Nietzsche and Modern German Thought Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson London and New York First published 1991 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1991 Keith Ansell-Pearson for selection and editorial matter. Individual chapters © 1990 the respective contributors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted, or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Catagloguing in Publication Data Nietzsche and modern German thought. 1. German philosophy. Nietzsche, Friedrich 1844–1900 I. Ansell-Pearson. Keith 193 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Nietzsche and modern German thought/[edited by] Keith Ansell-Pearson p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Nietzsche. Friedrich Wilhelm. 1844–1900—Contributions in modern German philosophy. 2. Philosophy, German—19th century. 3. Philosophy, German—20th century. I. Ansell-Pearson, Keith. B3317.N485 1991 193–dc20 90–48665 CIP ISBN 0-415-04442-1 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-203-00397-7 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-21078-6 (Glassbook Format) Contents Notes on contributors v Introduction 1 Keith Ansell-Pearson 1 Nietzsche, Christianity, and the legitimacy of tradition 10 John Walker 2 Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche: critique of knowledge 30 George J.Stack 3 Schein in Nietzsche’s philosophy 59 Robert Rethy 4 Hermeneutics and Nietzsche’s early thought 88 Nicholas Davey 5 Nietzsche, the self, and Schopenhauer 119 Christopher Janaway 6 Marx and Nietzsche: the individual in history 143 Ian Forbes 7 Nietzsche and the problem of the will in modernity 165 Keith Ansell-Pearson 8 Autonomy and solitude 192 J.M.Bernstein 9 Affirmation and eternal return in the Free-Spirit Trilogy 216 Howard Caygill 10 Art as insurrection: the question of aesthetics in Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche 240 Nick Land iv Nietzsche and Modern German Thought 11 Reading the future of genealogy: Kant, Nietzsche, Plato 257 Michael Newman 12 Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the metaphysics of modernity 282 Robert B.Pippin Index 311 Contributors Keith Ansell-Pearson is lecturer in political theory at Queen Mary & Westfield College, University of London, having previously taught philosophy at the University of Malawi. He has published essays on Nietzsche, Kant, Marxism, Foucault, and African thought. His study of Rousseau and Nietzsche will be published later this year by Cambridge University Press, and he is currently preparing a new edition of Nietzsche’s ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’ for the Cambridge University Press series Texts in the History of Political Thought. Jay Bernstein is reader in philosophy at the University of Essex. He was educated at Trinity College, Connecticut, and Edinburgh University. He is the author of The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukács, Marxism, and the Dialectics of Form (Harvester: Minnesota University Press, 1984), Art, Metaphysics, and Modernity: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Polity). He has also edited a selection of Adorno’s essays on mass culture published by Routledge. At present he is engaged on a study of Rousseau’s critique on liberalism. Howard Caygill lectures in the School of Economic & Social Studies at the University of East Anglia. He was educated at the universities of Bristol and Sussex and has held research posts in Sociology and Philosophy at Balliol College and Wolfson College, Oxford. He is the author of Art of Judgement (Blackwell, 1989). Nicholas Davey studied the history of ideas and philosophy at the universities of York, Sussex, and Tübingen, and has undertaken research in Berlin and Weimar. Since 1976 he has lectured in philosophy at the City University, London, Manchester University, and South Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education, Cardiff. He has published essays on Baumgarten’s aesthetics, Hume, Heidegger’s aesthetics, Gadamer, Habermas, and Nietzsche’s contribution to aesthetics and hermeneutics. Ian Forbes has been a lecturer in politics at Southampton University since 1983. His prize-winning Ph.D. thesis, Marx and the New Individual, is published by Unwin Hyman. He has co-edited a book on human nature, and published essays on Nietzsche, feminist thought, rights, and socialism. For three years he was director of the Socialist vi Nietzsche and Modern German Thought Philosophy Group, and edited the influential pamphlet Market Socialism: Whose Choice?. Christopher Janaway graduated from Oxford in philosophy and German and went on to do a D.Phil, on Schopenhauer. Since 1981 he has been lecturer in philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989). Nick Land studied philosophy at the universities of Sussex and Essex and is currently lecturer in philosophy at the University of Warwick, where he specializes in mass materialism. He has published essays on Blanchot, Kant, and de Sade, and is currently completing a book on Bataille. Michael Newman is an art critic and is currently writing a Ph.D. at Essex University on Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin. He lectures in art history and theory at various art schools and universities. His publications include ‘Revising Modernism, Representing Post-modernism’ in Postmodernism, ed. Lisa Appignanesi, London, Free Association Books (1989), and essays and catalogue books on modern and contemporary art. Robert B.Pippin is professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. He was educated at Trinity College, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Kant’s Theory of Form (Yale University Press, 1982), Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 1989), and numerous articles on the history of the modern philosophical tradition. His most recent book is Modernity as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (Basil Blackwell). Robert Rethy is currently associate professor of philosophy at Xavier University. He was educated at Trinity College, and Pennsylvania State University. During 1989– 90 he was visiting professor at the University of Essex. He is the author of numerous articles and reviews on Heraclitus, Descartes, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and modern German philosophy. George J.Stack is professor of philosophy at the State University of New York, Brockport College. Amongst his books are On Kierkegaard: Philosophical Fragments (Humanities Press, 1976), Kierkegaard’s Existential Ethics (University of Alabama Press, 1976), Sartre’s Philosophy of Social Existence (Warren H.Green Inc., 1978), and Lange and Nietzsche (Walter de Gruyter, 1983). He is currently completing a study of Nietzsche and Emerson. John Walker was educated at Queen’s College, Cambridge, and has studied at the University of Tübingen. He has been a research fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, and at the University of Liverpool. Since 1988 he has been fellow and director of studies in German at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He is currently completing a book on Hegel. Introduction Keith Ansell-Pearson Almost every important German thinker, even if he has not remained a Kantian, has at least started out from Kant and from the need clearly to define his position with respect to Kant’s ideas. Lucien Goldmann, Immanuel Kant Recent years have seen an astonishing array of studies on Nietzsche’s philosophy reflecting the emergence of a serious and scholarly interest in Nietzsche’s writings amongst Anglo-American philosophers, sociologists, and political theorists. This volume sets out to make a contribution to the current revaluation of Nietzsche’s philosophy. All of the essays have been specially written at the request of the editor and have not appeared before. The aim is to examine in a critical and illuminating way Nietzsche’s relation to Kant and the post-Kantian tradition of modern German thought. The volume taken as a whole is designed to cast light on the chief areas of Nietzsche’s relation to the Kantian heritage that encompasses the domains of knowledge, ethics, and art as articulated in Kant’s three major critiques of pure reason, of practical reason, and of judgement. Some grandiose claims have been made on behalf of Nietzsche’s writings in recent years—that he brings about the end of the western philosophical tradition, that he overcomes metaphysics, that he inaugurates a post-philosophical style of thinking, that he is the first postmodernist, and so on. But the claim that Nietzsche breaks with the philosophical tradition neglects the fact that his innermost thinking is born out of a ‘confrontation’ (the German is Auseinandersetzung, denoting a settlement, an exchange) with the modern philosophical tradition. By emphasizing the importance of situating Nietzsche’s ideas in the context of the modern philosophical tradition it is not the intention of the volume to undermine the radical nature of his thought; rather, it has to be the case that the originality 2 Nietzsche and Modern German Thought and radicalness of any thinker can only be fully appreciated when his or her ideas are situated in the context of the tradition that the particular thinker was seeking to overcome. In several ways the essays which make up this volume can be taken to constitute exercises in what Nietzsche called philosophical labouring (a kind of labour that he himself was fairly industrious at). This does not reflect an impotence of the intellect, or a failure to take risks and experiment, but the belief shared by a number of the contributors is that the task of philosophical legislation has become increasingly problematic in recent years with the advent of what, for the sake of shorthand, can be called the ‘post- modern condition’—a condition which is neither regressive nor progressive, but which simply denotes a difficulty and a problem concerning the actualization of philosophy and the status of modern forms of knowledge and truth. In the essay on ‘Nietzsche, Christianity, and the legitimacy of tradition’ which opens the volume, John Walker examines Nietzsche’s appraisal of the significance of Kant’s critique of metaphysics. Kant’s critique of metaphysics undoubtedly constituted the most important and lasting influence on Nietzsche’s education as a philosopher. In his philosophical notebooks of 1872–3, for example, he is preoccupied with what he regards as the fundamental revolution in thought brought about by Kant’s philosophy: ‘The altered position of philosophy since Kant. Metaphysics impossible. Self-castration. Tragic resignation, the end of philosophy. Only art has the capacity to save us’ (Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke III, 4, 19 [319]). Walker draws on the insights of Alasdair MacIntyre in order to show that Nietzsche’s attempt to inaugurate a new style of philosophy has to be understood in the context of a tradition, in this case that of European Christianity and its philosophical inheritance in Kant and Hegel. Despite its claim to have established the possibility of a new kind of philosophy, Nietzsche’s thought, Walker maintains, remains inextricably tied to the philosophical tradition in so far as it retains what are essentially Kantian premisses. Walker shows that Nietzsche wished to cultivate a specifically existential reading of the meaning and significance of Kant’s critique of metaphysics, so that it becomes, as it had been for Kleist, an existential experience. Thus he is less concerned with the validity of the conclusions arrived at about truth and knowledge by Kant from a critique of reason than with the existential conclusions we need to draw from our reading of that critique about the activity of philosophy itself. However, Walker argues that Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics is ultimately self-contradictory in that it attempts to establish a philosophy that will be life-affirming and life-enhancing but which, in its claim that Introduction 3 thought must serve existential and practical needs, cannot demonstrate the legitimacy of its own mode of philosophical argument and reasoning. Walker finds Hegel’s attempt to overcome metaphysics a more coherent enterprise since, unlike Nietzsche’s critique, it does not separate the epistemological and existential aspects of philosophical argumentation. Walker is adamant that his reading of Nietzsche is not a reactionary one but a concrete one which situates the ‘text’ of Nietzsche’s philosophy in an appropriate and illuminating ‘context’. In his essay on ‘Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche’, George Stack sets out to show the importance of a book which Nietzsche read avidly on its publication in 1866, namely, F.A.Lange’s History of Materialism, and which served to mediate his reading and appropriation of Kant. Stack shows that Nietzsche’s preoccupation with Kantian themes extends from the philosophical notebooks of 1872 to the late 1880s, a longevity which reveals Nietzsche’s intense concern with epistemological questions and issues. Nietzsche’s critical analyses of truth, knowledge, belief, and scientific concepts are essential, Stack argues, to his attempt to articulate a post-metaphysical and post-epistemological conception of philosophy. Stack’s essay illuminates for us the philosophical context in which Nietzsche sought to formulate a new mythopoetic and existential conception of philosophy. In his essay entitled ‘Schein in Nietzsche’s philosophy’, Robert Rethy examines the extent to which Nietzsche’s attempt to overcome metaphysics still operates within metaphysical oppositions, notably Kant’s distinction between appearance and the thing-in-itself. What concerns Rethy is the use of the distinction between Schein (semblance) and Erscheinung (appearance) in Nietzsche’s early writings and the way in which his later work is characterized by the opposition between Schein and the will to power. In the Birth of Tragedy semblance is conceived by Nietzsche to be the power that is constitutive of visibility, whereas Erscheinung is conceived as mere appearance. Turning to the works of Nietzsche’s so-called middle period (1878–82), Rethy contends that here we find an elimination of the duality between appearance and a deeper level of reality such as the thing-in-itself, and in its place the triumph of the notion of Schein as a notion which contains its opposite within itself. Art is celebrated by Nietzsche precisely because it affirms the ‘good will to semblance’. The rest of his essay is devoted to examining the implications of the fascinating relationship between Schein and will to power as it appears in Nietzsche’s later works. Throughout, Rethy’s analysis is guided by the question to what extent Nietzsche’s thinking remains determined by metaphysical oppositions in spite of its radical pretensions.