We must be very careful, therefore, not to mistake Nietzsche's overt hostility towards Darwin and Darwinism for an attack on evolutionary biology in general, for it seems that Nietzsche had his own evolutionary theories. 'Uniform' one calls what they wear: would that what it conceals were not uniform! So far Nietzsche's critique of the history of religious guilt and its developments appears to be in line with Kant's belief that any man seeking enlightenment must not be hampered by religious imposition. Again in the Gay Science, Nietzsche writes: "long live physics! In this sense his work is reminiscent, as I shall argue below, of Enlightened thinkers such as Condorcet, who posit world history as a teleological process leading to a positive goal for humanity. For Nietzsche to provide an explicit political doctrine would be absurd because it would lend credence to the autonomous Cartesian subject that Nietzsche was trying to subvert through a dramatic revision of our categories of selfhood. "67 Again, we see that despite their surface differences, science and religion, both of which manifest asceticism, resentment and nihilism, are anathema to Nietzsche for the same reasons. "No one today is naive enough to set the 'I-subject' as a condition of thinking, in the manner of Descartes," Nietzsche says scornfully.15 It is quite possible and reasonable, Nietzsche argues, to postulate thought simply as something that happens, without reference to the kind of subject that is, in Cartesian epistemology, absolutely necessary for thought to occur. And in this sense, his project remained true to the spirit, if not to the objective content, of the Enlightenment. Here I examine Nietzsche's vitriolic attacks on the political systems of his time, in which I include liberalism, socialism, nationalism and anarchism. His goal was therefore to undermine this herd-based politics, clearing away the politics of the conventional Enlightenment in order to make possible the creation of this new subjectivity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Both of these features are manifested, to a significant extent, in Darwin's theory in the Origin.�.�. 45Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 24. As Louis Loeb argues, "the priority of reason [in Descartes] is grounded in the superiority of reason as a source of true belief, in the greater truth-conduciveness of reason: whereas reason is infallible, sense-perception is fallible. 131Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science, 80. This progress is to come about through the development of the overman; the overman represents for Nietzsche a higher state of humanity and is in that sense clearly a notion of progress. "124 Nietzsche is suggesting here is that the problems of science derive largely from the fact that science has not yet had much of a chance to develop itself fully; the implication is that once science blossoms, these problems will disappear. In a note from the will to power, Nietzsche describes modern virtue, modern spirituality and "our science" as "forms of sickness. '"52 To be sure, this strategy of critique is not without its problems. Rather he is arguing for a particular attitude towards time, an attitude which will permit us to do what we have been so far unable to do: to stop focusing our energies exclusively on the past, to stop wasting time with resentment and guilt about what has happened. The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. This, in turn, has led to fierce academic debates, … "60 But what Hatab fails to recognize is that this idea is only subtly different from the notion of progress. Chapter Five: The Overman as Enlightened Utopia. Thus as Cartright puts it, "by overcoming his pity, Zarathustra returns to his own self-creation and overcoming in pursuit of �bermenschlichkeit. Nietzsche's "Zarathustra" als moderne Trag�die. '"68 By instructing us in how to will, Zarathustra is clearly engaged in an ethical project. SCHMIDT, J. and WARTENBERG, T. E.: «Foucault's Enlightenment: Critique, Revolution, and the Fashioning of the Self» in KELLY, M. Nietzsche himself suggests that such a reconciliation of the seemingly contradictory elements of his project will be possible when he writes in Ecce Homo, the psychological problem in the type of Zarathustra is how he that says No and does No to an unheard-of degree, to everything to which one has so far said Yes, can nevertheless be the opposite of a No-saying spirit; how the spirit who bears the heaviest fate, a fatality of a task, can nevertheless be the lightest and most transcendent--Zarathustra is a dancer--how he that has the hardest, most terrible insight into reality, that has thought the 'most abysmal idea,' nevertheless does not consider it an objection to existence, not even to its eternal recurrence--but rather one reason more for being himself the eternal Yes to all things, 'the tremendous, unbounded Yes and Amen.'52. Again, one reading of this is that Rousseau means to promote the interests of the community without concern for the status of individuals in the community. In these perilous dreams there is still an echo of Rousseau's superstition, which believes in a miraculous primeval but as it were buried goodness of human nature and ascribes all the blame for this burying to the institutions of culture in the form of society, state and education.39. Nietzsche believed that he could complete the modern project of subjectivity successfully, as the traditional Enlightenment could not. By retaining the idea that there could be a kind of political agent, and that this agent could and should engage in political action, Nietzsche tied himself inextricably to the Enlightenment tradition which he so vehemently attacked. His answer is, among other things: "Disgust for the demagogic, for the 'enlightenment,' for 'being cozy,' for plebeian familiarity. This 'modern science' --let us face this fact!--is the best ally the ascetic ideal has at present, and precisely because it is the most unconscious, involuntary, hidden, and subterranean ally! This is what Volker Gerhardt refers to as Nietzsche's "Dionysian desire for a release from the principle of individual action. The motivation for postulating the social contract is outlined in the Second Discourse, in which Rousseau describes the origins of human inequality. Jacob, Margaret. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. He attacked both the early Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the later Enlightenment of his own nineteenth century. Nietzsche-Studien (1991): 267-283. Nietzsche Critique Of Socrates. The twin pillars on which Kant based his morality are rationality and freedom, and as we have already noted, both are key terms of the Enlightenment. Nietzsche felt that socialism, with its leveling effects, could lead only to a community of the herd. Since it was Nietzsche's profound concern to counteract the influence of the modern Nation State, he was opposed to Rousseau; for the Nation State seemed to Nietzsche the archenemy of nonconformity, self-realization, and the 'single one's' remaking of his own nature. "3 The Discourse announced to intellectual Europe that reason had arrived. Traditional, Enlightened or Cartesian science is something dangerous for Nietzsche. That which was Christian, decadent and poor in life was inevitably what he attacked most enthusiastically. Ph.D. diss. "53 Here Nietzsche seems to formulate a moral or ethical critique of Rousseau, which he develops more fully later in the same work: "you have the choice of concluding with Rousseau that 'this pitiable civilisation is to blame for our bad morality' or against Rousseau that 'our good morality is to blame for this pitiableness of our civilisation. However, this admiration need hardly be understood as a symptom of Nietzschean nationalism. The socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker's sense of satisfaction with his small existence--who make him envious, who teach him revenge. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Here I discuss Nietzsche's critique of Cartesian rationality, which he held to be a representation of human existence that was both misleading and dangerous. "The Significance of Michel Foucault's Reading of Nietzsche: Power, the Subject, and Political Theory." Mill's essay on Bentham is perhaps the best example of his modified utilitarian position. This belief in the rational autonomy of human beings implies a definite kind of politics, and this is the second aspect of Enlightenment thought I wish to consider. 25Kaufmann, translator's introduction to Gay Science, 5. In England, the ideology of liberalism was institutionalized in a way that it never was in Germany. Indeed, an examination of his positive project will suggest that much of Nietzsche's hostility towards the traditional Enlightenment is done in the name of this transformed and transfigured Enlightenment. It is characterized by a positive faith in the possibilities of human development; it is the conviction that the future of humanity will represent a radical improvement over the present. Nietzsche's critique of Darwin makes it seem as if he was unrelentingly hostile to nineteenth century biological science, and his attack on Spencer suggests an equivalent hostility to the kinds of social theory and practice that arose from Darwinism. One of the founding figures of modern liberalism, and a thinker who operates very clearly within the intellectual framework of the Enlightenment, Mill earns Nietzsche's wrath as a proponent of liberal progress and an ideologue of the politics of the Enlightened Cartesian subject. Nietzsche writes in Daybreak: "In Germany it was Schopenhauer, in England John Stuart Mill who gave the widest currency to the teaching of the sympathetic affects and of pity or the advantage of others as the principle of behaviour: but they themselves were no more than an echo--those teachings have shot up with a mighty impetus everywhere and in the crudest and subtlest forms together from about the time of the French Revolution onwards, every socialist system has placed itself as if involuntarily on the common ground of these teachings. "127 We have come full circle, it seems, from Nietzsche's devastating critique of modern scientific "truth." Let me first address the claim that amor fati represents the limits of humanism for Nietzsche. In Strong's view, if one had to choose between complacent English liberalism, virulent Bismarckian nationalism, or French Third Republic decadence and apathy, one had no choice at all. Antosik, Stanley J. Nietzsche was not the only thinker of his time to critique liberalism and socialism. "90 Clearly, these are some of the strongest criticisms available to Nietzsche. Nietzsche is arguing that, contrary to what many scientists and laymen assume, there is no necessary reason to suppose that the world should behave according to laws. Human, all too Human is in many ways quite a mature book, and it contains many of the elements of Nietzsche's later thought. The essence of Enlightened thought, like the essence of Nietzschean thought, lies in its utopianism. The intellectual labor of the Discourse is not meant to justify science in any abstract or nebulous way; Descartes intended for it to vindicate a particular kind of knowledge, knowledge that was "useful in life" and promoted "the general welfare of mankind. It is through the category of absolute reason that Kant is able to maintain an essentially Christian ethical position without explicit reference to a Christian God. We might read Nietzsche, then, as offering a devastating and debilitating--but relatively straightforward--critique of Enlightened thought. The importance of this divergence from conventional utilitarian theory may not be readily apparent, but in fact it represents a dramatic change. The Cartesian advocacy of science--and specifically of practical science dedicated to the project of improving humanity's lot--lies at the very heart of the Enlightenment. New York: Washington Square Press, 1969. Fell, Albert. Indeed, Clark does not succeed in explaining how someone who has already assumed the existence of true beliefs could possibly perform experiments which call truth into question, since that person would have already presupposed the validity of the very thing they were attempting to examine. My reasons for selecting these six men as representatives of Nietzsche's Enlightenment are hopefully clear. If this obstacle can be overcome, life will be elevated to a higher stage of self-surpassing, and the opposition between the Will to Power and eternal recurrence will vanish. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964. There is a reading of his project which accounts for the suffering implied by a total affirmation of the world, and yet retains the positive vision which is, I feel, central to his thought. This suggests that there may be ways in which Nietzsche's thought is not a simple attack on the Enlightenment. "97 Nietzsche was well aware, then, of the real and extreme limitations of traditional Enlightened freedom as it was articulated by Descartes, Rousseau and Kant, and their nineteenth century heirs. Condorcet divides human history into a number of stages, beginning with fairly primitive tribal and pastoral phases and moving on through agrarianism to the modern period. Thus in the Genealogy Nietzsche marvels at how "the Darwinian beast and the ultramodern unassuming moral milksop who 'no longer bites' politely link hands. And his overman, though based on radically different concepts than the rationally autonomous individual of the conventional Enlightenment, remains nonetheless a strongly individualistic figure very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment. system of morality with the origin of morality. In the process, some of Nietzsche's "postmodern" admirers are taken to task for appropriating his criticisms of the Enlightenment without acknowledging his ambivalence toward it. His dramatic critique of the autonomous Cartesian subject and its epistemology cannot mask the fact that Nietzsche is pursuing his own project of subjectivity, and any such project must necessarily retain important traces of Enlightenment. "All our political theories and constitutions--and the 'German Reich' is by no means an exception--are consequences, necessary consequences, of decline. Yet this is a book about Nietzsche, and so the Enlightenment must remain simply a context, while the texts upon which I rely are, for the most part, Nietzsche's. Second, and more importantly for the present work, I do not believe that Nietzsche saw the Enlightenment as something that ended with the French Revolution. Descartes begins with a process (rationality) and from it he establishes a new kind of individual, a new kind of self: the rational, autonomous self that will come to be the standard-bearer of Enlightenment. Indeed, Gilles Deleuze suggests that for Nietzsche, nihilism and science are so interrelated that it will be difficult if not impossible for modern science to rid itself of nihilistic impulses. Stambaugh, Joan. But hopefully it is already clear, at least in part, what Nietzsche's brand of Enlightenment is not: it is not the conventional Enlightenment of Cartesian subjects engaged in Rousseauian politics or Kantian ethics. David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley have argued that "without the stimulus of a popular movement that was strong enough to shift bourgeois notables to the left, the constitutionalist movements of the last century were unlikely to embrace a significant element of democracy. Thus he writes in the Nachla�: "That which is really good for us according to strict scientific ideas of causality (e.g. I suspect that this is because anarchists remain trapped within the Enlightened political framework that Nietzsche is struggling so desperately to overcome. Nietzsche was not interested in promoting the rational, autonomous self that is central to Enlightened politics; indeed, he found this subject to be entirely unviable, as I shall argue below. Yet in our everyday interpretation of the world we constantly rely on this distinction. Another defining characteristic of late nineteenth century nationalism was its frequent incorporation of racism into its ideology. Greg Whitlock is quite right when he writes that "as human history continues to develop. He writes: "There is simply for Nietzsche no coherent way to talk about politics of his day because--in genealogical perspective--the politics tend to be incoherent. The answer is that I believe that Victorian England represented for Nietzsche and for many other nineteenth century thinkers the epitome of the Enlightened society: complacent, smug and self-assured, nineteenth century England institutionalized all of the characteristics of Enlightenment outlined above. : Presses Universitaires de France, 1974. Having explored some of the dimensions of Nietzsche's critique of nineteenth century science in general, I now wish to turn to some specific examples. I do not want to proceed this way, however, for two reasons. Nietzsche, Friedrich. In The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, edited by David B. Allison. Is he attacking science from the standpoint of truth? It is not intended as a statement against humanity as such, for the overman remains a human destination. The eternal return is the reproduction of becoming but the reproduction of becoming is also the production of becoming active: child of Dionysius and Ariadne. Philosophy Today 38 (1994): 70-88. His thought is optimistic and full of hope; in its affirmation of the possibilities of life, Nietzsche's project remains that of an Enlightened utopia. Zarathustra says: "to me justice speaks thus: 'men are not equal.' The same is true of his attack on science. The presupposition here is ignoble in the lowest sense: here an equivalence of value between my actions and yours is presupposed. This is a list of the very features emphasized by advocates of modernity as liberation and enlightenment--and Nietzsche praises them in later sections [of the Gay Science]. Just as in his critique of the political forms of Enlightenment, Nietzsche carried out a thorough investigation into the origins of the scientific Enlightenment, in this case choosing Descartes as his target. We shall discuss what that science might look like shortly. Nietzsche writes in a note from the Nachla�: "Starting point. I would now like to say something about the basic principles that these men represent. Thoughtful scholarly reflections on all aspects Nietzsche's project towards autonomy is not the Kantian moral project, nor is it any other kind of traditional Enlightened project. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. The anti-philosopher disputes the posibility of objectivity snd universality and rejects the absolute authority of reason; anti philosophers also reject the possibility of a neutral stance or perspectivelss perspective. "52 It may seem odd that the way in which he chose to do this was by attempting to resurrect Christian dogma and smuggle it in through the back door of Enlightenment, but the fact that Kant used Enlightenment's tools to restructure Christianity makes clear his commitment to the project of Enlightenment. Against this he offered a transformed Enlightened freedom the details of which I shall explore in Chapter Five. Hollingdale. . "14 Nietzsche refuses to accept the claim that without a conscious subject to think our thoughts no thought can occur. I do not think that the association of these various thinkers is a spurious one. This work focuses on the ideas of ‘freedom’, ‘autonomy’, ‘individual virtues’ and ‘morality as a science’. By attacking a central term, one that is absolutely fundamental to a branch of science and without which that science simply would not be possible, Nietzsche immediately undermines the validity of the entire discipline. To float! "The Ethics of Enlightenment: Goya and Kant" Philosophy and Literature, Volume 15, Number 2 (October 1991): 189-211. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill's Moral and Political Philosophy. "64 However, Alan Kahan claims that the individual was the highest value for Mill, and places him alongside Burckhardt and Tocqueville, as an "aristocratic liberal" who valued the individual more than society.65 It is hardly surprising that there should be an interpretive debate of this kind, since as we have seen, the tension between individual needs (liberty) and social needs (utilitarianism) is very real in Mill's thought. Wiltshire, David. The attitude portrayed is that of affirmation, overfulness; the attitude which expresses ascending life, life in and as celebration. . He also realized that time had done nothing to heal the Enlightened tradition, but had only amplified its problems until Nietzsche's own century was confronted with the distorted abominations of soulless science and exhausted democracy. Here Nietzsche's critique blossoms into a full-fledged attack on Rousseau as a revolutionary "fantasist." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. He writes: "the entire old psychology, the psychology of will, was conditioned by the fact that its originators, the priests at the head of ancient communities, wanted to create for themselves the right to punish--or wanted to create this right for God. "3 At first glance, Nietzsche seems to be rejoicing here in the fact that science can provide us with real, verifiable scientific laws. "83 This is a peculiarly Victorian combination of scientific objectivity and moral righteousness, but it serves to illustrate Spencer's belief that the scientific method and approach--at least as he saw it--was indispensable to his sociology. "59 Hatab argues persuasively that the idea of Becoming is crucial for Nietzsche. "80 Kant's extreme rationalism, beyond simply creating a problematic philosophical position, makes Kant problematic for Nietzsche as a philosopher. 94Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times, 360. "113 Consciousness, in this now familiar Nietzschean formulation, is an historical development designed to meet specific historical needs. It is my hope that an account of this struggle may prove instructive or helpful for the rest of us as we try to work out for ourselves whether it is possible or desirable to overcome Enlightenment, and if so how we should go about it. What Nietzsche is arguing is that Descartes has no right to claim the cogito as an absolute principle. How, then, does Darwin qualify as an Enlightened scientist in the sense that Descartes was one? Or in Winfried Happ's words, "one can only formulate the meaning of Nietzsche's philosophy in the perspective of the creation of the self."104. Like many of Nietzsche's critiques, it takes the form of a cultural critique: what was wrong with the public sphere was that it represented modern decadence; it was the sphere of the philistine. He is searching for a valid "we," as Strong suggests. Precisely the opposite is palpable: the elimination of the lucky strokes, the uselessness of the more highly developed types, the inevitable dominion of the average, even the sub-average types. On gathering together the threads of the argument, however, we shall find that the chief conclusions forced on us by the evidence are those which Evolution implies.82. He writes: "socialism is the fanciful younger brother of the almost expired despotism whose heir it wants to be; its endeavors are thus in the profoundest sense reactionary. Tracy Strong suggests that the social contract is an attempt to explain how someone who discusses politics in terms of the first person singular might with equal success use the first person plural, and this interpretation certainly has its merits.21 The social contract can with little difficulty be read as a principle of social unity and harmony. He saw Darwin's theory as entirely at odds with his own understanding of human social development. This should be understood as a special case of the critique of the "man of science" discussed above. And there are certainly passages where Nietzsche seems to hint at anarchistic beliefs. He writes in Human all too Human: "And now try to assess the greatness of those exceptional Greeks who created science! As Nietzsche writes, "Europe is sick but owes the utmost gratitude to her incurability and to the eternal changes in her affliction: these constantly new conditions and these no less constantly new dangers, pains and media of information have finally generated an intellectual irritability that almost amounts to genius and is in any case the mother of all genius. Nehamas suggests that the idea of Eternal Recurrence serves a very similar function in Nietzsche's later works; for Nehamas, the Eternal Return serves as a rejection of the substantial subject and its will.124 It seems that Nietzsche deployed a number of his most fundamental and creative principles in the service of this major theme in his writings: that the individual subject or self as it has been traditionally presented to us is a dangerous illusion which serves only to obscure true selfhood. Perhaps it fulfills a certain psychological need for us, but if so, we must either find something else to play this role, or better yet, transcend this need entirely. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. "63 Although this passage shows that Nietzsche holds a firm belief in the value of warfare, it also begins to raise some puzzling questions. Nietzsche: Critique de Kant. Nietzsche is obviously interested in preserving and protecting a kind of political agency here, and at this early stage in his writing, that agency looks very much like the kind of individual political agency favored by the thinkers of the conventional Enlightenment. However, Nietzsche's strategy does have a good deal of rhetorical power, particularly in the context of nineteenth century Europe. Moles argues that Nietzsche's "reconstruction of the doctrine of eternal recurrence provides the grounds for claiming that it is entailed by Nietzsche's principles of natural philosophy. It is clear that Nietzsche understood the modern era of human history to have a purpose, and that purpose was to create the conditions that would make possible the overman. Second, as I shall argue shortly, there was for Nietzsche very little difference between liberalism and socialism. A note from the will to power nicely describes the ambivalence Nietzsche seems to feel towards science: "compared with the artist, the appearance of the scientific man is actually a sign of a certain damming-up and lowering of the level of life (--but also of strengthening, severity, hardness, will power). The rejection of this politics forms the political component of Nietzsche's attack on Enlightenment in its conventional form. He suggests that once we realize this arbitrariness, we are no longer even able to believe in causality as we once were. .has discovered himself who says, 'This is my good and evil'; with that he has reduced to silence the mole and dwarf who say, 'Good for all, evil for all. If anything, this attempt at a reconciliation between utilitarian thought and liberalism earns Mill an even greater share of Nietzsche's wrath. The small man recurs eternally! Jaspers admits that "to Nietzsche the first effect is paralyzing shock" as one realizes that even the lowest things must recur eternally.36 But Jaspers also finds that "this extreme can change into its opposite: Complete, despairing negation of existence can become a no less complete affirmation: Instead of being crushed, the believer will be transformed."37. Thus in the Will to Power, for example, Nietzsche writes that "because we forget that valuation is always from a perspective, a single individual contains within him a vast confusion of contradictory valuations and consequently of contradictory drives. "78 It is interesting to note that here even the hated Rousseau fares better than Kant, for at least the former has some element of passion and soul in his writing, whereas Kant emerges from this critique as some kind of cold mental mandarin, churning out abstract treatises on the ideality of space and time with no real sense of human experience. It is "the meaning of the earth," the culmination of human development in this world. Or more accurately, Nietzsche wishes to explore the possibilities of subjectivity available to us once we begin to think of rationality as one quality or aspect of humanity, rather than as humanity's single defining characteristic. . However, Nietzsche is always extremely careful with his language, and we must be as well. 99Schwartz, "The Status of Nietzsche's Theory of the Will to Power," 90. "117 Perhaps it is infinitely distant. 47Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche Contra Rousseau, 24. This leads Deleuze to argue that "the conditions which would make the enterprise of the higher man viable are conditions which would change its nature: Dionysian affirmation rather than man's species activity. "62 Science attracts those who are unable or unwilling to be noble and genuine, because it makes no demands of authenticity. "For his children's sake, Zarathustra must perfect himself," Nietzsche writes, suggesting that the benefits of his future utopia are to be enjoyed by future generations.22 Zarathustra goes on to claim that "he who creates.�.�.creates man's goal and gives the earth its meaning and its future. "51 For these thinkers, then, Nietzsche's attack on Rousseau is only superficially political; beneath this, it is fundamentally ethical or cultural. The "great wars" that were to come were to be wars of ideas. The commitment to progress is another Enlightenment category which Nietzsche retains. Gay, Peter. "88 Understood in this way, Nietzsche's project is perfectly Enlightened. Zarathustra thus immediately gives up such rescue operations. "81 This shows us that Nietzsche is not simply rejecting the project of subjectivity begun by the Enlightenment. Spencer explored the implications of Darwinian evolutionary theory for human society even more thoroughly than did Darwin; he thus became the target of a series of even more vicious attacks from Nietzsche. Quotations from Nietzsche's unpublished notebooks (the Nachla�) are based on the standard Colli and Montinari edition of the Nietzsche Werke. 29Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times, 6. It is a highly structured, rigorous and rational method. But for Nietzsche this progress remained a dangerous illusion. Nietzsche's contempt for Darwin is clear; consider the sarcasm in this sketch for a poem from the Nachla�: Hail your Darwin, who understands no word of "philosophy"!84. "93 Here once again we see the ideology of progress, but this time the ideology is being used in the service of a politics. "68 The individual for Mill is a social good. 27Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 65. This is part of Nietzsche's humanism; he intends the overman as a goal towards which actual humans may project themselves. If it was Enlightened science in particular that Nietzsche opposed, then we would expect him to make sympathetic comments about pre-Enlightenment scientists and their work, and this is indeed the case. These are not the only authors who represent the Enlightenment, by any means. In an interesting passage from Ecce Homo, Nietzsche describes Zarathustra as a "type" and claims that "to understand this type, one must first become clear about his physiological presupposition: this is what I call the great health. In addition to a spirited defense of the value of the Jewish people, Nietzsche gives us here a searing critique of anti-Semitism as a component of nationalism. In a very revealing note from the Will to Power, Nietzsche claims that he is "a few centuries ahead in Enlightenment not only of Voltaire but even of Galiani, who was far profounder. The Enlightenment that Nietzsche found insisted that humans were rational, autonomous subjects, that they deserved and could attain political freedom. We must recall here Nietzsche's idea of the slave revolt. Instructions --. However, we should be careful to note here that Nietzsche's critique of modern science must not be mistaken for a critique of the scientific enterprise in general. "69 The reference to redemption is a parody of Christian redemption, of course, but it also implies that the structure of Zarathustra's project is not vastly different from that of Christianity, though the content of the two projects remains wildly divergent. I want to cite four principles which are fundamental to the essence of Enlightenment as Nietzsche understood it. '"9 Nietzsche seems to be suggesting an interpretation of the natural world that is quite at odds with the rational, Enlightened, scientific understanding: rather than seeing the world in terms of specific, identifiable causes and effects, Nietzsche is arguing for something much less rigid, less orderly, less subject to scrutiny. Furthermore, it does so, most of the time, in such a way that we are completely unaware of what is happening. He attacks Kant on the grounds that Kant limits or excludes many valuable perspectives. He writes: "I see on top and surviving everywhere those who compromise life and the value of life.--The error of the school of Darwin becomes a problem to me: how can one be so blind as to see so badly at this point? Nietzsche is also opposed to the varieties of nineteenth century Enlightened thought that build upon these foundations, as I shall show in later chapters. .But I also think--and so, I believe and argue, does Nietzsche--that some interpretations are better than others and that we can even know sometimes that this is the case. On Liberty. It is this scientific discipline which alone redeems all the horrors of modern science that Nietzsche has catalogued for us. There are, however, some important limitations to Nietzsche's critique, and it is not too soon to begin to deal with those here. .With this Darwinist approach he moves beyond Kant and toward what pragmatism later developed. Rational thought is, after all, the cornerstone of the conventional Enlightenment, and as we have seen, Nietzsche attempted to maintain a profoundly critical stance towards this Enlightened tradition. The problem, of course, is that Enlightened science refuses to accept this role for itself. But this should not be understood as undirected, formless Becoming. "60 When Nietzsche says "they," he is referring to the philosophers of universalistic morality. My first chapter is a brief sketch of Nietzsche's Enlightenment, by which I mean the Enlightenment that he encountered, criticized and ultimately reproduced. Without an attack on these founding fathers of Enlightened thought, Nietzsche's anti-Enlightenment project would necessarily remain incomplete. Translated by Charles F. Wallraf and Frederick J. Schmitz. In the Gay Science, however, we can see many hints of what is to come in the next book. Spencer writes: "setting out with social units.�.�. Access supplemental materials and multimedia. But we must also emphasize again that it is a kind of autonomy based on a profoundly new understanding of human subjectivity. "So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle of universal law giving"39 is not really that different from "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Nietzsche's idea of a proper morality is one that is perspectival, and this is what he means when he discusses a morality beyond good and evil. Nietzsche is no enemy of Enlightenment: as Georg Picht argues, he wants to deepen and broaden the European Enlightenment "and force it to take the next step. Once the Cartesian method had been established as a metaphysical basis for the pursuit of science, Descartes would have no problem with someone using this method to acquire empirical knowledge. First, by rejecting Rousseau's egalitarianism, Nietzsche is also implicitly rejecting the individualistic motivation behind that egalitarian project. 58Spiekermann, Naturwissenschaft als subjektlose Macht?, 213. Peters, H. F. Zarathustra's Sister: the Case of Elisabeth and Friedrich Nietzsche. '"94 What the fate of the "rabble" may be once the "new nobility" arises to oppose them is uncertain, but we may suspect that it will not be pleasant. 22Moles, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature, 37. J. W. Burrow writes that "Spencer's 'Synthetic Philosophy,' of which The Principles of Sociology is a part, was an attempt to apply a formula of evolution whose central idea was the development from simple to complex, purporting to be derived from the fundamental laws of matter and motion, to every kind of phenomenon throughout the universe. "25 For Heidegger, then, despite Nietzsche's critique of Descartes and despite the obvious differences between their two positions, Nietzsche's project is in some profound sense linked to that of Descartes. . "81 Nietzsche is extremely skeptical of Kant's idealism and of the Kantian claim that one can say anything for certain about the world of things-in-themselves. As I shall show in Chapters Three and Four, Nietzsche's hostility to the Enlightenment reached its apex with his critique of such Enlightened nineteenth century thinkers as Mill, Darwin and Spencer. In addition to a general critique of the state, Nietzsche offered detailed criticisms of the specific ideologies and forms of government that existed in the late nineteenth century. . "23 Nietzsche returns several times to this formulation about "the meaning of the earth," and this suggests that his vision of the future is to be understood teleologically, as a goal perhaps reminiscent of Condorcet's "tenth stage." "105 This is the challenge Nietzsche makes. It is perhaps for this reason that Nietzsche retained so many of the structures and forms of Christian thought. It has nothing to do with the development of a stronger, more noble kind of human; it exhibits no understanding of the will to power. "45 Here Nietzsche is hinting that the inner spirit of socialism is much the same as that of liberalism, and that what drives them is secretly similar. Bernd Magnus describes this affirmation as follows: "an �bermensch is a representation only of a particular attitude toward life, that it articulates a certain form of life. More important for our purposes at the moment is the suggestion that the overman's attitude towards the world is totally affirmative. Nietzsche attacks the imperative on a number of other grounds as well. Nature and Politics: Liberalism in the Philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Yet he was unable to remove all elements of the old Enlightened science from this new formulation. The goal of his philosophy, especially in Zarathustra, was to improve and perfect humanity. "111 Kaufmann remarks that "here, as elsewhere, Nietzsche gives expression to his Lamarckian belief in the heredity of acquired characteristics. Spencer completes the synthesis of science and social theory begun by Darwin. The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw. Rather, Nietzsche's overman constitutes a claim that subjectivity can be viable if we think of it apart from rationality. This brings me to the final possibility I wish to consider, namely that in addition to retaining from Enlightened science a faith in its rigor and its ability to lead to progress, Nietzsche also developed concrete empirical theories of his own. The terms of Mill's struggle were utilitarianism and liberty; it was the struggle between these two key concepts that largely defined him as a political thinker. For Nietzsche, modern politics was inevitably the child of the conventional Enlightenment. If we understand Rousseau's egalitarianism in this specific sense, then it becomes clear that Nietzsche will have nothing to do with Rousseau's project, since that project is based on a variety of subjectivity which Nietzsche has already rejected. Yet this does not by any means indicate that Nietzsche has no concept of progress. Much as he did with Darwin, Nietzsche offered a critique of Spencer as a decadent. We saw that an important part of Nietzsche's critique of Darwin was his claim that Darwin's ideas of evolution, especially social evolution, were contrary to what Nietzsche thought to be the actual conditions for the advancement and improvement of the human species. The full nature of this version of Enlightenment will become more clear as we turn to Nietzsche's critique of it. This strand is characterized by the four principles of rationality, freedom, science and progress, and it ties these thinkers together as members of a single unified intellectual tradition which, for lack of a more specific term, I have called the Enlightenment. Heidegger writes: "for Nietzsche, what underlies is not the 'I' but the 'body'. As he puts it in the Gay Science, "it is a profound and fundamental good fortune that scientific discoveries stand up under examination and furnish the basis, again and again, for further discoveries. Central to Nietzsche's understanding of modern morality was his belief that the weak of an earlier time had triumphed over the strong and acted to institute their morality of weakness as the dominant morality for human society. This attempt to overcome Enlightenment, however, has a history that begins well before our century, and one of the most important episodes in this history is to be found in the nineteenth century with Friedrich Nietzsche. If this state is achieved mankind would have become too feeble still to be able to produce the genius. Rather, he used his critique to create a space for an alternate theory of human development. I believe that Goyard-Fabre is right to suggest that Nietzsche's philosophy was antipolitical in the sense that it provided none of the conventional trappings of a practical political ideology; there is, for example, no description in Nietzsche's writings of how the state should be organized, or of what the rights and obligations of the citizen should be. But the passage does describe a sympathy for certain impulses within anarchism, especially in that it suggests that there are no social institutions capable of legitimately judging the actions of individuals. Human life as known hitherto would cease to exist. Zarathustra must create himself and strive for �bermenschlichkeit. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Thus "'attraction' and 'repulsion' in a purely mechanistic sense are complete fictions: a word. So far we have seen that Nietzsche is sympathetic to science in both his earlier and later works, and that this sympathy often seems to apply to science in general; that is, that Nietzsche makes no attempt to exclude Enlightened or modern science. Ironically, this is exactly the same kind of trap that Nietzsche himself falls into, as he criticizes the Enlightenment while continuing to make use of some of its most important categories. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 92Bergmann, Last Antipolitical German, 147. As Allan Megill writes, Nietzsche believes that "only under the most delicate circumstances will science be able to serve as the mythic basis of culture. In either case, it is clear that any discussion of Nietzsche and his relationship to Darwin that emerged from this turbulent time would be hopelessly colored by politics. Among the most important of these aspects is a belief in the possibility of a metaphysics--though Nietzsche's metaphysics is, as we have begun to see, profoundly different from that of Descartes--and the desire to advocate a science--though again, this science is to be Nietzsche's joyous or gay science, and definitely not the coldly rational science of Descartes. "Selbstbegr�ndung: Nietzsches Moral der Individualit�t." Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. "86 This is the essence of Nietzschean affirmation, and it points to the true meaning of eternal return. Karl Jaspers suggests that it was in fact Nietzsche's opposition to this liberal/bourgeois ethos that lead him to adopt his sometimes misleading "antipolitical" stance: "Nietzsche calls himself the 'last anti-political German' to contrast his own political position with that of the world around him which, after the success of 1870-71, submitted in bourgeois self-satisfaction to the politics of the day."28. . To Nietzsche, this universalistic approach reveals a certain ignorance about the world: "To assert the existence as a whole of things of which we know nothing whatever, precisely because there is an advantage in not being able to know anything of them, was a piece of naivet� of Kant, resulting from needs, mainly moral-metaphysical. "97 Ib�nez-No� is associating Nietzsche here with the project of modernity, and implicitly with the project of the Enlightenment; he is suggesting that Nietzsche's goal is the creation of a viable and free human subject. 54Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche contra Rousseau, 24. However, it is not absolutely true, in the sense Nietzsche attributes to this word, because it is dependent on interpretation from a definite perspective. Thus he writes in the will to power: "'Useful' in the sense of Darwinist biology means: proved advantageous in the struggle with others. Get to the point GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) Philosophy questions for your exams. This, then, is Nietzsche's critique of Darwinism. Both critiques are motivated by the belief that these Enlightened ideologies, although they claim to be providing a beneficent egalitarianism, actually produce a very dangerous mass politics. This would be a grave error, however. "J. S. Mill and Bentham on Liberty: The Case of the Unacknowledged Mentor." "Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promising intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not follow any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought, lest it should land them in something which would admit of being irreligious or immoral? It also asserted that humans could and should seek knowledge of the natural world and that they must use that knowledge along with their own rationality to perfect their societies. The state's betrayal of true political agency was, in Nietzsche's view, sufficient cause to condemn it. "3 We have seen already how Nietzsche rejected the facile solutions of Enlightened politics and science. "27 Again Zarathustra almost seems to be attacking Voltaire's "infamous thing," the dark ignorance and superstition of conventional Christian religion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. This, then, is the limitation of his critique of Enlightened science. Alan Ryan. . Zarathustra is a utopian vision of a future populated by strong and independent individuals whom Nietzsche calls overmen; it contains, in short, a project that is very much in harmony with the Enlightenment. Granier writes: "science aligns itself spontaneously, through the truth of its rationalism, with the theological options inherent in the Socratic vision of the world. --. Since the particular science that he used to explore society was that of Darwinian biology, it is perhaps not surprising that he is often referred to as a "social Darwinist," though this is somewhat misleading; in fact, his philosophy was already fairly well-developed before he began to incorporate Darwinism into his work. Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Ciencias Sociales working paper, February 1993. Darwin, Charles. "41 While this may be interesting, it is hardly surprising, for this is exactly Kant's project: to formulate a rational morality that is at the same time Christian. "33 In other words, when science presents itself as absolutely true, it inadvertently shows us how ludicrous it is to accept any perspective as truth. Nineteenth century England represented in Nietzsche's eyes the Enlightened society achieved. Here again we see Nietzsche favoring a line of interpretation that is entirely incompatible with science understood in the rational, Enlightened way. Nor would a Nietzschean feel comfortable in Britain's Labour Party or the German right-wing Republicans. Tracy Strong argues that Nietzsche's attack on egalitarianism is related to his critique of liberal individualism. 67Hunt, "The Eternal Recurrence and Nietzsche's Ethic of Virtue," 3. In a Nachla� segment from 1881, he writes: "egoism is something late and is still rare: herd feelings are older and more powerful! The autonomous will of Kant determines the universal, but remains restricted by the limits of reason. "42 Kaufmann is arguing that Nietzsche's attack on Rousseau's concept of nature leads to the broadest possible critique of Rousseau as the symbol of all modern politics, and I believe that Kaufmann is right about this. "Rousseau: The General Will and the Scandal of Politics." Thus, while on the surface Nietzsche seems to be offering a virulent critique of the Cartesian project to rational subjectivity, in fact he is doing so in the name of what is essentially a radicalized Cartesianism.