passion’. So far ‘nobody [has] ventured’ that –​probably ‘even we’ haven’t yet, since the text ends by saying ‘precisely this is our task’. In my presentation of these three sections, that parallel Kant’s questions, I underlined the different nature of Nietzsche’s questions: they seem not so much to be questions that can or have to be answered, problems that could be solved, but rather question (or exclamation) marks that confront us with a situation that we –​‘even we’ –​have to acknowledge. This brings us to the last section of this series, in which I think we find Nietzsche’s parallel to Kant’s fourth question. This section (GS 346, KSA 3.579–​81) has again, at least in a certain sense, no question mark in its title. But in another sense it does have one, or even is one; for the title reads: ‘Our question mark’. The whole title is a question mark, or rather: it draws the conclusion from the way in which ‘even we’ were put into question in the preceding sections and presents ‘us’ as a question mark. The

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thinker who has interrogated as thoroughly as possible every belief (religion), every practice (morality) and all knowledge (metaphysics and science), ends up being confronted with his own suspicious questions. This thinker starts to surmise that religion, morality and truthfulness were not only the object of his questions, but animated his very questioning. Religion, morality and knowledge have been criticized because of their being motivated by ideals (God, goodness, truth) that include a negation of reality. The mistrustful philosopher has criticized ‘man [as] a reverent animal’. But now he discovers that this reverence and these ideals were still effective in his own mistrust. He cannot escape the confronting question, ‘[H]‌ave we not simply carried the contempt for man one step further? [. . .] Have we not exposed ourselves to the suspicion of an opposition [. . .] an inexorable, fundamental, and deepest suspicion about ourselves?’8 Kant summarized his three questions in a fourth one, which was not so much a question but rather an expression of reverence for the human being who proved to be capable of true knowledge, good will and firm faith. Nietzsche on the contrary summarizes his rhetorical questions in a problematization of the reverence included in his own questioning. For even the mistrustful philosopher turns out to be an idealist, so it seems. As soon as he acknowledges this, he becomes a question mark for himself. In the next section I will elaborate on this idealism and show how it haunts its very problematization, by focusing on the topic of friendship: a topic from practical philosophy on which both Kant and Nietzsche wrote, and  –​more importantly –​which was extremely important for both in the practice of life. But before doing that I want to conclude this section by quoting Nietzsche’s conclusion so far: when the philosopher discovers that he is being driven by what he tries to overcome, he experiences by anticipation ‘the terrifying Either/​Or’ that according to Nietzsche will ‘confront coming generations’: ‘ “Either abolish your reverences or –​yourselves!” The latter would be nihilism; but would not the former also be –​nihilism? –​This is our question mark.’ Nietzsche’s fourth question is the opposite of Kant’s: not a consoling awareness of our dignity as a human being in a tribute to its Creator, but a distressing confrontation with the consequences of nihilism in the light (or rather the shadow) of the death of God.

3.  Friendship and nihilism In order to elaborate my third example of the practical commitment of Nietzsche’s philosophy, I will first introduce the topic of friendship and relate it to Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism, by expanding very briefly on this concept

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(3.1), and by a very quick overview of the history of thought on friendship (3.2), before focusing on the antagonism as well as the similarity between Kant (3.3) and Nietzsche (3.4) regarding this topic.9

3.1  Nihilism Nihilism as conceptualized by Nietzsche has a threefold meaning:  it is (in an inverted chronological order) (3) the corrosion of (2) the protective structure that was built to hide (1) the absurdity of life and world.10 Nihilism-​1 is sometimes also indicated as ‘Greek pessimism’, but seems to me to be the basis of Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism; it refers to the meaningless and chaotic nature of the world and the tragic acknowledgement thereof in pre-​Socratic Greek culture. Nihilism-​2 is Nietzsche’s way to refer to the history of European culture from Socrates and Plato on unto the nineteenth century; and nihilism-​3 refers to what is happening since then, that is, what Nietzsche sometimes labels as ‘the death of God’, what he describes as the history of the centuries to come and with regard to which he makes all these well-​known distinctions (such as between active and passive, complete and incomplete nihilism, etc.). Nihilism is therefore not only, and not primarily the corrosion of ‘meaning’ or ‘value’ as summarized in the formula of the death of God (nihilism-​3). On the contrary: it is important to acknowledge that according to Nietzsche ‘God’ is itself a nihilistic concept, even the core concept of nihilism-​2. The history of European philosophy, science, morality, politics, religion and art is itself deeply nihilistic.11 It is because of the nihilistic structure of European culture (from Plato up to Nietzsche) that the death of God has become possible and is (and will continue to be) such a threatening event. Only because ‘truth’ or the idea(l) of truth and the ‘will to truth’ have been the driving force of European culture could they eventually undermine the whole construction they helped build; a construction that on the one hand has protected us against the ‘fact’ that there is no truth, but that on the other hand has done so by imagining a true world behind or beyond all apparent (contingent etc.) reality:  a construction  –​in other (Samuel Beckett’s (1981:  408)) words  –​that had us ‘waiting for Godot’, even accepting that ‘mr. Godot [. . .] won’t come this evening’ in order not to ­acknowledge that there is no Godot. That there is no Godot, no God, no absolute principle of truth, beauty and goodness, makes human existence extremely difficult. Humans –​at least since Socrates made an end to the ‘tragic age of the Greek’ –​cannot live without the difference between true and false, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, that is: we

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cannot live without that what is indicated with these words, that is:  without ‘meaning’. The tradition recognized this as it called the human being an animal rationale. Aristotle pointed to an important implication of this by linking two defining characteristics of the human being to each other: because the human being is a dzooion logon echoon, (s)he is a dzooion politikon. For logos deals with meaning; that is, with the difference between to sumpheron and to blaberon, to dikaion and to adikon (Aristotle, Politics 1253 a1–​20), or between true and false, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. Aristotle seems to contend that because we cannot live (at least not as human beings, not in a humane way) without meaning, we cannot live as isolated, solitary individuals: because we are logikoi, we are politikoi. From a Nietzschean perspective, I understand this as follows: Human beings need each other, because their lives in order to be meaningful depend on something highly insecure: ‘meaning’. Human beings need communication and community in order to get hold on this meaning by sharing their interpretations of it. They are all the more in need of it to the extent that this meaning is threatened, that is, to the extent to which they recognize the groundlessness (the nihilism-​2) of their interpretations; in other words, to the extent to which nihilism-​3 imposes itself on them. Friendship is a name for the ideal community –​therefore, nihilism calls for friendship. What would Vladimir as well as Estragon be without the other! In the most literal sense of the word, it is their being together that prevents them from committing suicide.12 But . . .

3.2  Friendship and philosophy Nihilism-​2, that is, the nihilism of this construction that was supposed to protect us against nihilism-​1 consists –​to put it very briefly –​in the denial of the apparent world on behalf of a true world. The contingency of this world is put in perspective by the eternity of the true world; the evil in this world by the goodness of its creator; the imperfection of factual reality by the perfection of the ideal. The ideality of the true world is, however, a devaluation of the real world. The history of nihilistic European culture can therefore be summarized as the history of this construction of an ideal world, the history of ‘idealism’ in this sense of the word. It is the construction as Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote in section 346 of the Gay Science, KSA 3.580: ‘The whole pose of “man against the world,” of man as the measure of the value of things, as judge of the world who in the end places existence itself upon his scales and finds it wanting.’ Nietzsche

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famously completes this history of the construction of an ideal world with the history of its de(con)struction, and summarizes the whole in the Twilight of the Idols as the ‘History of an Error’ (TI Fable, KSA 6.80–​81). As I wrote before: friendship is the ideal community. It is an ideal. It is probably not by accident that the praise of friendship has been sung throughout the history of philosophy, and especially by those thinkers who had a sharp eye for the problem of contingency and for the contingencies of life, such as Aristotle, Augustine, Montaigne and also Immanuel Kant (cf. Derrida 1994). The history of thinking about friendship makes it obvious that friendship has always been idealized, even extremely so. Let’s have a quick look at some moments from this history. Aristotle is usually considered to be the normative beginning of the history of thinking about friendship. Friendship between two perfectly virtuous men is for him the crowning glory of the good and happy life. Of course he knows that there are forms of friendship that do not meet this ideal highest form. The less perfect forms of friendship –​for utility or for pleasure –​can only be called forms of friendship pros mian kai prootèn (Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics 1236a16), that is, to the extent to which they keep oriented towards the ideal friendship, towards what can be called ‘friendship protoos kai kyrioos’. But this latter friendship is very rare, if it can exist at all. It is not by chance that the famous words O philoi, oudeis philos (‘O my friends, there is no friend’), words that have been quoted time and again throughout the history of thinking about friendship, are ascribed to Aristotle, although we don’t find them literally in his writings. Augustine’s Confessions contain moving passages on friendship that show how important the topic was for him. It looks like an awkward contrast when Augustine in the midst of his lively memories of one of his closest friendships suddenly states that friendship can only become true friendship through God: amicitia [. . .] non est vera nisi cum eam tu agglutinas (Augustine Confessions, IV.7).13 The framework of this remark in the Confessions suggests that the explanation has to do with the contingency of human life or the variability and uncertainty of human relations. His friend’s passing away shows how he has loved something transient and it moreover confronts him with his own mortality. In order to save him from the despair caused by this death, he discovers or constructs an eternally loving and lovable God: ‘Blessed is he, who loves you and loves his friend in you’ (Augustine 1997: 101; Confessions, IV.14). Montaigne doesn’t need God for true friendship, but he nevertheless continues the history of idealization of friendship. His famous essay on friendship is built on the opposition between what people call friendship on the one hand

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and friendship as he experienced it with Etienne de la Boetie on the other hand. Only this was true friendship. The ideality of this friendship appears most clearly in the famous lines in which Montaigne (1969: 92) claims that there were in a certain sense no reasons for this friendship: it was ‘[b]‌ecause it was he, because it was my self ’. This ideal is however conceptualized following the friend’s passing away, that is, the ideality appears after the ‘real thing’ has ended. There are many more landmarks in the history of thought about friendship, but these few indications may suffice as a framework for our main authors: Kant and Nietzsche.

3.3  Kant on friendship In a lecture on friendship that was part of a course on ethics that Kant offered at the University of Königsberg from 1775 till 1780, he states: ‘[T]‌here are two motives to action in man. The one –​self-​love –​is derived from himself, and the other –​the love of humanity –​is derived from others and is the moral motive. In man these two motives are in conflict’ (Lecture, 210). This conflict is so deep, the opposition between the two so absolute, that a synthesis of these two motives is actually impossible. We do have, however, a name for this synthesis: friendship. Friendship is self-​love that is completely merged into love of the other, or love of the other that is so absolutely sure about its being reciprocal that it is no longer in conflict with self-​love. We can hardly be surprised that Kant immediately adds that this impossible combination of self-​love and love of humanity cannot be an empirical fact. It will never be experienced in reality, because this coincidence of love of the other and self-​love is humanly impossible: ‘in practical life such things do not occur’ (Lecture, 212). In the Metaphysics of Morals Kant stresses a slightly different reason for the same impossibility of friendship: since friendship is ‘the union of two persons through equal mutual love and respect,’ and since not only the equality in this reciprocity is extremely difficult to realize, but –​more importantly –​there is an inherent contradiction between love and respect (‘For love can be regarded as attraction and respect as repulsion’), ‘it is readily seen that friendship is only an Idea and unattainable in practice’ (MS 469). Notwithstanding his pessimism regarding the possibility of friendship, we know that Kant used to have lunch with ‘friends’ on a daily basis. The apparent contradiction might be solved with the help of Aristotle’s distinction between kinds of friendship. Just like him, Kant, too, distinguishes three kinds, founded ‘respectively on need, taste and disposition’. But whereas for Aristotle these really

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are three ways in which friendship can be realized, for Kant they all have a mark of impossibility. Friendship based on need (which equals Aristotle’s friendship for utility) is, according to Kant (in his Lecture), less possible to the extent to which someone is more needy; the more needs one has, the more one will be concerned about getting them fulfilled; and the more one is obsessed with taking care of one’s own needs, the less one will be concerned about the other’s well-​being. Moreover, needs increase with their being fulfilled. Luxury creates ever-​new needs. Therefore the conclusion must be a very paradoxical one, namely, that friendship based on need can only exist to the extent that this friendship proves unable to fulfill this need. There is another reason why this friendship based on need is nearly impossible: friendship always (for Kant as for Aristotle) requires equality. But as soon as my friend has helped me, I owe him something, that is, I am not his equal until I pay off my debt. In other words (and according to the Metaphysics of Morals): if one of the ‘friends’ ‘accepts a favor from the other, then he may well be able to count on equality in love, but not in respect’. ‘Hence,’ as Kant concludes, ‘friendship cannot be a union aimed at mutual advantage’ (MS 470). Friendship based on taste is similar to Aristotle’s friendship for pleasure. What Kant writes about this type of friendship in his Lecture (in the Metaphysics of Morals he hardly touches on it at all) is very peculiar. It seems that here again the requirement of equality is the problem. According to Kant pleasure can only be given among those who are different. I quote: ‘I am not attracted to another because he has what I  already possess, but because he can supply some want of mine by supplementing that in which I am lacking.’ Moreover, ‘[p]‌ersons of the same station and occupation in life are less likely to form such a friendship than persons of different occupations. One scholar will not form a friendship of taste with another; because their capacities are identical; they cannot entertain or satisfy one another, for what one knows, the other knows too’ (Lecture, 214). However, those who are different will easily annoy one another:  a scholar would be rather irritated by a businessman or a soldier than entertained. The examples of businessman and soldier are Kant’s. A  friendship for pleasure is therefore hardly conceivable to Kant. The only way he can imagine something like that is, and I quote again, ‘if the scholar is not a pedant and the business-​ man not a blockhead’. The conditions seem for Kant to suggest that such a thing never happens. Or if it happens, it will ‘after a while [. . .] go [. . .] up in smoke’ (MS 470).

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The third form of friendship is of course the highest one. Kant’s version (‘friendship of disposition or sentiment’) is a bit different from Aristotle’s ‘friendship for the good’. Here Kant relies probably more on the romantic tradition or on Montaigne than on Aristotle. They agree, however, in this respect that, according to both, this highest form of friendship is very exclusive. This type of friendship can be characterized as a relation that makes one abandon the distance and suspicion that are normal and required in everyday life. A friend, in this type of friendship, is therefore, I quote, ‘one in whom we can confide unreservedly, to whom we can disclose completely all our dispositions and judgments, from whom we can and need hide nothing, to whom we can communicate our whole self ’ (Lecture, 214). In his Metaphysics of Morals Kant immediately adds that such a friendship is ‘rare like a black swan’ (MS 472), and if it can exist at all, it cannot be between many people, but at most between two people only. But what is more remarkable, it seems that Kant –​at least in the Lecture –​deems this friendship morally impossible or unlawful. It is, according to Kant, distasteful and repugnant, to give oneself away completely: ‘Even to our best friend we must not reveal ourselves, in our natural state as we know it ourselves. To do so would be loathsome’ (Lecture, 215). Instead ‘we must so conduct ourselves towards a friend that there is no harm done if he should turn into an enemy’ (217). In other words, we should conduct ourselves with great reservation. It is difficult to avoid an ironical conclusion:  for Kant the ideal friendship can only exist (or at least be approximated) among friends who are not in need of anything, who are so different that they hardly have anything to say to each other, and who make no distinction between their friends and others. In other words: this kind of friendship does not exist; it cannot exist. With a quotation from the Metaphysics of Morals: ‘[I]‌t is readily seen that friendship is only an Idea (though a practically necessary one) and unattainable in practice, although striving for friendship (as a maximum of good disposition toward each other) is a duty set by reason, and no ordinary duty but an honorable one’ (MS 469). It comes to no surprise that Kant, in his Metaphysics of Morals, as well as in his earlier lecture, quotes with approval this famous pronouncement attributed to Aristotle: ‘My dear friends, there is no such thing as a friend!’ (MS 470).

3.4  Nietzsche’s inverted idealism Reading that true friendship for Kant exists only as an ideal and as an idea, we are reminded of what Nietzsche writes about what happens to the ‘real world’ in Kant’s philosophy. I refer to the third step in his six-​step summary of the history

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of metaphysics, which, in his view, coincides with the history of nihilism: ‘The [true] world, unattainable, undemonstrable, cannot be promised, but even when merely thought of [–​] a consolation, a duty, an imperative. (Fundamentally the same old sun, but shining through mist and skepticism; the idea grown sublime, pale, northerly, Königsbergian.)’ (TI Fable, KSA 6.80). The tradition of thinking about friendship is a good example of what Nietzsche calls ‘nihilism’, to be more precise: nihilism-​2, the nihilism of European history since Plato; nihilism as the name for this structure of meanings, constructed with the help of philosophy, morality and religion, which was meant to replace (or to hide) the actual chaotic, absurd and aimless reality. Friendship fits perfectly in this construction: by way of negating the reality of suspicion and deceit, of reservation, distance and solitude, and by inverting this reality into its opposite, an ideal of friendship is being construed. This ideal is itself nihilistic, because it originates from a negation of factuality, and because it takes its energy and attraction from this negation. It is a conspicuous feature of Nietzsche’s critique of this nihilistic structure that the nihilism returns in the criticism itself. This becomes very clear in what Nietzsche writes about friendship, especially in the earlier aphoristic books. A full and systematic presentation of Nietzsche’s thoughts on friendship is not possible in the given framework,14 but the following examples, which are admittedly only a limited selection, may give an indication of what is at stake, and an illustration of the practical commitment of Nietzsche’s philosophy and the way it differs from Kant’s. Friendship is, according to Nietzsche, only possible through concealment and deceit, that is, deceit of the other as well as self-​deception. The idea that friends could possibly know one another is an illusion. They can only be friends as long as they are ready to hide and to pretend: ‘For such human relationships almost always depend upon the fact that two or three things are never said or even so much as touched upon: if these little boulders do start to roll, however, friendship follows after them and shatters’ (HH I 376). Living together is just not a simple thing, ‘even the best friendships are only seldom able to endure this’ (NL 18[38]123, KSA 8.325). Conversations among old friends usually make clear that they have grown apart; such conversations will often be ‘like those in the realm of the dead’ (AOM 259, KSA 2.491). It is most unlikely that friends will not deceive one another if the occasion arises: ‘There will be a few who, when they are in want of matter for conversation, do not reveal the more secret affairs of their friends’ (HH 327, KSA 2.245–​6). Many more examples could be added, also from later writings.15

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The tone of disappointment and even bitterness cannot be misheard and is symptomatic for the critic’s suffering from his own critique; that is, it shows –​in the terminology of the later Nietzsche –​how strongly the nihilism of the critique is tied to the nihilism that is being criticized. Against this background it is not surprising that we find in Nietzsche’s writings quite a few texts on friendship that perfectly fit in the idealist tradition. When we read in Human, All Too Human that many people ‘would be mortally wounded if they discovered what their dearest friends actually know about them’ (HH 376, KSA 2.263), we hear (possibly via Schopenhauer’s Parerga) the echo of Pascal’s (1958: 101) saying that ‘si tous les hommes savaient ce que disent les uns des autres, il n’y aurait pas quatre amis dans le monde’. Just like Kant, Nietzsche, or Zarathustra to be more precise, also rejects the idea that friends should be completely open toward one another. Kant called it ‘loathsome’ (repugnant, ‘ekelhaft’), Nietzsche/​ Zarathustra calls it ‘empörend’ (‘shocking’ or ‘revolting’). But similar to Kant, who despite his scepticism continues to long for a friend ‘in whom [h]‌e can confide unreservedly, to whom [h]e can disclose completely all [his] dispositions and judgments, from whom [h]e can and need hide nothing, to whom [h]e can communicate [his] whole self ’ (Kant Lecture, 214), also Nietzsche writes about the ‘full happiness of love, which resides in unconditional trust’ (D 216, KSA 3.192). In the 1886 preface to Human, All Too Human he confesses that what he needs most is precisely this friendship:  ‘a reposing in a trust of friendship, a blindness in concert with another without suspicion or question-​ marks’ (HH I Preface 1, KSA 2.14). The attachment to the ideal makes for the bitterness of the criticism. This might give the impression that Nietzsche’s criticism is less radical and in a certain sense less revolutionary than it claims to be. What else does it do than revealing the unreality of the ideal, of which –​after all –​the criticized tradition was already aware by itself? Isn’t Nietzsche after all, just like Kant, one of those many authors quoting Aristotle’s melancholia? ‘ “Friends, there are no friends!” thus said the dying sage’ (HH 376, KSA 2.263).

4.  The practical commitment of Nietzsche’s philosophy At least one point of difference between Nietzsche and Kant will be clear: Nietzsche puts to the fore almost violently what Kant rather hides by transforming into an ‘honorable duty’ what turned out to be ‘unattainable in practice’. I want to focus, however, on something else in Nietzsche’s critique of friendship and of idealism

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in general, something that refers to the question that is central in the practical commitment of Nietzsche’s philosophy. For not only do we find the criticized idealism return in Nietzsche’s critique of it, but he himself is also constantly aware of this self-​referentiality of the critique. This is most apparent in the critique of the will to truth or truthfulness, which itself is motivated precisely by what it criticizes. I quoted already the conclusion Nietzsche draws from this awareness: it transforms us into ‘a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks’ (BGE 1, KSA 5.15). But the same is the case in all domains of Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism. He is aware of the fact that in his critique of the traditional ideals he repeats the old idealism. That is –​I think –​the reason why the third essay of his Genealogy of Morals is about ideals; not only about a particular, ‘ascetic’ ideal but rather about the asceticism of all ideals, and about the way these ideals continue to work through everything we think and do and create. Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism repeats the criticized structures, but does not do so naively. It expressly demonstrates how this critique necessarily gets entangled in these idealist structures, and concludes that the recognition of this inevitability is a point beyond which one cannot get any further: ‘what meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem?’ (GM III 27, KSA 5.410). Nietzsche’s thoughts on friendship give a perfect example of what according to him is the ultimate problem of nihilism, the problem that he foresees and of which he describes the future history. In his criticism of the unreality of the ideal of friendship, we clearly hear the longing for precisely this ideal friendship. But this longing for friendship is always already affected by the scepticism about the possibility of its being realized. The tension between the two is not overcome, as in Aristotle by a melancholic complaint or resignation or as in Kant by a moral imperative, but rather presented as the actual problem, as the question mark that defines our condition. The ambivalence in Nietzsche’s thoughts on friendship is a perfect exemplification of the imminent nihilistic catastrophe that Nietzsche announced at the end of section 346 from the Gay Science: ‘an inexorable, fundamental, and deepest suspicion about ourselves that is more and more gaining worse and worse control of us Europeans and that could easily confront coming generations with the terrifying Either/​Or: “Either abolish your reverences or  –​ yourselves!” The latter would be nihilism; but would not the former also be –​nihilism?’ (GS 346, KSA 3.581). Who abandons or abolishes his or her reverences, including his or her ideal of friendship, will as a result abolish him-​or herself. For without friendship, without this commonality, without any release from our choking solitude, we would not be able to live as human beings. Therefore, when we lose our faith in the

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possibility of friendship, a faith that for a long time was nourished with descriptions of the ideal and for which doubts about its possibility were relegated to the melancholic quote from Aristotle, or to the ‘honorable’ moral duty that Kant suggested, we might lose faith in ourselves, we might lose ourselves and sink into nihilism. So what Nietzsche adds to this history of nihilistic thinking on friendship that I outlined is not very hopeful: we remain caught in the longing for what we cannot believe in any more; or we cannot but criticize the ideals that we need in order to live. There might be something more; there might be a step beyond nihilism. But I have my doubts whether what Nietzsche writes on the overcoming of nihilism is more than a question, more than a ‘maybe’. At the end of one of his most important texts on nihilism, the Lenzer Heide outline, Nietzsche appeals to the strongest, which he describes as follows: The most moderate; those who do not require any extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede but love a firm amount of accidents and nonsense; those who can think of man with a considerable reduction of his value without becoming small and weak on that account:  those richest in health who are equal to most misfortunes and therefore not so afraid of misfortunes –​human beings who are sure of their power and represent the attained strength of humanity with conscious pride. (NL 1887 5[71] 12.217)16

This is the penultimate section of Nietzsche’s text. The very last one is –​once again –​a question. ‘How would such a human being even think of the eternal return?’ In the present framework, we could make a variation: ‘How would such a human being even think of friendship?’ We don’t find the answer to either question. More important than the answer is the question as well as the task included in that question. The practical commitment of Nietzsche’s philosophy comes to a question, a question that invites or forces us, or at least the philosopher, to incorporate it, and to which there is no other answer than to engage in the experiment.

Notes 1 That is, in the writings in which Nietzsche’s thinking reaches its climax and in which the author finally discovers the true question that guides him: cf. Van Tongeren (2012b).

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2 Cf. Lampert (2001: 39), who correctly underlines (and gives evidence for) the importance of this section, although he mistakenly restricts its meaning to it being a confrontation with the materialism from which ‘the Kantian dream [. . .] sheltered us’ (40). 3 Burnham (2007: 26f ) also writes regarding this section that he does not want to consider whether Nietzsche’s critique ‘involves a misunderstanding, perhaps a deliberate one, of Kant’s thought’. But he nevertheless does call Nietzsche ‘disingenuous here’ and shows in an interesting way what he calls ‘the problem of the outside’ that the two authors have in common: ‘What is the thinking that can look outside the conditions of thinking, and judge what is necessary for it such that it could in fact be false or contingent?’ or –​in a Nietzschean phrasing –​‘How is it possible for thought to look outside the value of truth in order to ask the question of the value of the will to truth?’ I agree with Burnham but want to highlight an important difference within this commonality. 4 The quotation is again from BGE 11, but Nietzsche makes the same pun even more eloquently already in his early text On the Pathos of Truth (PT: 65 ff., KSA 1.760): ‘Yet even while he believes himself to be shaking the sleeper, the philosopher himself is sinking into a still deeper magical slumber. Perhaps het then dreams of the “ideas” or of immortality.’ 5 Cf. also Acampora and Ansell-​Pearson (2011: 31) who (although they do not pay much attention to aphorism 11) with regard to the first chapter of BGE correctly speak about ‘[t]‌he question [that] Nietzsche lays at the feet of his readers’ (my emphasis). 6 GS 342, KSA 3.571, is the last section of the fourth book. At the end of the fifth book, just before the epilogue, this reference to the beginning tragedy returns: GS 382, KSA 3.637. 7 Werner Stegmaier (2012) in his astonishingly rich ‘contextual interpretation’ of the fifth book of The Gay Science does not mention (and he possibly does not agree with my suggestion that there is) this implicit reference to Kant, but he does clearly agree that the first four sections of the fifth book present what is implied in what Nietzsche already in the first edition of GS (section 125, KSA 3.480–​2) had indicated as ‘the death of God’ and the difficult task for philosophy that is the result of this event. Different from my interpretation, though, Stegmaier emphasizes the way in which Nietzsche brings that task to a successful ‘liberation of thinking’ in the final part of the fifth book. Without being able to discuss this in detail in the present framework, I want to point to the fact that Nietzsche in the final section of the book, right before the epilogue, refers to his ‘ideal’ (GS 382), which –​however different it may be –​shows how much even his thinking is ‘idealist’ and dependent on the old faith. Different from B. Reginster (2006: 53), I do not think that Nietzsche in this

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period still ‘believes in the possibility of “new values” ’, or at least not unless in a sense in which he at the same time put serious question marks behind his ‘idealism’. In my opinion it is this idealism that already in the end of GS 346, KSA 3.580–​1, but more explicitly in the third essay of GM, will be criticized as the core of what Nietzsche diagnoses as ‘nihilism’ (cf. Sections 3 and especially 4 of this chapter). Therefore it would be my suggestion that Nietzsche at the end of the fifth book of GS refers back, in a self-​critical way, to its beginning and by doing so shows how he himself is caught in the nihilism he tries to describe. That would also explain why he (as of course also Stegmaier observes) at this point repeats as a matter of fact the end of the fourth book (‘Incipit tragoedia’ GS 342, KSA 3.571): ‘the tragedy begins. . .’ (GS 382, KSA 3.637), the formula that he repeats once again in the newly added preface (section 1) to the 1886 edition of GS (cf. Stegmaier 2012: 619–​29)! For Stegmaier’s interpretation of GS 343–​46 (and related sections), cf. Stegmaier (2012: 91–​221). Cf. also from the 1886 preface to Daybreak: ‘there is no doubt that a “thou shalt” still speaks to us too, that we too still obey a stern law set over us’ (D Preface 4, KSA 3.16). Parts of this section are (with minor changes) taken from my article ‘Kant, Nietzsche and the Idealization of Friendship into Nihilism’ (Van Tongeren 2013). I have elaborated this differentiation of meanings of ‘nihilism’ more extensively in chapter IV of my book on Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism, Het Europese nihilisme (Van Tongeren 2012a: 83–​133). This is one of the important insights of Heidegger’s Nietzsche interpretation (cf. Heidegger 1961; 1986), completely overlooked in Bernard Reginster’s (2006) and many other interpretations of Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism, with which I therefore strongly disagree at this crucial point. Cf., for example, the hilarious passage in Beckett (1981: 373f.). The English translation (Augustine 1997: 96) reads, ‘friendship is genuine only when you bind fast together people who cleave to you’. The topic is clearly much more central to Nietzsche’s than to Kant’s philosophy. The word ‘freund’ together with all its compounds occurs about one thousand times in Nietzsche’s writings, more or less equally spread over the whole of his oeuvre. A full presentation of the different meanings will be given in the entry ‘Freund(schaft)’ that I will prepare for the Nietzsche Wörterbuch, to be published in Nietzsche Online. Cf., for example, in BGE, sections 27, 40, 268 and the ‘Aftersong’, KSA 5.45–​6, 57–​ 8, 221–​2, 241–​3. With regard to the chapter ‘On the friend’ from the first part of Thus spoke Zarathustra, a text that has often been (mis)interpreted in a much too optimistic way, see Van Tongeren (2003/​2004). English translation taken from Kaufmann (1967: 38 ff.).

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References Immanuel Kant Kant, I. (1885), Kant’s Introduction to Logic, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, London: Longmans, Green & Co: https://​archive.org/​stream/​kantsintroductio00kant uoft#page/​n21/​mode/​2up (accessed 13 January 2014). Kant, I. (1949), Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Paul Carus, Chicago/​ London: The Open Court Publishing Company. Kant, I. (1991) ‘Lecture on Friendship’, in M. Pakaluk (ed.), Other Selves. Philosophers on Friendship, 208–​17, Indianapolis/​Cambridge: Hackett (quoted as Lecture). Kant, I. (1991), The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor, London: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. (1998), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Friedrich Nietzsche Nietzsche, F. (1968), Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Modern Library. Nietzsche, F. (1968), On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Modern Library. Nietzsche, F. (1974), The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, F. (1979), ‘On the Pathos of Truth’, in Dan Breazeale (ed.), Philosophy and Truth, 61–​6, New Jersey/​London: Humanities Press. Nietzsche, F. (1982), Daybreak, ed. and trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1986), Human, All Too Human, ed. and trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1990) Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin Books.

Other references Acampora, C. D., and Ansell-​Pearson, K. (2011), Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. A Reader’s Guide, London/​New York: Continuum. Aristotle, Politics (1977), Loeb Classical Library Nr. 264, with an English translation by H. Rackham, Cambridge/​London: Harvard University Press/​William Heinemann.

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Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics (1981), Loeb Classical Library Nr. 285, with an English translation by H. Rackham, Cambridge/​London: Harvard University Press/​William Heinemann. Augustine Aurelius (1997), Confessionum Libri XIII. Zwolle: Tjeenk Willink, 1960; Engl. translation: The Confessions New York. Beckett, S. (1981), ‘Waiting for Godot’, in Dramatische Dichtungen in drei Sprachen, Frankfurt/​M: Suhrkamp. Burnham, D. (2007), Reading Nietzsche. An Analysis of Beyond Good and Evil, Stocksfield: Acumen. Derrida, J. (1994), Politiques de l’amitié. Paris: Galilée. Heidegger, M. (1961), Nietzsche, 2 vols, Pfullingen: Neske. Heidegger, M. (1986), Nietzsche: der europäische Nihilismus. Gesamtausgabe Vol. 48. Frankfurt/​M: Klostermann. Kaufmann, W. (1967), Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage. Lampert, L. (2001), Nietzsche’s Task. An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil, New Haven/​London: Yale University Press. Montaigne, Michel de (1969), The Essays, Menston: The Scolar Press. Pascal, B. de (1958), Pensées, Paris: Garnier. Reginster, B. (2006), The Affirmation of Life. Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism, Cambridge MA, et al.: Harvard University Press. Stegmaier, W. (2012), Nietzsches Befreiung der Philosophie. Kontextuelle Interpretation des V. Buchs der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft, Berlin: De Gruyter. van Tongeren, P. (2003/​4), ‘On Friends in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’, New Nietzsche Studies 5 (3/​4) and 6 (1/​2): 73–​88. van Tongeren, P. (2012a), Het Europese nihilisme. Friedrich Nietzsche over een dreiging die niemand schijnt te deren, Nijmegen: Vantilt. van Tongeren, P. (2012b) ‘Nietzsche’s Questioning’, South African Journal of Philosophy (31) 4: 727–​36. van Tongeren, P. (2013), ‘Kant, Nietzsche and the Idealization of Friendship into Nihilism’, Kriterion 128: 401–​17.

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Siemens, H. W. (2016), ‘ Nietzsches Sozio-Physiologie des Selbst und das Problem der Souver.ntit.t ’, in H. Heidt und S. Th orgeirsdottir (eds), Nietzsche als Kritiker und Denker der Transformation, 167–182, Berlin and Boston: De Gryuter. Siemens, H. W., and Roodt, V. (eds) (2008), Nietzsche, Power and Politics, Berlin/​ New York: De Gruyter. Skinner, Q. (1998), Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Q. (2002), ‘Classical Liberty, Renaissance Translation and the English Civil War’ in Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics (volume II): Renaissance Virtues, 308–​43, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Solomon, R. C. (2006), ‘Nietzsche’s Fatalism’, in A. K. Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche, 419–​34, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Stegmaier, W. (1994), Nietzsches ‘Genealogie der Moral’, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Stegmaier, W. (2012), Nietzsches Befreiung der Philosophie. Kontextuelle Interpretation des V. Buchs der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft. Berlin: De Gruyter. Strawson, P. F. (2006), The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, New York: Routledge. Swanton, C. (2006), ‘Nietzschean Virtue Ethics’, in C. D. Acampora (ed.), Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays, 291–​303, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Tevenar, G. von (2001), Pity and Compassion, Birkbeck College, University of London (PhD). Timmermann, J. (2007), Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Timmons, M. (1987), ‘Foundationalism and the Structure of Ethical Justification’, Ethics 97 (3): 595–​609. Uleman, J. K. (2010), An Introduction to Kant’s Moral Philosophy, New York: Cambridge University Press. Ure, M. (2006), ‘The Irony of Pity: Nietzsche contra Schopenhauer and Rousseau’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 32. Ure, M., and Ryan, T. (2014), ‘Nietzsche’s Post-Classical Therapy’, PLI: Warwick Journal of Philosophy 25: 91–110. van Tongeren, P. (2003/​4), ‘On Friends in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra’, New Nietzsche Studies 5 (3/​4) and 6 (1/​2): 73–​88. van Tongeren, P. (2006), ‘Nietzsche and Ethics’, in K. A. Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche, 389–​403, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. van Tongeren, P. (2012a), Het Europese nihilisme. Friedrich Nietzsche over een dreiging die niemand schijnt te deren. Nijmegen: Vantilt. van Tongeren, P. (2012b), ‘Nietzsche’s Questioning’, South African Journal of Philosophy 31 (4): 727–​36. van Tongeren, P. (2013), ‘Kant, Nietzsche and the Idealization of Friendship into Nihilism’, Kriterion 128: 401–​17.

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Whiten, A., Goodall, J., McGrew, W. C., Nishida, T., Reynolds, V., Sugiyama, Y. et al. (1999), ‘Cultures in Chimpanzees’, Nature 399: 682–​5. Wiggins, D. (1995), ‘Categorical Requirements: Hume and Kant on the Idea of Duty’, in R. Hursthouse, G. Lawrence and W Quinn (eds), Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, 297–​330, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Williams, B. (1981a), ‘Persons, Character and Morality’, reprinted in his Moral Luck, 1–​19, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1981b), ‘Internal and External Reasons’, reprinted in his Moral Luck, 101–​13, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1981c), ‘Practical Necessity’, reprinted in his Moral Luck, 124–​31, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1985), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williams, B. (1993), Shame and Necessity, Berkeley: University of California Press. Williams, B. (1995), ‘Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame’, reprinted in his Making Sense of Humanity, 35–​45, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, G. D. (1999), ‘Nietzsche’s Response to Kant’s morality’, Philosophical Forum 30 (3): 201–​16. Wood, A. E. (1990), Hegel’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, A. E. (1999), Kant’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Index Adorno, T. 214 agency 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 19, 45, 54, 55, 69, 70, 74, 76, 80, 82, 91, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 109, 126, 128, 129, 146, 148, 149, 150, 154, 156, 163, 164, 168, 190, 194, 219, 220, 221, 233, 241, 267 agon see agonism agonism 7, 11, 146, 149, 150, 151, 153, 156 Anscombe, G. E. M. 208 Aristotle 152, 208, 209, 223, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 305, 306, 307 ascetic ideal see asceticism asceticism 13, 15, 98, 102, 156, 163, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184, 185, 267, 268, 306 Augustine 300, 309 autonomy 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 19, 20, 22, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 82, 83, 84, 86, 95, 103, 109, 119, 128, 129, 153, 159–70, 173, 176, 177, 180, 181, 182, 185, 188, 189, 220, 235, 236, 238, 239, 242, 244, 259, 264, 266, 269, 274, 285, 286 back to Kant movement 219, 220, 221 bad conscience see conscience Bain, A. 13, 219, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 232, 237, 246, 247, 248, 252 Baumann, J. 13, 219, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 231, 232, 236, 237, 240, 246, 247, 248, 251, 252 Beckett, S. 298, 309 Beethoven, L. W. 204 Bentham, J. 263 Bergson, H. 286 Bradley, F. H. 199, 212 Brandes, G. 207, 214

categorical imperative 2, 4, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 30, 42, 44, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 77, 78, 83, 84, 86, 87, 193, 199, 202, 205, 206, 211, 213, 235, 236, 239, 259, 261, 264, 265, 267, 274, 275, 286 Christianity 7, 27, 152, 161, 167, 170, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184, 185, 209, 245, 258, 273, 274 Cicero 201 Cohen, H. 219, 222, 245 community 6, 7, 106, 127, 142, 166, 197, 198, 269, 270, 299, 300 compassion/​pity 30, 31, 41, 152, 203, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 282, 283, 284, 286 conscience 5, 8, 11, 12, 109, 129, 151, 164, 165, 165, 167, 170, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 181, 182, 184, 189, 190, 195, 198, 201, 203, 237, 241, 242, 243, 259, 260, 262, 270, 271, 281, 286, 295 contracts 12, 15, 139, 162, 197, 199, 206, 211 creativity 2, 3, 12, 52, 147 Darwin, C. 172, 186, 189, 210, 212, 223, 258, 267, 272, 275, 278, 279, 280 deliberation 2, 9, 53, 54, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 83, 84, 93, 106, 153 Derrida, J. 300 Descartes, R. 235, 249 dignity 1, 8, 140, 144, 207, 295, 297 dominantion/​non-​domination 11, 137, 139, 149, 150, 151, 154 drives 3, 7, 10, 36, 37, 47, 54, 61, 63, 64, 72, 85, 92, 98, 101, 103, 120, 124, 125, 152, 153, 154, 174, 187, 231, 232, 240, 250, 269, 273, 277, 278, 279 Drossbach, M. 249

326

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Index

duty/​moral duties 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 12, 14, 15, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 68, 70, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 112, 139, 142, 156, 157, 193–215, 261 egalitarianism 7, 27, 42 end in itself 1, 6 enlightenment 11, 119, 140, 142, 143, 144, 151, 272, 275 Epictetus 258 Epicurus 258, 263, 277, 280 equality 1, 6, 8, 41, 44, 139, 140, 206, 301, 302 equals 6, 12, 59, 152, 203, 207, 214, 247, 302 evil 1, 32, 45, 147, 170, 182, 203, 220, 229– 33, 239, 245, 248, 249, 267, 268, 278, 299 feeling of power 10, 33, 109, 110, 122, 123, 126, 127, 128, 129, 134, 149, 232, 252, 282 Féré, C. 229, 248 Fichte, J. 1 Fischer, K. 1, 221, 245, 249 Foot, P. 204, 208 Fouillée, A. 259, 285 free spirit 5, 28, 59, 61, 78, 231, 258, 265 free will 5, 8, 12, 27, 33, 52, 54, 55, 74, 92, 94, 96, 99, 100, 111, 220, 223, 224, 226, 227, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 251, 252 freedom 1, 2, 36, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 19, 20, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 55, 70, 74, 76, 79, 84, 93, 95, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 161, 162, 163, 166, 168, 173, 175, 220, 222, 225, 227, 232, 238, 240, 241, 243, 251, 266, 283 Freud, S. 189 friendship 7, 14, 15, 152, 283, 284, 292, 297, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 309 Fries, J. F. 220

German idealism 12, 164, 219 God 1, 2, 7, 176, 177, 182, 184, 190, 198, 209, 259, 287, 295, 296, 297, 298, 300 Goethe, J. W. 204, 229, 230, 245, 248 good/​goodness 1, 2, 4, 13, 21, 31, 32, 33, 45, 52, 54, 57, 58, 59, 75, 80, 81, 147, 151, 152, 153, 164, 166, 174, 176, 181, 182, 184, 193, 195, 203, 205, 209, 211, 242, 243, 251, 262, 267, 268, 269, 278, 297, 298, 299, 300, 303 good will 54, 80, 191, 297 Gould, S. J. 273 Guyau, J.-​M. 13, 257–88 Habermas, J. 2, 155 happiness 1, 152, 156, 189, 190, 204, 213, 262, 269, 270, 276, 277, 294, 305 Hartmann, E. von 13, 220, 236, 239, 243, 244, 245, 250, 251 Hegel, G. W. F. 1, 2, 8, 9, 14, 19, 20, 21, 22– 6, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 110, 111, 131, 160, 161, 167, 168, 169, 171, 184, 188, 189, 198, 199, 212, 258, 260, 261 Heidegger, M. 46, 309 Helmholtz, H. von 222 Herbart, J. F. 220, 221, 224, 245, 251 herd 5, 6, 61, 82, 208, 281, 285 higher types 5, 9, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 82, 83, 84 Hume, D. 2, 10, 39, 72, 92, 95, 96, 101, 117, 293 Huxley, A. 263 immorality 23, 47, 59, 109, 122, 130, 131, 202, 203, 235, 236, 260, 281, 285 immortality 2, 308 individualism 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 13, 14, 69, 204, 270, 282 James, W. 246, 258 Jesus 259, 287 Kant, I. passim Kierkegaard, S. 170

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Index kingdom of ends 1, 6, 128 Kipling, R. 212 Kirchhoff, G. 233 Korsgaard, C. 2, 43, 49, 69, 79, 83, 84, 86, 209 Kropotkin, P. 258, 285 Lamarck, J.-​B. 267 Lange, F. A. 1, 45, 219, 220, 221, 222, 224, 248 law/​moral law 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 20–5, 27, 31, 44, 45, 51, 53, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 75, 76, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 92, 93, 94, 95, 103, 104, 107, 109–22, 123, 124, 127, 130, 131, 132, 137, 138, 143, 144, 155, 161, 162, 164, 165, 181, 187, 197, 198, 203, 206, 208, 211, 213, 221, 224, 230, 239, 260–75, 281, 282, 287, 303, 309 Leopardi, G. 286 Lichtenberg, G. C. 220, 233, 234, 235, 249 Liebmann, O. 221, 245 life 2, 3, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 23, 34, 36, 41, 53, 62, 107, 125, 128, 129, 130, 135, 168–80, 185–7, 189, 190, 193, 203, 205, 207, 213, 214, 219, 226, 227, 228, 230, 231, 232, 240, 243, 261, 263, 264, 265, 266, 268, 269, 271, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 282, 283, 284, 287, 291, 294, 297, 298, 300, 301, 302, 303 Lotze, H. 224, 245 love 7, 11, 97, 112, 131, 137, 140, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 183, 268, 286, 300, 301, 302, 305 Mach, E. 233 MacIntyre, A. 209, 212 Maudsley, H. 263 Mayer, J. R. 133, 220, 227, 244, 247 metaphyscis 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 12, 13, 55, 71, 76, 91, 92, 106, 107, 183, 202, 209, 214, 220, 221, 223, 228, 229, 230, 231, 233, 234, 236, 240, 241, 250, 262, 267, 268, 271– 80, 294, 296, 297, 304

327

Meyer, J. B. 219, 221, 222, 224, 244–​5 Mill, J. S. 161, 250 Molière 293 Montaigne, M. 300, 301, 303 moral duties see duty/​moral duties moral law see law moral psychology 8, 9, 51–​86, 102 morality 3, 5, 7, 8, 14, 24, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 41, 51–​5, 57, 58, 59, 62, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 86, 105, 107, 109, 111, 115, 122, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 145, 146, 153, 154, 156, 159, 163, 164, 167, 168, 178, 188, 193, 194, 195, 196, 200, 201, 203, 206, 207, 210, 211, 212, 214, 215, 235, 237, 238, 239, 242, 244, 258, 259, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 281, 282, 283, 285, 286, 293, 295, 296, 297, 298, 304 morality of custom/​morality of mores (Sittlichkeit der Sitte) 3, 5, 82, 163, 164, 167, 188, 196, 237, 237, 239 Müller, J. 224, 225 naturalism 3, 8, 15, 96, 121, 129, 130, 196, 202, 210, 259 neo-​Kantianism 1, 12, 79, 80, 86, 219, 220, 221, 244, 245, 252 Nietzsche, F. passim nihilism 7, 8, 14, 15, 177, 180, 183, 236, 292, 293, 297, 298, 299, 304, 305, 306, 307, 309 non-​domination see domination/​non-​ domination 11, 137, 139, 149, 150, 151, 154 normative claims see norms normative judgements see norms normative laws see norms normativity 1, 9, 24, 33, 34, 41, 46, 51, 57, 58, 59, 65, 77, 78, 85, 122 norms 7, 8, 9, 15, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 41, 42, 43, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 65, 67, 69, 71, 76, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 153, 162, 210, 211, 214, 276, 278

328

328

Index

O’Neill, O. 2 Pascal, B. 305 pathos of distance 13, 15, 149, 156, 220, 242, 243 Paul 287 Peirce, C. S. 247 pity see compassion/​pity Plato 211, 298, 304 positivism 12, 219 power 6, 7, 9, 11, 15, 20, 27, 31, 33, 34–​48, 52, 64, 81, 109, 110, 121, 122–​35, 138, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 155, 156, 162, 170–​5, 180, 181, 186, 187, 188, 189, 197, 225, 228, 231, 232, 233, 238, 241, 242, 252, 275, 282, 287 practical reasoning 1, 39, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 81, 84, 91, 92, 93, 94, 98, 102, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 126, 131, 146, 151, 154, 168, 189, 221, 222, 224, 246, 266, 267, 268, 276, 291, 294, 303 progress 1, 52, 165 promise-​keeping 10, 12, 95, 102, 109, 111, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 163, 164, 165, 167, 169, 185, 186, 188, 190, 196, 197, 198, 205, 206, 210, 211, 212, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241 radical evil 220, 229, 230, 231, 239, 245, 248, 249 Rawls, J. 2 Rée, P. 267 Reid, T. 259 resistance 10, 35–​40, 46, 47, 110, 112–​15, 116, 121, 122, 123, 124, 131, 146, 147, 150, 260 respect (Achtung) 10, 56, 63, 69, 80, 109–​ 17, 120, 121, 123, 131, 132, 139 respect (Ehrfurcht) 6, 7, 197 responsibility 4, 5 reverence (Achtung) see respect (Achtung) reverence (Ehrfurcht) see respect (Ehrfurcht) rights 1, 6, 7, 15, 139, 200, 203, 205, 213, 280

Rousseau, J.-​J. 139, 161, 170, 189, 284 Royce, J. 258 Schaarschmidt, K. 223, 245, 246 Schiller, F. 1 Schopenhauer, A. 1, 13, 14, 72, 98, 126, 134, 169, 190, 223, 230, 231, 244, 246, 248, 253, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 284, 286, 305 self-​legislation 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 21, 28, 42, 43, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 61, 66, 70, 94, 110, 137, 139, 164, 165, 168, 186, 204, 212, 238, 239, 272, 274, 279 self-​love see love Shakespeare, W. 124, 133, 199, 212 slave revolt 11, 134, 146, 147 Socrates 102, 211, 291, 298 Stoics/Stoicism 206, 266, 267, 268, 269, 277, 280, 283, 284 sovereign individual 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 45, 82, 109, 110, 117–​22, 125, 128, 164, 188, 235–​44, 249, 250 sovereignity 12, 13, 109, 122, 123, 129, 159, 219, 220, 235–​44, 261, 271, 281 Spencer, H. 212, 225, 246, 258, 259 Spinoza, B. 35, 263 Spir, A. 249 spontaneity 12, 13, 92, 102, 219–​35, 237, 239, 241, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 252 Stirner, M. 13, 236, 239, 243, 244, 250 Teichmüller, G. 249 Trendelenburg, F. A. 249 universal law(s) see law universality 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 41–​86, 164, 261, 264, 280 unsociable sociability 1, 139, 154, 159, 166, 169, 187 value(s) 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, 12, 14, 20, 21, 26–​34, 38–​47, 52, 53, 58, 65, 66, 72, 79, 81, 83, 109, 110, 122, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129,

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Index 130, 135, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 156, 164, 165, 174, 175, 176, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 190, 194, 195, 202, 204, 206, 207, 224, 242, 246, 257, 264, 268, 269, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 283, 286, 287, 296, 298, 299, 307, 308, 309 virtue(s) 1, 2, 3, 4, 12, 30, 46, 59, 64, 82, 127, 147, 153, 162–5, 180, 182, 190, 193, 205, 206, 208, 209, 243, 268, 269, 275 Wagner, R. 223, 228, 246 Widemann, P. H. 249

329

will 1, 6, 10, 12, 20, 21, 22, 33, 35, 36, 54, 55, 62, 71, 80, 84, 92, 93, 94, 97, 98, 101, 102, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 123, 125, 126, 128, 131, 138, 151, 191, 177, 180, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 231, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 246, 251, 252, 261, 264 will to power 9, 20, 31, 33, 34–48, 130, 146, 149, 150, 159, 180, 188, 227, 228, 232, 287 will to truth 296, 298, 306, 308 Williams, B. 82, 84, 86, 208

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Nietzsche and Kant on Aesthetics and Anthropology

ii

Nietzsche’s Engagements with Kant and the Kantian Legacy Edited by Marco Brusotti, Herman Siemens, João Constâncio, Tom Bailey Nietzsche has often been considered a thinker independent of the philosophy of his time and radically opposed to the concerns and concepts of modern and contemporary philosophy. But there is an increasing awareness of his sophisticated engagements with his contemporaries and of his philosophy’s rich potential for debates with modern and contemporary thinkers. Nietzsche’s Engagements with Kant and the Kantian Legacy explores a significant field for such engagements, Kant and Kantianism. Bringing together an international team of established Nietzsche-​scholars who have done extensive work in Kant, contributors include both senior scholars and young, upcoming researchers from a broad range of countries and traditions. Working from the basis that Nietzsche is better understood as thinking ‘with and against’ Kant and the Kantian legacy, they examine Nietzsche’s explicit and implicit treatments of Kant, Kantians, and Kantian ­concepts, as well as the philosophical issues that they raise for both Nietzschean and Kantian philosophy. Volume I: Nietzsche, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics Edited by Marco Brusotti and Herman Siemens Volume II: Nietzsche and Kantian Ethics Edited by João Constâncio and Tom Bailey Volume III: Nietzsche and Kant on Aesthetics and Anthropology Edited by Maria João Mayer Branco and Katia Hay

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Nietzsche’s Engagements with Kant and the Kantian Legacy Volume III Nietzsche and Kant on Aesthetics and Anthropology Edited by Maria João Mayer Branco and Katia Hay

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK  USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Maria João Mayer Branco, Katia Hay and Contributors, 2017 Maria João Mayer Branco and Katia Hay have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the editors. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: Pack: 978-1-4742-7603-0 HB: 978-1-4742-7599-6 ePDF: 978-1-3500-3557-7 ePub: 978-1-3500-3558-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Brusotti, Marco, editor. Title: Nietzsche’s engagements with Kant and the Kantian legacy / edited by Marco Brusotti, Herman Siemens, Joäao Constncio, Tom Bailey. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017– | Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Volume 1. Nietzsche, Kant, and the problem of metaphysics / edited by Marco Brusotti and Herman Siemens – Volume 2. Nietzsche and Kantian ethics / edited by Joäao Constncio and Tom Bailey – Volume 3. Nietzsche and Kant on aesthetics and anthropology / edited by Maria Branco and Katia Hay. Identifiers: LCCN 2016040856 | ISBN 9781474274777 (volume 1 : hb) | ISBN 9781474274791 (volume 1 : epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. | Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804. Classification: LCC B3317 .N5424 2017 | DDC 193–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040856 Cover design: Catherine Wood Cover image © Getty Images Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

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Contents Notes on Contributors Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant Translations of Nietzsche’s and Kant’s Writings Introduction 

Maria João Mayer Branco and Katia Hay

vii x xvi

1

Part I  On the Third Critique 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8

Nietzsche Contra Kant on Genius, Originality and Agonal Succession  Herman Siemens Art beyond Truth and Lie in a Moral Sense  Ekaterina Poljakova ‘Who is Right, Kant or Stendhal?’: On Nietzsche’s Kantian Critique of Kant’s Aesthetics  João Constâncio Beyond the Beautiful and the Sublime? Nietzsche, Aesthetics and the Question about the Subject  Barbara Stiegler From Kant’s Critique of Judgement to The Birth of Tragedy: The Meaning of ‘Aesthetic’ in Nietzsche  David Puche Díaz Aesthetic Quantity, Aesthetic Acts and Willed Necessity in Nietzsche’s Engagement with Kant’s Critique of Judgement   Elaine P. Miller Teleological Judgement and the End of History  Anthony K. Jensen Nietzsche and ‘the Great Chinese of Königsberg’  Carlo Gentili

15 43 63 99 113

133 157 179

Part II  On the Anthropology  9 Reason and Laughter in Kant and Nietzsche  Katia Hay 10 ‘jeder Geist hat seinen Klang’: Kant and Nietzsche on the Sense of Hearing  Maria João Mayer Branco

197 219

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Contents

11 On the Role of Maxims: Nietzsche’s Critique of Kant’s Philosophical Anthropology  Matthew Dennis Complete Bibliography Name Index Subject Index

251 273 281 282

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Notes on Contributors Editors Maria João Mayer Branco is a postdoctoral researcher at the Instituto de Filosofia da Nova (Lisbon, Portugal). She studied at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and at the Università degli Studi di Pisa and worked extensively on Nietzsche and aesthetics. She co-​edited the volumes Nietzsche on Instinct and Language (Walter de Gruyter, 2011), As the Spider Spins: Essays on Nietzsche’s Critique and Use of Language (Walter de Gruyter, 2012), Sujeito, décadence e arte. Nietzsche e a modernidade (Tinta-​da-​China, 2014) and Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity (Walter de Gruyter, 2015). She is member and co-​founder of the Nietzsche International Lab, member of the Seminario Permanente Nietzscheano –​Centro Interdipartimentale Colli-​Montinari di Studi su Nietzsche e la Cultura Europea (Università di Pisa, Lecce, Padova, Firenze) and the GIRN (Groupe International de Recherches sur Nietzsche). Katia Hay is currently developing a research project on the nature of images and censorship at the University of Leiden. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Instituto de Filosofia da Nova (Lisbon, Portugal) with a project on Nietzsche and Post-​Kantian aesthetics. She is also a member of the Centro de Filosofia at the University of Lisbon and of the Collège d’études juives et de philosophie contemporaine at the Sorbonne, Paris IV. She is the author of Die Notwendigkeit des Scheiterns. Das Tragische als Bestimmung der Philosophie bei Schelling (Alber, 2012) and of numerous other works on Nietzsche and Schelling. Katia Hay is also the main editor of Nietzsche, German Idealism and Its Critics (Walter de Gruyter, 2015).

Contributors João Constâncio is associate professor of philosophy at Nova University of Lisbon (UNL/​FCSH). He earned his PhD there with a dissertation on Plato. He also does research at IFILNOVA/​FCSH, where he directs the research group, ‘Nietzsche International Lab’ (NIL). He is the author of Arte e niilismo: Nietzsche e o enigma do mundo (2013) and co-​editor of four books on Nietzsche, including Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity (Walter de Gruyter, 2015). He has also

viii

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published many articles on Nietzsche, including ‘On Consciousness: Nietzsche’s Departure from Schopenhauer’, Nietzsche-​Studien 40 (2011). Matthew Dennis is completing his thesis on Nietzsche and philosophical self-​ cultivation at the University of Warwick. He works on ethics and aesthetics in the modern European philosophical tradition, Hellenistic philosophy and contemporary Virtue Theory. He is co-​editor of an issue of Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy on Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Trilogy and is the author of two articles on contemporary virtue ethical readings of Nietzsche to be published in 2016. Carlo Gentili is full professor of aesthetics at the University of Bologna. In 2006 he became a member of the scientific committee of the Nietzsche-​Studien. He has dedicated his universitary courses to Nietzsche, as well as to other modern German philosophers (Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Adorno, Heidegger). Since 2009 he is a member of the ‘Friedrich-​Nietzsche-​Stiftung’. Among his previous publications are: Nietzsches Kulturkritik zwischen Philologie und Philosophie (Basel, 2010); and Der Tod Gottes und die Wissenschaft (ed. with C.  Nielsen; Berlin/​ New  York, 2010). He edited a new Italian translation, with commentary, of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (Einaudi, Torino, 2015). Anthony K. Jensen is associate professor of philosophy at Providence College and associate editor of the Journal of Nietzsche Studies. He is the author of three books: An Essay on Nietzsche’s ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ (Routledge, 2016); Nietzsche’s Philosophy of History (Cambridge University Press, 2013)  and, with Helmut Heit (ed.), Nietzsche as a Scholar of Antiquity (Bloomsbury, 2014). He has written more than fifty articles, chapters, translations, reviews and encyclopedia articles on Late Modern Philosophy, especially historical theory, epistemology and psychology. Elaine P.  Miller is professor of philosophy at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, USA. She is the author of The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine (State University of New York Press, 2002) and Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times (Columbia University Press, 2014), the co-​editor of Returning to Irigaray (SUNY Press, 2006) and the author of several articles on Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Beauvoir and Benjamin. Ekaterina Poljakova is Privatdozentin at the University of Greifswald, where she gained her Habilitation in Philosophy by W. Stegmaier. She is author of Differente Plausibilitäten: Kant und Nietzsche, Tolstoi und Dostojewski über Vernunft, Moral und Kunst (Walter de Gruyter, 2013), as well as of articles on Nietzsche, such as Mehrdeutigkeit des Antichristlichen. Deutsch-​russische Reflexionen in Antichrist

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(Jahrbuch für Religionsphilosophie, 2014). She is also affiliated to the Russian Academy of Sciences (Institut of Philosophy). David Puche Díaz completed his studies in philosophy at the Universidad Complutense (Madrid) and at the Humboldt University (Berlin). His PhD thesis, awarded by the Complutense, was on Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. He is currently teaching philosophy and aesthetics at the ‘Escuela de Arte y Superior de Diseño’ in Mérida. He has published several articles in philosophy journals and a monograph on Nietzsche (UCM, 2010). His main lines of research are metaphysics, aesthetics, political philosophy, Nietzsche and German Idealism. Herman Siemens is associate professor of modern philosophy at Leiden University, adjunct professor at the Universidad Diego Portales (Chile) and research associate of the University of Pretoria (South Africa) and the Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal). He is president of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society and, with P.  van Tongeren, director of the Nietzsche-​Wörterbuch (Walter de Gruyter). He specializes in Nietzsche and post-​Nietzschean philosophy, political philosophy and aesthetics, and has published widely in these areas, including the book, co-​edited, with V.  Roodt, Nietzsche, Power and Politics: Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought (Walter de Gruyter, 2008). He currently leads a research programme on Nietzsche and Kant as ancestors of contemporary agonistic and deliberative theories of democracy. Barbara Stiegler is associate professor at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne, director of the BA on “Care Ethics and Health” and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). She is the author of Nietzsche et la biologie (PUF, 2001) and Nietzsche et la critique de la chair. Dionysos, Ariane, le Christ (PUF, 2005), as well as of several articles on German philosophy and on philosophy of the body. She is currently working on the relation between life sciences and human and social sciences and on the evolutionist sources of neoliberalism.

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Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant Abbreviations for Nietzsche’s Writings All references to Nietzsche’s writings are from the following editions: BAW

KGB

KGW

KGW IX

KSA

KSB

Nietzsche, F. (1933–​40), Historisch-​kritische Gesamtausgabe, Hans Joachim Mette/​ Carl Koch/​ Karl Schlechta (eds), Munich:  C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Reprinted as:  Frühe Schriften 1854–​1869, Munich: DTV 1994. Nietzsche, F.  (1975–​ ), Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, established by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, continued by Norbert Miller and Annemarie Pieper, Berlin/​New  York:  De Gruyter. Nietzsche, F. (1967–​), Werke Kritische Gesamtausgabe, established by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, continued by Wolfgang Müller-​ Lauter and Karl Pestalozzi (eds), Berlin/​ New  York:  De Gruyter. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung IX:  Der handschriftliche Nachlaß ab Frühjahr 1885 in differenzierter Transkription, Marie-​Louise Haase/​Michael Kohlenbach et al. (eds), Berlin/​New York: De Gruyter, 2001ff. Nietzsche, F.  (1980), Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, Giorgio Colli/​Mazzino Montinari (eds), Munich/​ Berlin/​New York: DTV/​De Gruyter. Nietzsche, F. (1986), Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe in 8 Bänden, Giorgio Colli/​Mazzino Montinari (eds), Munich/​Berlin/​ New York: DTV/​De Gruyter.

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Abbreviations or ‘Siglen’ for Nietzsche’s Writings in German CV   CV 1   CV 3   CV 5 MA   MA II NL PHG RWB UB   UB I   UB II   UB III (SE) VM

Fünf Vorreden zu fünf ungeschriebenen Büchern Ueber das Pathos der Wahrheit Der griechische Staat Homer’s Wettkampf Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freie Geister. Erster Band Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freie Geister. Zweiter Band Nachlass Fragmente Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen Richard Wagner in Bayreuth Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Erstes Stück:  David Strauss der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Zweites Stück:  Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Drittes Stück: Schopen­ hauer als Erzieher (MA II) Erste Abtheilung: Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche

Abbreviations for Nietzsche’s Writings in English A AOM BGE

The Antichrist Assorted Opinions and Maxims (HH II) Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future BT The Birth of Tragedy   BT Attempt The Birth of Tragedy, Attempt at a Self-​Criticism   BT Foreword Foreword to Richard Wagner CW The Case of Wagner: A Musician’s Problem D Daybreak DS David Strauss the Confessor and the Writer (UM I) DW The Dionysian Worldview EH Ecce Homo. How One Becomes What One Is

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  EH (CW)   EH (HH)   EH Books   EH Clever GM GS HH   HH II HL

Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant

See CW See HH Why I Write Such Good Books Why I Am So Clever On the Genealogy of Morals (or: Morality). A Polemic The Gay Science Human, All Too Human (Volume I) Human, All Too Human (Volume II) On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (UM II) TI Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer   TI Ancients What I Owe the Ancients   TI Arrows Arrows and Epigrams   TI Errors The Four Great Errors   TI Fable How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable   TI Reason ‘Reason’ in Philosophy   TI Skirmishes Skirmishes of an Untimely Man TL On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense UM Untimely Meditations   UM III Schopenhauer as Educator   UM IV Richard Wagner in Bayreuth WS The Wanderer and His Shadow (HH II) Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra   Z Prologue Prologue   Z I Reading On Reading and Writing   Z II Great Events On Great Events   Z II Knowledge On Immaculate Knowledge   Z II Redemption On Redemption   Z II Stillest Hour The Stillest Hour   Z III Apostates On Apostates   Z III Evils On the Three Evils   Z III Homecoming The Homecoming   Z III Virtue On Virtue That Makes Small   Z III Vision On the Vision and the Riddle   Z IV Festival The Ass Festival   Z IV Higher Man On the Higher Man   Z IV Sleepwalker The Sleepwalker Song

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Abbreviations of Kant’s Writings with Indication of the Corresponding AA Volume Anth EEKU GMS GSE

IaG

KpV KrV KU Log MAM MS NTH

RGV V-​Anth/​Mron

Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht/​ Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (AA 07) Erste Einleitung in die Kritik der Urteilskraft/​ First Introduction to the Critique of Judgement (AA 20) Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten/​Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (AA 04) Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen/​Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (AA 02) Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht/​Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (AA 08) Kritik der praktischen Vernunft/​Critique of Practical Reason (AA 05) Kritik der reinen Vernunft/​ Critique of Pure Reason (According to the original editions A/​B) Kritik der Urteilskraft/​Critique of Judgement (AA 05) Logik/​Logic (AA 09) Muthmaßlicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte/​ Conjectural Beginning of Human History (AA 08) Die Metaphysik der Sitten/​ The Metaphysics of Morals (AA 06) Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels/​ Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (AA 01) Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft/​ Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (AA 06) Vorlesungen Wintersemester 1784/​1785 Mrongovius (AA 25)

Also: Nachlaßreflexionen are to be found in Handschriftlicher Nachlaß. Logik (AA 16) Lose Blätter zu GSE is in AA 20

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Abbreviations and References for Nietzsche and Kant

References Nietzsche’s writings Emphases in Nietzsche’s writings:  normal emphases (= ‘gesperrt’ in KSA) are rendered in italics. Further emphases (‘halbfett’ in KSA for the Nachlass) are rendered in bold italics. Interventions/​omissions: any interventions in citations by the author, including insertions of original German words, are indicated by square brackets: []. Any omissions by the author are also inserted in square brackets [. . .] in order to distinguish them from Nietzsche’s own ellipses. References to Nietzsche’s published/​titled texts:  follow the standard abbreviations given in Nietzsche-​Studien under ‘Siglen’ and are listed here. Authors have used either German or English abbreviations, followed by the section/​aphorism number (e.g. JGB 12 or BGE 12, M 54 or D 54, GM I 13). For sections/​chapters that are not numbered but named, the abbreviations from Nietzsche-​Studien have been used or otherwise devised for easy identification when necessary, for example: Twilight of the Idols, ‘What the Germans Lack’, section 3 = TI Germans 3 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Book I, ‘On the Three Transformations’  =  Z I Transformations. Page references, where given, are to the relevant passage in the Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA), not to any translations used. The format is as follows: BGE 12, KSA 5.76 (= Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 12, KSA volume 5, page 76); M 95, KSA 3.86f. (Morgenröthe, aphorism 95, KSA volume 3, page 86f.). References to the Nachlass: follow the notation in KSA, followed by volume and page and preceded by NL and the year, for example: NL 1883 15[44], KSA 10.491 = note 15[71] in KSA volume 10, page 491. NL 1885-​86 2[15], KSA 12.74 = note 2[15] in KSA volume 12, page 74. References to the Nachlass material in Kaufmann’s The Will to Power (=WP) are given as references to the equivalent notes in KSA. References to Nietzsche’s letters:  include addressee, date, volume and page number in KSB (Sämtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe) or KGB (Nietzsche Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe).

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Kant’s writings Emphases and interventions/​omissions are rendered as earlier. References to Kant’s texts: follow the standard German abbreviations given in Kant-​Studien and are listed here. The abbreviations are followed by the page number(s) in the ‘Akademie Ausgabe’ (AA), for example, KU 238 (= AA vol. 5, p. 238), Anth 315–​16 (= AA vol. 7, pp. 315–​16). The relevant volume of the AA for each work is given in the list of abbreviations. Where relevant, the standard A and/​or B version for first and second editions of Kant’s works are given, for example, KrV B150, KrV A743/​B771. References to numbered sections/​paragraphs are also sometimes given by the author, for example, KrV §25 B157, KU §1 204 (= AA vol. V, p. 204).

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Translations of Nietzsche’s and Kant’s Writings Next to their own translations, authors and editors have drawn on a broad range of available translations of Nietzsche’s and Kant’s writings, modifying and combining them as they considered appropriate. Translations used: Nietzsche The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New  York:  Vintage (1974); The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage (1968); Daybreak, eds Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1997); The Anti-​Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of idols, ed. Aaron Ridley, trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2005); On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-​Pearson, trans. Cariol Diethe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2007); Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1993); Human, All Too Human, trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1996); ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, in:  Philosophy and Truth:  Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press (1979); Human, All Too Human:  A  Book for Free Spirits, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1996); On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith, Oxford:  Oxford University Press (1996); The Gay Science:  With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Josephine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2001); Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New  York:  Penguin Books (1966); The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House (1967); On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage Books (1989); Beyond Good and Evil, trans. with commentary Walter Kaufmann, New  York:  Vintage Books/​ Random House (1966); The Antichrist, trans. H.L. Menchen, Las Vegas:  Alba & Tromm (2010); The Wanderer and His Shadow, in Human, All Too Human II, trans. and Afterword Gary Handwerk, Stanford: Stanford University Press (2013). Kant

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Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1998); Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. and ed. Robert B.  Louden, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (2006); The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1996); Religion within the Bounds of Reason and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Allen Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1998); Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, trans. Ian Johnston, Arlington, VA:  Richer Resources Publications (2008); Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis-​Cambridge: Hackett (1987); Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S.  Pluhar, Indianapolis, IN:  Hackett Publishing Company (1996); Lectures on Logic, ed. and trans. M. Young, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1992); Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (1996); Lectures on Anthropology, ed. Allen Wood and Robert Louden, trans. Clewis, Louden, Munzel and Wood, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press (2012); Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Robert Louden and G.  Seller, trans. Gregor, Gayer, Louden, Wilson, Wood, Zöller and Zweig, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2007); Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregor, and A. Reath, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1997).

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  1

Introduction Maria João Mayer Branco and Katia Hay

The field of philosophy may be reduced to four questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. For what may I hope? 4. What is the human being? The first question is answered by Metaphysics, the second by Morals, the third by Religion and the fourth by Anthropology. In reality, however, all these might be reckoned under anthropology, since the first three questions refer to the last. Kant (Log 25) Man’s longing to be completely truthful in the midst of a mendacious natural order is something heroic and noble. But this is possible only in a very relative sense! That is tragic. That’s Kant’s tragic problem! Art now acquires an entirely new dignity. The sciences, in contrast, are degraded to a degree. Nietzsche (NL 1872–​3 19[104], KSA 7.453–​4) Kant’s critical writings marked a turning point in the history of European philosophy. Intended to save the concept of reason at the heart of the Enlightenment project from what seemed to be its inevitable crisis, Kant’s critical system sought to establish the differentiated unity of reason, in which truth, goodness and beauty would each find a secure home within an autonomous domain of pure reason. Within this system, the third Critique has an ambiguous and complex role. Is it just an afterthought, in which Kant tries to add aesthetic and teleological judgement to the architectonic of the first two Critiques? Or is it where Kant tries to solve the problems engendered by the first two Critiques –​to make good their deficits and overcome the profound divisions they left behind them? Or is it even the place where Kant finally tackles the question of judgement power (Urteilskraft) at the very core of the unity of reason? In order to save freedom and morality in a world governed by theoretical reason, Kant was forced to introduce a series of radical distinctions and exclusions: to separate ‘theoretical or natural philosophy’ from ‘practical or moral philosophy’ (KU Introduction II 171) and to divide reason against feeling and desire. What troubled him above

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all was the unbridgeable division or ‘immense gulf ’ that had opened up between ‘the domain of the concept of nature, the sensible, and the domain of the concept of freedom, the supersensible [. . .], just if they were two different worlds’ (KU Introduction II 175). In the Critique of Judgement, as well as in the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, we see Kant extending and modifying the stringent notion of pure reason from the first two Critiques in order to make good some of the deficits and exclusions therein, to shore up the unity of reason and to address the gulf or fissure between the supersensible and the sensible, between freedom and nature. This is evident in the third Critique, which, while committed to the transcendental project, to pure reason and to the autonomy of each of its domains, formulates key notions that cross or cross out these divisions and fissures –​genius (nature as legislator, radical freedom manifested in its works); beauty as the symbol of morality; aesthetic ideas (defying articulation and conceptualization); reflective judgement (non-​subsumptive thought); purposiveness without purpose and lawfulness without a law (law-​like behaviour without coercion, harmonization both within and between subjects), among others. In Anthropology, by contrast, Kant takes up reason in a sense that is anything but pure or a priori by considering what the human ‘as a free-​acting being makes of itself, or can and ought to [make of itself]’ (Anth Introduction 119). Kant’s pragmatic empirical anthropology thus provides a counterpoint to the abstract and divided accounts of the knowing subject and the moral agent in the Critiques. In effect, Kant’s anthropology lectures present the acting and knowing subject as ‘fully constituted in human flesh and blood, with the specific virtues and foibles that make it properly human’ (Jacobs and Kain 2003: 6). In this pragmatic sense, Kant’s anthropology is inspired, as he declares at the beginning of the Mrongovius anthropology lectures, not by ‘scholastic knowledge’ but by ‘dealings with the world’ (V-​Anth/​ Mron 1209) and develops a rather optimistic view about the contributions not only of sensibility, but also of sociability for the constitution and development of human reason. Kant’s legacy is thus deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, he bequeathed to philosophy a series of deeply problematic distinctions, exclusions and fissures; on the other hand, he opened new possibilities for rethinking reason in ways that could overcome them and address the human condition in modernity. Nietzsche is heir to both sides of this legacy. Reflecting on the scepticism that flows from the distinction between phenomena and things in themselves, the young Nietzsche warns of the ‘despair of the truth’ that ‘attends every thinker who begins his path from Kantian philosophy’ (UM III 3, KSA 1.355). He also writes of the ‘philosopher

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of tragic knowledge’, who feels it to be ‘tragic that the ground of metaphysics has been cut away’ since Kant and can ‘never be satisfied by the colourful kaleidoscope of the sciences’. Yet, he also glimpses new opportunities opened by the tragedy of knowledge authored by Kant. For the philosopher can now ‘work[.]‌toward a new life: he returns to art its rights’ (NL 1872–​3, 19[35], KSA 7.427f.). To some extent, this tendency can be made out already in Kant. The loss of metaphysical ground makes him turn to what reflection (or ‘reflective judgement’) reveals about the human being by way of the aesthetic feelings (the beautiful and the sublime in nature and in art). Indeed, the idea that ‘the only certainty philosophy can provide us is grounded in ourselves, not in something outside ourselves’ led to ‘Kant’s turn to aesthetics’ (Bowie 1990; 2003: 2). But in Nietzsche’s mature thought the loss of metaphysical ground is radicalized as the thesis of the death of God, and the absence of metaphysical truth extends to the overriding absence of meaning or purpose, what he comes to call ‘nihilism’. Yet the famous dictum ‘God is dead’ (GS 125, KSA 3.481) signifies not just a devastating loss, but also an opportunity for Nietzsche: the opening of an unprecedented sense of space and freedom for human capacities and knowledge, coupled with a strong suspicion that all meaning rests on mere anthropomorphisms. Hence, Nietzsche drives the ‘radicalization of Kant’s critique into the suspicion that the structures of reason are also sources of powerful deceptions’ (Strong 2013: 55). In the absence of metaphysical truth, all meaning becomes a matter of human projection. Yet none of this implies a blanket rejection of human reason. In refusing the Kantian separation of reason, as unconditioned and autonomous, from nature, Nietzsche’s move is to relocate human reason in nature and to explore both its pitfalls and errors, as well as the ‘uncharted seas’ (GS 283, KSA 3.526) and ‘impending adventures’ (GS Preface 1, KSA 3.346) that beckon a newly naturalized concept of human reason. If for Kant, the impossibility of metaphysics as knowledge delimits the field of philosophy to the anthropological question: ‘What is the human being?’, for Nietzsche the human becomes ‘the as yet undetermined animal’ (das noch nicht festgestellte Thier, BGE 62, KSA 5.81), and philosophy becomes a radical interrogation of the purpose and value of human existence. Nietzsche does a great deal in developing a new anthropology informed by a naturalized concept of reason and aesthetic categories. At the same time, however, the category of ‘the human’ is but a shadow of God, no less than ‘the truth’, and, as Foucault (2008: 124) reminds us, Nietzsche’s anthropology puts the very question ‘What is the human being?’ radically into question. The chapters that compose the first part of this volume deal with Nietzsche’s questioning of Kant’s aesthetics. In the Critique of Judgement, Kant gives an

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unexpectedly high value to our experience of ourselves as natural beings, particularly to our subjective feelings and to our sociability as a species. This is apparent in Herman Siemens’s analysis of genius and the problem of the origins or the conditions for the creation of a culture in Kant and Nietzsche, as well as in the chapters by João Constâncio, Barbara Stiegler and Elaine Miller. In different ways, they show how Nietzsche rejects Kant’s focus on the universal validity of aesthetic judgements, but also develops a new understanding of the concepts of beauty, the sublime, and subjective experience. Moreover, while Kant’s aesthetics vindicates the importance of first-​personal experience, sensibility and affectivity not only for aesthetic judgement, but for every form of human judgement and evaluation, Nietzsche engages Kant’s aesthetics in ways that exceed the limits of a ‘theory of art’ (Poljakova), a ‘regional aesthetics’ (Stiegler) or a ‘strict understanding of the aesthetic’ (Miller). Likewise, all the chapters in the first part of this volume reject (either explicitly or implicitly) the view that Nietzsche’s call for an aesthetics that looks at art from the viewpoint of life betokens a commitment to ‘aestheticism’ (see Came 2014: Introduction). Both for Kant and for Nietzsche ‘the aesthetic is not a privileged form of experience, but rather the very form of our experience in general’, as Puche Díaz puts it. Hence, in considering human beings as ‘creatures who are not pure reason, but who are themselves aesthetically conditioned’ (to borrow Ekaterina Poljakova’s words), both thinkers’ interest in aesthetics is deeply connected to a characterization of human reason that includes the realms of sensibility, feeling, desire and illusion, and that serves not only the analysis and assessment of the experience of beauty, artistic production and reception, but also of science, history, and philosophy, as the different perspectives of the authors here presented elucidate. Nevertheless, Kant and Nietzsche develop very different views on the human being. Indeed, as suggested earlier, Nietzsche’s engagement with the loss of metaphysical truth and meaning is also an opportunity for affirming the human as a natural being –​as the ‘bravest, most cunning, most enduring of animals’ (TI Skirmishes 32, KSA 6.131). In rejecting the Kantian separation of reason and nature, Nietzsche proposes ‘to translate humanity back into nature’ (BGE 230, KSA 5.169), or ‘to “naturalize” humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature’ (GS 109, KSA 3.469). This is the problem addressed by the last chapters of this volume, which show how Nietzsche’s rejection of the Kantian separation of reason and nature is also a radicalization of Kant’s anthropology, as Carlo Gentili’s chapter puts it. Anthony Jensen, in turn, addresses Kant’s view of teleology as a matter of ‘judgement’ in the third Critique that encompasses not only the organization and development of organisms, but also

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the history of humankind as directed towards ends that will realize its vocation to free itself from nature. What Nietzsche questions is how we can still trust or value this teleological point of view if we are now aware that it comes down to nothing more than a human projection. In other words, Nietzsche sees through what Foucault termed ‘the anthropological illusion’, that is, that human reason responds to the anthropological question with human, all too human answers, and thus puts the very anthropological question in question. Perhaps this is at bottom what is expressed in his famous critique of Kant’s entire critical project: ‘(–​and, come to think of it, was it not somewhat peculiar to demand of an instrument that it should criticise its own usefulness and suitability? That the intellect itself should “recognize” [erkenne] its own value, its own capacity, its own limitations? Was not even a little absurd? –​)’ (D Preface 3, KSA 3.13). Nietzsche, then, exposes the answers to the question ‘what is the human being?’ as anthropomorphisms, highlighting their fundamental insufficiency as well as the power of human self-​deception and error. This was Kant’s tragic legacy. However, contrary to Kant, Nietzsche’s philosophical ‘dealings with the world’ did not lead him to optimistic views of humankind, as is shown in the chapters by Katia Hay, Maria Branco and Matthew Dennis on particular questions raised by Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Nietzsche’s ‘naturalization’ of the human being enabled him to diagnose the disease that he saw was growing within Western culture, that is, the loss of meaning, the devaluation of values and nihilism, and to question Kant’s Enlightenment faith in the progress and purpose of the human species. In this context –​which, most likely, is still the same context in which we are living today –​the question of the human being requires the kind of revaluation that Nietzsche’s philosophy called for. In different ways, the authors in this volume explore this challenge and its implications for contemporary debates in anthropology and aesthetics.

Contributions In the opening chapter of the volume, ‘Nietzsche Contra Kant on Genius, Originality and Agonal Succession’, Herman Siemens explores Nietzsche’s ‘response to the pervasive sense of disorientation brought on by the collapse of traditional authorities, and the demand that modernity find ways to orient and guide itself in its own terms’. In Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditation, he argues, the problem is that of the origins of (German) culture and self-​legislation in modernity, which he approaches through an engagement with Kant’s reflections

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on genius in the Critique of Judgement. Central to both thinkers, he contends, is the problem of thinking origins or originality together with precedent, tradition and historicity. Indicating how Kantian genius plays into Nietzsche’s portrait of Schopenhauer in UM III and transforms the problem of normativity into the question of the rule or law of genius, this chapter shows how Nietzsche is drawn by the radical freedom of Kantian genius, but seeks to break Kant’s opposition between creative freedom and passive mimesis by developing a notion of agonal mimesis. According to Siemens, this notion conjugates originality and tradition and offers a model of overcoming-​through-​imitation as a conflictual form of succession that addresses the problem with Kant’s opposition. Moreover, by extending the Kantian figure of genius beyond the domain of art, Nietzsche strives to overcome the alienation or isolation of the aesthetic in modernity. Nietzsche’s early engagement with Kant, he concludes, raises problems that, in different contexts, will preoccupy him throughout his work. This same isolation is the starting point of Ekaterina Poljakova’s chapter, ‘Art beyond Truth and Lie in a Moral Sense’, where Kantian genius is also addressed. The chapter aims at clarifying the reasons why both Kant and Nietzsche turn to art, and it claims that ‘considering the question of art in isolation, that is, regarding it as a theory of art, it is impossible to understand the fundamental difference of [their] views’. Poljakova proposes to consider Kant’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies of art in connection with the problem of truth as the opposite of lie, that is to say, with the philosophical problem Nietzsche puts in terms of ‘whether one can consciously remain in untruth?’ (HH I 34, KSA 2.53). She explores the antinomies of Kant’s account of art as the aesthetic manifestation of the invisible, which is indispensable to man but whose criterion of truth is impossible to establish. Being a production of geniuses, art is ‘random, temporary and inadequate’ and ‘has to produce new and new models of connection between the inner and the outer’. For the ‘rule’ set by the work of genius can be refuted by another genius because of its inevitable inadequacy. Works of art therefore only create the illusion of bridging the gap between the world of ideas and the world of sensory perception, and this illusion indicates that art is after truth, which nonetheless is unattainable for a human as such. According to Poljakova, then, Kant already thinks of art as beyond truth and lie, but for him that is no reason for despair. Here lies the divide with Nietzsche, who insists on the necessity of overcoming art itself in its complicity with illusion, that is, of going beyond art by accepting the tragic inescapability of ‘untruth’. In his early work, the author claims, Nietzsche tried to set the ideal of the truth of art against the hopelessly false world of morals and had no intention of reconciling art and morality, even

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if, unlike Kant, he aimed at abolishing the very difference between truth and illusion. In his mature phase, Nietzsche’s project of a tragic philosophy makes clear that the duality of human beings, seemingly abolished by art, remains nonetheless an unresolved problem. The divide between Nietzschean and Kantian views on aesthetics is, in turn, questioned and rejected by João Constâncio in his chapter ‘ “Who Is right, Kant or Stendhal?” On Nietzsche’s Kantian Critique of Kant’s Aesthetics’. This chapter shifts the question of the illusory power of art to the concept of beauty by focusing on the way in which Nietzsche recasts ‘the aesthetic problem’ as an opposition between Kant and Stendhal in GM III 6. Nietzsche here presents a prima facie irreconcilable opposition between the conception of beauty as disinterestedness and the conception of beauty in terms of desire. In taking sides with Stendhal against Kant, Nietzsche seems at first to be defending what Constâncio calls a reductionist view of beauty; that is, a ‘subjectivism’ that reduces beauty to a merely subjective ‘projection’, and a ‘biologism’ that reduces beauty to the mirror image of a discharge of sexual desire. This reductionist view of beauty also seems to be expressed in Twilight of the Idols and in the Nachlass, particularly when Nietzsche conceives of beauty as expressive of the ‘feeling of power’. Constâncio’s main aim, however, is to debunk this interpretation. While conceding that Nietzsche wants to develop ‘a view of beauty that makes beauty subjective and links beauty to desire’, he argues that Nietzsche’s real target in GM III 6 is Schopenhauer, not Kant, and that the Nietzschean concepts of ‘spiritualization’ and ‘pathos of distance’ entail a quasi-​Kantian conception of judgements of beauty as reflective judgements, and hence the rejection of reductionism. Thus, according to Constâncio, Nietzsche recasts the aesthetic problem not so much by means of the opposition, ‘Kant or Stendhal’, as by means of a juxtaposition, ‘Kant and Stendhal’. The relation of aesthetics to subjectivity in Kant and Nietzsche is also at stake in Barbara Stiegler’s chapter, ‘Beyond the Beautiful and the Sublime? Nietzsche, Aesthetics and the Question about the Subject’, which adds to the question of beauty that of the sublime. The chapter examines the concepts of beautiful and sublime asking whether Nietzsche considers them from a perspective beyond Kantian morality and beyond Kant’s critique of modern metaphysics. In line with the previous chapters, Stiegler argues that the question of the status of the beautiful and the sublime in Nietzsche’s aesthetics is not merely about a regional aesthetics. Rather, the question of art’s autonomy and illusion is essentially about Nietzsche’s place in the history of the metaphysics of the subject. With the concepts of the ‘beautiful’ and ‘sublime’, she contends, Kant developed an aesthetics

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of pure ‘presentation’, beyond the modern metaphysics of representation. She then argues that Nietzsche reassesses those concepts through the figures of ‘Apollo’ and ‘Dionysos’ and, from the 1880s onwards, places them in the context of what she calls the question of ‘flux’ and ‘stasis’. Drawing on Jean-​Luc Nancy’s The Sublime Offering, Stiegler argues against Heidegger that Nietzsche does not complete the metaphysics of modernity by affirming the unlimited powers of the subject over the whole of Being, but rather resumes the Kantian affirmation of an excess that delimits and surpasses our finitude. Her conclusion is that, while inheriting this Kantian insight, Nietzsche also changes the meaning of this excess fundamentally, by moving it from the superior and moral sphere of the supersensible towards what he calls ‘the absolute flux of what happens’ (absoluten Fluß des Geschehens]) (NL 1881–​2 11[293], KSA 9.554). In his chapter, ‘From Kant’s Critique of Judgement to the Birth of Tragedy: The Meaning of “Aesthetic” in Nietzsche’, David Puche Díaz proposes to reconsider the meaning of the ‘aesthetic’ in Nietzsche’s thought through a comparative study of The Birth of Tragedy and Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Puche argues that in Nietzsche the aesthetic responds to a certain comprehension of the world as an openness of meaning. In other words, the problem of the aesthetic in Nietzsche is the problem of a hermeneutic and practical metaphysics, that is, of a comprehension of reality that excludes any claim of absolute knowledge. In order to develop his argument, Puche draws similarities between some of the fundamental theoretical aspects of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, such as the division between Apollo and Dionysus, or the figure of the genius with elements from Kant’s third Critique, in order to show how for both authors, thinking about the aesthetic reveals something fundamental about human experience in general (i.e. not only of the aesthetic experience). Finally, Puche localizes the conceptual matrix of the Nietzschean experience of the Apollinian and the Dionysian in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, and more precisely in the feelings of the beautiful and the sublime. Elaine Miller’s chapter, ‘Aesthetic Quantity, Aesthetic Acts and Willed Necessity in Nietzsche’s Engagement with Kant’s Critique of Judgement’, also questions a strict understanding of the ‘aesthetic’ in Kant and Nietzsche. In specific, this chapter argues that, while Nietzsche almost completely dismissed Kant’s aesthetics as antithetical to his own, their points of view on beauty and sublimity actually strike some common chords, with broad implications for their views of philosophy. The chapter proceeds by examining Kant’s four moments of aesthetic judgement in the Critique of Judgement, relating each to Nietzsche’s explicit comments and criticisms, but also to themes in Nietzsche’s philosophy

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that can be understood in relation to Kantian aesthetic judgement. Whereas Nietzsche’s critique of Kant primarily disputed his analysis of the moment of quality in aesthetic judgements on the basis of a misunderstanding of disinterestedness, she argues that the Kantian themes of aesthetic quantity, willed necessity and purposiveness without a purpose, appear transformed in Nietzsche’s mature philosophy. The moments of quantity, relation and modality fundamentally influenced Nietzsche’s articulation of the metaphorical origin of concepts, aesthetic acts and the eternal recurrence of the same, ideas that can be traced to Kant’s account of aesthetic quantity, purposiveness without a purpose and the necessity implied by aesthetic judgements. Comparing the third Critique with passages from Nietzsche’s writings, both early and late, published and unpublished, Miller concludes that the imbrication of science and art in the Critique of Judgement, as well as the concepts of aesthetic quantity, willed necessity and singularity, had enduring effects on Nietzsche’s philosophical writings and appear transformed in the concepts of the Apollinian and Dionysian (purposiveness without a purpose), the metaphorical origin of all concepts (aesthetic quantity), the excess of the aesthetic act, amor fati and the willing of the eternal recurrence of the same (aesthetic necessity). The enduring effects of Nietzsche’s engagement with Kant are also thematized in the two chapters that focus on both thinkers’ anthropologies and contrast their views on teleology. In ‘Nietzsche and the “Great Chinese of Königsberg” ’, Carlo Gentili argues that by reproaching the centrality that Kant gives to the human being as a privileged agent to understand nature, Nietzsche reconfigures the question of anthropology leading to ‘an extreme radicalization of Kantian philosophy’. The chapter shows that Nietzsche’s anthropological transformation consists in reducing man to his ‘species’, in line with his wish for a ‘de-​deification of nature’ that would ‘ “naturalize” humanity’ (GS 109, KSA 3.469). Nietzsche charges Kant with anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism for considering metaphysics to be an irrepressible need of human nature and for construing judgements of taste as a particular form of synthetic judgements a priori. By focusing on the ‘preservation of the species’ (Arterhaltung), Nietzsche translates Kant’s transcendental setting into a simple question of perspective among natural beings. Hence, while reproaching Kant for not being able to make a clean break with an anthropomorphic view and arguing that nature is exempt from any conformity to an end, Nietzsche opposes the human world and the animal world, thereby undoing Kantian teleological continuity and admitting gaps that leave the field open to the struggle between heterogeneous systems of ends, which, according to Gentili, encapsulates Nietzsche’s concept of nature.

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Anthony Jensen’s chapter ‘Teleological Judgement and the End of History’ also explores Nietzsche’s interest in Kant’s teleology, but focuses on its relation to history. His chapter examines the reasons for Nietzsche’s interest in Kant’s teleology when he was a young philologist, showing that for both Nietzsche and Kant, neither science nor history can be considered ‘regionally’, any more than aesthetics can; at stake for both thinkers is rather their intertwinement and contribution to the philosophical examination of the relation between man and world. Only this intertwinement can explain, as Jensen puts it, ‘why he [Nietzsche] decided to write his doctoral dissertation in philology on an obviously non-​philological topic’: ‘On the Concept of the Organic since Kant’. The thesis is that Nietzsche’s early interest in teleology and natural sciences was part of his reflections on history and contributed to his formulation of a conception of historical change in non-​teleological terms. For Jensen, Kant’s view of teleology is not just about the development of organisms, but an entire teleological worldview in historiography that construes the march of history as a system of change directed towards a single or set of ends; he then enumerates Nietzsche’s arguments against teleological judgement and his position that teleology anthropomorphizes reality and attributes anthropological characteristics to nature. These arguments are then traced to Nietzsche’s later reflections about history, not only in On the Uses and Disadvantages of History that features an existential critique of teleology, but also in his mature writings. The last three chapters of the volume engage directly with Kant’s Anthropology, exploring issues that cut across the fields of aesthetics and anthropology and defy any clear-​cut classification as well as overlapping topics. Katia Hay’s ‘Reason and Laughter in Kant and Nietzsche’ analyses the ways in which Kant’s and Nietzsche’s approaches to laughter reveal fundamental characteristics of their philosophical positions, and most importantly, how they reveal the radical differences between them. Thus, she argues that Kant’s emphatic refusal of any substantive relation of laughter to reason and knowledge betrays an indirect acknowledgement of its subversive power. Moreover, contrasting the relevance of laughter in Kant’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies enables her to question the extent to which this exclusion (in Kant’s philosophy) is not in fact counterproductive for his project of critical reason. Through a comparative analysis of Nietzsche’s much richer and more variegated accounts of laughter and ‘gay science’, she throws light on the role and the meaning of laughter in Nietzsche’s thought and its implications for his understanding of philosophy as critique and self-​critique. In effect, if Nietzsche embraces laughter it is precisely for its critical and self-​critical power.

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Maria Branco’s chapter, ‘ “jeder Geist hat seinen Klang”:  Kant and Nietzsche on the Sense of Hearing’, is also dedicated to an apparently secondary concern within Kant’s anthropological account that is essential for Nietzsche, namely, the importance of the sense of hearing. The chapter argues that Kant and Nietzsche revaluate the traditional, metaphysical understanding of hearing and analyse the different consequences of their conceptions of hearing for their ideas on free thinking, sociability and language. Branco starts by exploring Kant’s ambivalent view of the sense of hearing in his Anthropology and then compares it with Hannah Arendt’s definition of thought as ‘the soundless dialogue between me and myself ’ and with the forms of ‘silence’ and ‘solitude’ it requires. After showing that for Kant, hearing is the condition for the subject’s relation with himself and with others, Branco focuses on Nietzsche’s account of the relation between hearing and thinking in order to clarify what kind of freedom Nietzsche has in mind and what brings him close to Kant, as well as what separates them. The chapter that closes the volume is Matthew Dennis’s ‘On the Role of Maxims:  Nietzsche’s Critique of Kant’s Philosophical Anthropology’. It is dedicated to Kant’s and Nietzsche’s different philosophical anthropologies and their connection to their moral philosophies. Dennis argues that, for Kant, while anthropology is separable from the universalizable maxims that dominate his moral philosophy, we need it in order to give a comprehensive account of the ethical lives of human beings. For Nietzsche, anthropology has a more fundamental role: it both explains the dictates of traditional morality and offers the potential for a new account of human flourishing that acknowledges our embodied nature. The chapter’s main claim is thus that viewing Kant’s and Nietzsche’s anthropologies side by side sheds light on how their differing anthropological commitments result in deep differences in their moral philosophies, as well as elucidating each thinker’s philosophical motivation for enlisting anthropology for explanatory purposes. By considering the differences between these anthropologies, Dennis proposes that we can better understand the motivations for Nietzsche’s critique of Kant’s moral philosophy.

References Bowie, A. (2003), Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche, Oxford/​New York: Manchester University Press.

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Came, D. (ed.) (2014), Nietzsche on Art and Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foucault, M. (2008 [1961]), Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, trans. R. Nigro and K. Briggs, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Jacobs, B., and Kain, P. (eds) (2003), Essays on Kant’s Anthropology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strong, T. B. (2013), Politics without Vision. Thinking without a Banister in the Twentieth Century, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

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Part I

On the Third Critique

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Nietzsche Contra Kant on Genius, Originality and Agonal Succession Herman Siemens

1.  Introduction Without doubt, Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (UB) offer one of the classic articulations of the problem of modernity in the philosophical literature. Among the various statements of the problem Nietzsche offers, two stand out: the demand for an origin of German culture in UB I, and the demand for radically individual self-​legislation in UB III. At stake in both is a problem of origins, of unprecedented birth and formation (Bildung). In the first case, the problem is not just that German culture is in need of reform. The UB offer a bewildering variety of critical perspectives on contemporary culture, from the quasi-​aesthetic critique of ‘lack of style’ (Stillosigkeit) to the quasi-​scientific critique of ‘atomistic chaos’ and the quasi-​medical diagnosis of historical sickness. But the crisis of German culture runs deeper than these medical, scientific or aesthetic discourses suggest: it is not that German culture is already there, living in a chaotic and unhealthy state that needs to be ‘cured’ or reformed around a new unifying principle. The problem is one of absence: absence of a German style, absence of a ‘foundation’ for German culture, indeed the absence or non-​being of the German –​‘You have no culture, not just a bad or degenerate culture, for even it would still have unity of style’ (NL 1873 27[66], KSA 7.607),1 Nietzsche writes in a preparatory note. Or again: The German must first form itself:  /​Formation not on a national basis, but rather formation of the German […] /​The German must be formed: that does not yet exist. (NL 1872/​73 19[284], KSA 7.508)2

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Given the non-​existence or absence of the German qua culture (and qua people or Volk),3 the problem is one of origins, of giving birth or being to an original German culture and people.4 In the second case, the demand for self-​legislation is Nietzsche’s response to the problem he shares with Schiller, the young Hegel and early German Romanticism –​the pervasive and radical sense of disorientation brought on by the collapse of traditional authorities, and the demand that modernity find ways to orient and guide itself in its own terms. In the absence of credible rules or models from the past, we are thrown back on ourselves for the norms that could guide and ground our actions and judgements.5 In Nietzsche’s words, modernity represents the ‘low tide of all moral powers’ and is incapable of generating values; we live instead on a dwindling capital of inherited morality: What has become of any reflection on questions of morality [sittliche Fragen], questions that have at all times occupied every more highly civilized society? (SE 2, KSA 1.344)

Any shared values or mores that could give orientation to modern humans are unclear; they are not even discussed. We are therefore thrown back on ourselves and ‘have to answer to ourselves for our existence’: our wondrous existence just in this moment, gives us the strongest incentive to live according to our own measure and law [nach eignem Maass und Gesetz]. (SE 1, KSA 1.339)

Nietzsche’s ‘particularist’ orientation is established at the very start of SE where the cause of ‘every human being’ as ‘Unicum’ is taken up against the forces of conformity and convention. It is, he argues, the artists alone who reveal the mystery that every human is a unique miracle, they dare to show us the human being just as it is, uniquely itself down to every last movement of its muscles, more, that in being thus strictly consistent in its singularity [Einzigkeit], it is beautiful and worthy of contemplation [betrachtenswerth], new and unbelievable like every work of nature, and not at all tedious. (SE 1, KSA 1.337–​8)

But the artist just confronts us with the problem. For what is to be the ‘measure’ and ‘law’ for us in the absence of traditional norms? What are to be its sources, given the bankruptcy of mores ‘in this now’? At stake in Nietzsche’s concept of radically individual self-​legislation is, once again, the problem of origins: of original norms and standards of evaluation.

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Both cases –​the problem of original German culture and original values or norms –​are very much a problem of originality in the sense developed by Kant in his reflections on genius in the Kritik der Urteilskraft. In this chapter I argue that Nietzsche’s way of addressing his problems in the UB is best understood as an engagement with Kant’s account of genius. In the first case, it is because Nietzsche thinks original German culture on the model of the original work of art. Drawing on categories for the work of art (unity, necessary relation between form and content, adequation between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ (Lacoue-Labarthe 1990: 217), Nietzsche translates the problem of birth and formation into the problem of the work,6 with questions such as:  How to effect the passage from absence to presence (poiesis) for German culture? How is German culture to ‘set itself to work’, to form itself into a work? And whence does it acquire the ‘formative power’ for this task? In the second case, Nietzsche thinks self-​legislation as a transaction between one (would-​be) genius and another who serves him as an exemplar of human perfection. Schopenhauer is cast in shape of Kantian genius as a natural disposition ‘that makes itself into the law’ (SE 2, KSA 1.346), and the problem of normativity is treated by Nietzsche as the question of the rule or law of taste in a relation of succession (Nachfolge) between one (would-​be) genius and another. In both cases Kant is important because Nietzsche thinks the problem of origins or originality in the light of our inescapable historicity, the central theme of UB II. Kant first tackles this problem in §32 of KU where he tries to reconcile originality with the existence of classical precedent and historical continuity or tradition. What Nietzsche calls ‘das Klassische’ in a preparatory note to this essay refers to culture (‘der Grundgedanke der Kultur’): the questions of greatness (Grösse), of continuity and precedent. But in the first instance it refers to the ‘ “historische” Urphänomen’ of human memory.7 For Schopenhauer, time involves the progressive destruction (Vernichtung) of each moment by the next (cf. PHG, KSA 1.823; CV 3, KSA 1.768). For Nietzsche time remains conflictual and problematic, but a conflictual interpenetration of past, present and future is determining for the human condition (NL 1873 29[29], KSA 7.636ff., and UB II, KSA 1.293ff.). Historicity, that is, the openness of the present to the past, is embedded in basic human drives and elementary processes of concept-​ formation by way of memory. Coming to the problem of the work of art from very different angles, both thinkers come under the same pressure of demanding origins/​originality under the seemingly impossible conditions imposed by their commitment to historicity or tradition: our inescapable openness in the present towards the past and precedent.

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In Kant, the notion of genius and the problem which it foregrounds, namely, the historicity of art, shifts the question of originality (original sense or meaning) towards the questions of imitation and succession (Nachahmung/​Nachfolge). Of particular significance for Nietzsche’s Betrachtungen is the key distinction Kant makes between passive imitation (Nachahmung), which precludes creative originality, and creative succession (Nachfolge), which allows for creative originality. For Nietzsche, as I have argued elsewhere (Siemens 2001),8 the birth of German culture is a matter of replacing a passive imitation of French culture with a relation of creative succession to Greek culture. Both here and in the question of original norms or values, Nietzsche is drawn by the radical freedom in Kant’s notion of original genius, but he seeks to break Kant’s opposition between creative freedom or originality on one side and passive mimesis on the other, by proposing a concept of antagonistic or agonal mimesis between one genius and another, one culture and another. In elaborating this moment of antagonism, I shall argue, Nietzsche is more successful than Kant in thinking creative originality and tradition together. First I would like to indicate how Kantian genius plays into Nietzsche’s portrait of Schopenhauer in UB III and transforms the problem of normativity into the question of the rule or law of genius (§2). I will then focus on Kant’s account of genius and the problem of originality, imitation and succession (§3), before turning to Nietzsche’s model of overcoming-​through-​imitation as a conflictual form of succession that addresses the problem with Kantian succession (§4–​5).

2.  Schopenhauer as Kantian genius In the low tide of moral forces that is modernity, the task of orientation is inscribed by Nietzsche in a one-​to-​one relation with (his representation of) his educator, Schopenhauer, whom he casts as a creator of morality on the model of Kantian genius, with questions like: Where are we all, learned and unlearned, high placed and low, to find our moral exemplars [Vorbilder] and models among our contemporaries, the visible embodiments [Inbegriff] of creative morality in this time? (SE 2, KSA 1.344)

For Kant, the genius is a legislator, the creator of a new rule for art or standard of taste, embodied in original works (KU §46). When Nietzsche begins his account of Schopenhauer as a moral educator, legislation is equally prominent:  as an author, Schopenhauer has no truck with social conventions or established

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rule of rhetoric; in conversation ‘with himself ’, he writes ‘for himself ’ and ‘to himself ’ (SE 2, KSA 1.346, 350) as a ‘philosopher, who even makes himself into the law’ (SE 2, KSA 1.346). Now according to Kant, genius does not actually plan or think through his creative legislation; it is rather ‘nature’ in him –​his ‘talent’ or ‘innate disposition’ (Gemütsanlage, ingenium) –​that gives the rule to art (KU §46, esp. 307). For Nietzsche likewise, Schopenhauer’s law or standard of style is not in any way contrived; it is, Nietzsche writes, an inner ‘law of gravity’ which, like any law of nature, he is compelled to follow (SE 2, KSA 1.350). The language of nature is used with remarkable insistence throughout this passage, where Schopenauer is portrayed as both a legislator and an ‘unhampered natural being’ (ungehemmtes Naturwesen) or ‘natural growth’ (Naturgewächs) (SE 2, KSA 1.349, 350). Indeed, the thematic focus on style and writing allows Nietzsche to capture the dual emphasis on law and nature in Kant’s account of taste, and to cast Schopenhauer in the image of Kantian genius as a disposition of nature that makes itself into the law (Natürlichkeit, die sich zum Gesetz macht): The speaker’s powerful well-​being embraces us immediately with the first sounds of his voice; we feel as we do entering the high forest, we take a deep breath and feel the same sense of well-​being ourselves. Here is a steady, bracing wind, we feel; here is a certain inimitable unaffectedness and naturalness, such as those have who are within themselves masters of their house, and a very rich house at that. (SE 2, KSA 1.347)

At stake in Nietzsche’s language of nature is the question inherited from the Greeks at the end of the UB II; namely, the nature and constitution of a ‘moral nature’ (sittliche Natur) such as theirs in the context of modernity. And it is because the question of creative moral legislation is posed by Nietzsche at the level of nature that he draws on Kantian genius. At the same time, however, Nietzsche’s interest in SE lies principally in the moral resources harboured by Kantian genius. What Kant calls the ‘attunement of the faculties’ (Stimmung der Vermögen) in genius (KU §46 307) recurs in SE as the ‘attuned, self-​contained and self-​ moving, unconstrained and unhampered natural being’ (einstimmiges, in eignen Angeln hängendes und bewegtes, unbefangenes und ungemmtes Naturwesen) that is Schopenhauer (SE 2, KSA 1.350).9 But for Nietzsche it names a specifically moral quality: the ‘virtue of honesty’ (Ehrlichkeit) required of a ‘moral educator’. In choosing the thematics of style and writing to portray Schopenhauer’s genius, Nietzsche is concerned, not with laws or rules of taste in the narrow, non-​moral sense used by Kant; rather, the question of style is used by Nietzsche to subvert the categorial separation of art from morality, with the

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purpose of rethinking the moral law and legislation on the model of taste and the rule of art. It allows him to treat the problem of normativity as a question of moral education focused on the rule or law of taste in a transaction between one (would-​be) genius and another, his model or ‘exemplar’. The question is how an original law of taste can be thought together with the process of learning, a question very much on Kant’s mind in his account of genius.

3.  The problem of originality and precedent in Kant’s account of genius When Kant introduces the notion of genius as the source of fine art in KU §46, he names, as ‘its first property’, originality (Originalität); that is, the capacity to make original sense (as distinct from original nonsense or Unsinn: KU A180, 308). In its proper radicality as absolute novelty and unprecedented birth, this notion creates serious difficulties for Kant; for it needs to be reconciled with a certain regularity in art and with the existence of precedent, tradition or continuity, all essential for a rich, progressive concept of culture (cf. KU §32). Ultimately Kant tries to resolve these difficulties by distinguishing two kinds of relation in art: passive imitation (Nachahmung), identified with mere learning; and creative succession (Nachfolge), as an inspired exemplarity that allows for both continuity and originality. These efforts have a direct bearing on Nietzsche’s problem of original legislation, as well as the problem of original German culture, since he thinks culture on the model of the artwork and ‘expects the Germans [. . .] to succeed to the heritage of Greek genius’ (Lacoue-​Labarthe 1990: 224). But first we need to ask why Kant should insist on a notion as problematic as originality. The notion of genius goes back to Kant’s fundamental interest in the groundlessness or indeterminacy of the work of (fine) art; that is, the absence of a ‘concept of the way in which it is possible’ (ground of possibility) or a ‘determinate rule’ for the production of the work of art (KU 307–​308). This requirement in turn must be understood from two perspectives. On the one hand, Kant’s attempt to construe fine art as the sensory presentation (Darstellung) of the idea of freedom; on the other, the attempt to show that judgements of taste are autonomous. The former involves showing that art is produced through freedom (KU §43) and manifests that freedom through the absence of determinate antecedents;10 the latter requires showing that judgements of taste have their source a priori in Reason, without there being any rule or concept as the determining ground of judgement. For both ends, it is essential that the production of art be radically

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indeterminate or groundless; for otherwise it would embody a rule or concept –​ not radical freedom –​which could then serve as the rule for judgement. The work of ‘originality’ is, then, to place the production of fine art beyond any explanation in terms of determinate antecedents. In doing so, however, it creates two problems. For one it is unclear how we can speak of any precedent or continuity among things whose antecedents are by definition unavailable; originality seems rather to constitute the history of art as permanent revolution (cf. Bernstein 1992: 94). This difficulty is addressed for the first time in §32. But when Kant first introduces genius in §46 he faces the more urgent problem of showing that originality is compatible with the very existence of artworks. As human, intentional products or products of techne, works of art must in some sense be rule-​governed (KU A184, A180; 310, 307). Thus, the declared aim of §46, to prove that fine art is necessarily the art of genius, is also an attempt to show that genius or originality is compatible with rules (rule-​boundedness, to be precise). In order to establish the radical indeterminacy or groundlessness of the work of fine art, namely, that ‘fine art cannot itself think through the rule, according to which it should bring its product into being’ (KU A180, 307), Kant recurs to nature: ‘talent (nature’s gift)’ or the ‘inborn productive capacity of artist (that) belongs to nature’ is defined precisely as ‘that for which no determinate rule can be given’, and distinguished from ‘competence [Geschicklichkeitsanlage] towards what can be learned following a rule’ (KU A180, 307). Clearly the point of appealing to nature here is that it is inscrutable, opaque enough to founder any attempt to determine the creative antecedents or rules for fine art. But how, then, can nature be the source of fine art which is, by definition, rule-​bound? Kant’s solution is to make nature the source of art’s rules: Since [. . .] a product can never be called art unless it is preceded by a rule, it must be nature in the subject (and through the attunement of his powers [Stimmung der Vermögen]) that gives the rule to art [. . .] (KU A180, 307)

It is upon this point that Kant’s proof that art is necessarily the work of genius rests. Yet it lacks conviction. It is unclear how nature, opaque and impenetrable as it is here, can be the source of rules or anything intelligible at all; and art is, for Kant, required to make sense. It seems that he has gone too far in burying the antecedents of art in this notion of nature. The rules of art are more than inexplicable; they are external to the work. As if in response to this worry, Kant returns to rules with the second feature of genius: its products must be

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[m]‌odels, i.e., they must be exemplary [exemplarisch]; hence, though they do not themselves arise through imitation [Nachahmung], still they must serve others for this, i.e. as a standard or rule by which to judge. (KU A180, 307)

Here Kant tries to recuperate the intentional origins of art lost in the opacity of nature, after the event, as it were, in the ‘rule for judgement’ that is derived from the work.11 But he seems to have swung from one extreme –​obscure origins –​to another –​public effect –​that remains equally external to the work itself: to use ‘exemplarity’, that is, the occurrence of imitation, as the measure of a work of art’s rule-​bound sense is to rely on something utterly contingent that depends on many factors outside the work itself. Moreover, the notion of imitation is deeply problematic in itself, as Kant indicates by pointedly excluding it from the origins of fine art (in the earlier quotation). For Kant, imitation involves the application of a determinate rule, undermining originality and the autonomy of judgements of taste; it involves subjection to a rule, undermining freedom in producing art. How, then, to define proper succession that is inclusive of originality? How to understand precedent in a way that allows for freedom? In the following sections of KU Kant tries to correct his reliance on imitation in §46, especially through the opposition of imitation (Nachahmung) to genius in §47 and to inspired succession (Nachfolge) in §49. I shall begin with the question of precedence, discussed earlier in §32, where the distinction Nachahmung/​Nachfolge is first made.

3.1 KU §32 The Nietzschean problem of reconciling originality with historicity and tradition, or in more Kantian terms, radical freedom with binding ‘classical’ precedents, is addressed in §32. As his starting point he takes the autonomy of judgements of taste:  they must have their source a priori in Reason without, however, having a conceptual ground or rule to follow; the subject must, above all, ‘judge for himself and not as imitation, (say) on the grounds that a thing is liked universally [für sich [. . .] urteilen [. . .] nicht [. . .] als Nachahmung, weil ein Ding etwa wirklich allgemein gefällt]’; for ‘to make others’ judgements into the determining ground of one’s own would be heteronomy [[f]‌remde Urteile sich zum Bestimmungsgrund des seinigen zu machen, wäre Heteronomie]’ (KU A135–​ 6, 282–​3). But this is the very threat posed by the work of the ancients as exemplary classics: like the noble class they were named after (by Aulus Gellius) they seem ‘through their precedent to give laws: seem to reveal a posteriori sources of taste and to refute its autonomy in every subject’ (KU A137, 282–​3). Kant’s task is to neutralize this threat, to show that obeying the laws set by precedent does

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not preclude the autonomy of judgement. His strategy will be (a) to argue for the ineluctable historicity of our rational powers ((Vernunft-​)Kräfte) and their a priori application, and (b) to privilege non-​conceptual ‘examples’ (Beispiele) over ‘general prescriptions’ as the medium of instruction and continuity. (a) Kant’s response is first to show, by analogy with mathematics, that following precedent does not preclude autonomy (KU A137, 282). Modern mathematicians demonstrate that following an ancient model (Muster) does not condemn one to a mere ‘imitative Reason’ (nachahmende Vernunft). Obeying the ‘a posteriori’ laws of precedent is compatible with the (autonomous) use of Reason ‘from within oneself ’ (aus sich selbst) with ‘sources a priori’. Indeed, the core of the argument is that there is no ahistorical use of our powers (Kräfte), including Reason: whoever tried to begin from the ‘crude predisposition given him by nature’ (rohen Anlage seines Naturells) would inevitably fail; precedent is constitutive of the autonomous employment of our powers. In order to explain this sense of necessary or binding precedent that preserves creative autonomy and originality, Kant distinguishes ‘succession that relates to a precedent’ (Nachfolge, die sich auf einen Vorgang bezieht) from ‘imitation’ (Nachahmung) as a mere ‘mechanism’ (KU A138, 283), that is, application of rules. Classical precedents, Kant argues, serve not to make successors into mere imitators, but rather through their procedure to put others on the track of searching within themselves for the principles and thereby to take their own better path. (KU A137, 212; my italics)

Kant, like Nietzsche, thinks cultural continuity, not in static terms, nor as mere repetition (passive mimesis), but dynamically, as a process of intensification, surpassing the precedent you follow in search of a new, original principle or law, a new ‘greatness’ (Grösse).12 But in §32 the discontinuities required by originality and autonomy prove too much for Kant, and he looks for a ground of identity to stabilize the ‘progress of culture’ (Fortgange der Kultur) (KU A138, 283). (b) His second move to reconcile precedent and autonomy is to privilege ‘examples’ over ‘general prescriptions’ as the source of tradition and regularity. Examples are particulars, not concepts, and so do not threaten the autonomy of judgements of taste. Moral exemplars, by analogy, are more effective than abstract (conceptual) rules as teachers of virtue, but they do not impinge on personal responsibility or the personal (‘a priori’, ‘from within oneself ’) quest for virtue (KU A138, 283). By now, however, Kant’s law of precedent is so crossed by difference, autonomy and contingency that it is hard to see any continuity or necessity in it. This is a law with (1) contingent, empirical –​not

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transcendental –​origins in a particular (Vorgang, Beispiel); a law that (2) culminates in another particular, which (3) deviates from the original, exceeds and outbids it in search of its own, better path (besseren Gang). How can such a law be in any way necessary or binding on the present? At this point the radical historicity of nature (unsere Kräfte) and Reason proves unsustainable. In the name of continuity and identity, Kant tries to ground this law outside historicity and appeals once again to nature as an original plenitude, an inscrutable reserve of identity and regularity: ‘Succeeding’ means drawing on the same sources [aus denselben Quellen] from which [the exemplary creator, HS] himself drew, and to learn from one’s predecessor only the way to proceed. (KU A138, 283; my italics)

Continuity between one genius and the next is secured by the transhistorical identity of the very same (Vernunft-​) Kräfte they draw on (denselben Quellen); originality (aus sich selbst schöpfen) is the same as following precedent (aus einer fremden Quelle schöpfen). As for technique, or the application of these powers, continuity is ensured by repetition through taught rules (ablernen). In seeking to conjugate continuity with originality, Kant negates historicity, our openness to the past, in a gesture of closure. But he seems dissatisfied with his solution in §32; after introducing genius in §46, he returns in subsequent sections to the question of succession and offers a different account of continuity.

3.2 KU §47 One of Kant’s priorities in §47 (and §49), as mentioned, is to correct his reliance in §46 on imitation (Nachahmung) as the measure of an artwork’s original sense and regularity. He therefore begins §47 by opposing genius to the spirit of imitation (Nachahmungsgeiste), or rather, to learning: Now since learning is nothing but imitating, the greatest competence, quickness (capacity) to learn, as a capacity to learn, can still not count as genius. (KU A181, 308)

Kant’s argument against learning as genius is, in two ways, the negative counterpart to the analogy drawn in §32 between autonomy in art (judgement) and mathematics. In the first place (i) he emphasizes the qualitative difference (spezifisch unterschieden) or disanalogy between the artistic genius (e.g. Homer, Wieland) and even ‘the greatest discoverer’ in science (e.g. Newton). A Newton is denied genius, in part, because his procedures are too close to Nachahmung: his

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discovery ‘could have been learned’; since it lies ‘on the natural path of research and thinking according to rules’ (auf dem natürlichen Weg des Forschens und Nachdenkens nach Regeln), it is distinguished from mere learning only by degree (‘nur dem Grade nach’: KU A182, 309). More importantly, Newton was a good teacher, able to present (vormachen, vortragen) all his steps for others ‘completely intuitively and enabling others to follow’ (ganz anschaulich und zur Nachfolge bestimmt) (KU A182, 309). Artistic genius, by contrast, is devoid of techne, for Kant as it is for Plato: a Homer cannot explain the provenance of his ideas ‘just because he does not know it and cannot therefore teach it to others’ (KU A182, 309). This point is underscored further on, where Kant recurs again to the immediacy of nature: ‘Such a skill [of artistic genius, HS] cannot be communicated but must be conferred directly on each person by the hand of nature’ (KU A182, 309) –​only to die with him. The second disanalogy between art and science (ii) follows from the first and reverses the emphasis in §32 on dynamic intensification and ‘progress’ (Bessermachen) in artistic culture. Precisely because Newton was such a good teacher, he made a decisive contribution to ‘the progressive, ever greater completion of knowledge’, knowledge which moreover is useful (Nutzen). The progressive character of science is then denied to art: because artistic genius is divorced from learning (without techne, without knowledge of the antecedents of art, unable to communicate its ability), because it is buried in an opaque and inarticulate nature, art becomes static. For the genius art comes to a standstill at one point or other, because a limit is set for it beyond which it cannot go and which has probably long since been reached and cannot be extended any further. (KU A182, 309)

At this juncture Kant’s account reaches crisis point; it is a crisis of continuity, as in §32, only worse. He has gone so far to divorce and distance art from imitation, in the name of originality and autonomy, that any sense of tradition, that is, transmission, communication, learning, breaks down. We have: the inability to teach (lack of techne and thus of teachable rules), incommunicable ability; we have stasis, finitude, the hand of nature that gives and takes –​death and rupture, but no continuity. Kant’s immediate response to the death of genius in his text is weak: we must wait till nature one day endows someone else who needs nothing but an example in order to put the talent of which he is conscious to work in a similar way. (KU A182, 309)

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In order to clarify this statement, Kant goes on to specify the kind of rule (Regel) which nature (in genius) gives to art. A rule that could be formulated as a prescription or ‘Vorschrift’ would undermine creative originality and autonomy of judgement. It must therefore be post hoc: [T]‌he rule must be abstracted from the deed, i.e. from the product, against which others may test their own talent, letting it serve them as a model, not to be imitated [Nachmachung. Read: Nachahmung, HS] but to be followed [Nachahmung. Read: Nachfolgen, HS]. How that is possible is hard to explain. The artist’s idea provokes similar ideas in his apprentice if nature has provided the latter with a similar proportion of mental powers. That is why the models of fine art are the only means of transmitting these ideas to posterity. Mere descriptions could not accomplish this. (KU A184, 309)

There are, I suggest, two ways to read this passage as a solution to the problem of continuity. (a) The reaffirmation of (particular) examples/​models (Muster) over (conceptual) prescriptions or descriptions (Vorschriften, Beschreibungen), in line with originality and autonomy, forces an admission of defeat on Kant’s part: the possibility of Nachfolge is ‘hard to explain’. This admission is mitigated by an appeal to the notion of similarity (Ähnlichkeit): the bond or continuity between exemplar and Nachfolger derives from ‘similar ideas’ and similar natures (‘proportion of mental powers’, ‘attunement of faculties’). Here Kant is but one step away from the transhistorical reserve of identity proposed in §32:  in following precedent the genius draws on ‘the same sources’ as his precedent. It is a significant step, since, unlike identity, similarity implies difference as well, and so allows for a dynamic concept of tradition. Yet it remains unexplained and obscure –​ Or does it? (b) A second reading –​one that I will trace in Nietzsche –​places the accents elsewhere in the passage, and finds a clue to continuity or similarity (i.e. identity and difference) in a relation of provocation and contestation: the exemplar provokes (erreg[t]‌) ideas in the Nachfolger, who tests (prüf[t]) his own powers (talent) against the former’s work by treating it as a model to be surpassed through the creation of a new rule for art. This agonal moment was implicit in §32, when Kant referred to the Nachfolger’s ‘quest’ (Suchen) for new principles, for his ‘own, better path’ (eigenen, besseren Gang).13 Integrating both passages we can say: the exemplar provokes the Nachfolger to search for new principles of his own; the Nachfolger tests his own powers against the former’s work by treating it as a model to be surpassed through the creation of a new rule for art.

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Intermezzo: Nietzsche’s programme of aesthetic perfectionism In what follows, I  argue that this antagonistic or agonal moment in Kantian Nachfolge is explored by Nietzsche in the period of UB as the clue to a dynamic understanding of cultural history that allows for both precedent and freedom, continuity and originality. Just how important this connection between continuity and contestation is for Nietzsche can be seen in what he calls ‘the foundational thought of culture’ (der Grundgedanke der Kultur): That which was once there to plant forth the concept ‘human’ more beautifully, that must also be eternally at hand. That the great moments form a chain, that they, as a mountain range connect humanity across millennia, that what is greatest from a time past is also great for me and that the belief in the desire for fame should fulfil itself, that is the foundational thought of culture [. . .] The demand that what is great ought to be eternal ignites the fearful struggle of culture [. . .] Who would suspect among them [mortal beings, HS] that demanding competitive torch race, through which alone that which is great lives on [. . .] The boldest knights among these fame-​seekers, who believe they can see their coat of arms hanging among the stars, these must sought among the philosophers. (CV 1, KSA 1.757; boldface added)14

If, as I maintain, Kant fails to conjugate originality and continuity in his conception of culture, it is because Nachfolge excludes any concept of mimetic reception between one genius and the next. In Nietzsche’s UB, I will argue, Kantian Nachfolge is displaced by an ideal of overcoming-​through-​mimesis or emancipatory reception, comprising at least four moments: 1. an antagonistic moment of emancipation or overcoming; 2. a mimetic moment, both receptive and creative; 3. an affirmative moment of gratitude that attenuates the antagonism with genius by acknowledging it as an origin and a necessary opponent; and 4. an energetic moment that turns the oppressive tyranny of genius into a source of power, a stimulant to self-​legislation. Nietzsche’s agonal dynamic of overcoming-​through-​imitation corrects the polarization of active autonomous creation (originality in genius) against passive imitation and learning that leads Kant to swing between permanent revolution, stasis and ahistorical identity in his account of Nachfolge. Rather than exclude learning from succession, Nietzsche develops a notion of active antagonistic

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imitation: ‘Nachahmen’ as ‘Bessermachen’ (UB II 2, KSA 1.258). Agonal contestation becomes the organizing principle of a new concept of succession aimed at surpassing (überwinden) the precedent you need to follow in search of greatness or ‘Grösse’. In order to substantiate this thesis, I will concentrate on two key passages in Nietzsche’s early writings. To begin with, I turn to some retrospective notes from the Nachlass of the 1880s that situate (the first three moments of) Nietzsche’s model of overcoming-​through-​imitation in the context of his philosophical programme in the UB. The UB belong to what he calls in one note the ‘the first stage’ on his ‘path to wisdom’: The path to wisdom. Pointers towards the overcoming of morality. The first stage. To learn how to honour (and obey and learn) better than anyone. To gather all things worthy of honour in oneself and allow them to fight it out. To bear all that is heavy. Asceticism of the spirit –​courage period of community [. . .] (NL 1884 26[47], KSA 11.159–​60)15

What exactly he means by this is spelled out in another note, which describes Nietzsche’s programme of ‘aesthetic’ perfectionism: To win for myself the immorality of the artist with regard towards my material (humankind): this has been my work in recent years. To win for myself the spiritual freedom and joy of being able to create and not to be tyrannised by alien ideals. (At bottom it matters little what I had to liberate myself from: my favourite form of liberation was the artistic form: that is, I cast an image of that which had hitherto bound me: thus Schopenhauer, Wagner, the Greeks (genius, the saint, metaphysics, all ideals until now, the highest morality) –​but also a tribute of gratitude (NL 1883 16[10], KSA 10.501)16

Aesthetic perfectionism:  The first lines (‘To win . . . recent years’) inscribe Nietzsche’s philosophical work within his enduring commitment to the species-​concept ‘human’ or ‘humankind’ (his ‘material’) and its open-​ended perfectibility –​what he elsewhere calls the extension (Vergrösserung), elevation (Erhöhung) or intensification (Steigerung) of human life towards new possibilities. But they do so in aesthetic terms, on the model of the ‘artist’ or genius. This connection between the genius and the philosopher’s perfectionist labour is made in another note from the same notebook, where Nietzsche writes with and against Kant:

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In the place of the genius I  posited the human being who creates the human being over and above itself (new concept of art (against the art of art-​works) [. . .] (NL 1883 16[14], KSA 10.503)

For Kant, as we saw, the genius is the creator of a new rule for art, a new standard of taste.17 He is thus uniquely suited for the work of perfectionism, conceived by Nietzsche as creative legislation. Since the question of human perfectibility is posed by Nietzsche in a genuinely open way, without prepared answers, the philosopher cannot work to any inherited or predetermined standard or telos of human perfection. His task is rather to re-​create the concept ‘human’, so as to expand the range of human powers and possibilities; in short, to redefine the horizon of human perfectibility. But as the creator of a new rule or standard for evaluating human life, Nietzsche’s philosopher also transgresses the boundaries of the aesthetic, where Kant sought to confine genius. In Nietzsche’s new aesthetic, the concept of the artwork is rejected in favour of a dynamic and open-​ended process creative overcoming (über sich hinaussschaffen) centred on human existence. We can therefore say: the perfectionist work of philosophy is modelled on a displaced version of Kantian genius in a gesture that would overcome the isolation and alienation of the aesthetic in modernity. Emancipation from tyranny: The subsequent lines (‘To win for myself . . . alien ideals’) place the question of freedom or emancipation (Losmachung) at the centre of Nietzsche’s perfectionist work. They do so by setting out the problem-​ background to this task in a prior condition of radical heteronomy: bondage or subjection to tyrannical, ‘alien ideals’. Nietzsche’s interest in genius as a model for the work of perfectionism is thus clearly an interest in the radical freedom of Kantian genius. Yet the Nietzschean problem of tyranny raises the stakes dramatically.18 For the problem for philosophy is now: How to free ourselves from the tyranny of alien ideals? How to turn heteronomy into autonomous legislation in the name of human perfectibility beyond good and evil? Freedom as creative mimesis: Nietzsche’s answer, given in the closing lines of the text (‘I cast an image . . . gratitude’), is to identify emancipatory agency or freedom with active reception –​the creative mimesis of tyrannical ideals –​in a move that focuses on the purely performative quality of emancipatory reception: it matters little which particular ideal or law we break with –​the Greeks, Schopenhauer, Wagner and their ideals of the saint and the genius. What matters is not the content of this or that system, teaching or ideal and its replacement by another content. Rather, it is the tyranny of an alien law over us, and our emancipation from it by way of creative mimesis or appropriation.

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The emphasis on form or performance over content in Nietzsche’s aesthetic model takes up an important strand in Kant’s account of Nachfolge and radicalizes it: the particular, a posteriori sources of Kant’s law of genius in ‘examples’, ‘precedents’ and ‘models’, rather than ‘general precepts’ or conceptual ‘descriptions’, intended to safeguard the Nachfolger’s autonomy. This can be traced to Nietzsche’s portrait of Schopenhauer in SE, where the primacy of form or performance is thematized as exemplarity. Schopenhauer is an ‘example’ or ‘model’ (Beispiel, Vorbild), whose value lies, not in created works of any kind (including books and systems), but in the ‘visible life’ of genius, whose very speech and writing are dismissed in favour of his mores or customs (Sitte), habits and attitudes (SE 3, KSA 1.350).19 In other words, the concept of genius is emptied of determinate normative content, and concentrated on the performative aspect of his life. As a Beispiel, the philosopher’s task is to enact or perform emancipation; he is to offer a ‘practical proof ’ of radical freedom in the sense of ‘creative self-​restraint’: Very gradually our bodies are emancipating themselves, long after our minds seem to be free; end yet it is only a delusion that a mind can be free and independent if this sovereignty [Unumschränktheit]  –​which is at bottom creative self-​restraint –​is not proven anew from morning till night through every glance and move (SE 3, KSA 1.350–​1)

In Nietzsche’s case, as we have seen, the stakes are raised by his prior condition of heteronomy and by asking how our subjection to an alien law can be turned into the radical freedom needed to create a new law for humankind. In response, Nietzsche’s model once again takes up and radicalizes a key moment in Kantian Nachfolge, the adversarial relation between geniuses, but also brings to it two further moments that completely transform it:  According to these retrospective notes, Nietzsche’s philosophical programme in UB involves a confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with his ideals that combines (1) an antagonistic moment of emancipation and overcoming with (2) a mimetic moment of creative reception and learning (excluded by Kant) and (3) an affirmative moment of gratitude or honouring (Dankbarkeit, Verehrung), absent in Kant. This description will now be brought to bear on Nietzsche’s actual practice in the UB. Focusing on a key passage in Nietzsche’s engagement with Wagner from UB IV, I will argue that this relation is best understood as an engagement between one (would-​ be) genius and another that takes up, but also corrects and supplements Kant’s account of Nachfolge.

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4.  Nietzsche’s engagement with Wagner: Daemonic transmissibility or agonal Betrachten There is a real paradox in the suggestion that the best way to break free from a tyrant is to imitate or cast an image of him; as an image of him, it implies mimetic dependence. Clearly Nietzsche has more in mind than the passive mimesis condemned by Plato and Kant. Aristotle’s more active conception of mimesis as the creation of ‘plausible yet fictional structures of possible (rather than actual) events’ (Halliwell 1987: 74)20 certainly fits better with Nietzsche’s actual portraiture of Schopenhauer and Wagner in the UB. In these essays, the mixture of creative activity and mimetic reception, of overcoming and thanksgiving described in the retrospective notes can be seen at work in Nietzsche’s portraiture. In §7 of Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, the consideration (Betrachtung) or image cast of Wagner instantiates or performs the act of emancipation through portraiture described in the retrospective note. As described in the note, Nietzsche approaches freedom from the perspective of reception and bondage:  the Betrachtende begins with a sense of ‘smallness and frailty’, of self-​alienation or nonidentity, in the face of Wagner’s overwhelming force. But Betrachten is also the medium of emancipation and empowerment. In this portrait of Wagner, freedom (from Wagner) is portrayed as a transference (Übertragung) of energy or power from the tyrannical force to its subject by way of an intensified reception in the sphere of communication: the active reception or mimesis of Wagner’s own capacity for active reception or mimesis (Empfängniskraft), what Nietzsche calls his ‘daemonic transmissibility’ (dämonische Uebertragbarkeit). In a sense, self-​alienation is not just the problem: for with this feeling one partakes of the mightiest expression, the central point of his power, that daemonic transmissability and self-​relinquishment of his nature, which is able to communicate itself to others just as it communicates other beings to itself and has its greatness in giving and taking. In succumbing apparently to Wagner’s out-​and over-​flowing nature, the Betrachtende has himself partaken of its energy [Kraft] and has become powerful through and against him, so to speak; and everyone who examines himself closely knows that a mysterious antagonism [Gegnerschaft] belongs even to Betrachten, that of expectation or looking towards [Entgegenschauen]. (RWB 7, KSA 1.466)21

In line with the retrospective note, freedom is approached here by emptying action of all determinate/​normative content in favour of performative qualities.

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The figure of genius is stripped of any determinate form or content (subjectivity) by the concept of ‘daemonic transmissibility’ and focused instead on the performance of ‘giving and taking’ in the sphere of communication (‘to communicate itself to others just as it communicates other beings to itself ’). Freedom works through the active reception of genius, itself conceived in purely performative terms, as the power of active reception: through the active reception of genius, understood as a power of active reception, the Betrachtende is empowered ‘through and against him’. The act of emancipation through portraiture constitutes itself through a performative doubling of the purely performative actions of genius. This dynamic of overcoming-​through-​imitation in Nietzsche’s concept of contemplation or ‘Betrachten’ is best understood as a reworking of Kantian Nachfolge. In §47 of the KU, as we saw, Kant concedes his difficulty in explaining any real sense of continuity or transmission between genius and genius. But he does hint at a solution in the form of a relation of similarity (Ähnlichkeit) born of a dynamic of provocation and antagonism between genius and genius:  the exemplar provokes (erregt) similar ideas in the his successor, who in turn tests (prüft) his powers against the former’s work, treating it as a model to be surpassed through the creation of an original work and a new rule for art. In Nietzsche’s idiom, we can say: the contemplator or ‘Betrachtende’ is empowered and emancipated through and against genius, such that the rule of genius acts, not as a constraint on his creative freedom, but as a provocation or stimulant, a source of energy and a model to be overcome or surpassed through the creation of a new rule or law. On the other hand, Nietzsche’s dynamic of antagonistic emancipation works through a mimetic practice of Betrachten, the very thing that Kant excludes from genius. In this sense, he turns Kantian Nachfolge on its head. Kant’s difficulty in explaining succession comes from the absence of any concept for a receptive relation between genius and genius as a consequence of his overly sharp distinction between creative originality and freedom on one side, and passive conceptions of mimesis (Nachahmung) and learning on the other. Nachfolge between one genius and the next is therefore defined against the Nachahmung that would compromise the latter’s freedom. For Nietzsche, by contrast, it is only through an intensified or ‘daemonic’ mimesis of genius that full creative autonomy is to be won against the rule of genius. With his concept of ‘Betrachten’, he corrects the polarization of freedom and passive mimesis in Kant, and supplements Kantian Nachfolge with a concept of active antagonistic mimesis (Nachahmung) or reception. In agonal contemplation or Betrachten, emancipation is achieved through

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the active reception (Empfangen) or appropriation (not of any rule or given content, but) of the very power of active reception or appropriation at the centre of genius; for the contemplator ‘partakes of ’ (nimmt Theil an) the daemonic transmissability and self-​relinquishment of [Wagner’s, HS] nature, which is able to communicate itself to others just as it communicates other beings to itself and has its greatness in giving and taking [. . .] (RWB 7, KSA 1.466)

With the concept of Betrachten, the exemplarity of genius is effectively stripped of any determinate content and becomes purely performative. Here again an engagement ‘with and against’ Kant is in play: if for Kant it is the work of art that, produced through freedom (KU §43), manifests the freedom of genius, Nietzsche locates the manifestation (Darstellung) of freedom, not in created works or any determinate content whatsoever, but in the visible life of genius and its performative qualities. Nietzsche effects this shift by displacing Kant’s conception of genius with Wagner’s, for whom art is the need (Bedürfnis) ‘to give and to receive, such that each penetrates and conditions the other through multiple relations’, and who describes the ‘performing, artistic human’ as one ‘who communicates himself according to the highest plenitude of his capacities in active reception [Empfängniskraft]’ (Wagner 1849: 128, 133, 137). In his ‘Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde’, Wagner (1851:  217)  concentrates his views on art in a (re)definition of genius around what he calls ‘power of active receiving’ (die Kraft des Empfängnisvermögens): through his heightened power of reception, the genius is filled ‘with impressions to the point of ecstatic excess’, giving rise to the ‘need [Bedürfnis] to give back the seething mass of impressions [überwuchernde Empfängnis] from himself through communication’ (218–​19). But Nietzsche’s appropriation of Wagnerian genius is not just mimetic; it is also antagonistic. The active reception of the active receptivity of Wagnerian genius serves Nietzsche not only to describe the ‘mysterious antagonism’ of contemplation, but also to perform it in relation to Wagner. For in effect, he is deploying Wagner’s own ideal of receptive genius against the tyrannical genius that Wagner himself became.22

5.  Agonal jealousy: Originality and mimesis In KU, I have argued, Kant fails to think the originality and freedom of genius together with the continuity needed for a progressive concept of culture. In his account of Nachfolge he swings between an account of culture as permanent

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revolution and as stasis (with the death of genius), while helping himself to an ahistorical concept of nature as a reserve of identity that guarantees the continuity between one genius and the next. Kant’s failure is a consequence of the polar opposition of active freedom and passive mimesis or learning, which Nietzsche corrects with his concept of active antagonistic mimesis (Nachahmung) or Betrachtung. Nietzsche’s concept of agonal Betrachtung points towards the overcoming of genius altogether, which is engaged in MA and described most succinctly in VM 407: What is genius worth if it does not communicate such freedom and heights of feeling to its contemplator [Betrachter] and venerator that he no longer has need of the genius! To make oneself superfluous –​that is the distinction of those who are great. (VM 407, KSA 2.533; cf. NL 1878 29[19] 8.515)

This may well be the telos of the ‘mysterious antagonism’ described in RWB 7, where the emancipation from genius is rather ‘mysterious’, an instance of wishful thinking perhaps, rather than an intelligible concept. It is far from clear how agonal Betrachtung can account for the relation of continuity or similarity between one genius and the next in a way that allows for radical freedom or originality. In this last part of my essay, I turn to a passage from Homer’s Contest where, in thinking through the moment of antagonism, Nietzsche offers what I believe is the clearest account of this problem. The passage in question concerns the notion of agonal envy or jealousy (Eifersucht), where Nietzsche focuses on the moment of transition, when the rule of one genius is wrested by another. Agonal jealousy is described in a way that gives genius the freedom to create a new rule for art, but also the opportunity to receive and learn from his precedent. The jealous attacks on Homer by, say, Xenophanes or Plato, he writes, need to be grasped in their true strength, as the monstrous desire [.  . .] to take the place of the fallen poet themselves and to inherit his fame. Every great Hellene passes on the torch of the contest; every great virtue ignites a new greatness (CV 5, KSA 1.788)23

In these terms, jealousy is (a) not a desire to belittle, degrade or destroy Homer, but rather to ‘take his place’ as a better poet, and so to ‘inherit his fame’ and authority. Jealousy forges an affirmative, genealogical bond of inheritance with precedent: the new poet does not seek to undermine the fallen poet’s fame and authority; rather, he acknowledges and affirms it, while seeking to appropriate it for himself. But jealousy is also (b) a source of rupture and originality insofar as it is the desire not just to surpass what is valuable in precedent, but to

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create an entirely new standard or rule of evaluation: Homer’s ‘great virtue’ provokes not an even greater virtue (according to the same standard of ‘greatness’), but the creation of ‘a new greatness’, that is, a new standard or rule of virtue. What Nietzsche means is exemplified by Plato’s relation to the poets and sophists. On the one hand, he strove to surpass them at their own game: to be a better poet, a better dramatist, a better speaker, so as to ‘take their place’, ‘inherit their fame’ and appropriate their authority. Plato, then, sought to outperform his opponents according their own standards of greatness ((a) earlier). At the same time, however, he sought to establish an entirely new standard of greatness. While incorporating unsurpassed tracts of poetry and rhetoric in his work, he also rejected the poets and sophists, and tried, in those same works, to establish a new standard or rule for education ((b) earlier), namely, dialectical philosophy: That which is of particular artistic significance in Plato’s dialogues for instance is mostly the result of a contest with the art of the speakers, the sophists, the dramatists of his time, devised with the purpose of being able to say: ‘Look, I can also do what my great rivals can; what is more, I can do it better than them. No Protagoras ever created as beautiful myths as I, no dramatist ever composed a living and gripping whole like the Symposium, nor any rhetorician speeches like mine in the Gorgias –​and now I reject it all together and condemn all mimetic art! Only the contest made me into a poet, a sophist, and rhetorician!’ What a problem opens itself to us when we question the relation of the agon to the conception of the work of art! (CV 5, KSA 1.790–​1)24

Nietzsche’s account of agonal jealousy can be reconstructed in terms of the following three moments: 1. The new poet or second genius (e.g. Plato) incorporates in his works and deeds the standard or rule created by the fallen poet or first genius (e.g. Homer) 2. The new poet surpasses his precedent in the realization of that standard or rule. These two moments make for a creative reception or appropriation of the other in its particularity. In this sense, the new poet takes, or takes up, the perspective of the other. At the same time, however, 3. the new poet or second genius incorporates the rule of his precedent and surpasses his achievements in a way that establishes an entirely new standard or rule of greatness, one that exceeds his precedent (e.g. dialectical philosophy vs. poetry). Under the rubric of jealousy, then, Nietzsche tries to combine or conjugate the demand for originality and freedom of creation and judgement, with the

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need to receive, imitate or appropriate the rules and works of others. This text works as a mimetic reworking of Kantian succession or Nachfolge at an affective level. It is a reworking that takes up Kant’s clue that antagonism is the key to understanding the relation of continuity and rupture between one genius and the next, and develops that clue as a relation of jealousy that incorporates the rule of one genius by another, surpasses the first genius in the realization of that rule, but does so in a way that establishes an entirely new rule or standard of greatness. In this passage, we find an intelligible account of the four moments in Nietzsche’s aesthetic model of mimetic overcoming first described in a somewhat mystifying form in RWB –​the mimetic moment, both receptive and creative; the antagonistic moment of emancipation or overcoming; the affirmative moment of honouring that attenuates the antagonism with genius by acknowledging it as an origin; and the energetic moment that turns the oppressive tyranny of genius into a source of power, a stimulant to (self-​)legislation. The importance of Nietzsche’s account of agonal jealousy lies in the precision and intelligibility it brings to these moments by reconfiguring them around a double-​movement that affirms and incorporates the standard or rule of the other and at the same time contains it within an attempt to set an entirely new standard or rule.

Conclusion In this chapter I have focused on the early Nietzsche and what he later calls the ‘first stage’ on his ‘path towards wisdom’: his emancipation from Wagner and Schopenhauer in the UB. Doing so has enabled me to highlight the Kantian and anti-​Kantian traces in his account of freedom or emancipatory reception, which are strongest in his early writings. But it would be wrong in my view to confine his preoccupations there or the lessons learned from his engagement with Kant to his early work. Wagner, Schopenhauer and the Greeks are of enduring importance for Nietzsche as antagonistic or agonistic opponents from whom he continued to learn, as are the concepts of culture and genius,25 and above all, the problems of thinking freedom and dependence, original norms or values and genealogical continuity, creativity and learning. In my closing remarks, I want to indicate how several moments of the aesthetic model of mimetic overcoming and the account of agonal jealousy examined in this chapter can be recognized years later, transposed into the completely different key of Nietzsche’s physiology. The principal clue to this connection is the concept of agonal appropriation

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or incorporation, exemplified so neatly by Plato’s use of poetry and myth in his philosophy, which becomes a key concept in Nietzsche’s later physiology, variously named Einverleibung, Aneignung or Assimilation. In a Nachlass text from the period of FW (1881), Nietzsche sketches a model of freedom or sovereignty based on the ‘qualities’ or functions of the organism: A strong free human being feels the qualities of the organism towards [gegen] everything else 1) self-​regulation:  in the form of fear of all alien incursions, in the hatred towards [gegen] the enemy, moderation etc. 2) overcompensation:  in the form of acquisitiveness the pleasure of appropriation the craving for power 3) assimilation to oneself:  in the form of praise reproach making others dependent on oneself, to that end deception cunning, learning, habituation, commanding, incorporation of judgements and experiences 4) secretion and excretion: in the form of revulsion contempt for the qualities in itself, which are no longer of use to it; the communication of that which is superfluous goodwill 5) metabolic power: temporary worship admiration making oneself dependent fitting in, almost dispensing with the exercise of the other organic functions, to transform oneself into an ‘organ’, to be able to serve 6) regeneration: in the form of the sexual drive, the pedagogic drive etc. (NL 1881 11[182], KSA 9.509)26

In this text freedom is thought in naturalistic terms on the model of the organism. Following Wilhelm Roux and other contemporary biologists, Nietzsche’s account takes assimilation, appropriation or incorporation (Habsucht, Aneignungslust, Assimilation an sich, Einverleiben) as the primary drive within an expansionist model of activity governed by an economy of overcompensation (überreichlicher Ersatz) for energetic losses. Without question, these considerations place the text in the orbit of Nietzsche’s later thought culminating in the will to power. Yet it is important to see that his principal concern here, as in his early thought, is with the problem of freedom, and it is not difficult to recognize key moments from his aesthetic model of mimetic overcoming in his physiology of freedom: antagonistic overcoming in the form of ‘hatred’, ‘the craving for power’, ‘reproach’, ‘making others dependent on oneself ’ and ‘commanding’; mimetic reception in the form ‘appropriation’, ‘assimilation to oneself ’, ‘learning’, ‘incorporation of judgements and experiences’; and the ‘moderation’ of antagonism in the form of affirmative gestures such as ‘praise’, ‘temporary worship making oneself

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dependent fitting in’, all within an economy of ‘overcompensation’ driven by the appropriation of energetic resources from the other. At the same time, analogies with Nietzsche’s account of agonal jealousy are also unmistakable: between the acknowledgement of the fallen poet’s authority, and ‘temporary worship admiration making oneself dependent fitting in’; between the first movement of agonal jealousy –​incorporation of the fallen poet’s standard or rule –​and the ‘incorporation of judgements and experiences’; and between the second movement of agonal jealousy –​surpassing the fallen poet in the realization of his standard or rule –​and the appropriation of others for the sake of extending one’s power (‘the pleasure of appropriation the craving for power’). Clearly these motifs are now cast in the completely different idiom of physiology and reorganized around the dynamics of organismic self-​regulation, but these analogies indicate that Nietzsche’s early engagement with Kant in the context of his programme of cultural reform has a long-​lasting impact on his thought of freedom.

Notes 1. ‘Ihr habt keine Kultur, nicht etwa eine schlechte oder entartete, sondern auch die würde noch Einheit des Stils haben.’ 2. ‘Das Deutsche muss sich erst bilden: /​Bildung nicht auf nationaler Grundlage, sondern Bildung des Deutschen [. . .] /​Das Deutsche muss gebildet werden: das noch nicht existiert.’ Cf. NL 1872/​73 27[65], 19[298], KSA 7.511. Also UB II 10, KSA 1.328 on the ‘Nothwahrheit [...] dass der Deutsche keine Cultur hat [. . .].’ 3. As the note quoted earlier (NL 1872/​73 19[284], KSA 7.508) indicates, a real ‘nationale Grundlage’ for German Bildung –​what Nietzsche calls a ‘Volk’ as a ‘living unity’ (UB II 4, KSA 1.274–​5) –​does not yet exist. See also UB II 7, KSA 1.302: ‘Schafft euch den Begriff eines “Volkes”: den könnt ihr nie edel und hoch genug denken.’ The existing ‘nationale Grundlage’ for German identity, militarist statism, is of course dismissed at the very start of the UB (UB I 1, KSA 1.159–​60) as Verstellung, a pre-​text for the absence of any ‘Nationale’. 4. For this ontological reading of Nietzsche’s diagnosis, see Lacoue-​Labarthe (1990: 223). 5. On the problem of modernity, see Habermas (1987: 1–​19). 6. See NL 1872/​73 19[278], KSA 7.506; 19[298], KSA 7.511; 19[309], KSA 7.513. 7. ‘All remembering is comparing, that is, establishing an equivalence. Every concept tells us that; it is the “historical” Ur-​phenomenon. Life, then, requires establishing equivalences between present and past; so that a certain violence and distortion is tied to the act of comparing. I designate this drive as the drive to the classical

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and exemplary: the past serves the present as model [or exemplar]’ (NL 1873 29[29], KSA 7.636–​7) (Alles Erinnern ist Vergleichen d.h. Gleichsetzen. Jeder Begriff sagt uns das; es ist das ‘historische’ Urphänomen. Das Leben erfordert also das Gleichsetzen des Gegenwärtigen mit dem Vergangnen; so dass immer eine gewisse Gewaltsamkeit und Entstellung mit dem Vergleichen verbunden ist. Diesen Trieb bezeichne ich als den Trieb nach dem Klassischen und Mustergültigen: die Vergangenheit dient der Gegenwart als Urbild.) This passage relates to the discussion of memory introducing UB II and the concept of monumental history developed further on (UB II, KSA 1.249ff.; UB II, KSA 1.258ff.). It is, in fact, one of a series of notes (see also NL 1873, 29[24], KSA 7.635; 29[31], KSA 7.637ff.; 29[38], KSA 7.640ff.; 29[97], KSA 7.676; 29[101], KSA 7.678; 29[102], KSA 7.679) where the contrast between monumental and antiquarian history is first worked out in rather undifferentiated forms. On this, see Salaquarda (1984: 15–​30). 8. In this chapter, I argue with and against Lacoue-​Labarthe (1990). 9. Cf. also the ‘Einhelligkeit zwischen Leben, Denken, Scheinen und Wollen’ (UB II 10, KSA 1.334) of the Greek culture born of their ‘moral nature’. 10. In their purely inner finality without external ends (zweckmässig ohne Zweck: KU §44 306), works of fine art are produced of actions done purely for their own sake and manifest the freedom presupposed by such actions. For a brilliant discussion of this issue, see Bernstein (1992: 91f.). 11. See also KU A18, 309, on the primacy of the deed (Tat) over the rule (Regel) that must be abstracted from it. 12. Nietzsche’s Grundgedanke der Kultur. For full quote, see p. 27. 13. It becomes most explicit and most extreme in §49, when he describes the Nachfolger as ‘ein anderes Genie, welches dadurch [durch die Nachfolge eines Beispiels, HS] zum Gefühl seiner eigenen Originalität aufgeweckt wird, Zwangsfreiheit von Regeln so in der Kunst auszuüben, dass diese dadurch selbst eine neue Regel bekommt, wodurch das Talent sich als musterhaft zeigt’ (KU A198, 318). Here, the dynamic of provocation–​contestation has been radicalized into one of destruction–​creation: Nachfolgen means to be provoked (aufgeweckt) by the exemplar to break and transgress all existing rules and create a new rule. 14. Cf. ‘der Grundgedanke im Glauben an die Humanität’: ‘Zumeist winkt ihm kein Lohn, wenn nicht der Ruhm, das heisst die Anwartschaft auf einen Ehrenplatz im Tempel der Historie [. . .] Denn sein Gebot lautet: das was einmal vermochte, den Begriff “Mensch” weiter auszuspannen und schöner zu erfüllen, das muss auch ewig vorhanden sein, um dies ewig zu vermögen. Dass die grossen Momente im Kampfe der Einzelnen eine Kette bilden, dass in ihnen ein Höhenzug der Menschheit durch Jahrtausende hin sich verbinde [. . .] Wer möchte bei ihnen jenen schwierigen Fackel-​Wettlauf der monumentalen Historie vermuthen, durch den allein das Grosse weiterlebt [. . .] [die] Forderung, dass das Grosse ewig sein solle In dieser verklärtesten Form ist der Ruhm doch etwas mehr als der köstlichste Bissen

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unserer Eigenliebe, wie ihn Schopenhauer genannt hat, es ist der Glaube an die Zusammengehörigkeit und Continuität des Grossen aller Zeiten, es ist ein Protest gegen den Wechsel der Geschlechter und die Vergänglichkeit’ (UB II 2, KSA 1.259–​ 60; my italics). In this passage we see continuity (Kette) in the assertion of being (ewige) against becoming (Vergänglichkeit), mediated by an agon of geniuses at both metaphorical (Kampf des Einzelnen, Fackelwettlauf) and affective (Ruhm, i.e. Ehrgeiz) levels. 15. Cf. NL 1884 26[48], KSA 11.160: ‘Die Überwindung der bösen kleinlichen Neigungen. Das umfänglishe Herz, man erobert nur mit Liebe.’ 16. ‘Mir die ganze Immoralität des Künstlers in Hinsicht auf meinen Stoff (Menschheit) zu erobern: dies war die Arbeit meiner letzten Jahre. /​Die geistige Freiheit und Freudigkeit mir zu erobern, um schaffen zu können und nicht durch fremde Ideale tyrannisirt zu werden. (Im Grunde kommt wenig darauf an, wovon ich mich loszumachen hatte: meine Lieblings-​Form der Losmachung aber war die künstlerische: d.h. ich entwarf ein Bild dessen, was mich bis dahin gefesselt hatte: so Schopenhauer, Wagner, die Griechen (Genie, der Heilige, die Metaphysik, alle bisherigen Ideale, die höchste Moralität) –​zugleich ein Tribut der Dankbarkeit’. Cf. NL 1883 16[14], KSA 10.503: ‘An Stelle des Genies setzte ich den Menschen, der über sich selber den Menschen hinausschafft (neuer Begriff der Kunst (gegen die Kunst der Kunstwerke) [. . .]’ 17. Genius is the talent or ‘innate mental disposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art’ (KU §46 A180, 307). 18. Cf. NL 1880 6[78], KSA 9.215: ‘Geht die edle Unabhängigkeit verloren, so werden alle Talente matt –​ob es unter der Tyrannei Napoleon’s oder des Altruismus ist: Ende der Genies!’ 19. For Schopenhauer as ‘Beispeil’ and ‘Vorbild’, see: SE 3, KSA 1.351, 359, 360 (‘das Vorbildliche und Erzieherische in Schopenhauers Natur’); SE 6, KSA 1.403. See also NL 1878 30[9]‌, KSA 8.524 and NL 1874 34[8], KSA 7.794ff. 20. See also Lacoue-​Labarthe (1990: 221ff.) on Nietzsche’s active concept of mimesis, and my critical rejoinder in Siemens (2001). 21. ‘Denn gerade mit diesem Gefühle nimmt er Theil an der gewaltigsten Lebensäusserung Wagner’s, dem Mittelpuncte seiner Kraft, jener dämonischen Uebertragbarkeit und Selbstentäusserung seiner Natur, welche sich Anderen ebenso mittheilen kann, als sie andere Wesen sich selber mittheilt und im Hingeben und Annehmen ihre Grösse hat. Indem der Betrachtende scheinbar der aus-​und überströmenden Natur Wagner’s unterliegt, hat er an ihrer Kraft selber Antheil genommen und ist so gleichsam durch ihn gegen ihn mächtig geworden; und Jeder, der sich genau prüft, weiss, dass selbst zum Betrachten eine geheimnissvolle Gegnerschaft, die des Entgegenschauens, gehört.’ 22. On Wagner as a tyrannical force see, for example, NL 1874 32[32], KSA 7.764ff. (cf. MA 577); NL 1874 32[34], KSA 7.765; NL 1874 32[61], KSA 7.775.

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23. ‘Wir verstehen diesen Angriff auf den nationalen Heros der Dichtkunst nicht in seiner Stärke, wenn wir nicht, wie später auch bei Plato, die ungeheure Begierde als Wurzel dieses Angriffs uns denken, selbst an die Stelle des gestürzten Dichters zu treten und dessen Ruhm zu erben. Jeder große Hellene giebt die Fackel des Wettkampfes weiter; an jeder großen Tugend entzündet sich eine neue Größe.’ 24. ‘Das, was z.B. bei Plato von besonderer künstlerischer Bedeutung an seinen Dialogen ist, ist meistens das Resultat eines Wetteifers mit der Kunst der Redner, der Sophisten, der Dramatiker seiner Zeit, zu dem Zweck erfunden, daß er zuletzt sagen konnte: “Seht, ich kann das auch, was meine großen Nebenbuhler können; ja, ich kann es besser als sie. Kein Protagoras hat so schöne Mythen gedichtet wie ich, kein Dramatiker ein so belebtes und fesselndes Ganze, wie das Symposium, kein Redner solche Rede verfaßt, wie ich sie im Gorgias hinstelle –​und nun verwerfe ich das alles zusammen und verurtheile alle nachbildende Kunst! Nur der Wettkampf machte mich zum Dichter, zum Sophisten, zum Redner!” Welches Problem erschließt sich uns da, wenn wir nach dem Verhältniß des Wettkampfes zur Conception des Kunstwerkes fragen! –​’. 25. For genius, see, for example, JGB 295 on the ‘Genie des Herzens’ and GD Streifzüge 44: ‘Mein Begriff vom Genie’. For culture, see NL 1887 10[28], KSA 12.470: ‘an Stelle der “Gesellschaft” der Cultur-​Complex /​als mein Vorzugs-​Interesse (gleichsam als Ganzes, /​bezüglich in seinen Theilen) [. . .]’ 26. ‘Ein starker freier Mensch empfindet gegen alles Andere /​die Eigenschaften des Organismus 1) Selbstregulirung: in der Form von Furcht vor /​allen fremden Eingriffen, im Haß gegen den Feind,/​im Maaßhalten usw. 2) überreichlicher Ersatz: in der Form von Habsucht /​Aneignungslust Machtgelüst 3) Assimilation an sich: in der Form von Loben Tadeln /​Abhängigmachen Anderer von sich, dazu Verstellung /​List, Lernen, Gewöhnung, Befehlen Einverleiben von /​Urtheilen und Erfahrungen 4) Sekretion und Excretion: in der Form von Ekel /​Verachtung der Eigenschaften an sich, die ihm nicht mehr /​nützen; das Überschüssige mittheilen Wohlwollen 5) metabolische Kraft: zeitweilig verehren bewundern sich /​abhängig machen einordnen, auf Ausübung der anderen /​organischen Eigenschaften fast verzichten, sich zum /​‘Organe’ umbilden, dienen-​können 6) Regeneration: in der Form von Geschlechtstrieb, Lehrtrieb /​ usw.’

References Bernstein, J. M. (1992), The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno, London: Polity Press.

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Habermas, J. (1987), The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. F. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Halliwell, S. (1987), The Poetics of Aristotle, trans. and commentary, London: Duckworth. Lacoue-​Labarthe, P. (1990), ‘History and Mimesis’, in L. Rickels (ed.), Looking after Nietzsche, 209–​31, Albany: State University of New York Press. Salaquarda, J. (1984), ‘Studien zur Zweiten Unzeitgemässen Betrachtung’, Nietzsche-​ Studien 13: 1–​45. Siemens H. W. (2001), ‘Agonal Configurations in the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen: Identity, Mimesis and the Übertragung of Cultures in Nietzsche’s Early Thought’, Nietzsche-​Studien 30: 80–​106. Wagner, R. (1983 [1849]), ‘Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft’, in D. Borchmeyer (ed.), Dichtungen und Schriften. Jubiläumsausgabe in zehn Bänden, vol. VI, 9–​157, Frankfurt a.M.: Insel Verlag. Wagner, R. (1983 [1851]), ‘Eine Mitteilung an meine Freunde’, in D. Borchmeyer (ed.), Dichtungen und Schriften. Jubiläumsausgabe in zehn Bänden, vol. VI, 199–​325, Frankfurt a.M.: Insel Verlag.

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Art beyond Truth and Lie in a Moral Sense Ekaterina Poljakova

1.  Art and the question of truth Nietzsche’s philosophy of art is something quite different, almost opposite to what we might call a theory of art. The problem of art was interesting and important to Nietzsche, not only and not so much in itself, but because it allowed him right from the start of his philosophical endeavor to distance himself from European morality, to see it from a new angle. Much later, in the introduction (An Attempt at Self-​Criticism) to The Birth of Tragedy, written sixteen years later, he would define the central task of his first work like this: to look at science and morals ‘through the prism of the artist’. Still he would not stop here but would add:  ‘and art more over through the prism of life’ (BT Attempt 2, KSA 1.14), also mentioning that even by then he had not given up this issue. Indeed, it is hardly possible to understand Nietzsche’s critique of the will to truth or his project of tragic philosophy without taking into consideration the role of art in his late works. Remarkably, the same holds true for Kant. In the Critique of Judgement, art is not just another theme upon which one might make a few remarks –​or not; on the contrary the problem of art rather appears to be the result of an enquiry that began in the first Critique. Indeed, the path of criticism steadily leads from the exploration of the general principles of the understanding and of the ideas of reason towards the question of their specific application in concrete judgements; and then towards the question about the guiding thread of this application. In the end, Kant finds it in aesthetic judgements, and this, in its turn, raises the question about the relationship between the ‘good’ and the ‘beautiful’, and therefore about the activity that establishes this relationship, that is, about art. As it turned out, this question required careful consideration and could not be

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unequivocally resolved in terms of a unified principle, but rather negatively, as the impossibility of such a principle. Thus, the question of art makes it possible for both Kant and Nietzsche to approach the matters of their concern: first and foremost the problem of the general in its relation to the particular. In this respect, it may seem that their answers are in complete contrast to each other. As is well known, it is for his predilection for the general at the expense of the personal that Nietzsche criticizes Kant. He interprets Kant’s definition of the beautiful as that which ‘pleases without interest’, as specifically directed against everything individual and subjects it to a ferocious criticism.1 In what follows, however, I will try to show that such a rebuke does not hit the mark. For it is precisely from the assumption of the individual as the only concrete criterion of the universal that Kant proceeds in his analysis of art. The point of departure between Kant’s and Nietzsche’s philosophy of art, therefore, does not seem to be here. I would like to stress once again that by considering the question of art in isolation, that is, regarding it as a theory of art, it is impossible to understand the fundamental difference of views on art held by Nietzsche and Kant. Instead, one should ask oneself what makes both of them turn to art, why it falls within the focus of their attention. The problem of truth in its relation to untruth or lies, the problem of truth in a moral sense, that is, understood as a duty (Kant’s favourite example of a moral action is rejecting lying regardless of consequences), may give us the key to find this difference. But, why the problem of truth and lie in particular? Because it is particularly in art that ‘lying sanctifies itself ’ and that ‘the will to deception has good conscience on its side’ (GM III 25, KSA 5.402). Art in this capacity, as Nietzsche observes in The Genealogy of Morality, proves to be a powerful enemy of morals and of the ascetic ideal. This thought can already be traced in The Birth of Tragedy –​the opposition of morals requiring truthfulness, on the one hand, and art which is entirely based on illusion, on the other, while the latter is not by any means perceived as the opposite of truth. Later, however, Nietzsche will cast doubt on a simple opposition morals –​art, as he writes: ‘Nothing is more corruptible than an artist’, and complains especially about the ‘artistic servitude in the service of the ascetic ideal’ (GM III 25, KSA 5.403). For Nietzsche, the example of such ambiguity of art will always be Plato, who proclaimed himself to be the enemy of art and who, nevertheless, made use of it in order to give weight to his own fabrication –​to the world of ideas, that is, to the world of truth which should be free from illusion. Unlike Kant and many other philosophers dealing with this problem, Plato, however, did not try to hide the antagonism between art and morals. Moreover,

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he followed just the same logic as Nietzsche –​the deceit of art discourages virtue and the desire for truth (Politeia 608b). Such evaluation, as well as the request to expel poets from the state, seems extremely exaggerated, and the first argument put forward by Socrates does not sound convincing enough: art is useless, since it is a superficial pastime, and it concentrates on emotions –​on joy and pain –​ distracting one from the important affairs of state (387b, 607a). But this does not exhaust the reasons why Plato rejects art, nor are they the most important ones. In fact, art is not simply useless, it is extremely deleterious; it does not merely distract us from virtue, but leads one astray, in the opposite direction. It is also a powerful rival to philosophy. The stronger its influence (Socrates unexpectedly admits that he himself is not alien to its effect; 607c), the more dangerous it is. The danger is that poetry, as well as tragedy, presents illusory pictures and not the living experiences. But why is an illusion harmful? This is the main point of Plato’s critique of art: Because those who enjoy illusory pictures (spectators and listeners) are perfectly aware that they are three steps far beyond the truth (art after all is the imitation of imitation), and knowing this, they nevertheless take delight in it. That is, they take delight in voluntary self-​deception. The fact that art is deception, illusion, simulacrum is not only of no concern to them (which would be a minor misfortune), but it is the necessary condition of aesthetic pleasure. The spectators burst into unfeigned tears when the hero is dying on the stage, that is, when the actor falls down slain by a stage prop sword. But this readiness of taking delight in illusion is the exact opposite of what leads to virtue and knowledge (598е–​600е); such duality is dangerous and poses a threat to an ideal state. Therefore Plato suggests expelling poets from it. For Nietzsche, this hostility towards art –​of a ‘typical Hellenic youth’ (BT 13, KSA 1.91) –​was an invaluable proof that the role of art was determined by the result of the struggle between the so-​called ‘theoretical’ and the ‘intuitive’ man (the outcome of the struggle was not obvious to Plato, even in what concerns his own soul). According to Nietzsche, in Plato we have the struggle for truth, that is, for the very concept of truth as an opposite of illusion, and the moral rethinking of that opposition: truth not merely as the opposite of illusion, but as the opposite of lie and deceit, especially self-​deceit. Kant is also known to have been concerned with the problem of self-​deceit, having to acknowledge that he was unable to explain how one could do this. Since ‘to deceive oneself on purpose seems to contain a contradiction’ (MS 430). To do that, one would have to divide oneself in two. Yet, however incredible this phenomenon may seem, there is no doubt that it does exist. Kant used this idea in order to introduce the concept of consciousness:  ‘the moral faculty of

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judgement, passing judgement upon itself’ (RGV 186); he even strengthened the paradox of this phenomenon, observing that the silence of conscience by no means implies that the subject’s moral is satisfactory, most probably it is evidence to the contrary (RGV 38). Nonetheless, for Kant, this most interesting twist of the problem of deception is not connected either with the idea of beauty or with art. The latter remains, as it were, beyond this issue. Yet, in the next paragraph we shall see that this is not exactly so; that Kant also tries to reconcile art and morals, which means that he sees a special challenge or breach between the two. But he is still quite far from Plato’s open antagonism. For Nietzsche, however, this antagonism was invaluable, since he himself, as he put it in a Nachlass note, was aiming to overturn Platonism: My philosophy reversed Platonism: the further away from true Being [wahrhaft Seienden], the purer, more beautiful better it is. To live in semblance [Schein] as a goal. (NL 1871 7[156], KSA 7.199)

In the first volume of Human, All Too Human published soon after that, this thought was expressed again, although entirely devoid of any optimistic tone. In fact, it is here that Nietzsche for the first time says what it means to regard philosophy as a tragedy, what it means to take the path of a tragic philosophy: But will our philosophy not thus become a tragedy? [. . .] A question seems to lie heavily on our tongue and yet refuses to be uttered: whether one can consciously remain in untruth? Or, if one were obliged to, whether death would not be preferable? (HH I 34, KSA 2.53–​4)

It is art that, according to Nietzsche, could give an answer to the question of ‘how it is possible to remain in untruth’; or rather it simply does what from the viewpoint of the philosopher looks insolvable. Both Kant and Nietzsche were trying to solve this very problem. In the next two sections, we shall see that they took quite different paths to achieve this goal. I will argue that Kant regards art as an important, though imperfect representation of moral ideas that should bridge the gap between pure reason and sensibility, without despairing at the impossibility of its task, trying instead to accomplish it again and again. Nietzsche, on the other hand, insists on the necessity of overcoming art itself in its dealing with illusion, that is, to go beyond it by accepting the tragic inevitability of remaining in ‘untruth’, by learning to bear the unbearable tragedy of being, and all this without beatifying life as artists tend to do.

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2.  Kant: Aesthetic clarification of the ideal As has already been said, the path of critique unfailingly led Kant from defining general principles towards the issue of their specific application and the criteria of such application. It turned out that there was an abyss between the formal rigor of the categorical imperative and a particular singular proposition. The ideas of reason cannot in any way be presented as particular cases. Therefore an ideal is not to be presented in terms of specific examples or images completely corresponding to it. But it is at this point that the difference between the first and the third Critique becomes clear. In The Critique of Pure Reason we read: But to aim to realize the ideal in an example, i.e. in [the world of, EP] appearance (Erscheinung), such as the wise man in a novel, is impracticable and has, furthermore, something absurd and hardly edifying in it (KrV A570/​B598)

In The Critique of Judgement, the view of such aesthetic manifestation of an ideal is completely different. An ideal that exists only as a conglomeration of abstract concepts could be a measure for a creature that is itself but pure reason. But a human is not such a creature. Moreover, the necessity to act in the context of the sensible world means that he should not be it. A human is a two-​faced Janus. On the one hand, there is no doubt that he is guided by concepts and rules of pure understanding, as well as by the ideas of reason, or, as Kant calls it, the ‘fact of reason’ (the categorical imperative)  –​the inherent condition permitting us to speak of reason at all. But, on the other hand, the use of this reason is conditioned aesthetically. It is not accidental that the starting point of the critique was transcendental aesthetics, that is, the analysis of the aesthetic forms of perception a priori. For it is only by proceeding from a specific point in time and space, from ‘here and now’, from a unique position inside the sensible world that it is possible to start using reason –​even theoretically. While it is true theoretically, practically, that is, concerning the subject of action, the role of sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) is even greater. It is not the influence of sensibility that causes a false judgement, but the fact that this influence remains unnoticed; it is not the lust of the flesh that causes bad deeds, but the misuse of reason, the abuse of its freedom. This is the critical distinction between Kant’s philosophy from, say, Augustine and all those who believed sensuousness to be the source of sin and falsehood. According to Kant, sensual perception, the aesthetic conditionality of the subject, his ‘here and now’, is a necessary condition for the judgement as well as for an action to take place at all.2

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Therefore, in the third Critique, Kant finds it possible to pave the way for the aesthetic clarification of ideas and of the ideal of reason itself by providing concrete examples. The following lines seem to be in direct contradiction to the strict taboo of the first Critique: The poet ventures to give sensible form to the rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, the kingdom of hell, eternity, creation, and so forth; and, again, to make things sensible of which there are examples in experience, such as death, envy, and all vices, as also love, fame, and the like, with completeness and in a way that goes beyond the limits of experience; and he does so with the aid of an imagination, which emulates the prelude of reason as it reaches for a maximum (KU 314)

Interestingly, both here and previously, Kant refers to the experience of poets and writers, disapproving of their attempts to present an ideal through specific fictitious characters in the former case, and recognizing the need of such experiments in the latter. I would like to stress, however, that I am far from wishing to catch Kant contradicting himself. It is just a matter of different aspects of one and the same problem. In the first case, Kant stresses the inappropriateness of visual representations of super-​sensible ideas, while in the second he stresses its inevitability for an aesthetically conditioned creature, that is, a human who has to adjust his ideas to the sensible world in order to be able to operate in it (to pass from pure ideas to concrete activities). In The Critique of Judgement, Kant goes further bringing to the fore not only the ideal of reason but even more so the ideal of beauty as ‘the visible expression of moral ideas that govern the human being inwardly’ (KU 235). The latter (i.e. the ideal of beauty), unlike the former, is simply bound to be embodied in a sensory image. But how is it possible? How should a sensory embodiment of morals be possible? After all, sensation is not in any way indicative of moral worth and beauty is the concept referring to the external sensation. Moral ideas, on the contrary, determine the intrinsic value of principles, while it is not quite clear even for the subject of action which of the principles has been applied to it. Nonetheless, Kant is known to maintain that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good. This in the first place, however, means a restrictive principle, that is, the beautiful is a mere symbol, nothing more than ‘the mere rule of reflection’ applied ‘to quite another object’ (KU 352). After all, the entire famous section ‘Beauty as the Symbol of Morality’ is incorporated into The Dialectics of Aesthetic Judgement and therefore plays a purely critical part.3 Emphasizing the character of analogy, Kant makes it clear that by taking the beautiful for the symbol of

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morals, we are implicitly accepting the rules of the game: we know that we will have to do with an inadequate representation, and by accepting this inadequacy, we testify that the adequate presentation of morals in a sensory form is basically impossible. In this scheme of thought, complex but quite typical for Kant, one can hear the echo of Plato’s critique of voluntary self-​deception underlying art. In Kant however, the critical tone is not only softened, but transformed into a positive one: this is not only and not so much about self-​deception; the point is that by accepting the inadequacy of an image we confirm the very impossibility of the adequacy: the impossibility of expressing the good in sensuous terms. Plato himself might well have found such a correction to his taste, since ‘the world of ideas’ remains in its basic principles unaffected by the senses. But Kant goes further than Plato. Certainly, the world of ideas, especially morals, should not be determined by sensory images, it should not be affected by them. All this is true. But this is true only in theory; as for practice, it is obvious that such representations of ideas in concrete images are not only irremovable, but also necessary for creatures that are not pure reason, but are themselves aesthetically conditioned. The symbolic bond between the moral ideas of reason and their sensory embodiment is in and of itself by no means accidental. Despite its inadequacy it is essential, since it is the only mediator between the sensible world and the categorical imperative. It is the only validation that the latter can actually be embodied in action. Kant’s moral philosophy left the reader bewildered on that point. For as Nietzsche rightly put it: ‘probably no such action [Tat] has ever been done’ (NL 1881 11[303], KSA 9.557–​8).4 It is for this reason that in the third Critique, Kant not only lends himself to the possibility of a symbolic connection between the ideal of beauty and the ideal of morals, but insists on its inevitability. But how is it possible that such connection could arise at all? In order to answer this question, Kant refers to the analysis of a particular aesthetic activity which is called art. By representing abstract ideas in sensual images an artist or a writer demonstrates his special ability (Vermögen), the power of his imagination (Einbildungskraft). Here Kant is forced to introduce another, even more paradoxical concept. The world of ideas and the sensible world are ‘bridged’ neither by a pure idea nor by a visualized image, but by something intermediary –​an aesthetic idea. In addition, Kant stresses its paradoxical feature pointing out that although this idea tends to go beyond the limits of experience, and although it ‘gives much to think about’, it cannot correspond to any concrete thought or any concrete concept (KU 314). The power of imagination here appears to be

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creative and, as Kant puts it, it sets the mind in motion (KU 315). But though the aesthetic idea itself cannot obtain the conceptual concreteness without impoverishing itself, it may and even must from time to time be embodied in concrete images, the products of an artist’s imagination. Here is roughly how it works. Experience is the source of concrete images, the aesthetic peculiarities of the perceived objects being involuntarily associated with abstract characteristics and intrinsic qualities attributed to these objects, including virtues and vices of certain people whose appearance turns out to be, as it were, a symbolic representation of their inner characteristics. But the aesthetic details are numerous and ambiguous, their connection with some or other qualities is far from obvious. It is then that one will need a special gift or the power of imagination, passing from perception to productivity. It is due to this productivity that out of numerous sensual impressions and ‘in a manner quite incomprehensible to us’ there arises a unified ‘image and shape of an object’ (Gestalt des Gegenstandes) (KU 233–​4), claiming to be the sensual model of the super-​sensual –​the pattern of intellectual ideas. Where a certain person is concerned, the productivity of the power of imagination, according to Kant, turns out to be inevitably aimed at creating the aesthetic model of the ethical, that is, at creating a certain standard for any specific embodiment of moral ideas in concrete images.5 It not only takes talent to create such an image, which is both the ideal of beauty and the symbol of good; Kant uses here even a stronger concept: it is the task of a genius. Moreover, it is in connection with the genius of an artist that Kant introduces a concept which so far has been of no relevance to his philosophy –​the concept of ‘spirit’. An artist’s talent is a spirit awakening all mental abilities of a human, opening the way for their free use (KU 317–​18). However, what Kant is known to have suggested just then was to ‘clip the wings’ of such a genius, taming him by the force of the judgements of taste (KU 319). This is not accidental. Despite his ‘flying high’ and the ability to present model of integrating the outer and the inner, including the beauty and the good, the activity of a genius is nothing but an attempt to do the impossible. This is the very essence of the paradox of art described by Kant. Bridging the gap between the aesthetic and the super-​sensual cannot succeed, but the connection should be established and is actually established by art. Describing a genius by means of the high concept of ‘spirit’, moreover, laying stress on its biblical meaning (the Spirit granting life and freedom), Kant makes it absolutely clear that such aesthetic manifestation of the invisible is indispensable to man. It not only has a supportive function, but also a vital and liberating significance. It enables one to feel the free play of all rational faculties and by doing so turns out to be the

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symbol of ones’ highest spiritual freedom. Nevertheless, just at the moment of the highest flight, the voice of reason must sound again, making clear that such visual clarification of the super-​sensual is inadequate and that one should not trust it too much. Meanwhile one’s good taste will allow one to suspect that the boldness of genius is but cheating or, what is worse, just the lack of taste. On the face of it, it appears that Kant shares the views of his time according to which art is the art of geniuses;6 he even ascribes to art the function of presenting the ideal of beauty. Art is understood as an activity of specially gifted individuals capable of setting a standard for the aesthetic to the effect that it becomes the outer expression of the inner qualities and characteristics and  –​ beauty being inevitably connected with the morally good –​gives the latter visual features. However, while defining art as the art of geniuses, Kant also makes clear that it is essentially impossible to say what art should actually be like, in other words, the criterion of true art is impossible (cf. Simon 2003: 227–​8). All taste judgements are nothing but subjectively conditioned assertions claiming for a universal approval. Moreover, judgements of taste themselves are influenced by works of art and are even formed thanks to a certain canon of art –​a set of its universally recognized works.7 But while taste cannot give us an absolute criterion of art, morals can do it even less. It is not the moral ideal that determines the aesthetic one, but just the contrary –​a sensory image becomes a model for a concrete embodiment of moral qualities. The concrete in works of art becomes the measurement of the universal and even imposes some rules on nature itself, thus setting standards for all later works of art. But such claim immediately shows its illusiveness. For the ‘rule’ set by the work of genius can be refuted by another genius because of its inevitable inadequacy. Or rather, a genius is the one who can do it, who can create a new image that sets a new rule of connecting what cannot be connected –​ the world of ideas and the world of sensory perception. To this effect the creation of every artist is illusory, it creates the illusion of bridging the gap; and every new creation, every new work of art deceives us by generating concrete images; it lures us into the dream of the ideal embodied in the real world.8 But Kant, unlike Plato, is far from blaming art for this deceit. For the deceit in this case does not claim to be the truth. On the contrary, a simple reference to art indicates that there are no such claims and makes it clear that inadequacy has been accepted as the condition of the game. The connection between the inner and the outer presented by a genius is his own creation. The latter claims to become a model for others or, as Mikhail Bakhtin put it, to become a participant of a ‘big dialogue’ of artists and poets. But thus it turns out to have

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only one voice in this dialogue indirectly pointing to its non-​universality and non-​finality, although hoping for our support, for the appreciation of spectators and readers. It is not just that the appraisal may turn out to be not as high as the artist would have liked. Even if his work is acknowledged as the product of a genius, it will still remain the product of his art, his view of life, the play of his fancy. In that way it will remain a random product of the sport of nature, since the genius himself is ‘favoured by nature’ (KU 318), he is but one of its random productions. Therefore the clarification of the ideal qualities of things and people presented by him cannot be final. Although it seems to set rules for the very nature and for human behaviour, it must every time assert itself all over again. Being random, temporary and inadequate, art has to produce new and new models of connection between the inner and the outer. The illusion of such connection indicates therefore that art searches after truth (i.e. it searches a true correspondence between the inner and the outer, the true embodiment of an ideal) which is unattainable not only for this particular kind of human activity, but for a human as such. Thus, art mysteriously shows the unattainability of truth for man, giving him at the same time no reason to despair. For, though approaching truth is nothing but an illusion, it is precisely this concrete embodiment of the unattainable that is the primary interest of reason. So the illusions of art keep alive the hope that all human efforts in search for truth are not in vain or, as Kant puts it in his draft note, that ‘man belongs to the world’ (der Mensch in die Welt passe) (Nachlaßreflexionen (1820a) 127), or, as he writes elsewhere, that ‘the world as a beautiful moral whole’ (MS 458) can truly become reality.9 Kant’s concept of art as the product of geniuses who are to be tamed by good taste, receives, however, an unexpected twist: in a sense, art is now posed beyond truth and lie. Being a deceit, it cannot be blamed for its deceitfulness; not only because the untruth of an embodied ideal cannot be opposed to any true knowledge, but because this untruth is interpreted as the only path leading to truth, the only path which a human being can take if his reason is not to remain just an abstract idea, but is to serve him as a guide to particular judgements and actions. Thus, the untruth of art turns out, even for Kant, that is, long before Nietzsche, to be a deceit in ‘a non-​moral sense’. It breaks away from the simple opposition of being denounced as a lie or being praised as truth. Being an activity beyond truth and lie in a moral sense, art appears, according to Kant’s analysis, to be crucial for the life of human beings who search for a concrete realization of the true and the good.

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3.  Nietzsche: ‘Consciously remaining in untruth’ (bewusst in der Unwahrheit bleiben) In his early notes, the young Nietzsche called man’s heroic quest for truthfulness (the possibility of which is nevertheless quite dubious) ‘Kant’s tragic problem’ (NL 1872–​3 19 [104], KSA 7.453–​4). It is this quest that aroused the thirst for knowledge, that is, science itself. But these efforts proved to be futile. Not only futile but deceitful. Nietzsche adds: ‘Truthfulness of art: is it now alone sincere?’ Thus, just at the start of his philosophical path Nietzsche believes that today ‘an entire new dignity [Würde]’ (NL 1872–​3 19 [104], KSA 7.454) belongs to art, that is, the dignity of bringing back the cultural achievements of the Greeks, who clearly understood that it was impossible for culture to be based exclusively on knowledge. It is to this ‘return’ of the Greek understanding of art that Nietzsche dedicated The Birth of Tragedy, the work of his youth. Later, criticizing his early work, but giving it credit for posing the question of art, Nietzsche would complain about having resorted to the help of ‘Schopenhauer’s and Kant’s formulae’ while presenting thoughts that worried him at that time and continued to worry him now, sixteen years later, in the mature period of his creative work. Using the phraseology of Kant and Schopenhauer, he even then managed to express ‘new evaluations’ that were not only alien but even opposite to their taste (BT Attempt 6, KSA 1.19). Indeed, it is not difficult to see what Nietzsche means by ‘Schopenhauer’s and Kant’s formulae’, which he used at that time although giving them an opposite meaning. What is meant here is Kant’s distinction between the thing-​in-​itself and the phenomenon, the distinction which later Nietzsche will call ‘a foul stain of Kantian criticism’ (NL 1886–​7 5[4]‌, KSA 12.185). Schopenhauer will rethink this opposition with regard to art, introducing the concept of will as the true essence of the world whose immediate representation (Abbild) he believes to be music (cf. Schopenhauer 1991: 366–​7). In actual fact, using the phraseology of Kant and Schopenhauer, even then in his work of youth, Nietzsche meant something different. Music really ‘appears as Will’. But [. . .] music cannot possibly be Will, by its essence, because as such it would have to be banished entirely from the realm of art –​for Will is that which is entirely un-​aesthetic –​but it appears as Will. (BT 6, KSA 1.50–​1; my italics)

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The young Nietzsche, although still distinguishing between essence and appearance, pays little attention to this distinction, unlike Schopenhauer, his teacher, and unlike Kant, the teacher of the latter. In fact, he is least of all interested in the essence and even less in true essence and its objectification. Not refuting his predecessors and even using their notions, he stresses something quite different –​ the beneficial semblance (Scheinbarkeit) of art is not at all concerned with the world of truth and its objective reflections. Moreover, ‘overturning Platonism’, Nietzsche completely expels the ‘non-​aesthetic’ will out of the sphere of art –​ contrary to Plato, who expelled poets from his ideal state. In this sense, it seems to me that the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy should not be understood as Schopenhauer’s essence of the world, which could be achieved by art, transfiguring it and rendering it harmless by means of the world of Apollinian illusion. This is not the essence of the world, this is the essence of art –​casting a glance into the abyss of being. The primordial unity (das Ur-​Eine) which stands, as the young Nietzsche tells us, behind all phenomena, is in and of itself but a vision –​a vision of an artist and of an aesthetically sensitive spectator. That is why the opposition of the Dionysian/​Apollinian, strictly speaking, corresponds neither to Kant’s noumena/​phenomena nor to Schopenhauer’s will/​representation. According to Nietzsche, art itself creates an illusion of such oppositions, alluring us with promises of the pleasure in semblance (Lust am Schein), but not revealing to us the knowledge of the essence of the world. That is the ‘truth’ of art, and in defiance of the heavy thirst for truth of a scientist, it calls for joy at superficiality, exposing the illusiveness of the world of phenomena and at the same time the prospect of delight which this exposure promises. Nevertheless, Nietzsche will later call The Birth of Tragedy ‘a book perhaps for artists with some subsidiary capacity for analysis and retrospection’ (BT Attempt 2, KSA 1.13), adding that as such it deserves mercy, for an artist should perhaps look at his creation just like that, but that it is unforgivable for a philosopher, since it contains too much metaphysics and youthful pathos mistaken for proofs. For the mature Nietzsche, however, worst of all was his youthful fancy of the justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon, the very thought that the world needs justification. That such a task was ascribed to an artist was in and by itself an illusion, an illusion that was excusable and even necessary for an artist, but if one looks at it ‘through the prism of life’, it looks more like a gullible devotion to the same old moral ideal. The once ‘reversed Platonism’ is becoming less and less acceptable to the late Nietzsche. But ascribing a special, ‘true’ veracity to art would just mean ‘reversing’ Plato, as well as ‘Platonism for the people’ (BGE Preface, KSA 5.12); that is,

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the Christian morality that sends ‘art, all art, to the realm of lies’ (BT Attempt 5, KSA 1.18). Contrary to the ideal of truth that was hostile to art, Nietzsche in his early work tried to set the ideal of the truth of art against the hopelessly false world of morals, to overturn values, to put pros in place of cons, ‘truth’ in place of ‘falsehood’. But this was not the intention of the mature Nietzsche. The statement ‘[t]‌o live in semblance [Schein] as a goal’ (NL 1871 7[156], KSA 7.199) implied that the old Plato–​Kant–​Schopenhauer oppositions being/​appearance, truth/​illusion were still valid. It is their abolition, however, that the late Nietzsche aims at. Now, not only the true world, but also the world of appearances were to be abolished, as he writes in Twilight of the Idols: The true world is gone: which world is left? The illusory perhaps? . . . But no! We got rid of the illusory world along with the true one! (TI Fabel, KSA 6.81)

An important stage in the abolishment of the true world, as it is written there, was the Königsbergean ‘scepticism’. Due to Kant, this world had become inaccessible, elusive and obscure. Yet it remained the shadowy background and even the measurement of the perceived world, unshakable in its inaccessibility. For Kant, art was a bridge that permitted a painless transition from the inner to the outer, from the world of noumena to the world of phenomena, although herein he emphasized the temporariness and inadequacy of such transitions, their purely symbolic character. As for Nietzsche, he aimed at abolishing the very difference between them  –​between truth and illusion, being and appearance, the inner and the outer. To be sure, Nietzsche himself was well aware of the paradox of this task. Giving up his youthful optimism, Nietzsche, as was mentioned earlier, states his adherence to illusion in the form of a question: ‘whether one can consciously remain in untruth?’ (HH 34, KSA 2.53), doubting there and then whether this task might be too dreadful, whether philosophy might thus turn into tragedy, and even whether it should be better to prefer death to such a turn of human thought and history.10 At this point in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche tried to soften the tragic character of this thought, offering a certain abstinence (Entsagung) as a solution, that is, the abolition and purification of affects, typical of him at that time (HH 34, KSA 2.53–​5). Later, though, his treatment of the problem looks quite different. That philosophy turns into tragedy is regarded by the mature Nietzsche as his new task, since he calls himself ‘the first tragic philosopher’ who has succeeded in ‘converting the Dionysian into a philosophical pathos’ (EH Books 3, KSA 6.312). It was Nietzsche’s project of tragic philosophy which was to give a response as to whether and how it should be possible to remain in untruth.

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In fact, saying ‘yes’ to a life in untruth seems an unsolvable problem to a philosopher. Probably, he would learn this again from artists. But doing that he would also remember that art is not a metaphysical completion of being, a certain highest justification of life, but is just what makes life ‘bearable’. As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable to us, and art furnishes us with the eye and hand and above all the good conscience to be able to make such a phenomenon of ourselves. (GS 107, KSA 3.464)

In what concerns the teaching of how to make life bearable, art still deserves our gratitude (i.e. by the way the title of the aforementioned aphorism: Our ultimate gratitude towards art). But nothing more than that. Art cuts short the pathos of truthfulness which otherwise would have become unbearable and, as Nietzsche instantly observes, would have turned a philosopher into a moralist, into someone ‘virtuous, monstrous and a scarecrow [tugendhafte[] Ungeheuer[] und Vogelscheuche[]]‌’(NL 1884 26[417], KSA 11.263). As, for example, is the case with Kant himself. Art is to protect the philosopher from the temptations of his own intellectual conscience.11 Then, however, he should not forget that the unbearableness of being is merely beautified by art, that is, he should not yield to the naïve faith of an artist or the one who, just as formerly Nietzsche himself, theorizing as an artist, claims that the world is really justified as an aesthetic phenomenon, that the redemption from the abysses of being is really possible, that illusion may appear to be truth, or at least, as Kant implied, a path to truth. In The Gay Science Nietzsche therefore returns again to the theme of art, pointing out the artist’s experience, which is invaluable, because it teaches us to see things in perspective, to present them as ‘beautiful, attractive and desirable’. At the same time, Nietzsche also warns against overestimating this experience. A philosopher ought to be wiser than an artist: For usually in their case this delicate power stops where art ends and life begins; we, however, want to be poets of our lives, starting with the smallest and most commonplace details. (GS 299, KSA 3.538)12

That is why it is necessary to look at art ‘through the prism of Life’, partly in order to avoid being too affected by the naïve admiration of artists, partly in order to learn from their invaluable experience, to make it fruitful for philosophy and for human’s own life. But what can a philosopher see if he looks upon art ‘through the prism of life’? How does that help him to become the poet of his own life, to make an artistic

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phenomenon of it? The mature Nietzsche, far from just admiring artists’ genius, now suggests that we should address the ‘dangerous concept “artist” ’ from the perspective of the ‘problem of the actor’ (GS 361, KSA 3.608). However, this is not only and not so much about a stage actor, as it is about any role in life, including the problem of lying and lying to oneself, it is about the great acting (Schauspielerei) of the spirit, about the increasing acting of contemporary Europeans of his time.13 In this context ‘more may belong in the concept “art” than is generally believed’ (BGE 291, KSA 5.235). Using this new extended notion of art, Nietzsche interprets man as a dual creature. This duality, however, is quite different from that pointed out by Kant. Man, as Nietzsche presents him proceeding from his art analysis, is a ‘manifold, mendacious, artificial, and opaque animal’ that invented ‘good conscious’ and ‘the whole of morality’, ‘in order to enjoy his soul for once as simple’ (BGE 291, KSA 5.235). It is a ‘basic will of the spirit [Grundwille des Geistes]’  –​the will ‘from multiplicity to simplicity’, the will ‘to mere appearance, to simplification, to masks, to cloaks, in short, to the surface’ –​in a word, it is these ‘Protean arts’ of the spirit that enable us to speak of the spirit at all (BGE 230, KSA 5.167–​8). But this will is countered by that sublime inclination of the seeker of knowledge who takes and wants to take things in profundity, in their multiplicity, thoroughly: a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste, which every courageous thinker will recognize in himself (BGE 230, KSA 5.168)

Let us stress once again. This is not about the opposition of the inner and the outer, essence and phenomenal surface, or truth and illusion. Both tendencies –​ the will to superficiality and the voice of the intellectual conscience –​are nothing but the manifestation of the same old aesthetic activity of man, his ability to see things in perspective, his propensity for adding attraction and meaning to them. It would be wrong to claim for giving preference only to one of these tendencies. This is however exactly what morals do, by declaring art to be a lie: it turns out to be a lie itself, as if it were possible to see a face without a mask, truth without appearance or essence out of perspective. Therefore, morality itself appears to be an illusion and a kind of art. Even Plato’s ascent to the world of ideas was nothing but such a piece of art.14 What Nietzsche suggests to us, however, is not to reject masks or to take a mask for a face, but just to see the mask as an inevitability, to see that the will to truth, as well as the will to illusion, is the creative power generating the world, which is incommensurate with verity or truth. Or rather, a new truthfulness beyond that of Plato and even of Kant would mean that one

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never forgets the theatrical nature of one’s own spirit, its ‘Protean arts’. For a philosopher, this means that he should not take ‘the wishes of his heart’ (BGE 229, KSA 5.167) as a proof. He should bear in mind that, after all, all art aims at ‘desirability of life’ (TI Skirmishes 24, KSA 6.127), and therefore should learn to keep it at a distance, especially when it comes to his own ‘art’, to his own life. Nietzsche’s ‘tragic knowledge’ (tragische Erkenntnis)15 does not offer and does not promise liberation from the duality inherent in human spirit, neither in the form of the will to truth, nor in the form of taking delight in illusion. On the contrary, it sees in both the irrepressible conflict generating the ‘eternal comedy of existence’ (die ewige Komödie des Daseins) (GS 1, KSA 3.372). The latter however seems tragic to man, since he risks to die of its unsolvable contradictions. It is this eternal conflict that generates works of art –​as an attempt to resolve it over and over again. Kant has a point there. But these fruitful attempts, this will to bridge the gap between an ideal and the world of sensuality, are not as harmless as Kant wished. For there is no way leading to truth, not even that which artists would take. Even philosophers may be seduced (and actually have been seduced many times16) by their fine art, so that they take the wishes of their own heart for reality, believing, as Kant did, that illusion can be the path that truth takes in the human world. Therefore, unlike Kant, Nietzsche has no intention in reconciling art and morality (not even the one which would provide the justification of being); and even less does he intend, unlike Plato, to oppose art and the will to truth. Claiming to look at the problem of art ‘through the prism of life’, he makes it clear that the duality of a human, seemingly abolished by art, remains nonetheless an unresolved problem. Not only and not so much because it is impossible to overcome such a duality, but because in both respects the human spirit turns out to be nothing but an actor. It appears to be the product of art. For a philosopher the question: How is it possible to remain in untruth?, receives herein a disquieting answer: It is necessary because it is inevitable. For the world of truth opens to us as a result of artistic illusion, and the very opposition of truth and lie has become but a manifestation of the will to create appearances. But since it is impossible to abolish the will to truth, since the very discovery of the illusiveness of truth turns out to serve it, it is necessary to extend the artist’s experience to life, bearing in mind, however, that no one is as prone to naivety towards their own creations as the artists themselves. Being ‘the poets of our lives’, philosophers cannot afford such naivety and must beware of taking their own creations for truths, that is, of forgetting the artistic drive within their own spirits.

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Claiming to be the first tragic philosopher (EH Books 3, KSA 6.312), Nietzsche does not suggest reversing Plato or attributing a certain healing metaphysical power to illusion, that is, opposing art and truth or reconciling them. What he does suggest is that we view ourselves as an ambiguous artistic creation, learning to bear the unbearableness of being and stay beyond truth and lie. In this sense, art may become a great teacher. But it should be remembered that its easy consciousness is inexcusable for a philosopher. Even Kant, though emphasizing the concept of conscience as such, was not quite innocent in this respect; even he let himself be seduced by the artists’ feats, thinking that they can be reconciled with morals and even with truth. Urging us to be wiser than artists, Nietzsche indirectly points out: Love for wisdom, the way philosophy has always understood itself, would mean its will to resist such seduction –​this is the philosopher’s burden which the artist is free from. The latter could be admired and even envied (wasn’t this the case of Plato himself?). Creating his works, he does not reflect on how they are possible. Immersing himself in a world of illusion, he becomes indifferent to the problem of truth and lies. What appears to be a tragic problem to a philosopher, to him means the delight in semblance; and where the former sees the unbearableness of being, he can speak of its justification. To sum up, for both Kant and Nietzsche art is a special human activity beyond truth and lie in a moral sense. There is no reason to blame art for its deceitfulness, for truthfulness itself has become a tragic problem that cannot be resolved by banning the poets or by subordinating art to morality or even to the judgement of good taste. But while Kant presents this deceit of art as the inevitable path that truth takes in order to reveal itself among humans, Nietzsche calls us to look upon ourselves as an ambiguous product of art. For Nietzsche, human beings turn out to be actors in two respects: in their quest for truth, on the one hand, and in their urge for appearances, their will to semblance, on the other. Accepting this untruth of one’s own spirit means therefore to learn not only to resist Plato’s naivety of opposing art and morals or to look through Kant’s ruses to reconcile them; it also means to regard oneself as one’s own creation. What should be opposed to the illusions of breaking free from the deep duality of the spirit is the readiness to bear this tragic duality, to bury any hope for the triumph of illusion.

Notes 1. For Nietzsche, Kant’s ‘without interest’ is a misunderstanding towards one’s own self, towards one’s extremely personal ‘interest’ (GM III 6, KSA 5.347). Though Nietzsche

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Ekaterina Poljakova directed this criticism not only towards Kant but also towards Schopenhauer, still first and foremost it concerns Kant (cf. NL 1884 25[101], KSA 11.35). See Hödl (2005). In my interpretation of Kant, I follow Josef Simon who showed in his breakthrough interpretation that Kant is not only always keeping in mind the aesthetic conditionality of the subject, but that it is the starting point of the transcendental analysis. According to Simon (2003), what Kant aims at with his Critiques is not the statement of some abstract universal reason that to some extent involves all rational beings (Kant subjects to criticism the very idea of such reason), what he aims at is the irremovable aesthetic difference between my reason and that of another human (the alien reason). The significance of the aesthetic conditionality of the subject, his position here and now for Kant’s Critiques, was pointed out by Friedrich Kaulbach (1990). This is one of the most discussed sections of The Critique of Judgement in academic literature (cf. Recki 2008; Vossenkuhl 1992). As to the question of the relationship between the aesthetic and the ethic in Kant, see Früchtl (1998). My interpretation is given in Poljakova (2013: 69–​76). Cf. Kant: ‘Reason therefore provides laws that are imperatives, that is, objective laws of freedom, which tell us what ought to happen –​although perhaps it never does happen’ (KrV A802/​B830). The intermediate link here is what Kant calls a ‘normal idea’ (Normalidee). Being connected with the aesthetic idea of beauty, it generates the ideal of beauty. Only the latter is not purely aesthetic, since it indirectly depends on the ideal of morals (KU 234–​6). On the paradoxical character of Kant’s concept of genius, see Desmond (1998). The discussion, critically directed against Kant, whether to give primacy to taste or to genius, was already launched by Schopenhauer (1974) and supported by Gadamer (1972: 54). The theory of art by Leo Tolstoy, for example, who in other respects (especially in what concerns moral philosophy) considered himself to be Kant’s follower, appears to disagree with Kant’s critique of art. In his article ‘What Is Art?’ Tolstoy (1995) rejects the canon of art, for it prevents one from making independent judgement and see whether it is the case of a real work of art or its imitation. It should be specially noted that this concerns not only good and beautiful qualities. Had Kant reduced art to the reproduction of the ideal, his philosophy of art would have been badly behind our time. This is about the ideal in the broad sense of the word: about the intrinsic characteristics manifested aesthetically, that is, by means of visual images and specific details, about the concrete sensory embodiment of the invisible. About the importance of this idea for Kant see Henrich (1992).

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10. It is not by chance that already in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche avoids the words ‘illusion’ and a ‘lie’. Such words would have implied the very possibility of truth opposed to them. 11. About the ambiguity of Nietzsche’s concept of intellectual conscience, see Poljakova (2010). 12. One of the draft titles, supposedly for Beyond Good and Evil, was ‘Philosopher as a Higher Artist [Philosoph als höherer Künstler]’ (NL 1884 26[297], KSA 11. 229). 13. Cf. ‘The extent to which things will become ever more “artistic” in Europe [Inwiefern in Europa immer “künstlerischer” gehen wird]’ (GS 356, KSA 3.595). Interestingly, Plato spoke of the influence of art in the same framework, pointing out the doubling of roles in life as its deleterious effect (Politeia 397e). 14. Cf. ‘the Platonic dialogue was the boat on which the older forms of poetry, together with all her children, sought refuge after their shipwreck’ (BT 14, KSA 1.93). 15. About Nietzsche’s concept of tragic knowledge, see Poljakova (2013: 209ff.). 16. Here I am not discussing the biographical relations between Nietzsche and Richard Wagner. Nietzsche’s break with Wagner certainly gave him an impetus for his new estimation of art. But his critical attitude towards his own early work and the very idea that not only the true world but also the world of illusion were to be abolished surely had more deep roots than mere disappointment about the idol of his youth.

References Desmond, W. (1998), ‘Kant and the Terror of Genius: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism’, in H. Parret (ed.), Kants Ästhetik, Kant’s Aesthetics, L’esthétique de Kant, 594–​614, Berlin/​New York: Walter de Gruyter. Früchtl, J. (1998), ‘Getrennt-​vereint. Zum Verhältnis zwischen Ästhetik und Ethik bei Immanuel Kant’, in B. Greiner and M. Moog-​Grünewald (eds), Etho-​Poietik. Ethik und Ästhetik im Dialog: Erwartungen, Forderungen, Abgrenzungen, 15–​29, Bonn: Bouvier. Gadamer, H. G. (1972), Wahrheit und Methode, Tübingen: Mohr. Henrich, D. (1992), Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World. Studies in Kant, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hödl, H. G. (2005), ‘Interesseloses Wohlgefallen. Nietzsches Kritik an Kants Ästhetik als Kritik an Schopenhauers Soteriologie’, in B. Himmelmann (ed.), Kant und Nietzsche im Widerstreit, 186–​95, Berlin/​New York: Walter de Gruyter. Kaulbach, F. (1990), Philosophie des Perspektivismus, Teil 1: Wahrheit und Perspektive bei Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Tübingen: Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Poljakova, E. (2010), ‘ “Das intellectuale Gewissen” und die Ungerechtigkeit des Erkennenden. Eine Interpretation des Aphorismus Nr. 2 der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft’, Nietzsche-​Studien 39: 120–​44.

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Poljakova, E. (2013), Differente Plausibilitäten. Kant, Nietzsche, Tolstoi und Dostojewski über Vernunft, Moral und Kunst, Berlin/​Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Recki, B. (2008), ‘Die Dialektik der ästhetischen Urteilskraft’, in O. Höffe (ed.), Immanuel Kant: Kritik der Urteilskraft, 189–​210, Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Schopenhauer, A. (1974), ‘Über die “Kritik der Urteilskraft”’, in J. Kulenkampff (ed.), Materialien zu Kants ‘Kritik der Urteilskraft’, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Schopenhauer, A. ([1819]1991), Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, in 2 Bdn. Sämtliche Werke, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Simon, J. (2003), Kant. Die fremde Vernunft und die Sprache der Philosophie, Berlin/​ New York: Walter de Gruyter. Tolstoy, L. (1995), What Is Art?, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, London: Penguin. Vossenkuhl, W. (1992), ‘Schönheit als Symbol der Sittlichkeit. Über die gemeinsame Wurzel von Ethik und Ästhetik bei Kant’, Philosophisches Jahrbuch 99 (1): 91–​104, half-​volume 1.

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‘Who is Right, Kant or Stendhal?’: On Nietzsche’s Kantian Critique of Kant’s Aesthetics João Constâncio

1.  Introduction In ­chapter 6 of the Third Essay of the Genealogy of Morality Nietzsche recasts ‘the aesthetic problem’ as an opposition between Kant and Stendhal, or between the conception of beauty in terms of disinterestedness and in terms of desire (GM III 6, KSA 5.346–​9). The present chapter is an attempt to make sense of this opposition in order to clarify, more generally, the relationship between Nietzsche’s and Kant’s aesthetics.1 As I  shall try to show, in taking sides with Stendhal against Kant, Nietzsche seems at first to be defending what I shall call throughout this article a ‘reductionist view of beauty’. This is basically a view according to which (a) beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder, beauty is a merely subjective ‘projection’ (we can call this ‘subjectivism’), and (b) beauty is an effect of desire, ultimately of biological or physiological desire, that is, beauty is merely a subjective form things acquire when they reflect or mirror back at us a biological ‘feeling of power’ that we discharge or project onto them (we can call this ‘biologism’). This reductionist view of beauty also seems to be the one Nietzsche expresses in Twilight of the Idols, as well as in a set of important posthumous notes from the 1880s (especially from 1887). However, I shall try to show that all of this only seems to be so. There is no doubt that Nietzsche takes sides with Stendhal and uses the latter’s definition of beauty, namely, ‘beauty is a promise of happiness’, against Kant’s definition of beauty as ‘that which gives us pleasure without interest’ (GM III 6, KSA 5.347). There is also no doubt that, in doing this, Nietzsche develops a view of beauty that makes beauty subjective and links beauty to desire. But this view is not reductionist, that is, it is neither a form of subjectivism, nor a

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form of biologism. Moreover, Nietzsche’s love of multilayered irony and subtlety makes things even more interesting, as (a) the reductionist view of beauty he only seems to defend coincides to a large extent with the view of beauty of his main target in GM III 6 –​which is Schopenhauer, not Kant –​and (b) his defence of the Stendhalian view of beauty has a clear Kantian dimension, such that the opposition ‘Kant or Stendhal’ in fact recasts ‘the aesthetic problem’ in a subtle juxtaposition, ‘Kant and Stendhal’, rather than in a true opposition. Nietzsche’s conceptions of ‘spiritualization’ (or ‘sublimation’) and perspectival ‘expansion’ (or of enlargement of perspective as a ‘pathos of distance’ or an ‘expansion of distance within the soul itself ’; BGE 257, KSA 5.204) are the key conceptions which show that his view of beauty involves a quasi-​Kantian conception of judgements of beauty as reflective judgements, and hence the rejection of reductionism.

2.  The ‘promise of happiness’ versus ‘disinterestedness’ According to Nietzsche in GM III 6, one of the reasons why Kant and Schopenhauer interpreted the judgement ‘this is beautiful’ as a ‘disinterested’ judgement was the fact that Kant conceived of art and the aesthetic experience from the perspective of the ‘spectator’ rather than from the perspective of artistic creation, that is, the perspective of the artist, and Schopenhauer repeated the same mistake: [. . .] all I wish to underline is that Kant, like all philosophers, instead of envisaging the aesthetic problem from the point of view of the artist (the creator), considered art and the beautiful purely from that of the ‘spectator,’ and unconsciously introduced the ‘spectator’ into the concept ‘beautiful’. It would not have been so bad if this ‘spectator’ had at least been sufficiently familiar to the philosophers of beauty –​namely, as a great personal fact and experience, as an abundance of authentic experiences, desires, surprises, and delights in the realm of the beautiful! But I fear that the reverse has always been the case; and so they have offered us, from the beginning, definitions in which, as in Kant’s famous definition of the beautiful, a lack of any refined first-​hand experience reposes in the shape of a fat worm of error. ‘That is beautiful’, said Kant, ‘which gives us pleasure without interest’. Without interest! Compare with this definition one framed by a genuine ‘spectator’ and artist –​Stendhal, who once called the beautiful une promesse de bonheur [a promise of happiness.] At any rate he rejected and repudiated the one point about the aesthetic condition which Kant had stressed: le désintéressement [disinterestedness]. Who is right, Kant or Stendhal? (GM III 6, KSA 5.347)

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If we conceive of the beautiful from the perspective of the artist, that is, the perspective of the creation of the beautiful, and if we think of the ‘spectator’ as an interested spectator, we arrive at Stendhal’s definition of the beautiful as a ‘promise of happiness’. What does this idea of a ‘promise of happiness’ mean? The key is obviously Stendhal’s (1980 [1822]:  chapter II) famous concept of ‘crystallization’: At the salt mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they haul it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-​tit’s claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable. What I  have call crystallization is the operation of the spirit which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one. [. . .] The phenomenon that I  have called crystallization springs from Nature, which ordains that we shall feel pleasure and sends the blood to our brain. It evolves from the feeling that the degree of pleasure is related to the perfections of the loved one, and from the idea that ‘She is mine’.2

‘Passionate love’, ‘amour-​passion’ (‘the love of the Portuguese nun, that of Heloïce for Abelard, of the captain of Vésel and of the gendarme of Cento’; chapter I), depends fundamentally on that ‘operation of the spirit’ which discovers in all events and circumstances (even in those which would otherwise be considered negative) signs of new perfections of the loved one. The intensity of this form of love results not so much from admiration, hope and proximity as rather from doubt and distance. Admiration, hope and proximity can generate what Stendhal calls a ‘first crystallization’ and a superficial form of love. But doubt and distance generate a ‘second crystallization’ in which the spirit oscillates between ‘yes, she loves me’ and ‘does she love me?’, so that the imagination stirs up in the spirit such a strong feeling for the ‘perfections’ of the loved one, that is, of her beauty, that doubt and distance occur always against the backdrop of the certainty: ‘she alone could give me pleasure as I could find nowhere else on earth’ (cf. Stendhal 1980: 30–​3). This explains why beauty is a ‘promise of happiness’: beauty as the representation of the ‘crystallized’ perfections of the loved one is a sign of a happiness to come, the perceptual ‘promise’ of a pleasure that the one in love imagines is the highest possible pleasure (or is ‘happiness’), and that he/​she feels could only be provided by that single person, that is, by her supposed (or imagined, crystallized) ‘perfections’.

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Stendhal is one of the very few authors whom Nietzsche always mentions with praise, and few concepts seem to have aroused in him such an unconditional admiration as Stendhal’s ‘amour-​passion’.3 One of the reasons for this is perhaps the fact that the interpretation of passionate love as crystallization has a number of anti-​Schopenhauerian –​and, ultimately, anti-​nihilist –​implications that could not fail to appeal to the mature Nietzsche. First, the concept of crystallization entails that beauty depends on desire, ultimately on amour-​passion, and is therefore the opposite of the conceptualization of beauty as an object of ‘disinterested contemplation’ (or disinterested ‘intuition’), as in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics. Second, the concept of crystallization suggests that artistic beauty and art itself ought to be philosophically interpreted and conceived in the light of the experience of passionate love and the feeling that the loved one is beautiful. In fact, the concept of crystallization practically conflates these two experiences from a psychological point of view, that is, it makes art, as well as aesthetic contemplation, an analogue of passionate love. Third, the concept of crystallization implies that desire is a form of pleasure: even if desire should be conceived of as a ‘lack’, this does not imply, contrary to what Schopenhauer thought (as well as e.g. Socrates in Plato’s Gorgias), that desire is ‘pain’, ‘suffering’. Even while suffering from doubt (‘does she/​he loves me?’) at a distance, the person in love feels, at the same time, the most intense of all pleasures by imagining the ‘perfections’ of the loved one, that is, by anticipating the unique pleasures (or happiness) that the sheer existence of the loved one promises. Both in art and in passionate love, desire is already a form of intense pleasure –​or, in Nietzsche’s terminology, desire is in itself a form of Rausch: ‘intoxication’, ‘drunkenness’, ‘ecstasy’. But the concept of crystallization also seems to have a darker side and to express a pessimistic form of subjectivism. What is beautiful is the ‘galaxy of scintillating diamonds’ resulting from the crystallization, not the leafless wintry bough itself. ‘The original branch is no longer recognizable’, that is, the beauty it acquires does not belong to it per se. The lesson here appears to be that beauty is always a projection, beauty is the effect of the representation of the perfections which the person in love imagines and hence ‘projects’ onto the loved one –​or, in the case of art, the perfections which are first imagined by the artist and later by the spectator. Moreover, the concept of crystallization anticipates the Nietzschean idea that the spectator’s contemplation of the work of art is a creative act and should be interpreted from the point of view of the artist qua creator. Even the ‘first

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crystallization’ does not result from a passive perception, but already from an ‘operation of the spirit’ in which the imagination is active and, spontaneously and without a conscious intention, selects and highlights particular properties of the loved one. A subjectivist reading of this idea involves the claim that the imagination in fact exaggerates and idealizes those properties, that is, ‘crystallizes’ them, turning them into ‘perfections’. In the only text where Nietzsche uses the term ‘crystallization’ in a clearly Stendhalian sense  –​a posthumous note from 1880–​81 –​he highlights precisely this point, as he wonders (he does not affirm, but he nonetheless wonders) whether crystallization involves lying (namely, lying to oneself –​self-​deception), and hence ‘error’: But when we let our passions grow, with it grows also, as we know, a ‘crystallization’ [Cristallisation]: I mean, we become dishonest and give ourselves freely to error? (NL 1880–​1 8[40], KSA 9.391; my translation)

Finally, as a consequence of the previous point, the concept of crystallization leads to the conceptualization of a phenomenon which is crucial for Nietzsche:  the ‘spiritualization’ (Vergeistigung), ‘sublimation’ (Sublimieren) or ‘refinement’ (Verfeinerung) of instincts or drives, particularly of the sexual drive. The process whereby passionate love comes to be is a typical process of spiritualization, both in those cases in which it begins with just a first look (‘love at first sight’) and in those cases in which it results from a piecemeal transformation of a ‘mannered-​love’ or a ‘physical-​love’ or a ‘vanity-​love’ (to use Stendhal’s terms of art). As we shall see, the spiritualization of a drive, in Nietzsche’s sense, is something totally different from what Schopenhauer describes as the passage from ‘interest’ to ‘disinterest’ (i.e. to impersonality, impartiality and universality). The Nietzschean spiritualization is a process of internalization, and not of disaffection. A drive becomes more ‘spiritual’ by being, as it were, reshaped or redone by a number of conceptualizations and imaginings which intensify it. On the one hand, our relationship with the object (or subject) becomes more distant, for it is mediated by images and concepts, and hence also by new feelings, volitions and thoughts. But, on the other, it becomes more intense, to some extent it becomes closer, for everything happens as if the spirit were taking possession of the object of the drive, ‘internalizing’ it. The drive is not thereby eradicated (as supposedly happens, even if only momentarily, in the passage from ‘interest’ to ‘disinterest’). It is still that drive which is being spiritualized:  its feelings are intensified, its object is internalized.4 So, in view of what I said at the beginning, the first important question to be raised here is whether a subjectivist reading of the concept of crystallization

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and, especially, of Nietzsche’s interpretation of it is indeed correct, or if there is an alternative reading and Nietzsche’s view of spiritualization entails, in fact, a non-​subjectivist view of beauty. But there is also a second important question: whether some kind of biologism is involved in Nietzsche’s view of beauty (and hence also of art, artistic creation, aesthetic judgement, etc.). Although, as mentioned, Nietzsche barely uses the term ‘crystallization’,5 there are many passages where he seems to offer an interpretation of beauty and art on the basis of the phenomenon of crystallization, and these passages seem to entail both a form of aesthetic subjectivism and a form of aesthetic biologism. This is especially so in Twilight of the Idols, as well as in several posthumous notes from 1887 and 1888, in which Rausch (‘intoxication’) becomes the key term to designate the ‘physiological precondition’ of art, as well as of all artistic creation and aesthetic judgement and contemplation: One physiological precondition is indispensable for there to be art or any sort of aesthetic action or vision: intoxication [Rausch]. Without intoxication to intensify the excitability of the whole machine, there can be no art. (TI Skirmishes 8, KSA 6.116)

Let us now look closer into this and similar passages, not only because the opposition Nietzsche draws in the Genealogy –​‘Kant or Stendhal?’ –​seems to be an opposition between Kantian and Schopenhauerian disinterestedness, on the one side, and Stendhalian and Nietzschean spiritual Rausch, on the other, but also because the late passages on spiritual Rausch seem to make the case for attributing to Nietzsche a reductionist view of beauty involving both subjectivism and biologism. (Given that no possible translation of the word Rausch –​ ‘intoxication’, ‘ecstasy’, ‘drunkenness’ –​comes close to giving its full meaning and force, I shall often use the original German word without translating it.)

3.  Rausch and idealizing Rausch is that which makes art possible because, as shown most clearly in its ‘oldest and most original’ form, that of ‘sexual excitement’, it is an ‘idealizing’, a drive to ‘make perfect’, a ‘physio-​psychological’ process which crystallizes perfections: The essential thing about intoxication is the feeling of fullness and increasing strength. This feeling makes us release ourselves onto things, we force them to accept us, we violate them, –​this process is called idealizing. We can get rid of a prejudice here: contrary to common belief, idealization does not consist

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in removing or weeding out things that are small and incidental. Much more decisive is an enormous drive to force out the main features so that everything else disappears in the process. (TI Skirmishes 8, KSA 6.116) In this state one enriches everything with one’s own fullness: everything one sees, everything one wants, one sees swollen, driven, robust, overloaded with strength. In this state one transforms things until they reflect [or mirror] one’s own power, –​until they are the reflexes of one’s perfection. This need to make perfect is –​art. A person even finds inherent pleasure in things that she herself is not; in art, the human being enjoys itself as perfection. (TI Skirmishes 9, KSA 6.116–​17)

Here, at least one dimension of what Nietzsche means when he criticizes the aesthetic theories that interpret art from the point of view of the spectator and not of the artist becomes clear. Only if we think from the point of view of the physio-​ psychology of the creator do we really realize that art is this making-​perfect, this idealizing, forcing things to accept us, ‘violating’ them so as to highlight in them certain perfections and give rise to the feeling that they are beautiful. This point of view is, at the same time, the point of view of the person in love and her Rausch –​a point of view in which desire itself is already an intense form of pleasure because in projecting onto the loved one all possible perfections and anticipating the happiness that these promise, the person who desires in this way enjoys herself as perfection, that is, feels pleasure in finding herself mirrored, reflected in the perfections she was strong enough to project. The posthumous notes underline the eminently sexual nature of such Rausch, or, at bottom, the fact that both art and amour-​passion are spiritualizations of the sexual drive. Here are two examples: [. . .] artists, when they are good, have a strong disposition (also bodily), excessive, they are power-​animals, sensual; without a certain overheating of the sexual system a Raphael is unthinkable . . . [. . .] artists should not see things as they are, but fuller, simpler, stronger: to do so, they must have in their bodies a kind of eternal youth and spring, a form of habitual Rausch. (NL 1888 14[117], KSA 13.295; my translation) on the genesis of art. That making-​perfect, seeing-​as-​perfect, which is proper of a cerebral system overloaded with sexual forces (the evening with the beloved, the smallest casualties transfigured, life a succession of sublime things, ‘the misfortune of the unfortunate lovers regarded as the most important thing of all’):  on the other hand, everything perfect and beautiful works as an unconscious memory of that state of passion [jenes verliebten Zustandes] and its particular way of seeing –​each perfection, the whole beauty of things evokes the

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João Constâncio aphrodisiac happiness by contiguity. Physiologically: the creative instinct of the artist and the distribution of semen in his blood . . . The yearning for art and beauty is an indirect yearning for the ecstasies of the sexual drive, which the latter communicates to the brain. The world made perfect, through ‘love’ . . . (NL 1887 8[1]‌, KSA 12.325–​6)

In Twilight of the Idols, this relationship between sexuality and art is made explicit in several ways. One of them is the reformulation of the opposition between Stendhal and Kant as an opposition between Plato and Schopenhauer. In this opposition, Plato is on the side of Nietzsche and Stendhal –​because, unlike Schopenhauer and Kant, he conceives of beauty as the object of eros (TI Skirmishes 21–​3, KSA 6.125–​ 6). By promoting a return to the Platonic eros and Dionysian Rausch Nietzsche seems to be showing how radical his intention is of breaking up not only with Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, but also with Kant’s. Because Kant interpreted art and beauty only ‘from the point of view of the spectator’ and this point of view was not, for him, anything like ‘a great personal fact and experience, an abundance of authentic experiences, desires, surprises, and delights in the realm of the beautiful’ (GM III 6, KSA 5.347), he made the aesthetic judgement the kernel of the aesthetic experience and interpreted this kind of judgement as a basically critical judgement, a judgement which (Kant thought) exhibits the impartiality, impersonality and universality typical of critical evaluation and the scientific perspective: Kant thought that he was honouring art when among the predicates of beauty he emphasized and gave prominence to those which establish the honour of knowledge: impersonality and universality. (GM III 6, KSA 5.346)

For Nietzsche, however, not only does the aesthetic experience have the profoundly personal character of a ‘passionate love’, but it is also rooted in the most basic of the drives, the sexual drive (or instinct), and intensifies (rather than eradicates or suppresses) the most basic affects, the affects related to the sexual drive. But should we not agree with Kant rather than with Nietzsche? Isn’t it true that the aesthetic experience is a matter of reflective taste, a matter of reflective evaluation, appreciation or assessment (Beurteilung) of the beautiful, the ugly and the sublime, just as Kant claims? How could one deny that such an evaluation can only be expressed and communicated in a judgement? Above all, how could one deny that the relevance of any given judgement about a work of art will always depend on the degree of critical thinking it involves, and hence on its degree of impartiality, impersonality and universality? If a person limits herself to communicating her affective reaction to a given work of art, if she speaks

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only of the way in which she was personally affected by the work of art and takes its ‘beauty’ to be the immediate effect of an emotion, we have no reason to consider her judgement to be aesthetically relevant. Her judgement will be at the same level as other judgements in which we express sensory pleasure or displeasure, or mere physiological preference or dislike, for example, with regard to the taste of food or the smell of a particular perfume. We do not expect an aesthetic judgement to be a definitive verdict formulated with scientifically verifiable concepts, but we expect it at least to be a critique (entirely positive, entirely negative or mixed) that can claim the approval of others –​and therefore not to be based on a merely personal emotion, which is by definition incommunicable. To say that ‘the yearning for art and beauty is an indirect yearning for the ecstasies of the sexual drive, which the latter communicates to the brain’ –​is that not the crudest and most reductive way of understanding the aesthetic experience? Is it reasonable to equate the aesthetic experience with the experience of passionate love? Doesn’t that eliminate the critical dimension of the aesthetic experience, such that the value of the work of art becomes just something that the spectator either feels or does not feel? Do we really have to involve the Platonic eros in the aesthetic experience, or is it preferable to preserve the Kantian conception of the aesthetic judgement as a critical evaluation, a ‘reflective judgement’?6 In considering these questions, one should also consider whether Nietzsche really dismisses Kant’s aesthetics in the Genealogy. Does Nietzsche oppose Stendhal to Kant in a way that entails a full rejection of Kant? Or might there be a Kantian dimension in Nietzsche’s defence of Stendhal against Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s conception of disinterestedness? The general tendency of Nietzsche’s philosophy is to reject oppositions (or to invert them in order to end up dissolving them). For Nietzsche, the ‘fundamental belief ’ of metaphysics and traditional dogmatic philosophy is ‘the belief in oppositions of values’ (BGE 2, KSA 5.16), which he seems to want to replace with a belief in ‘levels of appearance and, as it were, lighter and darker shades and tones of appearance –​different valeurs, to use the language of painters’ (BGE 34, KSA 5.53–​4). Hence, it will perhaps be only natural if, in the end, the opposition ‘Kant or Stendhal’ is to be replaced by a more nuanced ‘Kant and Stendhal’, and in fact the initial positive evaluation of Stendhal’s definition of the beautiful and the decision in favour of Stendhal and against Kant are replaced with a positive evaluation of that very juxtaposition, ‘Kant and Stendhal’. (Perhaps everything in Nietzsche is, in the end, very nuanced, and the more one reads him, the more one understands his self-​description in Ecce Homo as ‘a nuance’: ‘wehe mir! ich bin eine nuance’, EH (CW) 4, KSA 6.362).

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Second, Nietzsche’s real target in GM III 6 (actually in GM III 5–​7) is Schopenhauer, not Kant,7 and as it turns out he is quite careful in distinguishing his critique of Schopenhauer’s conception of aesthetic disinterestedness from what might be his critique of Kant’s conception of aesthetic disinterestedness: ‘Schopenhauer made use of the Kantian version of the aesthetic problem –​ although he certainly did not view it with Kantian eyes’ (GM III 6, KSA 5.346; my italics), Nietzsche writes. It is true that he criticizes Kant and suggests that Kant interprets the aesthetic judgement in the light of his theory of knowledge, but this critique does not entail a rejection of the whole of Kant’s aesthetics: ‘Kant thought that he was honouring art when among the predicates of beauty he emphasized and gave prominence to those which establish the honour of knowledge: impersonality and universality’ (GM III 6, KSA 5.346; my italics). Similarly, disinterestedness is only something Kant stressed too much and Nietzsche knows that that is not the whole of Kant’s aesthetics: ‘he [Stendhal, JC] rejected and repudiated the one point about the aesthetic condition which Kant had stressed: le désintéressement [disinterestedness]’ (GM III 6, KSA 5.347; my italics). Finally, Nietzsche explicitly writes that Schopenhauer ‘was quite wrong in thinking himself a Kantian’ with regard to beauty and disinterestedness: ‘he by no means understood the Kantian definition of the beautiful in a Kantian sense’ (GM III 6, KSA 5.349).

4.  Rausch, instinct and judgement In his notebooks, Nietzsche often puts forward the view that beauty is a matter of, or is dependent on, judgement and taste, which seems to agree with the Kantian view of aesthetic judgement as a judgement of taste and, most importantly, of our experience of beauty as centred on such a judgement. However, it is not immediately clear how one should interpret this, because Nietzsche also seems to claim that all aesthetic judgements are instinctive judgements, such that beauty is a matter of instinct, and hence beauty is a ‘biological’ or ‘physiological’ value. In a posthumous note from 1887, for example, Nietzsche writes: Aesthetica. On the genesis of the beautiful and the ugly. What is instinctively repugnant to us, aesthetically, is what the very longest experience has demonstrated to be harmful, dangerous, suspect to the human being: the aesthetic instinct which suddenly raises its voice (e.g. when we feel disgust) contains a judgement. To this extent, the beautiful belongs within the general category of the biological values

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of the useful, beneficent, life-​intensifying: but in such a way that many stimuli which very distantly remind us of and are associated with useful things and states arouse in us the feeling of the beautiful (NL 1887 10[167], KSA 12.554)

In a note from 1881, Nietzsche explains what he means by this connection between instinct, judgement and taste: I speak of instinct when a certain judgement (taste at its lowest level) is incorporated, so that now it stimulates itself spontaneously and no longer needs to wait for stimuli (NL 1881 11[164], KSA 9.505)

Instincts are the product of ‘the very longest experience’ of the human species; they are what the species ‘incorporated’ in its evolution over time. Some instincts are ‘automatisms’ resulting from personal experiences, but even these should be seen as developments of drives, affects, sensations and memories that took shape in the course of the deep-​time of evolution.8 Instincts ‘no longer need to wait for stimuli’ because they are, in fact, drives that have become permanently active, drives that constantly seek and find satisfaction in stimuli and thus stimulate themselves. The reason why the instincts take the form of judgements is because in their restless activity, they say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ –​they consist in affirmations and negations: they evaluate some things as ‘harmful, dangerous, suspect to the human being’ and others as ‘useful, beneficent, life-​intensifying’. In other words, the instincts are judgements, and in fact evaluative judgements, because the affects and feelings that necessarily accompany their activity either affirm or deny. For example, ‘pain [is, JC] a judgement (a negative judgement) in its crudest form/​pleasure is an affirmation’ (NL 1886–​7 7[3]‌, KSA 12.256). This means that instincts are judgements because they function as evaluations or assessments, such as ‘x is beautiful’ or ‘x is ugly’. Thus, taste ‘at its lowest level’ is nothing but a set of instinctive judgements that discriminate and evaluate according to the value ‘beautiful’ (or ‘what is useful, beneficent, life-​intensifying’) and the value ‘ugly’ (or ‘what is harmful, dangerous, suspect to the human being’). There are, however, other types of judgements besides instinctive judgements. In the same note from 1887 quoted earlier, Nietzsche establishes a contrast between ‘instinctive judgements’ and ‘intellectual judgements’: the former ‘appeal to our instincts at the point where these decide most rapidly and say their Yes or No before the intellect has had a chance to speak’, whereas the latter are reflective and result from the ‘inhibiting’ of the rash, automatic judgements of the instincts (e.g. NL 1887 10[167], KSA 12.554–​5).9 This already indicates that Nietzsche’s point may not be to reduce all aesthetic judgements to instinctive judgements.

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In fact, his writings abound in intellectual aesthetic judgements, long arguments and critical elaborations about works of art and the artists who created them. One could even argue that since Nietzsche sees the proper task of philosophers as the creation of ‘new values’ (BGE 211, KSA 5.144, BGE 253, KSA 5.197), he believes that proper philosophical judgements are (or, at least, should be) evaluative judgements rooted in taste and creativity.10 If taste ‘at its lowest level’ is instinctive, that does not exclude, and in fact entails, that there is a higher level of taste, a ‘higher taste’, or that taste can be cultivated, that is, transformed by means of reflection and accumulation of different aesthetic experiences –​which involves, of course, the influence of the intellect and the development of intellectual aesthetic judgements. Or, in other words, if instinctive taste is only the ‘lowest level’ of a higher taste, one should not exclude the possibility that Nietzsche may want to interpret higher taste (e.g. the taste of ‘free-​spirits’) in Kantian terms, that is, as a form of ‘reflective taste’ (Reflexions-​Geschmack) (KU §8 214). Thus, it may well be that Nietzsche’s idea is not to reduce the aesthetic to the instinctive, but to defend that every conceptual and symbolic development, every ‘intellectual’ complexification of the instinctive remains aesthetic to the end (i.e. remains a matter of ‘taste’, and not, e.g., of insight into the ‘the lap of being, the everlasting, the hidden God, the “thing-​in-​itself ” ’; BGE 2, KSA 5.16). It may well be that the claim is not that there are no intellectual aesthetic judgements, but only that these judgements are conceptual and symbolic developments of other, more basic judgements.11 Similarly, it may well be that the claim is not that beauty should be reduced to the biology of ‘what is useful, beneficent, life-​intensifying’, and ugliness to the biology of ‘what is harmful, dangerous, suspect to the human being’, but only that ‘higher’, reflective conceptions of beauty and ugliness are developments of a basic, instinctive, ‘biological’ taste for ‘what is useful, beneficent, life-​intensifying’ and ‘what is harmful, dangerous, suspect to the human being’.12 In sum, the way in which Nietzsche connects beauty with the instinctive, biological or physiological basis of our being in the Nachlass does not prove, by itself, that his views on beauty commit him to aesthetic biologism.

5.  Rausch, ‘power’ and the ‘vanity of the species’ In several other posthumous notes from the 1880s, and especially from 1887 and 1888, however, Nietzsche does seem to commit himself to aesthetic biologism by interpreting beauty and aesthetic judgement in the light of the hypothesis of the ‘will to power’. In one of the posthumous notes quoted earlier, for example,

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he defines the ‘feeling of the beautiful’ simply as ‘growth in the feeling of power’ (NL 1887 10[167], KSA 12.554), and in the note which immediately follows this one, he writes that ‘if or where the judgement “beautiful” is applied’ is only ‘a matter of force (of an individual or a people)’ –​for ‘the feeling of power predicates the judgement “beautiful” of things and conditions which the instinct of powerlessness would evaluate only as worthy of hate or “ugly” ’. To clarify this statement, Nietzsche adds a parenthesis where he writes: ‘ “this is beautiful” is an affirmation [Bejahung]’ (NL 1887 10[168], KSA 12.555–​6). Beauty results from affirmative judgements, and these judgements, it seems, are a matter of power or force. Similarly, when, in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche explains all aesthetic feelings in terms of Rausch, he claims that ‘the essential thing about intoxication is the feeling of fullness and increasing strength’ (TI Skirmishes 8, KSA 6.116), that is, precisely growth in the feeling of power. The aesthetic judgement ‘this is beautiful’ expresses, in short, a feeling of intoxication that is synonymous with growth in the feeling of power –​synonymous, that is, with an affirmation or satisfaction of the will to power of the most basic instincts of the human organism; the judgement ‘this is ugly’ expresses a depressive feeling that is synonymous with the feeling of impotence, or powerlessness  –​synonymous with a denial and dissatisfaction of the will to power of those basic instincts, particularly the sexual instinct. It is precisely this reductive, ‘physiological’ conception of the aesthetic judgement which seems to be presupposed in one of the most important texts about beauty and the aesthetic in the mature published writings: aphorism 19 of the ‘Skirmishes of an untimely man’ in Twilight of the Idols. The first part of this aphorism reads as follows: Beautiful and ugly.  –​Nothing is more highly conditioned  –​let us say:  more limited  –​than our feeling for beauty. Anyone trying to think about this feeling in abstraction from the pleasure human beings derive from humanity will immediately lose any sense of orientation. ‘Beauty in itself ’ is an empty phrase, not even a concept. In beauty, human beings posit themselves as the measure of perfection; in select cases, they worship themselves in it. In this way, a species cannot help but say yes to itself and only itself. Its lowest instincts, those of self-​preservation and self­propagation, shine through in sublimities like these. People think that the world itself is overflowing with beauty, –​they forget that they are its cause. They themselves have given the world its beauty –​but oh! only a very human, all too human beauty . . . Fundamentally, humanity is reflected in all things, people find beauty in everything that throws their image back at

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João Constâncio them: the judgement ‘beautiful’ is the vanity of their species . . . (TI Skirmishes 19, KSA 6.123)

There is no beautiful ‘in-​itself ’, the beautiful, as Kant had shown, is ‘subjective’ in some decisive sense. For Nietzsche, this subjectivity, however, means that beauty is relative to the species: beauty ‘exists’ only insofar as the most basic instinct of the species  –​the sexual instinct as the instinct for self-​preservation and self-​ propagation of the species (or Schopenhauer’s ‘will to live’)  –​forces beauty to appear in the world. It is this instinct that ‘violates’ things, ‘idealizes’ and ‘forces out’ perfections, thereby generating the feeling that something is beautiful. This power to idealize and cause perfections to appear or manifest themselves is what ends up being ‘mirrored’, ‘reflected’ in the things one feels are beautiful, and that means that those perfections are reflections, mirrors, images of the feeling of our perfection, our beauty, reflected images of the power of the most basic instincts of our species.13 Therefore, the subjectivity of beauty means that beauty is an anthropomorphism, an anthropomorphic projection –​the ‘vanity of the species’. This is, of course, Nietzsche’s mature formulation of his Stendhalian view of beauty as a ‘promise of happiness’: that beauty is a ‘crystallization’ means that it is an anthropomorphic projection, the ‘vanity of the species’. But, if this is so, then there is indeed ‘nothing more highly conditioned –​let us say: more limited –​than our feeling for beauty’ (TI Skirmishes 19, KSA 6.123). Evaluations that tell us that something is beautiful (or ugly) are no more than mirrors or reflected images of our feeling of power (or powerlessness); aesthetic evaluations are ‘short-​sighted’ judgements (NL 1887 10[167], KSA 12.554) that never lead us beyond ourselves qua specimens of our species. In this idea of the ‘vanity of the species’ we see, finally, how Nietzsche seems to combine subjectivism and biologism in a reductionist view of beauty: beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder, although this is in fact the eye of the species, not of an independent or individual conscious mind. John D. Arras (1980) has described Nietzsche’s view of beauty as a ‘brutally reductionist analysis’. There is perhaps no way to refute such a reading: Nietzsche wants to reduce morality to aesthetics, he sees aesthetic judgements as physiological or biological judgements of the instincts, particularly of the sexual instinct. Although his view of beauty as an anthropomorphic projection allows for the existence of a human species (and not just an individual subject) that does the projecting, the fact (it seems) is that it reduces beauty to a mere subjective illusion and expresses a pessimistic view of the affirmation of life as based on illusory projections.

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In the second part of TI Skirmishes 19, however, Nietzsche suggests that this aphorism hides some sort of secret, a mystery even: Of course a sceptic might hear a suspicious little whisper in his ear: does the world really become beautiful just because it is seen that way by human beings, of all creatures? People have humanized it: that is all. But nothing, absolutely nothing, guarantees that a human being is the standard of beauty. Who knows what a human being looks like in the eyes of a higher arbiter of taste? Daring, perhaps? Perhaps even funny? Perhaps a bit arbitrary? . . . ‘O Dionysus, divine one, why do you pull on my ears?’ Ariadne once asked her philosophical lover in one of those famous dialogues on Naxos. ‘There is something amusing about your ears, Ariadne: why aren’t they even longer?’ (TI Skirmishes 19, KSA 6.123–​4)

If Dionysus, who is not only a ‘higher arbiter of taste’, but also the god of the affirmation of life, were to hear that beauty is only an illusion or an anthropomorphism, he would pull Ariadne’s ears and censor her for not hearing properly. Ariadne obviously represents the human being in this story, but also the reader of the story. So, we need to ‘hear’ better what Nietzsche really wants say with his Stendhalian view of beauty. Perhaps there is an alternative to the reductionist reading of Nietzsche’s claims about the ‘vanity of the species’, as well as about the opposition ‘Kant or Stendhal?’

6.  Kantian versus Schopenhauerian disinterestedness The idea that beauty is just the ‘vanity of the species’ evokes an important aspect of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. In fact, it makes one think of one of the strangest contradictions (or at least apparent contradictions) of his work. Schopenhauer argues, on the one hand, that beauty is by definition the object of disinterested contemplation. But he also argues that beauty is something that human specimens see in other specimens because they are, so to speak, programmed by their sexual instinct to do so. Beauty is an illusion and indeed a delusion (Wahn) that the species planted in its specimens in order to convince them to reproduce, that is, to ensure the preservation of the species. The ‘will to live’ is the will of the species, and beauty is the bait that the species uses to make the individual specimens satisfy that will. The individual is not at all satisfied in this process –​the individual is a victim of the tyranny of the will of the species, just a puppet in the hands of the sexual instinct, which oppresses the individual with afflictions of all kinds.14

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Is there a pure contradiction here, or Schopenhauer wants to distinguish two senses of beauty? Beauty is, first, a natural event  –​an anthropomorphic projection and a subjective illusion induced by the sexual instinct, precisely as in Nietzsche’s aphorism –​but in its proper, aesthetic sense beauty is the spiritual effect of the pure contemplation of the form of objects, and hence the spiritual effect of a liberation from beauty in the first sense? If so, then Schopenhauer’s idea might be that aesthetic contemplation is ‘disinterested’ because it achieves a liberation from the (supposed) tyranny, oppression and tension of the sexual instinct. This is precisely how Nietzsche interprets Schopenhauer in the chapter of the Genealogy of Morality about ‘who is right, Kant or Stendhal?’ (GM III 6, KSA 5.347). Here, Nietzsche claims that (a)  Schopenhauer equates ‘interestedness’ with ‘sexual interestedness’, and thus also ‘disinterestedness’ and aesthetic contemplation with ‘sexual disinterestedness’, and that (b) Schopenhauer’s understanding of the Kantian definition of beauty as what ‘gives us pleasure without interest’ is basically a ‘generalization’ from his personal experience of the calming effect of aesthetic contemplation. Nietzsche writes: […] he [Schopenhauer, JC] interpreted the term ‘without interest’ in an extremely personal way, on the basis of one of his most regular experiences. Of few things does Schopenhauer speak with greater assurance than he does of the effect of aesthetic contemplation: he says of it that it counteracts sexual ‘interestedness,’ like lupulin and camphor; he never wearied of glorifying this liberation from the ‘will’ as the great merit and utility of the aesthetic condition. Indeed, one might be tempted to ask whether his basic conception of ‘will and representation,’ the thought that redemption from the ‘will’ could be attained only through ‘representation,’ did not originate as a generalization from this sexual experience. (GM III 6, KSA 5.347–​8)

Thus Nietzsche makes it quite clear that his reference to Stendhal’s ‘promise of happiness’ (and, implicitly, to Stendhal’s ‘crystallization’) is mostly directed against Schopenhauer, not Kant. His basic point is that even if sexual desire was immensely oppressive to Schopenhauer because he experienced the sexual instinct as being tyrannical, nothing really justifies the generalization that sexual desire is painful. As Stendhal shows, the beautiful can intensify (rather than ‘calm’) desire, and moreover, desire can be in itself a form of pleasure, not pain (or not just pain): Schopenhauer described one effect of the beautiful, its calming effect on the will –​but is this a regular effect? Stendhal, as we have seen, a no less sensual but

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more happily constituted person than Schopenhauer, emphasizes another effect of the beautiful; ‘the beautiful promises happiness’; to him the fact seems to be precisely that the beautiful arouses the will (‘interestedness’). (GM III 6, KSA 5.348–​9)

This is the context in which Nietzsche most explicitly separates Kant’s sense of ‘disinterestedness’ from Schopenhauer’s, and indeed seems to side with Kant and use the latter’s conception of disinterestedness to draw his critique of Schopenhauer to an end: And could one not finally urge against Schopenhauer that he was quite wrong in thinking himself a Kantian in this matter, that he by no means understood the Kantian definition of the beautiful in a Kantian sense –​that he, too, was pleased by the beautiful from an ‘interested’ viewpoint, even from the very strongest, most personal interest –​that of a tortured man who gains release from his torture? (GM III 6, KSA 5.349)

There is no reason to equate sexual desire with tyranny and aesthetic contemplation with liberation from tyranny. But, furthermore, it is not true that in contemplating the beautiful our ‘will’ is abolished, or that we ‘liberate’ ourselves from our body in a radical, metaphysical way, such that we become ‘a pure, will-​less, painless, timeless knowing subject’, as Schopenhauer’s theory of disinterested contemplation implies.15 In fact, Schopenhauer’s aesthetics is a performative contradiction, for it says that aesthetic contemplation is disinterested and, at the same time, entails (or at least unwittingly suggests) that disinterestedness is impossible. But in presenting aesthetic contemplation as a liberation from the tyranny of sexual interest, Schopenhauer involuntarily confesses that aesthetic contemplation satisfies his interest in calming down his sexual instinct.16 The question, however, is whether all of this helps to clarify the mystery surrounding the thesis that the judgement ‘beautiful’ is just the ‘vanity of the species’. The confirmation that the real target of Nietzsche’s Stendhalian critique of Kant is Schopenhauer, not Kant himself, is not enough to dissipate the spectrum of a reductionist interpretation of what Nietzsche means by the claim that beauty is the ‘vanity of the species’. According to the reductionist reading, what this thesis says is that even the most seemingly disinterested aesthetic contemplation is, in fact, a ‘yearning for the ecstasies of the sexual drive’ (NL 1887 8[1]‌, KSA 12.326). Or, in other words, the point of conceiving of beauty in terms of an anthropomorphic projection and a ‘vanity of the species’ could indeed just be to claim that we never really go beyond our most basic, ‘biological’ instincts. True, the main, or at least the most obvious, target of this view could well be

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Schopenhauer and his belief that in aesthetic contemplation those instincts are radically overcome, that is, his belief that in aesthetic contemplation the merely ‘natural’ experience of beauty under the influence of the sexual instinct is radically overcome, even if only momentarily. But Kant seems to be a second target, if not the main one, as Nietzsche clearly, indeed explicitly rejects Kant’s conception of beauty and of the aesthetic judgement in terms of the predicates that ‘establish the honour of knowledge: impersonality and universality’ (GM III 6, KSA 5.346). Kant’s conception of disinterestedness is not ascetic in the sense in which Schopenhauer’s is, for Kant does not equate ‘interest’ with sexual desire and does not describe aesthetic disinterestedness specifically as a liberation from it. In fact, Nietzsche suggests that Kant’s view of sexuality and, presumably, of the achievements of sexual asceticism is much less innocent than Schopenhauer’s: the latter ‘stood much closer to the arts than Kant’, but the fact that Kant has ‘the naïveté of a country parson’ (GM III 6, KSA 5.347) makes him less innocent in these matters than Schopenhauer.17 Moreover, one should add that in the very first paragraph of his ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’ Kant writes that aesthetic judgements refer a given representation of an object to a subject’s Lebensgefühl, ‘feeling of life’, or ‘feeling for life’ (KU §1 204). At least officially, Kant’s aesthetics does not have the ‘ascetic’, life-​denying character of Schopenhauer’s:  according to Kant, aesthetic reflection ‘vivifies’ (belebt) our cognitive faculties, and hence our feeling of life; or, in other words, the pleasure which arises from the use of the aesthetic faculty of judgement is a truly human pleasure which involves our rationality but also our animality (KU §5), and is, hence, a pleasure in life. This is, I think, an important point, which should be further pursued. In fact, we haven’t yet raised the question why Nietzsche separates Kant’s sense of ‘disinterestedness’ so clearly from Schopenhauer’s. What did Nietzsche understand of Kant’s aesthetics of disinterestedness which he does not reveal to us in GM III 6? Why does he suggest that Kant’s conception of disinterestedness is not only different from Schopenhauer’s, but also much more acceptable? Although it is only half-​certain that Nietzsche read and studied the third Critique in 1868, there is at least no doubt that one of the several secondary works on Kant that he read was Kuno Fischer’s excellent Immanuel Kant, Entwicklungsgeschichte und System der kritischen Philosophie, the second volume of which includes a very clear and comprehensive exposition of Kant’s ‘Analytic of Beauty’ and, indeed, of the whole Critique of Judgement.18 It is particularly significant that Nietzsche reread this work in 1887, just a few months before

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writing the Genealogy.19 So, when he wrote the chapter on disinterestedness in the Third Essay of the Genealogy, he must have had a fresh and clear notion of what disinterestedness means in Kant’s aesthetics. For Kant, as Fischer emphasizes, aesthetic judgements are ‘disinterested’ insofar as the pleasure that accompanies them is different from our pleasure in the ‘agreeable’, the ‘good’, and the ‘useful’. Aesthetic pleasure results from a purely reflective and contemplative use of the faculty of judgement and consists in delighting in the mere representation (Vorstellung) of an object, that is, in the sheer contemplation of its form (Form). This kind of pleasure is ‘free’ or ‘disinterested’ because it is indifferent to –​or takes no ‘interest’ in –​the existence (Dasein) of the object. The quasi-​ascetic dimension of this view is obvious. As Fischer (1882: 426) puts it, ‘[H]‌aving an interest means wanting or desiring something’ (my translation), which means that contemplating the form of an object and abstracting from whether it really exists or not is tantamount to feeling pleasure without desiring (i.e. without desiring an object that might satisfy our needs, either at the level of the ‘agreeable’, the ‘good’, or the ‘useful’). But the way in which this view of the aesthetic experience differs from Schopenhauer’s and includes a non-​ascetic dimension should also be clear. (a) Nowhere does Kant suggest that sheer reflective judgement, or pure contemplation of form, ‘liberates’ from the burden of sexual desire, or serves some other similar purpose. That would indeed entail ‘interest’ in the realization of some (apparent or real) good. (b) For Kant, aesthetic pleasure is, thus, not a relief from pain, but a positive pleasure, a positive delight in the contemplation of form, or in the ‘free play’ of the imagination and the understanding, which is not preceded by any pain, or lack or need. (c) This pleasure or delight is (dangerously) autonomous from morality, from the ‘good’. For Kant, the ‘good’ is realized in the realm of morality, not in the realm of aesthetic judgement. The latter is a realm of pleasure, and the fact that it is a realm of a ‘higher’ form of pleasure, namely, a reflective or contemplative pleasure, does not make it a realm of moral (or political) good. (d) Besides being autonomous from the ‘agreeable’, the ‘good’ and the ‘useful’, Kantian aesthetic judgements are also autonomous from truth and knowledge, such that the aesthetic pleasure is a pleasure in reflection and contemplation, not a satisfaction of a need to know or to get at the objective truth. (e) Aesthetic pleasure, for Kant, is particular to the human being –​a point very much emphasized by Fischer (1860: 571ff.) –​and as such, it is indeed a pleasure which we enjoy as specimens, as rational animals, and hence a pleasure in life, not in an ascetic absence of life. So, there is much in Kant’s aesthetics which is appealing to Nietzsche, and it is perfectly justifiable that he wanted to indicate that not everything he writes

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against Schopenhauer’s conception of disinterestedness applies also to Kant’s. What Nietzsche clearly repudiates in Kant’s view of aesthetic pleasure as disinterested is (a) the ‘epistemological’ approach (the effort to achieve a ‘deduction’ of aesthetic judgements, the conception of aesthetic judgements as ‘universal’, ‘necessary’, etc.); and (b) the idea that beauty is essentially something one contemplates passively, without being moved by any desire (except the desire for the pure, free, disinterested pleasure of contemplation), or, in other words, that the aesthetic experience is about contemplating forms, not creating forms, creating beauty. But, although privileging the ‘point of view of the artist’ (the creator of forms) is an important aspect of Nietzsche’s aesthetic, he must have been aware of the fact that Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgement in terms of ‘contemplation’ (‘a judgement of taste is merely contemplative’, KU §5 209) is very different from Schopenhauer’s conception of aesthetic contemplation in terms of a passive ‘intuition’. Kant’s spectator reflects, actively engages his/​her cognitive faculties in a reflective ‘play’ with forms, and this reflection ‘enlarges’ his/​her ‘way of thinking’ by taking into account the ‘community’ of human beings, the human species as such (KU §20–​2, §40; Fischer 1860: 623 ff.; Fischer 1882: 470 ff.). In what follows, I shall try to show two things: (a) Nietzsche’s Stendhalian conception of ‘spiritualization’  –​the spiritualization or ‘sublimation’ of the instincts or drives, especially the spiritualization of the sex drive into amour-​ passion –​is the key to a non-​reductionist reading of the thesis of the ‘vanity of the species’ in Twilight; and (b)  Kant’s aesthetic conceptions of reflection and enlargement are crucially helpful for the interpretation of Nietzsche’s conception of spiritualization/​sublimation.

7.  Spiritualization The idea that drives can be ‘spiritualized’ works against reductionist readings of Nietzsche (not only in the field of aesthetics). When he claims that aesthetic values are just ‘biological values’ (NL 1887 10[167], KSA 12.554), we do not have to assume that he is cancelling the difference between ‘instinctive judgements’ and ‘intellectual judgements’ –​or that he is saying that the contents of intellectual aesthetic judgements are in fact reducible to what is already included in more basic instinctive aesthetic judgements. As we saw, the point may be, rather, that intellectual aesthetics judgements are conceptual and symbolic developments of instinctive judgements. They are not

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‘epiphenomenal’  –​they develop something new from previous, more basic judgements, and what they develop has an impact (greater or lesser) in our experience of ourselves and the world. This helps to clarify why Dionysus criticizes the way in which Ariadne and the reader of Twilight of the Idols tend to read the passage that presents beauty as the ‘vanity of the species’. His objection is that the fact that human beings project beauty onto the world and ‘humanize’ it does not entail that ‘a human being is the standard of beauty’ (TI Skirmishes 19, KSA 6.123). The problem with interpreting beauty as the ‘vanity of the species’ is, first, that such an interpretation confuses the claim that our judgement of beauty is subjective with the claim that all beauty is relative to human subjectivity. The point is that there can be beauty for other species, but, most importantly, the point is also that we cannot rule out that beauty is not merely a subjective ‘projection’ and ‘anthropomorphism’. There can be a dimension of discovery, and not just of projection, in our judgements of beauty. To put it in the terms of Nietzsche’s view of ‘interpretation’ in Book V of The Gay Science, we cannot rule out that in making the judgement ‘beautiful’ we sometimes go ‘beyond [our] horizon’ (GS 373, KSA 3.625), that is, that we develop an interpretation of the object of our judgement which surpasses, overcomes, and enlarges some limitations of our previous interpretation of it. Think, for example, of music and the way in which we learn, and have to learn to hear a melody –​a melody which sounds strange when we first hear it, but then becomes ‘beautiful’ as we slowly become used to it (GS 334, KSA 3.560).20 What this actually means is that Dionysus’s criticism of the subjectivist and reductionist interpretation of beauty as the ‘vanity of the species’ is tantamount to the rejection of the idea that there is a fixed species doing the ‘projection’ of beauty. The human species is a very plastic species –​a species which is susceptible to change, and hence a species whose ‘standard of beauty’ can be changed and enlarged. A mechanistic interpretation of the beauty of a piece of music, for example, is ‘one of the stupidest of all possible interpretations’ (GS 373, KSA 3.626) because it judges according to one of the most limited of all possible standards of beauty; it is certainly possible to judge from a larger standard of beauty than that one. Such possibilities of enlargement are what are ultimately at stake in the notion of ‘spiritualization’. For what does it mean for Nietzsche to assert that Stendhal’s amour-​passion is a spiritualization of the sexual drive? Nietzsche explicitly makes this assertion, both in the published and the unpublished writings (BGE 189, KSA 5.111, NL 1887 10[144], KSA 12.537). Perhaps we can get a first inkling of what he means by that if we consider the concept of ‘internalization’ in GM II 16. Our social life, Nietzsche famously

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argues there, inhibits the ‘outward discharge’ of our most basic instincts, that is, of the ‘animal instincts’ (GM II 22, KSA 5.332), the ‘old instincts’ of the hunter–​ gatherer –​‘all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man’ (GM II 16, KSA 5.322). This inhibition causes the instincts to ‘turn inward’, and this ‘turning inward’ is the origin of the development of human ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’: All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward –​this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his ‘soul’. The entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breath, and height, in the same measure as outward discharge was inhibited. (GM II 16, KSA 5.322)

But how is this expansion of our inner world supposed to be possible? (a) First, through something like ‘intellectual judgements’, for sure. If our intellectual judgements could not check the prevalence of the ‘old instincts’ and their automatic judgements –​and if, in addition, our intellectual judgements did not have the ability to be ‘incorporated’ in our bodies and become new automatisms (or become our ‘second nature’) –​it is hard to see how society could be possible, but also how the ‘turning inward’ of the instincts could cause the expansion of our inner world. (b) Second, precisely the case of the spiritualization of the sexual instinct and its transfiguration into amour-​passion shows that intellectual judgements impact on our instincts by creating new evaluations, which change the goals or ends of the instincts (or drives). Clearly, what happens in the spiritualization, sublimation or refinement of the sexual drive to amour-​passion is that the imagination sets in motion a panoply of conceptualizations and symbolizations that generate feelings, volitions, and thoughts in which the loved one (the ‘object’ of desire) appears as much more than just an object that could satisfy the initial goal of the drive (i.e. the sexual act). The immediate, outward discharge of the drive is inhibited (or ‘internalized’) in a way that radically changes the goal (Ziel) of the drive.21 This goal becomes more complex, and also more diffuse: instead of the simple sexual act, it is now the happiness promised by the perfections which crystallize in the image of the loved one. Or, put differently, the bare drive and its initial goal have been integrated in a larger project and a larger inner world. As Ken Gemes (2009: 48) has claimed, Nietzsche’s conception of sublimation/​ spiritualization differs from Freud’s in that Nietzsche conceives of sublimation as ‘integration or unification’, while Freud is unable to dispense with the conception of sublimation as a form of repression, whose effects are actually pathological symptoms and involve ‘splitting off or disintegration’. But sublimation/​

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spiritualization as a process of integration is, according to Nietzsche’s view, a process of expansion of the ‘soul’  –​a process which gives ‘depth, breath, and height’ to an inner world. The activity of the drive becomes ‘spiritual’, as it now consists mostly in the development of a whole multiplicity of complex images, words, concepts, judgements, feelings, volitions and thoughts. Such a development  –​the whole process of ‘spiritualization’  –​escapes the control of consciousness, but is impossible without the workings of consciousness. It is true (and it is implied in Nietzsche’s use of Stendhal’s conception of ‘crystallization’) that the imagination plays a crucial role in a process such as the spiritualization of the sexual drive, and it is true that there is no control over the imagination. Particularly in the Nachlass, but also in scattered crucial moments in the published writings, Nietzsche develops the idea that the imagination is not so much a ‘cognitive faculty’ as rather a ‘force’, an inventing, fabulating, ‘artistic’, ‘poetic’ force (eine dichtende Kraft) which comes from the unconscious depths of our inner life and belongs, in fact, to the drives themselves.22 But without words and concepts –​without that which is particular to our human, sapient kind of consciousness –​the imagination would not have the transforming power which it obviously has in the development of an amour-​passion. Without the specifically human form of consciousness the initial goal of the sexual drive could not be revalued, or, ‘transvalued’, that is, no reflections and revaluations would be possible, and hence the ‘spiritualization’ of the drive could not come to pass. Given that spiritualization involves not only a modification of the goals of certain drives, but also a reflective and (re)evaluative expansion of the inner world –​ truly an enlargement of perspective –​in Nietzsche’s writings there is perhaps no better image of what spiritualization really means than the image of the ‘pathos of distance’ in aphorism 257 of Beyond Good and Evil. This is, first of all, an image of what is ‘nobility’ of spirit, an image of what Nietzsche means by the figure of the noble ‘free spirit’ and the ‘heights’ of free-​spiritedness. These ‘heights’ he also terms ‘high spirituality’ (hohe Geistigkeit) (BGE 61, KSA 5.80, BGE 219, KSA 5.154), which is the spirituality of ‘high culture’. What makes ‘high culture’ possible is, however, the ‘spiritualization’ (Vergeistigung) of drives and instincts, for example, the spiritualization of cruelty, or the spiritualization of the sexual drive.23 Interpreting this spiritualization in the light of the notion of ‘pathos of distance’ is tantamount to interpreting it as an enlargement or expansion of inner distance, that is, as an inner ‘pathos of distance’, which Nietzsche describes as a demand for new expansions of distance within the soul itself, the development of states that are increasingly high, rare, distant, tautly drawn and

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As an inner pathos or a spiritual state, nobility is a matter of developing a ‘higher’ perspective, a perspective that enlarges or expands what is already present in previous perspectives by encompassing them, incorporating them, ‘overcoming’ them. But, in addition, this inner pathos of distance is ‘noble’ insofar as it strives to go beyond itself. To be ‘noble’ is to be driven by a longing to be more than one already is, in fact (as just quoted) by a longing for ‘the enhancement of the type “man”, the constant “self-​overcoming of man” (to use a moral formula in a supra-​moral sense)’ (BGE 257, KSA 5.205). The spiritualization of drives is always a process of ‘self-​overcoming’, and it becomes ‘noble’ when it includes a longing for the ‘enhancement’ or ‘self-​overcoming’ of the human being itself or, as Nietzsche puts in his Zarathustra, whenever human beings still ‘launch the arrow of their longing beyond the human’ (Z Prologue 5, KSA 4.19).24 This makes clear, I think, that the ‘distance’ here at stake is the distance of reflection or, in Nietzsche’s terminology, the distance of Umwertung, the distance created by our capacity to reevaluate, invert and recreate our values, that is, the distance which arises when we distance ourselves from our most immediate or habitual valuations by reflecting upon them, criticizing them, considering if they can be inverted, reevaluating them and creating new ones out of them. What should also be clear is that the ‘distance’ involved in an ‘expansion of distance within the soul itself ’, that is, in inner distance, does not disaffect us, and it can, on the contrary, intensify human desire. This can be the case, for example, in the case of amour-​passion: ‘the magic and most powerful effect of women is, to speak the language of the philosophers, action at a distance, actio in distans’ (GS 60, KSA 3.425). Thus we can finally see why Nietzsche’s conception of spiritualization entails the rejection of a reductionist reading of his view of beauty, particularly in Twilight. The analogy between passionate love and artistic creation –​ the Stendhalian thesis that both art and amour-​passion are spiritualizations of the sexual drive –​expresses a non-​reductionist view of beauty, which suggests that the purpose of Dionysus’s criticism of the thesis of the ‘vanity of the species’ is to indicate that a non-​reductionist reading of this thesis should be possible. The kernel of this non-​reductionist reading is, I think, the following analogy:  such as amour-​passion presupposes the sexual drive but cannot be

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reduced to it because it is its spiritualization, artistic creation presupposes the vanity of the species but cannot be reduced to it because it is its spiritualization. Even when Nietzsche claims that artistic beauty requires the ‘overheating of the sexual system’ of the artist who creates such beauty, the idea is not to reduce artistic creation to a mere manifestation of the power of the sexual instinct of the species. Nietzsche emphasizes the involvement of the sexual instinct in artistic creation –​but this is in fact to emphasize the involvement of the sublimation of the sexual instinct in artistic creation (the indirect, not the direct yearning for the ecstasies of the sexual drive). Art, like passionate love, is a sublimation of the sexual instinct, which means that it involves a desiring attitude (a desire to give form, etc.), but also that it depends on a ‘pathos of distance’ and on the ‘development of states that are increasingly high, rare, distant, tautly drawn and comprehensive’ (BGE 257, KSA 5.205). The horizon within which the development of these states can occur is always that of the ‘vanity of the species’, that is, the horizon of the mirroring of the power of the species, but that horizon is expanded, enlarged by the ‘distance’ that such states create ‘within the soul itself ’. The proprium of art is thus the capacity to revaluate and thereby enlarge the concepts ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’, the very conception that the species has of what is ‘useful, beneficent, life-​intensifying’, as well as what is ‘harmful, dangerous, suspect to the human being’. Aesthetic judgements are ‘short-​sighted’ only insofar as they never go beyond the horizon of the anthropomorphisms at play in the concepts of ‘beautiful’ and ugly’, that is, they can only consider what is ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’ for the species –​they can only express the ‘vanity of the species’. But that which is particular to art, as well as to the aesthetic judgements that art gives rise to, is the constant enlargement of an initial short-​sightedness by means of the revaluation of what is ‘useful, beneficent, life-​intensifying’ and what is ‘harmful, dangerous, suspect to the human being’. That is why, as Nietzsche puts it, art ‘does more than just imagining, art modifies the values’ (NL 1888 14[120], KSA 13.299) –​art transforms our values in a process of internalization, spiritualization and enlargement of perspective, which is, by itself, an ‘enhancement’ and a ‘self-​overcoming’ of the human being, the ‘still undetermined animal’ (BGE 62, KSA 5.81). The sexual instinct is an instinct that affirms life by affirming the preservation and propagation of the species –​but its spiritualization in art recreates the species itself and, thus, its very conception of ‘life’ and what it is that ought to be affirmed. Let us now draw a few conclusions from all of this –​particularly with the aim of clarifying the relationship between Nietzsche’s and Kant’s aesthetics.

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8.  Life and expansion of perspective in Nietzsche and Kant As an analogue of ‘passionate love’, as a form of Rausch, as a spiritualization of the sexual drive, and a constant recreation of a ‘promise of happiness’, art promotes the affirmation of life. The subtler point, as we have just noted, is that precisely as a form of Rausch and spiritual eros, art promotes ‘life’ in a way that involves a permanent modification, expansion, enlargement of ‘life’, that is, of what ‘life’ is for the human species. This is why art is the Gegenbewegung, the ‘counter-​ movement’ (NL 1888 14[169], KSA 13.355, NL 1888 16[51], KSA 13.503) that makes possible the ‘struggle against nihilism’ (NL 1886–​7 5[50], KSA 12.202, NL 1886–​7 7[31], KSA 12.306). When, many pages after the chapter on disinterestedness, Nietzsche returns to the theme of art in the Third Essay of the Genealogy of Morality, he declares that art is moved by a ‘will’ that is ‘opposed to the ascetic ideal’, and which, therefore, ‘expresses’ an alternative ideal, ‘the opposed ideal’ (GM III 25, KSA 5.402). Only art could perhaps inspire a new philosophical ideal that would replace the millennia old domination of the masked nihilism of the ‘ascetic ideal’ –​because it is art, not science, that affirms life, and indeed ‘modifies the values’ (NL 1888 14[120], KSA 13.299) by relentlessly creating new meanings for what life itself is about.25 The idea that artistic creation and aesthetic reflection promote the affirmation of life can easily be formulated in terms of ‘interest’. One can say that they satisfy an ‘interest’, namely, the ‘interest’ of life, and therefore neither the creation nor the contemplation of beauty is ‘disinterested’. But it is questionable whether this captures the relevant meaning of ‘interest’ in Kant’s aesthetics. As mentioned earlier, the idea that artistic creation and aesthetic reflection promote life is very far from being foreign to Kant’s aesthetics: Kant thinks that the aesthetic experience ‘vivifies’ (belebt) our cognitive faculties and hence our species’ ‘feeling of life’, or ‘feeling for life’ (Lebensgefühl) (KU §1 204). Yet he does not take this to imply that there is an ‘interest’ at play in the aesthetic experience. The reason why the aesthetic experience promotes the feeling of life is not because we need, desire or want this to happen  –​rather, the aesthetic experience promotes the feeling of life because this simply belongs to the nature of the aesthetic experience, and there is no reason to see this either as a deliberate or an involuntary satisfaction of some need (such as the need to achieve liberation from the tyranny of sexual desire, for example). Nietzsche has no objection to the use of art as a means to an end –​on the contrary, he does want to use art to satisfy an ‘interest’ that he has, namely, the promotion of the affirmation of life in the context of the philosophical struggle against nihilism. But he, too, thinks that the

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promotion of life-​affirmation is something that simply belongs to the aesthetic experience: art is affirmative, whether one also wants to deliberately use it to that end or not (see TI Skirmishes 9). So Nietzsche and Kant agree more on this point than what might seem at first sight. But the fundamental agreement between the two in aesthetic matters goes much deeper. Let us now, to conclude, consider a set of other Kantian, or quasi-​ Kantian, aspects of Nietzsche’s aesthetics, particularly with the end of showing how Kant’s aesthetic conceptions of reflection and enlargement are crucially helpful for the interpretation of Nietzsche’s conception of spiritualization/​ sublimation. (a) One could argue that all Nietzschean philosophical judgements are analogous to Kantian aesthetic judgements: all such judgements (and not just the strictly aesthetic ones) are reflective evaluative judgements (or reflectively re-​ evaluative judgements, ‘transvaluations of values’) which aim to promote life from an aesthetic point of view ‘beyond good and evil’ and are to some extent autonomous from the agreeable, the (morally) good, the useful and the true.26 Naturally, this raises the question about the value of such judgements: why and in what respect are they superior to other judgements if they are not about the agreeable, the good, the useful or the true? From what we saw so far, one could perhaps think that such judgements are mere feel-​good judgements which promote the affirmation of life by means of evaluative fictions! The key here is the idea of expansion or enlargement –​the idea, often repeated earlier, that certain types of judgements, as well as certain types of activities (particularly artistic creation), involve an enlargement of perspective. This, as we indicated, is indeed one of the most important aspects of Kant’s view of aesthetic judgements: he claims that aesthetic reflective judgements involve a ‘broad mind’, or that the aesthetic ‘way of thinking’ is an ‘enlarged way of thinking’ (KU §40). His argument is that this is so because, although aesthetic judgements do not expand our knowledge by giving us more truths about what is objectively the case in space and time, they ‘enlarge’ our perspective by incorporating other perspectives in our own in such a way that our concepts become richer than they initially were. Reflecting, according to the third Critique, is about searching for concepts when ‘only the particular is given’ (KU 179), that is, when no a priori rules (or no ‘determinate concepts’) apply, and this involves elevating oneself above one’s merely individual, private subjectivity by trying to judge or think ‘from the standpoint of everyone else’ (KU §40 294). One reflects when one searches for new concepts by questioning one’s own judgement in the light of the way others judge and, ultimately, in the light of a ‘universal standpoint’ (KU

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§40 295), that is, by considering what the standpoint of the species (the human being as such) ought to be. Nietzsche knew about this Kantian concept of an ‘enlarged way of thinking’, at least from his readings of Kuno Fischer’s second volume on Kant.27 His most clear attempt to conceptualize the idea of enlargement (although not with reference to Kant, and in fact in a context which appears to be hostile to Kant) is his attempt to develop his concept of ‘objectivity’ in the Genealogy of Morality, again in the Third Essay (GM III 12). The main idea in this text is that we can speak of ‘objectivity’, and particularly of philosophical ‘objectivity’ (always in quotation marks), if we conceive of it as an enlargement of our concepts resulting not from the suppression of our ‘affects’ (as the philosophical tradition has always assumed), but rather from the ability to multiply the number of our affects. Affects are perspectival, they result from the activity of ‘active and interpretative forces’ (GM III 12, KSA 5.365) within us, and thus the multiplication of our affects is tantamount to a multiplication and indeed incorporation of other perspectives. This is what ‘enlarges’ our conception of things: [. . .] the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’, be (GM III 12, KSA 5.365)

The ‘objectivity’ here at stake is, obviously, perspectival, and indeed always provisional. Nietzsche puts the word ‘objectivity’ in quotation marks precisely because his idea is that multiplying the number of one’s perspectives over a Sache, an ‘object’ or ‘subject-​matter’, makes our concept of it more complete, but not really complete, not definitive, or not (in Kant’s terminology in KU) a ‘determinate concept’. Nietzsche explicitly affirms that ‘there is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing” ’ (GM III 12, KSA 5.365), that is, there is no way out of our perspectival finitude. Positing a ‘pure, will-​less, painless, timeless knowing subject’, as Schopenhauer does, is just to indulge in a ‘dangerous old conceptual fiction’ (GM III 12, KSA 5.365). What is not a ‘conceptual fiction’ is the possibility of developing richer, ‘more complete’ concepts –​and hence also richer, ‘more complete’ reflective evaluative judgements (or ‘transvaluations’) by incorporating other perspectives in our own, that is, by being able to see what they see and something more (or what their ‘eyes’ see, but also something beyond that).28 (b) For Kant, as Kuno Fischer (1860:  623; 1882:  470)  puts it, ‘the aesthetic sense is a sense of community’ (der aesthetische Sinn ist Gemeinsinn).

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Nietzsche claims that judgements of beauty express the way in which the power of the species is reflected or mirrored in given idealizations. He does not at all attempt anything like a Kantian ‘deduction’ of the aesthetic judgement; he is not at all interested in providing an argument for justifying the ‘subjective universal validity’ of aesthetic judgements (e.g. by positing the existence of the same cognitive faculties in every human being etc.). But he nonetheless suggests that a sense of belonging to the human species is a crucial part of what is at stake both in aesthetic judgement and in artistic creation  –​even if that ‘species’ has, for him, a much more plastic, changeable nature than for Kant. In this sense, Nietzschean aesthetic judgements and, indeed, Nietzschean evaluative judgements in general do purport, like Kantian aesthetic judgements, to reflect and evaluate ‘from the standpoint of everyone else’, that is, from a ‘universal standpoint’ (KU §40 295). They do require something like a Kantian sensus communis (KU §20–​2, §40), the feeling of belonging to the community of ‘human beings’, or simply to the human species, and thus the ability to (at least try to) think and judge from the perspective of this species as such. (c) We saw that Nietzsche clearly rejects Schopenhauer’s ascetic conception of ‘disinterestedness’, but also that he is more ambiguous about Kant’s. Even if there is something intrinsically ascetic in the idea of disinterestedness, this does not prove that Nietzsche unconditionally is opposed to the idea of disinterestedness. There is no doubt that, although Nietzsche is fundamentally critical of the asceticism of the ‘ascetic ideal’, he also values asceticism in another sense. According to the Nietzsche-​Wörterbuch, Nietzsche is favourable to asceticism if askesis designates a multiplicity of deliberate exercises, procedures and measures that tame and sublimate the instincts and drives in ways that do not harm or deny life, but, on the contrary, intensify the ‘will to live’ and affirm life by promoting the creative forces of the human organism.29 As shown earlier, both Stendhal’s conception of crystallization and Nietzsche’s Stendhalian view of spiritualization involve several of these aspects: the sublimation of the instincts and drives, the affirmation of life by means of the intensification of desire, the ‘will to live’ and the power to create. But, at first sight, the properly ascetic element  –​the element of discipline, the taming of the instincts and drives by means of ‘deliberate exercises, procedures, and measure’ –​seems to be absent both in Stendhal’s conception of crystallization and in Nietzsche’s Stendhalian view of spiritualization. However, a closer look leads to a different conclusion. When Stendhal (1980 [1822]:  chapter LI) describes the emergence of the concept of amour-​passion ‘in Provence from 1100 to 1328’, he emphasizes that ‘an established code of laws

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covering the amatory relationships between the two sexes’ was a necessary condition of that event: ‘these laws must have brought about a great deal of happiness’; without the delight of a still young society in ‘formalities and ceremonies which were then a mark of civilization’ the emergence of the concept of amour-​ passion would not have been possible, and the instrumental role of the ‘ballads of the troubadours’ in the development of that concept was part of the same process –​indeed a process of taming but also of intensification of the passions by means of discipline. This is also what Nietzsche emphasizes when he writes about the ‘purely noble descent’ (BGE 260, KSA 5.212) of the concept of amour-​ passion. Europe, Nietzsche writes, is ‘indebted’ to the troubadours of Provence ‘for many things, almost for itself ’ (BGE 260, KSA 5.212), for it was through them that ‘the sex drive sublimated itself into love (amour-​passion)’ (BGE 189, KSA 5.111) –​but this was possible ‘only under the pressure of Christian value judgements’, indeed under the tutelage of Christian ‘law-​makers’ and the imposition of ‘compulsion and fasting’ (BGE 189, KSA 5.111).30 This is, in fact, part of a much more general point for Nietzsche, a much more general point about the nature of ‘spiritualization’ and the relationship between spirit and discipline. There is no ‘spirit’ without discipline and cultivation (Zucht und Züchtung) –​without ‘obedience’ to laws, even if to very indeterminate and arbitrary laws: the strange fact is that everything there is, or was, of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, or masterly assurance on earth, whether in thinking itself, or in ruling, or in speaking and persuading, in artistic just as in ethical practices, has only developed by virtue of the ‘tyranny of such arbitrary laws’ (BGE 188, KSA 5.108)

‘Obedience’ to such laws is a necessary condition of everything that ‘makes life on earth worth living –​for instance: virtue, art, music, dance, reason, intellect’ (BGE 188, KSA 5.108); ‘every artist knows’ that the spirit has to be ‘trained’, ‘bred’, ‘cultivated’, ‘disciplined’, for in the moments of ‘inspiration’ every artist ‘knows how strictly and subtly he obeys thousands of laws’, even if these ‘defy conceptual formulation’ (BGE 188, KSA 5.108). Obviously, something similar also applies to all forms of ‘free-​spiritedness’ and ‘high spirituality’ that result from the ‘pathos of distance’. This ‘pathos’ has to be cultivated –​it requires discipline. If Nietzschean aesthetic judgements depend on the distance of the ‘pathos of distance’, if such judgements involve the distance of reflection and indeed of reflective transvaluations, then they certainly require discipline, or asceticism and a multiplicity of ‘deliberate exercises, procedures, and measures’ to tame and sublimate the instincts and drives. If, in addition, the ascetic discipline here at stake promotes

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life by enlarging one’s perspective, but abstracts from the agreeable, the good, the useful and the true –​then Nietzsche’s view of the aesthetic judgement is indeed much closer to Kant’s than usually supposed, and his Stendhalian critique of Kant’s aesthetics is also a Kantian critique of Kant’s aesthetics.

Notes 1. This chapter is also part of a larger research project on Nietzsche’s relationship with Kantian and Post-​Kantian aesthetics, which I am currently developing in collaboration with my colleague (and co-​editor of this volume) Maria João Mayer Branco. This chapter owes a great deal to our scientific collaboration over the years. An earlier version in Portuguese made essentially the same argument as the present one with regard to the relationship between Nietzsche and Stendhal and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, but did not explore the relationship between Nietzsche and Kant, as the present one does. 2. See the definition of ‘beauty’ as a ‘promise of happiness’ in chapter XVII. Translations of Stendhal in this chapter are my slightly modified versions of Gilbert and Suzanne Sale’s translations in Stendhal (1975 [1822]). 3. See, for example, BGE 189, KSA 5.110–​11 and 260, KSA 5.208–​12. The idea that the European concept of amour-​passion comes from the ‘knightly poetry of Provence’ (BGE 260, KSA 5.212) is taken from Stendhal (see Stendhal 1980 [1822]: chapters LI and LII; see Campioni (2010, in particular p. 32). 4. On ‘spiritualization’, ‘sublimation’ and ‘refinement’, see Kaufmann (1974: 235–​8), Wotling (1995: 205–​10, 228–​41, 335, 344 ff.), Richardson (1996: 25–​6, 156–​7, 178–​ 89) and Gemes (2009). The main passages about spiritualization in the published writings are, perhaps, BGE 219, KSA 5.154, BGE 229, KSA 5.165–​7, BGE 230, KSA 5.167–​70, GM II 6, KSA 5.300–​302, GM II 7, KSA 5.302–​305 and GM II 16, KSA 5.321–​4; but Nietzsche explores the idea of spiritualization and uses either this term or other related terms, such as ‘sublimation’ or ‘refinement’, in many, many passages (see e.g. BGE 24, KSA 5.41–​2, BGE 189, KSA 5.110–​11, BGE 252, KSA 5.195–​6, BGE 263, KSA 5.217–​18, BGE 271, KSA 5.226-​227; D 18, KSA 3.30–​2, D 23, KSA 3.34–​5, D 30, KSA 3.39–​41, D 53, KSA 3.56–​7, D 77, KSA 3.74–​6, D 106, KSA 3.93–​4, D 113, KSA 3.102–​104, D 202, KSA 3.176–​8). 5. He uses Cristallisation in the posthumous note just quoted above (NL 1880–​1 8[40], KSA 9.391) and Crystallisation in NL 1880 6[201] KSA 9.249. 6. On this question, see Nehamas (2007). 7. See Heftrich (1991) and Poljakova (2013: 89 ff.). 8. On instincts as ‘automatisms’, see A 57, KSA 6.241–​4 and NL 1884 26[94], KSA 11.175, NL 1888 14[144], KSA 13.329. On instincts as judgements, see Lupo (2006: 75ff.).

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9. On Nietzsche’s conception of the distinction between instinctive and intellectual judgements, see Lupo (2012). His conception is uncannily similar to Daniel Kanheman’s (2012) idea that the human mind is always divided between two ‘systems’ –​‘system 1’, which ‘thinks fast’ and forms beliefs in an intuitive and automatic way; and ‘system 2’, which ‘thinks slow’ and forms beliefs in a conscious and rational way. 10. See Branco and Constâncio (forthcoming). 11. So much so that even moral judgements are no more than developments of more basic aesthetic judgements –​see, for example, NL 1881 11[78], KSA 9.471: ‘The aesthetic judgements (taste, discomfort, nausea etc) form the basis of the tables of value [or “table of of goods”, Gütertafel]. These, in turn, form the basis of moral judgements.’ 12. See my previous explorations of the view that conceptualization, language and consciousness are developments of instincts, drives, and affects along a continuum: Constâncio (2011) and (2012a). See also Constâncio/ Branco/ Ryan (2015). 13. See TI Skirmishes 19 with TI Skirmishes 8 and 9. 14. See WWV II §44 (the famous chapter on the ‘metaphysics of sexual love’ and the ‘genius of the species’). 15. This formula, ‘a pure, will-​less, painless, timeless knowing subject’ (ein reines willenloses, schmerzloses, zeitloses Subjekt der Erkenntniss), occurs in WWV I §34, 210–​11 and is quoted by Nietzsche in GM III 12, KSA 5.365. 16. Nietzsche is most likely making a very good point here, but in full fairness to Schopenhauer one has to say that he does not ‘think himself a Kantian in this matter’, that is, he is well aware that what he means by ‘disinterestedness’ is not the same as Kant. On this point, see Heftrich (1991). 17. This reference to ‘the naïveté of a country parson’ occurs when Nietzsche makes fun of Schopenhauer’s innocence and criticizes him for believing that Kant’s definition of beauty is supported by the fact that ‘one can even view undraped female statues “without interest” ’ (GM III 6, KSA 5.347). One has to ‘credit to the honour of Kant’, Nietzsche writes, that he never used such an argument, which contrasts with ‘what he [Kant] has to teach about the peculiar properties of the sense of touch [Tastsinn] with the naïveté of a country parson!’ (GM III 6, KSA 5.347). Nietzsche might be referring to Anth. §15–​§17, and the fact that he writes that touch gives only an ‘organic impression’ (i.e. a localized impression), not a ‘vital impression’, could be the reason why he has ‘the naïveté of a country parson’. This possibility is reinforced by the fact that Nietzsche certainly read Kuno Fischer’s (1860: 198ff.; 1882: 138ff.) summary and discussion of Kant’s views on marriage in MS §24 277ff., and he was, therefore, aware that Kant argues that in sexual relationships outside of marriage people make use of each other merely as ‘tools’ and ‘things’ and that doing this necessarily involves making use of just a part of a person and fail to treat

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her as whole. I thank Maria João Mayer Branco for her comments and suggestions regarding this passage. 18. See Brobjer (2008: 36–​40, 104, 128–​30, 195, 229). 19. See Brobjer (2008: 38, 129, 229). The several pages of notes, comments and quotations from Kant’s works (including from the Critique of Judgement) published in NL 1886–7 7[4], KSA 12.264–72, seem to stem from Nietzsche’s second reading of Kuno Fischer’s work in the library at Chur, Switzerland, in 1887: see Brobjer (2001: 421; 2008: 38, 129). The first reading, in 1868, must have been of the first edition of Fischer’s work (Immanuel Kant, Entwicklungsgeschichte und System der kritischen Philosophie, Manheim, 1860, 2 volumes), but the second seems to have been of a revised edition, which was included in Fischer’s Geschichte der neuern Philosophie and renamed as Kant und seine Lehre. The section on the Critique of Judgement has a few significant additions and clarifications (and a somewhat different structure): see Fischer (1860 and 1882) and Brobjer (2008: 195, 229). 20. On Nietzsche’s conception of interpretation in Book V of The Gay Science, particularly on the series of aphorisms GS 373–​5, see Stegmaier (2012: 385–​421). 21. See Richardson (1996: 25–​6), who makes the point (contra Kaufmann) that in Nietzsche’s notion of spiritualization or sublimation ‘ends are modified, not replaced’. 22. In the published writings, see, for example, D 119 and D 129 with BGE 192 and BGE 268. As Nietzsche puts it in BGE 192, ‘even in the middle of the strangest experiences we do the same thing: we invent [wir erdichten uns] most of the experience and can barely be forced not to assume the role of “inventors” [Erfinder] when we look into any sort of event’ (BGE 192, KSA 5.114). Even our bare sensations (Empfindungen) are always already ‘inventive’. See Siemens (2006), Lupo (2012), Riccardi (forthcoming) and Constâncio (2102a and b). In these two essays, I tried to show (among other things) that Nietzsche’s conception of the imagination is indebted to Kant’s because it presupposes and makes use of the Kantian conception of the ‘productive imagination’ as a producer of ‘schemata’, that is, of general images which make concepts possible. 23. See BGE 40, 44, 61, 189, 201, 213, 219 229, 252, 260. 24. See Branco and Constâncio (forthcoming). Note that if one wants to conceive of the ‘self-​overcoming of man’ in terms of ‘evolution’, one should make clear that the positive ‘evolution’ (or ‘enhancement’ or ‘overcoming’) Nietzsche has in mind is fundamentally ‘spiritual’, a matter of enlargement, a matter of ‘expansion of distance within the soul itself ’ (BGE 257, KSA 5.205). 25. See GM III 25, KSA 5.402, where Nietzsche claims that science, unlike art, ‘never creates values’. On the masked nihilism of the ascetic ideal, see Constâncio (2016).

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26. This is the claim of Branco and Constâncio (forthcoming). This claim can be very well supported, as well as directly dovetailed with the theme of the present chapter, by a posthumous note (NL 1881 11[79], KSA 9.471) in which Nietzsche exclaims that his philosophical ‘task’ (Aufgabe) is the ‘reduction of morality to aesthetics’ (Reduktion der Moral auf Aesthetik!!!), but instead of explaining this as a reduction to the biological or physiological, he explains it as a redesign of philosophy as a ‘creating’ of ‘aesthetic [. . .] estimations of value’. (An additional point in this note is that philosophy should always create a multiplicity of ‘equally justified’ aesthetic estimations of value, not a single, ‘true’ one.) 27. See Fischer (1860: 623ff., 1882: 470ff.). Note that Fischer’s formulation of the idea of enlargement includes Nietzsche’s favorite metaphor for the expansion of perspective involved in free-​spiritedness and high spirituality –​the metaphor of ‘elevating’ oneself above other points of view –​as well as the idea that enlarging reflective judgements are reflections about one’s own judgement and perspective: ‘die ästhetische Denkweise [ist, JC] eine erweiterte, die sich über die Schranken des bloßen Privaturtheils erhebt’ (623; my italics); ‘die erweiterte Denkart, welche das Gegenteil der bornierte und die Wohltat der aeshtetischen Betrachtung ist, vermöge deren wir uns über die Privatbedingungen des Urteils, worin so viele wie eingeklammert sind, erheben und in den Standpunkt ander, also in einen allgemeinen Standpunkt versetzen, von dem aus wir über unser eignes Urteil reflektieren’ (Fischer 1882: 470–​1; my italics). 28. I owe these formulations to John Richardson. See, again, Richardson (1996: 262–​ 80). Richardson’s interpretation of what I call ‘enlargement’ in terms of ‘truth’ and a ‘new truth goal’ (280ff.) raises questions which I cannot possibly address in this chapter. It seems clear to me that Nietzsche avoids conceiving of the ‘expansion of distance within the soul itself ’ (BGE 257) in terms of truth, and I believe that the distinction Kant makes in the third Critique between ‘reflection’ and ‘knowledge’ (or between ‘aesthetic reflective judgements’ and ‘logical judgements’) can indeed be the key to understanding Nietzsche’s approach. 29. See van Tongeren et al. (2011ff.). 30. On the courtly love of the Provence and BGE 189 and 260, see Branco (2015).

References Arras, J. D. (1980), ‘Art, Truth, and Aesthetics in Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Power’, Nietzsche-​Studien 9: 239–​59. Branco, M. J. M. (2015), ‘Le non plus ultra de Wagner. Nietzsche sur Tristan et la valeur esthétique de la distance’, in P. Wotling and C. Denat (eds), Nietzsche. Les textes sur Wagner, 213–​33, Reims: Éditions et Presses Universitaires de Reims.

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Branco, M. J. M., and Constâncio, J. (forthcoming), ‘Philosophy as ‘Free-​ Spiritedness’: Philosophical Evaluative Judgements and Post-​Kantian Aesthetics in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil’, in P. Katsafanas (ed.), Routledge Philosophy Minds: Nietzsche, London/​New York: Routledge. Brobjer, T. H. (2001), ‘Beiträge zur Quellenforschung’, Nietzsche-​Studien 30: 418–​21. Brobjer, T. H. (2008), Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Campioni, G. (2010), ‘ “Gaya scienza” und “gai saber” in Nietzsches Philosophie’, in C. Piazzesi, G. Campioni and P. Wotling (eds), Letture della Gaia scienza, Lectures du Gai savoir, Pisa: ETS. Constâncio, J. (2011), ‘On Consciousness: Nietzsche’s Departure from Schopenhauer’, Nietzsche-​Studien 40: 1–​42. Constâncio, J. (2012a), ‘Consciousness, Communication, and Self-​Expression. Towards an Interpretation of Aphorism 354 of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science’, in J. Constâncio and M. J. M. Branco (eds), As the Spider Spins: Essays on Nietzsche’s Critique and Use of Language, 197–​231, Berlin/​Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Constâncio, J. (2012b), ‘ “A Sort of Schema of Ourselves”: On Nietzsche’s “Ideal” and “Concept” of Freedom’, Nietzsche-​Studien 41: 127–​62. Constâncio, J. (2016), ‘Nietzsche on Nihilism (Eine unersättliche Diskussion?)’, in A. Bertino, E. Poliakova, A. Rupschuss and B. Alberts (eds), Zur Philosophie der Orientierung, 83–​100, Berlin/​Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Constâncio, J., Branco, M. J. M., and Ryan, B. (eds) (2015), Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, Berlin/​Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Fischer, K. (1860), Immanuel Kant: Entwicklungsgeschichte und System der kritischen Philosophie. Zweiter Band. Das Lehrgebäude der kritischen Philosophie. Das System der reinen Vernunft/​Geschichte der neuern Philosophie. Vierter Band, Mannheim Verlagsbuchhandlung von Fr. Bassermann. Fischer, K. (1882), Immanuel Kant und seine Lehre. Zweiter Theil. Das Vernunftsystem auf der Grundlage der Vernunftkritik/​Geschichte der neuern Philosophie. Vierter Band, Dritte neu bearbeitete Auflage, München: Verlagsbuchhandlung von Fr. Bassermann. Gemes, K. (2009), ‘Freud and Nietzsche on Sublimation’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 38: 38–​59. Heftrich, U. (1991), ‘Nietzsches Auseinandersetzung mit der “Kritik der Ästhetischen Urteilskraft”’, Nietzsche-​Studien 20: 238–​66. Kahneman, D. (2012), Thinking, Fast and Slow, London: Penguin. Kaufmann, W. (1974), Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lupo, L. (2006), Le Colombe dello Scettico, Riflessioni di Nietzsche sulla Coscienza negli anni 1880–​1888, Pisa: ETS. Lupo, L. (2012), ‘Drives, Instincts, Language, and Consciousness in Daybreak 119: “Erleben und Erdichten”’, in J. Constâncio and M. J. M. Branco (eds), As the

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Spider Spins: Essays on Nietzsche’s Critique and Use of Language, 179–​95, Berlin/​ Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Nehamas, A. (2007), Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Poljakova, E. (2013), Kant und Nietzsche, Tolstoi und Dostojewski über Vernunft, Moral und Kunst, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Riccardi, M. (forthcoming), ‘Nietzsche on the Superficiality of Consciousness’, in M. Dries (ed.), Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind, Berlin/​ Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Richardson, J. (1996), Nietzsche’s System, Oxford/​New York: Oxford University Press. Schopenhauer, A. (1949 [1819]), Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, in A. Hübscher (ed.), Arthur Schopenhauer, Sämtliche Werke, Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, vol. 2 (= WWV I). Schopenhauer, A. (1949 [1819]), Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II, in A. Hübscher (ed.), Arthur Schopenhauer, Sämtliche Werke, Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, vol. 3 (= WWV II). Siemens, H. (2006), ‘Nietzsche and the Empirical: Through the Eyes of the Term “Empfindung”’, South African Journal of Philosophy 25 (2): 146–​58. Stegmaier, W. (2012), Nietzsches Befreiung der Philosophie, Kontextuelle Interpretation des V. Buchs der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Stendhal (1975 [1822]), Love, London: Penguin. Stendhal (1980 [1822]), De l’amour, Paris: Gallimard. Tongeren, P., Schank, G., and Siemens, H. W. (eds) (2011 ff.), Nietzsche-​Wörterbuch Online, Berlin/​Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Wotling, P. (1995), Nietzsche et le problème de la civilisation, Paris: Puf.

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Beyond the Beautiful and the Sublime? Nietzsche, Aesthetics and the Question about the Subject Barbara Stiegler

1.  Introduction As long as one interprets Kant’s aesthetics as a simple appendix to his moral philosophy, and as long as one reduces Nietzsche’s philosophy to the overcoming of morality in general and of Kantian morality in particular, the conceptual pair ‘beautiful’ and ‘sublime’ will inevitably appear to be an obsolescent metaphysical relic. Indeed, by elevating modern thought ‘beyond good and evil’, Nietzsche is supposed to have also elevated it beyond the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘sublime’. This point of view is no doubt convenient –​but is it solid? Are the beautiful and the sublime so dependent on Kantian morality and so obsolete as they seem to be? Why should the disclosure of a pure aesthetic field, a field of ‘presentation’ (Darstellung) prior to every ob-​jectifying ‘representation’ (Vorstellung) mean that a particular philosophy is still being held captive by morality? Why should the distinction between two aesthetic modalities –​one in which we experience ourselves in accordance with what is presented, and another in which we experience ourselves overwhelmed, elevated or exceeded by what happens to us –​prove that we are still in the presence of a metaphysical way of thinking? This fundamental duality in the aesthetic experience –​does it not lie at the heart of contemporary experience, both in the field of philosophy and in the field of art? Also, if this is so, does Nietzsche’s thought give it the rightful place? Or, in other words, does Nietzsche’s thought live up to the two concepts Kant left us as a legacy?

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These questions, however, are intertwined with another subterranean type of question. For, if the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘sublime’ are the concepts that allowed Kant to question the realm of representation, we should see them as the surest signs of a critique of the metaphysics of mastery, that is, the metaphysics that conceives of the subject as exclusively engaged in constituting a world of calculable and exploitable objects. In moving from the realm of the object (and its representation) to the field of beauty and sublimity, one would be moving from the realm where beings are exploited by a conquering subject towards the aesthetic field of pure presentation of what happens (regardless of whether one might call it ‘being’ or ‘phenomenon’). But if Nietzsche bypasses those two concepts, is that not a proof that he accomplishes, as Heidegger defends, the metaphysics of modernity? Does this not prove that he, too, tries to present the subject (now baptized as ‘will to power’) as ‘master’ and ‘possessor’ of everything that is? Has Nietzsche been able, or has he failed, to inherit Kant’s ‘beautiful’ and ‘sublime’ and, with them, the Kantian critique of modern metaphysics? Has his critique of Kantian morality made him overlook fundamental issues of contemporary thought? One can see that the question about the status of the beautiful and the sublime in Nietzsche’s aesthetics is by far not merely a question about a regional aesthetics, but rather about Nietzsche’s place in the history of the metaphysics of the subject. In order to deal with these two questions (has Nietzsche inherited the concepts of beautiful and sublime, and what is his place in the history of modern metaphysics?), I shall begin by recalling the sense in which the Kantian concepts of the ‘beautiful’ and ‘sublime’ can be said to have developed an aesthetics of pure ‘presentation’, beyond the modern metaphysics of representation. Next, I shall show how Nietzsche has managed to recapture that conceptual pair in his own way, in the first instance by rebaptizing both concepts (the ‘beautiful’ as ‘Apollo’ and the ‘sublime’ as ‘Dionysus’), and second by placing them, from the 1880s onwards, in the context of the question about flux and stasis. However, far from arguing that Nietzsche’s thought accomplishes the metaphysics of modernity and affirms the unlimited powers of the subject over the whole of Being, I shall try to establish, against Heidegger’s reading, that Nietzsche’s thought resumes the Kantian affirmation of an excess that delimits and surpasses our finitude, but also that he fundamentally changes the meaning of this excess –​namely, by moving it from the superior and moral sphere of the suprasensible towards what he calls ‘the absolute flux of what happens [absoluten Fluß des Geschehens]’ (NL 1881–​2 11[293], KSA 9.554).

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2.  The Kantian ‘beautiful’ and ‘sublime’: A critique of modern metaphysics Does the experience of the beautiful and the sublime mean, as Cassirer asserted against Heidegger à propos Kant’s moral philosophy, that the subject of morality is the subject that moves into ‘infinity’ (Cassirer and Heidegger 1972: 67)? Should it be interpreted as an ‘opening’ outside of finitude, or as a ‘passage’ into the absolute (31)? Shouldn’t we see here one of most clear affirmations of finitude, over and against every previous attempt (and also future temptations) to move the subject into ‘unlimitedness’? This is the question raised by an important article by Jean-​Luc Nancy, The Sublime Offering, published within a community that, towards the end of the 1980s, wanted to renew the interpretation of the ‘sublime’ by following the guidance or tools of contemporary phenomenology. Jean-​Luc Nancy’s (1993 [1988]: 27) first point is that the significance of the beautiful and the sublime in the economy of Kant’s work is not at all regional, and the same should be said for the whole of aesthetics. What is at stake in Kantian aesthetics is ‘the sensible presentation as a question’ (1). Aesthetics begins where the routine logic of representation ends; it begins where the relentless production of objects (objects of perception, knowledge or thought) –​objects that are always produced by a subject that needs them (in order to perceive, know or think) –​is replaced by the question of presentation as such, that is, the question concerning what is given to us before any representation. What is presented before the representation of objects by the subject? How does that present itself to us before we re-​present any object whatsoever? That is the question or problem that aesthetics raises, the question that Kant tried to answer with the concepts of the beautiful and the sublime. In the Preface to the French edition to Of the Sublime, Nancy writes: Representation is articulated in terms of conformity and signification. But presentation puts into play the event and the explosion of an appearing and disappearing which, considered in themselves, cannot conform to or signify anything. This explosive event is what tradition passes on to us under the names of beauty and/​or sublimity. (2)

The beautiful and the sublime are thus meant, first of all, as means for criticizing (J. L. Nancy says ‘deconstructing’1) the classical metaphysics of representation, or, more fundamentally, the modern project of mastery.

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That they have this meaning is attested by the experience of beauty. What happens when we stand before the spectacle of beauty? Nancy (1993 [1988]: 28–​9) writes: On the occasion of an object of the senses [. . .] the faculty of presentation [i.e. the imagination, BS] –​plays at finding a form in accord with its free play. [. . .] a free accord between the sensible (which is essentially multiple or manifold) and a unity (which is not a concept, but rather free indeterminate unity). The imagination thus presents the image, or rather that there is (such a thing as) ‘image’ –​ Bild. The image here is not the representative image, and it is not the object. It is not the placing-​in-​form of something else, but rather is the form forming itself, for itself, without object

A given object, for example, the blue arabesques of an Azulejo, is the occasion for my imagination to play without end the game of combining in a harmonious fashion the multiplicity that is given (the plurality of shadows and reflections, the multiplicity of nuances of white and the shades of blue, the complexity of folds and counter-​folds) and thus of unifying by form, or by the constant formation of a unity that assembles in the same image (Bild) all that multiplicity. This is a presentation that is multiple and yet assembled, made present in one single image (Bild) only by the play of that faculty of presentation which is called imagination (Einbildungskraft). Here no object is produced (no object to be perceived, known or thought), but only a form that has no object:  a unity ‘without object and without subject, and yet, without end’ (Nancy 1993 [1988]: 29). It is this activity of presentation without end that makes the experience of the beautiful ‘disinterested’. Disinterested means, thus, not only liberated from the inclinations of the body and its need to consume objects, but also, and above all, liberated from the interests of the modern subject, as well as from this subject’s project of constituting objects in order to master and possess them. However, such an interpretation of disinterestedness is impossible if one does not think the beautiful with and against the sublime, that is, if one does not think of the limits of form against the sublime background of the unlimited, or the organized beauty of beautiful forms against the sublime background of chaos. According to Jean-​Luc Nancy (Nancy 1993 [1988]), Kant himself probably did not measure this relation clearly. In presenting the beautiful and the sublime as two distinct and disjointed experiences, he overlooked that the pleasure we take in the beautiful –​if left on its own –​far from being disinterested, fatally intertwines with the supreme interest of subjectivity:

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The disinterestedness of the judgement of beauty [. . .] is a profound interestedness: one has an interest in the being-​anticipated of unity, in the (pre)formation of the figure, in the avoidance of chaos. (Nancy 1993 [1988]: 31)

Or, in other words: Taken literally as the pure pleasure of pure presentation, the beautiful reveals itself to be responsive to the interest of reason which is all the more interested because it is hidden. (Nancy 1993 [1988]: 33)

Indeed, how can one avoid suspecting that there is an essential affinity between the imagination of schematism, the ‘hidden art in the depths of the human soul’ (KrV A141/​B180-​181) that secretly serves the supreme interest of reason  –​ namely, the unification of the multiplicity of sensibility by the unifying forms of subjectivity –​ and the aesthetic imagination, which freely forges forms in order to unrestrainedly enjoy a feeling of harmony and unity, or, in sum, the feeling of being armored in advance against the untimely irruption of chaos? In this way, a supreme self-​enjoyment of the constituting subject would underlie the alleged disinterestedness of the aesthetic experience: The beautiful in Kant [. . .] constitutes the subject as enjoying itself, its unity and its free legality, as that artist-​reason that insures [i.e. protects, BS] itself against the chaos of sensible experience (Nancy 1993 [1988]: 32)

By means of a rather particular ‘perversion’, the beautiful, which the Ancients (with Plato) regarded as the splendor of the ‘true’, would be finally degraded (with Kant) to an ‘enjoyment of reason’, a jouissance de la raison. At any rate, as we stated earlier, the beautiful should be conceived of in relation to the sublime. But what is there to say about this relation? For Nancy (1993 [1988]: 35), the connection between the beautiful and the sublime should be understood, more clearly than Kant himself understood it, as the contact between the limit and the unlimitedness: The unlimited as such is that which sets itself off on the border of the limit, that which detaches itself and subtracts itself from limitation (and hence from beauty) by an unlimitation that is coextensive with the external border of limitation.

Thinking the beautiful with the sublime implies that the sublime should be thought of as the ‘external edge’ of beauty, and that beauty should be conceived of as that which produces beautiful forms always at the threshold of the sublime. It is there, and only there, that the aesthetic presentation is found, before every

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appropriation of the object by a representation. The aesthetic begins when the form, the figure or the limit stands out against the background of chaos and unlimitedness: It is the gesture of formation, of figuration itself (of Ein-​Bildung), but only insofar as the formless too stands out –​without itself taking on any form –​along the form that traces itself, joins itself to itself, and presents itself. (Nancy 1993 [1988]: 36)

The reason why it makes no sense to oppose two aesthetics –​one of the beautiful and another of the sublime –​is precisely because the space of aesthetics lies in that zone of contact between order and chaos, or between limit and unlimitedness. The beautiful without the sublime would not be beauty, but only the subjective pleasure of imposing order and figuration. The sublime without beauty would not be the sublime, but only the threat of chaos, excess and lack of form. Aesthetic pleasure lies beyond the enjoyment of oneself and the fear of oneself: it lies in the disinterested pleasure that we take in the simple spectacle of presentation, in between the emergence of forms and the formless backdrop from where they emerge. Ultimately, at the core of the aesthetic experience of the presentation there will always be the experience of an excess. But only at the edge of the limit, only at the limit, are we able to experience that excess. Like the aesthetic and like art, the sublime is ‘the emotion of the subject at the limit’ (Nancy 1993 [1988]: 44). This is why there can be no opposition between an aesthetics of form and an ethical meta-​aesthetics of the formless. The aesthetic always concerns form [. . .] It is how the limit offers itself to the border of the unlimited, or how the limit makes itself felt: exactly on the cutting edge of the figure that the work of art cuts (Nancy 1993 [1988]: 50)

This is also why Kant’s aesthetics, if we understand its real issue, constitutes one of the most solid critiques of modern metaphysics, that is, the kind of metaphysics in which the subject that thinks and feels is entirely resolved in the appropriation. Beyond this feeling of appropriation, Kant’s aesthetics discovers a ‘feeling of exposition’ (sentir d’exposition) (47). Beyond the subject that constitutes, the subject exclusively preoccupied with constituting objects and consuming them, Kant’s aesthetics reveals a subject who is exposed to that which surpasses him. In Jean-​Luc Nancy’s view, this is the true meaning of the suprasensible destination of the aesthetic subject. What is at stake is not a passage into the absolute or the unlimitedness beyond finitude (Cassirer), but rather the sensible subject’s capacity to feel himself overwhelmed by that which exceeds him.

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The aesthetic subject, unlike other animals, is not satisfied to feel the sensible or receive sensations. At the limit of each of his sensations, he is also always able to feel that something ‘other’, something immense (and nonsensible) surpasses the limits of what he feels. It is a feeling of the nonsensible, the pure pleasure of presentation that is revealed in the aesthetic experience. It is precisely here that, in Kant’s view, what he calls our ‘suprasensible destination’ is felt. In other words: it is not felt in the unlimitedness, beyond finitude, but rather insofar as we, at the limit of appearances, are exposed to that which surpasses us. This is precisely the true meaning of ‘finitude’. It expresses not so much our incapacity to reach the absolute as our ability to expose ourselves and be moved by the excess of what surpasses or overwhelms us. If the beautiful and the sublime are the surest signs of a radical critique of the metaphysics of mastery undertaken in the name of finitude, the question that remains is whether Nietzsche was able to integrate this critique into his own aesthetics. Did Nietzsche understand the profound meaning of Kant’s aesthetic categories? Was he able to renew their meaning and usage? In the end, what does Nietzsche’s interpretation of the beautiful and the sublime teach us about his place within the metaphysics of modernity?

3.  Nietzsche’s reassessment of the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘sublime’ In regard to this problem, Jean-​Luc Nancy’s article gives us no more than two quick indications, which are sibylline and contradictory at the same time. First, he argues that Kant’s beautiful and sublime have nothing to do with Nietzsche’s Apollinian and Dionysian –​at least not in the ‘common’ interpretation of these terms. Since the movement of the sublime is not an ‘agitation in the face of immobility’, ‘it is not a version of the ordinary –​if not Nietzschean –​doctrine of the couple Dionysos/​Apollo’ (Nancy 1993 [1988]: 36). However, Nancy himself suggests afterwards that there is a fundamental proximity here. He tells us that the ‘sublime joy’ is, at bottom, nothing else than the ‘tragic joy’ (52). What justifies the previous opposition between the Kantian beautiful and sublime and the Nietzschean Apollinian and Dionysian? What allows him now to approximate the sublime and the tragic? In order to avoid any contradiction between these two indications, should we conclude that the Apollinian and Dionysian that Nancy rejects are not Nietzsche’s, but only their vulgate version –​so that, perhaps, the Nietzschean Apollinian/​Dionysian have after all a profound proximity

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to the Kantian beautiful/​sublime? Or is it so that in as much Nietzsche’s tragic depends on the Apollinian and Dionysian, it totally bypasses what Nancy refers to as the true ‘tragic joy’? My hypothesis is that, following Heidegger, Nancy’s benevolence towards Kant is absent in his interpretation of Nietzsche. Kant is credited by Heidegger as an authentic thinker of finitude, whereas Nietzsche is systematically accused of accomplishing the metaphysics of modernity. Has Nancy also yielded to the temptation of replaying this division? At any rate, what I wish to do in what follows is to question that division of roles by showing how, contrary to Nancy’s suggestions and Heidegger’s reading, Nietzsche inherited and was indeed able to integrate the critical burden underlying the concepts of the beautiful and sublime. In my Nietzsche et la critique de la chair (Stiegler 2005), I  have tried to establish that The Birth of Tragedy finds its meaning precisely in that inheritance. As Nietzsche tells us, tragedy is ‘the sublime work of art’ par excellence (cf. BT 4, 7 and 17, and also DW 3). The characterization of the tragic as the art of the sublime is certainly not new. It can be traced back to Schiller, who in fact developed a first indication by Kant.2 But in what sense is tragedy sublime for Schiller (1845 [1801])? In the sense that tragedy, according to him, makes one suspect the resistance of a suprasensible human faculty to sensible suffering, the ‘possibility of an absolutely free will’ liberated from the obstacles of sensibility (237). Legitimating in advance Cassirer’s interpretation, Schiller entirely bypasses the true meaning of the Kantian sublime, which, if one believes Jean-​Luc Nancy’s reading, is played out between the limits of the figure and unlimitedness. But the opening pages of The Birth of Tragedy recapture the Kantian categories. As in the third Critique, after beauty (the Apollinian), the sublime (the Dionysian) appears as excessive in relation to the faculty of presentation. Does Nietzsche recognize its meaning more faithfully than Schiller? At first, one is struck by what opposes the Kantian to the Dionysian sublime. Whereas for Kant the unlimitedness of the sublime should be seen as suprasensible, Nietzsche sees it as arch-​sensible: If the beautiful depends on a dream of being [Traum des Wesens], the sublime depends on an intoxication of being [Rausch des Wesens]. [. . .]. The excess of the will [Übermaß des Willens] produces the sublime impressions [. . .]? The frightful sensation of the unmeasurability of the will [Unermeßlichkeit des Willens] (NL 1870–​1 7[46], KSA 7.149)

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Schopenhauer is to whom Nietzsche owes this incarnation of the sublime in the figure of ‘Dionysus’ or the ‘Will’ (in the sense of a carnal or ‘fleshy’ continuum that connects all living beings to each other). But not to Schopenhauer’s interpretation of the sublime and the tragic (which is still Schillerian), but rather to his interpretation of the Will as Zerfleischung, as a ‘tearing of the flesh’ –​a unity of all living beings that tears itself under the weight of all its contradictions (cf. Schopenhauer 1972 [1819]:  §39 and §63). What is sublime here is no longer the presentiment of something suprasensible, but rather the carnal sensation of oneself, the enjoyment of an excess of contradictions.3 Given that, by contrast, the Kantian ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ insists on the suprasensible vocation of the subject, it seems that the Nietzschean and the Kantian interpretations of the sublime are absolutely in opposition to each other. But this objection is only partially right. For what distinguishes the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ from previous texts about the suprasensible is that in the former Kant describes a ‘feeling of our own supersensible vocation [Gefühl unserer übersinnlichen Bestimmung]’ (KU 258). Once Kant abandons the perspective of the second Critique, which was still dualistic, he defends that it is in the activity of acquiring presentations that the subject has a presentiment of the limits of his sensibility, as well as of the surpassing of those limits in the nonsensible. If Nietzsche describes the pure Dionysian as a feeling of fulfillment, the tragic also consists in the un-​livable, non-​presentable and, in this precise sense, nonsensible character of that fulfillment for our finite sensibility. In both cases, that which has no limit can be seen as ‘suprasensible’ (über-​sinnlich), no longer in the sense of something opposed to the sensible, but rather in the sense of something that exceeds the figurative syntheses of sensibility from within their limits. That which Kant conceives of as the unlimited suprasensible is conceived of by Nietzsche as the arch-​sensible surplus at the limits of all sensible presentation. The passage from the beautiful to the sublime (Kant) and the passage from the plastic to the tragic art (Nietzsche) have indeed something in common: in both cases, the one who feels (the one who establishes the limits of his finitude) is profoundly summoned to feel something more than what he feels –​he is made to have a presentiment of the unlimitedness that emerges at the boundaries of appearances: we do now understand the meaning of our desire to look, and yet to long to go beyond looking when we are watching tragedy [. . .]. [Tragedy is, BS] that striving towards infinity, that wing-​beat of longing even as we feel supreme delight in a clearly perceived reality (BT 24, KSA 1.153)

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Here, as in the Kantian sublime, the figure culminates (or is elevated) in the unlimitedness that starts at its borders. The beautiful and the sublime are not simply juxtaposed (as they seemed to be in the third Critique), nor are they opposed to each other. The beautiful becomes the starting point of the sublime, that which stops at the limit of the unlimited. This desire to surpass the beautiful forms so as to gain a presentment of the ground from where all forms emerge is tantamount to an interpretation of the sublime which is no longer moral, but rather aesthetic. It gives us the solution to an enigma. ‘How can we find pleasure in tragedy?’ –​Nietzsche asked himself. How can one enjoy the passage and the destruction of the most beautiful figures offered to us by the heroes? The tragic pleasure taken from the demolition of the forms (the pleasure we feel at the expense of the suffering and death of the heroes), the enjoyment of seeing the most beautiful forms tremble and then fall apart under the pressure of the excessive, is the purely aesthetic pleasure of feeling the form being driven by the excessive ground from whence it emerges. Now we understand why the spectator can have pleasure in tragedy. What tragedy shows on stage is that the suffering and death of individuals is also always a drive or impetus of the excess of possibilities, and, in this sense, an epiphany of the excessive.4 In tragedy, as in the Kantian sublime, the presentiment of that which ‘exceeds the realm of nature’ (KU 268) –​not of any sort of transcendent opening beyond finitude –​is a sure sign of the necessary finitude of appearances. The death that destroys all appearances suddenly ‘seems necessary to us, given the uncountable excess of forms of existence thrusting and pushing themselves into life, given the exuberant fertility of the world-​Will’ (BT 17, KSA 1.109). One should understand the attraction that the tragic figure feels for Dionysus as the respect for the carnal continuum of everything that lives, has lived and will live, that is, as the presentiment of the Heraclitean aïôn, which is the endless continuity of living beings (BT 24).5 In this sense, tragedy is an incarnation of the Kantian sublime that is not necessarily unfaithful to the spirit of the third Critique. The unity of the suprasensible  –​that unity which was first thought and then postulated (in the first and second Critiques) –​becomes the aesthetic presentiment of the unlimited (in the third Critique), and in The Birth of Tragedy it finally becomes the incarnated presentiment  –​at the very limits of appearances –​of a living and carnal continuity that connects all living beings to each other. ‘The supreme task of this life’ (art) and ‘duty’ itself should be understood, no longer in opposition to sensibility or ‘flesh’, but rather in relation to the arch-​ unity of all living beings: ‘The most important demands of the human being as such should be deduced from its relation to the whole river of future generations’

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(NL 1870–​1 8[92], KSA 7.258). Here more than ever, ‘spirit [which has become a living body, BS] can come to feel [i.e. make sensible, BS] the sublimity of its own vocation’ (KU 262). The problem that remains is that, if compared with the Kantian sublime, this first Nietzschean posterity of the sublime has the defect that it imprisons the flesh or life within itself, that is, in its auto-​affection. There is no doubt that the tragic flesh is an exposed flesh, for it is the flesh of a mortal individual affected by the whole ‘river’ (Strom) or ‘flux’ (Fluß) of all living beings. But, at the same time, this exposed flesh is never exposed to anything but that which lives, has lived or will live. That flesh is never exposed to something other than life or flesh (past, present or future), that is, to something other than itself. Hence, it is not capable of surpassing the narrow domain of auto-​affection.6 It remains to be seen, however, whether the way Nietzsche recaptures the concept of the ‘tragic’ and the name ‘Dionysus’ from the 1880s onwards allows him to emancipate them from the confines of auto-​affection. For, the Dionysus that reappears from 1883 onwards is no longer merely the name for the carnal or fleshy continuum of all living beings: it becomes the name for the ‘absolute flux of what happens’, living and nonliving. As for tragedy itself –​both as tragic philosophy and as tragic art  –​it also receives a new meaning, for it becomes the totality of human stases (concepts, representations and figures), stases that know about and want to be overwhelmed by the flux of what happens. But how should we then understand the fact that, in that same period, Nietzsche systematically plays down the importance of the aesthetic category of the sublime? By imposing to the forms of art and the categories of thought the obligation to expose themselves to the absolute flux that surpasses and exceeds them, is not Nietzsche recapturing the Kantian theme of a suprasensible vocation of the animal ‘man’, the only living being that is able to expose appearances to that which surpasses them? Indeed, it remains to be shown how in the 1880s Nietzsche continues to inherit the critical meaning of the sublime, but also goes beyond it. For, with Nietzsche, the absolute flux that exceeds our sensible capacities (the ‘suprasensible’ flux in this sense) loses all moral content. No longer anthropomorphic, purged from every connection to the human ‘good’ and ‘evil’, as well as to the anthropomorphism of Kant’s and Schiller’s ‘free’ and ‘autonomous’ will, the absolute flux elevates us ‘beyond good and evil’, while, at the same time, it imposes upon us the obligation to expose ourselves, beyond ourselves, to expose ourselves to what exceeds us. In this sense, it may well be that Nietzsche, more than anyone else, has indeed inherited the profound sense of the Kantian sublime. At any rate, this

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is what is suggested by Jean-​Luc Nancy’s (1993 [1988]) reading of the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’. As long as [r]‌epresentation is articulated in terms of conformity and signification [.  . .] presentation puts into play the event and the explosion of an appearing and disappearing which, considered in themselves, cannot conform to or signify anything. This explosive event is what tradition passes on to us under the names of beauty and/​or sublimity. (2)

By making use of ‘the event and the explosion of an appearing and disappearing’ beyond all our categories, is it not the absolute flux (that Nietzsche will name as Dionysus) precisely what summons us, not to become masters and possessors of all objects of representation, but to expose ourselves to the excess that lies at the edge of all presentation? To paraphrase and, at the same time, go beyond Kant, isn’t Dionysus, more than anything else, what allows us to ‘feel [i.e. make sensible]’ what is properly ‘sublime’ in our ‘vocation’?

Notes 1. ‘From the moment when representation comes to know itself to be such and comes to present itself as such (that is, also to criticize, distance, deconstruct or destroy itself), a moment, which constitutes the history of modern art and thought, it takes up at unknown cost a question of presentation –​a question that is at the same time traditional and unheard of ’ (Nancy 1993 [1988]: 2; emphasis in the original). 2. ‘Even the presentation of the sublime, so far as it belongs to fine art, may be brought into union with beauty in a tragedy in verse’ (KU 325). 3. Cf. NL 1870–​1 7[64], KSA 7.153: ‘Essence of beauty. /​Essence of the tragic. /​[. . .] Total pleasure [Genuss] –​Beauty. Pleasure in laceration [Zerfleischung] –​ Sublime’ 4. What ‘the individual instances of such destruction illustrate’ is the ‘omnipotent Will behind the principium individuationis, as it were, life going on eternally beyond all appearance and despite all destruction’ (BT 16, KSA 1.108) 5. Nietzsche considers the Heraclitean child (the aion) as an image of Dionysus and hence as another name for the primordial unity (Ur-Eine) of living beings (cf. BT 24). 6. This point has also been made by Jean-​Luc Nancy, who, thus, contests the argumentations developed by Michel Henry (1985).

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References Cassirer, E., and Heidegger, M. (1972), Débat sur le kantisme et la Philosophie (Davos, mars 1929), et autres textes de 1929–​1931, trad. Aubenque/​Fataud/​Quillet, Paris: Beauchesne. Henry, M. (1985), Généalogie de la psychanalyse, Paris: Puf. Nancy, J.-​L. (1993 [1988]), ‘Preface to the French Edition’, in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett, 1–​4, Albany: State University of New York Press. Nancy, J.-​L. (1993 [1988]), ‘The Sublime Offering’, in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett, 25–​54, Albany: State University of New York Press. Schiller, F. (1845 [1801]), ‘Upon the Pathetic’, in The Aesthetic Letters, Essays, and the Philosophical Letters of Schiller, trans. J. Weiss, 199–​238, Boston: Freeman and Bolles. Schopenhauer, A. (1972 [1819]), Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, in Arthur Schopenhauer, Sämtliche Werke. 7 vols, Arthur Hübscher (ed.), vol. II. 3rd ed. Wiesbaden: Brockhaus. Stiegler, B. (2005), Nietzsche et la critique de la chair. Dionysos, Ariane, le Christ, Paris: Puf.

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From Kant’s Critique of Judgement to The Birth of Tragedy: The Meaning of the ‘Aesthetic’ in Nietzsche David Puche Díaz

1.  Introduction The aim of this chapter is to reconsider the meaning of the aesthetic (das Ästhetische) in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Its central role in his thought is indeed well known, but it is also true that it has frequently been misunderstood, leading to misinterpretations of Nietzsche’s thought altogether. I  would like to develop the following points: (a) the aesthetic should not be seen as an object of Nietzsche’s thought, but rather as something that characterizes his particular way of thinking; (b)  This, however, does not mean that Nietzsche’s thought is merely ‘aesthetic’, but that it is necessary to re-​evaluate the meaning of the aesthetic in Nietzsche’s thought, instead of assuming its significance uncritically; and (c) I would like to show how the aesthetic in Nietzsche responds to a certain comprehension of the world qua world, that is, to a metaphysics,1 and that its ultimate sense is synonymous of ‘hermeneutics’. In other words, the problem of the aesthetic in Nietzsche is the problem of a hermeneutic and practical metaphysics, that is, of a comprehension of reality that excludes any claim of absolute knowledge and therefore has an eminently critical value (cf. Cacciari 1994: 83–​6). For this purpose, I will trace the origins of the aesthetic in Nietzsche back to Kant’s Critique of Judgement by showing how the latter offers the theoretical basis upon which The Birth of Tragedy is conceived (Hill 2003: 39). For Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy is not only the text in which the meaning of the aesthetic is best exposed, it also contains the germ of many motives that Nietzsche will develop

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in later texts, such as the ‘will to power’, the ‘eternal recurrence of the same’, ‘justice’ (Gerechtigkeit), ‘genealogy’ or the notion of ‘transvaluation’. I will begin by (Section 2) sketching some of the fundamental theoretical aspects of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, the division between Apollo and Dionysus, not only as two opposed aesthetical principles, but also as principles constituting the ‘real’. Then I will show (Section 3) the ways in which this basic sketch of Nietzsche’s thought brings us to Kant, for who the aesthetic or reflective judgement is not merely aesthetic, but also reveals something about human experience in general. I will continue (Section 4) with an analysis of the transition from aesthetic contemplation to aesthetic production and the figure of the genius in Kant and Nietzsche. All this will enable me to rethink (Section 5) the Nietzschean experience of the Apollinian and the Dionysian in order to (Section 6) localize its conceptual ‘matrix’ in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, and more precisely in the feelings of the beautiful and the sublime.

2.  Nietzsche’s aesthetic conception of reality The Birth of Tragedy is an extremely rich and dense text. It begins nevertheless with a straightforward conception of the world as being split into two opposing forces: the Apollinian and the Dionysian. As Nietzsche writes: the continuous evolution of art is bound up with the duality of the Apollinian and the Dionysian in much the same way as reproduction depends on there being two sexes which co-​exist in a state of perpetual conflict interrupted only occasionally by periods of reconciliation. [. . .] These two very different drives [Triebe] exist side by side, mostly in open conflict, stimulating and provoking [reizen] one another to give birth to ever-​new, more vigorous offspring in whom they perpetuate the conflict inherent in the opposition between them, an opposition only apparently bridged by the common term ‘art’ (BT 1, KSA 1.25)

By introducing this opposition, Nietzsche overcomes both the perspective of the object (realism) and the perspective of the subject (idealism), in order to attain the perspective of the world, which is prior to any form of subjectivity or objectivity. This also enables him to avoid dogmatic metaphysics  –​which for Nietzsche means metaphysics tout court –​and the need of a ‘supreme object’ (summum ens) or a ‘founding subject’ (subiectum).2 One could object to the metaphysical dimension we are referring to here by stressing the fact that Nietzsche is not talking about the ‘world’, but about art. In

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this case Nietzsche’s claim would be merely aesthetic. Nietzsche would be talking about the artistic production and not about ontological principles. But we need only to read a passage from BT 2 to realize that this is not the case: So far we have considered the Apollinian and its opposite, the Dionysian, as artistic powers [künstlerische Mächte] which erupt from nature itself, without the mediation of any human artist, and in which nature’s artistic drives attain their first, immediate satisfaction (BT 2, KSA 1.30)

Here, Nietzsche undeniably explains that he was not merely referring to aesthetic principles, nor biological ones (instincts), nor purely human (psychological or sociological) principles, but to natural forces. These forces, however, are not ‘physical’  –​for they are not empirically provable  –​but, as we mentioned earlier, ontological, that is, constituting ‘what there is’. However, according to Nietzsche, art constitutes the ‘highest task and the true metaphysical activity of this life’ (BT Foreword, KSA 1.24), and nature itself is seen as the true artist, of which ‘every artist is an “imitator” ’ (BT 2, KSA 1.30). This means that, for Nietzsche, the aesthetic is never a simple contemplation or the production of something beautiful, but a form of experience that goes beyond what can be objectified, measured or quantified. In other words: the aesthetic goes beyond the mere (scientific) knowledge of objects; it is rather the intuition that enables us to apprehend the world as such. This is why Nietzsche says in 1886 that with The Birth of Tragedy he was dealing with ‘a new problem’, namely, the problem of science itself, a problem that cannot be understood from the perspective of science, but from the perspective of art (BT Attempt 2, KSA 1.13). Science is an interpretation of the world, but it can never attain the experience of the world as such. Science acknowledges only parts, whereas art puts us in relation with a totality. It is in this sense, I argue, that the aesthetic for Nietzsche is genuinely metaphysical and is not limited to the boundaries of beauty. But if art, in Nietzsche, can be understood more metaphysico it is also because it is a form of poíesis, a form of production. The work of art constitutes the most clear and vivid synthesis of the two opposed principles, the Apollinian and the Dionysian. It reveals the discord and the struggle between these principles in a way that no other phenomenon does. It constitutes a microcosm that gives us a glimpse of what goes on in the macrocosm and –​in as much as it is a human production –​it also reflects our ability of expressing this very structure. This is why art offers us a better model for understanding the world than science. One might argue that, for Nietzsche, art creates in the

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same way nature does, and that one can only understand nature by imitating her, that is, through art. In addition, artistic creativity is radically different from the monotheist creatio ex nihilo, according to which, as we read in the Gospel of John (1:1): ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God’. But, for Nietzsche, the artistic process nature goes through does not respond to a pre-​established reason (first cause), nor to a teleological one (final cause); it has no fundament nor ultimate sense apart from its own production or the pure act of giving itself. Also, it is a totally amoral process. All of this is somehow contained in the Nietzschean expression, ‘the innocence of becoming’, which, in its turn, is the necessary consequence of the ‘death of God’. The world is a contingent work in progress; and this is precisely why it is artistic, although, in this case, without an artist. It is the pure will that is not governed by any intellect and which redefines its own rules on the way. Nobody can say that the laws of nature, such as we know them now, have always been the same or that they will always remain the same, or that they must be the same in all circumstances and all possible worlds. There is no eternal and universal logos; for it is always becoming: it is immanent to the world, but not its cause. In his Attempt to Self-​Critique, we find a revealing passage to this respect where Nietzsche writes: the whole book acknowledges only an artist’s meaning (and hidden meaning) behind all that happens –​a ‘god’, if you will, but certainly only an utterly unscrupulous and amoral artist-​god who frees [löst] himself from the dire pressure of fullness and over-​fullness, from suffering the oppositions packed within him, and who wishes to become conscious of his autarchic power and constant delight and desire, whether he is building or destroying, whether acting benignly or malevolently. The world as the release and redemption [Erlösung] of god (BT Attempt 5, KSA 1.17)

In contrast to what we have seen in relation to the prologue to Richard Wagner, Nietzsche seems here to be explicitly criticizing metaphysics. But it is also true that he does so in as much as he explicitly identifies metaphysics with Christian theology, ‘resignation’ and ‘consolation’ –​something also embodied by the Romantics.3 Still, what Nietzsche is proposing in the text quoted earlier is quite obviously metaphysical, but as I argued before: a metaphysics that is able to overcome traditional, monotheistic ways of conceptualizing things. In other words, a metaphysics that is able to overcome the split between Creator and Creation, for it is this split or

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differentiation that first enables us, on the one hand, to conceive the world as having a transcendent basis and, on the other, to affirm the possibility of an absolute standpoint, from which the world as a totality can be known and judged. For Nietzsche, in contrast, the world is in constant becoming and is therefore hazardous and prior to all necessity, all providence and all theology. It redeems itself constantly through its sheer existence. There is nothing exterior or prior to it, so that we could never attain an ultimate knowledge of the world, not to mention a global evaluation or moral verdict about it.

3.  Kant’s conceptual framework There are many concepts in Nietzsche’s thought whose origin is rooted in The Birth of Tragedy. Conversely, the theoretical structure of this text has its roots in the Kantian Critique of Judgement. Yet, the influence of the latter on Nietzsche’s thought has not yet been sufficiently examined.4 However, what is relevant for us here, in order to understand the somewhat hidden connection between the two works, is the role of the ‘reflective judgement’, most specifically in the form of the judgement of taste or ‘aesthetic judgement’ in Kant’s third Critique. Indeed, we will find in the aesthetic judgement an attempt to think of something pre-​logical, that is, prior to the determinations of the understanding (that establish what is true) and prior to the determinations of reason (that establish what is good). We will see how this relates to Nietzsche in the following. The problem Kant is presenting in the third Critique is that of an ‘inestimable chasm’ (unübersehbare Kluft) (KU 175) between the realm of nature (governed by the understanding) and the realm of freedom (governed by the concept of reason). But, although both spheres seem to be completely divided, there is a ‘middle term’ (Mittelglied) (KU 177), that is, a faculty, that enables us to connect these spheres, and hence, the whole ensemble of our experience. It is the faculty of judgement, of which we may reasonably presume by analogy that it may likewise contain, if not a special authority to prescribe laws, still a principle peculiar to itself upon which laws are sought, although one merely subjective a priori. This principle, even if it has no field of objects appropriate to it as its realm, may still have some territory or other with a certain character, for which just this very principle alone may be valid. (KU 177)

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Now, judgement in general is the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, principle, or law) is given, then the judgement that subsumes the particular under it is determining (even where such a judgement is transcendental and, as such, provides the conditions a priori in conformity with which alone subsumption under that universal can be effected). If, however, only the particular is given and the universal has to be found for it, then the judgement is simply reflective. (KU 179)

But this reflective judgement is in need of ‘a principle, which it cannot take from experience’ (KU 181). The guiding thread of the Critique of Judgement (which has its origin only in the reflective judgement) is the notion of a ‘formal purposiveness of nature’ (KU 181). That is to say, a purpose for which the reflective judgement cannot find a concept –​this is why it is only a regulative principle, and not a form of knowledge –​and yet it proves to conform to it even in its absence. To show its possibility would mean to show that nature can be thought ‘in such a way that in the conformity to law of its form it at least harmonizes with the possibility of the ends to be effectuated in it according to the laws of freedom’ (KU 176). This would then be the keystone of the entire critique-​project (and hence, of the unity of philosophy), since it allows the transition (Übergang) between the sphere of nature (the sensible or sensitive, subject to laws of causality) and the sphere of freedom (the supersensible, with its own ends). Kant ascribes two functions to the reflective judgement:  (1)  as a teleological judgement, it organizes our representations (Vorstellungen) of nature into a whole directed towards an end (i.e. into a ‘system of ends’, which, as mentioned earlier, can never become the object of knowledge); (2)  as an aesthetic judgement or judgement of taste, it connects our representations with our own cognitive faculties, giving place to a ‘free play’ among them, a certain harmony, that is granted by the imagination and which does not respond to any concept. Or as Kant famously put it, beauty is a ‘purposiveness without a purpose’ (KU 226). However, according to Kant, there is only one type of reflective judgement (and hence of purposiveness), and not two. But whereas the faculty granting teleological judgements is the understanding, in the aesthetic judgement it is ‘the faculty for judging an object in reference to the free conformity to law of the imagination’ (KU 240), that is, what Kant calls taste. Taste is a faculty or capacity (Vermögen) that lies on a feeling of pleasure or pain in relation to the agreement or disagreement among our faculties. This is why both the presentation and grounding of

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the aesthetic judgement necessarily precedes the teleological judgement, for it shows the conditions of possibility a priori of the harmony of our faculties, that is, the ultimate basis of subjectivity that sustains all objectivity. The Critique of Judgement constitutes, thus, the ground for the whole critical edifice, for it is in the reflective judgement (and more precisely in the aesthetical judgement) that we find the form of judgements in general (KU §35). This means that the aesthetic judgement not only delimits the realm of science and morality, but it also unifies the very realm of human experiences, which was characterized for being torn between freedom and nature. The ‘aesthetic’ is not another ‘realm’, but rather the indeterminate basis of human logos, always finite and divided. For Kant, ‘beauty’ is what pleases within the ‘free play of the faculties of our mind’ (Gemüt), it pleases within the very moment of the judgement of taste, that is, it is prior to any form of determination, for it is without concept. To the extent that ‘we may observe purposiveness with respect to form, and trace it in objects [. . .] without resting it on an end’ (KU 220), the problem of meaning (Sinn) is prior to the problem of ‘truth’ or ‘duty’. In other words: it is in his reflections on beauty that Kant grounds the possibility of communication (and hence, of knowledge and praxis). In this way, he sets the basis for contemporary hermeneutics.5 To be sure, the free play (between the imagination and the understanding that originates the feeling of beauty, or between the imagination and reason that originates the feeling of the sublime) defines an experience, which is subjective. But at the same time it claims or aspires to universality (KU §9), that is, to communicability and assent. In other words, it is a hermeneutic experience: an aesthetic judgement is ‘a special faculty of judging according to a rule, but not according to concepts’ (KU 194). The purposiveness without a purpose that is revealed in the aesthetic experience exposes the freedom (although it conforms to laws) of the imagination, which searches for concepts to a given representation. These concepts, however, cannot be given a priori by the understanding nor can they be induced in any way from comparison or generalization of similar experiences. In this sense, the aesthetic is not a privileged form of experience, but rather the very form of our experience in general, and hence, previous to its division into different discursive fields.6 The aesthetic defines the openness of human beings to the world, which, conversely, only presents itself as such in this way.7 In what follows my claim is that the aesthetic in Nietzsche also enables us to reflect on a meaning that is prior to scientific determinations of truth or moral determinations of what is good.8 It provides a means to access the mystery of

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existence; a means that exceeds all concepts that may try to delimitate this very experience, but without renouncing to its communicability –​which is, by the way, what distinguishes the aesthetic from the mystical. The aesthetic represents the search for a concept, a search for a meaning, which is an inevitable search, even though it is doomed to failure. It is for this reason that, from a purely hermeneutical standpoint that is exempt from the aspiration to achieve an absolute or definitive comprehension of reality, we can say that the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘metaphysical’ in Nietzsche are synonymous.9 Indeed, this metaphysics cannot become an apodictic form of knowledge (deduced from concepts that have been presumably previously given by understanding, i.e. episteme), but must be understood in Kantian terms as a reflection (as a thought that tries to produce the concept, which nevertheless always escapes us, i.e. apagoge). In the Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche refers to this form of reflection as the ‘Dionysian’ or ‘tragic’ wisdom, which he opposes to the kind of Apollinian logocentrism initiated by Socrates, or as he calls it ‘Socratic optimism’ (BT 24, KSA 1.153), which underlies the apodictic pretensions of dogmatic metaphysics and its modern heir: science (BT 15–​16). Here too, he associates this Dionysian wisdom with ‘taste’ and ‘style’, which are also two fundamental terms of his writings.10 My claim is, however, that Nietzsche draws on The Critique of Judgement, which is the foundation –​or rather a dis-​foundation –​of the other two Critiques, but at the same time openly rejects what Kant argues in these two (i.e. that there be determining judgements in nature and morals). In other words, what Nietzsche keeps from Kant’s third Critique is only the hermeneutic structure underlying his aesthetics. In this way Nietzsche will also reformulate the meaning of ‘critique’ understood as a bridge over the breach or abyss between discourses (interpretations), a breach that is as impossible to close as it is inevitable to confront.11

4.  The voice of nature Nietzsche does not concentrate so much on aesthetic contemplation, but rather on aesthetic production. For it is here that he finds the true correspondence between man and nature, and our participation in nature’s infinite creativity. That is why he will say that artistic creation (not contemplation) is ‘the truly metaphysical activity of life’ (BT Foreword, KSA 1.24.). On this basis, one might argue that Nietzsche gives preference to ‘artificial’ beauty over ‘natural’ beauty. But Nietzsche does not make such a distinction; in a sense one could say that for

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Nietzsche, artistic beauty is an ‘artifice’ whose law is given by nature. The only distinction that Nietzsche makes in this regard, as we can see in the Untimely Meditations, is the one between the ‘artistic’ (künstlerisch) and the ‘artificial’ (künstlich) (cf. Puche 2010: 68). Culture is always artificial, but it can be so in an artistic way, what we could call a ‘healthy’ way (which in Nietzsche does not imply any kind of ‘naturalism’, for it can take multiple cultural expressions), or in a purely artificial way –​lacking ‘style’ –​which we could see as being sick or ‘unhealthy’.12 Culture is for Nietzsche the ‘unity of artistic style in all the vital manifestations of a people’, to which he opposes the barbaric, that is, the ‘lack of style or the chaotic confusion of all styles’ (UM I 1, KSA 1.163). Style (unity) constitutes for Nietzsche the direction, whereas its absence is what makes the barbaric, which he will later call ‘nihilism’. However, not everybody can be such a medium, such a voice of nature. Only the genius (and not the spectator) is able to fulfil this metaphysical activity and productivity that reunites man to nature. But the notion of the genius and the distinction between contemplating and creating art takes us back to Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Here, Kant defines ‘genius’ as the talent (natural endowment) that gives the rule to art. Since talent, as an innate productive faculty of the artist, belongs itself to nature, we may put it this way: Genius is the innate mental aptitude (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art. (KU 307)

To be sure, genius cannot be learned or taught; it is a natural gift that goes beyond any technique or ability. Kant calls it a ‘superhuman [übermenschliche] art’ (KU 311); for such an art does not and cannot come from man, it requires ‘spirit’ (Geist), it comes from nature and is beyond the human. For Nietzsche, who also opposes contemplation (understood in an originary and pre-​logical sense, i.e. as ‘taste’, which is the distinctive trait of a ‘true’ philosopher) to creation (understood as poíesis, which is the realm of the genius, the true artist), both the artist and the philosopher represent the highest figures; they are the type of human beings in which the species attains its maximum realization. In his early writings Nietzsche also mentions the saint, although not in a Christian sense, but rather in a Greek sense, as phrónimos, as the master of praxis, who always knows what to do. Both –​or the three –​of these figures will eventually converge into the figure of the Übermensch.13 In a way, this ‘total man’ (like Wagner’s ‘total work of art’) will also receive its law from nature, and will create in accordance to this law, such as the Kantian genius (realizing its übermenschliche art). Although, in Nietzsche’s case, it is not just a matter of

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creating works of art, but of creating an entire ‘artistic world’; for it is a process of autopoiésis whose object is the whole of humanity; an autopoiésis through which, as Nietzsche already announces in The Birth of Tragedy: ‘man is not an artist anymore; he has become a work of art’ (BT 1, KSA 1.30).

5.  Return to the Apollinian-Dionysian dualism Now that we have explained the sense and filiation of the aesthetic in Nietzsche and have seen how the aesthetic or rather ‘artistic’ has a much deeper meaning than the mere production of beauty, we can return to the principles, which, according to Nietzsche, define the aesthetic, namely, the Apollinian and the Dionysian. Nietzsche explains the Apollinian, preliminarily, in relation to semblance –​ which he associates to dreams and the oneiric. It represents the realm of the figurative and is also related to sculpture. But the first and most precise (philosophical) characterization he gives is the following: Apollo is the most sublime expression of imperturbable trust in this principle and of the calm sitting-​there of the person trapped within it; one might even describe Apollo as the magnificent divine image (Götterbild) of the principium individuationis, whose gestures and gaze speak to us of all the intense pleasure, wisdom and beauty of ‘semblance’ (BT 1, KSA 1.28)

Apollo represents the principle of individuation, that is, it is the split or separation –​a centrifugal movement –​from the primordial unity. It is for this reason that it is associated with light (the sun), appearances and beauty. Moreover, one could argue that to the extent that he represents the principium individuationis, he also incarnates the principium rationis, for it is only through individuation that things appear as such, and only then can we begin to consider that ‘nothing takes place without sufficient reason’ (Leibniz 1714: §7). Indeed all determinations derive from others; logos is only possible through individuation. This means that the Apollinian is, in the first instance, an ontological principle, and only then can it be also a gnosiological and esthetical principle. It constitutes the realm of semblance, of the appearance of things –​tà ónta –​and therefore delimitates what strictly speaking belongs to ontology: the realm of reality.14 It is, hence, what constitutes the knowledge of things as being separate, it is scientia –​although it should never be taken in absolute terms; it is an interpretation. The Apollinian is in Kantian terms the ‘phenomenal’ (or the ‘representation’ for Schopenhauer). That is to say: it is what is subject to space, time and logos.

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Nietzsche’s account of the Dionysian is much more exhaustive. It is first associated with intoxication –​although Nietzsche goes on to say that it is only thus by analogy (BT 1, KSA 1.28). It is ecstasy, such as manifest in music; it is a non-​ figurative art form. The first explanation of the Dionysian reads as follows: Under the spell of the Dionysian not only is the bond between human beings renewed, but nature, alienated, inimical, or subjugated, celebrates once more her festival of reconciliation with her lost son, humankind. [. . .] Now, hearing this gospel of universal harmony, each person feels himself to be not simply united, reconciled or merged with his neighbour, but quite literally one with him, as if the veil of maya had been torn apart, so that mere shreds of it flutter before the mysterious primordial unity (das Ur-​Eine). Singing and dancing, man expresses his sense of belonging to a higher community (BT 1, KSA 1.29–​30)

Dionysus represents the opposite principle as Apollo. It implies the dissolution –​ a centripetal movement –​and symbolizes the return to the originary or primordial unity, to the Ur-​Eine. From the point of view of the Apollinian, this original unity has negative connotations,15 although Nietzsche associates it with the sublime in contrast to the beautiful (Apollinian). The Dionysian is the Nietzschean term for the undeterminate, that is, that which is not subjected to the principium individuationis nor, consequently, to the principium rationis. The Dionysian is thus ontologically –​although not chronologically –​prior to logos. In this sense it does not respond to logos, which means that we could also call it khaos. The Dionysian is for Nietzsche –​at least in the period of the Birth of Tragedy –​ the name for the Schopenhauerian ‘will’ (which, in its turn, is the result of a rather peculiar way of understanding the Kantian ‘thing in itself ’). It is a blind, irrational, arbitrary will that always wants more and is permanently unsatisfied with its phenomenal (i.e. Apollinian) manifestations, which it constantly destroys in an Heraclitean play as if it were a child (BT 24, KSA 1.153). The Dionysian is the obscure; it is what only shows itself through Apollinian masks, that is, symbols. To be sure, Nietzsche starts from a certain Schopenhauerian dualism, which he also attributes to Kant, as he reads the latter through the former. Schopenhauer takes the Kantian difference between the ‘phenomenon’ and the ‘thing in itself ’ as the difference between two forms of being: the ‘world of appearances’ (representations) and the ‘real world’ (will). (Although, Kant only posits this difference in the context of a transcendental explanation, that is to say, in the context of the distinction between entities and their ‘conditions of possibility’.)16 However, already in the Birth of Tragedy we can perceive an overcoming of this dualism towards what will be Nietzsche’s mature

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philosophy of the ‘will to power’. Here, the will is not one of the ‘poles’ of that initial dualism, and therefore cannot be understood as a type of ‘being’ (ens). On the contrary, everything will be ‘will to power’, so that both the Apollinian and the Dionysian can be seen as moments or states of a same physis, considered from the perspective of its actuality (Apollo) or potentiality (Dionysus). In other words, the world –​the free play between these principles –​will be understood as will to power,17 which is not the ‘thing in itself ’ opposed to the ‘phenomenon’, but rather one and only continuous becoming that can be understood or seen from different points of view. By understanding the Dionysian as the always inexhaustible potentiality of the Apollinian, the Apollinian as the always imperfect and one-​sided realization of the Dionysian, all signs of dualism will disappear, and when Nietzsche believes to be criticizing Kant, he will be in fact coming back to him. The one he definitely abandons, though, is Schopenhauer. In other words, although the Birth of Tragedy still draws on this dualism, it also offers the basis for its overcoming. As Nietzsche puts it: ‘Dionysos speaks the language of Apollo, but finally it is Apollo who speaks that of Dionysos’ (BT 21, KSA 1.140). Both principles need each other mutually (BT 4), and this already eliminates any trace of transcendence and situates them on the same level, so to say. Hence, the importance of Nietzsche’s concept of ‘justice’ (Gerechtgkeit) or equilibrium between both these principles. There is  –​or must be  –​a correspondence, an eternal cycle between the Dionysian and the Apollinian, the result of which will be the world itself. The world as kosmos is, in effect, the result from the proportion and reciprocity between logos and khaos, between what is subject to determination and the indeterminate. ‘Health’ (of the world of culture and of the individual) depends on this ‘justice’ (cf. BT 25, KSA 1.155), whereas the imbalance –​the ‘injustice’ –​is the ‘sickness’ that can affect all these spheres alike. Such imbalance or sickness is what Nietzsche will later call nihilism. It is fundamental to maintain this equilibrium in the knowledge that there can never be a final unity between the two principles or dialectic sublimation (Aufhebung) of their differences (cf. Puche 2012: 15ff.). In relation to Greek culture, Nietzsche says that it was able to reach the reconciliation [Versöhnung] of two opponents, with a precise delineation of the borders that they now had to respect and with a periodic exchange of honorific gifts; fundamentally the chasm [Kluft] had not been bridged (BT 2, KSA 1.32)

Through the ecstatic experience of the Dionysian dissolution, a bond (fraternity) emerges among human beings, who will constitute that ‘higher community’

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mentioned earlier (BT 1).18 It is the reconciliation with an alienated nature, the communion and reunion with her, although in the absence of any kind of teleological transcendence. This reconciliation, however, is not something that took place in the past (so that the modern nostalgia is totally inadequate), but rather something that needs to be created (BT 3):  it is the task of the genius, who acts according to ‘nature’  –​although this ‘nature’ cannot be understood empirically: Nietzsche is not advocating that we go back to the biological. It is not a physical, but rather a metaphysical notion of nature.19 It is the originary nature, prior to all division: the will that can never be experienced on the level of phenomena, and cannot be the subjected of any form of objective knowledge. For the Dionysian is not an ‘object’ in any sense. It can only be attained by what Nietzsche calls ‘tragic’ or ‘Dionysian’ wisdom, which shows us the path to the indeterminate. It is a form of knowledge that does not explain (such as the ‘determining judgement’), but comprehends (as the ‘reflective judgement’) and allows us to penetrate the abysses underlying our existence.

6.  The metaphysical experience of the aesthetic The aforementioned ‘communion’, however, is not agreeable or beautiful. Moreover, although it also gives us pleasure, it is painful –​as could not be otherwise if we bear in mind that its basis is the will, which is a constant yearning. Here we are indeed confronted with a paradox in Nietzsche’s argumentation, due, most likely, to the mismatch between what he intends to express and the Schopenhauerian language he uses to do so: the idea of a ‘painful destruction’ (leidvollen Untergange) (BT 17, KSA 1.109) seems to contradict the idea that all pain allegedly comes from individuation. But if the dissolution, so to say, does not entail an abandonment or rejection of the will, but rather an immersion in it, it could not be otherwise. Nietzsche is indeed taking a distance from Schopenhauer, but the result is rather strange. For, according to Schopenhauer, the aesthetic redeems us from the suffering of existence to the extent that it ‘appeases’ the will and, hence, constitutes a preparation for the ethic, for sanctity and the total annulment of the will. But Nietzsche, more coherently than Schopenhauer, considers that art, being the clearest expression of the will, excites and strengthens the will; its function is therefore not to appease the will, but to enable us to accept it as it is, that is, to help us enjoy that primordial suffering. A  world that is characterized by suffering can only be ‘redeemed’ if it is able to affirm itself and is, hence, able to recognize that it is also inseparable

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from pleasure. That is why, in response to Schopenhauer’s pessimism, Nietzsche advocates for a tragic optimism:  the affirmation both of the suffering and of pleasure of existence. To be sure, this dissolution does not lead to happiness; happiness belongs to the Apollinian and its forms. To pursue happiness is the leitmotiv of what Nietzsche calls the ‘Socratic’, that is to say:  the Apollinian that, avoiding the Dionysian, believes in the total rationalization of existence in order to escape from suffering (BT 13, KSA 1.89). This ‘Socratic optimism’ is in effect the exact opposite of Nietzschean ‘tragic optimism’. One might be tempted to ask: Why should we seek that painful Dionysian dissolution, why strive for the experience of the indeterminate? Why not continue the Socratic endeavour? The answer is, however, simple: it is because of what we might call with Freud the ‘reality principle’ that forces us to go beyond the consoling Apollinian dream-​world, forces us to face the ‘real’ (tragic) sense of existence. This last point brings us back to Kant’s third Critique and the distinction he makes here between the beautiful and the sublime, as it bears similarities with the way in which Nietzsche describes the Apollinian and the Dionysian and the relation between them. For Kant, The beautiful in nature is a question of the form of the object, and this consists in limitation, whereas the sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes, a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-​added thought of its totality (KU 244)

Whereas the similarity between the Apollinian and the beautiful is quite clear, the parallel between the sublime and the Dionysian perhaps needs further clarification.20 Kant distinguishes two notions of the sublime: the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime. The first is ‘absolutely great. But to be great and to be a magnitude are entirely different concepts (magnitudo and quantitas)’ (KU 248). ‘Absolutely great’, says Kant, is that which is great ‘beyond all comparison’ (KU 248), so that what produces delight is not the object itself, but the way in which it affects the imagination. The sublime is beyond all measure, it is a greatness comparable to itself alone. Hence it comes that the sublime is not to be looked for in the things of nature, but only in our own ideas. [. . .] Nothing, therefore, which can be an object of the senses is to be termed sublime. (KU 250)

The sublime is not ‘some-​thing’, an object that we may find among us, but rather a phenomenon that awakens in us the idea of an absolute greatness, of an

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incomparable magnitude, unknowable, but apprehensible as such by our imagination; thinkable, although not through concepts.21 In sum: ‘The mere thought of the sublime evidences a faculty of the mind that transcends every standard of the senses’ (KU 250). This ‘transcendence’ does not mean to say a faculty or capacity to know the transcendent, but a capacity to glimpse the indeterminate, that is, that which lacks all forms and exceeds all representation. In this way, this faculty ‘widens’ our way of thinking. It is a process that arouses pleasure, but a different form of pleasure than the one given by beauty, for it also brings displeasure (Unlust) with it (KU 257) as it reminds us of the limitations of theoretical reason (governed by the understanding and its categories). On the dynamically sublime, Kant writes: Power [Macht] is a capacity [Vermögen] that is superior to great hindrances. It is called violence [Gewalt] when it is superior also to the resistance of that which possesses power. Nature, considered in an aesthetic judgement as power, that exerts no violence upon us is dynamically-​sublime. If we are to judge nature as dynamically sublime, it must be represented as arousing fear (KU 260)

And then he adds that provided our own position is secure, their aspect is all the more attractive for its fearfulness; and we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the forces of the soul [Seelenstärke] above the height of vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence [Allgewalt] of nature. (KU 261) In this way external nature is not aesthetically judged as sublime in so far as it arouses fear, but rather because it summons our power [Kraft] (one not of nature) to regard as small those things of which we are inclined to be solicitous (worldly goods, health, and life) [. . .] (KU 262).

Thus, what incites fear in the dynamically sublime is at the same time attractive for us, because it is a force [Gewalt] that reason exercises over sensibility with a view to extending it to the requirements of its own realm (the practical) and letting it look out beyond itself into the infinite, which is an abyss [Abgrund] for it. (KU 265)22

Kant concludes his ‘General Remark upon the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgements’ by arguing that the ‘delight in the sublime in nature is only negative (whereas that in the beautiful is positive)’ (KU 269). It is a satisfaction or

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pleasure that is intertwined with fear, such as we find in the Dionysian, namely, the fear of the force of nature, which we nevertheless find strength to resist as it ‘challenges our own strength’ (KU 264) and makes us relativize the daily, factual (one could say Apollinian) world, beyond which an abyss opens up. In Kant, what pleases is the free play of the faculties of the mind. But, while the beautiful ‘only’ pleases within the boundaries (the forms) of that free play, the sublime surpasses it, it exceeds those very faculties provoking ‘pain’ and ‘fear’. Both terms, pain or un-​pleasure (Unlust) and fear, remind us of the terms Nietzsche uses to refer to the Dionysian. In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche often refers to a primordial pain (Urschmerz), an aesthetic pain, which is the essence of the tragic, that is, of the Dionysian. Such pain, united with the ‘negation’ of the world of appearances and the fleeing ‘back into the womb of the one’ (or ‘return to home and origin’) is both irresistible and redeeming (cf. Guervós 2004: 272). In the end, this is what constitutes the phenomenon of katharsis –​a phenomenon that, according to Nietzsche, has been misinterpreted and which he calls ‘aesthetic play’ (BT 22, KSA 1.142). What is at stake in such an experience is the access to the indeterminate, the glimpsing of the abyss, which we can never access through the beautiful. For the beautiful does not enable us to surpass the realm of forms. Beauty as well as the aspiration for pleasure and happiness lies in the Apollinian, in the determinate, whereas the sublime presupposes the experience of the Dionysian (the ecstasy), the indeterminate. Ultimately, the indeterminate redeems the world by presenting it as a ‘play’; a play that allows for certain form of freedom, even if it turns out to be terrible.23 As Nietzsche says, ‘The Apolline Greek, too, felt the effect aroused by the Dionysian to be “Titanic” and “barbaric” ’, for, from the Apollinian point of view he could not recognize that his entire existence, with all its beauty and moderation, rested on a hidden ground of suffering and knowledge [. . .] Excess revealed itself as the truth; contradiction, bliss born of pain, spoke of itself from out of the heart of nature. (BT 4, KSA 1.40–​1)

To conclude I would like to emphasize that it is not my intention here to sustain that Nietzsche said the same as Kant, but rather that both Kant and Nietzsche thought, each of them in their own way, about the same ‘thing’. What I  have tried to analyse here are the hidden or concealed connections between the two authors that in a way reveal what is essential to their thoughts (beyond what they explicitly said or thought to have said). All genuine thinkers ‘deterritorize’ the concepts of their predecessors, as Deleuze would put it; they reorganize them

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into a new constellation that creates new meanings, both theoretically and practically. That is what Nietzsche did with his predecessors, Kant being one of the most influential ones, but also most invisible or most difficult to trace.

Notes 1. Although this may seem to go against the spirit of Nietzsche’s thought, in what follows I distinguish between Nietzsche’s ‘metaphysics’ from the ‘dogmatic metaphysics’ he criticizes for confusing what belongs to the world with something transcendent. Thus, I will refer to ‘metaphysics’ as any discourse about the world understood in Heideggerian terms as an ‘openness of meaning’, whereas I will refer to ‘ontology’ as the realm of the objects we find in the world. Such a world is, in Nietzsche’s case, a space of immanence. 2. BT 5 shows how this is Nietzsche’s explicit intention. See also Vattimo (1992: 32ff.). 3. For how Nietzsche introduces laughter in contrast to the transcendent consolation of the Romantics, see Deleuze (2006: 193–​4). 4. See Hill (2003), Quesada (1988) and Himmelmann (2005). 5. Cf. KU §9, §22, §57 and §60. 6. On the aesthetic judgement as basis for all human experience, see Caygill (1989: 320ff.). 7. The ‘world’ is what, to put it in Kantian terms, the understanding cannot apprehend and in which reason will never see its purpose fully realized. To prove the possibility of a ‘correspondence’ between both faculties is the purpose of the third Critique. 8. The very capacity to make a judgement, that is, to subsume a particular case under a concept that is not given a priori nor extracted from the very particular case is what Nietzsche will later call to evaluate. ‘Value’ is in a way what we could call a hermeneutical transcendental. Or in Wittgenstein’s terms: the aesthetic (for Kant and Nietzsche) is not merely another language-​game, nor is it a superior game (as the Romantics thought), but the very essence of language prior to its divisions in different systems of rules. To be sure, this is not possible for Wittgenstein, but it is for Kant and, as we shall see, for Nietzsche too. It is also in this sense that we can talk about an ontology (which is not the case for Wittgenstein). 9. The fact that Nietzsche himself only conceived of metaphysics as a thought sub specie aeterni is less important than to understand the fundament of his critique. 10. See, for instance: GS 39, KSA 3.407, where Nietzsche says that ‘powerful, influential’ individuals, who are able to change their taste, do so because ‘[t]‌heir aesthetic and moral judgements’ respond to the ‘ “subtlest tones” of their physis’. In other words, ‘taste’ refers us to a pre-​logical (pre-​Apollinian) nature.

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11. It is important to note here the different uses in Nietzsche’s BT of Kluft and Abgrund. The ‘breach’ between Apollo and Dionysus is described by Nietzsche always in terms of a chasm (Kluft) (cf. BT 2 and 7), such as Kant refers to the abyss between the realms of nature and freedom. But, at the same time, Dionysus is described as ‘the deepest abyss of being’ (BT 5, KSA 1.44; see also BT 9, 14 and 15). Opposed to the ‘ground’ (Grund) provided by the Apollinian (the principium rationis) there is the Dionysian ‘lack of ground’ (Ab-​grund), which is the chaotic basis for all rationality. Nietzsche uses Schopenhauer’s image of the fragile boat in the middle of a Dionysian storm to illustrate this (BT 4, KSA 1.39–​40). 12. Cf. Schiller’s (2004: 43) influence, for whom ‘this antagonism of powers is the great instrument of culture, but only the instrument, for as long as it continues, we are only on the way towards culture’. That is why, for Schiller this antagonism must be overcome: ‘we must be at liberty to restore by means of a higher Art this wholeness in our nature which Art has destroyed’ (Schiller 2004: 45). 13. The figure of the philosopher vis à vis the Übermensch is ambiguous. Although the philosopher is according to Nietzsche a creator of new values, he is foremost a destructor of values (he is the ‘lion’), preparing the path for the Übermensch (the ‘child’). In any case, the figure of the genius as well as the problem of the aesthetic in general do not disappear in Nietzsche’s mature thought: they rather constitute the basis of his thoughts. 14. However, when we consider the play between the Apollinian and the Dionysian, we enter a different level of reflection: it is a reflection of totality, of the world –​a concept which is ungraspable for logos –​that is to say: we enter the terrain of metaphysics (which Nietzsche sees from an aesthetic point of view). 15. Nietzsche talks about the ‘horror [Grausen]’ it produces (BT 1, KSA 1.28). 16. According to Kant, thus, although we can certainly think of things ‘in themselves’, we cannot know them beyond the possibilities given by those very conditions. 17. ‘And do you also know what “the world” is to me? Should I show it to you in my mirror? This world: an immensity of strength [ein Ungeheuer von Kraft], without beginning, without end, a fix, brazen magnitude of strength, which will not become bigger or smaller, which does not consume itself, but only transforms itself [. . .] as a play of strengths and wave-​strengths the world is one and “many” at the same time, here augmenting and diminishing there at the same time, a sea of raging and agitated strengths, eternally transforming themselves [. . .] –​: this my Dionysian world of eternal-​self-​creation [Ewig-​sich-​selber-​Schaffens], of eternal-​ self-​destruction, this secret-​world of double lusts, this my beyond good and evil, without target [Ziel], lest there be a target in the happiness of the circle, without a will, lest a ring towards itself should have a good will, –​do you want a name for this world? An answer [solution] to all its riddles? A light also for you, the most concealed, the strongest, the boldest, the most nocturnal? –​This world is the will to

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power –​and nothing else! And you are also that will to power –​and nothing else!’ (NL 1885 38[12], KSA 11.610–​11). One could compare this idea of community with Kant’s notion of sensus communis and the underlying understanding of humanity. Once again: Apollo and Dionysus are not concepts that one could gain through deduction or induction of any kind. They are, to put it in Kantian terms, concepts of reflection, thus enabling the only possible form of metaphysics. In fact, Nietzsche talks about a ‘metaphysical conjecture’ (BT 4, KSA 1.38). As has been already been pointed out by Nuno Nabais (2006: 10), in order to understand Nietzsche’s text within the context of a ‘theory of the tragic’, one needs to situate it in relation to the Kantian concept of the sublime: ‘This is because the true model for the fundamental Dionysian/​Apollinian theory is the difference between the sublime and the beautiful’. Nabais even goes on to argue that the reason why this connection has been neglected has to do with a certain ‘repressed Kantianism’ symptomatic of Nietzsche’s postmodern heirs (9). Although, this absence can also be justified by the fact that Nietzsche does not refer explicitly to the Kantian sublime. In any case, Nabais stresses the difficulty in comparing the beautiful/​sublime with the Apollinian/​tragic and asks whether the same relation can be established between the two pairs of concepts. We believe that this chapter, which follows different paths than Nabais, may add some light to these issues. For Kant’s distinction between ‘comprehension’ and ‘apprehension’, see KU §26. In a way these passages prefigure the Nietzschean Dionysian understood as will-​to-​ power. However according to Kant the sublime is not ‘in’ nature, but in us, for it is a feeling produced by the free play of reason and the imagination. For Nietzsche, in contrast, the Dionysian is nature itself. That ‘free play’ does not take place in the faculties of the mind, but within or among the (metaphysical) principles that constitute the world. Here lies the main difference between the Kantian beautiful/​ sublime (which are aesthetic feelings) and the Nietzschean Apollinian/​Dionysian (which are ontological principles, and as such prior to the former). The latter go beyond the mere comprehension of the real. The beautiful is reinterpreted by Nietzsche as the appearance, the dream of being, whereas the sublime is reinterpreted as the surpassing, the intoxication of being. ‘If the beautiful rests upon a dream of being, the sublime rests upon an intoxication [Rausche] of being [. . .] The beautiful and light, the sublime and darkness’ (NL 1870–​1 7[46], KSA 7.149). The Dionysian is a much more profound and originary comprehension of the world than the Apollinian, but it needs the latter in order to symbolize the ineffable. There is no world without the two. Lyotard (1988: 14–​15) makes a similar distinction between the ‘modern’ and the ‘postmodern’ when he argues that: ‘the modern aesthetic is an aesthetic of the sublime. [. . .] it is nostalgic; it allows the unpresentable to be invoked only

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David Puche Díaz as absent content’ and therefore still seeks for a certain form of pleasure or consolation. The postmodern, in contrast, is ‘that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste allowing for a common experience of nostalgia of the impossible’.

References Cacciari, M. (1994), Desde Nietzsche. Tiempo, arte, política, Buenos Aires: Biblos. Caygill, H. (1989), The Art of Judgement, Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Deleuze, G. (2006 [1962]), Nietzsche and Philosophy, New York: Columbia Classics. Hill, R. K. (2003), Nietzsche’s Critiques. The Kantian Foundations of His Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Himmelmann, B. (ed.) (2005), Kant und Nietzsche im Widerstreit, Berlin/​ New York: Walter de Gruyter. Leibniz, G. W. (1989 [1714]), ‘Principles of Nature and of Grace, Based on Reason’, in R. Ariew and D. Garber (eds), G.W. Leibniz. Philosophical Essays, 206–​13, Indiana/​ Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Lyotard, J.-​F. (1992 [1988]), The Postmodern Explained. Correspondance 1982–​1985, Minneapolis/​London: University of Minnesota Press. Nabais, N. (2006), Nietzsche and the Metaphysics of the Tragic, London: Continuum. Puche, D. (2010), La ontología de la historia de Nietzsche, Madrid: UCM. Puche, D. (2012), En torno al concepto de ‘naturaleza humana’ en Nietzsche, Logos vol. 45: 269–​92. Quesada, J. (1988), Un pensamiento intempestivo. Ontología, estética y política en F. Nietzsche, Barcelona: Anthropos. Santiago Guervós, L. E. de (2004), Arte y poder. Aproximación a la estética de Nietzsche, Madrid: Trotta. Schiller, F. (2004 [1794]), On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, trans. R. Snell, New York: Dover Publications. Vattimo, G. (1992), Más allá del sujeto. Nietzsche, Heidegger y la hermenéutica, Barcelona: Paidós.

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Aesthetic Quantity, Aesthetic Acts and Willed Necessity in Nietzsche’s Engagement with Kant’s Critique of Judgement Elaine P. Miller

1.  Introduction Friedrich Nietzsche’s early interest in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement, and in particular Kant’s ‘Critique of Teleological Judgement’, has been documented quite widely.1 Most commentary focuses on Nietzsche’s unfinished dissertation project on teleology and the organism in Kant. In this chapter I propose to look at Nietzsche’s reception of the other part of Kant’s third Critique, namely, the ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgement’. Nietzsche’s remarks on Kant’s aesthetics are scattered and few, so I will consider them in a broader context that takes into account and organizes them according to the four logical moments of Kant’s discussion of aesthetic judgement, namely, quality, quantity, relation and modality. I will argue that while Nietzsche himself almost completely dismissed Kant’s aesthetics as antithetical to his own, their points of view on beauty and sublimity and the larger implications of these claims for philosophy actually strike some common chords. This chapter will concentrate on elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy that show a surprising affinity with Kant’s account of judgements of beauty, as well as, to a lesser extent, that of judgements of the sublime. The striking thing about Nietzsche’s use of concepts from Kant’s aesthetics is that they only rarely occur in discussions of art specifically. Only in his critique of Kant’s claim that the aesthetic judgement must be disinterested does Nietzsche explicitly address Kant’s aesthetics in relation to artworks and artists, and he does so in order to repudiate Kant. However, I will argue that because Nietzsche tends to conflate his critique of Kant’s teleological judgement with his

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commentary on Kant’s purposiveness without a purpose, misunderstanding the precise meaning of the latter term, their views appear to differ more widely than is actually the case. It is rather in other, non-​art related, but nonetheless broadly ‘aesthetic’ discussions that the influence of Kant’s aesthetics on Nietzsche’s philosophy can be more clearly discerned. Therefore, I will be understanding ‘aesthetics’ to refer not only to the creation or appreciation of the beauty of artworks and of nature, but also to the partitioning of the phenomenal world in terms of conceptual categories, a process Nietzsche understands to be historical and contingent, and to the possibility of shifting these conceptual boundaries, allowing for the uncovering of a new way of conceiving, and of willing, existence. I will proceed by examining Kant’s four moments of aesthetic judgement as outlined in the Critique of Judgement, relating each to Nietzsche’s explicit comments and critique, but also to themes in Nietzsche’s original philosophy that can be understood as drawn from or broadly reflective of Kantian aesthetic judgement. I will focus on the themes of aesthetic quantity, willed necessity and purposiveness without a purpose as Kantian themes that appear transformed in Nietzsche’s mature philosophy. But first a word about Kant’s conception of imagination and judgement as they change from the first Critique to the third. Both imagination and judgement operate as mediating faculties or powers. As is well known, the imagination, for Kant, has a kind of intermediary status between sensibility and understanding. When a person imagines an object, either the object was but is no longer present, or its presence lies in the future, or it is entirely fantasized. Kant distinguishes between human reproductive imagination, which is empirical or recollective, and productive imagination, which, in its ordered and spontaneous form makes synthesis in general possible in a way that we are almost unaware of. In its poetic form, productive imagination does not merely accord with the laws of the understanding but itself gives rise to and applies original ‘laws’ or universals, the unity of which evokes pleasure. The faculty of judgement, as Kant articulates in the Preface to the Critique of Judgement, forms a ‘middle term’ between understanding and reason, mediating between them as well as encompassing them both. He defines ‘judgement’ in general as ‘the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal’ (KU 179). In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant describes the understanding as a ‘faculty of judgement’, and reason, too, operates by subsuming particulars under universals; the definition of judgement Kant gives in the third Critique. The reproductive imagination shapes intuitions such that they are capable of

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being subsumed under the categories of the understanding, synthesizing the concepts of the understanding with a manifold in intuition. If the universal (the rule, principle, law) is given in this way, ‘then judgement, which subsumes the particular under it, is determinative’. If ‘only the particular is given and judgement has to find the universal for it’, by contrast, then the judgement is ‘merely reflective’ (KU 179). The productive imagination thus presents a singularity that searches for a universal, resulting in a judgement that is reflective in the sense of making one’s own representations explicitly the objects of one’s indeterminate pleasure. Kant explains this reflection as the activity of the power of judgement in providing its own concept, not an act that will lead to cognition, but rather one which can ‘serve as a rule for the power of judgement itself ’. Judgements of beauty do not contribute anything to our cognition of objects, but nonetheless ‘prove’ a direct relation of judgement to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure ‘according to some a priori principle’ (KU 169). Although judgement has no domain over which it legislates, Kant nonetheless postulates that it has a territory of its own (KU 176). All of the soul’s powers, he argues, can be reduced to three that cannot be derived further from a common basis:  (1)  the cognitive power according to which we make determinate theoretical judgements that give rise to knowledge of appearances; (2) the power of desire or the orientation of the will towards its objects; and (3) the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, which ‘lies between the other two’ (KU 178). In the introduction to the Critique of Judgement Kant assumes provisionally that judgement also contains an a priori principle of its own that will allow it to effect a transition from the pure cognitive power to the domain of the concept of freedom, which otherwise would remain separated from each other by a large ‘gulf ’ (KU 175–​6). In the ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgement’, again, as is well known, Kant describes two types of aesthetic judgements, judgements of beauty and judgements of sublimity, only one of which (judgements of beauty, or judgements of ‘taste’) really properly performs this mediating function. Judgements of sublimity cannot be deduced in the same way because only judgements of beauty are concerned with the form of an object, even if only the apprehension of this form in nature rather than its real existence. Judgements of sublimity are only improperly attributed to nature, since in such claims, according to Kant, we are really making a judgement about our own thinking. Commentators have found elements of Kant’s theory of the judgement of taste (beauty) in Nietzsche’s articulation of the Apollinian aesthetic force, and of Kant’s judgement of the sublime in Nietzsche’s description of the Dionysian aesthetic force of nature.2 Although

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I agree that this parallel can be drawn, I will argue that elements of both types of aesthetic judgement can be found scattered over all major areas of Nietzsche’s philosophy. In considering proximities between Kant’s and Nietzsche’s aesthetics, I will proceed by examining in turn each of Kant’s four logical moments of judgement, namely, quality, quantity, relation and modality.3 Since, as Kant specifies, the aesthetic judgement is a judgement, albeit a new form of judgement in that it is reflective rather than determinative, he resolves that the best way of examining it would be to abstract all content from it, and look at its mere form. To proceed in this way is to acknowledge that the influence of Kant on Nietzsche’s aesthetics and his philosophy in general is piecemeal; these four moments show up in disparate parts of Nietzsche’s work over time, not as part of a unified aesthetic theory. Indeed, my concern in discussing the effects of Kant’s Critique of Judgement on Nietzsche is not so much with trying to accord Nietzsche’s explicit discussions of beauty (or sublimity) with Kant’s but to show that crucial concepts of Nietzsche’s philosophy overall were fundamentally shaped by an engagement with Kant. I  will argue that Nietzsche’s critique of Kant, which is often foregrounded when one considers their aesthetics together, primarily disputed Kant’s analysis of the moment of quality in aesthetic judgements, and in a way that reflects a basic misunderstanding of what Kant meant by disinterestedness. I argue that the moments of quantity, relation and modality, by contrast, fundamentally influenced Nietzsche’s articulation of the metaphorical origin of concepts, aesthetic acts and the eternal recurrence, ideas that can be traced to Kant’s account of aesthetic quantity, purposiveness without a purpose and the necessity implied by aesthetic judgements.

2.  Moments of aesthetic judgement in Kant and Nietzsche 2.1  Quality –​life and communicability The quality of an aesthetic judgement lies in its being simultaneously subjective and disinterested. By ‘subjective’ Kant means that in a judgement of taste rather than (1) using our understanding to refer the presentation of the object in such a way as to give rise to cognition, we (2) use our imagination to refer the presentation to the subject and her feeling of pleasure or displeasure. Option 1 would be what Kant calls ‘objective’, and option 2 ‘subjective’. Strictly speaking, in Kant’s view, even cognition that gives rise to knowledge is grounded in the subject’s

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cognitive capacities, to which appearances conform and which constitute the object’s universality and determinability. What Kant calls a subjective reference here, by contrast, is one that refers to the feeling of undetermined pleasure (or displeasure) within the subject in response to an external presentation, one which designates nothing whatsoever in the object as constituted by the subject. This ‘pleasure’ is a feeling of ‘pure life’, or the quickening or harmonious play of the cognitive powers (KU 205), a feeling that contributes nothing to cognition but allows the mind to become conscious of its own state, the state that is most conducive to making judgements in general (KU 238–​9). Now this feeling of life is not at all alien to Nietzsche’s discussion of aesthetic judgement. In The Birth of Tragedy and in Twilight of the Idols he writes of the aesthetic phenomenon as an overflowing of the feeling of life. Tragedy ‘sits in the midst of ’ a ‘superabundance of life’ (BT 20, KSA 1.132). What Nietzsche appears to have objected to in Kant was the characterization of this feeling of pure life as a pleasure that is disinterested, an uninteressiertes Wohlgefallen (KU 205; GM III 104, KSA 5.347). Nietzsche discusses disinterestedness explicitly in a passage from the third essay of The Genealogy of Morals, ‘What Is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?’, where he derides Kant’s claim that the judgement of taste is one that is devoid of all interest (ohne alle Interesse). The Kantian spectator, on Nietzsche’s view, is an ascetic, unable to access ‘the most personal intense experiences, desires, surprises, and delight in the realm of the beautiful’ (GM III 6, KSA 5.347). Kant, however, explicitly defines ‘interest’ quite narrowly as ‘the liking we connect with the presentation of an object’s existence’, rather than as the exclusion of desire (KU 204). Now, it is true that the liking connected with the presentation of an object’s existence, or interest, does indicate its availability for desire understood as the grasping power of the will (my liking of a beautiful apple is not disinterested if it will not be satisfied by a mere contemplation of the apple at a distance), but it does not follow that a disinterested judgement will preclude intensity or delight. In the Critique of Practical Reason, indeed, Kant defines ‘life’ as ‘the ability of a being to act according to laws of the power of desire’ (KpV 9, n), so a feeling of ‘pure life’ –​such as the Kantian aesthetic judgement arouses –​devoid of desire is a contradiction in terms. What a disinterested judgement implies is that the disinterested spectator does not seek to consume its object (such as a painting by Raphael or a Beethoven symphony), but lingers in contemplating it. At the same time, this contemplation is always active, in contrast to the passive contemplation of something charming (like a photo of adorable kittens) that repeatedly draws our attention to it but does not arouse our cognitive powers (KU 222).

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We might be able to derive a version of disinterestedness that draws Kant and Nietzsche closer together by looking to Martin Heidegger’s lecture course on Nietzsche, The Will to Power as Art. Heidegger writes that Nietzsche misunderstands Kant’s aesthetics, and in particular the idea of disinterested judgement, because he was introduced to Kant’s Critique of Judgement through his reading of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer interpreted ‘disinterestedness’ to mean the act of refusing to invest our will at all. Nietzsche interpreted the aesthetic state, in direct contrast to Schopenhauer’s interpretation of Kant, as rapture (Rausch). As Heidegger (1984: 109) points out, the meaning of ‘interest’ from which Kant wanted to separate aesthetic judgement had the meaning of ‘wanting to have [something] for oneself as a possession, to have disposition and control over it’. Heidegger argues that instead of signifying that every essential relation to the object in question is lost or suppressed, the appellation ‘disinterested’ signals that ‘for the first time the object comes to the fore as pure object’ and ‘such coming forward into appearance is beautiful’ (110). Kant’s primary reason for characterizing judgements of beauty as disinterested lies in his need to distinguish them both from judgements of agreeableness and judgements of the good. The distinctiveness of a judgement of beauty lies in its voice and its freedom (KU 215–​16). The voice of an aesthetic judgement is a universal voice, but not one that determines the hearer, in the way that a moral claim would. The practical way in which this plays out is that, unlike a moral claim, which obligates everyone equally, not everyone will agree on what is beautiful, but that nevertheless a judgement of beauty lays claim to the agreement of everyone, as opposed to a private sensation (such as ‘I like chocolate’) that we do not expect any one else to share. Kant in fact derives the freedom of a judgement of beauty from the fact that we are not compelled to give our approval by any interest, so that in this way disinterestedness is inextricably linked not to ‘impersonality’ (Unpersönlichkeit), as Nietzsche describes it (GM III 6, KSA 5.346), but to an absence of external constraint. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra berates the one who wants to ‘perceive immaculately’, secretly loving the earth and the earthly, but with shame in his love: Your spirit has been persuaded to despise the earthly; but your entrails have not been persuaded, and they are what is strongest in you. And now your spirit is ashamed at having given in to your entrails, and, to hide from its shame, it sneaks on furtive and lying paths (Z II Knowledge, KSA 4.157)

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The equation of this path of immaculate perception with the judgement of beauty, and with the spectator who will touch the earth only with his eyes, contemplating and baptizing the object of its cowardly glances with the name ‘beautiful’, suggests strongly that Nietzsche is referring to Kant’s critique of aesthetic judgement here. Beauty, Zarathustra proclaims, lies ‘where I must will with all my will, where I want to love and perish that an image may not remain a mere image’. The one who perceived immaculately (the word has the double sense of purity and sterility) will never give birth, even if it ‘lies broad and pregnant on the horizon’ (Z II Knowledge, KSA 4.158). In The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche goes on to specify that his main objection to Kant’s aesthetics lies in the fact that Kant, like all philosophers, instead of envisaging the aesthetic problem from the point of view of the artist (the creator), considered art and the beautiful purely from that of the ‘spectator’, and unconsciously introduced the ‘spectator’ into the concept ‘beautiful’ (GM III 6, KSA 5.346)

He contrasts Kant’s articulation of the aesthetic judgement’s quality as disinterested to Stendhal’s definition of beauty as the ‘promise of happiness’, which Nietzsche interprets as ‘arousing the will and interestedness’ (GM III 6, KSA 5.347). Nietzsche is correct in aligning Kant’s aesthetics with the perspective of the spectator, aside from a few comments on genius in the Critique of Judgement. Hannah Arendt (1992) argues that Kant’s assumption that it is only the spectator who is capable of being impartial and of seeing the whole rather than just the part she plays, is, as Arendt articulates it, ‘one of the oldest, most decisive notions of philosophy’. The claim to the superiority of the contemplative life is grounded on the belief that only the one who restrains herself from acting will have truth revealed to her (55). Kant’s aesthetics specifies that the artist who succeeds will be the one who has the power to make her ideas understood to others (63). It is this orientation of the artwork towards others and not its abdication of the will that gives the aesthetic judgement its disinterested quality. For Nietzsche, this idealization is objectionable, but he nonetheless also links the success of the artwork to its communicability and the porosity of boundaries that it induces among those who are enraptured by it psychologically and perceptually (BT 1, KSA 1.29–​30, TI Skirmishes 10, KSA 6.117). In The Birth of Tragedy he writes that the aesthetic phenomenon, and in particular Dionysian excitement, ‘is capable of communicating’ to a mass of people (BT 8, KSA 1.61), and in the Twilight of the Idols, the Dionysian artist ‘possesses the art of communication

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to the highest degree’ (TI Skirmishes 10, KSA 6.118). In understanding the misplaced nature of Nietzsche’s critique of the disinterested quality of Kant’s aesthetic judgement, and by remarking that both Kant and Nietzsche argue that aesthetic judgement gives rise to a feeling of life and an overabundance of communicability, then, we can begin to see the common themes emerging among their views of aesthetic phenomena, even though they approach the question from differing, indeed, opposing, perspectives. For the spectator, beauty remains at a distance in order to let it be untouched by personal biases. For the Dionysian artist, all vestiges of individuation are destroyed in expressing aesthetic force.

2.2 Quantity As mentioned earlier, the judgement of beauty, for Kant, is subjective. However, at the same time it is universal, and this marks its distinctive quantity. Disinterestedness grounds the possibility of calling the judgement of beauty universal, for such a judgement, unlike a judgement of agreeableness, resembles a logical judgement insofar as we may judge it to be valid for everyone if the one who judges has successfully separated herself from her biases or inclinations. Unlike a determinately conceptual judgement, however, the aesthetic judgement is based on no (determinate) concept but rather on conceptualizability in general (KU 238–​9), a capacity which all humans share, and this capacity grounds its claim to subjective universality. Kant calls this type of quantity an aesthetic quantity, and this quantity distinguishes the claim articulated by the universal voice. The aesthetic judgement is a singular claim that nonetheless addresses the public: ‘Hence all that is postulated is the possibility of a judgement that is aesthetic and yet can be considered valid for everyone’ (KU 216). Subjective universality is thus only an idea, and never an empirical reality. This general definition of aesthetic quantity will be narrowed down in Kant’s discussion of the sublime aesthetic judgement, which we will specify as relating to Nietzsche’s philosophy. At the same time that it is universal, a judgement of beauty is always of necessity singular. Kant insists that we may call a singular flower beautiful and thereby make a judgement of taste, but in calling, for example, flowers or a kind of flower in general beautiful, we make a judgement that is logical rather than aesthetic, or, more accurately, that is logical in such a way that it is based upon an aesthetic judgement (KU 215). Subsequently one may claim that beauty is a property of a certain kind of flower, such as a rose, but one does this in a different manner than one would in claiming that the rose is a plant of a particular genus and

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species. This is because the general claim that roses are beautiful can be made only by abstracting from a previous aesthetic quality and extending it to all flowers of this type, making a subjective quality appear to be objective. Kant returns to the notion of an aesthetic quantity in discussing the mathematical sublime, but in a narrower sense. In judgements of the mathematical sublime, the imagination is overpowered by an attempt to take in a magnitude that is absolutely large. Kant explains that to call something absolutely large is to say that it is large beyond all comparison. But, he muses, what does it mean to say that something is large, medium-​sized or small? Certainly the meaning of such phrases is relative to a degree, and differs from the articulation of a specific magnitude, which can be determined without comparing the object to anything else (KU 248). A term such as ‘large’ or ‘medium-​sized’ is too general and cannot refer to a pure concept of the understanding, but it is not a rational idea either, for there is nothing cognitive about it at all, in Kant’s view. Furthermore, such a term equally does not articulate an intuition of sense. Therefore, Kant concludes, such a term must ‘stand in for the concept that belongs to the power of judgement’ (KU 248). To judge magnitude, one needs something else, that is, a unit of magnitude, as its measure. It is true that to get determinate concepts of the magnitude of any given thing we use numbers, and ‘to that extent all logical estimation of magnitude is mathematical’. However, Kant goes on, we cannot estimate the measure of the unit by which we measure mathematically, because to do so we would further need another independent unit by which to measure that unit, and so on ad infinitum. Ultimately, then, we could have no first or basic measure, and therefore no determinate concept of any given magnitude at all. Hence, the estimation of the magnitude of the basic measure ‘must consist merely in our being able to take it in directly in one intuition and to use it, by means of the imagination, for exhibiting numerical concepts’. This claim has the interesting result that numbers, those most formal and abstract of concepts, are based on images, or the power of the imagination. In fact, Kant goes on, ‘all estimation of the magnitude of objects of nature is ultimately aesthetic (i.e., determined subjectively rather than objectively)’ (KU 251; my emphasis). The consideration of the striking claim that logical judgements are based upon aesthetic ones unexpectedly recalls Nietzsche’s analysis of the metaphorical origin of all concepts. In On Truth and Lies in a Extramoral Sense, Nietzsche discusses the impossibility of ‘measuring’ the objective logically through the subjective. In order to make the translation from subjective apprehension to objective comprehension, one must make a kind of leap:

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For between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue –​for which there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force (TL 1, KSA 1.884)

I argue that Nietzsche is following a conceptual thread here that originates out of Kant’s third Critique but was probably inherited through a reading of F. A. Lange and other neo-​Kantians. Despite Nietzsche’s vehement rhetoric in this piece, what he is fundamentally arguing is that formal concepts have an aesthetic or metaphorical origin. Now of course Nietzsche goes much further than Kant, for whom, although the original concept of a number or a standard unit of measurement might be conventional or aesthetic, certainly not all concepts were fundamentally so since they are based on pure categories of the understanding. However, as such, the categories still translate things as they are in themselves (noumena) into appearances (phenomena) that the human mind is capable of receiving, phenomena shaped by and through the categories of the human understanding and the human forms of intuition of space and time. Nietzsche again agrees: We are not acquainted with [a law of nature] in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature –​which, in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence (TL 1, KSA 1.885)

In a Kantian manner, Nietzsche argues that [a]‌ll that we actually know about these laws of nature is what we ourselves bring to them–​time and space, and therefore relationships of succession and number (TL 1, KSA 1.885)

He even refers to this claim as a form of idealism, and he draws attention in particular to the constitution of number, the original aesthetic quantity: But everything marvelous about the laws of nature, everything that quite astonishes us therein and seems to demand explanation, everything that might lead us to distrust idealism: all this is completely and solely contained within the mathematical strictness and inviolability of our representations of time and space. But we produce these representations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins. If we are forced to comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things we actually

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comprehend nothing but these forms. For they must all bear within themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number which is most astonishing in things. All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which we bring to things (TL 1, KSA 1.885–​6)

This claim differs in degree, but not in kind, from Kant’s statement that objects conform to our cognition, rather than our cognition conforming to objects. For ‘understanding has its rule, a rule that I must presuppose within me even before objects are given to me’ (KU B xvii). If Kant and Nietzsche share this conviction that understanding’s rules shape the constitution of objects, how can we understand beauty, which for both is a singular event that cannot be generalized or repeated without destroying its specific quality? The answer to this question, I argue, can be found in the concept of aesthetic quantity that Kant and Nietzsche both put forward. As Kant said regarding the move from understanding a singular flower as beautiful to predicating the property ‘beautiful’ of all flowers of a given type, what we have is a transformation of an aesthetic judgement into a logical judgement, where the logical judgement is based on the aesthetic judgement. Just as in the transformation of a metaphor into a concept, the singular event of beauty grounds the universal. For both Kant and Nietzsche, beauty is evanescent and singular, an unrepeatable, spontaneous event. We might even go so far as to say that the moment of beauty has the capacity to shift the logical categories of our perception, to allow us to see something that was previously inaccessible to us. I will discuss this possibility in the next section.

2.3  Relation: Purposiveness without a purpose As we have just seen, what Kant refers to as an aesthetic quantity, Nietzsche describes as a kind of relation, albeit a discontinuous leap, between subjective representations and the objective world. Kant also refers to the third moment of the aesthetic judgement as one of relation. By this, Kant means that the aesthetic judgement does not make any claims about the nature of objects in the world, even as appearances, but only involves the peculiar relation of the presentational powers, namely, the imagination and the understanding in their spontaneous response to a given presentation. Kant describes the relation of the imagination and the understanding, and the pleasure that it gives rise to in the judgement of beauty, as a purposiveness without a purpose. He describes purposiveness without a purpose as a ‘liking that, without a concept, we judge to be universally

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communicable and hence to be the basis that determines a judgement of taste’; he also calls this subjective purposiveness ‘the mere form of purposiveness’ (KU 220). It is important to underline that what Kant means by purposiveness here has to do with the will, and not with any actual purpose inhering in objects (again underscoring the importance of willing, and not will-​lessness, in Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgement). Kant goes out of his way in the Critique of Judgement to argue that purposiveness or systematicity in nature could never be deduced or demonstrated, but must be presupposed as a heuristic principle, without which any investigation of nature might never begin. He writes that we call objects, states of mind, or acts purposive even if their possibility does not necessarily presuppose the presentation of a purpose because we can explain and grasp them only if we assume that they are based on a causality that operates according to purposes, i.e., on a will that would have so arranged them in accordance with the presentation of a certain rule (KU 220)

Purposiveness without a purpose as a sort of generalized willing without determination is the principle that would allow for the possibility of so willing in the first place. In the first Introduction to the Critique of Judgement, Kant describes the limits inherent in the attempt to describe the natural world solely in terms of empirical observations. The human mind, he argues, is compelled to go beyond explanations of discrete natural phenomena in order to connect them by subsuming them under laws and classes and ultimately by organizing them in a system. Kant introduces and defends an excursion beyond the classificatory system of the Critique of Pure Reason, which describes a formal pattern that explains the uniformity of human experience of the world of natural appearances but fails to articulate the systematic interconnectedness of these phenomena. In the third Critique Kant argues that only such a unity will satisfy the human need for scientific explanations of nature. Kant calls this demand for integrity and totality ‘artificial’ (künstlich) in the sense that it is not derived from ordinary empirical cognition, and he goes so far as to describe this process as one of regarding nature as art (EEKU 251). The faculty of judgement carries a priori within it the principle of purposiveness, a principle that, in cases of scientific explanation of nature, necessitates constructing explanations that can explain how the different parts of nature operate in a mutually conducive way as a purposive whole. Kant calls the a priori principle that makes only a holistic explanation of nature satisfactory to the human mind a ‘technic of nature’, taking ‘technic’ from the Greek

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word, techne, for art. Insofar as humans cognize nature on the basis of cause and effect or dissection of its parts, Kant argues, natural explanations can be mechanical ones. As soon as one attempts to make any claims about the whole, however, he maintains the subjective necessity of human cognition proceeding technically (KU 404). It is difficult not to be reminded here in Kant’s call to approach nature techically, of Nietzsche’s description of his own project in The Birth of Tragedy: ‘To look at science in the perspective of art’ (BT Attempt 2, KSA 1.14). For Nietzsche, to examine science through the lens of art effected a kind of estrangement on a culturally unreflective assumption, namely, that the paradigm for truth must be scientific, cultivating logic and the separation of reality from illusion (BT 15, KSA 1.101). Art, by contrast, at least the art that Nietzsche considers in The Birth of Tragedy, deliberately cultivates illusion ‘as protection and as medicine’ (BT 15, KSA 1.101). According to Kant, reflective judgement, unlike determinative judgement, manifests a certain freedom of expression in that it arises spontaneously out of a play of the cognitive powers imagination and understanding, whose harmony with each other forms the basis of this pleasure. This spontaneity or freedom in response to a presentation of nature, Kant argues, makes the concept of purposiveness suitable for mediating the domain of the concept of nature with that of the concept of freedom (KU 196). While it mediates between the two domains, however, it itself remains purely subjective. The concept of teleology in Kant was clearly one that fascinated Nietzsche in his youth, as attested to by his choice of dissertation topic. In early notes for this project, Nietzsche notes in apparent agreement with Kant that the purposiveness of the organic as well as the lawfulness of the inorganic are brought to these phenomena by human understanding rather than inhering in nature. Even if we can assign purposiveness subjectively to a thing, he writes, we can conclude nothing more from this than the existence of reason, and it is impossible to derive objective value judgements from our judgements of purposiveness; this is a point also emphasized by Kant (BAW 3, 373; cf. KU 180). Nietzsche’s claim that our impression of the world as consisting of discrete objects that perdure in space and time is a result of the constitution of the human cognitive powers is also a Kantian one. He claims that it is because our cognitive organs are not finely tuned enough to perceive the flow of continual becoming that we posit laws of nature:  ‘the perdurant [that] is there only thanks to our unrefined organs, which summarize and display that which really does not exist in that way’. In particular, ‘we assert form because we are incapable of perceiving the most precise absolute movement’ (NL 1881 11[293], KSA 9.554).

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Nietzsche builds upon and naturalizes Kant by arguing that our categories for understanding the world, like life itself, are formed through natural selection, ‘an endless chain of failures and half-​successful attempts’ (BAW 3.381). Since in nature only inorganic forces prevail, he claims, things that appear to be purposive are deceptive; their purposiveness is a human construct (BAW 3.381). Even organisms, which for Kant provide the most convincing evidence for the existence of an objective purposiveness in nature, manifest only forces that work blindly according to Nietzsche. However, in facing the unknown, human beings are by nature animals who, for the sake of self-​preservation, are compelled to organize the world by inventing concepts, including the concept of an organism. Nevertheless, he argues, these concepts can only bring us to a collection of appearances, one that will never make the leap to a living body (Leib), which is incommensurate with them. This limitation applies equally to the concepts of force, substance, individual, law, organism, atom and final cause (BAW 3.383). According to a letter to Gersdorff, Nietzsche was reading Lange’s History of Materialism And Criticism of its Present Meaning (1866) around the time of his dissertation proposal on The Idea of the Organism in Kant (KSB 2.160). Lange, a neo-​Kantian, argued against teleology in nature by appealing to Democritus’ materialism and Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Lange speculated that not only the positing of final causes in nature, but also all metaphysical categories such as substance, object, cause and even ‘ego’ or ‘I’ are fictions that may have practical value but no ontological reference. Nietzsche, following Lange, argues that these scientific or metaphysical categories are derived as irreducible based on the perceived unity of our ‘ego’ or ‘I’. We need unities in order to be able to make calculations, and ‘we have borrowed the concept of unity from our ‘ego’-​ concept –​our oldest article of faith. We would never have formed the concept ‘thing’ if we did not take ourselves to be unities’. Nonetheless, like Lange, he is ‘firmly convinced’ that even the concept of the I  ‘does not guarantee any real unity’ (NL 1888 14[79], KSA 13.258). Likewise, Nietzsche, following Lange, argues that what Kant conceives of as a priori categories were generated in time and for the purpose of utility. The particular ‘grammar’ of our way of dividing up the world according to concepts and categories, which for Kant followed an a priori logic, has no necessity, but evolved over time in response to practical exigencies, having proven to have life-​preserving utility. Nietzsche’s 1873 essay On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense is his most explicit formulation of the Langian interpretation of Kant, combining Nietzsche’s own reflections on the nature of language with Lange’s exposure of the anthropomorphic projection and use of metaphors in scientific and philosophical

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language. Lange was interested applying a Darwinian theory of evolutionary to concepts and to knowledge. Lange’s point of departure was Kant, whose philosophy he transformed by arguing that the categories that make human cognition possible are not given a priori but develop in response to environmental conditions.4 Nietzsche, following Lange, accepts Kant’s conclusion that purposiveness is part of the human understanding of nature rather than anything objectively inherent in nature itself. However, unlike Kant, he argues that the existence of things that are not purposive demonstrates that there is no unity in the teleological world.5 We assume that there is such a unity based on the form of our own bodies, which we take to be individuated and unified. Thus Nietzsche’s critique of the organic and of teleology cannot be separated from his discussion of consciousness and of language, which he alternately blames for the creation and perpetuation of a subject-​centered metaphysics, and excuses for merely manifesting the effects of an already existing conception of subjectivity based on the form of our animal bodies (NL 1887–​8 11[111], KSA 13.52). The organism, which for Kant gave better evidence than any other form in the phenomenal world for the purposiveness of nature, for Nietzsche, can be included in a more general category of metaphysical individuation or atomism, or any doctrine that apportions the world up into self-​enclosed forms. The assumption that such unities exist may have practical usefulness, but in fact do not do justice to the multiplicity of being.6 In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche seems to reverse Kant’s formulation of purposiveness without a purpose, but it is worth looking at this passage closely to see some commonalities with Kant’s formulation: How can one take pleasure in nonsense? For wherever in the world there is laughter, this is the case; one can say, indeed, that almost everywhere there is happiness there is pleasure in nonsense. The overturning of experience into its opposite, of the purposive into the purposeless, of the necessary into the arbitrary, but in such a way that this even causes no harm and is imagined as occasioned by high spirits, delights us, for it momentarily liberates us from the constraint of the necessary, the purposive and that which corresponds to our experience, which we usually see as our inexorable masters; we play and laugh when the expected (which usually makes us fearful and tense) discharges itself harmlessly. It is the pleasure of the slave at the Saturnalia (HH 213, KSA 2.174)

Here Nietzsche suggests that what is most pleasurable to humans is an experience that we might call an aesthetic act, one that reconfigures the usual way in which we perceive the realm of appearances, thereby creating a new mode

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of sense perception. What Nietzsche calls ‘nonsense’ (Unsinn) is so only from the point of view of a given distribution of the sensible,7 just as Kierkegaard (2013) argues that the religious experience of faith is absurd from the perspective of the universal or ethical order. Likewise, the Dionysian aesthetic act is incommensurable with, disruptive of and incomprehensible from the perspective of the Apollinian order; Nietzsche often refers to it as Dionysian ‘madness’ (BT Attempt 4; KSA 1.16). The dithyrambic chorus is ‘a chorus of transformed beings who have completely forgotten their civic past and their social position’ and become ‘timeless servants of their god, living outside every social sphere’ (BT 8, KSA 1.61). Forgetting their civic past and social sphere indicates disruption of an alignment with a pre-​existing universal. Nietzsche assumes that such an aesthetic act would be of necessity ‘purposeless’, since it does not accord with the parameters of categorically ordered experience. However, we might also, with Kant, call this experience one that is purposive, but without a purpose. By ‘purposive without a purpose’, Kant means universally communicable without a concept. The attunement of the cognitive powers most suitable for turning a presentation into cognition, when indeterminately at play, must also be universally communicable (KU 239), since it is the basis for all concepts and hence all language. Indeed, one could argue that this attunement is at the origin of cognition and language, since it makes conceptual communication possible. Likewise, in the Nachlass to the Will to Power, Nietzsche writes that ‘the aesthetic state has a superabundance of means of communication’, and this is also how he describes the Dionysian experience. Like Kant’s aesthetic judgement, ‘it constitutes the high point of communication and transmission between living creatures –​it is the source of languages’ (NL 1888 14[119], KSA 13.296). As Matthew Rampley (2007: 160) argues, Nietzsche’s claim here can be taken to refer to the excess of meaning in any given work of art. Kant also discusses the excess of meaning in a work of art, referring to the artwork’s capacity to produce ‘aesthetic ideas’, which prompt ‘the imagination to spread over a multitude of kindred presentations that arouse more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words’ and give rise to ‘a multitude of sensations and supplementary presentations for which no expression can be found’ (KU 316). Kant refers to this excess as ‘spirit’, or the ‘animating principle of the mind’, and it is the genius, or the artist herself in her works, who exhibits this capacity to quicken the minds of her audience. Finally, purposiveness also suggests a future-​directedness, a willing.8 To be structured purposively without a determinate purpose means to be directed

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towards a future, but one that responds to contingencies, and that can be thus interpreted in line with the evolutionary development of both organisms and concepts. In this sense, I argue that Nietzsche’s concept of self-​overcoming and redemption through willing the past into the future can also be understood as a form of purposiveness without a purpose. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra he writes: I walk among men as among the fragments of the future –​that future which I  envisage. And this is all my creating and striving, that I  create and carry together into One what is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident [. . .] To redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate all ‘it was’ into a ‘thus I willed it’–​that alone should I call redemption. (Z II Redemption, KSA 4.178–​9)

Such a willing is purposive, but in taking the past and overcoming it through willing, it remains open-​ended. Its only purpose is the perpetuation of its own will and the resultant self-​overcoming, not a determinate end. It is undeniable that willing the past transforms a contingent (chance) happening into a (willed) necessity, a quality that it shares with the Kantian judgement of beauty, which makes a claim on others whose modality demands agreement of necessity even while recognizing that the agreement may not empirically obtain (KU 239). It is to this necessity that I will finally turn as the fourth moment of aesthetic judgement.

2.4 Modality The final moment of the judgement of taste, its modality, makes the claim that we think of the beautiful as having a necessary reference to pleasure or liking (KU 236). The necessity involved in a judgement of beauty is of a special kind, however. Contrasting the necessity of a judgement of beauty with that of either a theoretical objective judgement or a practical objective judgement, Kant writes that in the case of a theoretical necessity our cognition a priori ensures that everyone will agree with our judgement, while in the case of a practical judgement, since it is the necessary consequence of an objective law, we know that we ought necessarily to act in a certain way. In the case of an aesthetic judgement, by contrast, the necessity can only be called exemplary. We ‘solicit’ the assent of everyone to our judgement of beauty on the basis of a cognitive capacity that is common to all human beings. Kant calls this basis a ‘common sense’, and by this term he means that all humans have, among the multiple attunements of which the cognitive powers of imagination and

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understanding are capable, one attunement that is the perfect balance of the two, ‘in which this inner relation is most conducive to the (mutual) quickening of the two mental powers with a view to cognition in general’ (KU 238). This attunement, since it is not fixed in any determinate cognition but is the basis for any given one of those, is ascertained not by concepts but by feeling. This basis is the necessary precondition for any cognition whatsoever, and for the universal communicability of our cognition, which must be presupposed if we are not to give in to skeptical conclusions (KU 238). Because it is located within the relationship between the subject’s cognitive powers, this necessity is subjective. Moreover, the relationship between the singular judgement of beauty and the necessity we attribute to it is exemplary rather than conceptual. Another way of thinking of this exemplary nature is to call it metaphorical, as Hannah Arendt (1992: 77) does in illustrating it with the example ‘Courage is like Achilles’. In other words, the singular object is indicated, in its singularity, as capable of calling up reflectively the universal feeling of attunement  –​which we colloquially refer to as a quality ‘beautiful’ of the object, although it is entirely subjective –​without thereby being transformed into a particular subsumed determinately under a universal. Nietzsche scoffs at the purported necessity of the Kantian subjective judgement of beauty. However, in his articulation of willing the eternal recurrence and amor fati, the modality of willed necessity likewise arises from the force of a singular speech act. Following Austin’s theory of speech acts, I will refer to this moment, which Kant’s judgement of taste and Nietzsche’s ‘thus I willed it’ have in common, as the illocutionary force of a claim (cf. Austin 1975). The act of uttering this judgement is itself a performance that entails necessity and indeed an obligation. The difference between the illocutionary act ‘this is beautiful’ (for Kant) and ‘thus I willed it’ (for Nietzsche) is that the first makes a claim on others, and the second only on oneself. This distinction is consonant with Kant’s emphasis on the perspective of the spectator, and Nietzsche’s on the perspective of the actor/​artist. The narrative and philosophical climax of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra occurs in the section ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’; Zarathustra has a dreamlike encounter with a dwarflike creature who sits on his back and mutters discouraging words in his ear as he climbs a steep rocky mountain path, weighing him down both mentally and physically. As Zarathustra finally stops to confront the dwarf, he notices a gateway at which two paths meet and stretch off eternally in opposite directions; these are past and future, and the gateway is the moment or instant (Augenblick).

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Zarathustra asks the dwarf whether he believes that these two paths contradict one another eternally, and the dwarf replies contemptuously that ‘all truth is crooked’ and ‘time itself is a circle’ (Z III Vision, KSA 4.200). To this Zarathustra responds in anger, admonishing the dwarf not to make things too easy on himself. Yet Nietzsche himself, through Zarathustra, goes on to articulate a vision of time that is also circular. My argument is that the dwarf ’s articulation of circular time is a description, while Zarathustra’s is a speech act. In a similar manner, Nietzsche repudiates an understanding of necessity as simple determinism, as well as the philosophical account of free will as something we simply possess while embracing both in the form of performatives. In ‘On Redemption’ Zarathustra describes the one who will create a salubrious and cohesive future out of the ‘fragments, riddles and dreadful accidents’ of the past as one who can ‘recreate all “it was” into a “thus I willed it” ’ (Z II Redemption, KSA 4.178–​9). To live predominantly in the past is, according to Nietzsche, to feel fixed and determined by as well as resentful of the accidents that gave rise to your existence. The ‘cripples’ and ‘beggers’ (Krüppel und Bettler) whom Zarathustra meets on a ‘great bridge’ in this section are crippled or impoverished spiritually because they cannot overcome whatever it is that they deem to be holding them back from success or happiness in existence. They demand either to be reimbursed for their suffering or cured of their ills. Both of these remedies are exclusively past-​oriented; these persons want ‘revenge’ on their past (Z II Redemption, KSA 4.180). It is in having the strength to transform every ‘it was’ (past) into a ‘thus I  willed it’, which one effects precisely in performing the willing (future) that humans are capable of overcoming resentment and the futile effort to will backwards in order to change the past. This willing of the eternal recurrence of what is transforms, through an illocutionary act, one kind of necessity into another. The first kind of necessity is what we might call, looking backwards, of ‘fate’, or that which has passively happened to us, what we have undergone. Each person is part of a causal chain of events consisting of both law and chance, purpose and chaos. Nietzsche has the second type of necessity in mind when he speaks of learning to love necessity (amor fati). This kind of necessity actively wills what has already of necessity (in the first sense) happened, thereby transforming it into something that can be affirmed. The long philosophical and theological history of aligning loving with willing as a binding force is reflected here.9 As Karl Jaspers (1936: 369) writes, ‘Only when the true necessity of a fate that transcends any definite category has gained recognition, can the constantly repeated and consistently interpreted amor fati that complements it develop’. The words

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‘consistently interpreted’ indicate the specifically human, crafted and volitional nature of this second type of necessity. Thus, despite Nietzsche’s statement that to endure the idea of the eternal recurrence one needs an ‘abolition of the “will” ’ (Beseitigung des ‘Willens’) (NL 1884 26[283], KSA 11.225), it is important that this will is in scare quotes, for what is being abolished is the will as a substantive, not its activity. To will actively is to affirm and to love, as he writes in Ecce Homo: My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it –​all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary –​but love it (EH Clever, KSA 6.297)

It happened, therefore I  must will it to be and love it. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes that he wants ‘more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful’ (GS 276, KSA 3.521). I argue that ‘seeing as beautiful what is necessary in things’ involves making what is already necessary (in the first sense) beautiful by willing them necessary in the second. The act of willing and loving the past, doubling the necessity and thereby transforming its crippling and contingent nature into a redemptive and necessary future, mirrors the necessity that characterizes the Kantian judgement of beauty. While Nietzsche’s amor fati affirms the redemption of the seemingly unbearable ‘it was’, rendering crafted and carved (in the act of being willed) and purposefullly necessary the otherwise passive, contingent, and resentfully endured necessity of existence of the one who wills it, Kant’s judgement of taste invokes necessity in making an implicit claim on others based on the disinterested quality of the judger’s appraisal. Both actions take a contingent singular event and transform it into an adjudication with universal scope either in terms of audience (communicability) or time (eternity). In this sense, although the necessity of Nietzsche’s amor fati is achieved a posteriori, while Kant’s judgement of taste, based as it is upon the constitution of the human mind, rests on an a priori principle, both arise as products of the mental acts of either willing (Nietzsche) or reflective judging (Kant). Since the judgement of taste is based on an a priori principle of purposiveness, it can have nothing to do with purpose understood as final cause or necessary end. As Nietzsche writes in the Nachlass notes to The Will to Power: I seek a conception of the world that takes this fact [that the motion of the world does not aim at a final state, EM] into account. Becoming must be explained without recourse to final intentions; becoming must appear

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justified at every moment (or incapable of being evaluated; which amounts to the same thing); The present must absolutely not be justified by reference to a future, nor the past by reference to the present. ‘Necessity’ not in the shape of an overreaching, dominating total force, or that of a prime mover; even less as a necessary condition for something valuable (NL 1887–​8 11[72], KSA 13.34–​5)

The Kant of the Critique of Judgement, at least, would agree.

3.  Conclusion Nietzsche engaged with the Critique of Judgement very early on, and his interest in its themes lasted until the end of his intellectual career. The imbrication of science and art in the Critique of Judgement, as well as the concepts of aesthetic quantity, willed necessity and singularity, would have long-​lasting effects on Nietzsche’s philosophical writings and appear transformed in the concepts of the Apollinian and Dionysian aesthetic forces (purposiveness without a purpose), the metaphorical origin of all concepts (aesthetic quantity), the excess of the aesthetic act, amor fati and the willing of the eternal recurrence (aesthetic necessity). The concept of purposiveness without a purpose, and of the organism and teleology in the Critique of Judgement, not only formed the basis of Nietzsche’s earliest engagement with Kant, but remained an important theme all the way through the Nachlass fragments.

Notes 1. See, for example, Crawford (1988: 105–​27), Hill (2003: 73–​116), Miller (2006: 58–​ 75), Nancy (1990: 49–​66), Swift (2005: 71–​95). 2. Nabais (2006: 10), for example, has argued that the Nietzsche’s model for the polarity between the aesthetic forces of the Dionysian and the Apollinian was the difference between the sublime and the beautiful as it was formulated by Kant, developed by Schiller and transformed by Schopenhauer. 3. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant analyses the logical functions of judgement by abstracting all content from them and paying attention only to their form, through the moments of quality, quantity, modality and relation. 4. For more on Lange and Nietzsche, see Stack (1991, 30–​58). 5. ‘Teleology since Kant’, in BAW 3.372.

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6. See my chapter on Nietzsche in Miller (2002). 7. The ‘distribution of the sensible’ is a term used by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière (2004) to describe the aesthetico-​political regime that determines both what is perceived in common and those parts that exclude certain groups from visibility or the capacity to perceive. 8. See Emden (2014: 140) and Zuckert (2007: 86). 9. See especially Augustine (2003: Books XI and XIV).

References Arendt, H. (1992), Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. R. Beiner, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Augustine, (2003), On the Trinity, trans. Stephen McKenna, ed. G. Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Austin, J. L. (1975), How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Crawford, C. (1988), The Beginnings of Nietzsche’s Theory of Language, New York: Walter de Gruyter. Emden, C. (2014), Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. (1984 [1961]), Nietzsche I, trans. D. Farrell Krell, San Francisco: Harper. Hill, R. K. (2003), Nietzsche’s Critiques. The Kantian Foundations of His Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jaspers, K. (1936), Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity, trans. Charles Wallraff and Frederick Schmitz, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. Kierkegaard, S. (2013 [1843]), Fear and Trembling, trans. Edna H. Hong and Howard V. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Miller, E. (2002), The Vegetative Soul, Albany: State University of New York Press Miller, E. (2006), ‘Nietzsche on Individuation and Purposiveness in Nature’, in K. Ansell Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche, 58–​75, London: Wiley-​Blackwell. Nabais, N. (2006), Nietzsche and the Metaphysics of the Tragic, trans. Martin Earl, New York: Continuum. Nancy, J.-​L. (1990), ‘Nietzsche’s Thesis on Teleology’, in Looking after Nietzsche, 49–​66, Albany: State University of New York Press. Rampley, M. (2007), Nietzsche, Aesthetics, and Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rancière, J. (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, New York:  Continuum.

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Stack, G. (1991), ‘Kant, Lange and Nietzsche’, in K. Ansell Pearson (ed.), Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, 30–​58, London: Routledge. Swift, P. A. (2005), Becoming Nietzsche: Early Reflections on Democritus, Schopenhauer, and Kant, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Zuckert, R. (2007), Kant on Beauty and Biology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Teleological Judgement and the End of History Anthony K. Jensen

What Hamann says about Kant’s optimism (Reflections on Optimism) applies to optimism generally: ‘His ideas are like blind cubs fawned by a hasty bitch . . .’ (BAW 3.392)1 There is no biographical evidence from Nietzsche’s notebooks or correspondence that indicates precisely why he decided to write his doctoral dissertation in philology on an obviously non-​philological topic: ‘On the Concept of the Organic since Kant’ (BAW 3.372–94).2 While its very existence belies Heidegger’s and others’ claims that Nietzsche was no direct reader of Kant,3 it is equally hard to think of Nietzsche ever fancying himself a meat-​and-​potatoes Kant scholar.4 Those who speculate about Nietzsche’s motivation have typically pointed to, and not without warrant, Nietzsche’s increasing dissatisfaction with the field of philology,5 his attraction to Democritus’s naturalism (e.g. Porter 2000: 106–​10), his affinity with Kant’s critical spirit as well as his being a precursor to Schopenhauer (Reboul 2013–​14:  22),6 his engagement with theoretical problems stemming from Schopenhauer’s dual-​aspect account of subjectivity (Toscano 2001:  40f.) or his newfound fascination with the life sciences (cf. Emden 2014:  77–​82). R. Kevin Hill (2003: 74) claims the reason lies not only in Nietzsche’s discomfort with Schopenhauer in light of his reading of evolutionary science, but also in his desire to find a non-​transcendent, naturalistic mode of philosophy capable of addressing conventionally metaphysical questions. It is probable that many of these factors contributed to Nietzsche’s interest in the topic. But that is not the question, so much as why Nietzsche thought that interest should be expressed in the formal requirements for a degree in philology.

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From a purely biographical perspective, the explanation of Nietzsche’s motivation is moot. Nietzsche never had to complete his dissertation since he was offered an Extraordinarius professorship at Basel without it. The degree was conferred retrospectively to him in consideration of accomplishments that were indisputably philological: papers on the ordering and composition of the writings of Theognis, on the sources of Diogenes Laertius and so on (cf. Jensen and Heit 2014).7 As such, Nietzsche never had to face what would likely have been any dissertation committee’s first and most condemnatory question: what does this dissertation have to do with history? But even if it is not a biographer’s question, it remains one of historical–​philosophical importance. To be sure, that importance is not a function of the quality of Nietzsche interpretation.8 Written hastily and by a student, the dissertation notes are surely worth little to scholars of Kant. Rather it is in their testimony about Nietzsche’s philosophical development, as evidence about what and how Nietzsche was thinking in 1868, that their historical–​philosophical value lies. Out of that context, the claim here is that Nietzsche’s dissertation on Kant’s notion of teleological judgement was proposed to philologists because its main question –​how and why rational agents propose teleological explanations for the growth of organisms –​was indeed a proper and significant meta-​historical question, which, in the 1860s no German-​speaking professor of any stripe of historical science could have ignored. If this hypothesis should prove correct, it will reveal that what is sometimes viewed as Nietzsche’s attempt to dissociate himself from the field of philology should instead be interpreted within the context of a budding meta-​historical theorist’s interest in the kinds of explanations offered of development and becoming. What is viewed as a focus on philosophy and science should be viewed as an attempt to marshal the resources of proto-​Neo-​Kantianism9 and the life sciences to formulate a conception of historical change in non-​teleological fashion. Nietzsche’s critique of non-​naturalistic explanations of the growth and development of biological organisms is consistent with, if admittedly unstated, what would become his critique of teleological historiographical attempts to explain the growth and development of culture. Read this way, Nietzsche’s dissertation will seem neither an abrupt departure from his field nor a one-​off foray into this technical area of philosophical analysis. My strategy to test this hypothesis will be to first explicate briefly Kant’s notion of teleological judgement and its connection to historiography. Second, I enumerate Nietzsche’s dissertation’s arguments against teleological judgement. Third, I sketch briefly the younger Nietzsche’s alternative to teleological explanations and its problems. Finally, I  describe how the 1868 arguments against

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teleology and his proffered alternative influence Nietzsche’s later reflections about history.

1.  Teleological judgement and historiographical judgement Kant’s position on teleological judgement, put succinctly as possible, is that natural organisms cannot be determined constitutively as having purposes nor as not having purposes, but that the possibility of their being cognized qua organisms nevertheless depends upon our conceiving of them as purposefully arranged, that is, regarded regulatively as purposive (KU §10).10 Organized natural objects such as plants and animals appear to be both the cause and effect of themselves, which entails that their parts be arranged in such a way that promotes the life of the entire organism (KU §64). Those parts are in turn only to be conceived as having an appropriate place in that organism insofar as they appear necessary for its integrity (KU §65). At the level of nature generally, which is defined as the orderly arrangement of all such natural organisms, the universe is regulatively regarded as the purposive connection of outer purposes within the organism of nature itself. Nature, for Kant, is therefore ‘a system in accordance with the rule of purposes’ (KU 379). We cannot experience and consequently cannot form a valid determinative judgement about any ultimate aim in nature. Nevertheless, Kant holds the self-​determining moral subject as the end of natural development. Since that general end of nature cannot be located in the realm of scientific inquiry purely, it falls to the historian to demonstrate how the summary happenings in nature and human agency form a cohesive directed progress over time (KU §84). In Kant’s short essay ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, the Enlightenment faith in moral progress as unfolding throughout the course of history is combined explicitly with his view of natural teleology. Kant’s Eighth Thesis is articulated in obvious anticipation of what would become the teleological view of nature in the third Critique: The history of mankind can be seen, in the large, as the realization of Nature’s secret plan to bring forth a perfectly constituted state as the only condition in which the capacities of mankind can be fully developed, and also bring forth that external relation among states which is perfectly adequate to this end. (IaG 27; emphasis in the original)

It would be unthinkable for a philology student, especially one whose interests intertwined to the degree Nietzsche’s did, to fail to connect Kant’s vision

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of organic teleology to his vision of history. What is at stake for Kant’s view of teleology is not simply the development of organisms, but the entire teleological worldview in historiography from Augustine to Herder that perceives the march of history as a directed system of change towards a single or set of ends. Nietzsche’s teachers at Leipzig assiduously scourged teleological interpretations of history from their works and lectures, and Nietzsche’s own early philological publications shunned teleological explanations, too.11 Consistent with this context, Nietzsche’s dissertation would turn avoidance into explicit rejection, knowing full well that to undermine Kant’s teleology would be to damage the very cornerstone of the edifice of nineteenth-​century teleological historiography.

2.  Five arguments against teleology There are special hermeneutical difficulties with Nietzsche’s dissertation beyond its fragmentary character. Much of what Nietzsche writes is quoted or summarized material from Kant, and often enough is copied over from Kuno Fischer’s Geschichte der neuern Philosophie (1854–​77) and his Immanuel Kant (1860). Still more difficult to parse out is the influence of F. A. Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus (1866), which Nietzsche only occasionally quotes directly but which stands prominently behind much of Nietzsche’s attempt to both reject metaphysical teleology as well as to naturalize Kantian explanations within a general epistemological framework. Since their and others’ thoughts bleed into what Nietzsche, even in his own words, thought, it is not always possible to say definitively what is Nietzsche’s original and what is borrowed from other sources. With that caveat in place, there are in Nietzsche’s extremely compacted and inelegant dissertation notes five key arguments. One: Optimism and teleology go hand in hand: both are about disclaiming the unpurposive [Unzweckmäßige] as something really unpurposive [Unzweckmäßiges]. In general the weapon against teleology is:  proof of the unpurposive [Unzweckmäßigen]. (BAW 3.371)

When it comes to explaining the uses of the internal parts of an organism, the danger is allowing the known effects to dictate our interpretation of the function of that part. Consider instances of sensation or digestion. The scientist reflectively seeks parts that would seem instrumentally related to fulfilling those ends. When the ends which an organism accomplishes are enumerated to the

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satisfaction of the scientist, any organs not tied to a function are considered leftover. Such goes the thinking that leads physiologists to consider the appendix a sort of biological throwaway, as it serves no known purpose. This is illogical unless it can be shown that the physiologist’s determination of possible bodily functions is entirely exhaustive. Organs may well have purposes we have yet to envision; they may have multiple purposes; they may have no purposes (BAW 3.386).12 Nietzsche’s point, however, is that teleological descriptions of organisms that start with the presumption of particular ends and retrospect towards the purpose of their constituent parts illogically explain away as inexpedient anything which does not fit their preconceived notion. Since those parts of an organism genuinely are a part of the organism, as present as any other, to dismiss them as irrelevant is tantamount to cherry-​picking data for a conclusion one has already prejudged. Two: The analogy of human experience provides the random, i.e., non-​intended emergence of the purposeful, e.g. in the happy coincidence of talent and destiny, lottery tickets, etc. [. . .] The conjecture of such a one is made by human analogy: why can there be no power unconsciously creating the purposive, i.e. nature: one may think of the instinct of the animals. This is the standpoint of natural philosophy. (BAW 3.371)

Nietzsche here acknowledges the preferability of the Kantian vision of teleology over the ancient and medieval ones insofar as it eliminates the need for an external regulating intelligence, whether we call this God or Nous. ‘One must sever every theological interest from the question’ (BAW 3 372). In place of the ancient and medieval versions of divine governance, Naturphilosophie of various stripes, from Kant’s third Critique through the works of Goethe and the mature Schelling, attributes to the organism the inherent purposiveness necessary to achieve its own ends. While outer purposes are rightly denied in Naturphilosophie, the inner purposiveness of nature is retained. Nietzsche suggests two problems. First, this view, ‘roughly anthropological [. . .], resorts to an intelligible world in which the end is immanent to things’ (BAW 3, 372). That is to say, the sort of naïve anthropomorphism that results in Augustine’s divine regulator of world history infects also the conception of an organism as having parts that develop in order to support or work for the whole. Attributing even immanent ends to natural organisms entails attributing some form of intelligence, for insofar as an end is intelligible it requires something intelligent to pose as such. Whether it be Hegel’s Geist or Hartmann’s metaphysiche Unbewusstsein

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or any variation thereon, even immanent teleology attributes anthropological characteristics to nature. Kant himself tried to avoid this, by affirming that ‘[t]‌he organization of nature is not analogous to any causality which we know’ (KU 375), and Nietzsche highlights the irony of his doing so. That is, the presumption of any ‘end’ whatsoever, insofar as that presumption proceeds only from the human form of cognition, is to belie the claim that it resembles nothing we know. Second, Kant’s conception smuggles in metaphysics so that we ‘have to bring up the Ding an sich’ (BAW 3, 372). If Kant is indeed claiming that the kind of development embodied by nature is non-​mechanical, then since all understanding is mechanical it cannot be a function of the understanding but a characteristic of the object as it stands apart from our understanding. But such a claim would involve an illicit attribution of a characteristic to what supersedes mechanical understanding, namely, the noumenal.13 The limits of Kantian philosophy should not open the door to reflective judgement on this score; instead it should demand epistemic agnosticism about any form of causality that is allegedly non-​mechanical.14 Three: The thing in itself ‘must show its unity in the harmony of all phenomena.’ ‘All parts of nature comply with each other because there is a will’. But the contrary to the whole theory is formed by that awful battle of the individuals [schreckliche Kampf] (who also manifest an idea) and the species. Thus the explanation presupposes a continuous teleology: which does not exist. (BAW 3, 373)

Christian Emden (2014) has provided a superb account of the scientific context of Nietzsche’s dissertation, and I can do little more than report his findings.15 Essentially, in the then burgeoning field of cell biology, there was a distinct reaction against the ‘living forces’ position held by Darwinians from Blumenbach to Czolbe. In place of the generative forces posited as mechanisms, which organize organisms and even propagate species, cell-​theory focused on the reproduction and assimilation of the individual parts of organisms as a conflict between fundamentally hostile forces. This ‘awful battle’ within cells inverts Kant’s –​and by extension, Darwin’s –​claim that mutually supportive collaboration between both the parts of organisms and also nature generally would guarantee a better-​ integrated and hence better-​functioning natural order. While Nietzsche does not possess the scientific wherewithal (he was after all a philology student) to demonstrate this empirically, the conflict theory he cites does at least present the resources for a non-​purposive explanation of organic development.

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Four: The strict necessity of cause and consequence excludes ends from unconscious nature. Since the representations of ends do not originate in nature, they must be regarded as motives injected from external causality here and there; whereby even the strict necessity is continually interrupted. Being [Dasein] is punctured by miracles (BAW 3, 375)

Cause and effect, as Schopenhauer stressed with respect to Kant’s transcendental deduction, are the necessary forms through which human beings cognize processes within nature. Nietzsche reaffirms this several times throughout his dissertation. ‘What understanding recognizes by its concept of nature is nothing other than the effect of a moving force, i.e. mechanism’ (BAW 3, 376–​7). ‘Only the mechanical way of originating of things is cognizable’. ‘We only understand mechanism’ (BAW 3, 377). If this is so, then every cognitive representation of change within nature will involve cause–​effect relationships. That is Kant’s position in the first edition of the first Critique, of course, and also the reason Schopenhauer admired it most of all among Kant’s works. But the third Critique was written in part to address the claim of non-​mechanistic natural development which itself falls under the domain of regulative rather than constitutive judgement. Nietzsche has two criticisms of Kant’s move here, one the articulation of Kant’s logical misstep and the other a nascent expression of his own view of becoming. First, the transcendental condition for thinking an ‘end’ of any kind will always involve at least a conceptual distinction between the end and whatever brings the end about –​in time at least, if not in space as well. However, that conceptual distinction necessarily implicates the understanding, the very organ Kant thinks would be uninvolved in the feeling of natural ends. Thus Kant would either have to regress to trying to represent purposiveness constitutively, which the entire third Critique is written to avoid, or else give up trying to understand purposive change of any kind, which amounts to admitting that, as Nietzsche states, ‘[w]‌hat lies beyond our concepts is completely unknowable [unerkennbar]’ (BAW 3, 379).16 In terms of Nietzsche’s own nascent views, second, the organization of our mental faculties entails we see ends as our own representations rather than things themselves. If ends are our doing, then they cannot be presumed to inhere within nature. Thus any ‘stage’ or ‘level of development’ we claim an organism to have reached cannot be anything more than a subject-​side representation of the organism as being such insofar as that projected distinction between causes and effects, means and ends are themselves subjective forms of rendering experience. If we represent what can be experienced as having

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attained a certain ‘end’ outside our representation of it, then surely we must think nature has been ‘perforated with miracles’, that it has miraculously halted its perpetual becoming. Consequently, Kant cannot judge, even regulatively, the purposiveness of nature since purpose itself is forever a human, all-​too-​human imposition. ‘The purposiveness of a thing can only be valid with respect to an intelligence, with whose intention the thing conforms’ (BAW 3, 377). Five: The idea of the effect is the concept of the whole. [. . .] But the concept of the whole is our achievement. Here the source of the imagination of an end lies. The concept of the whole does not lie in things, but in us. But these units which we call organisms are multiplicities again. There are no individuals in reality; rather, individuals and organisms are nothing but abstractions (BAW 3, 379)

Purposiveness for Kant arises from the interplay of non-​physical mental forces. For the proto-​Neo-​Kantians, whose attempt to reunite Kant’s transcendental philosophy with the results of contemporary science effectuated a general naturalization of Kant’s program, purposiveness results like all thinking from the character of our mental organization.17 That naturalizing move leads Nietzsche to uncover two distinct problems with Kantian teleology. First, the attribution of causation generally, and by extension any notion of causation which requires it, is not anything necessary but a happenstance of our brain’s physical organization. Nietzsche would elaborate on this point in his 1873 On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense. But here in 1868, he seems content to rely on the authority of Lange and Helmholtz.18 The second problem alluded to in Nietzsche’s phrasing earlier is the seemingly eternal one of individuation, about which Alberto Toscano (2001: 50f.) has already published a definitive article.19 What is, precisely, the object under teleological judgement? In Toscano’s words, the problem with teleology when it comes to individuation is that ‘a multiplicity is a unity for another multiplicity’ (51, 57f.). Organisms in nature are perhaps infinitely divisible, as are their constituent parts. To investigate any particular part and its relation to its correlative ‘whole’ is therefore always a leap of reason which glides over the always-​possible further division or synthesis of an individual thing that we represent as an ‘organism’.20 Cell-​theorists like Virchow wish to stop this regression of individuation at the microscopic level –​specifically, the cell –​but for Nietzsche, following Lange, such a move is merely an abstract generalization of theoretical convenience (cf. Toscano 2001: 58). Because ‘individual is an insufficient [unzureichender] term’ (BAW 3, 390), any ends attributed to the organism as a whole or among its parts effectively reifies what are in reality only an abstraction and generalization within representation.

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3.  An alternative to teleology The five arguments Nietzsche sketches roughly and without overmuch attention to analytical clarity (these are, after all, unpublished notes) nevertheless show considerable insight for a graduate student who had taken a grand total of one philosophy course.21 Beyond the criticism of Kant’s teleology, however, Nietzsche’s dissertation features a positive attempt to explain natural change in a way consistent with the naturalism of the life sciences. This, at least according to one of his draft outlines, was to have occupied the fourth and final chapter of his dissertation: ‘The recognized purposelessness in nature in conflict with purposiveness’ (BAW 3, 393).22 The present section will accordingly exposit Nietzsche’s nascent alternative to teleological explanations and articulate what seems an evident shortcoming in the logic of that alternative. In place of Kant’s purposive organism, Nietzsche asserts: ‘Chance rules unconditionally, i.e., the opposite of purposiveness in nature. The storm that moves things around is chance. This is knowable’ (BAW 3, 386). The last line of this note indicates the argumentative strategy Nietzsche employs, which is distinctively Kantian. The understanding proceeds discursively rather than intuitively (BAW 3, 377–​9). That entails, as Kant himself decrees, that what can be understood will be understood mechanically, that is, through the pure forms of intuition which render all judgement of experience spatio-​temporally determined. The change an organism undergoes, insofar as we are capable of understanding change at all, will necessarily be understood mechanically as well in terms of causes and effects that are spatially-​temporally determinable. Accordingly, the attempt to think a non-​mechanical form of purposive causation must remain speculative rather than be understood. ‘If within nature only mechanical forces battle, then the purposive phenomena [Erschein] are only apparent [scheinbare], too:  their purposiveness is our idea’ (BAW 3, 381). This allows Nietzsche to reject Kant’s purposiveness by means of his own epistemological demands from the First Critique: Purposes can ever only be considered attributions of reason irrespective of whether or not they are ‘necessary’ or regulative assumptions. The grounds why may involve any of the five arguments Nietzsche already rehearsed. The unavoidable result is that Kant posits ‘ein falscher Gegensatz’: an opposition between teleology and non-​teleology. Since the former is conceptually vacuous in the first place the latter’s oppositional status is meaningless precisely therein.23 However, Nietzsche’s next move entails accepting as constitutive the contrary of Kant’s failed conclusion: ‘The blind forces act unintentionally [absichtlos]: therefore they can bring about nothing purposive’ (BAW 3, 381). Even if

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Nietzsche is right that Kant’s teleological conclusion involved a contradiction of his own transcendental deduction and that whatever forces can be ascribed to nature cannot be determined to have an Absicht, he is not logically warranted to assert that conclusion’s contrary as a reified necessity: that whatever forces are involved in change are indeed blind.24 That is, even if the regulative judgement that portrays the world purposively is fraught with overwhelming incoherencies, this does not entail that the contrary of purposiveness –​blind forces –​characterizes the workings of nature.25 A more logically sound conclusion would have been what Nietzsche quotes here from Friedrich Albert Lange, though does not seem to retain: ‘There is no order and disorder in nature. We attribute those effects to chance where we do not see its nexus with causes’ (BAW 3, 375; cf. Lange 1866: 197). To deny the possibility of understanding organic purposiveness logically entails the denial of the meaningfulness of attributing concepts like organic order and disorder, of either a goal-​oriented nature or a random nature. Indeed towards the end of the dissertation, Nietzsche falls back to a sceptical conclusion about both the possibility of explaining anything teleologically and about even the value of such an explanation in the first place: ‘Do we need final causes [Zweckursachen] to explain the life of a thing? No, “life” is something completely dark, on which we can shed no light by final causes either’ (BAW 3, 388). Such would be a reiteration of Lange’s critique, and such would leave Nietzsche a teleological agnostic rather than an anti-​teleologist. But if we can ‘shed no light’ upon the inscrutable phenomenon of life, then it is incoherent to ascribe to life the character of blind forces. Since Nietzsche does not rest with scepticism, his reification of blind forces from the framework of a Kantian epistemology fails.26 Moreover, had he not marshalled a transcendental strategy and stayed within the realm of empirical physiology instead, Nietzsche would have stood on safer ground with respect to his assertion about ‘blind forces’. Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb, Karl Ernst von Baer’s embryological theory of development, Fries’s morphotic processes, Helmholtz’s principle of the conservation energy and Goethe’s morphological development were each derived from old-​fashioned empirical observation of organic objects. Even hardened anti-​Kantians like Czolbe and Moleschott made room to establish physicalist versions of force-​ theory as means to explain change within organic bodies non-​teleologically. At the end of Nietzsche’s dissertation notes, his book-​list indicates strongly that he intended to utilize their empirical research to better establish his own notion of blind forces.27 It is doubtless a shame that Nietzsche dropped the dissertation project before he had sufficient opportunity to more fully investigate

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the empirical evidence for his anti-​teleological declaration. For an incoherent argument is incoherent irrespective of whether its author hits upon a true conclusion.

4.  Reviving the argument against teleology in historical theory Contemplation of history has never flown so far, not even in dreams; for now the history of mankind is only the continuation of the history of animals and plants:  even in the profoundest depths of the sea the universal historian still finds traces of himself as living slime [. . .]. He stands high and proud upon the pyramid of the world-​process: as he lays the keystone of his knowledge at the top he seems to call out to nature all around him: ‘We have reached the goal, we are the goal, we are nature perfected’ (HL 9, KSA 1.312f.)

On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life offers Nietzsche’s most sustained argument against teleological historiography. The criticism thereof is rhetorically intermingled with that of the teleological life sciences: it is mere conceit to believe nature ordained a place for us at the head of her table. Curiously, the target is never said to be Kant (in fact, Kant is never mentioned in the book), and is only tangentially Hegel or David Friedrich Strauss. Eduard von Hartmann, who was at the time of composition the leading torchbearer of teleological historiography, is the enemy.28 Against Hartmann, and against his form of teleology whose motivating force is a ‘metaphysical unconscious’, Nietzsche claims: The time will come when one will prudently refrain from all constructions of the world-​process or even of the history of humanity; a time when one will regard not the masses but individuals [Einzelnen], who form a kind of bridge across the turbulent stream of becoming (HL 9, KSA 1.317)

The reason it would be ‘prudent’ to avoid Hartmann is primarily existential: the belief in historical teleology inculcates a trust that ‘things will work out’ in place of a trust in one’s own self to accomplish the ends they seek. Accordingly, acts of willing will be effectively considered superfluous insofar as history will accomplish its ends with or without our efforts. Hartmann transforms Hegel’s history-​ guaranteed rational-​ freedom into a history-​ guaranteed Schopenhauerian pessimism. Acerbic and profoundly serious reflection on the worthlessness of everything that has happened, on a world ripe for the judge, is made volatile by the skeptical

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consciousness that it is at any rate good to know about everything that has happened, because it is too late to do any better. (HL 8, KSA 1.305)

On the Uses and Disadvantages additionally frames this will-​ cynicism of Hartmann in terms of a secular extension of a similarly paralyzing Christian impulse: A religion which of all the hours of a man’s life holds the last to be the most important, which prophesies an end to all life on earth and condemns all who live to live in the fifth act of a tragedy, may well call forth the profoundest and noblest powers; but it is inimical to all new planting, bold experimentation, free aspiration; it resists all flight into the unknown because it loves and hopes for nothing there [. . .] (HL 8, KSA 1.304)

On the Uses and Disadvantages of History thus features an existential critique of teleology, which proves both that Nietzsche continued to think of teleology as deeply problematic and also that he came to think of it as problematic for reasons largely other than what he wrote in the dissertation. They also show the influence of Wagner, for whom academic constructions of rational progress were just so many childish encomia to progress, and of Nietzsche’s colleague at Basel, Jacob Burckhardt, who rejected Hegelian rational optimism on political as well as historical grounds. Nevertheless, there are places throughout Nietzsche’s corpus where his arguments against teleology return to the very strategies he employed against Kantian teleology in his dissertation notes. In what follows, I  discuss five texts that evoke the five major arguments in his dissertation, which will of itself suggest my overarching hypothesis for not only the continued relevance of Nietzsche’s critique of Kant for his historiography but also the continued place of his specific arguments in the dissertation notes to his mature thinking. One: Nietzsche would take this precise criticism of teleological views of historiography directly in his hand against those who would purport progress while simultaneously naming everything regressive ‘inexpedient’ to their explanation. Nietzsche marshals Goethe –​who was cautious enough not to blindly apply his teleology of organic nature to the world of historical human activity –​to mock the teleologist’s Pangloss smile as instead a ‘world-​system of passion and error’ (HL 8, KSA 1.311). That Raphael died at thirty-​six years of age, Nietzsche claims, is genuinely a brutal stupidity of the historical world, a death inexpedient in the highest sense for the formation of European culture. But rather than let such a case stand as counterevidence to historical teleological schema, rather than acknowledge the purposeless accidents of history, the teleologist must instead explain it away:  ‘he had expressed everything that was in him, had he lived

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longer he would have only produced a repetition of the beauty he had already created’ (HL 8, KSA 1.310).29 In the case of the organism and in the conception of history as an organism, the teleological prejudice entails discarding as irrelevant anything which does not fit the narrative the historian or scientist foists upon her object of study. In both cases, for Nietzsche, what is discarded as inexpedient only highlights how narrow is the limit of the teleologist’s knowledge in comparison to their eagerness to judge the essential and inessential. Nietzsche articulates just this in the Gay Science: Judged from the vantage point of our reason, the unsuccessful attempts are by far the rule; the exceptions are not the secret aim, and the whole musical mechanism repeats eternally its tune, which must never be called a melody –​and ultimately even the phrase ‘unsuccessful attempt’ is already an anthropomorphism bearing a reproach. But how could we reproach or praise the universe! (GS 109, KSA 3.468)

Consistent with his second argument, that any attribution of goals involves an illicit anthropomorphism on the part of the historiographer, Nietzsche mocks the religious historian and Hegelian-​outcast David Friedrich Strauss for his optimism that history would necessarily bring people to the enlightened rational acceptance of common rights under the banner of religion. On the contrary, Herr Magister:  an honest natural scientist believes that the world conforms unconditionally to laws, without, however, asserting anything as to the ethical or intellectual value of these laws: he would regard any such assertions as the extreme anthropomorphism of a reason unchecked by the bounds of the permitted [einer nicht in den Schranken des Erlaubten sich haltenden Vernunft] (DS 7, KSA 1.197)

This ‘however’ that divides Nietzsche’s assertion of lawfulness inherent in nature as a concomitant of a naturalist perspective and his rejection of the teleologist’s hijacking of laws in order to ascribe some end in history as an illicit anthropomorphism follows plainly the second strategy of his 1868 dissertation. There and here it is argued that while the ascription of lawfulness to the natural organism or to historical change is defensible, the further step which asserts that lawfulness entails an end or purpose –​that it moves directionally in some way –​transcends the boundary of what can be understood. Thus the strategy Nietzsche uses against Strauss, at least here, is overtly Kantian. It is not a lack of empirical evidence that prevents the assertion of purpose, nor at least any point about the psychology of the teleologist. Nietzsche’s argument is recognizably transcendental:  any teleological assertion would stand outside the ‘Schranken

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des Erlaubten’, beyond the limits of possible knowing. Beyond the Kantian strategy, though, Nietzsche adds a critique of the Hegelian stance about the inherent rationality of existence, which he takes to be a consequence of his teleological adaptation of Kant’s third Critique. Nietzsche asks: what would nature itself have to do with ethical and rational progress?  –​These are human, all-​too-​human aims and accordingly looking for them in nature is tantamount to seeking to blame Zeus’ wrath for lightning.30 He writes, Let us hope there really are more spiritual beings than men are, so that all the humor shall not go to waste that lies in the fact that man regards himself as the goal and purpose of the existence of the whole universe and that mankind will not seriously rest satisfied with itself as anything less than the accomplisher of a universal mission. If a god created the world, then he created men as the apes of god, so as always to have on hand something to cheer him up in his all-​too-​ protracted eternities. (HH II, 14, KSA 2.548)

Nietzsche is obviously writing ironically here. But the implicit critique stands plainly: human beings tend to seek the meaning of their existence in some universal plan, ordered within or outside of nature, and in doing so impose upon nature various kinds of benevolent intentionalities to accomplish it. Combing the rejection of teleology as anthropomorphism with the imposition of chaos as a better description of development is characteristic of Nietzsche’s Gay Science as well: The total character of the world [. . .] is forever chaos, not in the sense of a lack of necessity, but in a lack of order, organization, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic anthropomorphisms are called. (GS 109, KSA 3.468)31

Nietzsche would marshal the third dissertation argument concerning the positing of a harmonious collaboration among the parts of an organism for his work on history.32 The changes over time that are represented as history do not proceed by a ‘harmonious’ working together of people, events or cultures, but, like the growth of an organism according to nineteenth-​century life scientists, proceed by antagonistic conflict among its constituent parts. Nietzsche portrays the changes within Greek culture as an agonism between the Dionysian and the Apollinian: the most perfect example of Greek art results from a balance achieved only by the accidental and temporary balance of these opposite forces waged each against the other.33 In Nietzsche’s mature work, the same anti-​teleological historiography informs the genealogical analysis of how the meaning of a notion like punishment proceeds by the successive appropriation and dominance of old ascribed meanings by the new. In both cases, Nietzsche marshals the proto-​ Neo-​Kantian epistemology for a statement about history that stands consistent

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with the advances in the life sciences. Just as today’s meaning of punishment, for example, is no progressive correction of earlier errors but instead the result of a long agonism of various meanings, one on top of the other, so too [m]‌an as a species does not constitute any progress in comparison to any other animal [. . .] Everything grows at the same time, one on top of the other in a disorderly and competitive way with one another. (NL 1888, 14[133], KSA 13. 316f.)34

Note that this move exhibits the same problem in Nietzsche’s transition from the rejections of teleological explanations to the determinative assertion of that position’s contrary. Not content to rest with a well-​grounded agnosticism, Nietzsche claims ‘[t]‌hat which we now call the world is the outcome of a host of errors and fantasies which have gradually arisen and grown entwined with one another in the course of the overall evolution of the organic being’ (HH 16, KSA 2.37). Here, as well as with his dissertation, Nietzsche is consistent with certain natural scientists. But by not relying on their empirical evidence explicitly, his argument on behalf of the ‘chaos’ theory rests regrettably upon having shown the untenability of the teleological argument on transcendental grounds alone. Nietzsche uses the fourth strategy against the teleological historian’s claim that an individual has a special meaning guaranteed by the purposes of historical processes. In the Twilight of the Idols he writes, Nobody is responsible for existing at all, or for the state or circumstances or environment they are in. The fatality of human existence cannot be extricated from the fatality of everything that was and will be. People are not the products of some special design, will, or purpose [. . .]. We have invented the concept of ‘purpose’: there are no purposes in reality . . . One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the context of the whole [. . .] (TI Errors 8, KSA 6.96)

Since, according to the fourth argument against Kant, mechanism alone is cognizable, the attribution of meaning within the context of some special divine plan is absurd. Nietzsche would come to reject that mechanism alone is the only possible manner of causal explanation. But he would maintain that explanations must in some sense be confined to the natural. Just as every event is brought about necessarily by naturalistic causes, so must the human person in their everyday activities as much as in their very existence be considered a part of the natural flow of causes and effects without reference to the kinds of ‘miracles’ of purpose that Nietzsche already mocked in 1868. Purposes are not real but imagined. They are fantastical abstractions from the real at the level of both the growth of the organism and the life of a person within the context of their

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historical time and place.35 As the natural scientist should avoid talking about the ends the parts of an organism achieves as if that were something natural to it, so should the historian resist thinking that people and events have some special meaning outside the perpetual flow of time. At the end of the Gay Science’s longest reflection on teleology, Nietzsche asks, When will all these shadows of god no longer darken us? When will we have completely de-​deified nature? When may we begin to naturalize humanity with a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature? (GS 109, KSA 3.468f.)

The fifth argument from his dissertation concerns the subjectivity of individuation, and as such plays a prominent part in Nietzsche’s theory of description generally, and especially in his conception of the way that historians describe the objects under their purview. What has happened! Yeah, what has happened has been made! [Facta! Ja Facta ficta!] An historiographer [Geschichtsschreiber] has to do, not with what actually happened, but only with events supposed to have happened: for only the latter have been efficacious. (D 307, KSA 3.224)

Here Nietzsche applies his general theory of description specifically to historiography. Just as the descriptions of individual objects, and indeed even the notion of a static, non-​becoming object at all, will abbreviate and affix what is in reality always multifarious and changing, so too will the historian necessarily render the effluvia of the past into conceptually distinct units.36 Accordingly, describing discrete and static events as causally efficacious will fail to correspond to any real happenstance in the world that can be known outside the historian’s account. In the same passage from Daybreak, Nietzsche continues: His theme, so-​called world history, consists in opinion about supposed actions and their supposed motives, which in turn give rise to further opinions and actions, the reality of which, however, is at once vaporized again and only as vapor [Dampf] is efficacious, –​a continual generation and pregnancy of phantoms over the impenetrable mist of unfathomable reality. All historians speak of things which have never existed except in representation. (D 307, KSA 3.224f.)

If this is so, then the historian ought to admit the ideal status of their teleological imputation of history every bit as much as the life scientist should admit the ideal status of their judgement about the purposive development of organisms:  both require overlooking the merely conceptual status of the ‘organism’ in question so as to show its alleged purposiveness. In other words, if we think purposively about organisms or about history, then it is only because cognition has evolved to

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reflexively abstract static individuals from the effluvia; proclaiming any patterns either within that ‘individual’ –​whether an organism or an historical event –​effectively attributes real characteristics to what is merely a conceptual abstraction. [W]‌e are not finely tuned enough to see the supposed absolute flow of becoming: the enduring is there only thanks to our unrefined organs which summarize and display that which really does not exist at all. (NL 1881 11[293], KSA 9.554)

Without question, Nietzsche’s epistemology evolved beyond his fledging dissertation notes. But the same general move –​that any ascription of a teleological order involves overlooking the ideal status of individuals where actually there are none –​is manifestly key to both his dissertation as well as his mature historical theory.

Conclusion Nietzsche’s once-​envisioned dissertation on Kant’s third Critique was not a polished scholarly treatise. It did not treat classical philology, and it did not concern a theme he would come around to in any systematic way later in his career. However, it simply was not a radical or abrupt departure from his interests at the time. Nor was it a childish effort that failed to influence his mature thinking.37 Nor, indeed, were the notes wholly disconnected from his interest in history, even if they were from philology proper. Here I have tried to show that Nietzsche offered five insightful criticisms of Kant that incorporate elements of his proto-​Neo-​Kantian epistemology and his reading in the life sciences at the time. Those five criticisms form the basis for five definitive aspects of his later meta-​historical reflections. The generally anti-​teleological view of history that Nietzsche carries into his mature thought has its first roots here in the 1868 dissertation. Consequently, it ought not to be thought that the dissertation was an implicit rejection of his training in classical philology, but an attempt to marshal a fuller range of intellectual pursuits for one of the most pressing meta-​historical concerns of the age.

Notes 1. While translations are ultimately my own, I have conferred three extant English translations: the Appendix to Claudia Crawford (1988), Paul A. Swift (2005: 95–​105) and Th. Nawrath (2010: 86–​110).

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2. Swift (2005) argues that a dissertation titled ‘I. Kants Ansicht von der Willensfreiheit’, by a certain Otto Kohl suggested the theme to Nietzsche in April 1868. Nietzsche mentions that dissertation to Rohde on 3 April 1868 and proposes to write a dissertation on philosophy almost as a joke: ‘I’m always strolling around as a stud. philos. [sic] anyway’ (KSB 2.265). Although the timeline is suggestive, Swift leaves it unclear as to why Kohl’s dissertation would have so spontaneously ignited such a long-​term project. 3. ‘Had Nietzsche inquired of Kant himself, instead of trusting in Schopenhauer’s guidance’ (Heidegger 1984: 111). This claim’s inanity is only compounded by the fact that Nietzsche barely mentions Schopenhauer’s views on teleology in his dissertation. 4. While Nietzsche plainly read Kant directly and at least the third Critique quite carefully, he was undoubtedly influenced by a wide number of secondary sources (see Hill 2003: 13–​20). 5. For a discussion of these points of view, see Latacz (2014). 6. Both claims of Reboul seem doubtful. Nowhere in his dissertation does Nietzsche’s celebrate any sort of ‘critical’ spirit beyond Kant’s rejection of theological explanation, a conclusion which Nietzsche held long before his reading of Kant in any case. Nor does Nietzsche ever portray Kant as a predecessor to Schopenhauer, the latter of whom, not beyond criticism himself, is more often than not considered an essential corrective to Kant’s errors. 7. For the details of Nietzsche’s school days, see the excellent new biography by Blue (2016). 8. For a thorough criticism of Nietzsche’s reading of the third Critique, see Hamacher (1998: 49–​112). For a rebuttal, see Hill (2003: 73). See also, if for nothing more than an historical curiosity, the well-​known critical interpretation by Jean-​Luc Nancy (1990: 49–​66). For a decisive rebuttal of Nancy, see Toscano (2001: 37, n.3). 9. On which designation, see my article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘Neo-​Kantianism’ http://​www.iep.utm.edu/​neo-​kant/​. 10. Incidentally, Nietzsche’s text of the third Critique was Karl Rosenkranz’s 1838 edition. 11. For the aims of Nietzsche’s teachers, see Jensen (2014). For Nietzsche’s earliest articles, see the first chapter of Jensen (2013). 12. Elaine Miller (2006) is right to allude to Goethe’s morphology as providing insight into ‘multiple purposes’. However, any number of the life scientists Nietzsche was reading in 1867–​68 were working on the same or nearly the same conceptual possibility. 13. For a well-​nuanced interpretation of Nietzsche’s critique of Kant on this point, see Riccardi (2010).

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14. Kant scholars have routinely defended Kant against this criticism, which Nietzsche shares with Kantians from Schopenhauer to Cohen. While the former embraces this metaphysics and attempts a dual-​aspect epistemology to account for our insight into the noumenal, the latter largely pushes aside the third Critique in order to concentrate on the first Critique’s relatively safer attempt to logically ground mathematics and natural science. Whether or not Kant’s teleological judgement crosses into the ether of speculative metaphysics, Nietzsche’s critique stands in rather good company. 15. See also the underappreciated classic of contextual scholarship, Orsucci (1992). 16. See also BAW 3, 381. At least according to one of Nietzsche’s outlines (BAW 3, 385) this argument was intended as the bulk of his dissertation’s third chapter. 17. Variations of this view could be found in Eduard Zeller and Otto Liebmann as well, both of whom Nietzsche read. The most cogent argument, and the source Nietzsche read most closely, was no doubt found in F. A. Lange. 18. Paul A. Swift (2005: 85–​7) offers a capable discussion of this point. 19. For Toscano, the problem of individuation is really the motivating factor of the entire dissertation, as it marked Nietzsche’s departure from Schopenhauer while simultaneously allowing him to reflect upon current scientific problems from a classically philosophical framework. 20. According to that same outline, this argument seems to have been intended as Nietzsche’s second chapter. 21. That course was Karl Schaarschmidt’s overview of the history of philosophy at Bonn in the summer of 1865 (cf. Broese 2005). 22. There are several outlines throughout the dissertation, but only some are labelled with chapter numbers. 23. This argument resembles Nietzsche’s later claim of a ‘false opposition’ between free and unfree will in BGE 21. There is no opposition since only a misunderstanding led to the supposition of actual combatants. 24. Emden (2014: 78–​82) recognizes a similar ambivalence. His preferred formulation is that Nietzsche rejects teleology though accepts ‘path dependent development’ (125–​42). While there is much to recommend Emden’s reading, it is difficult to see how Nietzsche could hold this consistently in the face of his own fifth argument above. 25. Were ‘Will to Power’ intended teleologically, then it would be difficult to explain Nietzsche’s consistent vitriol against all other teleological thinkers, to say nothing of his actual arguments against teleology. However, compare Poellner (1995: 163–​70) and Engelland (2010: 413–​26). Miller (2006: 72f.) actually ascribes purpose to Will to Power due to its ‘intentionality’. 26. Th. Nawrath (2010: 89) sees the same ambivalence, and suggests plausibly that Nietzsche really was stuck on this point in his dissertation.

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27. See BAW 3, 393–​4, where Nietzsche lists books by authors such as Treviranus, Czolbe, Moleschott, Virchow, Helmholtz, Wundt and Johannes Müller. Because Nietzsche lists these as ‘zu lessen’, it is not certain that he ever did come to read them. 28. As Emden notes, it is curious that Nietzsche either overlooked or else was not put off by the teleological formulations of certain other historians. The most prominent of these was Walter Bagehot, who continued to influence Nietzsche well into his mature writing. See Emden (2014: 97–​9). 29. The choice of Raphael’s death is probably not accidental, as he was one of Hegel’s favourite artists. The claim that, had he lived longer, Raphael would likely have only repeated his achievements is probably Nietzsche’s (rather unfair, but typical) parody of Hegel’s notorious aesthetic claim that once Spirit moves beyond an age its art can only repeat that stage of Spirit’s expression in varied, but non-​ progressive fashions. 30. Carlo Gentili offers a fine analysis of Nietzsche’s displacement of teleology on the grounds of its anthropomorphic character (cf. Gentili 2010). 31. Cf. Emden (2014: 79). 32. For a detailed account, see Acampora (2013). 33. Miller argues that the dissertation is essentially a forerunner of the Birth of Tragedy in its presenting individuation as ideal and the Dionysian as a sort of Goethian morphology (2005: 61f.). However, in doing so, she does not take into account the context of what Nietzsche was reading at the time. 34. Nietzsche’s mature view of competition as the character of organic life was also heavily influenced by Wilhelm Roux’s, Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1881), on which see Müller-​Lauter (1978). 35. Javier Ibáñez-​Noé’s contention that Nietzsche laments the failure of teleological explanations and posits his own ‘immanent’ teleology for the sake of creating a new global meaning for human existence is accordingly problematic in two major respects apart from its lack of contextualization. First, Ibáñez-​ Noé presumes that meaning must be tied to overarching purposes. Second, he presumes that there must be one goal or purpose to human life generally. There is ample evidence that Nietzsche holds just the opposite of both (see Ibáñez-​Noé 1997). 36. For a more thorough treatment of how Nietzsche’s mature epistemology influences his historical theory, see the fifth chapter of my Nietzsche’s Philosophy of History (Jensen 2013). 37. For a discussion of the impact the dissertation had on Nietzsche’s mature thought concerning the topics of selfhood, consciousness, language and science, see Miller (2006: 69f.).

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References Acampora, C. D. (2013), Contesting Nietzsche, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Blue, Daniel. The Making of Friedrich Nietzsche: The Quest for Identity, 1844–​1869. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Broese, K. (2005), ‘Nietzsches frühe Auseinandersetzung mit Kants Kritizismus’, in B. Himmelmann (ed.), Kant und Nietzsche im Widerstreit, 363–​72, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Crawford C. (1988), The Beginnings of Nietzsche’s Theory of Language, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Emden C. (2014), Nietzsche’s Naturalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Engelland, Ch. (2010), ‘Teleology, Purpose, and Power in Nietzsche’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 84: 413–​26. Gentili, C. (2010), ‘Kants ‘kindischer’ Anthropomorphismus: Nietzsches Kritik der ‘objektiven’ Teleologie’, Nietzsche-​Studien 39: 100–​19. Hamacher, W. (1998), ‘Das Versprechen der Auslegung. Zum hermeneutischen Imperativ bei Kant und Nietzsche’, in Entferntes Verstehen: Studien zu Philosophie und Literatur von Kant bis Celan, 49–​112, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Heidegger, M. (1984 [1961]), Nietzsche I, trans. D. Farrell Krell, San Francisco: Harper & Row. Hill, R. K. (2003), Nietzsche’s Critiques. The Kantian Foundation of His Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ibáñez-​Noé, J. (1997), ‘Nietzsche and the Problem of Teleology’, International Studies in Philosophy 29 (3): 37–​48. Jensen A. (2013), Nietzsche’s Philosophy of History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jensen, A. (2014), ‘Friedrich Ritschl, Otto Jahn, Friedrich Nietzsche’, German Studies Review 37 (3): 529–​47. Jensen, A., and Heit, H. (eds) (2014), Nietzsche as a Scholar of Antiquity, New York/​ London: Bloomsbury. Lange, F. A. (1866), Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, Iserlohn: J. Baedeker Verlag. Latacz, J. (2014), ‘On Nietzsche’s Philological Beginnings’, in A. Jensen and H. Heit (eds), Nietzsche as a Scholar of Antiquity, 3–​26, London/​New York: Bloomsbury. Miller, E. (2006), ‘Nietzsche on Individuation and Purposiveness in Nature’, in K. Ansell Pearson (ed.), A Companion to Nietzsche, 58–​75, London: Wiley-​Blackwell. Müller-​Lauter, W. (1978), ‘Der Organismus als innerer Kampf. Der Einfluß von Wilhelm Roux auf Friedrich Nietzsche’, Nietzsche-​Studien 7: 189–​235. Nancy, J. L. (1990), ‘Nietzsche’s Thesis on Teleology’, in L. Rickels (ed.), Looking after Nietzsche, 49–​66, Albany: SUNY Press. Nawrath, Th. (2010), ‘Friedrich Nietzsche: On the Concept of the Organic since Kant’, The Agonist 3 (1): 86–​110.

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Orsucci, A. (1992), Dalla biologia cellular alle scienze dello spirit, Bologna: il Mulino. Poellner, P. (1995), Nietzsche and Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Porter, J. I. (2000), Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Reboul, O. (2013–​14), ‘Nietzsche’s Critique of Kant’, trans. Tracy B. Strong, New Nietzsche Studies 9 (1&2): 21–​33. Riccardi, M. (2010), ‘Nietzsche’s Critique of Kant’s Thing in Itself ’, Nietzsche-​Studien 39: 331–​51. Swift, P. A. (2005), Becoming Nietzsche, Lanham, MA: Lexington Books. Toscano, A. (2001), ‘The Method of Nature, The Crisis of Critique: The Problem of Individuation in Nietzsche’s 1867/​1869 Notebooks’, PLI 11: 36–​61.

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Nietzsche and ‘the Great Chinese of Königsberg’ Carlo Gentili

Analysing Nietzsche’s relationship with Kant means acknowledging two problems: The first lies in Nietzsche’s own statements, in many of his works and in the Nachlass, where he quite openly manifests his hostility towards Kant. The second is the fact that Nietzsche doesn’t often refer explicitly to Kant, but instead does so latently or allusively. Seeing Kant as the ‘apparent antipode’1 of Nietzsche allows one to shed light on the solid philosophical basis of Nietzsche’s thought and on the way in which the latter draws on Kant’s philosophy, as becomes evident in his  –​seemingly occasional  –​hints to the philosopher from Königsberg (cf. Hill 2003). It also enables us to explain Nietzsche’s primary theoretical–​gnoseological interest, which would also inform his position on the issue of morality. At the same time, highlighting the relation between Kant and Nietzsche will force us to question our own reading of Kant’s thought, for Nietzsche takes it to its most radical conclusions –​ones that Kant certainly couldn’t have thought of and yet were implicit in his position. As the neo-​Kantian philosopher Hans Vaihinger (2014) noted in his seminal work Die Philosophie des Als Ob, the Kantian ‘or, if you will, neo-​Kantian’ origin of Nietzsche’s thought was not recognized because the latter, ‘as was to be expected from his temperament, has repeatedly and ferociously attacked Kant, whom he quite misunderstood’. Despite all this, he argues, ‘as a matter of fact, there is a great deal of Kant in Nietzsche; not, it is true, of Kant in the form in which he is found in the text-​books [. . .] but of the spirit of Kant, of the real Kant’ (842). While keeping those statements in mind, it seems appropriate to start by examining the real scope of Nietzsche’s supposed anti-​Kantian invectives, giving

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a close look at what is perhaps the most famous affirmation, found in Beyond Good and Evil: ‘Even the great Chinese of Königsberg was merely a great critic’ (BGE 210, KSA 5.144).2 This sentence concludes an observation that Nietzsche attributes to ‘our new philosophers’, that is, the philosophers of the future: ‘Critics are instruments of the philosopher and for that very reason, being instruments, a long ways from being philosophers themselves’ (ibid.). That Kant might be defined a ‘critic’ is rather obvious: ‘one should remember the titles of his major works’ (ibid.). What is less obvious is the reason why this should be taken as a flaw and, most of all, why Kant should be called ‘Chinese’. The explanation can be found in the following paragraph, which Nietzsche begins by wishing ‘that people should finally stop confounding philosophical workers [Arbeiter] [. . .] with philosophers’ (BGE 211, KSA 5.144), later defining the latter as conforming to the ‘noble model of Kant and Hegel’. However, in order to understand the equation between ‘workers’ and ‘Chinese’ one must take a step back to the aphorism in Daybreak where Nietzsche exhorts European workers to migrate so as to find in foreign virgin lands the lost heroism of their vocation, escaping their condition of ‘factory slaves’, that is, the ‘disgrace’ consisting in being ‘used, and used up, as a part of a machine and as it were a stopgap to fill a hole in human inventiveness!’ Not even a ‘higher payment’ could eliminate ‘the essence of their miserable condition –​I mean their impersonal enslavement!’ (D 206, KSA 3.183). However, if they migrate, those workers will take ‘outside of Europe the virtues of Europe’, so that that which was at home beginning to degenerate into dangerous ill-​humour and inclination for crime will, once abroad, acquire a wild beautiful naturalness and will be called heroism (D 206, KSA 3.185)

In this context, it is not of interest that Nietzsche’s ideas may seem to be very close to the imperialist and populist thought of his time:  what is interesting is rather the conclusion he draws. If, once his wish came true, Europe were to run out of ‘workforce’, there would be a solution: ‘Perhaps we shall also bring in numerous Chinese: and they will bring with them the modes of life and thought suitable to industrious ants’ (ibid.). If we use those words to understand the statements in the passage of Beyond Good and Evil, we must conclude that: (1) by calling Kant (as well as Hegel) a ‘philosophical worker’ because he is a ‘critic’, Nietzsche means to say that critique plays an instrumental (‘servile’) role with respect to philosophy; (2) by defining Kant as ‘Chinese’, he is comparing his philosophical work to that of an ‘industrious ant’. As for this second point, Nietzsche probably wants to underline –​in an

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evidently ironic way –​Kant’s meticulous obsession for conceptual definitions as well as the rigorously consequential (and sometimes pedantic) structure of his arguments. The first point, though, is more complicated. In fact, Nietzsche does not merely remove critique from philosophy, as if it were foreign to philosophizing: rather, he acknowledges its heuristic function. His argument starts from a consideration of what he defines ‘the German form of scepticism’ (BGE 209, KSA 5.141), born as ‘a military and sceptical genius’ (BGE 209, KSA 5.140) and finding its greatest expression in Frederick the Great. It bore with it a ‘critical and historical mistrust’, a scepticism that ‘does not believe but does not lose itself in the process’, and it was shaping ‘a new concept of the German spirit’ that looked like an ‘inclination to virile scepticism’ –​it was thanks to it that ‘Europe was after all awakened from her “dogmatic slumber” ’ (BGE 209, KSA 5.141–​2). Nietzsche later says that an element of this scepticism is also typical of ‘the philosophers of the future’, with the difference that they do not fully identify with it: ‘With just a much right one could call them critics: and certainly they will be men of experiments’ (BGE 210, KSA 5.142). The main character of ‘these coming philosophers’ will precisely be this essential conjunction point, also indicating another essential differentiation:  that between criticism and scepsis –​‘those serious and by no means unproblematic qualities which separate [abheben] the critic from the sceptic’. The critic can save himself from the ocean of indeterminacy in which the sceptic risks drowning by finding a bit of land on which to find shelter: ‘I mean the certainty of value standards, the deliberate employment of a unity of method, a shrewd courage, the ability to stand alone and give an account of themselves’ (BGE 210, KSA 5.142–​3). (It is worth recalling here that at least one of those characters immediately evokes Kant and his adoption of the Cartesian unity of method.) These ‘critics’ will recognize their ‘pleasure in saying No and in taking things apart’, and therefore they will not dally with ‘Truth’ to be ‘pleased’ or ‘elevated’ or ‘inspired’ by her. On the contrary, they will have little faith that truth of all things should be accompanied by such amusements for our feelings (BGE 210, KSA 5.143)

In this way they will be still fully in line with the sceptic component of their nature. At the same time, though, as ‘philosophers of the future’, they will not be contented with exercising a ‘critical discipline’: at most, they’ll display it ‘as their kind of jewels’ (ibid.). Therefore, the statement that ‘critics are instruments of the philosopher’ and not quite philosophers themselves should be only understood in this sense.

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The philosophy of the future will be realized insofar as it overcomes its own sceptical and critical component. The ‘genuine philosopher’ will necessarily go through those stages during his education: it may be ‘that he himself has also once stood on all these steps on which his servants, the scientific workers of philosophy, remain standing’. He might have been a ‘critic and sceptic and dogmatist and historian’; but those properly critical qualities, in him, will be set aside by properly creative ones: he must be ‘also poet and collector and traveller’ (BGE 211, KSA 5.144). This last quality is recognized by Nietzsche in the ‘tough will to undertake dangerous journeys of exploration’ (BGE 209, KSA 5.141) typical of the German ‘sceptics’ during the reign of Frederick the Great. The ‘philosophical workers’ (Kant and Hegel) had the task ‘to determine’ (feststellen) all those creations of values that have become dominant ‘and are for a time called “truths” ’. But once this phase is over, the task of the philosopher of the future ‘demands something different –​it demands that he create values’. The ‘knowledge’ of the philosophers of the future ‘is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is –​ will to power’ (BGE 211, KSA 5.144–​5). At this point, it might be worth recalling Nietzsche’s tribute to Kant (in aphorism On the old problem: ‘What is German?’ in book V of The Gay Science) dating back to about the same time when he wrote the aforementioned passage. Answering the question whether German philosophers were ‘really  –​philosophical Germans’ –​that is, if there was something specifically German about their philosophizing –​Nietzsche quotes Kant along Leibniz and Hegel. When talking about Hegel, Nietzsche presents this character as negative, as he was the ‘delayer par excellence’ of the philosophical atheism that only caught on with Schopenhauer, and Hegel’s was but a ‘grandiose attempt to persuade us of the divinity of existence’ (GS 357, KSA 3.599). When speaking about Kant, though, things are different: Let us recall [.  . .] Kant’s tremendous question mark that he placed after the concept of ‘causality’ –​without, like Hume, doubting its legitimacy altogether. Rather, Kant began cautiously to delimit the realm within this concept makes sense (and to this day we are not done with this fixing of limits). (GS 357, KSA 3.598)

Kant is here presented as a ‘moderate’ sceptic  –​compared to Hume’s radicalism –​and his delimitation of the validity of the concept of causality is attributed to the precaution typical of a ‘critic’ (‘cautiously’).3 The statement in brackets clearly indicates what the task of philosophers, including Nietzsche himself, is. As the following affirmation shows:  ‘As Germans, we doubt with Kant the

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ultimate validity of the knowledge attained by the natural sciences and altogether everything that can be known causaliter’ (GS 357, KSA 3.599). The way in which Nietzsche presents here the role of doubt in Kant –​to use the expression found in Beyond Good and Evil –​corresponds to the act of ‘distinguishing’ (abheben) the ‘critic’ from the ‘sceptic’. But the precise reference to the concept of causality –​as well as the even more specific reference to Hume –​ seems to allude to the Introduction of the Critique of Pure Reason, in which Kant reproaches Hume for failing to recognize the principium causalitatis as an a priori principle. Thus, Kant concludes, not only metaphysics ‘would come down to a mere delusion of an alleged insight of reason into that which has in fact merely been borrowed from experience and from habit has taken on the appearance of necessity’, but there would be ‘no pure mathematics, since this certainly contains synthetic a priori propositions’ (KrV B19–​20). The issue of the principium causalitatis and the related one of the a priori synthetic judgement are relevant to the way in which Nietzsche takes Kant’s position to its most radical consequences (cf. Heit 2005). Therefore, the aforementioned statement –​‘As Germans, we doubt with Kant’ and so on –​should be taken seriously. As for the first issue, Nietzsche takes a stand in the aphorism Cause and effect of The Gay Science, where he distinguishes the ‘explanation’ of the moderns from the knowledge of the ancients solely based on a higher level of ‘description’: ‘Our descriptions are better –​we do not explain any more than our predecessors’ (GS 112, KSA 3.472). So, in every case the series of ‘causes’ confronts us much more completely, and we infer: first, this and that has to precede in order that this or that may than follow –​but this does not involve any comprehension. (Ibid.)

In our explanatory attempts we only work with fictional notions –​‘lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time spans, divisible spaces’  –​whereas what we truly face is ‘a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces’,4 therefore our explanation is actually nothing but a self-​description: ‘we first turn everything into an image, our image!’. Hence, science is not but ‘an attempt to humanize things as faithfully as possible’ (GS 112, KSA 3.473). Nietzsche describes the scientific method as anthropocentric and anthropomorphic. As we shall see, this will also be the fundamental argument of his criticism of Kant. One can approach this problem by starting from the second issue first, that is, the possibility of synthetic judgements a priori, which Nietzsche focuses on in Beyond Good and Evil. Here he asks the same question as Kant: ‘How are synthetic judgements a priori possible?’ (cf. KrV B19), proposing

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to correct Kant’s answer –​‘By virtue of a faculty’ (Vermöge eines Vermögens) (BGE 11, KSA 5.24) –​by replacing Kant’s question with another one: ‘Why is belief in such judgements necessary?’ His conclusion is that ‘such judgements must be believed to be true, for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves’. Synthetic judgements a priori may therefore be ‘false’ or they even ‘should not “be possible” at all’; ‘only, of course, the belief (Glaube) in their truth is necessary, as a foreground belief and visual evidence belonging to the perspective optics of life’ (BGE 11, KSA 3.25–​6). As is known, Kant grounds the possibility of synthetic judgements a priori on the consideration that, without them, not only pure mathematics and physics, but also metaphysics would cease to exist. It is licit to doubt metaphysics for its unfortunate outcomes, but it still has to exist at least as a human ‘natural predisposition’ (Naturanlage); therefore, even if it is not legitimate to speak for the moment of a metaphysical science, one should at least contemplate a metaphysica naturalis: ‘And thus a certain sort of metaphysics has actually been present in all human beings as soon as reason has extended itself to speculation in them, and it will also always remain there’ (KrV B21). Thus Kant considers metaphysics as an irrepressible need of human nature. It is in relation to this point that Nietzsche accuses Kant of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism. Upon closer inspection, though, Nietzsche doesn’t at all reject the fact that metaphysics should be a natural human need: by focusing on the ‘preservation of the species’ (Arterhaltung), he simply regards that need in the same way as the other needs of other natural beings, translating Kant’s transcendental setting into a simple question of perspective. This is a radical transformation, which removes the centrality of the human being as a privileged agent to understand nature as it is expressed in the Introduction to the Critique of Judgement (§§IV–​V and VII). In fact, the ‘conservation of the species’ is an issue that concerns man no less than other living beings, and ‘our species’ not less than the others. Nietzsche discusses several examples of this. The first one to mention is the aphorism Humans, the comedians of the world from The Wanderer and His Shadow. In it, he claims that the ant imagines ‘that it is the goal and purpose for the existence of the forest’ as man does when he pictures the end of mankind as necessarily connected to the end of the world (WS 14, KSA 2.549). The anthropological transformation consists in reducing man to his ‘species’, in line with the end of aphorism Let us beware in Gay Science, where Nietzsche wishes for a ‘de-​deification of nature’ and hopes ‘to “naturalize” humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature’ (GS 109, KSA 3.469) –​which, in The Antichrist, is presented as a matter

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of fact: ‘We no longer derive man from the ‘spirit’, from the ‘godhead’; we have dropped him back among the beasts’ (A 14, KSA 6.180). This rearrangement has consequences in the context of morality. When the preservation of the species is taken as a reference point, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are no longer discernible with the usual ease. It is such a consideration that opens The Gay Science (The teachers of the purpose of existence): Even the most harmful man may really be the most useful when it comes to the preservation of the species; for he nurtures either in himself or in others, through his effects, instinct without which humanity would long have become feeble or rotten. Hatred, the mischievous delight in the misfortunes of others, the lust to rob and dominate, and whatever else is called evil belongs to the most amazing economy of the preservation of the species. (GS 1, KSA 3.369)

Nietzsche reproaches Kant’s foundation of morality on the absolute (i.e. on the ‘thing-​in-​itself ’) for losing sight of the fact that man is rooted in sensibility (as emerges from its species-​belonging) and seeking the foundation in the supersensible. As Nietzsche puts it with a colourful image in aphorism Long live physics! in the Gay Science: ‘the old Kant’ had obtained the ‘thing in itself ’ by stealth [. . .] and was punished for this when the ‘categorical imperative’ crept stealthily into his heart and led him astray–​ back to ‘God’, ‘soul’, ‘freedom’, and ‘immortality’, like a fox who loses his way and goes astray back into his cage. Yet it had been his strength and cleverness that had broken open the cage! (GS 335, KSA 3.562)

Nietzsche’s argument is based on his explicit recognition of Kant’s ‘strength and cleverness’ –​in fact, he compares him to a fox. However, after doing away with the absolute by showing, in the first Critique, the unreachability of the ‘thing-​in-​itself ’  –​as all knowledge is ultimately based on empirical intuition and therefore sensibility –​he comes back to it to found the moral law on the supersensible. Nietzsche’s anthropological re-​dimensioning leads to the heart of the definition of beauty. A first step in this direction is the acknowledgement that in the aforementioned paragraph of Beyond Good and Evil, addressing the possibility of synthetic judgements a priori, Nietzsche does not refer to the way in which Kant deals with this issue in the Critique of Pure Reason: rather, he has in mind the Critique of Judgement. In fact, Nietzsche states that Kant solves the problem ‘by virtue of a faculty’ and, little earlier, he specifies that ‘he was proud of having discovered a new faculty in man, the faculty for synthetic judgements, a priori’

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(BGE 11, KSA 5.24). Indeed, it is only in the third Critique that Kant makes the power of judgement autonomous, as Mittelglied between the legislation of the intellect and that of reason, while in the Critique of Pure Reason he had stated that ‘the understanding in general can be represented as a faculty for judging’ (KrV B94). However, Kant asks the same question in §36 of the Critique of Judgement. After wondering if there can be a ‘deduction’ of the judgements of taste –​that is, ‘a guarantee of their legitimacy (Rechtmäßigkeit)’ (KU §31 280) that justifies their subjective and, at the same time, universal nature –​Kant solves the problem by acknowledging the judgements of taste as a particular form of synthetic judgements a priori. In them, just as in gnoseological judgements the perception of an object is related to the concept of it, the perception is in this case connected to ‘a feeling of pleasure (or displeasure)’ –​that is, ‘a liking [Wohlgefallen] that accompanies the object’s presentation and serves in the place of a predicate’. Therefore, Kant refers to the way in which the deduction of pure concepts  –​ that is, categories –​was treated in the Critique of Pure Reason. The fact that this deduction ‘made it possible to solve’ the problem of ‘How are synthetic cognitive judgements possible a priori?’ (KU 288)  is probably the source of Nietzsche’s remark on Kant’s proudness. In fact, he writes:  ‘Let us only understand this “could be” ’ (BGE 11, KSA 5.24). A further proof that Nietzsche read the topic of the nature of judgements having in mind the Critique of Judgement is what he writes later against the universality of the Kantian judgements in Beyond Good and Evil, where he makes the ‘coming philosophers’ say: ‘ “My judgement is my judgement: no one else is easily entitled to it” [. . .] One must shed the bad taste [schlechten Geschmack] of wanting to agree with many’ (BGE 43, KSA 5.60). The reference to ‘taste’ (albeit ‘bad’, in this case) seems to be related exactly to §40 of the third Critique, where Kant legitimates the universality (albeit subjective) of the judgements of taste based on the sensus communis: that is, based on the fact that ‘we compare our judgement [. . .] with the merely possible judgements of others, and thus put ourselves in the position of everyone else’. This corresponds to the second maxim of the ‘common human understanding’ on which Kant founds the power of judgement, for which man ‘overrides the private subjective conditions of his judgement’ (KU 293–​6). That the judgement of taste –​that is, the faculty to judge something as ‘beautiful’  –​may be founded on a supposed universality of human nature (Kant’s ‘common human understanding’, which allows for the representation ‘of truth, propriety, beauty, or justice’ insofar as we rise ‘above the senses to higher

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cognitive powers [Erkenntnißvermögen]’, KU 293)  reveals for Nietzsche the anthropocentric prejudice of the Kantian view.5 In the aforementioned aphorism 109 of Gay Science, after warning the reader against the idea that the world might be ‘a living being’ –​as we know too little ‘of the nature of the organic’ –​or ‘a machine’, as ‘it is certainly not constructed for one purpose’ (GS 109, KSA 3.467), he concludes that The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos –​in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms [. . .] it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man. (GS 109, KSA 3.468)

It is likely that Nietzsche has in mind here what Kant writes at the beginning (§61) of the second part of the Critique of Judgement (the ‘Critique of Teleological Judgement’), in which he states that, once we assume a system of nature, ‘we can then expect that the many natural products in such a system might include some that, as if (als ob) adapted quite expressly to our judgement, contain certain specific forms’, so that they serve to ‘entertain our mental powers’, and we are therefore legitimated to call them ‘beautiful forms’ (KU 359). Of course, Nietzsche is not taking account of the als ob set by Kant as a condition of his argumentation, and he understands the predisposition for the power of judgement as an immediate and objective reference, from which follows –​as that power is obviously human –​the accusation of anthropomorphism. This reduction of Kant’s ‘conditional’ (als ob) to an objective reference is likely the result of the mediation given by one of the authors that Nietzsche uses to interpret Kant. In his History of Materialism –​which Nietzsche had already read in 1866 and read many times after that –​Friedrich A. Lange had proposed a teleological reading of Darwin, somewhat objectifying Kant’s idea of teleology. Compare the following passage by Lange (1881–​82: 68) with the aforementioned aphorism: Is this world a special case among innumerable equally conceivable worlds, which would remain eternally chaotic or eternally inert, or must we assert that whatever might be the constitution of the beginning of things on the Darwinian principle, there must finally result order, beauty, perfection, in the same manner in which we see them?

Apart from Lange’s mediation, the idea of natural beauty as corresponding to some finality that is objectively present in nature in Nietzsche seems to still

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refer to Kant’s early work Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755). References to this work, even if only in a second-​hand reading, appear in the first, early, expression of Nietzsche’s interest in the philosophy of Kant. Just at the time when he thought he would dedicate his research to philology, he manifested a special attention for the Critique of Judgement. Between April and May 1868, after reading the third Critique, Nietzsche worked at a philosophical dissertation that he probably regarded as his Doktorarbeit.6 One of the provisional titles for it was ‘Die Teleologie seit Kant’ (NL 1868 62[6]‌, KGW I/​4.551). Despite the fragmentary nature of his notes, one can clearly see that the arguments Nietzsche would use against Kant in his later years are rooted here,7 starting from the fundamental and mistaken attribution to Kant of a natural objective teleology. This misunderstanding results from the texts Nietzsche read alongside Kant:  Lange’s already mentioned History of Materialism, and Kuno Fischer’s Geschichte der neuern Philosophie. In fact, it is in his dissertation draft that Nietzsche formulates his first accusation of anthropomorphism towards Kant. This accusation is not so much about really thinking of an objective teleology, but rather about presupposing that nature can only be understood starting from the teleological system represented by humans. In this sense, Nietzsche brings elements of Kant’s thought to its extreme consequences. For example, he writes in an orthodoxically Kantian sense: ‘The finalities (Zweckmäßigkeit) of the organic and the regularity of the inorganic are introduced in nature by our intellect’ (NL 1868 62[7], KGW I/​ 4.551). Later he notes: ‘By mechanism Kant means the world devoid of final causes: the world of causality’ (NL 1868 62[41], KGW I/​4.565). It follows that a thing does not conform to its end to the extent that it has a mechanical origin: ‘Kant states so’. When Nietzsche asks ‘Why could chance fail to produce something conform to an end?’ he replies by agreeing with Kant:  ‘He is right:  the finality is only in our idea’. Therefore, it is inevitable to conclude that, from the standpoint of nature, there are no differences between organic and inorganic,8 and that the organic is nothing but the casual in which we introduced our observation point. In fact: ‘ “Life” appears with sensation: therefore we consider sensation as a condition of “the organic” ’. This means that the organic is constructed according to an anthropomorphic measure: ‘ “Living” is “existing in awareness, that is, in a manner similar to man” ’ (NL 1868 62[52], KGW I/​4.575). What Nietzsche reproaches Kant for, however, is the fact that he wasn’t fully consistent with his own criticism: that is, he wasn’t able to completely dispense with an anthropomorphic view. But underlying this criticism is Kuno Fischer’s

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comment. In fact, Nietzsche observes that life cannot be included ‘amongst final causes’, that is, it cannot be explained through them. In other words, it cannot correspond to the principle of self-​organization of living beings conceived by Kant: ‘In Kant, “self-​organization” is deduced arbitrarily’ (NL 1868 62[47], KGW I/​4.571). The phrase in quotations sums up a step in which Fischer (1860 IV: 638) states that when, in one thing, the parts mutually develop, we can say ‘that it organizes itself ’. This way, we judge the thing, ‘according to the principle of internal conformity with the purposes of nature’, which can only produce ‘living beings which are self-​organized’. But the final causes, says Nietzsche, do not serve to explain ‘that something lives’, but only ‘how this thing lives’: final causes are, therefore, only formal.9 The question ‘why is it that something is’ ‘belongs to an external teleology [äußere Teleologie]’, completely foreign to our sphere. At this point he writes in brackets: ‘(Example of a childish anthropomorphism even in Kant)’ (NL 1868 62[47], KGW I/​4.571) (cf. Gentili 2010). Nietzsche’s accusation evidently consists in supposing that Kant illegitimately extended the characters of a solely formal teleology to an äußere Teleologie; essentially that he fell into a metaphysical hypothesis. Even if the Kantian idea that the finality of the organic and the regularity of the inorganic are introduced by our intellect is true, this does not make its extension legitimate10: ‘The same idea, expanded, provides an explanation of external finality’. To legitimize this expansion, one should think that it is ‘the thing in itself ’ that shows, in its unity, ‘agreement with all phenomena’; only in this way the parts of nature would correspond to each other as a result of a single will. But, against this hypothesis, there is ‘that terrible struggle of individuals [. . .] and species’. The explanation ‘therefore presupposes a gapless teleology [eine durchgehende Teleologie]: which doesn’t exist’ (NL 1868 62[7]‌, KGW I/​4.551). This durchgehende Teleologie can only be the continuity between formal teleology and the äußere Teleologie. Considered outside of the ‘childish’ anthropomorphic view, nature is exempt from any conformity to an end: it is nothing but struggle. The critique of Kantian anthropomorphism, from now on, in Nietzsche, takes the form of an opposition between the human world and the animal world, which is an explicit reversal of continuity that he finds in Kant. It is only apparently surprising that, once again, Kant himself provides him with the arguments of this contraposition. The already mentioned aphorism 14 of The Wanderer and His Shadow and the conclusion of aphorism 109 of Gay Science can be considered exemplary of Nietzsche’s opposition between human and animal world. In addition to those, there is a passage from the posthumous On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral

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Sense.11 This work, which Nietzsche dictated to his friend von Gersdorff in summer 1873, is chronologically close to his draft dissertation of 1868 and is well suited, then, to show the progressive work by which Nietzsche elaborates the position on Kant he expressed in it. Here, after observing that only the human intellect can consider itself ‘so solemnly  –​as though the world’s axis turned within it’, Nietzsche states: But if we could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself. (TL 1, KSA 1.875)

The source of these examples can probably be found in the Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven, in which Kant opposes, in the same way, the life of the louse to human life so as to expose the human illusion that man is the ultimate purpose of creation: Since, according to the louse’s imagination, nature is endlessly well suited to its existence, it considers irrelevant all the rest of creation which does not have a precise goal related to its species as the central point of nature’s purposes. The human being, who similarly stands infinitely far from the highest stages of being, is sufficiently bold to flatter himself with the same imaginative picture of his existence as essential. (NTH 353)

These considerations, however, must be read against the background of a premise that underlies Nietzsche’s criticism. If both man and an insect are considered insignificant as part of the natural infinite, in which each can only carve out a self-​ referred horizon, it is also true that the same infinity –​insofar as it is the ‘infinity of creation’, a natural order in which all is ‘determined by universal laws’ –​is what gives both the human and the insect a necessity that is the very mark of creation: From the most refined classes of thinking beings right down to the most despicable insect, no link is irrelevant to nature. And not a single one can fail to appear without in the process fracturing the beauty of the whole, which consists in the interrelatedness. (NTH 354)

Nietzsche evidently judges the supposition of this order to be an illicit äußere Teleologie. Here, Kant certainly does not wonder how something lives, but why something lives. Nietzsche’s hint to the ‘examples of a childish anthropomorphism’ might refer precisely to this passage, given Kant’s mention of the ‘beauty of the whole’: after the Critique of Judgement, as Nietzsche knows very well, this can only be a judgement that, albeit universal, is aesthetic and therefore subjective –​and, consequently, human.

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All of this suggests that, once again, the place where Nietzsche’s critical dialogue with Kant unfolds is the 1868 dissertation. However, there is a pressing question that needs to be answered: did Nietzsche actually read the Universal Natural History? Even though the title is explicitly quoted in the youthful work (cf. NL 1868 62[9]‌, KGW I/​4.552), this hypothesis is very unlikely. But this makes no difference, because Nietzsche read the comprehensive summary of it by Kuno Fischer. In particular, he read the second quotation I have reported here, which Fischer (1860 III: 135) cited entirely. One can deduce that Nietzsche certainly read that from the fact that he explicitly refers to other pages from Fischer, in the same context. For example, he notes that Kant saw ‘in inorganic nature, for example in the structure of the universe’, ‘a necessity in conformity with a plan, the opposite of chance’, and soon after he notes: ‘K. Fischer, p. 130 etc.’ (NL 1868 62[55], KGW I/​4.577).12 Probably Fischer’s comment is what addresses Nietzsche towards the accusation of anthropomorphism: If the world consists in its development of spontaneous forces, then God created these forces so that they should fulfil the universal design; so the very construction of the universe is a development of the highest wisdom, predetermined harmony, a natural theodicy. (1860 III: 134)

Even though, according to Kant, his 1755 cosmogony really was a natural theodicy, the recourse to God and a supreme wisdom appears to Nietzsche as the intervention of a system of ends external to nature, introduced ex post by man. There is only one point left to clarify now. In fact, Nietzsche’s criticism surely is not limited to the Universal Natural History. The vice of anthropomorphism he believes to have clearly identified survives, in his view, also in the critical phase of Kant’s thought. It is a manifest fact that many annotations of the 1868 dissertation directly refer to the first paragraphs of the Critique of Teleological Judgement. For Nietzsche, evidently, there are not enough guarantees that the subjective conformity to ends mentioned in it would not end up being –​instead of the human way of understanding –​a representation of the world as a whole: that is, including the animal world. An example is probably offered by Kant’s consideration in §67. As much as he wants to reaffirm that the idea ‘of all of nature as a system in terms of the rule of purposes’ concerns nature itself as a principle of reason ‘only subjectively, namely, as this maxim’ –​and that, in addition, this principle holds ‘only for reflective but not for determinate judgement’ –​Kant still admits that it can be used ‘as a guide’ to consider the things of nature ‘in terms of a new law-​governed order’. So, if we cannot say that the grass exists to feed the ox

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or the sheep, or that these animals exist to feed humans, we can at least consider from this point of view ‘even things that we find disagreeable and contrapurposive in particular respects’ (KU 379). In this way, those insects that, in the Universal History of Nature, had exposed the human illusion of being the purpose of the whole are now supporting that very illusion. We might say, for example, that the existence of parasites urges men to cleanliness. But it is the second example that clearly attracts Nietzsche’s attention. We may in fact say, as Kant observes, that the mosquitoes and other stinging insects that make the wilderness areas of America so troublesome for the savages are so many prods to stir these primitive people to action, such as draining the marshes and clearing the dense forests that inhibit the flow of air, so that in this way, as well as by tilling the soil, they will also make the place where they live healthier. (KU 379)

Against this mosquito seen from the human perspective, Nietzsche sets the gnat of On Truth and Lies, which is not subject to any teleological consideration and looks at the world, of which it feels to be ‘the flying centre’, from its own perspective. That is what creates a gap in the durchgehende Teleologie, which thus turns out to be inconsistent and leaves the field to the struggle between heterogeneous systems of ends. Using Kant’s examples, lexicon and concepts against Kant himself, Nietzsche’s criticism paves the way to a better and better defined auf Kant gegen Kant.

Notes 1. Kaulbach (1980: 60) explained the perspectival creation of values as follows: ‘A worldy perspective (Weltperspektive) firstly amounts to a perspective of value (Wertperspektive), which sets measures of value for thinking and acting. Thus it clarifies the “meaning” of our action. This corresponds to Nietzsche’s conception if, with the words of his apparent antipode Kant, one interprets man as the legislator of himself and of being.’ 2. In The Antichrist Nietzsche takes up this definition, but referring to Kantian morality, which he deems to be constructed on abstractions: ‘ “Virtue”, “duty”, “good for its own sake”, goodness grounded upon impersonality or a notion of universal validity-​these are all chimeras, and in them one finds only an expression of the decay, the last collapse of life, the Chinese spirit of Königsberg’ (A 11, KSA 6.177). 3. Cf. Stegmaier (2012: 369): ‘Bucking the trend of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche does not understand Kant as a philosopher of knowledge, not as one that would

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finally provide a positive and solid theory of everyday and scientific knowledge, but he entirely focuses on his “cautious” criticism, on his “setting borders”, on his investigation oriented to the “conditions of possibility”. In this sense Kant neither affirmed nor denied the causality in nature, but showed [. . .] how, against Hume’s justified scepticism, it was still possible: as a mere category by which the human intellect gives the “contents” of sensitive affections a conceptual “form.” ’ 4. Cf. WS 11, KSA 2.546: ‘Our habitual, imprecise observation takes a group of phenomena as one and calls them a fact [. . .] In truth, however, all of our acting and knowing is not a consequence of facts and empty spaces in between, but rather a continual flow.’ 5. Kant himself seems to sometimes hint at the doubt about this prejudice. For instance, in §30 of KU, he notes that ‘concerning the beautiful in nature, we can raise all sorts of questions about what causes this purposiveness in nature’s forms, e.g.: How are we to explain why nature has so extravagantly spread beauty everywhere, even at the bottom of the ocean, where the human eye (for which, after all, this beauty is alone purposive) rarely penetrates?’ (KU 279). 6. This suggests that, at that time, Nietzsche thought ‘not of a doctorate in classical philology but in philosophy’ (Schlechta and Anders 1962: 58). 7. An argument in favour of this hypothesis can come precisely from Lange’s influence. In fact, as Salaquarda (1978: 238–​9) noted, Nietzsche’s dissertation ‘bears Lange’s mark also under the thematic profile’. Furthermore, despite the few explicit quotations –​ absent altogether from his published works –​Lange remains crucial also to Nietzsche’s later positions: ‘He did not simply receive Lange’s ideas, but he interwove them with his own reflection.’ If, in those years, Lange is still a reference point for Nietzsche, his dissertation is likely to play the same role. As a matter of fact, Nietzsche’s re-​ elaboration of Kant is ‘a kind of criticism’ where he accentuates ‘the biologization of the a priori conditions of knowledge as it had already been outlined by Lange’. 8. ‘The method of nature is the same in both the realm of the organic and in the realm of the inorganic.’ Just before Nietzsche had written: ‘As for the possibility that the organic may originate from “chance”, “absence of finality” (mechanism)/​Kant admits this possibility, but denies the possibility of knowledge’ (NL 1868 62[52], KGW I/​4.574–​5). 9. Cf. NL 1868 62[47], KGW I/​4.571: ‘The consideration according to final causes is therefore a consideration according to forms.’ 10. Cf. NL 1868 62[37], KGW I/​4.563: ‘Elimination of the extended conception of teleology.’ 11. On the possibility that the criticism of language characterizing this chapter can also be understood as a criticism of anthropomorphism, see Bittner (1987). 12. The note continues, again, by reference to Fischer: ‘A particularly notable passage, p. 132.’ Here Fischer reports a further quotation from Universal Natural History.

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References Bittner, R. (1987), ‘Nietzsches Begriff der Wahrheit’, Nietzsche-​Studien 16: 70–​90. Fischer, K. (1860), Geschichte der neuern Philosophie, Mannheim: Bassermann. Gentili, C. (2010), ‘ “Kants kindischer” Anthropomorphismus. Nietzsches Kritik der “objektiven” Teleologie’, Nietzsche-​Studien 39: 100–​19. Heit, H. (2005), ‘Wozu Wissenschaft? Nietzsches Wissenschaftskritik als Radikalisierung Kants’, in B. Himmelmann (ed.), Kant und Nietzsche im Widerstreit, 47–​56, Berlin/​New York: Walter de Gruyter. Hill, R. K. (2003), Nietzsche’s Critiques. The Kantian Foundations of His Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kaulbach, F. (1980), Nietzsches Idee einer Experimentalphilosophie, Köln-​Wien: Böhlau. Lange, F. A. (1881–​82), History of Materialism and Criticism of Its Present Importance, trans. E. C. Thomas, III, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. Salaquarda, J. (1978), ‘Nietzsche und Lange’, Nietzsche-​Studien, 7: 236–​53. Schlechta, K., and Anders, A. (1962), Friedrich Nietzsche. Von den verborgenen Anfängen seines Philosophierens, Stuttgart-​Bad Cannstatt: Frommann. Stegmaier, W. (2012), Nietzsches Befreiung der Philosophie. Kontextuelle Interpretation des V. Buchs der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft, Berlin/​B oston: Walter de Gruyter. Vaihinger, H. (2014 [1911]), The Philosophy of As If, trans. C. K. Ogden, London: Routledge.

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On the Anthropology

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1.  Introduction Kant very rarely refers to laughter, and when he does, it is almost en passant, as if he were forced to do so only for the sake of systematicity; what he says seems confined to a side remark of what really is his major concern: for instance, in the third Critique, Kant’s analysis of laughter is a ‘Remark’ of the ‘Comparison of the Aesthetic Worth of the Fine Arts’.1 This, however, does not mean that his views on laughter are vague in any way; on the contrary, he has a very clear understanding of what laughter is. Nietzsche, in contrast, who refers to laughter in many passages throughout his texts, does not offer us any definite and systematic account of laughter. There are only a few, rather obscure moments in which he provides us with (what might be taken to be) a definition of laughter –​such as when he writes in Gay Science: ‘Laughter means: being schadenfroh but with a good conscience’ (GS 200, KSA 3.506). In fact, in order to make sense of Nietzsche’s views on laughter, one would need to take into consideration a great number of texts and one would always be confronted with a plurality of meanings. As is the case with so many other terms, Nietzsche’s use of ‘laughter’ mirrors the complexities, fluidity and polymorphism of language, that is, of reality. My intention in the following is therefore not so much to compare Kant’s and Nietzsche’s views on laughter,2 but rather to show the ways in which their approaches to laughter reveal fundamental characteristics of their philosophical positions, and most importantly, how they reveal the radical differences between them. For this, I  will concentrate on a small number of passages from Kant’s Critique of Judgement and his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, and

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in Nietzsche’s case, I will focus on his use/​understanding of laughter in The Gay Science (especially aphorism 1); for it is here, I believe, that we will find one of the most representative approaches to laughter and reason in Nietzsche’s philosophy, as well as a key to understand his critique of Kant’s notion of reason and his way of pursuing philosophy.

2.  Kant: Laughter as an affect In §54 of the Critique of Judgement, Kant distinguishes three different ways in which the ‘changing free play of sensations’ (wechselnde freie Spiel der Empfindungen) can ‘be a source of pleasure or amusement [vergnügt]’, ‘without our having to fall back upon any consideration of interest’ (KU 331). These three correspond to: games of chance, music and wit or ‘plays of thought’. It is in this context that Kant, analysing the ‘plays of thought’ (Gedankenspiel), turns to the way in which jokes amuse us and make us laugh. He uses the following example: An Indian was once invited to sit at the table of an Englishman. Suddenly he showed great astonishment when he saw how a bottle of ale opened and all the beer turned into froth. The Englishmen asked him: What is there in this to astonish you so much? he answered: I am not at all astonished that it should flow out, but I do wonder how you ever got it in (KU 333)

Kant says that the reason why we laugh at this story and why it gives us ‘hearty pleasure’ (es macht uns eine herzliche Lust) (KU 333)  has nothing to do with the Indian’s lack of knowledge or inexperience with beers. Neither the Indian himself nor his mistake are the object of our laughter. If we laugh, says Kant, it is because: our expectation of understanding anything ‘was strained and then suddenly dissipated into nothing’ (unsre Erwartung war gespannt und verschwindet plötzlich in Nichts) (KU 333) This might seem to be a complicated way of saying that we laugh because the answer given by the Indian is both so unexpected and absurd that the Englishman is left speechless, as are we, and does not know where or how even to begin to explain. We would probably find many examples (e.g. in films or comedy series) where the unexpectedness or ‘surprise factor’ as well as the ‘absurd’ are the crucial ingredients for a joke or a certain comical scene to work. Many of the scenes from the Marx Brothers, for instance, depend upon a good pace and a (more or less) unexpected and somewhat silly surprise. Likewise, many humour theories and humourists inevitably draw on the so-​called surprise factor.3 Yet, one is

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tempted to argue that, although this might well explain Kant’s personal reason for laughing, it does not necessarily mean that it will always be the same for others. Others might laugh with certain condescension at the failed attempts of the Indian to reconstruct the production and bottling of ale or at what we could call something like the cultural differences between the Indian and the Englishman, while others might not find it at all funny,4 and this, not to mention the fact that not all jokes depend on the surprise factor or the absurd and that we don’t only laugh at jokes; jokes are not the only form of ‘plays of wit’ that can provoke a disinterested form of pleasure and ‘enlivening of the mind’.5 But Kant’s claim in the third Critique (of which this joke is only an example) is that laughter is always related to the fact that our ‘expectation suddenly is turned into nothing’ (KU 332). By ‘nothing’, what Kant means is that we are suddenly unable to continue reasoning, our understanding is abruptly interrupted. Or as he puts it: ‘what provokes laughter’ is a kind of ‘play with aesthetic ideas, or even with representations of the understanding, by which, all said and done, nothing is thought’ (KU 332). In the Anthropology, we find a similar account, to the extent that laughter is placed under the rubric of the affects, which are described as being a surprise through sensation [Überraschung durch Empfindung], by means of which the mind’s composure (animus sui compos) is suspended. Affect is therefore rash [übereilt], that is, it quickly grows to a degree of feeling that makes reflection impossible (it is thoughtless). (Anth 252)

In other words, being an affect, laughter is always thoughtless, sudden, short, unexpected, present, hasty and also  –​Kant will add  –​sincere and open or unconcealed (Anth 252–​3). In both texts, however, it seems that, for Kant, the mere idea that we might laugh for a specific reason or as a result of a specific thought is basically wrong, because being an affect (KU 332; Anth 255), that is, a sudden, physiological reaction, reason and reflection are always in the shadows, or as he puts it:  affects ‘make us (more or less) blind’ (Anth 253). In this way, Kant seems to exclude the possibility of there being any other explanation for us laughing at any particular joke (or situation in general) other than the confrontation with something that we cannot grasp, that is, something absurd.6 On the other hand, though, Kant is well aware of the fact that laughing at a joke or at a certain situation is not the same thing as laughing because someone is tickling us.7 In the former case, reason or thought are somehow involved in the whole process of laughter. But, for Kant, this is so only to a very limited extent, and he insists several times that these

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playful movements of the mind do not produce any interesting thought and that ‘nothing is gained or learnt thereby’ (KU 332); as mentioned earlier, in the end ‘nothing is thought’ (KU 332). Thus, the questions or the problems that Kant needs to solve have to do, in the first instance, with the nature of the pleasure we take in laughter; and in the second instance, with the connection between mind and body in laughter. Or, to put it in Kantian terms, the question at stake is: What is ‘the actual cause of this form of pleasure’ (die eigentliche Ursache des Vergnügens) (KU 334)? For at least one thing is certain: laughter is an affect that is always accompanied by a pleasant feeling (Vergnügen).8 For Kant, however, the answer to the first question is clear: the nature of the pleasure we take in laughter, its ‘enlivening effect [. . .] is physical’. It is physical:  ‘despite its being excited by ideas of the mind’ (KU 332; my italics). But this, indeed, only makes the answer to the second question even more problematic. For: how can a certain play of thought (Gedankenspiel) or a series of playful connections and associations of the representations of the understanding (Verstandesvorstellungen) awaken in us a feeling of pleasure that has absolutely nothing to do with our mind? According to Kant, when we listen to a joke, our reason is taken from here to there, without any interesting or fruitful outcome and without any real purpose. Because of this, he argues, it cannot be a thought that makes us laugh. If anything at all, we would feel frustrated as we faced the fact that our reason was being led to a dead end, which ‘is certainly not enjoyable to the understanding’ (KU 332). Hence, the cause of this form of pleasure, says Kant, must consist in the influence of the representation upon the body and the reciprocal effect of this upon the mind; and this, not because the representation as such is actually an object of pleasure (for how could a deluded expectation please at all [denn wie kann eine getäuschte Erwartung vergnügen]?), but simply through it as a mere play of representations bringing about an equilibrium of the vital powers in the body (KU 333)

What makes us laugh, or what constitutes our laughter is a certain playfulness; however not the play of thoughts qua thoughts as one might assume, but the play that takes place in our body as a result from the former. Our body mirrors the erratic movements of our mind as it tries to follow the story-​joke, and these movements of the body are what we know as laughter; they alone are the source of our pleasure. That is to say: there is no intellectual pleasure whatsoever. The cause of our delight lies in the tension and release that take place in our internal organs:

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to this sudden transportation of the mind, now to one now to another standpoint in order to contemplate its object, corresponds an alternating tension and relaxation of the elastic portions of our intestines, which communicates itself to the diaphragm [. . .]. In connection with this, the lungs expel the air at rapidly succeeding intervals, and thus bring about a movement beneficial to health; which alone, and not what precedes it in the mind, is the proper cause of the gratification in a thought that at bottom represents nothing [einem Gedanken, der im Grunde nichts vorstellt] [. . .] We may therefore [. . .] readily concede to Epicurus that all pleasure [Vergnügen], even that which is occasioned through concepts, excited by aesthetic Ideas, is animal, i.e. bodily sensation (KU 334–​5)

In a similar way to the Anthropology, we find here the idea that laughter is, to some extent at least, health-​enhancing; it is good for the body, since it promotes an ‘equilibrium of forces’.9 As he argues at the beginning of §54 of KU, the feeling of pleasure needs to be interpreted in physiological terms as the ‘furtherance of the entire life of human beings and, hence, also of their bodily well-​ being, i.e. their health’ (KU 330–​1). Laughing is healthy; or as he explains in the Anthropology, laughter ‘has actually been determined by nature to help the stomach in the digestive process through the movement of the diaphragm and intestines, thus promoting physical wellbeing’ (Anth 281). What is most interesting about this, however, is the underlying assumption, namely, that there is a special connection between our thoughts and our body, so that ‘all our thoughts are harmonically combined with certain movements in the organs of our body’ (KU 334). Yet, although one might be tempted to relate this insight to Nietzsche’s thoughts on drives and his (philosophical) physiology, the differences could not be greater. For, while Nietzsche uses this connection to question the traditional distinction between mind and body, reason and affects, to the extent of proposing that we interpret our thoughts as the result of bodily affections,10 Kant uses this connection or mirroring to explain laughter in purely mechanical terms, making the distinction between mind and body even stronger. Or to put it differently, it seems that the reason why Kant needs to assume a certain connection between mind and body is only to reinforce the overruling principle that laughter in itself and the pleasure of laughing have nothing to do with reason. In effect, worried about the ‘danger’ of contaminating ‘pure reason’ with affects, it seems that one of Kant’s strongest concerns in his analysis of laughter is to guard the realm of reason (at least theoretically) from the threat of laughter, because after all, laughter is an affect, and as such potentially dangerous. ‘Affects

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are generally diseased occurrences (symptoms)’ (Anth 255), and laughter is particularly dangerous, because [e]‌xuberant joy [ausgelassene Freude] (which is tempered by no concern about pain) and overwhelming sadness (which is alleviated by no hope), grief, are affects that threaten life [Affecten, die dem Leben drohen]. Nevertheless, we can see from the register of deaths that more human beings have lost their lives suddenly because of exuberant joy than because of grief (Anth 254–​5)11

Curiously, Nietzsche will agree with the idea that laughter can be very dangerous. . . dangerous enough to ‘kill’ –​although in a more metaphorical sense.12 But for him laughter is dangerous not so much for the one who laughs, as for the object of laughter and this will be a good reason for us to embrace it, to use, explore and experiment with it, rather than to run away from it.

3.  Pleasure in nonsense Before I  move on to examine the role of laughter in Nietzsche’s Gay Science, I would like to recall briefly a passage from Kant’s Critique of Judgement quoted earlier, in particular a rhetorical question that he puts in brackets: ‘how could a delusive expectation please at all?’ (KU 333). With this question, Kant openly rejects the possibility that we may find pleasure in something silly or absurd. For Nietzsche, in contrast, this is not problematic in any way. As we can see in the following passage from Human all too Human: Pleasure in nonsense [Unsinn]. –​How can man take pleasure in nonsense? For wherever in the world there is laughter this is the case; one can say, indeed, that almost everywhere there is happiness there is pleasure in nonsense. The overturning of experience into its opposite, of the purposive into the purposeless, of the necessary into the arbitrary, but in such a way that this event causes no harm and is imagined as occasioned by high spirits [Übermut], delights us, for it momentarily liberates [befreit] us from the constraint of the necessary, the purposive and that which corresponds to our experience [des Nothwendigen, Zweckmässigen und Erfahrungsgemässen], which we usually see as our inexorable masters; we play and laugh when the expected discharges itself [sich entladet] harmlessly. It is the pleasure of the slave of the Saturnalia. (HH 213, KSA 2.174)

Like Kant, Nietzsche associates laughter with purposelessness and nonsense and the experience of something unexpectedly turning out to be absurd, leading us

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nowhere. Furthermore, laughter is associated with the notion of an unthreatening ‘liberation’ and ‘discharge’, and the pleasure this liberation incites. But, whereas for Nietzsche this experience is directly related to our experience of the world (as a unity of body and mind) and the constraints we are subjected to in our daily lives (full of ‘meaningful’ and rational purposes, but also inevitable and very ‘real’ limitations and prohibitions), for Kant the only reason for there to be any kind of pleasure and liberation (in nonsense) is because of the way in which the movements of our mind, as we fail to ‘understand’ the nonsensical, affect our intestines.13 As we have seen, according to Kant, the liberation or relaxation is merely physical,14 which means that, contrary to Nietzsche’s view, there never is real ‘pleasure in nonsense’. This passage is especially interesting because of the ways in which it brings into play elements from Kant’s analysis of laughter in order to affirm what Kant so vehemently denies. But another important difference between Kant and Nietzsche on laughter is that, as I mentioned in the introduction, Nietzsche considers many different types of laughter throughout his texts. The passage earlier, in which the laughter and pleasure we take in nonsense is related to the experience of the Dionysian as the loss of boundaries and constraints, an interruption of what we would call the experience of ‘reality’,15 is only one example of many. In contrast, Kant’s Anthropology supposedly intends to give an exhaustive account of laughter (as being one of the affects). Yet, it is clear that his account is somewhat incomplete –​to say the least. In the end, he depicts only a very limited spectrum of human existence and social interaction. One cannot but wonder the extent to which his intention was not so much to describe, as to prescribe or promote a very specific type of laughter; a laughter that one should encourage in young girls,16 and which is an indispensable ingredient, for instance, at a dinner party; a benevolent laughter that will enliven and ‘stimulate’ a social gathering (cf. Anth 280–​1). In sum, an innocent and harmless, non-​disruptive kind of laughter, a laughter that, in a way, helps to preserve the status quo.

4.  Nietzsche: ‘To laugh from the whole truth’ Considering what Kant has to say about the relation between affects and wisdom in §75 of the Anthropology, namely, that wisdom is the ability to avoid any ‘state of affect’ whatsoever;17 one cannot but conclude that –​in his view –​laughter interferes with reason. Laughter, so it seems, makes us unwise, or, in any

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case, does not make us wiser, nor is the ability to laugh in any way distinctive of wisdom. Consequently, when he discusses the ‘hard to explain quality of the understanding’ (Anth 220) known as ‘wit’ (Witz, ingenium), he somehow manages to disconnect it from laughter, that is, from the affects. Kant situates wit within our cognitive faculties and defines it as a peculiar talent that cannot be learnt and does not depend ‘on instruction but on the subject’s natural predisposition’ (Anth 220); a talent that can obstruct, but also encourage cognitive processes and may even be used to expose or ridicule certain paradoxes. But, while acknowledging that wit ‘provides material for the understanding’ (Anth 221)  and, hence, that there is a certain thought process involved in making a joke, Kant still argues, as we have seen earlier, that laughing at a joke does not imply any understanding, comprehension, or appreciation of that very process; laughter has nothing to do with the understanding, but rather with the surprise vis-​à-​vis the impossibility of following a certain thought to the end.18 With this in mind, one could argue that in §333 of Gay Science Nietzsche is not just criticizing Spinoza for having misunderstood the nature of knowledge and, more precisely ‘conscious thought’, by presuming it was ‘something essentially opposed to’ our drives and instincts, such as ‘the drive to laugh, to lament, and to curse’ (GS 333, KSA 3.558–​59), but that he is also criticizing Kant and the entire philosophical tradition that has banned laughter from reason and knowledge. To be sure, in this particular aphorism Nietzsche is not taking laughter as an affect, but rather as a drive; and his intention is not so much to argue that laughter is an indispensable element of knowledge, as to explain how knowledge (intelligere) ‘is only a certain behaviour of the drives towards one another’ (GS 333, KSA 3.559). But the fact that Nietzsche mentions laughter in relation to the question of knowledge is not arbitrary. Nor is it a coincidence that, in contrast to the inscription that was presumably engraved at the door of Plato’s Academy –​ ‘let no one ignorant of geometry come under my roof ’ –​Nietzsche’s motto to Gay Science reads: I live in my own house, I’ve never aped anything from no one19 and –​I laughed at each master, who at himself did not laugh. Over my front door. (GS Motto, KSA 3.343)

We can find many passages throughout Nietzsche’s writings where laughter is presented as a sign of a specific form of wisdom or superiority, such as the tragic wisdom of the satires and Silenus in The Birth of Tragedy (BT 3, KSA

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1.35), Zarathustra’s wisdom20 or Nietzsche’s own philosophical style.21 But it is especially in Gay Science that Nietzsche develops a critique of the principle that knowledge  –​being a very ‘serious’ matter  –​must be kept separate from the affects and the drives, art, play and most definitely laughter and gaiety. In §327, for instance, Nietzsche exposes this very principle as a prejudice we should overcome: Taking seriously. –​For most people, the intellect is an awkward, gloomy, creaking machine [. . .] The lovely human beast seems to lose its good mood when it thinks well; it becomes ‘serious’! And ‘where laughter and gaiety are found, thinking is good for nothing’ –​that is the prejudice of this serious beast against all ‘gay science’. Well then, let us prove it a prejudice! (GS 327, KSA 3.555)

Indeed, breaking the dichotomy between seriousness and gaiety, science and laughter are among the most distinctive features of the type of knowledge and the type of philosophy that Nietzsche intends to develop in his book, as we can see already in §1, where Nietzsche expresses the hope that in the future ‘laughter will have finally formed an alliance with wisdom’ and ‘only “gay science” will remain’ (GS 1, KSA 3.370). Yet, however straightforward the ultimate message in these aphorisms may appear to be, what Nietzsche actually means by ‘laughter’ and the very notion of ‘gay science’ remain rather unclear. Which is the laughter that must be integrated into our way of thinking and pursuing science? How and why exactly is this integration or incorporation necessary? Is it for the sake of knowledge or for the sake of the knower? What is the relation between laughter and science? Is laughter to be a source of knowledge, or does it merely address a physiological or psychological need on the part of those who pursue knowledge (to the extent that they, as any other human being, have particular needs that may be addressed through laughter)? If the latter were the case, though, one would have to accept that Nietzsche is not so different from Kant after all, who ascribes to laughter only physiological and social benefits. In fact, the whole project of Gay Science would seem rather trivial.22 It is perhaps for this very reason that Nietzsche already addresses these questions in the opening aphorism to Gay Science; and he does so in such a way that we cannot but conclude that it is for the sake of knowledge and for the sake of science/​philosophy (and not merely to give the seekers of knowledge and lovers of wisdom a respite from their arduous task) that he advocates the reconciliation between reason and laughter. Moreover, in this first aphorism we will find helpful insights for grasping the notion of laughter and its relation to knowledge that is underlying Nietzsche’s project.

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Unsurprisingly, this first sketch of a future (and superior) form of science also includes a response to, and goes hand in hand with a critique of the present. Thus, after expressing the perspective of a future time where ‘perhaps only gay science will remain’, Nietzsche writes: At present, things are still quite different; at present, the comedy of existence [die Komödie des Daseins] has not yet ‘become conscious’ of itself; at present we still live in the age of tragedy, in the age of moralities and religions. (GS 1, KSA 3.370)

Nietzsche describes the present as a time of tragedy, moral and religious dogmas; a time where laughter and gaiety are excluded for being at best superficial, but also dangerous. More importantly, he suggests that this particular weighty character of the present, its fatality, severity and gravity, is the result of a misunderstanding, an error of judgement or lack of insight. There is, Nietzsche seems to argue, another way, a ‘lighter’ way, but also more accurate or richer way of seeing things: one that comprehends the ‘comic’ aspect of life, or as Nietzsche puts it the ‘comedy of existence’. In a certain sense, these lines also anticipate and offer an answer to the problems Nietzsche will raise again in §327 (quoted earlier), namely: Why is it that we are unable to incorporate laughter into reason, and why is the prejudice against all gay science still alive in our understanding of science? Nietzsche’s response is: because ‘we’ have not yet become aware of the comical nature of (our) existence. Or as he also suggests, we are still blinded by the teachings of those who believe in morality and religion, the ‘founders of moralities and religions’ and the ‘instigators of fights about moral valuations’ (GS 1, KSA 3.370); we are blinded by those who teach us ‘the purpose of existence’ (GS 1, KSA 3.369),23 and who, precisely because of this, cannot tolerate that we may ‘laugh at existence, or at ourselves –​or at [them, KH]’ (GS 1, KSA 3.371). For this would dismantle the very edifice of purposes and moral values they are trying to establish. Indeed, to the extent that these teachings need to be taken seriously in order for them to make any sense and to have any real effect, laughter is perceived quite rightly by their advocators as a threatening and disruptive force. Nietzsche’s prognosis, however, seems to be that, in the end, these recurrent teachers of values and, most importantly, the particular values themselves will inevitably succumb to laughter, as they have always done. For [t]‌here is no denying that in the long run each of these great teachers of a purpose [grossen Zwecklehrer] was vanquished by laughter, reason and nature: the

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brief tragedy always descended and returned into the eternal comedy of existence (GS 1, KSA 3.372)

In this passage Nietzsche refers to an ongoing, cyclical process of change, whereby all our attempts to interrupt the natural fluidity of things by determining unquestionable, eternal truths and all our attempts to give meaning to life by fixing certain values and beliefs prove to be pointless and irrational –​if not ridiculous. This is what he calls the ‘comedy of existence’, in which all values are constantly overcome and overthrown . . . (overthrown, presumably, by new values, new beliefs and new ‘truths’, which will be based on new understandings and new interpretations of the world). Thus, when Nietzsche writes that the problem in the present is that we have not become aware of the comedy of existence, what he means is that we have not become aware of this inevitable process. To be sure, the aphorism itself is written from this very peculiar, joyful and light but also grave ‘awareness’; an awareness that does not incorporate or identify with any particular standpoint, teaching, value or purpose, but is rather above and beyond all standpoints. It is what Nietzsche calls the standpoint of the species (Gattung) and of the ‘preservation of the species’ (Arterhaltung). Furthermore, this new standpoint also seems to exemplify the standpoint of the kind of laughter and light-​heartedness that are to inform Nietzsche’s new gay science. It is the point of view of the future, from which all human tragedies appear to be brief and risible.24 Yet, this does not mean that the comedy of existence represents the absence or blunt negation of what (from the point of view of the tragic) seems unbearable, but rather its overcoming. For it is only from the perspective of the individual that the tragic –​whether as the radical absence of meaning, as the conflict between freedom and necessity or fatum or as the overwhelming superiority of the universal25 –​is painful. But once we are able to embrace or incorporate (einverleiben) the ‘proposition “the species is everything, an individual is always nothing” ’, we will also be able to enjoy (at least according to Nietzsche in GS §1) ‘the ultimate liberation and irresponsibility’ that goes with this thought. Once we see things from the perspective of the species and understand that ‘when it comes to the preservation of the species’, ‘[e]‌ven the most harmful person may actually be the most useful’ (GS 1, KSA 3.369f.), we will also understand to see things ‘beyond good and evil’, ‘beyond reason and unreason’. From the perspective of the species anything that occurs in human life, just because it occurs, has its value and rationale in the preservation of the species. Or, as Nietzsche writes:

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I no longer know whether you, my dear fellow man and neighbour, are even capable [ich Weiss nicht mehr, ob Du, [.  . .] kannst] of living in a way that is damaging to the species, i.e. ‘irrationally’ [unvernünftig] and ‘badly’ [schlecht] (GS 1, KSA 3.370)

We, individuals, can no longer be damaging to the species, because from the perspective of the species, everything serves its preservation (which is nevertheless not to be understood as the preservation of its identity: already in this text, according to Nietzsche, human nature does not remain eternally equal to itself, but is subject to a constant development and change).26 As mentioned earlier, this moment of awareness is presented by Nietzsche as a moment of laughter.27 This means that, for Nietzsche, laughter is not disconnected from reason, but rather is completely intertwined with it. Laughter is not an affect, and it is not merely the expression of amusement and pleasure that comes from having incorporated this liberating perspective; more than this, it constitutes, together with ‘reason’ and ‘nature’, the very force that enables us to attain such perspective. In conjunction with reason and the experience of nature as a constant process of change, laughter detaches us from the values and ‘truths’ fixed by morality and religion (science and/​or philosophy). This particular aphorism, one could argue, is a performative example of how this process works. Here, Nietzsche uses laughter (for one must not forget Nietzsche’s witty style) to expose how those ‘teachers of purpose’, in their attempts to find a meaning to human existence and to ascribe ‘reason’ and ‘purpose’ to nature, merely ‘make us forget with mighty violence’ (mit aller Gewalt vergessen machen) that there are no rational grounds underlying life or nature, and that the preservation of human existence (although it may appear from time to time to be the incarnation of reason –​i.e. of what we take reason to be)28 is founded on ‘drive, instinct, stupidity, lack of reasons’ (Trieb, Instinct, Thorheit, Grundlosigkeit) (GS I, KSA 3.371). To be sure, by thinking reason, laughter and nature as working in ‘alliance’, Nietzsche is transforming the meaning of the three terms. Without going in detail into this complex issue, it is important to distinguish at least two different meanings or understandings of ‘reason’ (Vernunft) that Nietzsche is using in this passage. On the one hand, Nietzsche uses the notion of reason to refer to a traditional (Kantian) understanding of the term: reason as distinct from unreason, reason as opposed to nature, reason as what we believe to be universally valid, unchanging and unconditioned. On the other hand, there is the ‘reason’ that, together with laughter and nature, sees things from the perspective of the species.

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It is the reason that, having been elevated to this higher (almost impossible) perspective, exposes the futility of our attempts to fix particular values and truths, including of course the opposition between good and evil or between what is and is not rational, between reason and unreason. Whereas the first is eager to become the founder of eternal values and truths, the second is deflationary and amoral. While the latter is able to situate itself over and above all particular standpoints, and in doing so is able to explain the way in which each of these positions is serving nothing but the preservation of the species, the first is unaware of its own particularity, its timeliness and limitedness, and thereby remains blind to its conditioned nature: blind, namely, to its subjection to the preservation of the species. But what distinguishes one from the other above all is the way in which they both relate to laughter and nature. While the first repudiates laughter, the second embraces it; for it is through what Nietzsche calls a ‘corrective laughter’ (corrigirendes Lachen) (GS 1, KSA 3.372) that we are able to undo oppositions and to situate ourselves in that impossible perspective that is both within and without, present and future, here and beyond, particular and universal. As in other texts by Nietzsche, laughter is what enables us to adopt a more distanced and detached, that is, critical perspective on things; laughter is a form of critique. But, most importantly, laughter enables us to relativize our own ‘truths’ and beliefs. It enables us to look at ourselves and at our own positions from a distance and to see through ourselves; it enables us to perform self-​critique in a way that is not utterly destructive, for it does not demand that we totally abandon and reject the position we are criticizing. In this text it seems that Nietzsche is also arguing: laughter can transform the way we reason and the way in which we reason about reason. This laughter that we direct towards ourselves, the laughter that reason directs against itself in an effort ‘to laugh from the whole truth’ (um aus der ganzen Wahrheit heraus zu lachen) (GS 1, KSA 3.380),29 that is, from the truth of the individual and the truth of the species, from the truth of the tragic and the truth of the comic simultaneously, is the kind of laughter that Nietzsche aims to integrate into the process of knowledge. This is the only kind of laughter that can really ‘ally itself with wisdom’, and this is the kind of laughter that will transform reason and inform all future gay science. For the nature of gay science is not merely to show the flaws, one-​sidedness and blind-​spots of other theories and positions, it is not about destroying everything and avoiding any positioning or fixing of values whatsoever, it is not about denying that ‘life is worth living’30 –​which is what the teachers of the purpose of existence fear –​but most

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importantly it is about being able to see one’s own position from different points of view. It is about questioning one’s own position in the most radical way possible in order to become better at what we aimed at from the very start, namely, knowledge and self-​knowledge. To put it differently, it is not about denying that we should have fixed values and truths, but about understanding that we cannot do, cannot live without them. As Nietzsche writes at the end of the aphorism: Despite all this corrective laughter, human nature [. . .] has acquired one additional need, the need for the repeated appearance of such teachers and such teachings of a ‘purpose’.

Or in Schopenhauer’s terms (which Nietzsche knew well): man has a ‘need for metaphysics’, man is an ‘animal metaphysicum’ (WWV II 187). This means that: ‘Not only laughter and gay wisdom but also the tragic, with all its sublime unreason, belongs to the means and necessities of the preservation of the species’. And therefore! Therefore! Therefore! Oh, do you understand me, my brothers? Do you understand this new law of ebb and flood? We, too, have our time!

We cannot pretend that we do not need values or that we do not need to feel that life is meaningful, but from the perspective of laughter we can at least detach ourselves momentarily from these needs and take them for what they are. Yet, by affirming that the ‘tragic, with all its sublime unreason, belongs to the means and necessities of the preservation of the species’, after having argued that all ‘truths’ are in effect questionable and will become sooner or later ‘laughable’, Nietzsche seems to be falling into a trap. Indeed, this new perspective that is able to be both universal and particular at the same time, that is, to posit and criticize its own positing, cannot seriously be adopted; what is more, it is also almost impossible to utter without becoming itself ridiculous or paradoxical. Which is why, I believe, Nietzsche never really spells it out and instead seems to leave the thoughts hovering in the air, without actually fixing (as in Festsetzen) them.

Conclusion If we pay attention to Kant’s own examples and the ways in which he talks about laughter, both in the third Critique and the Anthropology, it seems that he can only imagine laughter in the context of a joke (Scherz, Witz). In this way Kant reduces drastically the different kinds of laughter as well as their motives or causes, which enables him to draw a very clear line between laughter and reason.

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In effect, it seems that Kant’s aim was not so much to understand laughter as to protect reason from its undermining and critical force. One could even say that, although he does not go as far as to ban laughter, he does try to destroy it theoretically by voiding it of any rational content and by disarming it of any disruptive or critical force. In brief, Kant’s ‘theory’ of laughter does not allow for any ‘alliance’ between laughter, reason and knowledge and is unable to account for any intellectual –​not even intelligent –​engagement with the object of laughter. In Nietzsche’s understanding of laughter in Gay Science the opposite is the case: Laughter is understood as being caused by a particular thought or as the result of having seen things in a different light. Furthermore, through laughter we are able to engage with a certain perspective or thought in a totally new way; laughter transforms us and the way in which we relate to whatever it is we once took seriously. Through laughter we feel differently towards a certain line of thought, differently also towards ourselves. It is therefore not a coincidence that in many passages of Nietzsche’s texts there is an association between wisdom and laughter.31 In these respects, the differences between Kant’s and Nietzsche’s approaches to laughter could not be greater. Yet, one could argue that this huge difference has to do with the fact that Nietzsche is creating or inventing a form of laughter that does not exist, whereas Kant is concentrating on a very specific type of laughter. This objection, however, does not take into account or explain the incredible efforts Kant makes to disarm laughter by interpreting it in purely physiological terms. But more importantly, my aim has not been merely to compare Kant’s and Nietzsche’s theories of laughter, but rather to see the ways in which their approaches to laughter reveal important aspects of their understanding of reason and its relation to laughter –​in descriptive as well as in normative terms. The aim was not to evaluate the extent to which Nietzsche invents or creates a new concept or meaning of laughter, but rather to see the ways in which his uses of laughter transform, expand, break and question the traditional boundary between reason (science, knowledge) and laughter, thereby forcing us to rethink our understanding of reason. We can safely say that in this sense Nietzsche’s intention is the exact opposite of Kant’s. These differences should not, however, blind us to a concern or worry they actually share; we must not forget that, in the end, both Nietzsche and Kant are concerned with reason and the value of reason. But in contrast to Kant, who attempts to protect reason from all kinds of impurities (such as affects, instincts, drives and feelings), this concern will lead Nietzsche to understand reason not only in natural terms (as a relation of drives), but also as process, as an historical process. But more than this, the very process whereby reason constantly changes

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is instigated to a great extent by laughter. Laughter, for Nietzsche, marks the moments of rupture and change, and enables reason to evolve. Thus, one could argue that by integrating laughter (especially understood as the capacity to laugh at oneself) into the very process of reasoning and knowledge, as Nietzsche does in GS 1, it is as if he wanted to imitate and accelerate that very long historical process whereby reason transforms itself, gradually attaining higher levels of perfection. By introducing laughter and its disruptive force into the pursuit of knowledge, Nietzsche is inscribing into our understanding of knowledge the ability to see things from a distance, to see through ourselves in the most unexpected ways, almost from another time, from the future and from a perspective in which what seems to be reasonable proves to be ridiculous, and what seems to be universal proves to be the most grotesque projection of one’s own particular needs and fears. From this conception of knowledge, it looks like Kant’s attempts to maintain the realm of reason untouched by dangerous affects such as laughter are in effect blocking the very process of reason, rather than furthering its development. Kantian reason is unable to step outside of itself in order to transform itself, unable to incorporate the radical critique and self-​critique that we can only attain through laughter. In order to become genuinely (self-​)critical, the critique of ‘pure’ reason would have to allow itself to be ‘contaminated’ by laughter. This uncritical, dogmatic aspect of Kant’s critical project, exposed now by integrating laughter into reason, is precisely what Nietzsche so often criticizes and enjoys ridiculing. We can think of GS 335 (KSA 3.562), where he pokes fun at the categorical imperative as the expression of ‘a blind, petty and facile self-​ centeredness [Selbstsucht]’ that feels its judgement to be a universal law; or of when he shows how Kant, instead of answering the question of knowledge he sets himself (‘How are synthetic judgements a priori possible?’), is only able to repeat the question (‘By virtue of a virtue’ (Vermögen eines Vermögens)) (BGE 11, KSA 5.24).32 In Nietzsche’s view, Kant always ends up doing the opposite of what he was aiming to do. In an irresistibly naïve and almost endearing way,33 he ends up repeating the very standpoint he seeks to overcome; in this case, entrenching an uncritical concept of reason by trying to protect critical reason from laughter.

Notes 1. Yet, quite surprisingly, many theorists of humour refer to Kant’s analyses, despite the fact that they are, as we will see, extremely questionable. See, for instance, Morreall (1983).

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2. A detailed analysis of the different types of laughter, the different meanings and functions that Nietzsche explores and develops throughout his texts would surpass the scope of this chapter. For an overview of the main meanings of laughter in Nietzsche’s texts, see Hay (2013). 3. See, for instance, Dancyner (2007, 293–​303), where he analyses the ways in which the editing (in film and video) must be done in order to produce a comic effect, the underlying assumption being that the pace and the ‘momentum’ are as important as the content. 4. On the way in which (sense of) humour is socially, culturally, historically determined, see Kuipers (2015). 5. Indeed, the ‘surprise factor’ is hardly sufficient to explain what produces laughter in a comedy or joke (cf. Keith-​Spiegel 1972: 9). One could argue that in those cases where the surprise factor is the most important comical element, the humour or laughter it provokes tends to be quite a specific kind of humour: a light-​hearted humour that does not contain, for instance, irony or cynicism. In other words, the type of humour that would be appropriate for a dinner party of a certain social class; and this is exactly the type of humour that Kant has in mind and the only type of humour that he really finds acceptable, as we can read both in the KU (331–​ 2) and more clearly in the Anthropology, where he writes: ‘At a full table, where the number of courses is intended only to keep the guests together for a long time (coenam due ere), the conversation usually goes through three stages: 1) narration, 2) arguing, and 3) joking. [. . .] But because arguing is always a kind of work and exertion of one’s powers, it eventually becomes tiresome as a result of engaging in it while eating rather copiously: thus the conversation sinks naturally to the mere play of wit. [. . .] And so the meal ends with laughter’ (Anth 280). 6. ‘Something absurd [etwas Widersinniges] (something in which, therefore, the understanding can of itself find no delight) must be present in whatever is to raise a hearty convulsive laugh’ (KU 332). This is why some authors have taken Kant to be developing what has been called an ‘incongruity theory’ of laughter. Although, as John Morreall (1983: 16 and 108) rightly observes, Kant’s theory of laughter –​if we may call it thus –​is not only an ‘incongruity theory’, but also a ‘relief theory’, because for Kant, laughter also has a liberating effect. As we read in the Anthropology: ‘both laughing and weeping cheer us up; for they are liberations [Befreiungen] from a hindrance of the vital force [Lebenskraft]’ (Anth 256; my italics). 7. In his notes to GSE Kant distinguishes laughter caused by tickling from that aroused by representations: ‘Laughter that is aroused by tickling is at the same time troublesome, that [aroused] by representation pleasurable [or amusing] still it can come to convulsions’ (Lachen das durch Kitzeln erregt wird ist zugleich sehr beschwerlich das aber durch vorstellung belustigend doch aber kan es bis zu convulsionen kommen) (Lose Blätter zu GSE AA 20: 187). In these notes he also

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9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

Katia Hay develops a physiological account of laughter to include a discussion of the kind of nervous excitation that distinguishes laughter from other pleasures: ‘The ground of laughter seems to consist in the trembling of the rapidly pinched nerve that is propagated throughout the whole system; other pleasures come from uniform movements of the nerve fluid’ (Es scheinet der Grund des Lachens in der Zitterung der schnell gezwickten Nerven zu bestehen die sich durchs gantze System fortpflantzt; andere Vergnügen kommen von einförmigen Bewegungen des nervensafts her) (Lose Blätter zu GSE, AA 20: 188). Even if, or even when the act of laughing may be harmful to others –​and although Kant does not analyse this type of laughter in much detail, he does mention or acknowledge its existence as a ‘malicious, bitter laughter’ (hämische, mit Bitterkeit verbundene) (Anth 261). Cf. ‘The jerky (nearly convulsive) exhaling of air attached to laughter [. . .] strengthens the feeling of vital force through the wholesome exercise of the diaphragm’ (Anth 262). See, for instance, GS Preface 2. On death from joy and from grief, see Rather (1965: 228–​30). With references to this passage and another (Anth 341), Brandt (1999: 231) points out that this is no joke by Kant and that death from excessive joy has been documented since antiquity. Cf. Z IV Festival, KSA 4.392: ‘oh Zarathustra: whoever wants to kill [tödten] most thoroughly, laughs. “One kills not by wrath, but by laughter” –​thus you once spoke. Oh Zarathustra, you hidden one, you annihilator without wrath, you dangerous saint –​you are a prankster!’. ‘[L]‌aughter always shakes the muscles involved in digestion, thus promoting it far better than the physician’s wisdom would do’ (Anth 262). Cf. note 6 and p. x. Cf. Baillie (1921), who argues that ‘we have the permanent conditions of laughter in a regulated society, since any departure from social standards is incongruous’, that is, laughable (quoted in Keith-​Spiegel 1972: 31). Cf. Anth 264–​5: ‘A mechanical (spiritless) laugher is insipid and makes the social gathering tasteless. He who never laughs at all at a social gathering is either sullen or pedantic. Children, especially girls [sic], must be accustomed early to frank and unrestrained smiling, because the cheerfulness of their facial features gradually leaves a mark within and establishes a disposition to cheerfulness, friendliness, and sociability, which is an early preparation for this approximation to the virtue of benevolence.’ Cf. Anth 253: ‘The principle of apathy –​namely that the wise man must never be in a state of affect, not even in that of compassion with the misfortune of his best friend, is an entirely correct and sublime moral principle of the Stoic school; for affect makes us (more or less) blind.’

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18. In this sense it is quite surprising that Kant does not reflect upon the way in which he uses ‘wit’ to engage with his own readers. The Anthropology itself is at times quite ‘funny’, inviting the reader to ‘laugh’, but not because what is written is absurd. 19. Through this peculiar construction with three negations ‘Hab Niemandem nie nichts nachgemacht’ (my italics) Nietzsche already seems to be making fun of himself. 20. In Z III Evils 4.235, Zarathustra describes his wisdom as a ‘laughing, alert day-​wisdom’. 21. In The Case Wagner, Nietzsche presents his own style of writing as ‘ridendo dicere severum . . .’ (which is part of the title page motto of CW). Nietzsche had in mind Horace’s dictum in his Satires: ‘Ridendo dicere verum: quid vetat?’ (Sermones 1.24; see also Bracht Branham 2004: 180). 22. In some passages, such as GS 107 (Our ultimate gratitude to art), Nietzsche connects laughter to art and seems to present it as the means by which the scientist is able to free him/​herself periodically from the burden of science. For a detailed analysis of the ambiguous relation between laughter, science, knowledge and seriousness in GS, see Siemens and Hay (2015). 23. From the title we can surmise that, in the first instance, the addressees of this aphorism are precisely the ‘teachers of the purpose of existence’, such as Kant, whose thought on the problem of teleology and the purposiveness of human existence was well known by Nietzsche. 24. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra also seems to incorporate this standpoint: ‘Whoever climbs the highest mountain laughs at all tragic plays and tragic realities’ (Z I Reading, KSA 4.49). 25. That is, Nietzsche’s, Schelling’s or Hegel’s conceptions of tragic respectively. 26. ‘[H]‌uman nature on the whole has surely been altered by the recurring emergence of such teachers of the purpose of existence’ (GS 1, KSA 3.372). 27. In D 124, Nietzsche depicts a similar realization, when he criticizes the idea that our ‘will’ may add anything to the world. In this case also, the realization that our individual will does not change anything is accompanied by laughter: ‘What is willing! –​We laugh at him who steps out of his room at the moment when the sun steps out of its room, and then says: “I will that the sun shall rise”; and at him who cannot stop a wheel and says: “I will that it shall roll” [. . .] But, laughter aside, are we ourselves ever acting any differently whenever we employ the expression: “I will”?’ (D 124, KSA 3.116). 28. ‘This drive, which rules the highest as well as the basest of human beings –​the drive for the preservation of the species –​erupts from time to time as reason and passion of mind; it is then surrounded by a resplendent retinue of reasons and tries with all its might to make us forget that fundamentally it is drive, instinct, stupidity, lack of reasons’ (GS 1, KSA 3.371).

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29. ‘To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh from the whole truth [um aus der ganzen Wahrheit heraus zu lachen] –​for that, not even the best have had enough sense of truth, and the most gifted have had far too little genius!’ (GS 1, KSA 3.370). 30. Although, Nietzsche plays with this idea as he ridicules the teachers of purpose and poets for wanting to give meaning to life: ‘They, too, promote the life of the species by promoting the faith in life. “Life is worth living”, each of them shouts, “there is something to life, there is something behind life, beneath it; beware!” ’ (GS 1, KSA 3.371). 31. This does not mean that laughter is always bound up with wisdom in Nietzsche’s texts. On the contrary, laughter can also be an expression of sheer ignorance, people also laugh because they cannot understand or adjust to what they are being confronted with, and Nietzsche is fully aware of this: cf. Z Prologue 5, KSA 4.18. 32. ‘[B]‌ut unfortunately not in five words, but so circumstantially, venerably, and with such a display of German profundity and curlicues that people simply failed to note the comical niaiserie allemande involved in such an answer.’ 33. In D Preface 3, KSA 3.14, for instance, Nietzsche talks about ‘Kant’s innocent language’ (unschuldige Sprache Kant’s).

References Baillie, J. B. (1921), ‘Laughter and Tears: The Sense of Incongruity’, Studies in Human Nature 254–​93, London: G. Bell. Bracht Branham R. (2004), ‘Nietzsche’s Cynicism: Uppercase or Lowercase?’, in P. Bishop (ed.), Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition, 170–​81, New York/​Woodbridge: Camden House. Brandt, R. (1999), Kritischer Kommentar zu Kants Anthropologie in pragmatischer Sicht (1798), Hamburg: Meiner Verlag. Dancyner, K. (2007), The Technique of Film and Video Editing: History, Theory, and Practice, Burlington, MA: Elsevier. Hay, K. (2013), ‘Wie Nietzsche uns zum Lachen bringt. Interview mit Katia Hay’, Journal Phänomenologie, Nr. 39. http://​www.journal-​phaenomenologie.ac.at/​texte/​ jph39interview.html. Keith-​Spiegel, P. (1972), ‘Early Conceptions of Humour: Varieties and Issues’. In J. H. Goldstein and P. E. McGhee (eds), The Psychology of Humor: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Issues, 1–​42, New York/​London: Academic Press. Kuipers, G. (2015), Good Humor, Bad Taste. A Sociology of the Joke, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Morreall, J. (1983), Taking Laughter Seriously, Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Rather, L. J. (1965), Mind and Body in Eighteenth Century Medicine. A Study Based on Jerome Glaub’s De regimine mentis, Berkeley/​Los Angeles: University of California Press. Schopenhauer, A. (1977 [1819]), Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II [= WWV II], in Arthur Schopenhauer, Werke in zehn Bänden. Band 3, Zürich: Zürcher Ausgabe. Siemens, H., and Hay, K. (2015), ‘Ridendo dicere severum: On Probity, Laughter and Self-​Critique in Nietzsche’s Figure of the Free Spirit’, in R. Bamford (ed.), Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Free Spirit, 111–​36, London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

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‘jeder Geist hat seinen Klang’: Kant and Nietzsche on the Sense of Hearing Maria João Mayer Branco

We are searching for words, perhaps also for ears. Who are we anyway? Nietzsche

1.  Introduction: Philosophy’s traditional disqualification of hearing In what follows, I  propose a revaluation of the anthropologic relevance of the sense of hearing in the works of Kant and Nietzsche. I shall proceed by comparing what they both wrote on the relation between hearing and thinking, particularly in Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Human, All Too Human and other published and unpublished texts, and I shall base this comparison on views developed by Hannah Arendt in The Life of the Mind. Taking her views into account clarifies the reasons why paying attention to what Kant and Nietzsche have to say on hearing helps to determine what it means to be or to become human because it elucidates the relation between this particular sense and thinking, a relation that was mostly disregarded by the philosophical tradition. As Hannah Arendt points out, in Western philosophical tradition the privileged model and metaphor to understand what thinking is has always been the experience of seeing. In fact, the most decisive philosophical terms regarding what is at stake in thinking and in philosophizing –​terms such as theory, intuition, contemplation or evidence  –​derived from the identification of thinking with ‘seeing the truth’. According to this tradition, thinking is the achievement of an intuition or evidence of truth, it means to see clearly and exactly something that is present but, at first, in an obscure or confused way.

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The main reason for the privilege of the sense of sight for understanding what thinking is was always the alleged objectivity it allows for. When Arendt (1978:  111–​12) mentions the ‘advantages’ of sight as a guiding metaphor to understand what thinking is, she points out precisely the ‘safe distance between subject and object’, which allows for objectivity. In other words, when the subject is seeing, he seems to be less engaged or affected by the object than when he is touching, smelling or hearing it, and thus it is as if he remained somewhat separated from what is seen. For this reason, not only does he seem to perceive the object more accurately or ‘objectively’ than by means of the other senses, but he also seems to remain more free for considering it and acting upon it. By contrast, the sense of hearing does not seem to allow for such freedom. According to Arendt (1978: 119), throughout the history of philosophy hearing was always ‘the only possible competitor sight might have for pre-​eminence’. Its ‘disqualification’ in the competition resulted from its alleged passivity, from the fact, that is, that our ears seem to be less free than our eyes and are more easily captured, or at the mercy of whatever sounds around us. My claim is that Kant’s and Nietzsche’s analyses of the sense of hearing propose a different account of what is at stake in thinking, one which is in fact an alternative to the traditional model of sight. I argue that they both revaluate hearing in a way that puts forth the freedom it allows for, and I  shall analyse the affinities and differences of their views, as well as the different consequences of their conceptions of hearing for their conceptions of thought. I shall start by analysing Kant’s somewhat ambivalent views on the sense of hearing and then compare them with Arendt’s definition of thought as ‘the soundless dialogue between me and myself ’ (74–​5) and with the forms of ‘silence’ and ‘solitude’ it requires. Last, I  shall focus on Nietzsche and on the relation he establishes between hearing and thinking. This will allow me to clarify the kind of freedom Nietzsche has in mind as well as to show what brings him close and what distances him from Kant.

2.  Kant’s revaluation of hearing in the Anthropology As is well known, in Kant’s works the sense of sight plays a primary role. There can be no doubt that Kant’s philosophy inscribes itself in the traditional tendency to compare thinking with seeing in order to explain our access to the world, as the notions of point of view and perspective, so often used by Kant, seem to prove. The primacy of vision over the other senses is explicitly confirmed in Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. In §§ 15–​23 Kant

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defines the five ‘organic senses’ as those that ‘refer to external sensations’ and divides them in ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ senses (Anth §16 154). Considering that touch, sight and hearing are objective senses while taste and smell are subjective ones, Kant establishes a hierarchy between these two classes. The place of the three objective senses is ‘higher’ because they are ‘senses of perception (of the surface)’, while the subjective senses of taste and smell are ‘senses of pleasure (of the most intimate taking into ourselves)’ (Anth §21 157). This means, according to Kant, that touch, sight and hearing ‘contribute more to the cognition of the external object than they stir up the consciousness of the affected organ’, while taste and smell bring about ‘more a representation of enjoyment than a cognition of the external object’ (Anth §16 154). Thus Kant grounds his hierarchical division of the senses on cognitive reasons. Perception and objectivity enable a better knowledge of external objects than the dependence on the changes of the organs that only provoke subjective pleasurable or displeasurable sensations. In Kant’s words, ‘[T]‌he senses teach less the more strongly they feel themselves being affected’ (Anth §21 158), that is to say, the less subjective or private the sensible impressions are the more we learn. Objectivity and independence from the affected organ provide better knowledge of external objects because they further the subject’s freedom from the organic impressions that affect his body. This freedom, in turn, that is, the fact that the subject is less dependent on subjective or private impressions, explains the fact that ‘one can easily come into an agreement with others regarding the objective senses’ (Anth §16 154). Kant places sight at the top of the hierarchy he proposes. Sight is ‘the noblest’ of the senses because ‘it not only has the widest sphere of perception in space, but also its organ feels least affected’ (Anth §19 156). Kant thus praises sight for being less restricted by the affections of the eyes, that is to say, for what seems to be its bigger freedom from subjective impressions. This is what makes sight the most objective of all the objective senses. In fact, being furthest removed from the sense of touch, the most limited condition of perception [. . .] sight comes nearer to being a pure intuition (the immediate representation of the given object, without admixture of noticeable sensation). (Anth §19 156)

Nevertheless, I wish to suggest that although he unequivocally expresses the traditional preference for sight over the other senses, what Kant says about hearing allows for a revaluation of this latter. Moreover, such revaluation brings to light important aspects of Kant’s conception of human beings with respect to which sight does not seem to have the last word. It is this very conception that

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explains the reason why, in defining sight as ‘the noblest’ of the senses, Kant is careful to declare that seeing ‘is not more indispensable than hearing’ (Anth §19 156). The place of hearing within Kant’s hierarchy of the senses is somewhat ambivalent because hearing compares both with the higher and with the lower senses. By placing hearing, in §18 of the Anthropology, between touch (§17) and sight (§19), Kant already seems to indicate its ambivalence:  it stands between the immediacy of touch and the distanciation of sight. While touch is the only sense of ‘immediate external perception’ (Anth §17 155), Kant describes hearing and sight as senses of ‘mediate perception’ (Anth §18 155), where sensations take place by means of a medium. In hearing, the medium is the air that surrounds us (Anth §18 155), while in sight sensations take place by means of light (Anth §19 156). What is at stake in this mediation is, on the one hand, less dependence on the affections of the organ and, on the other, the possibility of perceiving distant objects. Through the media of air and light we can perceive objects with which our body is not physically contiguous and may not even be physically near, so that our contact with them is less conditioned by physical proximity. By means of light and air our eyes and ears are capable of perceiving things that lie beyond the limits of our bodies, as in the case of the ‘self-​luminous celestial bodies’ and of sounding objects whose presence ‘spreads itself through space in all directions’ (Anth §19 156). Hearing is hence a sense of mediate perception which shares objectivity with sight, as well as the capacity to perceive objects at a distance. At the same time, however, its very objectivity reveals affinities with the most subjective of the senses, namely, smell. Like sounds, smells act at a distance and they are also brought to us ‘by air, which has to penetrate the organ in order to have its specific sensation sent to it’ (Anth §20 157). Such affinity of hearing with smell is not very positive for the former because Kant considers smell as the ‘most ungrateful’ and ‘most dispensable’ of all the senses (Anth §22 158). He presents two arguments for this judgement. First, the very fact that ‘smell is taste at a distance, so to speak’ makes it ‘contrary to freedom and less sociable than taste’, because ‘others are forced to share the pleasure of it, whether they want to or not’ (Anth §21 158). Sensations of smell are always compelling because the subject is, as it were, assaulted by them, he simply cannot choose not to be affected. Smell is therefore not ‘sociable’ because the sensations that correspond to this sense behave like intruders, affecting everyone whether one wants it or not. Second, sensations of smell are ‘fleeting’ and ‘transient’ and for this reason it ‘does not pay to cultivate or refine’ the sense of smell (Anth §22 158). In other words, because

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of their transience, we can neither seize sensations of smell in order to gain better knowledge of the external objects to which they correspond, nor can we educate or train the sense of smell, as it seems to be constrained to passively endure the ephemeral presence of impressions that leave without trace. So, if distanciation is a positive element that allows for objectivity, when it comes to sensations of smell it reveals itself as being a hindrance to cognition, because the subject cannot retain those sensations, that is to say, he cannot control them and their presence does not last long enough to be properly, objectively analysed, measured or studied. Being only temporary, smells cannot really teach us anything, and for this reason the sense of smell is unworthy of cultivation. Additionally, sensations of smell limit us to ourselves, they confine us to sensations of pleasure or displeasure, which are ‘the most intimate taking into ourselves’, leaving no room for any distanciation between the sensation and the organ that is being affected. They are, in other words, throughout subjective, and for this reason it is almost impossible, with respect to them, to ‘come into an agreement with others’. According to Kant, the same thing applies to sounds. In spite of being ‘perceptions’, their transience brings them near to the subjectivity of those impressions of pleasure or displeasure that define ‘enjoyment’, as is the case of sensations of smell (and taste). What is more, and once again as in the case of smells, because sounds spread through space in all directions, they are also ‘contrary to freedom’ and not ‘sociable’ (Anth §21 158). They impose themselves on everyone’s ears without, so to speak, asking for permission, forcing their presence whether one wants it or not. So, in Kant’s conception of the five senses, although hearing is said to be an objective sense, it seems to oscillate between objectivity and subjectivity, mediation and immediacy, independence from the organ and lack of control over it, cognition and enjoyment, perception understood as controlled access to the surface of objects and pleasure in the sense of the most intimate taking into ourselves. Like visual impressions, sounds allow for distanciation from objects and thus for an access to exteriority that prevents confusion between the inner and the outer world; at the same time, however, they are like smells, intruding and forcing their presence over the subject, being, as one could say, rude or uncivilized and showing the same ‘lack of urbanity’ that Kant attributes to music (KU §53 330). But whenever he describes the sense of hearing in the Anthropology, Kant seems more interested in the relation it has with linguistic sounds than with any other kind of sounds. Indeed, when deeming hearing as ‘indispensable’ what Kant calls attention to is the relation between hearing and communication, or hearing and language, underlining that it is the necessary condition for

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the occurrence of dialogue or conversation between human beings. This relation seems to counterbalance the aspects that devaluate hearing  –​that is, its similarities with the subjective senses, which promote the subject’s isolation and confinement to his organic sensations  –​because it indicates that hearing is important to sociability and culture and also indispensable to reflection or thought. Moreover, according to Kant, being the condition for the interaction with others, hearing can also be considered as a condition for the interaction of the subject with himself, that is to say, a condition for the possibility, not only of feeling and having a specific kind of sensations, but also of thinking. §§18 and 22 of the Anthropology elucidate this point. In §18, Kant describes, as mentioned, the sense of hearing as a sense of mediate perception whose impressions depend on the medium of air, by means of which we can cognize distant objects. Sounds arrive from a distance and affect our ears with all the implications already mentioned. In the paragraph he devotes to hearing, Kant focuses exclusively on a particular class of sounds, namely, the ones that are emitted by the human voice. Moreover, these sounds which seem to be the only ones that matter in Kant’s account of the sense of hearing are neither mere vocalizations, nor the musical articulation of voice in song, but rather, and very explicitly, the sounds of spoken language. In fact, Kant claims that it is by means of the medium of air, which is set in motion by the vocal organ, the mouth, that human beings are able most easily and completely to share thoughts and feelings with others, especially when the sounds which each allows the other to hear are articulated and, in their lawful combination by means of the understanding, form a language. (Anth §18 155)

So, what seems to be most relevant for describing the sense of hearing is not its receptivity to sheer sonority or to noises in general, but its relation to the possibility of communicating with others –​its relation to language. Hearing is here presented as the condition for the possibility of sharing thoughts and feelings especially, as Kant specifies, through sounds that are articulated (and different, as we can presume, from vocalizations such as cries, sighs, mumblings and other kinds of utterances), sounds that ‘form a language’. It is as if human ears were particularly fitted or sensible not only to natural sounds and to the sound of music, but also, and more importantly, to the sound of language. In effect, language is not silent but sonorous or composed by sounds and, according to Kant, this sonority is what enables the intimate relation between hearing and speaking. In addition, because the sounds of language ‘are nothing in themselves or at least

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not objects, but at most only inner feelings, they are the best means of designating concepts’ (Anth §18 155). Hence, if the sense of hearing is closely related to the language through which we can communicate with others, that is, to a language which is common, it also relates specifically to conceptual language, that is, to philosophical language. Kant establishes this relation between hearing and concepts through something that he had rather diminished in the third Critique, namely, to the fact that sounds are not ‘objects’ or ‘products’: being ‘nothing in themselves’ they are the ‘best means’ to designate concepts. What is here at stake is the relation between hearing and rational language, that is to say, between hearing and thinking. This is confirmed by the sentence that Kant adds to the one just quoted: ‘And people born deaf, who for this very reason must remain mute (without speech), can never arrive at anything more than an analogue of reason’ (Anth §18 155). Hence, when Kant describes the sense of hearing, he pays more attention to its relation to language than to its relation to general sounds. This attention will have decisive consequences for Kant’s anthropology, and that is rather surprising given the alleged lack of importance that language has in Kant’s philosophy. However, Kant’s supposed indifference to language as a philosophical relevant topic is, as it has been recently argued, if not false, at least highly questionable (Schalow and Velkley 2014). What is more, such questioning can be supported precisely by the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View –​a work that has been considered as ‘a sort of climax’ of the phase when Kant developed ‘a deeply linguistic picture of cognition, concepts, judgements, syllogisms’, and gives ‘an exceptionally emphatic and wide-​ranging account of the fundamental role of language’ (Forster 2012; see also Foucault 2008). An example of this account is Kant’s insistence on the case of deaf-​mute persons throughout the Anthropology (§§18, 22 and 39). After referring to them in §18 (as quoted earlier), Kant returns to their case in §22, where he asks whether one sense can be used as a substitute for another (Anth §22 159–​60). Reflecting upon the possibility that deaf people have of substituting hearing (that is, hearing speech) for seeing (that is, observing gestures and the movement of the lips of someone who is speaking), Kant arrives at three conclusions. First, if the person is born deaf, the sense of seeing the movement of the speech organs must convert the sounds, which have been coaxed from him by instruction, into a feeling of the movement of his own speech muscles. But he never arrives at real concepts in this way, because the signs that he needs are not capable of universality. (Anth §22 159)

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So, according to Kant, when deafness is inborn, it can hardly be replaced by sight, since sight can only give access to the movement of the speech organs, which converts spoken sounds into the mere feeling of that movement in the deaf person’s own body (an argument that Kant repeats in §39). In other words, the conversion of sounding words into movements of speech muscles is not really communication with others; it rather corresponds to the enclosure of the deaf person in himself by reinforcing the feeling of the movements of his own muscles, that is, by reinforcing his physical, private sensations. That is precisely what Kant means when he states that the deaf person ‘never arrives at real concepts in this way, because the signs that he needs are not capable of universality’ –​implying that, being deprived of concepts, that person is simultaneously deprived of conceptual, universally communicable reason, deprived of thought. Kant concludes, therefore, that the lack or loss of hearing is more serious than that of sight, such that, when this lack is inborn, hearing is ‘the least replaceable of all the senses’ (Anth §22 159). Nevertheless, Kant adds –​and this is his second conclusion –​that if the loss of hearing is not inborn and occurs ‘later after the use of the eyes has been cultivated’, then, although ‘not satisfactorily’, hearing can be compensated by sight ‘whether by observation of gestures or more indirectly by means of reading a text’ (Anth §22 159–​60). In this case, it seems to be implied that seeing will make possible the exercise of recalling the world of spoken sounds, a world which is now lost and which the deaf person can no longer access, but which remains alive in his memory, although not in his ears, but nonetheless somewhere in himself and in spite of his incapacity to hear. Even more precisely, this return by means of seeing gestures or reading texts –​and this last example will be decisive for what I suggest about Nietzsche later on –​is still, in truth, something like an access to the outer world, to the world outside the deaf person, even if, as Kant suggests, he seems now enclosed within himself and in his physical impressions. If such indirect access is not satisfactory, as Kant stresses, it corresponds nevertheless to the possibility of having contact with other people by means of universal signs, that is to say, to the possibility of communicating with other human beings, of belonging to a world in which one is not isolated but which one shares with others. Kant’s third conclusion refers exactly to this. In arguing that ‘a person who becomes deaf in old age misses this means of social intercourse very much’, he compares the ‘talkative, sociable, and cheerful’ attitude of blind people at the dinner table with the annoyance and distrust that a person who has lost his hearing manifests in a social gathering. Wearing himself out in vain ‘guessing’ the meaning of the expressions of the ones that surround him –​guessing

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the meaning of what he sees, but cannot really understand –​this person is thus ‘condemned to solitude’ (Anth §22 160). Hearing is hence the ‘means of social intercourse’ or of conversation, which is not only a pleasure, the ‘mental pleasure of communication of thoughts’ (Anth §21 157), but also a decisive human need, as it will become clearer in what follows. Hearing is, according to Kant, the condition for having access to a common ‘meaning’ outside oneself, a meaning that, as it were, releases the subject from being confined to private impressions that cannot be compared, discussed or shared with others. Hearing is, to put it simply, the way out of the silent privacy that seems to hold deaf-​mute people captive within themselves:  because they cannot hear, they cannot speak either, and are therefore condemned to muteness and isolation. For this reason, in spite of Kant’s appraisal of sight as ‘the noblest’ of the senses, and although the sense of hearing shares with the lowest senses the disadvantages of their subjectivity, it seems nevertheless that, for Kant, hearing has a fundamental importance for human beings. Its intimate relation to language  –​for hearing is the condition for the possibility of speaking, as the deaf-​mutes’ example shows –​distinguishes it from the sense of sight (because we don’t see words, because concepts are invisible) and makes it irreplaceable. Moreover, the relation of hearing with language, of hearing with speaking, is also a relation with thinking in a sense that should yet be clarified. On the one hand, only through hearing do we have access to concepts, that is to say, to ‘universal’ signs that can be shared and understood by many different subjects. This view of thought, that is, its presentation as conceptual, abstract thought, in fact shows thought to be that which brings about socialization and human exchange. In other words, the identification of thought and language and their relation with the sense of hearing presents thought as the sonorous articulation of concepts that allows for the exchange of feelings and ideas with other people and releases, so to say, the subject from inner isolation. But Kant also offers another, complementary, version of the experience of thinking, one which maintains the reference to conversation but does not rest upon spoken language and its linguistic sonorous signs. Furthermore, according to this other version, besides being an experience that provides intersubjective understanding, thinking consists in the experience that fosters self-​understanding. In §39 of the Anthropology, where he returns to the example of deaf people and classifies different classes of signs, Kant writes: All language is a signification of thought and, on the other hand, the best way of signifying thought is through language, the greatest instrument for understanding ourselves and others. Thinking is speaking with oneself (the Indians of Tahiti

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call thinking ‘speech in the belly’); consequently it is also listening to oneself inwardly (by means of the reproductive power of imagination). (Anth §39 192)

The connection of thought and language with hearing is here unequivocal. Not only does language signify thought, but Kant expressly states that thought is actually language, even when it consists in silent and solitary speech, or, to put it differently, when it is a conversation of the subject with himself. What is more, this speaking with oneself is also ‘listening to oneself inwardly’, that is to say, listening not to sounds, or to sounding words that come from outside the subject, from a distance or from other people’s mouths, and not even to the words voiced by the subject himself, but listening ‘inwardly’, that is, listening to what is closest and what, besides being invisible, is also inaudible. To think is thus to speak and to hear –​or, as Kant also writes, ‘speaking to and of oneself ’ (Anth §27 167), a conversation where the subject is simultaneously the speaker and the listener, the object of discussion or the topic in question, where he eventually becomes the object he wishes to know or to understand. So, even if the subject is alone and silent while he thinks, he is not condemned to solitude because thinking is a ‘conversation of the human being with himself ’ that ‘takes the place of a social gathering’ (Anth §23 160–​1). Thinking is keeping oneself company or communicating with oneself, ‘recollecting attention to the state of one’s own thoughts’ (Anth §23 160–​1); it is the inner listening and answering to one’s own questions which puts forth a soundless exchange of ideas. Considered from this perspective and confronted with Kant’s hierarchy of the senses, hearing gains an unsuspected value: it is the condition for the possibility of thinking, while sight, the noblest of the senses, seems to be completely irrelevant with regard to thought. Being the sense that allows us to connect to ourselves and to others, hearing proves to be decisive for achieving what it means to be human and humanly alive (what it means to experience the ‘life of the mind’, to use Arendt’s expression). Moreover, this perspective opens up the possibility for revaluating what Kant considered at first to be a disadvantage of this sense, namely, its lack of contribution not only to culture, but also to knowledge. Although, as indicated earlier, this objective sense only gives access to transient impressions, its privileged relation with language enables our access to words and concepts without which not only thinking is impossible, but also knowledge would be unthinkable because cognition cannot be constituted, maintained and improved without being translated into linguistic forms. These conserve, as it were, empirical experiences and allow for their transmission. However, as we have just seen, the sense of hearing plays a decisive role not only

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in our knowledge of objects in general but also, and most importantly, in our knowledge of ourselves.1 Also in this regard, the contribution of sight seems to be, in fact, scarce. Hence, and contrary to what Kant suggests at the beginning, in order to constitute knowledge, be it the knowledge of objects or the subject’s self-​knowledge, it is more important to hear than to see –​whether knowledge comes from contact with others or with oneself. This last point is extremely important in Kant’s anthropology. Kant is very careful to explain that the conception of knowing and thinking as speaking and listening to oneself ought not to replace the conception of thinking as communication with others and that they are both complementary. The Anthropology analyses the dangers that are at stake when ‘the tendency to retire into oneself ’ takes over the subject, namely, the way he then risks ‘mental illness’ (Anth §24 161). Isolation, therefore, not only defines the deaf-​mute’s situation; it is also constitutive of madness understood as the impossibility to contrast the inner with the outer world, as an enclosure in one’s private ideas that turns the inward conversation into a desperate soliloquy.2 Analysing this tendency, which is a ‘tendency to accept the play of ideas of inner sense as experiential cognition, although it is only a fiction; and also the tendency to keep oneself in an artificial frame of mind’ (Anth §24 161), Kant declares that it ‘can only be set right when the human being is led back into the external world and by means of this to the order of things present to the outer senses’ (Anth §24 161–​2). The return to the external world, moreover, if and when it is possible at all, is also fostered, according to Kant, by contacting with other human beings, or by the capacity to speak and listen not only to and of oneself, but to and of others. This contact is what allows for the replacement of what Kant calls the ‘logical private sense (sensus privatus)’ in which madness consists, with a sense that can be shared with other human beings, which Kant famously calls ‘common sense’ (sensus communis) (Anth §53 219). Madness is isolation from a common sense and a common world; it is a withdrawal to a private world which is kept apart and remains intelligible and valid only for the one who has become deaf or incapable to listen to what comes from outside himself. But even more importantly, of course, is that this kind of deafness to others in which madness consists of also implies that inward listening and speaking becomes harder or more difficult, so that the soundless dialogue runs the risk of ceasing to make any sense at all. For this reason, Kant claims that if the only universal characteristic of madness is the loss of common sense (sensus communis) and its replacement with logical private sense (sensus privatus) [. . .]

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it is a subjectively necessary touchstone of the correctness of our judgements generally, and consequently also of the soundness of our understanding, that we also restrain our understanding by the understanding of others, instead of isolating ourselves with our own understanding and judging publicly with our private representations, so to speak (Anth §53 219)

What Kant seems to be indicating here is the fact that there are limits for the inward listening and speaking in which thinking consists. Inward listening should not become excessive or too impositive (obsessive, as we might also say). This means that our ears should be capable of hearing also what sounds outside ourselves instead of becoming deaf to the voices that surround us. Put differently, inward listening should be tempered by inward deafness, in the sense that it should not completely dominate the life of our minds as in the state of madness or insanity. In effect, these states correspond to a lack of freedom inasmuch as one is not free to choose not to listen to himself. A healthy life of the mind, by contrast, implies that one feels free to make this choice, free to distance oneself even from one’s own thinking. As Kant concludes, he who pays no attention at all to this touchstone, but gets it into his head to recognize private sense as already valid apart from or even in opposition to common sense, is abandoned to a play of thoughts in which he sees, acts, and judges, not in a common world, but rather in his own world (as in dreaming) (Anth §53 219)

3.  The soundless dialogue between me and myself Before turning to Nietzsche, I shall briefly recall Hannah Arendt’s ideas about the primacy given to the sense of sight in the history of Western Metaphysics in order to clarify the reasons why the sense of hearing may be said to appear as sight’s ‘competitor’ both in Kant’s and in Nietzsche’s philosophies. Arendt draws two consequences from the traditional understanding of thinking as seeing the truth. The first one is that a truth that can be seen and contemplated cannot be said. In other words, a visible truth is necessarily ineffable because it depends upon an intuitive moment which excludes discursive articulation. Arendt (1978: 118) talks about an ‘incompatibility’ between intuition and speech grounded on the fact that ‘the former always presents us with a co-​temporaneous manifold, whereas the latter necessarily discloses itself in a sequence of words and sentences’. Thus, ‘no discourse [. . .] can ever match the simple, unquestioned

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and unquestionable certainty of visible evidence’ (119). The model of vision, that is, of truth as visibility and of thought as intuition is therefore based on the idea of an absolute presence which is, so to say, without rest. It does not allow for any translation of that presence into words because its temporal concentration or instantaneity cannot be dispersed in time, as discourse requires. A visible truth is hence a silent truth, and a truth before which the contemplator falls silent or becomes mute. For this reason, it can also be said that the conception of thought as vision is somewhat authoritarian, as it imposes a vision of which it is not possible to speak and whose intensity silences the ones who contemplate it. From here follows the second consequence entailed by the understanding of thinking as seeing. The silent contemplator is also an isolated contemplator, one who, given the incommunicability of what he sees, remains separated from other possible contemplators. Put differently, a truth that cannot be put into words cannot be shared or communicated either. By contrast, as Arendt underlines, the experience of hearing allows for a different conception of the silence and isolation of the one who thinks because it consists of a different temporal experience. In effect, while vision implies coincidence and instantaneity, hearing consists in the experience of a succession of perceptions, that is, in perceiving something which we only access by following a succession of instants, something that implies a sort of movement instead of static contemplation. In this sense, it is possible to add to what Kant pointed out about the extension of sonority in space –​like smells, sound ‘spreads itself through space in all directions’ (Anth §19 156) –​the fact that sounds also extend themselves in time. This seems to be even more so with regard to the sound of language, that is, with regard to the experience of hearing spoken language. In this case, as Arendt emphasizes, to hear is always to follow something which discloses itself within a certain temporal sequence with different moments, variations of quality and rhythm to which we must lend our ears.3 In this sense, hearing is more compatible with discourse and language than seeing because language requires precisely the possibility of sequentiating words and sentences in order to make sense. This compatibility, in turn, allows to question the supposed ineffability of truth as well as to break with the isolation of the thinker because it entails the possibility of sharing and communicating thoughts. Their dependency from their communicability, from the possibility of being shared offers a less authoritarian conception of thought that implies accompanying a sounding flux instead of passively coinciding with a decisive instant. As such, it requires the listener’s participation, the listener’s response to what he hears, as if a dialogue between two parts was taking place.

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Furthermore, hearing’s compatibility with discourse and language brings about its affinity, not only with spoken language, but also with thought, as Kant indicates. Better said, it brings about the conception of thinking as a dialogue or a conversation of the subject with himself, as Arendt (1978) emphasizes following Plato and echoing the passages of Kant’s Anthropology analysed above. She refers to thinking as ‘the soundless dialogue of the I with itself ’, or ‘between me and myself ’ (74–​54), and she argues that this dialogue ‘may be soundless [but] it is never silent’ (75) because it requires language. Hence, although ‘thoughts do not have to be communicated in order to occur’, they cannot occur ‘without being spoken –​silently or sounding out in dialogue, as the case may be’ (99). Indeed, as Arendt states, our mental activities, although invisible, are not properly inaudible and require the inward listening Kant alluded to. This inward listening, in turn, in which ‘the soul, when it is thinking, speaks with itself, questioning and answering, affirming and denying’ (Theaetetus 189e), allows for a revision of the isolated condition that the model of thinking as seeing implied because it requires that the thinker is not conceived of as an indivisible unity, but rather as someone capable of speaking to himself, that is to say, capable of an inner plurality. In other words, the hearing model, from which the conception of thinking as a dialogue results, puts forth the possibility of an intercourse within the same person whereby she can interrogate her own ideas and continue to think by putting herself into question –​the possibility, that is, of inserting ‘a difference into my Oneness’ whereby ‘I clearly am not just one’ (Arendt 1978: 183). Arendt terms this possibility the ‘two-​in-​one’ (179–​83). It consists in the essential ‘duality’ whereby the subject is capable of acting ‘back upon himself ’ (74), that is to say, whereby ‘I am both the one who asks and the one who answers’ and in which ‘I keep myself company’ (185). According to Arendt, thinking is therefore ‘a solitary but not a lonely business’ (185). This is so, she argues, because the state of ‘solitude’ is different from the state of ‘loneliness’. ‘Solitude’ is the ‘state in which I keep myself company’, that is, in which I ‘have intercourse with myself ’, whereas ‘loneliness’ is the state where I am ‘deserted not only by human company but also by the possible company of myself ’ (74). Hence, Arendt concludes, only in loneliness do we feel ‘deprived of human company’, and only ‘in the acute awareness of such deprivation’ do men exist really in the singular, as ‘in dreams or in madness’ (74). Solitude actualizes the duality that characterizes the thinking activity whereby we speak and listen to ourselves, a questioning and answering process, a ‘travelling through words’ (Sophist 253b)5 that prevents us from becoming fixed, incapable of moving, dogmatically enclosed within the same thoughts, or unfree to

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revise them. If thinking requires a ‘withdrawal’ (Arendt 1978:  69)  that allows for the soul to invisibly listen to itself, this retreat to solitude is not a condemnation to isolation analogous to the one which threatened Kant’s deaf-​mute; rather, it opens up the possibility of an intercourse where the subject keeps himself company. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates personified this process, which was named philosophy. Nevertheless, as Arendt points out, Plato does not describe Socrates seated alone occupied by his thoughts, but Socrates wandering through Athens and talking to the ones he meets on the street. In her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt (1992:  37)  recalls this fact and argues that what Socrates actually did ‘was to make public, in discourse, the thinking process –​that dialogue that soundlessly goes on within me, between me and myself ’. This making public is indispensable for the activity of thinking because it prevents contradiction, as Arendt claims, following Socrates and also Kant. In Kant’s words, quoted by Arendt, publicity is the rule that allows for ‘consistency’, that is to say, the only way to find out whether our thoughts possess meaning. Hence, even if thinking is a ‘solitary business’ (40), it depends on its public exposition, on its becoming audible to other people, on its communication whereby it opens itself to examination and becomes ‘critical’. Moreover, unless you can somehow communicate and expose to the test of others, either orally or in writing, whatever you may have found out when you were alone, this faculty exerted in solitude will disappear (40)

Critical thinking, as Kant understood it and as Arendt recuperates it, implies ‘general communicability’ and ‘contact with other people’s thinking’ (40–​1). The risk of non-​exposure, of remaining within the private, subjective sphere, is the risk of contradiction or inconsistency, as well as the risk of dogmatism. This means that unless thoughts are communicated, they can disappear either by destroying themselves by means of self-​contradictions or by arriving at dead-​ ends from which the thinker may not be able to find the way out, that is to say, in which he can become incapable of going on, of continuing to think. Simply put, unless thought is exposed publically, it runs the risk of extinction, of perishing at its own hands. However, as Arendt stresses, contrary to Socrates and in spite of defending public exposure and contact with other people’s thinking, Kant never set foot on the marketplace to discuss his ideas. Moreover, it is very unlikely that his most famous book, the Critique of Pure Reason, will ever become a popular one, that is to say, will ever be exposed to a wider public than that composed by people

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who study philosophy. Arendt recalls that, differently from most philosophers, Kant regretted this fact very deeply, and kept the hope that it would be possible to popularize his thought. Loyal to the idea that ‘every philosophical work must be susceptible of popularity; if not, it probably conceals non-​sense beneath a fog of seeming sophistication’ (Letter to Christian Garve, 7 August 1783),6 Kant remained faithful to his principle according to which critical thinking must expose itself to the test of free and open examination, a test in which the more people participate, the better it is. Also to this regard, he was beyond doubt a man of his time, that is to say, a representative of the Enlightenment for whom the word ‘freedom’ also meant the freedom to speak and to publish.

4.  Every spirit has its own sound I shall now turn to Nietzsche in order to clarify the affinities and differences between his and Kant’s account of the relation between hearing and thinking. Nietzsche’s interest for the sense of hearing is as indisputable as is his interest for everything associated with the universe of sound: the ears, the voice, silence, noise and, of course, music. However, Nietzsche’s approach to hearing and its consequences for the definition of thought and philosophy prove to be very different from Kant’s. To begin with, Nietzsche nowhere proposes a classification of the senses. One does not find in his writings any attempt to establish a hierarchy of the five senses (nor a hierarchy of the arts, by the way). Second, for Nietzsche hearing is not an ‘objective’ sense. In fact, his deep suspicion about the possibility of ‘objectivity’ or ‘objective knowledge’ achieved by any kind of inner ‘intuition’ prevents him from considering even sight as an ‘objective’ sense. However, for Nietzsche hearing is not a ‘subjective’ sense either, given his equally deep suspicion about the modern philosophical understanding of subjectivity.7 What is more, and contrary to what is suggested by Kant in the passages where he compares hearing with smell, Nietzsche’s concern seems to be to revaluate the passivity traditionally attributed to the sense of hearing, that is to say, the idea that hearing is nothing but a passive experience where the one who hears obediently submits himself to what he hears. As I shall try to show, Nietzsche’s positive conception of hearing implies, rather, an experience that involves as much courage and freedom as Kant’s critical thinking because it evokes the experience of overcoming the fear to think. This latter is tantamount to overcoming the fear of silence and solitude, a fear which Nietzsche considers to be typical of modern men. This idea persists throughout the whole of Nietzsche’s writings along with

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his well-​known praise of solitude (and particularly the solitude of the thinker, the philosopher or the free spirit), such that it suggests a very different relation with the public sphere from the one that is defended by Kant. The relation between thinking and hearing is recurrent in Nietzsche’s work. It indicates Nietzsche’s deviation from the model of sight, such as Arendt describes it, as well as from the traditional understanding of the vision or intuition of the truth. Nietzsche’s philosophy questions precisely this understanding and rejects, on the one hand, the model of the adequatio based on the experience of vision, and, one the other hand, the idea of a permanent, metaphysical, meta-​ linguistic and meta-​discursive truth. Nietzsche’s interest in the sense of hearing suggests a conception of philosophical thinking that refuses the static idolatry of a perennial and unchangeable truth,8 although it does not completely dispense with the model of sight and visibility. What happens is that, in Nietzsche’s philosophy, sight seems to share its privileges with hearing, and this sharing gives place to a different understanding of the experience of philosophical thinking where the latter does not remain hostage to ineffable intuitions. At the same time, by freeing thought from the exclusivity of the model of visual evidence, Nietzsche attributes a temporality to the thinking process that is contrary to the immediacy of intuition, and which the metaphor of hearing indicates in a more determinate way because of its implications with regard to language. This suggestion, however, raises a difficulty analogous to the one pointed out earlier with regard to Kant, namely, Nietzsche’s problematic account of language or Nietzsche’s polemic ‘philosophy of language’. As is very well known, this account is everything but uncontroversial, besides being usually taken for fundamentally negative. Nietzsche’s critiques of language should, thus, obviously be taken into account here, but I will nevertheless argue that they do not imply that thought can dispense with language. To prove it, as well as to show an important difference between Kant and Nietzsche as far as this topic is concerned, I shall focus on the relation between thinking and writing. Among Nietzsche’s published texts, it is in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that references to hearing are more abundant. In this work Nietzsche refers several times to hearing and to ears –​to having or not having ears. Zarathustra repeats several times the Evangelic refrain, ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear!’ (Z III Vision 1, KSA 4.199; Z III Apostates 2, KSA 4.230; Z III Tablets 16, KSA 4.256),9 regretting that nobody has his ears (Z III Virtue 3, KSA 4.216) and that he is not the mouth for his contemporaries’ ears (Z Prologue 5, KSA 4.18). But in spite of these complaints, he expresses hope in a future of which he already sees signs, a time when his words will be heard and human ears will become more refined

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(Z IV Sleepwalker 4, KSA 4.399). In all these passages, as well as in many others where hearing is mentioned, Nietzsche’s concern seems to be, like Kant’s, the hearing of the human voice, that is to say, hearing other people’s ideas, words or thoughts, and not hearing sounds in general. Excluding the (many) texts where he writes about music, what seems to be important to Nietzsche is thus the human capacity to listen to other human beings. An exception to this can, however, be found in §250 of Daybreak, where Nietzsche refers to hearing as the hearing of noises in general, of the sounds that warned uncivilized, primitive men, still living in caves and forests, of the dangers that could threaten them. In this text Nietzsche defines ears as the ‘organs of fear’ and mentions ‘the longest human age’ as the age of the ‘fearful’ (furchtsamen) men, implying that hearing was the most important sense for human survival within a wild or hostile environment because, as Kant puts it, it enabled the perception of sounds at a distance and therefore prevented many deadly threats (D 250, KSA 3.205). Hence, in this particular text, the idea that the human species has developed the sense of hearing in order to survive does not seem to have much to do with the development of human culture, or with human interaction; rather, it relates to the preservation of human life at a very basic level. In this sense, hearing does not address the necessity of mutual understanding among individuals or the necessity of self-​understanding that is at stake in the process of thinking. It is, hence, as if Nietzsche separated the survival of the human species from the fact that human beings speak, both to themselves and to each other –​as if he considered that language is not indispensable for the preservation of humanity. However, in The Gay Science Nietzsche corrects this impression, writing that ‘as the most endangered animal, [man] needed help and protection, he needed his equals; he had to express his neediness and be able to make himself understood’ (GS 354, KSA 3.591). What is at stake in this text is the description of situations of danger and vulnerability that involve human survival. But here Nietzsche highlights the fact that those situations forced men to communicate with other men. Nietzsche argues that our becoming conscious of our sense impressions, our power to fix them and as it were place them outside of ourselves, has increased in proportion to the need to convey them to others by means of signs (GS 354 KSA 3.592)

Self-​consciousness developed from the capacity to externalize ‘inner facts’ such as the feeling of danger, that is to say, from the capacity to find a medium to convey them, to communicate them. In other words, as Nietzsche writes, ‘the

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ability to communicate’ developed from the ‘need to communicate’ (GS 354, KSA 3.590–​1). So, here, by establishing a relationship between communication among human beings and the survival of the species, Nietzsche suggests that that relationship was from the beginning a relationship of need (Noth) and that communication among human beings was functional, or an instrument which served self-​preservation and not self-​understanding, that is, not the inward speaking and listening that is closer to a state of freedom or independence from the most basic necessities and dangers. This state of freedom or inward dialogue is thematized in many other passages of Nietzsche’s work, and particularly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as mentioned earlier. In this work, Nietzsche considers the possibility of educating the ears of humanity, of teaching and learning how to hear well, of a modality of hearing that I suggest is the one which Nietzsche’s philosophy proposes, as well as the one which is, so to speak, the addressee of his philosophy. We could call it a philosophical listening or an ear to philosophy, and its description can be found in the chapter of Zarathustra titled ‘The Stillest Hour’ (Z II Stillest Hour, KSA 4.187–​90). The text presents the moment when Zarathustra returns to solitude for the second time, convinced that his words were not heard by men. Nietzsche presents Zarathustra in the process of questioning himself, his actions and judgements, and describes that moment as a very difficult one, a moment when Zarathustra suffers and asks himself (rather philosophical) questions such as ‘Who am I?’ (Z II Stillest hour, KSA 4.188). The ‘stillest’ of Zarathustra’s hours –​which he also calls the most terrible (furchtbar) hour – i​s the hour of the soundless dialogue between Zarathustra and himself where he is forced to recognize things that he knows but of which he does not ‘want to speak’, for which, that is to say, he does not have either the words or the courage yet. What he listens to is a part of himself which makes him hear and discover things about himself –​a voice ‘without voice’, as Nietzsche writes, the voice or sound of his thinking. He engages in a conversation in which nobody speaks in the proper sense of the word, and which, for this reason, does not really break with physical silence. The stillest hour resembles the event described earlier, the Platonic ‘soundless dialogue between me and myself ’, which the Platonic Socrates called ‘thinking’,10 and which Hannah Arendt examines in The Life of the Mind. Zarathustra listens to himself experiencing the ‘two-​in-​one’ described by Arendt. In this situation he recognizes  –​by hearing the stillest hour, which ‘speaks’ to him ‘like a whispering’ –​that ‘the stillest words are those that bring the storm’ and that ‘thoughts that come on the feet of doves steer the world’ (Z II Stillest Hour, KSA 4.189). The stillest hour is thus a moment of retreat

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where the ‘greatest events’ take place: ‘The greatest events –​these are not our loudest, but our stillest hours’ (Z II Great Events, KSA 4.169). Furthermore, it is the hour for which one must have ‘ears for the unheard of ’, the kind of ears typical of ‘lonesome and twosome hermits’ (Z Prologue 9, KSA 4.27). Hence, in Nietzsche’s view, thinking, the soundless dialogue of the soul with itself, is, as Arendt puts it, a ‘solitary business’. Thus Spoke Zarathustra confirms this idea by the opposition it creates between the solitude and silence required by thinking, on the one hand, and the ‘noise’ of the ‘market place’, where Zarathustra speaks to the ‘rabble’ and to ‘the rabble’s long ears’ (Z IV Higher Man 1, KSA 4.356), on the other. Zarathustra’s frustration for not being heard or understood when he goes down to the market place or whenever he tries to speak with other human beings indicates that, contrary to Kant’s defence of the public sphere and the public exposure of thoughts and ideas to others, Nietzsche suspects that the public realm and its ‘noise’ are not the best ground to cultivate thought. On the one hand, his account of this realm seems to reduce it to sheer sonority instead of acknowledging its importance for fostering thought, culture and freedom, as was the case for Kant; on the other hand, and perhaps even worst, for Nietzsche that sonority is such that, in the middle of it, it becomes impossible to hear and think. Precisely this idea is at stake in Zarathustra’s comings and goings from solitude to human interaction and back, as well as in his discovery that where ‘everyone talks’, ‘everyone is ignored’ and ‘no one knows anymore how to understand’ (Z III Homecoming, KSA 4.233). Hence, the difficulties that Zarathustra feels in his attempts to communicate with other men, the lack of ears capable of hearing what he has to say, do not imply that the men whom he addresses are deaf or hear badly, in the strict sense of this expression; on the contrary, and rather paradoxically, the problem seems to be that they hear too much and that their ears suffer from a kind of hyper-​sensibility that Nietzsche considers typical of modern men. At the time when he wrote the Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche already referred to this excess of hearing as the result of the modern incapacity to tolerate silence. In fact, Nietzsche considered that the noise of public life and the ceaseless rumour of daily events corresponded to a refuge from a silence that modern men find threatening. Dominated as they are by what Nietzsche calls ‘journalism’, that is to say, ‘the spirit and spiritlessness of our day and our daily papers’ (UM III 4, KSA 1.365), modern men run the risk of becoming incapable of thinking, that is to say, of becoming deaf to themselves, incapable of soundless inward speaking and listening. The deliberate search for such circumstances in which soundless inward speaking and listening becomes impossible

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corresponds, thus, to an obstruction of hearing by means of an excess of sounds. The excess is to be maintained as continuously as possible, so that no pause, no silent moment where the subject keeps himself company is permitted. The search or voluntary exposal to the constant flux of the rumour of ‘today’ is thus a strategy of self-​defence, that is, of defence from silent moments that have become intolerable. In Schopenhauer as Educator Nietzsche identifies this strategy with the tendency to distract one’s thoughts in order to ‘cease to be aware of life’ (UM III 4, KSA 1.373). This tendency is common in Modern European culture and it deviates men from essential questions such as ‘Why do I live? What lesson have I to learn from life? How have I become what I am?’ (UM III 4, KSA 1.374). Escaping from silence corresponds, thus, to escaping the conditions in which these (philosophical) questions appear, escaping the soundless interrogation where the subject questions himself and asks difficult questions for which he does not have the answer and perhaps the words yet, and that exposes the frailty of what he think he knows, first of all about himself. A posthumous note from 1874 names this modern intolerance to silence ‘fear’: Each moment of life wants to tell us something, but we do not want to hear; when we are alone and silent we fear [wir fürchten uns] that something will be whispered to our ears –​that’s why we hate silence and stupefy ourselves with life in society. (NL 1874 34[24], KSA 7.799)

Silence is felt as fearful because in it we hear things that we may not wish to hear, fearful things that we may prefer to ignore. Furthermore, as Nietzsche points out, this fear of silence is also a fear of solitude, modern men’s ‘terror’, he writes, ‘to live alone with themselves’: [modern men, MB] would rather be hunted, injured and torn to pieces than have to live quietly alone with themselves. Alone with themselves! –​the idea of this makes modern souls quake, it is their kind of terror and fear of ghosts! [ihre Angst und Gespensterfurcht] (UM IV 5, KSA 1.461)

The experience of silence demands a certain degree of courage to overcome the fear of living quietly alone with oneself, and such courage relates intimately with the capacity for a specific modality of hearing or inward listening. But this fear of listening to oneself seems to be very different from the one implied in the hearing described in text from Daybreak quoted earlier. While in that case Nietzsche referred to the perception of external sounds that protected human life from external dangers (which seems to presuppose that the sound of inner dialogue was not a problem among less civilized men), here he concentrates

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on inward listening understood as a potential inner danger, something fearful from which men try to escape through ‘life in society’. Thus, and contrary to what Kant argues, for Nietzsche modern ‘life in society’ is understood as a threat to thought, that is to say, as what puts in danger not physical, elementary survival, but survival of the life of the mind. Stupefied by the noise of the public realm, thought runs the risk of extinction among modern, civilized men, who prefer to escape from what makes them human, that is, the soundless dialogue whereby they speak and listen to themselves. Moreover, as Zarathustra indicates, the public realm prevents not only inward listening but also mutual listening and the possibility of mutual understanding, that is, the possibility of effective interaction. Hence, although in Nietzsche the reference to the hearing of human voices and words is crucial for his analysis of the sense of hearing, for him, and contrary to Kant, in modern times human public interaction seems to be not only dispensable but even harmful for thinking. In fact, as the passage from Gay Science quoted earlier seems to indicate, human interaction only serves the communication of basic needs instead of fostering the ‘spirit’ that Nietzsche misses in the public sphere. From this follows another consequence that brings to light an important aspect of Nietzsche’s account of hearing, namely, its relation with language. Besides his suspicions about the possibility of hearing within the public sphere –​where the discussion of thoughts and ideas can take place but at the price of hindering inward listening and transforming the exchange of thoughts into mere stupefying noise that brings about mutual deafness –​Nietzsche was also highly suspicious of the possibility of translating inward listening into words. This very well-​known aspect of his philosophy is spread all over his works. It raises several problems with which Nietzsche dealt since his earlier writings, and which are at the basis of his critical view of language.11 The first of them is that words are abusive generalizations that do not restore single unities. Nietzsche analysed this difficulty already in On Truth and Lying in an Extramoral Sense, where he demonstrated that words fix in general abstractions the incommensurable multiplicity of what exists, thereby taking to be identical what is in fact different. By unifying distinct and irreducible things in identical terms, language therefore ‘lies’ –​it fails to do justice to each object by naming it with words that apply to several cases. But besides preventing the apprehension of singular objects, language also hinders the expression of human individuality.12 By ‘overlooking what is individual’ (TL 1, KSA 1.880), words only express what is ‘similar’ or ‘common’, they ‘falsify and corrupt’ what Nietzsche refers to in a later Nachlass note as the most ‘personal’ aspect of ourselves (NL 1885–​6 1[202], KSA 12.56). As he will argue in another Nachlass note: ‘[A]‌ll communication

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by words is shameless; words dilute and make stupid; words depersonalise [entpersönlicht]; words make the exceptional [das Ungemeine] base [gemein]’ (NL 1887 10[60], KSA 12.493). These critiques of language ground, in part, Nietzsche’s scepticism about the possibility of communicating the soundless dialogue between the soul and itself, of conveying the stillest hours of inward listening by means of linguistic signs. The latter are ‘common’, that is, they abstract and vulgarize what could be called the quality or tonality of thinking. Nietzsche’s concern seems thus to be that if language is always ‘common’, it cannot convey the specific tone of our thoughts, as it reduces them always to general abstractions, depersonalized ideas and concepts. Consequently, he seems to claim that, since the soundless voice of the stillest hours cannot be heard once it is put into words, it cannot therefore be transmitted to others, it cannot be shared. In fact, this is what seems to be at stake whenever Nietzsche writes about the difficulty of being understood by others, either his contemporaries or his readers in general (see e.g. GS 381, BGE 290, GM Preface 1). Hence, Nietzsche seems to claim that the solitude required for thinking is, in fact, isolation, an isolation similar to the one Kant ascribed to deaf-​mutes who cannot hear and understand what other people say, nor can they make themselves heard and understood by expressing their thoughts, feelings and ideas by means of spoken language. Nevertheless, I argue that this is not the case. For Nietzsche also admits a positive account of language, suggesting, as we shall see, that there are ways of overcoming language’s silencing of the tonalities of thought. This results from a specificity of the sense of hearing which was mentioned earlier, namely, its relation with time and freedom. But before trying to clarify this claim, it is important to dismiss the prejudice that Nietzsche makes the apology of isolation and does not take language to be a requirement of thinking. A passage from Twilight of the Idols helps to elucidate Nietzsche’s view: We stop valuing ourselves when we communicate. Our true experiences are completely taciturn. They could not be communicated even if they wanted to be. This is because the right words for them do not exist. The things we have words for are also the things we have already left behind. There is a grain of contempt in all speech. Language, it seems, was invented only for average, mediocre, communicable things. People vulgarize themselves when they speak a language. –​Excerpts from a morality for the deaf-​mutes and other philosophers. (TI Skirmishes 26, KSA 6.128)

The last sentence reveals the irony of the previous ones: that they belong to a morality ‘for the deaf-​mutes and other philosophers’ means that they should

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not be taken as a rule for hearers and speakers, and hence also not as Nietzsche’s position regarding the problems he raises about language. In effect, they seem to apply to those who stupefy themselves with life in society, choosing to live in the market place in order not to really communicate with others, fearful as they are of not having the words to convey their thoughts, convinced that it is only possible to speak about what is average, mediocre and vulgar. To put it differently, they prefer to isolate themselves in the middle of the general, public noise, and to be reduced to deafness and muteness by words which are nothing but intrusive, general sounds that impose themselves on their ears preventing them both from speaking and listening to themselves and also from trying to find the way of sharing their thoughts with others. It is in this sense that Nietzsche considers that the public sphere does violence to one’s ears, violence to one’s freedom not to hear in order to be capable of actually listening, and therefore isolates men from each other and from themselves. However, my suggestion is that Nietzsche does not claim that absolute isolation from society is a condition for thinking, neither does he argue that thinking is independent from language. It does require going through the ‘stillest hours’, but the silence this involves is a sounding and speaking silence different, for example, from ‘the great silence’ that Nietzsche ascribes to nature, whereby nature manifests its muteness or its incapacity to speak. The latter is described in Daybreak 423 (KSA 3.259–​60) where Nietzsche praises the ‘silent beauty’ of nature that ‘cannot speak’ and points out that human hearts are sensible to it to a point that they eventually also ‘cannot speak’ whenever they are touched by it. In the same text, Nietzsche questions nature’s ‘malice’, which makes man ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate even thinking’. By doing so, he writes, nature teaches man ‘to cease to be man’. The text indicates, therefore, that language is what distinguishes man in the midst of nature, what separates humans from nature’s ‘muteness’ –​ which, nevertheless, seems to communicate with human beings and even to lead them to question what makes them human, that is to think about their humanity and question whether its separation from nature is really absolute. However, Nietzsche asserts that he ‘pities’ nature’s silence and the fact that it cannot speak, so that he expresses his doubts about whether men should ‘surrender’ to nature’s muteness and become themselves ‘mute’. In other words, in spite of his suspicions about language and of his critiques of the (over-​)civilized state of culture, Nietzsche does not argue for something like man’s return to the state of nature –​ although, as is well known, one of the aims of his philosophy is ‘to translate man back into nature’ (BGE 230)  and to make him ‘deaf ’ to the old metaphysical songs which abstract from the fact that man is also a natural being.13 Nietzsche’s

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point seems to be that nature’s silence is different from the silence of the man who is capable of remaining alone with himself, a silence in which, again according to Zarathustra, everything wants to ‘become word’, everything wants ‘to learn how to speak’ (Z III Homecoming, KSA 4.232). The silence of the stillest hour is not the ‘great silence’ of nature which, as Nietzsche writes in Daybreak, ‘teaches man to cease to be man’; on the contrary, it is the silence by means of which man becomes man, a ‘blissful silence’ that ‘listens’ and in which humans feel at their own ‘home and house’ (Z III Homecoming, KSA 4.233). Accordingly, the quietness at stake in thinking is not a silencing but a waiting, the auscultation that returns man to his humanity. For this reason, it corresponds not to an exile, or to the isolation which Kant attributed to deaf-​mutes and mentally disturbed people; according to Nietzsche, it is, rather, a ‘homecoming’. This implies that, in this state, man does not feel alone or abandoned, and that he feels at home in his own company, capable, as Arendt (1978: 74) puts it, of the essential ‘duality’ whereby he becomes capable of acting ‘back upon himself ’ and of ‘split[ting] up into the two-​in-​one’ (185). According to Nietzsche, too, the man who thinks, especially the philosopher, actualizes an inner plurality that prevents him from remaining enclosed or imprisoned in his own thoughts and ideas. Indeed, thinking allows for the ‘secret struggle with idea-​persons’ in which thoughts are like ‘individuals’ to whom we ‘involuntarily ascribe the capacity to instruct, despise, praise and censure us’ and with whom ‘we thus traffic as with free intelligent persons, with independent powers, as equals with equals’ (AOM 26, KSA 2.390). For Nietzsche, therefore, solitude is the state in which we can speak and listen to ourselves and engage in a questioning and answering process which is a ‘travelling through words’, in Plato’s (Sophist 253b) and Arendt’s (1978: 185) expression. If this is so, solitude can paradoxically free us from isolation as long as it corresponds to engaging in a dialogue with ourselves and our ideas so as to actualize the plurality which, according to Arendt, is the ‘outstanding characteristic of life of the mind’ (74). It is the dialogue or inward conversation where thought becomes alive and sounding, even within the same person, and whose model –​the ‘perfect conversation’ (das vollkommene Gespräch) –​ is the dialogue between two persons (Zwiegespräch): Dialogue.  –​The dialogue is the perfect conversation, because everything one of the parties says acquires its particular colour, its sound, its accompanying gestures strictly with reference to the other to whom he is speaking, and thus resembles a correspondence in which the forms of expression vary according to whom the correspondent is writing to. In a dialogue there is only a single

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refraction of the thought:  this is produced by the partner in the dialogue, as the mirror in which we desire to see our thoughts reflected as perfectly as possible. But what happens when there are two, three or more fellow participants? The conversation necessarily loses its subtle individuality, different intentions dash with and disrupt one another; a turn of phrase that appeals to one offends the disposition of another. That is why in converse with several people one will be compelled to draw back into oneself, to present the facts as they are but to deduct from the subjects of converse that opalescent ether of humanity that makes of a conversation one of the pleasantest things in the world. One has only to listen to the tone men tend to adopt when speaking to whole groups of men; it is as though the fundamental note of all speech were: ‘this is what I am, this is what I say, you can make of it what you will!’ [. . .] (HH 374, KSA 2. 261)

From this text we can hence infer that Nietzsche’s criticisms of the noise of the market place, as well as of the lack of spirit of journalism and of the violence of the public sphere in general, are not so much directed at the fact that these situations involve human interaction, but rather at the fact that they are the opposite of such a thing  –​the opposite of actual interaction. Better said, if that noise makes men deaf, if it stupefies thought, it is because it hinders the possibility of any effective conversation, of any communication among human beings in which the ‘colour’ and ‘sound’ (Klang) of thoughts can be perceived in their singularity, ‘refracted’ by someone who really listens to them. In effect, what is here suggested is that only such ‘refraction’ allows for the emergence of one’s singularity, that is to say, this latter depends on the ‘mirrors’, the ‘partners’ (the hearers or addressees) that are willing to reflect or resound it. This is what is lost, Nietzsche clarifies, when ‘two, three or more’ people participate: ‘the subtle individuality’ vanishes in face of the ‘fundamental tone’ normally adopted, a tone which imposes itself and does not wish to be itself ‘refracted’. To think is to hear and to be heard. Ears, external ears as we might call them, were precisely what Nietzsche’s writings sought, in spite of all his suspicions about the possibility of being understood and of all his doubts about the possibility of a restoration or refraction of thoughts through language: ‘we are searching for words, perhaps also for ears’, he writes in Gay Science 346 (KSA 3.579). In fact, in the texts just quoted Nietzsche does not mention these doubts. He even suggests that, contrary to what was pointed out earlier about Gay Science 354, namely, that communication among humans is born as a survival tool, human interaction may also have another origin, a freer and more liberating one. Indeed, dialogue and conversation are here presented as ways of self-​understanding, as well

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as of understanding our fellowmen and are even said to reveal the ‘opalescent ether of humanity’. Nietzsche develops precisely this idea in a long Nachlass note from 1874, where he explicitly mentions his understanding of the sounding dialogue between the soul and itself and refers to a ‘common soul’, a ‘universal soul’: All interaction between human beings is based on the ability of one man to read the soul of another; and a common language is the audible expression of a common soul. The more intimate and delicate that interaction becomes, the richer the language, which grows –​or atrophies –​together with the universal soul. Essentially, when I  speak I  am asking my fellowman if he has the same soul as I; the oldest sentences seem to me to be interrogatives, and I  suspect that the accent is the reverberation of those oldest questions addressed by the soul to itself, albeit in a different shell. Do you recognise yourself? –​this feeling accompanies every sentence of the speaker, who is attempting a monologue or a dialogue with himself. [. . .] If one could force man henceforth being silent one could reduce them to horses and seals and cows; for these creatures show what being unable to speak means: namely, the same as having a dull soul. [. . .] For it is not true that language is created by need, the need of the individual. If at all, it is created by the need of a whole herd, a tribe, but in order for this need to be perceived by the common factor, the soul must have become wider than the individual. It must travel and want to find itself again, it must want to speak before it speaks; and this will is nothing individual. [. . .] And does the glorious tonal system of a language really sound as if need was the mother of language? Is not everything born with joy and luxuriance, free and bearing the signs of contemplative profundity? A people that has six cases and conjugates its verbs with a hundred forms has a full, common and overflowing soul; and the people that has created such a language for itself has poured out the abundance of its soul over all posterity. In a later age the same forces projected themselves into the form of poets and musicians, actors, orators and prophets, but when they were still bursting with their first youth they produced creators of languages. These were the most fertile men of all ages and they were distinguished by what distinguishes those musicians and artists in all ages: their soul was greater, more loving, more communal, and almost more alive in all than in a single dim corner. In them the universal soul spoke to itself. (NL 1874 37 [6]‌, KSA 7.831–​2)

Several ideas are worth emphasizing here. The first one is that Nietzsche argues that to speak with others is a sign that we are attempting to speak with ourselves because in speaking what is at stake is an exercise of recognition; second, Nietzsche explicitly declares that it is not ‘need’ that creates language,

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but abundance and freedom; even more precisely, language does not express individual need, but is ‘the audible expression of a common soul’, a soul that becomes ‘wider’ than the individual, travelling and wishing to find itself again, to speak in order to recognize itself, to hear its voice sounding in the ‘glorious tonal system of a language’. Hence, language makes audible not only need and human neediness, but human spirituality and freedom, the inner dialogue of the soul with itself that is hindered by the public sphere. Hence, in spite of what is implied in Nietzsche’s statements about the public realm, they do not imply that freedom and spirituality should become confined to a private sphere. Nietzsche himself wished to hear and to be heard, and he believed that a certain kind of public life of thought was essential for the survival of thinking within our culture. For Nietzsche, however, this public life is something very different from the ‘popularity’ Kant aimed at and whose effectiveness Nietzsche strongly doubted.14 The public life of the mind that Nietzsche conceived and looked for presupposed different conditions of possibility than the ones considered by Kant, that is, a different space, a different time and, as we might add, a different sound. Put differently, that the common soul is to be found elsewhere than in the market place, as Zarathustra discovered, doesn’t mean, for Nietzsche, that it is confined to privacy or seclusion, but that it must sound within a much wider realm than the one implied in Kant’s ‘public sphere’, a realm that is spatially and temporally wider and where common words can find an uncommon meaning. This realm requires the kind of silent and solitary hearing of anyone who writes and/​or reads. It presupposes that writing is a modality of the inward listening, of the soundless dialogue of the soul with itself, and that reading allows for the same refraction of thoughts that happens in a dialogue, such that ‘writing well and reading well –​both virtues grow together and decline together’ (HH II WS 87, KSA 2.592). Indeed, as Nietzsche claims, we want to make ourselves understood, not merely beyond the city, but out over the nations. That is why everyone who is a good European now has to learn to write well and ever better [. . .] To write better, however, means at the same time also to think better; continually to invent things more worth communicating and to be able actually to communicate them; to become translatable into the language of one’s neighbour; to make ourselves accessible to the understanding of those foreigners who learn our language; to assist towards making all good things common property and freely available to the free-​minded (HH II WS 87, KSA 2.592)

Writing was Nietzsche’s way of hearing and voicing his thoughts and hence contributing for the life of the ‘common soul’. He believed that his books were an

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expression of freedom and that they would foster effective human interaction and find partners for dialogue, people to speak with, hearers in their readers. As is well known, Nietzsche was not only a prolific writer, he was also a great reader and a great reader of his own works. He was moreover convinced that the silent speaking in which writing consists of can quietly wait for future readers, for the ears of posterity, given that ‘posthumous people (me, for instance) are understood worse than contemporary ones but heard better’ (TI Arrows 15, KSA 6.61). In many of his texts, Nietzsche not only speaks in the first person but also directly addresses the reader in a very unconventional way when compared to what is usual in philosophical works. He often alternates the first-​person singular pronoun ‘I’ with the plural ‘we’ in the same aphorism, as is the case in the text from where the title of this paper comes from or in the famous text about ‘the philosophers of the future’, the ‘very free spirits’ (BGE 44, KSA 5.60). In the latter, Nietzsche addresses his readers like a solitary calling for other solitary spirits, listening and responding to himself as much as waiting for the reader’s response and hearing.15 He writes as if answering to the call he heard in his stillest hours and he appeals others to make the same experience of solitude. Clarifying that what modern men name ‘free spiritedness’ is completely alien to this understanding of solitude, he presents the free spirits as ‘born, sworn, jealous friends of solitude’ (BGE 44, KSA 5.63). Nietzsche ends this text with a question and using the interrogative in the way described in the note from 1874 quoted earlier. He asks if the reader recognizes himself and also if he can recognize the philosopher Nietzsche  –​if, that is to say, he has the same soul, the same free spirit as the one who is writing: ‘This is the type of people we are, we free spirits! and perhaps you are something of this yourselves, you who are approaching? you new philosophers?’ (BGE 44, KSA 5.63). Speaking with his reader, Nietzsche is here also entailing a dialogue with himself, a philosophical conversation that goes on in the public domain, by means of a published book, but which at the same time wishes to avoid the noise of the ‘market place’ in order to be heard: what Heraclitus was trying to avoid is the same that we try to get away from: the noise and [. . .] their market affairs of ‘today’, –​because we philosophers [. . .] appreciate [.  . .] more or less everything at the sight of which the soul is not forced to defend itself and button up –​something you can talk to without speaking loudly. Just listen to the sound of a spirit talking: every spirit has its own sound and likes to hear it. (GM III 8, KSA 5.353)

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Notes 1. On this topic, see Branco (2015). 2. At this point, I allow myself to clarify that this chapter is by no means meant to discuss Kant’s outdated and rather shocking account of deaf-​muteness, and particularly the correspondence he establishes between deaf-​muteness and lack of reason; nevertheless, I wish to draw the attention of the reader to Nicolas Philibert’s film Le pays des sourds (1993) where the same account is in many ways clearly and beautifully refuted. See in particular the testimony of the deaf lady who tells how she was put into a mental hospital when she was fifteen years old because of her deafness –​a testimony, moreover, that should be confronted with the same director’s La moindre des choses (1996), filmed in a mental institution and where at a certain point a group of internees reads the following passage from Witold Gombrowicz’s Operette: ‘When human affairs can’t be crammed into words, language explodes!’ 3. This idea is developed in detail by Jean-​Luc Nancy in his analysis of the sense of hearing, where he clarifies, among other things, that listening is not to perceive a ‘being present’, ‘a point on a line’. See Nancy (2007: 12–​14). 4. Arendt quotes Plato’s Theaetetus 189e and Sophist 263e. 5. Quoted in Arendt (1978: 185). 6. Quoted in Arendt (1992: 39). 7. On this topic, see Constâncio, Branco and Ryan (2015). 8. See, for example, his criticism of philosophical ‘Egipticity’ in TI Reason 1, as well as in GS Preface 4. 9. Cf. Matthew 13:9, 13:43; and Mark 4:9. See also GS 234. 10. Sophist 263e. 11. For further developments on this topic, see Branco (2012). 12. In a recent paper, John Richardson analyses Nietzsche’s critical judgements on language and distinguishes Nietzsche’s two ‘complaints’ against it: the first is a general ‘epistemic’ complaint that has to do with language’s ‘referential use’ regarding objects (it equates different objects); the second is an ‘existential’ one that concerns language’s ‘expressive use’ and regards the way words ‘harm our individuality’ by ‘commonizing’ it. See Richardson (2015). 13. ‘To translate humanity back into nature [. . .] to make sure that, from now on, the human being will stand before the human being, just as he already stands before the rest of nature today, hardened by the discipline of science, –​with courageous Oedipus eyes and sealed up Odysseus ears, deaf to the lures of the old metaphysical bird catchers who have been whistling to him for far too long: “You are more! You are higher! You have a different origin!” ’ (BGE 230, KSA 5.169). See also D 31, KSA 3.41.

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14. As he declares: ‘[I]‌t seems to me, indeed, that Kant has had a living and life-​ transforming influence on only a very few men. One can read everywhere, I know, that since this quiet scholar produced his work a revolution has taken place in every domain of the spirit; but I cannot believe it. [. . .] If Kant ever should begin to exercise any wide influence we shall be aware of it in the form of a gnawing and disintegrating skepticism and relativism’ (UM III 3, KSA 1.355). 15. See Jacques Derrida’s (1994: 43–​66) analysis.

References Arendt, H. (1978), The Life of the Mind, San Diego/​New York/​London: Harcourt Brace & Company. Arendt, H. (1992), Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Branco, M. J. M. (2012), ‘The Spinning of Masks. Nietzsche’s Praise of Language’, in J. Constâncio and M. J. M. Branco (eds), As the Spider Spins. Essays on Nietzsche’s Critique and Use of Language, 233–​53, Berlin/​Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Branco, M. J. M. (2015), ‘Questioning Introspection: Nietzsche and Wittgenstein on “The Peculiar Grammar of the Word ‘I’ ”’, in J. Constâncio, M. J. M. Branco and B. Ryan (eds), Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, 454–​86, Berlin/​ New York: Walter de Gruyter. Constâncio, J., Branco, M. J. M., and Ryan, B. (eds), Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, Berlin/​New York: Walter de Gruyter Derrida, J. (1994), Politiques de l’amitié suivi de L’oreille de Heidegger, Paris: Éditions Galilée. Forster, M. N. (2012), ‘Kant’s Philosophy of Language?’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 74/​ 2012: 485–​511. Foucault, M. (2008), Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Nancy, J.-​L. (2007), Listening, trans. Ch. Mandell, New York: Fordham University Press. Richardson, J. (2015), ‘Nietzsche, Language, Community’, in: J. Young (ed.), Individual and Community in Nietzsche’s Philosophy, 214–​43, New York: Cambridge University Press. Schalow, F., and Velkley, R. (eds) (2014), The Linguistic Dimension of Kant’s Thought. Historical and Critical Essays, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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On the Role of Maxims: Nietzsche’s Critique of Kant’s Philosophical Anthropology Matthew Dennis

1.  Introduction: Two anthropologies of character The philosophical investigation of anthropological themes features heavily in Kant and Nietzsche, although these themes are distributed unevenly and are invoked to do very different philosophical work. As we will see, rather than dealing with anthropology and moral philosophy separately, both Kant and Nietzsche propose treating them in tandem, recognizing that anthropology has much to contribute to their respective accounts of our ethical life. In some ways, their belief in the power of anthropology to inform and enrich our ethical understanding prefigures the increasing interest in moral psychology among contemporary ethicists. Moral psychology is now often regarded as indispensable to any comprehensive ethical theory, as it is seen as potentially strengthening the theory by connecting it with empirical insights into the nature of human beings. In this chapter, I examine Kant’s and Nietzsche’s anthropological theories to show how their opposing views on anthropology can explain the differences in their moral philosophy. I contend that only by taking into account the vastly different anthropological views that each philosopher offers can we make sense of the fundamental differences in their ethical accounts. Furthermore, I will claim that it is indispensable to grasp the philosophical significance of their anthropologies if we are to bring the moral philosophy of each thinker into focus. As we will see, understanding Kant’s account of moral character, and the factors that he believes affect it, underlies his emphasis on universalizable maxims; whereas understanding Nietzsche’s genealogical account of human development shows us why he emphasizes self-​formed ‘rules-​of-​thumb’ (Sprüche) to accommodate what he sees as individualizing us in ethical life.

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In what follows we will see that Kant believes that his anthropological investigations should complement but be cleanly separable from his critical writings, so our first interpretive task will be to show how his anthropology coexists with his moral philosophy. As we will see, the place Kant reserves for anthropology is an important one. Anthropology provides a developmental account of the ethical life of human beings, in which Kant claims that we start progressing morally when we resist acting on our inclinations and choose to act on self-​given principles. Acting on principles eventually provides the conditions for developing what Kant calls our moral character, which we reach when we move beyond acting on general principles to acting on universalizable maxims. The difficulty of moving from general principles to maxims will become apparent when we see Kant insisting that those universalizable maxims that he argues for in the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason must be placed at the very centre of his anthropology. Conceptually following his critical work, in his anthropological writings Kant remains adamant that acting on such maxims is the only indubitable source of moral excellence. With Nietzsche, the interpretive task will be somewhat different because anthropology has both a positive and a negative role, at once placed on the front line of his critical ‘historical philosophy’ while also informing his ethical ideal. As we will see, the power of anthropology to critique the metaphysical assumptions of the Kantian tradition forms a fundamental part of what Nietzsche calls his project of ‘naturalising humanity’ (GS 109, KSA 3.469), and elsewhere, ‘translating the human being back into nature’ (BGE 230, KSA 5.167), although since Nietzsche did not publish a work dedicated entirely to anthropology a certain amount of speculative work will be necessary when trying to tease our his anthropological claims. But we can say that in his work that touches on anthropological themes Nietzsche seeks to offer a less hubristic account of the moral motivations of human beings, to take seriously our embodied nature and to emphasize the contingent historical conditions that have formed our moral sensibility. As we will see, when we turn to the positive role Nietzsche allocates to anthropology in the final section, one of his seemingly most cherished ethical ideals –​his ideal of ‘becoming what one is’ –​makes much use of the fact that the nature of the human is not a fixed essence but is rather eminently protean and open to transformation.1 While Nietzsche’s criticisms of Kant’s moral philosophy have been the source of much commentary in recent years, work on his critique of Kant’s anthropology remain scarce. This may be due, in part, to a widespread lack of clarity as to whether Nietzsche was familiar with anything more than the gist of Kant’s critical philosophy. Curt Janz (1993:  199), for example, argues that we

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only have direct evidence that Nietzsche read the Critique of Judgement, and that his knowledge of Kant’s moral philosophy came second-​hand from Friedrich Lange’s History of Materialism and Kuno Fischer’s History of Modern Philosophy, neither of which make any mention of Kant’s anthropological writings.2 But the case for proposing that Nietzsche engaged in such a limited reading of Kant might not be so clear cut. As Thomas Brobjer (2003: 61) notes, after Plato and Schopenhauer, Kant is the ‘philosopher to whom Nietzsche refers most often’, and Brobjer (1995: 198) suggests that this is reflected by Nietzsche’s early enthusiastic comments on Kant and by the fact that his library contained numerous secondary works on Kant’s moral philosophy. Other scholars such as David Cartwright argue that there is evidence that Nietzsche conducted serious study on Kant’s texts in moral philosophy. Cartwright notes, for instance, that Nietzsche’s comments in the Nachlass on the worthlessness of moral sentiment are lifted directly from Kant’s ‘Doctrine of Virtue’ in the Metaphysics of Morals. Here Nietzsche quotes Kant verbatim (although the quote is unattributed), following Kant’s argument that pity increases the sadness of both the pitier and the pitied, and telling us that ‘it cannot possibly be our duty to increase the evil in the world’ (NL 1886–​7 7[4]‌, KSA 12.268).3 Furthermore, there is even evidence that Nietzsche knew something of Kant’s anthropological work. As Keith Ansell-​ Pearson (2006: 74n73) proposes, when Nietzsche mocks Kant in §6 of the third essay of The Genealogy of Morals for having the sensibility of a ‘country parson’, he is likely referring to Kant’s account of the tactile faculties of human beings from Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Setting aside the question of whether Nietzsche had first-​hand knowledge of Kant’s anthropological writings, as we will see there are many rich methodological and thematic comparisons to be made even. Not only are Kant and Nietzsche operating on common ground when they claim that human character is attained by resisting our inclinations and acting on principle, but they both identify this as a form of ‘anthropological’ progress. As we will see, Kant emphasizes the importance of resisting inclinations and acting on principles in all his major writings on anthropology, whereas Nietzsche explores this theme in his genealogical account of how human beings became the kind of creatures that are able to keep their promises. Both thinkers, however, recognize the importance of acting on principle, even if it occupies a very different place in their anthropological ‘stories’. As we will see, for Kant, acting on general principles is just a precursor for moral excellence, as it is only by acting on universalizable maxims that we can attain moral character; whereas, for Nietzsche, the achievement of character only requires that we act on self-​given rules to make our conduct consistent.4

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2.  Connecting Kant’s Anthropology to his critical project While Kant’s philosophical identity will always be tied to his critical works, he also makes it clear that anthropology plays a fundamental role in his system as a whole. In the handbook to his lectures on logic, for instance, he tells us that anthropology raises no less than one of the four constitutive questions of philosophical enquiry: ‘What can I know? What ought I do? What may I hope? What is the human being?’ (Log 25).5 And to further underscore the importance of anthropology he stresses that ‘we could reckon all [such enquiries] as anthropology because the first three questions relate to the last one’ (Log 25). Anthropology, then, draws together the findings of metaphysical, moral and religious enquiry, furnishes these disciplines with empirical evidence and illustrative examples, and brings them to life by showing how they can be practically applied. Most of Kant’s writings on anthropology are contained in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), comprising a collection of lecture notes assembled into a textbook, and two short texts:  Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (1784) and Conjectural Beginning of Human History (1786).6 All these texts were published relatively late, as they are mature formulations of early sketches and previously published work. One of these early drafts, Observations of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), testifies to Kant’s interest in the way that anthropological factors affect human behaviour, since it focuses on how different physiological and psychological conditions affect human perception.7 In later texts such as the Anthropology (1798), Kant broadens the scope of his inquiry to consider how anthropological factors such as human physiology and psychology inform our moral lives (see the ‘Anthropological Didactic’), as well as the how we are affected by those factors through which we can be collectively grouped as human beings (see Kant’s discussion of the ‘character of sex, peoples, races, species’ in the ‘Anthropological Characteristic’). All these factors are important, Kant contends, primarily because they show how our inclinations can be made more or less responsive to the demands of reason. As we will see, it is in the Anthropology that Kant begins to develop an account of how his moral philosophy needs to be calibrated to his anthropological claims about the nature of human beings, their differences and typical paths of development, and –​most crucially –​how their embodied nature affects their ability to act on maxims. Nevertheless, Kant’s interest in such anthropological themes could easily strike us as out of kilter with the tone and tenor of the so-​called Critical Kant, especially how he is routinely presented in moral philosophy today.8 In fact,

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Kant’s moral philosophy is notorious for giving the factors that make us distinctive as human beings a second-​class status, even telling us that they cannot be said to count at all. In the Critique of Practical Reason, for example, Kant insists, in the strongest possible terms, that our true moral motivations are entirely separable from other factors that affect our conduct: Duty! Sublime and mighty name that embraces nothing charming or insinuating but requires submission, and yet does not seek to move the will by threatening anything that would arouse natural aversion or terror in the mind but only holds forth a law that of itself finds entry into the mind and yet gains reluctant reverence (though not always obedience), a law before which all inclinations are dumb, even though they secretly work against it; what origin is there worthy of you, and where is to be found the root of your noble descent which proudly rejects all kinship with the inclinations, descent from which is the indispensable condition of that worth which human beings alone can give themselves? (KpV 86)

On this view, the remit of moral philosophy simply coincides with the requirements of duty, which in turn coincides with the requirements of universalizable principles. Acting on such principles provides necessary and sufficient moral motivation; other motivations such as pleasure, social approval or our own happiness are extraneous and tend to be misleading. Despite this, Kant recognizes that a complete account of human conduct must be able to explain the role of the inclinations, especially if this helps us to control them. Because embodied human beings are only reluctantly responsive to duty,9 Kant acknowledges that his critical project needs to be supplemented with an anthropological account of non-​rational inclinations, an account of how human beings can in fact resist these inclinations and bolster their ability to act on rational principles. One way of understanding the way in which Kant believes his critical project requires an anthropological supplement is to consider why he thinks that the demands of duty differ between various types of creatures. In the ‘Doctrine of Virtue’ he explains that living beings can be divided into three kinds: (i) non-​ rational animals, (ii) rational animals and (iii) and divine beings. As a rational animal, the human being can apprehend the moral law (unlike non-​rational animals), but it can also chose to disobey it (unlike divine beings). Kant writes: The moral imperative makes this constraint known through the categorical nature of its pronouncement (the unconditional ought). Such constraint, therefore, does not apply to rational beings as such (there could also be holy ones) but rather to human beings, rational natural beings, who are unholy enough that

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pleasure can induce them to break the moral law, even though they recognize its authority; and even when they do obey the law, they do it reluctantly (in the face of opposition from their inclinations), and it is in this that such constraint properly consists. (MS 379)

While the moral law applies to all rational beings unconditionally, in human beings it is manifested as a burden because humans are affected by their inclinations. This gives rise to two singularly human phenomena: first, the possibility of breaking the law to attain pleasure; second, the connected feeling that the law is a constraint and the consequent reluctance to obey it. For Kant, although these phenomena apply to humans as ‘rational natural beings,’ they do not apply to them insofar as they are rational but only insofar as they are ‘natural beings,’ that is, embodied beings with specifically human non-​rational desires. The aim of the anthropology, then, is to show how the conduct of human beings can be brought in line with rational principles, given that humans are embodied and are necessarily subject to their non-​rational inclinations.10 By showing how –​and how profoundly –​natural factors affect the human being, Kant aims to offer an account of how such factors can be managed to bring about our fullest possible exercise of rationality and humanity.

3.  Moral character in the Anthropology Now that we have seen how Kant intends anthropology to supplement his critical project, we are ready to examine the details of his anthropological project itself, especially his claim that the moral character of human beings is closely aligned with acting on rational principles. We have seen that Kant’s anthropology aims to show how we can manage our inclinations so that our principles have more traction. We have also seen that this is something which only applies to embodied beings, in contrast to divine ones, by virtue of the fact that embodied humans are also part of the natural world. So how does Kant think attaining moral character and acting on principle are connected? Why does he insist that it is through our moral character that we come to realize the highest aspects of our humanity?11 Kant’s most detailed answer to these questions can be found in the second division of the Anthropology (1798), as well as in his lecture transcripts from the winter term of 1784–​85. Here he begins applying his claims about the moral significance of maxims from the Groundwork to his anthropological account of character, initially arguing that we only achieve character by acting on principles.

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For Kant, even the sense of the term ‘character’ (Charakter) in common parlance give us a clue that it connected to our moral status, as it includes a normative dimension and a honorific sense. He writes: To be able to simply say of a human being: ‘he has a character’ is not only to have said a great deal about him, but is also to have praised him a great deal; for this is a rarity, which inspires profound respect and admiration toward him. (Anth 291–​2)

Even attaining this provisional level of moral status, Kant writes, involves ‘acting according to firm principles’, so that others know what ‘can definitely be expected of [this] person’ (Anth 292), rather than the person being inconsistent and acting on their inclinations as they arise. As Kant elaborates later in the passage, one provides the conditions for attaining moral character when one ‘binds oneself to definite practical principles that one has prescribed to oneself irrevocably by one’s own reason’. Nevertheless, Kant continues: Although these principles may sometimes indeed be false and incorrect, nevertheless the formal element of the will in general, to act according to firm principles (not to fly off hither and yon, like a swarm of gnats), has something precious and admirable in it; for it is something rare. (Anth 292)

Because attaining character in this liminal sense is only a precursor to fully fledged moral character, we should carefully distinguish it from moral character per se, as character in this liminal sense, Kant tells us, can be generated by any principle that is acted on consistently, even those that are ‘bad,’ ‘false’ or ‘incorrect’ (Anth 292). Kant’s examples of the kind of principles that gives rise to character, moral or otherwise, shed light on this, and will provide the material for our sustained comparison with Nietzsche in the next section. First, there are those whose character is consistently governed by their temperament rather than their principles. As we might expect, a temperamentally ‘malicious’ person –​Kant’s example is Sulla, a bloodthirsty Roman general12 –​should be regarded as immoral because they act, albeit consistently, on their malicious inclinations. But even a temperamentally ‘good-​natured’ person (die Gutartigkeit aus Temperament), one whose conduct resembles the ‘person of true character,’ has a low moral status –​will be like a ‘painting of watercolours’ as Kant rather nicely puts it –​if they only act on their inclinations instead of principles. Second, there are those who act from a ‘rigid, inflexible disposition [der steife, unbiegsame Sinn] which accompanies a formed resolution’. Using Charles XII of Sweden13 as his example, Kant concedes

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that his combination of a rigid temperament coupled with a firm resolution to act on principles is ‘very favourable to character’ (Anth 293), despite the fact that in the case of the Swedish king this combination did not result in moral excellence. As we will see later, moral excellence can only take place when a rigid and implacable temperament is combined with acting on a special kind of principle –​one which Kant calls a maxim. Kant’s comments on why the individuals in his examples manifest character says much about how important he considers character to be for his anthropology. Acting on principles, whether these principles are morally excellent or not, turns out to trump acting on good inclinations, as Kant regards the ability to act on principles as more vital to the development of our moral character. This means, rather surprisingly, that human beings who act on any kind of principle are more morally excellent than those who act on no principles at all. Kant emphasizes this when he writes: Maliciousness from temperamental predisposition [with character] is nevertheless less bad than good-​naturedness from temperamental predisposition without character; for by character one can get the upper hand over maliciousness from temperamental predisposition.14

While acting on principles or self-​given rules instead of on fleeting inclinations is conducive to character in the everyday sense, Kant tells us that to attain character in the full sense of the term, that is, moral character, we must act on the right kind of principles. Kant calls such principles ‘maxims that proceed from reason’ or ‘principles that are valid for everyone’ (Anth 293–​4).15 For Kant, acting on maxims is the ‘distinguishing mark of the human being as a rational being’ (Anth 285) and only by doing this can human beings reach the height of their rationality.16 Kant’s story about the nature of maxims is given in extenso in the Groundwork, where he emphasizes that rational principles  –​that is, maxims  –​differ from other principles because they derive from our rational faculties. For this reason, maxims have a different moral status, as it is through universalizable maxims that we bring our conduct into line with the demands of reason. Thinking back to Kant’s examples of character in the Anthropology, all three –​(i) the temperamentally ‘malicious’ person, (ii) the temperamentally ‘good-​natured’ person and (iii) those like Charles XII who exhibit both temperamental rigidity and the ability to act on principles  –​fail on this score. Both (i)  and (ii) fail because they directly act on their inclinations and not principles, whereas (iii), despite acting on principles, does not act on universalizable maxims. Perhaps Kant’s example of Charles XII brings the distinction between those with and without moral

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character into sharpest relief. While he thinks that the Swedish king demonstrates the most propitious conditions for eventually attaining moral character, because the king’s principles are idiosyncratic and cannot be universalized, we can only say that he attains character in the everyday but not the moral sense. As we have seen, aside from Kant’s discouraging remarks in Critique of Practical Reason about the relevance of anthropological factors for ethics, he clearly regards his anthropological investigations as an important way of showing how his moral philosophy can be made applicable to human beings. His anthropology aims to give an account of how embodied beings who are susceptible to inclinations can make themselves more responsive to the moral imperatives that concern Kant in the second Critique. Anthropology seeks to show how the foundations for moral character can be laid by resisting inclinations and choosing to act on principles, which we have seen is a necessary step towards providing the conditions for eventually acting on fully universalizable principles. Ultimately Kant thinks that universalizable principles, or maxims, are the only route to moral excellence, but the anthropology is meant to provide a vital developmental story of how human beings can begin resisting acting upon inclinations by acting on general principles and finally achieve robust moral character by acting on universalizable maxims. We will now move to compare Kant’s anthropological story to Nietzsche’s. Here we will examine how Nietzsche prioritizes anthropological questions in his ‘historical philosophy’ and why he believes anthropology has a fundamental role to play in putting pressure on the metaphysical framework supporting Kant’s moral philosophy. We will then examine how anthropology might be said to play a role in Nietzsche’s positive moral philosophy by looking at the genealogical stories that he tells about how our present human ethical sensibilities were formed. Here we will see that Nietzsche follows Kant in regarding the human capacity to resist inclinations and to act on self-​given principles as a source of anthropological progress. Nevertheless, we will see that Nietzsche’s account of what constitutes anthropological progress could not be more different from the Kantian one. For Nietzsche, the ability of humans to become self-​consistent through acting on principles –​and engaging in collective social practices such as promise-​keeping –​ only constitutes an intermediate stage in the development of the human being.

4.  Nietzsche’s genealogical anthropology As Nietzsche confides in Ecce Homo, his ‘burning thirst’ for ‘physiology, medicine, and natural science’ began while preparing his manuscript for Human, All

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Too Human (EH (HH) 3, KSA 6.324). As mentioned earlier, these new interests mark the start of what he later termed his project of ‘naturalizing humanity,’ and they are present in near-​manifesto form from the very beginning of Human, All Too Human. From the opening aphorism, Nietzsche distinguishes between two strikingly different philosophical methods: ‘metaphysical philosophy’ that posits an insurmountable ontological distinction between the metaphysical and physical realms17; and ‘historical philosophy’ that takes the natural world to be primary, if not ontologically replete, and engages in the task of reinterpreting so-​called metaphysical entities as natural ones (HH 1, KSA 2.23). Defining the metaphysical project in HH 16, Nietzsche writes: [Metaphysical, MD] philosophers are accustomed to station themselves before life and experience –​before that which they call the world of appearance –​as before a painting that has been unrolled once and for all and unchangeably depicts the same scene [. . .] (HH 16, KSA 2.36).

For Nietzsche, such an approach harbours two problems: first, by sharply distinguishing between the world’s transitory physical appearance and its (apparently) static metaphysical one, we are in danger of overlooking the world’s inherently physical character, the very thing that Nietzsche believes we should prioritize; second, in so doing this we may come to think of the metaphysical world as immune to change, which Nietzsche believes generates absurdities. While these general problems are serious in their own right, it is when the metaphysical approach is applied to the human being that Nietzsche believes it is most damaging. As he explains in §2: [Metaphysical, MD] philosophers have the common failing of starting out from human beings as how they are now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of them. They involuntarily think of the ‘human being’ as an aeterna veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things. Everything the philosopher has declared about what the human being is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as to the human being of a very limited period of time (HH 2, KSA 2.24)18

In opposition to the metaphysical philosopher, Nietzsche believes that even the most so-​called fundamental dimensions of human beings have changed and continue to do so. Moreover, even those very dimensions that we think of as distinguishing the human being from other animals have altered –​its cognitive and moral faculties, for instance, or its much lauded sense of freedom, or even its ability to think reflectively about its own political arrangements.19 Nietzsche writes:

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Lack of historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers; many, without being aware of it, even take the most recent manifestation of human beings, such as has arisen under the impress of certain religions, even certain political events, as the fixed form from which one has to start out. They will not learn that human beings have become, that the faculty of cognition has become; while some of them would have it that the whole world is spun out of this faculty of cognition (HH 2, KSA 2.24)

Nietzsche’s aim, then, is to redress this ‘lack of historical sense’ to account for the human being’s cognitive and affective nature –​its ‘moral, religious, and aesthetic conceptions and sensations’ (HH 1, KSA 2.24)  –​in terms of the natural and historical processes that have given rise to them.20 Accordingly, from ‘On the History of Moral Sensations’ (HH 35–​107) onwards, Nietzsche subjects each of these so-​called fixed or constitutive dimensions of the human being to a series of deflationary accounts that offer a markedly less flattering account of human nature. Our prized sense of ‘justice’, he writes in HH 92, simply originated from the realization that a contest between ‘parties of approximately equal power’ would result in ‘mutual injury’ and is badly accounted for by the metaphysical stories of the religious or philosophical traditions (HH 92, KSA 2.89). Other so-​ called moral sensations of human beings are explained in the same way: honesty arose on account of its ability to facilitate social harmony (HH 54, KSA 2.73, cf. HH 65, KSA 2.79), shame arose due to ignorance of the body’s sexual function (HH 100, KSA 2.97); whereas Nietzsche proposes that our moral notions of merit and blame can be dismissed as superfluous once we acknowledge the naturalistic forces that actually govern human conduct (HH 39, 102 and 106).21 While these deflationary accounts are relatively self-​standing in the middle period, Nietzsche weaves them into a more expansive account of the historical genesis of humanity in his later work,22 in which he claims that the character of the human being, its moral rules and principles, even its virtues,23 were fashioned in a protracted process of acculturation that was motivated by the exigencies of primitive communities. What we take to be ahistorical moral imperatives –​such as Kantian categorical imperatives –​he tells us, simply originated as practical rules to ensure our primeval ancestors could live collectively. Such principles have been given a sacred status as they have been enshrined in the religious edicts of Judeo-​Christianity or retrospectively argued for in what Nietzsche sees as Kant’s theologically inspired moral philosophy. In contrast to the conception of human nature presented in these stories, Nietzsche insists that the moral character of human beings was formed in a

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contingent historical process which he calls the ‘morality of custom’ (Sittlichkeit der Sitte),24 a process that was governed by two underlying ideas: first, ‘the community is worth more than the individual [Einzelne]’; second, ‘an enduring advantage is to be preferred to a transient one’ (AOM 89, KSA 2.412). Such ideas were used to justify the laws by which primitive communities ensured their survival, as such laws tend to promote individual expendability and the idea that the collective benefits that accrue to communities are worth more than those that pertain to individuals. Nietzsche claims that over time such external rules were internalized, becoming justified by new religious and philosophical narratives, and that our memory of their original motivations was eventually effaced. After this occurred, the original motivations for forming such laws were fictionalized and human beings were only left with internalized moral maxims which have since been considered, as we have seen in the case of Kant, to constitute one of the core dimensions of the human being. While we have seen that Nietzsche’s preference for a historical and non-​ metaphysical conception of the human being began in his first wave of middle-​ period texts, these early accounts can be understood as mere stage setting for his more robust account of how the moral character of human beings was formed, which we find in The Genealogy of Morals. Here he proposes –​in a passage taken verbatim from Dawn 18 –​that we can explain the origin of internalized moral maxims by examining ‘those tremendous eras of the “morality of custom” which precede “world history”, [those] actual and decisive eras of history which determined the character of mankind’ (GM III 9, KSA 5.359).25 Following his earlier formulations of the morality of custom, Nietzsche again argues that it was owing to the exigencies of primitive communities that the human being was made into a creature that was necessary, uniform, an equal among equals, regular and consequently calculable. The enormous labour of what I have called the ‘morality of custom’ –​the special work of human beings on themselves throughout the longest era of the human race, his whole endeavour prior to the onset of history, all this finds its meaning, its great justification  –​regardless of the degree to which harshness, tyranny, apathy, and idiocy are intrinsic to it –​in the following fact: it was by means of the morality of custom and the social straight-​jacket that man was really made calculable. (GM II 2, KSA 5.293)26

In other words, the ‘morality of custom’ provided the principles using which human beings were able to become self-​ consistent, as it forced them to renounce their inclinations and to conform to the collective laws of the

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community –​‘memorise five or six “I will not’s” ’ as Nietzsche summarizes later in the passage. For Nietzsche, ‘reason, seriousness, mastery over the affects’ (GM II 3, KSA 5.297) –​those very things that Kant insists are constitutive of human moral character –​only testify to our human capacity to internalize the principles that the morality of custom prescribed (GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4). Nietzsche’s term for the human being that has internalized the ability to act on laws instead of on its passing inclinations is the ‘sovereign individual’.27

5.  Character in the Genealogy of Morals Much scholarly ink has been spilt over the status of the sovereign individual in recent years. One of the many issues that still divides scholars is whether this figure is either (i)  a Nietzschean ideal28 or (ii) a send up of the Kantian subject.29 By reading the sovereign individual as occupying an intermediate place in Nietzsche’s anthropological story, however, I will propose that we can understand it as having both functions: on the one hand, we can say that Nietzsche regards human beings who act on internalized principles to be an advance on those who unreflectively follow their inclinations and those who obey the strictures of the morality of custom.30 On the other, we can say that Nietzsche’s own story of how human beings become ‘sovereign’ aims to undermine Kant’s claim that we attain moral character by acting rationally on universalizable maxims. As we will see, although Nietzsche agrees with Kant that character involves renouncing inclinations and striving to act on principles, he denies that this can be explained in terms of exercising of our inherent rational faculties, and instead proposes that we should explain these faculties genealogically. So can we view the sovereign individual as both a Nietzschean ideal and a genealogical alternative to Kant’s story about how we attain moral character? Is there textual evidence that the sovereign individual can occupy both these roles? Because of the rousing terms with which the sovereign individual is presented in GM II §2 it is easy to be persuaded that Nietzsche considers it to be an important anthropological achievement and –​at the very least –​a precursor to his own ethical ideal. Nietzsche warmly writes of its [P]‌roud consciousness, tense in every muscle, of what has finally been achieved here, of what has become incarnate in him –​a special consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of the ultimate completion of the human being. This liberated human, who is entitled to make promises, this master of free will, this

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sovereign –​how should he not be aware of his superiority over everything which cannot promise and vouch for itself? How should he not be aware of how much trust, how much fear, how much respect he arouses –​he ‘deserves’ all three –​and how much mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all less reliable creatures with less enduring wills is necessarily given into his hands along with this self-​mastery? The ‘free’ human being  –​the owner of an enduring, indestructible will –​possess also in this property his measure of value: looking out at others from his own vantage-​point, he bestows respect or contempt. Necessarily, he respects those who are like him –​the strong and reliable (those who are entitled to make promises), that is, anyone who promises like a sovereign –​seriously, seldom, slowly  –​who is sparing with his trust, who confers distinction when he trusts, who gives his word as something which can be relied on, because he knows himself strong enough to uphold it even against accidents, even ‘against fate’. (GM II 2, KSA 5.293–​4)

As if this was not enough, Nietzsche tells us that the sovereign individual is ‘the end to which [the morality of custom was] merely the means’ and that we should consider the ‘human being who is entitled to make promises’ to be superior to those ‘cowering dogs’ whose passing inclinations result in broken ones. Nevertheless, what seems to be most significant for Nietzsche’s anthropology comes when he writes of the sovereign individual’s ‘feeling’ (Gefühl) that it is the ‘ultimate completion of the human being’ –​seemingly high praise indeed. Combined with his rapturous description of the sovereign individual in the passage from §2 above, all these quotations strongly suggest that Nietzsche regards the sovereign individual as some kind of ideal. Prima facie, then, Nietzsche holds the sovereign individual in high esteem. He takes it to be a crucial stage in the development of the human being, one from which our modern conception of the morally autonomous (and thus morally culpable) subject was born. Furthermore, compared to those who act according to their shifting inclinations or who simply follow the dictates of the morality of custom, again the sovereign individual fares well, furthering our impression that Nietzsche regards it as a significant anthropological achievement. Thinking back to the examples in Kant’s Anthropology, we can say that Nietzsche’s sovereign individual most resembles that combination of temperamental rigidity and the ability to act on principles that Kant attributes to Charles XII. Here we saw Kant claiming that, although the Swedish king failed to achieve moral excellence, he was nonetheless closest to attaining moral character because the principles he acted on were powerful enough to control his unruly inclinations. As we saw, Kant not only considers Charles XII to be superior to those who consistently act

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on malicious inclinations such as the Roman general Sulla, but he even thinks of him as more morally excellent than those who follow their naturally virtuous inclinations. Nietzsche’s hierarchy of individuals seems similar: both those individuals who act on their inclinations and those who unreflectively follow the laws of the morality of custom are explicitly presented as inferior to the sovereign individual. But there are important differences. For the remainder of this section I will suggest that what motivates the Kantian individual with moral character and the Nietzschean sovereign to keep their promises is markedly different. While Kant’s individual with moral character and Nietzsche’s sovereign individual are similar insofar as both resist their inclinations in order to keep their promises, each philosopher tells a very different story about the motivation for promise keeping. Kant’s answer to the question of motivation is clear: individuals with moral character are motivated by their rational faculties which, as well as keeping check on their non-​rational inclinations, prescribes the very actions they ought to pursue. We saw this when we examined Kant’s insistence that to be motivated by one’s rational faculties is to act on maxims, that is, to act on those universalizable principles that Kant brings to his discussion of moral character from his critical works. Nietzsche’s answer is different. Despite the fact that the sovereign individual is likewise defined in terms of its ability to keep promises, it is not motivated to do this by Kantian worries about undermining the institution of promise keeping nor by concerns that it might contradict its own rationality. Instead it keeps its promises in order to make the strength of its will manifest and to show that it can surmount its own inclinations and unforeseen circumstances. Manifesting this strength of will is what generates the feeling of pride which we have seen the sovereign individual experiences when it compares itself to those who cannot promise. Despite similarities with the Kantian individual with moral character, therefore, we can say that the sovereign individual only keeps its promises in order to display its strength. Its principles are not generated by what Kant considers to be the rational faculties of human beings, but spring from the fact that it has successfully internalized the laws of the morality of custom and strives to celebrate this successful internalization by comparing itself to those with weaker wills. Understanding that self-​satisfaction and the desire for moral superiority are the true motives for promise keeping means that what Kantians regard as moral progress is, on the genealogical account, no more than moral hubris. Returning to the differing accounts of the sovereign individual in the recent scholarship, then, we can say that paying attention to what Nietzsche says about the sovereign’s motivation supports those scholars who read it as lampooning

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Kant’s ideal of the maxim-​guided individual with moral character. As well as the issue of the sovereign individual’s motivation, we should also note that scholars who hold this view frequently cite what they believe to be important qualifications in Nietzsche’s rapturous description of the sovereign, which they believe are expressed in a series of subtle distinctions between what the sovereign individual believes itself to be and what Nietzsche thinks it actually is (Leiter 2010: 109). As we have seen, Nietzsche does not tell us that the sovereign individual is the ‘ultimate completion of the human being’ but merely that it has the ‘feeling’ (Gefühl) that it is such an end point, which leads to its ‘proud knowledge’ (stole Wissen) and its ‘consciousness’ (Bewusstsein) of itself as an anthropological achievement. If we take these qualifications seriously, then the message seems to be that what Kantians identify as the exercise of human rational faculties –​ which is precisely what the sovereign individual regards as its own motivations for promise keeping –​is simply the self-​satisfaction of demonstrating the power of one’s will. So far we have seen that Nietzsche’s account of the sovereign individual follows Kant in emphasizing the anthropological importance of principles, although we have also seen that Nietzsche does not think these principles are universalizable maxims deriving from our rational faculties. The fact that it is the sovereign individual’s pride that motivates it to act on principles should be a clue to this. Because the sovereign individual acts on principles to demonstrate the strength of its will, it does not require that these principles be endorsed by anyone other than itself, let  alone that they be universalizable. In fact Nietzsche even suggests that universalizable principles are often the source of much anthropological harm. GS 335 epitomizes this. Here Nietzsche pours scorn on the idea that maxims could be an adequate source of moral judgement, suggesting that such principles are necessarily unresponsive to those idiosyncrasies that determine correct action in any situation. He writes: What? You admire the categorical imperative within you? This ‘firmness’ of your so-​called moral judgement? This absoluteness of the feeling, ‘here everyone must judge as I do’? Rather admire your selfishness here! And the blindness, pettiness, and simplicity of your selfishness! For it is selfish to consider one’s own judgements a universal law, and this selfishness is blind, petty, and simple because it shows that you haven’t yet discovered yourself or created for yourself an ideal of your very own [eigenstes Ideal] –​for this could never be someone else’s, let alone everyone’s, everyone’s! No one who judges, ‘in this case everyone would have to act like this’ has yet taken five steps towards self-​knowledge. For he would then know that there neither are nor can be actions that are all the same; that every

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act ever performed was done in an altogether unique and unrepeatable way [. . .] (GS 335, KSA 3.562–​3)31

Instead of acting according to universalizable principles, Nietzsche’s position here is that we should only act on those principles that are aligned with one’s ‘very own ideal’ (eigenstes Ideal). Following such an ideal does not involve allowing oneself to be governed by one’s inclinations, however, it involves acting on principles that are attuned to the singularity of one’s ideal, principles that take account of the idiosyncrasies that make the ideal one’s ‘very own.’ Indeed, Nietzsche’s commitment to the importance of acting on individually specific principles may have been somewhat obscured by the fact that translators have typically rendered Sprüche into English as ‘maxims’.32 By contrast, Kant’s term Maxime is well translated by the English term ‘maxim’ as this retains the connotation that such principles are universalizable and strictly obligatory. A better translation of Nietzsche’s Sprüche would seem to be ‘sayings’ or ‘proverbs’, as both these English terms retain connotations of permissibility without implying an obligatory or universal commitment. Nietzsche’s Sprüche, then, should be thought of as non-​universalizable principles that are primarily responsive to the individual’s eigenstes Ideal, rather than as principles that are morally universalizable. Such a privileging of non-​universalizable principles sheds much light on the anthropological status that Nietzsche gives to the sovereign individual and opens a new way of understanding it in the scholarly literature. The sovereign individual is heralded as an anthropological achievement because it offers an account of how human beings historically changed from acting on their inclinations to acting on principles by internalizing the external laws of the morality of custom. Nevertheless, although Nietzsche follows Kant in recognizing this as a form of anthropological progress, we have seen that his story of what motivates human beings to act on principles could not be more different. Principles do not come from exercising our rational faculties, but are rather the product of internalizing the laws of the morality of custom. Human beings are only motivated to act on principles because they wish to demonstrate the strength of their will compared to their contrary inclinations, in addition to the –​human, all-​ too-​human –​desire to feel a supercilious sense of pride when they compare the superior strength of their will to that of others. Furthermore, most crucially, while Nietzsche regards the sovereign individual as justified in its feelings of superiority over those who simply follow their inclinations, I  have suggested that he does not believe that acting on universalizable maxims is the height of

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anthropological progress. Instead he believes that the kind of principles that lead to human flourishing must attend to the fundamental differences between human beings.33

Notes 1. While Nietzsche is well known for criticizing many of the ethical ideals proposed by the theological and philosophical traditions, he also seems to have several ethical ideals of his own. Aside from the many exemplary artistic, military and philosophical figures who he often eulogizes, the Free Spirit has been described as an ethical ideal that Nietzsche is strongly and consistently committed to, as well his ideal of ‘becoming what one is’. We will explore the nature of this latter ideal in the last section of this chapter, as well as comparing to Nietzsche’s interest in what I will suggest is the intermediate ideal of the ‘sovereign individual’. 2. Fischer (1887: vol. II) and Lange (1925: 153–​254). 3. As Cartwright notes, Nietzsche follows Kant’s German to the letter except that he omits the ‘contextually superfluous “aber” ’. The citation, including Nietzsche’s quotation marks, reads ‘es kann aber unmoglich Pflicht sein, die Übel in der Welt zu vermehren’. See Cartwright (1984: 83–​98). Thanks to Michael Ure for directing me to this. 4. We will examine Nietzsche’s thoughts on how the sovereign individual plays a vital role in our anthropological progress on account of its self-​consistency in Section 5. But these themes appear much earlier, as we can see in his account of the societal value of character in Human, All too Human, especially in HH 224, HH 225, HH 228 and –​in a way which is much more closely related to Nietzsche’s own ethical concerns –​in GS 290. For Kant, we will discuss the role of self-​consistency in character in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View later. 5. Emphasis added. Kant tells us that the disciplines that provide answers to these questions are: ‘metaphysics’, ‘morals’, ‘religion’ and ‘anthropology’, respectively. See Log 25 and Louden (2011: xvii). 6. While these texts are the main works on anthropology that Kant authorized in his lifetime, there are also seven extant transcriptions of his lecture that were made by his students from 1772 to 1789. 7. Similar questions are raised in Kant’s other short anthropological tracts from the 1770s. In Of the Different Races of Human Beings, for example, he enquires into how race and climate determine behaviour, whereas in his Essays Regarding the Philanthropinum, he praises the pedagogic techniques in the human sciences that were employed by Johann Bernhard Basedow’s recently established ‘Philanthropinum’ institutes of education. Other notable references

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to anthropology are two anonymous reviews: in the first, a review of Pietro Moscati’s Of the Corporeal Essential Differences between the Structure of Animals and Humans, Kant comments favourably on Moscati’s contention that human physiology mirrors the structure of its rational faculties; in the second, a strongly critical review of Johann Gottfried Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity, Kant expresses dissatisfaction with his former student’s conception of anthropology. 8. See O’Neill (2013: 16), Wood (1999: 70) and Sedgwick (2008: 39). 9. While the passage states that duty can render ‘all inclinations [. . .] dumb’ and it is in principle capable of ‘reject[ing] all kinship with the inclinations’, Kant concedes that the law only commands ‘reluctant reverence’ and sometimes fails to receive complete ‘obedience’ (KpV 86). 10. Other non-​human or non-​natural rational beings would be immune to such phenomena, for example, the ‘holy [beings]’ which Kant mentions. Further explication of how such beings are not subject to inclinations and are unaffected by the natural world is given in the Critique of Practical Reason where Kant writes: ‘The moral law is, in other words, for the will of a perfect being a law of holiness, but for the will of every finite rational being a law of duty, or moral necessitation and of the determination of his actions through respect for this law and reverence for his duty’ (KpV 82). 11. Kant makes such claims frequently throughout the Anthropology. See, for example, the opening of the Anthropological Characteristic where he writes that ‘[moral character] is the distinguishing mark of the human being as a rational being endowed with freedom’ (Anth 285). 12. Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix (138–​78 bc). 13. Charles XII (1682–​1718). Interestingly, as G. Seller and R. Louden note, Charles XII features in Voltaire’s entry on ‘Character’ in his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764). 14. Again offering an empirical corroboration, Kant notes that we often reluctantly admire those who act on principles, despite their moral shortcomings: ‘Even a human being of evil character [. . .], though he arouses disgust through the violence of his firm maxims, is nevertheless also an object of admiration: as we admire strength of soul generally, in comparison with goodness of soul’ (Anth 293). 15. Emphasis added. 16. For a clear account of the difference between maxims and principles, see Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals where Kant tell us that a ‘maxim is a subjective principle of volition (i.e., that which would also serve subjectively as the practical principle for all rational beings if reason has complete control over the faculty of desire) us the practical law’ (GMS 401). 17. Nietzsche’s distinction aims to capture any ‘two-​worlds’ system that distinguishes between a so-​called world of appearance and that which is metaphysically real.

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Paradigmatic examples would be Plato’s account of how entities in the natural world are generated by their otherworldly ‘form,’ Schopenhauer’s account of the will which gives rise to the world of appearance, or Kant’s account of the difference between the phenomenal world and its transcendental conditions. 18. Throughout the opening of HH Nietzsche uses the term ‘philosophers’ for metaphysical philosophers with no corresponding term for those historical philosophers of which he considers himself to be both a harbinger and an example. I have appended the term ‘metaphysical’ to philosophers for clarity and consistency. 19. Of course the two major figures in the philosophical tradition who have defined the human being in these terms are Aristotle and Kant; the former defining human beings as both rational and political animals, the latter defining human beings as moral beings. 20. Nietzsche’s criticism that the philosophical tradition tends to neglect these themes is certainly not unfounded, since philosophical analysis of the historical processes that contribute to anthropology and moral philosophy is rare. Kant’s discussion of these themes is certainly more generous than most, see especially his Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim and Conjectural Beginning of Human History, but he typically emphasizes the emergence of human rational capacities without a naturalistic story that explains their emergence. See, for example, Kant’s account in Conjectural Beginning of Human History (MAM 111–​14). 21. ‘No one is accountable for his deeds, no one for his nature; to judge is the same thing as to be unjust’ (HH 39, KSA 2.62); ‘We do not accuse nature of immorality when it sends us thunderstorm and makes us wet: why do we call the harmful man immoral?’ (HH 102, KSA 2.99); ‘[E]‌verything here is necessary, every motion mathematically calculable [. . .] [s]o it is too in the case of human actions’ (HH 106, KSA 2.103). 22. As he writes in GM Preface 2, KSA 5.248: ‘My thoughts on the origin of our moral prejudices [. . .] found their first, spare, provisional expression in the collection of aphorisms entitled Human, All Too Human.’ As he later tells us in the text ‘I first brought to light those hypotheses on the genealogy of morals to which these present essays are devoted. I did so clumsily, as I would be the first to admit myself, in a manner still constrained, still without my own particular language for these particular things and with much backsliding and hesitation’ (GM Preface 4, KSA 5.251). 23. Nietzsche’s gives a concise version of his genealogical account of virtue in D 26, KSA 3.36: ‘The beginnings of justice, as of prudence, moderation, bravery –​in short, of all we designate as the Socratic virtues, are animal: a consequence of that drive which teaches us to seek food and elude enemies.’ 24. Sittlichkeit der Sitte trades on the etymological connection between Sitte (custom) and Sittlichkeit (morality) in German: Nietzsche’s preference for the term Sittlichkeit

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25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

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instead of Moralität or Moral also suggests the chronological dimension that he sees as operating here. As the German term suggests, Sittlichkeit alludes to those practices and customs that constitute a form of life, whereas Moralität connotes more abstract, codified principles such as the Decalogue or philosophically grounded moral imperatives. It is likely that Nietzsche was familiar with these connotations, as it is given a prominent role in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which we have evidence that he read. The passage continues with a list of the affects that have previously been considered virtues: ‘suffering counted as virtue, cruelty counted as virtue, dissembling counted as virtue, revenge counted as virtue, denial of reason counted as virtue, while on the other hand well-​being was accounted a danger, desire for knowledge was accounted a danger, peace was accounted a danger, pity was accounted a danger, being pitied was accounted an affront, work was accounted an affront, madness was accounted godliness, and change was accounted immoral and pregnant with disaster!’ (GM III 9, KSA 5.359). Nietzsche does not spare us when elaborating on which ‘images and procedures’ the morality of custom historically employed. He tells us that it was only through ‘stoning’, ‘breaking on the wheel’, ‘impalement on the stake’, ‘quartering’, ‘boiling in oil or wine’, ‘flaying’ that one eventually learns to resist one’s inclinations and to keep one’s promises ‘in return for the advantages offered by society’ (GM II 3, KSA 5.296). It is important to note, however, that although Nietzsche tells us that the sovereign individual is the ‘ripest fruit’ of ‘society and its morality of custom’, it is also distinct from it. In fact the sovereign individual represents anthropological progress because it ‘breaks away’ from the morality of custom since it is ‘autonomous’. As Nietzsche reminds us in parentheses, ‘ “autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive’ (GM II 2, KSA 5.293). See Acampora (2006: 156), Richardson (2009: 128), and Gemes (2009: 37). See Hatab (1995: 37–​8) and Leiter (2010: 106–​10). Christa Davis Acampora (2006) picks up on this. As she puts it, the sovereign individual is the ‘pinnacle of the current state of existence of humankind’ (156; first emphasis added). Cf. Simon May (1999: 117) who worries that while ‘one might suppose from Nietzsche’s praise of the “sovereign individual” [. . .] that he or she embodies his new ideal. [. . .] But from Nietzsche’s own point of view, the final achievement of this individual is both unattainable and undesirable, and so cannot be his ideal’. Also see the attacks against universality and calls for morality to attend to idiosyncrasy in HH 25, GS 3 and GS 89. Of course, most famously, this is the typical translation of Nietzsche’s ‘Assorted Opinions and Maxims’ (Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche) in Human, All Too Human.

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33. I am grateful for discussions with Keith Ansell-​Pearson, as well as for insightful comments from Benjamin Berger, David Rowthorn and Sander Werkhoven.

References Acampora, C. D. (2006), Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Ansell-​Pearson, K. (ed.) (2006), Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brobjer, T. (1995), Nietzsche’s Ethics of Character: A Study of Nietzsche’s Ethics and Its Place in the History of Moral Thinking, Uppsala: Uppsala University Press. Brobjer, T. (2003), ‘Nietzsche as German Philosopher: His Reading of the Classical German Philosophers’, in N. Martin (ed.), Nietzsche and the German Tradition, 39–​82, Bern: Peter Lang. Cartwright, D. (1984), ‘Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche on the Morality of Pity’, Journal of the History of Ideas 45, No. 1 (Spring): 83–​98. Fischer, K. (1887), History of Modern Philosophy, ed. N. Porter, trans. J. P. Gordy, London: T. Fisher Unwin. Gemes, K. (2009), ‘Nietzsche on Free Will, Autonomy, and the Sovereign Individual’, in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, 33–​50, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hatab, L. (1995), A Nietzschean Defence of Democracy: An Experiment in Postmodern Politics, Chicago: Open Court. Janz, C. (1993), Friedrich Nietzsche Biographie, Vol. I, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch. Lange, F. A. (1925 [1881–​82]), The History of Materialism, and Criticism of Its Present Importance, trans. E. C. Thomas, London: Routledge. Leiter, B. (2010), ‘Who Is the “Sovereign Individual”?: Nietzsche on Freedom’, in S. May (ed.), Cambridge Critical Guide to Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, 101–​19, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Louden, R. (2011), Kant’s Human Being: Essays on His Theory of Human Nature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. May, S. (1999), Nietzsche's Ethics and His War on ‘Morality’, Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Neill, O. (2013), Acting on Principle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richardson, R . (2009), ‘Nietzsche’s Freedoms’, in K. Gemes and S. May (eds), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy, 127–​50, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sedgwick, S. (2008), Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, A. (1999), Kant’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Complete Bibliography Acampora, C. D. (2013), Contesting Nietzsche, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ansell-​Pearson, K. (ed.) (2006), Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arendt, H. (1978), The Life of the Mind, San Diego/​New York/​London: Harcourt Brace & Company. Arendt, H. (1992), Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. R. Beiner, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arras, J. D. (1980), ‘Art, Truth, and Aesthetics in Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Power’, Nietzsche-​Studien 9: 239–​59, Berlin/​New York: Walter de Gruyter. Augustine. (2003), On the Trinity, trans. Stephen McKenna, ed. G. Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Austin, J. L. (1975), How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Baillie, J. B. (1921), ‘Laughter and Tears: The Sense of Incongruity’, Studies in Human Nature: 254–​93, London: G. Bell. Bernstein, J. M. (1992), The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno, London: Polity Press. Bertino, A. C. (2011), Vernatürlichung: Ursprünge von Friedrich Nietzsches Entidealisierung des Menschen, seiner Sprache und seiner Geschichte bei Johann Gottfried Herder, Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-​Forschung Bd. 58, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Bittner, R. (1987), ‘Nietzsches Begriff der Wahrheit’, Nietzsche-​Studien 16: 70–​90. Bracht Branham, R. (2004), ‘Nietzsche’s Cynicism: Uppercase or Lowercase?’, in P. Bishop (ed.), Nietzsche and Antiquity: His Reaction and Response to the Classical Tradition, 170–​81, New York/​Woodbridge: Camden House. Branco, M. J. M. (2015a), ‘Questioning Introspection: Nietzsche and Wittgenstein on “The Peculiar Grammar of the Word ‘I’ ”’, in J. Constâncio, M. J. M. Branco and B. Ryan (eds), Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity, 454–​86, Berlin/​ New York: Walter de Gruyter. Branco, M. J. M. (2015b), ‘Le non plus ultra de Wagner. Nietzsche sur Tristan et la valeur esthétique de la distance’, in P. Wotling and C. Denat (eds), Nietzsche. Les textes sur Wagner, 213–​33, Reims: Éditions et Presses Universitaires de Reims. Branco, M. J. M., and Constâncio, J. (forthcoming), ‘Philosophy as “Free-​ Spiritedness”: Philosophical Evaluative Judgments and Post-​Kantian Aesthetics in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil’, in P. Katsafanas (ed.), Routledge Philosophy Minds: Nietzsche, London/​New York: Routledge.

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Name Index Apollo 8, 100, 105, 114, 122–​3, 130–​1 Arendt, Hannah 11, 139, 150, 219, 220, 228, 230–​5, 237, 238, 243, 248 Aristotle 31, 270 Augustine, St. 47, 160, 161

Lange, Friedrich Albert 142, 146, 147, 160, 164, 166, 175, 187, 188, 193, 253 Leibniz 122, 182

Baer, Karl Ernst von 166 Bakhtin, Mikhail 51 Beethoven, Ludwig van 137 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich 162, 166 Burckhardt, Jacob 168

Nancy, Jean-​Luc 8, 101–​6, 110, 248

Czolbe, Heinrich 162, 166, 176 Darwin, Charles 146, 187 Deleuze, Gilles 128 Dionysus 8, 77, 83, 86, 100, 107–​10, 114, 123–​4, 130–​1 Epicurus 201 Fischer, Kuno 80–​2, 90, 94–​7, 160, 188–​9, 191, 193–​4, 253, 268, 272, 275 Foucault, Michel 3, 5, 225 Frederick the Great 181, 182 Freud, Sigmund 84, 126 Fries, Jackob Friedrich 166 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 161, 166, 168, 174 Hartmann, Eduard von 161, 167, 168 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm 16, 161, 167, 176, 180, 182, 215, 271 Heidegger, Martin 8, 100, 101, 106, 129, 138, 157 Helmholtz, Hermann von 164, 166, 176 Herder, Johann Gottfried 160, 269 Homer 24–​5, 34–​5 Hume, David 182–3, 193

Moleschott, Jacob 166

Plato 25, 31, 35, 37, 41, 44–​6, 49, 51, 54–​61, 66, 70, 71, 103, 204, 231–​3, 237, 243, 248, 253, 270 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino) 69, 137, 168, 176 Roux, Wilhelm 37, 176 Saturnalia 147, 202 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von 161, 215 Schiller, Friedrich 16, 106, 109, 130 Schopenhauer, Arthur 6, 7, 17–​19, 28–​31, 36, 40, 53, 54, 55, 60, 64–​8, 70–​2, 76, 77–​82, 90–​4, 107, 122–​6, 130, 138, 153, 163, 174, 175, 182, 210, 253, 270 Silenus 204 Socrates 45, 66, 120, 233, 237 Spinoza, Baruch 204 Stendhal, (Marie-​Henri Beyle) 7, 63–​98, 139 Strauss, David Friedrich 167, 169 Tolstoy, Leo 60 Vaihinger, Hans 179 Wagner, Richard 28–​31, 33, 36, 40, 61, 116, 121, 168

282

Subject Index actor 45, 57–​9, 150 aesthetic aesthetic idea/s 2, 50, 60, 148, 199, 201 aesthetic judgement 1, 4, 51, 64, 68, 70–​ 6, 79–​83, 87–​94, 103, 118, 119, 127, 129, 133–​50, 152, 186 aestheticism 4 affect/​s 4, 55, 70, 73, 90, 94, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 208, 211, 212, 214 agon/​agonism/​antagonism 15–​46, 130 agreeable 81, 89, 93, 125, 138, 140 alienation 6, 29, 31 amor fati 9, 150, 151, 152, 153 amour-​passion 63–​98 animality 3, 4, 57, 69, 80, 81, 84, 87, 105, 146, 147, 161, 171, 189, 191, 192, 210, 236, 255, 260, 270 antagonism see agon anthropocentric/​anthropocentrism 9, 183–​4, 187 anthropomorphism/s 3, 5, 9, 10, 76, 78, 79, 83, 87, 109, 161, 169, 170, 176, 184, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193 Apollo/​Apollinian 8, 9, 54, 100, 105, 106, 114, 115, 120–​31, 135, 148, 153, 170 appearance (Erscheinung) 47, 50, 55–​9, 71, 105, 107–​10, 122–​3, 128, 131, 135, 137–​8, 142–​143, 147, 183, 210, 260, 269–​70 art 1–​9, 17–​29, 32–​5, 39, 40, 43–​62, 64–​74, 86–​9, 95, 100, 104, 109, 114–​16, 121–​5, 133, 134, 139, 144, 145, 148, 153, 215 artist 16, 21, 28, 43, 44, 49–​57, 59, 64–​70, 82, 87, 92, 115, 121, 122, 148, 150 artwork/​work of art 17, 20–​2, 24, 29, 33, 35, 51, 60, 66, 70–​1, 104, 106, 115, 121–​2, 133–​4, 139, 148 ascetic/​asceticism 28, 80–​1, 91–​2, 137 ascetic ideal 44, 88, 91, 95, 137

beautiful/beauty 1–​8, 16, 43, 44, 46–​51, 56, 60, 63–​111, 115–​31, 133–​43, 149–​53, 169, 170, 185–​7, 190, 193, 242 judgement of beauty see judgement belief/s 27, 68, 71, 80, 94, 139, 167, 184, 207, 209, 251 body 79, 102, 109, 146, 200, 201, 226, 261 canon 51, 60 categorical imperative see imperative categories 3, 17, 105–6, 109–10, 127, 134–5, 142–3, 146–7, 186 character 70, 170, 181–​2, 187, 253–​69 moral character 251–​69 classical 17, 22–​3, 38, 101, 173, 175, 193 cognition 135–​7, 143–​50, 162, 172, 221–​5, 228, 229, 261 cognitive faculties/​powers 80–​91, 137, 148, 187, 204, 260 cognitive judgement 186 comic/​comedy 58, 197–​217 comedy of existence 206–​7 communicability 119, 120, 136, 144, 148–​52, 231, 233 communication 25, 31–​7, 71, 119, 120, 136, 139, 144, 148–​52, 190, 219–​49 community 28, 82, 90–​1, 101, 123–​4, 131, 262–​3 concept 17, 21, 38, 49, 75, 90, 118–​20, 140–​8 consciousness 45, 59, 85, 94, 147, 168, 176, 221, 236, 266 self-​consciousness 236 contemplation (Betrachten) 16, 31–​3, 40, 68, 77–​82, 88, 114–​15, 120–​1, 137, 167, 219, 231 cristallization (cristallisation) 67, 93 see also Stendhal critic(s)/​critical 1, 5, 10, 15, 40, 47–​9, 61, 70–​1, 74, 91, 106, 109, 113, 119,

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Subject Index 157, 174, 180–​3, 191, 209, 211–​12, 233–​4, 240, 252, 254–​6 criticism/​critique 3, 5, 7–​11, 15, 43–​5, 47, 49, 53, 60, 71–​2, 79, 83, 86, 93, 100–​1, 104–​5, 118, 120, 129, 133–​4, 136, 140, 147, 158, 163–​8, 170, 173–​ 5, 180–​1, 188–​93, 198, 205–​6, 209, 212, 235, 241–​2, 244, 248, 251–​2, 268, 270 self-​critique 10, 209, 212 culture 5, 15–​27, 36, 39, 41, 85, 121, 125, 130, 158, 168, 224, 236, 238, 242, 246 danger/​dangerous 45, 57, 72–​4, 81, 87, 90, 160, 180, 182, 201–​2, 206, 212, 214, 229, 236–​7, 239–​40, 260, 271 deception 3, 37, 44–​6 self-​deception/​self-​deceit 5, 45, 49, 67 desire 1, 4, 7, 34, 63–​70, 78–​91, 137 dialogue 11, 51–​2, 222, 224, 229–​32, 237–​47 Dionysus/​Dionysian 8, 9, 54, 55, 70, 77, 83, 86, 100, 105–​10, 114, 115, 120, 122–​31, 135, 139–​40, 148, 153, 170, 176, 203 discharge 7, 63, 84, 147, 202–​3 disinterestedness 63–​72, 78–​94, 102–​4, 133, 136–​40, 199 drive/​s 17, 37–​8, 67–​73, 79, 82–​7, 91–​4, 108, 111, 114, 201, 204–​5, 208, 211, 215, 270 artistic drive 58, 115 sexual drive 37, 67, 69–​71, 79, 83–​7 duty 44, 108, 119, 192, 253, 255, 269 Enlightenment 1, 5, 159, 234 equilibrium 124, 200–​1 error 3, 5, 64, 67, 168, 171, 206 eternal recurrence 9, 114, 136, 150–​3 exemplar/​exemplary/​exemplarity 17–​18, 20, 22–​6, 30–​3, 39, 149–​50, 189, 268 experience 4, 8, 37–​8, 45, 48–​50, 56, 58, 64, 66, 70–​4, 78, 80–​3, 88–​9, 95, 99, 101–​5, 114, 117–​20, 124–​32, 144, 147–​8, 159, 161, 163, 165, 183, 198, 202–​3, 208, 219, 227–​8, 231, 234–​5, 239, 241, 247, 260, 265 experiment 48, 168, 181, 202

283

fatality/​fate 151, 171, 206, 264 feeling 1, 4, 8, 65–​9, 73, 75–​6, 80–​1, 84–​5, 88, 103–​7, 114, 118–​19, 131, 135–​7, 140, 145, 150, 186, 200–​1, 211, 224–​7, 241, 264–​6 figuration 104 transfiguration 84 formation 15, 17, 102–​4, 168 transformation 9, 67, 184, 252 freedom 1–​3, 6, 11, 18–​22, 27–​39, 51, 60, 117–​19, 128, 130, 138, 145, 207, 220–​3, 230, 234, 237–​42, 246–​7, 260, 263, 269 free play 50, 81, 102, 118–​19, 124, 128, 131, 198 French (culture) 18 future 17, 149–​53, 205–​7, 209, 212, 235, 247 philosopher of the future 180–​2 genius 2, 4–​6, 8, 15–​42, 50–​2, 57, 60, 114, 121, 125, 131, 139, 148, 216 German 5, 15–​20, 38, 181–​3, 216 God 3, 74, 116, 161, 170, 172, 185, 191 good 43, 48–​52, 81, 89, 93, 138, 185, 258 gratitude 27–​30, 56 Greek/​s 18–​20, 28–​9, 36, 39, 53, 121, 124, 128, 144, 170 health/​y 121, 124, 127, 192, 201, 230 unhealthy 15, 121 hearing 219–​49 history 4, 5, 10, 27, 39, 157–​78, 188–​93, 262 historicity 6, 17–​18, 22–​4 ideal 29, 47–​60, 252, 263–​8, 271 illusion 4–​7, 44–​6, 51–​61, 77, 78, 145, 190, 192 imagination 49, 50, 65–​7, 81, 84–​5, 95, 102–​3, 118–​19, 131, 134–​6, 141, 143, 145, 148, 149 imperative/​s 60, 255, 259, 261, 271 categorical imperative 47, 49, 185, 212, 261, 266 impersonality 67, 70, 72, 80, 138, 192 incorporate/​incorporation (Einverleiben/​-​ ung) 35–​8, 41, 48, 73, 84, 86, 89–​90, 173, 205–​7 instinct 72–​80, 84, 87, 185, 208

284

284

Subject Index

intoxication (Rausch) 66–​75, 88, 106, 123, 131, 138 intuition 66, 82, 134, 135, 141–​2, 165, 185, 219, 221, 230–​1, 234–​5 judgement aesthetic judgement 4, 8–​9, 43, 48, 68, 70–​6, 80–​2, 87–​94, 117–​19, 127, 129, 133–​40, 143, 148–​9 judgement of beauty 83, 103, 138–​40, 143, 149–​50 judgement of taste 9, 20–​3, 50, 59, 72, 82, 135–​7, 140, 144, 149–​50, 152, 186 reflective judgement 2, 3, 7, 70–​4, 81–​2, 85, 89, 92, 96, 117–​19, 125, 127, 134–​6, 145, 152, 162, 191 see also power/faculty of judgement katharsis 128 language 94, 146–​8, 193, 223–​32, 235–​6, 240–​8 laughter 10, 129, 147, 197–​217 law 2, 6, 16–​24, 29–​32, 60, 117–​21, 134–​7, 142–​6, 149, 151, 169, 185, 190–​1, 212, 255–​6, 262–​9 legislation 18–​20, 29, 36, 182, 186 legislator 2, 18, 19, 192 self-​legislation 5, 15–​17, 27, 36 liberating/​liberation 28, 50, 58, 78–​80, 88, 203, 207–​8, 213, 244 lie 44, 45, 52, 55, 57, 58, 59, 61 see also untruth, illusion love 65–​71, 84–​8, 92, 94, 96, 138–​9, 151–​2 maxim/​s 251–​72 measure/​measurement 16, 22, 24, 47, 51, 55, 75, 91–​2, 126–​7, 141–​2, 188, 192, 260, 264 metaphor/​metaphorical 9, 40, 136, 141–​3, 146, 150, 153, 202 metaphysics 1, 3, 7, 8, 9, 28, 54, 71, 100, 101, 104–​6, 113–​16, 120, 129–​31, 162, 175, 183, 184, 210, 230 mimesis (Nachahmung) 6, 18, 23, 27, 29–​34, 40 modernity 2, 5, 6, 8, 15–​19, 29, 38, 100, 105, 106 morals/​morality 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 11, 16, 18–​20, 23, 28, 40, 43–​6, 48–​52, 54–​60, 81,

86, 94, 96, 99–​101, 108–​9, 116–​ 20, 129, 138, 159, 179, 185, 192, 206, 251–​72 morality of custom 262–​7, 271 music 53, 83, 92, 123, 169, 198, 223, 224, 234, 236 nature (human) 9, 184, 186, 208, 210, 250–​2, 254, 261 neo-​Kantianism 158, 174 nihilism 3, 5, 88, 95, 121, 124 nonsense (Unsinn) 20, 147–​8, 202–​3 norm/​normative/​normativity 6, 16–​18, 20, 30–​1, 36, 211, 257 ontological/​ontology 38, 115, 122–​3, 129, 131, 146, 260 organic 37, 94, 145, 147, 160, 162, 166, 168, 171, 176, 187, 189, 193, 221, 224 inorganic 145–​6, 188–​9, 191, 193 organism 4, 10, 37–​8, 41, 75, 91, 133, 146–​ 7, 149, 153, 158–​65, 169–​73, 176 origin(s)/​original/​originary 5–​6, 9, 15–​25, 27, 32, 36, 65–​6, 68, 84, 115, 117–​ 18, 121–​3, 125, 128, 131, 134, 136, 141–​2, 148, 153, 179, 188, 244, 248, 255, 262, 270 originality 5–​6, 15–​27, 32–​5 overcome/​overcoming 1–​2, 6, 29, 32, 58, 80, 83, 114, 116, 130, 151, 182, 205, 207, 212, 239 pain/​painful 45, 66, 73, 78, 81, 118, 125–​6, 128, 202, 207 painter/​painting 71, 137, 257, 260 past 16, 17, 24, 27, 38, 39, 125, 148–​53, 172 pathos of distance 7, 64, 85–​7, 92 perfectionism 27–​9 performance 30, 150 perspective/​perspectivism 4, 7, 9, 15, 20, 31, 35, 56–​7, 64–​5, 70, 85–​93, 96, 107, 114–​15, 124, 139–​40, 145, 148, 150, 158, 169, 184, 192, 206–​12, 220, 228 perspective of the species 207–​8 philology 10, 157–​9, 162, 173, 193 philosopher of the future see future philosophical workers (Arbeiter) 180, 182 physiological/​physiologist/​physiology 36–​8, 63, 68, 70–​2, 74–​6, 96, 161,

  285

Subject Index 166, 199, 201, 205, 211, 214, 254, 259, 269 Platonism 46, 54 pleasure 37, 38, 54, 63–​6, 69–​82, 102–​10, 118, 122, 125–​8, 132, 134–​7, 144–​9, 181, 186, 198–​203, 208, 214, 221–​3, 227, 255, 256 poet/​poetic/​poetry 34–​5, 37–​8, 45, 48, 51, 54, 56, 58–​9, 61, 85, 93, 134, 182, 216, 245 poíesis 115, 121 power 5, 7, 10, 17, 23, 26–​33, 36–​8, 49, 50, 56–​9, 63, 69, 74–​6, 85–​7, 91, 100, 114, 115, 116, 124, 127, 130, 131, 134–​45, 148–​50, 161, 168, 182, 186–​7, 200, 214, 228, 263, 266 power/faculty of judgement 80–1, 117, 119, 134–5, 141, 144, 186–7 progress 5, 23, 25, 159, 168, 170–​1, 252–​3, 259, 265–​8, 271 promise of happiness 63–​98, 139 pure reason 1–​2, 4, 46–​7, 49, 134, 144, 201, 212 purposiveness 118, 119, 144–​7, 148, 161–​6, 172, 193, 215 purposiveness without a purpose 2, 9, 118, 119, 134, 136, 143–​9, 152, 153

285

reception/​receptivity 4, 27, 29–​37, 133, 224 reflective judgement 64, 81, 89, 90, 94, 117, 118, 119, 125, 145, 162, 191 regulative 118, 163, 165–​6 religion 1, 168–​9, 168, 206, 208, 261 representation 8, 18, 46, 48–​50, 53–​4, 65–​6, 78, 80–​1, 99–​101, 104, 109–​10, 118–​19, 122–​3, 126–​7, 135, 142–​3, 163–​4, 172, 186, 191, 199–​200, 213, 221, 230 Romanticism 16, 116, 129 rule/​s 6, 16–​40, 47–​52, 89, 116, 118–​19, 121, 129, 135, 143–​4, 169, 233, 242, 261–​2 see also law rule of purposes 159, 191 self-​given rule/​s 253, 258

167, 171, 173, 175–​6, 183–​4, 205–​9, 211, 215, 248, 259, 268 gay science 10, 205–​9 self-​deception/​self-​deceit see deception self-​legislation see legislation semblance (Schein) 46, 54–​5, 59, 122 sensibility 2, 4, 46–​7, 103, 106–​8, 127, 134, 185, 238, 252–​3 sensible 2, 47–​9, 100–​10, 118, 148, 154, 221, 224, 242 supersensible 2, 8, 118, 185 sensus communis 91, 131, 186, 229 sick/​sickness 15, 121, 124 silence (and soundless) 11, 46, 220, 231–​4, 237–​43, 246 smell 71, 220–​3, 231, 234 social/​sociability 2, 4, 11, 148, 203, 205, 214, 224, 226–​8, 255, 259, 261–​2 solitude 11, 220, 227–​8, 232–​9, 241, 243, 247 sound/s ​sonority 19, 222–​31, 234–​9, 242–​7 soundless see silence spirit/​spiritual/​spirituality 28, 50–​1, 57–​9, 64–​8, 78, 84–​6, 92, 108–​9, 121, 138, 148, 151, 157, 170, 174, 181, 185, 192, 238, 244, 246–​9 ‘free spirits’ 74, 235, 247, 268 spirit of imitation (Nachahmungsgeist) 24 spiritualization 7, 64–​9, 82–​95 style 15, 19, 120–​1, 205, 208, 215 subjective/​subjectivity 4, 7, 51, 63, 76, 78, 83, 91, 104, 117, 119, 136–​7, 140–​5, 150, 163, 186, 190–​1, 221–​4, 227, 233–​4, 269 subjective universality see universality sublime 3–​4, 7–​8, 57, 69–​70, 99–​110, 114, 119, 122–​3, 126–​8, 131, 133, 135, 140–​1, 153, 210, 214, 255 succession (Nachfolge) 5–​6, 15, 17–​18, 20, 22–​4, 27–​8, 32, 36, 69, 142, 231 symbol/​symbolic/​symbolize 2, 48–​51, 55, 74, 82, 84, 123, 131

satire 204, 215 scepsis/​scepticism 2, 55, 77, 166, 181–​3, 193, 241 science 1, 3–​4, 9–​10, 24–​5, 43, 53, 88, 115, 119–​20, 145, 153, 157–​8, 164–​5,

talent (Begabung) 19, 21, 25–​6, 39–​40, 50, 121, 161, 204 taste 17–​20, 29, 49, 51–​3, 57, 70–​1, 73–​4, 77, 94, 117–​21, 129, 132, 186, 221–​3 judgement of taste see judgement

286

286

Subject Index

teleology/​teleological 4–​5, 9–​10, 116, 125, 133, 145–​7, 153, 158–​76, 187–​90, 192–​3, 215 teleological judgement 1, 118–​19, 133, 157–​9, 164, 175 terror 239, 255 thing-​in-​itself 53, 74, 123–​4, 162, 185, 189 tradition/​traditional 5–​6, 11, 16–​18, 20–​6, 71, 90, 101, 110, 116, 201, 204, 208, 211, 219–​21, 230, 234–​5, 252, 261, 268, 270 tragedy 3, 45–​6, 55, 106–​9, 137, 168, 206–​7 tragic 1, 5–​7, 43, 46, 53, 55, 58–​9, 105–​9, 120, 125–​8, 131, 207–​10, 215 tragic joy 105–​6 tragic knowledge/​wisdom 3, 58, 61, 120, 204, 210 transfiguration see figuration transformation see formation truth 1–​7, 43–​6, 51–​61, 81, 89, 96, 119, 128, 139, 145, 151, 181–​2, 184, 186, 193, 203, 207–​10, 216, 219, 226, 230–​1, 235 untruth 6, 44, 46, 52, 55–​9 ugly 70, 72–​6, 87 (the) understanding 43, 81, 117–​19, 127, 129, 134–​6, 141–​3, 162, 186, 199, 200, 204, 213, 224, 230, 246 unique 16, 29, 47, 66, 267

unity 1–​2, 15, 17, 38, 102–​3, 107–​8, 110, 118, 121, 124, 134, 144, 146–​7, 162, 164, 181, 189, 203, 232 primordial unity (Ur-​Eine) 54, 122–​3 universal/​universality/​universalizable 11, 22, 44, 51–​2, 60, 67, 70, 72, 80, 82, 89, 91, 116, 118–​19, 123, 134–​40, 143, 148, 150, 152, 167, 170, 186, 190–​2, 207–​12, 225–​9, 245, 251–​67 subjective universality 140 universal validity 4, 91, 191 universal voice 138, 140 value/s​ (e)valuation 3–​5, 16–​18, 30, 36, 48, 53, 55, 70–​6, 82–​92, 113, 117, 129–​30, 145–​6, 153, 158, 166, 169, 181–​2, 192, 206–​11, 220, 228, 241, 264, 268 devaluate/​devaluation 5, 224 revaluate, revaluation/​transvaluation 5, 11, 85–​92, 114, 220–​1, 228, 234 violence 38, 127, 208, 242, 244, 269 virtue 2, 19, 23, 34–​5, 45, 50, 92, 180, 192, 214, 246, 261, 270–​1 vision 54, 68, 220, 231, 235 will to power 37, 74–​5, 100, 114, 124, 131, 182 wit (Witz, ingenium) 204, 210 work of art see art