Nietzsche and Modern German Thought

321 Pages·1991·0.97 MB·English

by  Keith Ansell-Pearson

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.