© 1995 by Lewis Call
University of California, Irvine
Note: This online version of my dissertation contains no italics, as I have not had time to mark up the entire work in HTML. I ask the reader to forgive the resulting inaccuracies in quotation; all quotes are exact, apart from the lack of emphasis.
Introduction: Nietzsche as Critic and Captive of Enlightenment
"What is Enlightenment?" This question, asked by Immanuel Kant as he stood at the heart of the seventeenth century Enlightenment and again by Michel Foucault in our own century, is in many ways the defining intellectual question of our time. We must ask it because Enlightenment continues to be part of our intellectual and cultural tradition; as we strive to further our knowledge at the university, to reform and improve society in South Central Los Angeles and to promote the cause of individual liberty in Sarajevo, we are all children of the Enlightenment. Yet Enlightenment is also an intellectual movement that carries with it some sobering dangers. It is a totalizing and, some would say, totalitarian ethos; by making universal claims about humans and about their societies and their politics, Enlightenment threatens to silence unenlightened voices and discourses.1 It may well be, then, that Enlightenment is something that we will wish to overcome. But it is not a movement that is easy to surpass. Some of the most important intellectual work of this century has been concerned with the possibilities of escaping the tradition of the Enlightenment.2
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. Before postmodernism and poststructuralism, Nietzsche provided a virulent and comprehensive critique of the Enlightenment. The attack on Enlightenment is a thread that runs through his entire corpus. An examination of his work makes it clear, however, that Nietzsche was unable to overcome this pervasive, intractable tradition. Despite his best efforts, Nietzsche's work contains persistent elements of Enlightenment.
This dissertation is an inquiry into the status, nature and extent of Nietzsche's critique of Enlightenment. It is also an attempt to explore the limitations of that critique. I would like to make clear at the outset that when I use the terms "Enlightenment" or "Enlightened" I am referring to a very particular aspect of a very broad intellectual movement. Quite simply, I am talking about Nietzsche's Enlightenment: as this is a work about Nietzsche, I select for discussion aspects of the Enlightenment that are directly relevant to his work. The six intellectual figures I discuss as representatives of the Enlightenment--Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Darwin and Spencer--are all figures whom Nietzsche directly attacks in his work. Furthermore, as I shall make clear below, I believe that they represent essential aspects of Enlightenment thought. Descartes and Darwin promoted an Enlightened faith in human reason, science and progress. Rousseau and Mill showed a very Enlightened concern with human liberty and freedom. Kant represents the attempt to construct an Enlightened morality through the use of reason, and Spencer made an attempt to synthesize Enlightened science and politics. These are not the only authors who represent the Enlightenment, by any means. But these six individuals do represent the Enlightenment that Nietzsche encountered. And as such, they are indispensable to a clear understanding of his response to that Enlightenment. They provide, in short, the historical context without which we cannot fully understand Nietzsche's critique.
It should be clear by now that the Enlightenment I am discussing covers a fairly broad time period. Certainly one could make a case that the Enlightenment was a phenomenon of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that it did not extend into the nineteenth century in any significant way. I wish to argue against this interpretation for two reasons. First, I do not believe that this approach adequately accounts for the influence that the Enlightenment retained, particularly in matters of science and politics, through the nineteenth century and indeed to the present day. 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. The problem of Mill, Darwin and Spencer was not, as Nietzsche saw it, that they were intellectually or culturally dangerous in an isolated way. Rather, it was that they represented an insidious nineteenth century manifestation of his old enemy, Enlightenment: older, wiser and more clever, and thus all the more threatening.
It is not a coincidence that the three nineteenth century figures I have selected are all English. Nineteenth century England represented in Nietzsche's eyes the Enlightened society achieved. In its political forms, in its unquestioning faith in the possibilities of science and industry, in its unshakable confidence that it represented better than any other nation the future of human progress, England stood for the Enlightenment that Nietzsche despised. I would also like to say a word about the social status of these six men. They were all, with the qualified exception of Rousseau, members of the aristocracy or the comfortable middle class. I make no attempt to deal with the kind of lower-class Enlightenment that Robert Darnton explores3, not because it is unimportant, but again, because it was unimportant to Nietzsche. The Enlightenment that he attacked was the Enlightenment of elites, and it is with this Enlightenment that we must be concerned if we wish to explore his critique.
My reasons for selecting these six men as representatives of Nietzsche's Enlightenment are hopefully clear. I would now like to say something about the basic principles that these men represent. I want to cite four principles which are fundamental to the essence of Enlightenment as Nietzsche understood it. First, the Enlightenment held that human beings are rational creatures who exist independently of any metaphysical force, such as God. Ernst Cassirer argues that in the eighteenth century, power could be understood in terms of a single word: reason. Reason represented the central, unifying point for eighteenth century European thought; it was all that the Enlightenment longed for and all that it achieved.4 This is certainly not far from the truth. Reason was certainly one of the most important characteristics of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. And the concept of rational autonomy that is implied by this belief in universal reason was equally crucial: it profoundly influenced the shape of Enlightened science and politics, and it was the subject of a sustained critique by Nietzsche. It will thus be with us throughout the present work.
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. If humans are sovereign, independent subjects who are meant to use their reason, then they must naturally be opposed to those who would keep them locked in the dark world of tradition and superstition, notably the aristocrats and priests. Indeed, an Enlightened politics would be opposed to any force or idea that might in any way restrict the radical freedom implied by rational autonomy. As Peter Gay notes, the Enlightenment can be understood as a program of secularism, humanity and above all freedom in its many forms; it is humanity's claim to be recognized as adult, responsible beings.5 This claim manifests itself in various ways: it develops into Rousseau's radical attempt to form a human community in which all individuals cede their rights to the whole, yet retain their freedom. It can also be seen in Mill's liberal utilitarianism, which attempts to reconcile a Benthamite priority on pleasure maximization with a vindication of the importance of liberty. And it can be seen in Spencer's attempt to find a scientific justification for liberalism even as that liberalism was attacked on all sides by the forces of social unrest. What unites all these Enlightened positions is a belief that humans fundamentally are or should be free in a political sense; that is, that they should enjoy individual liberty unfettered by the oppression of an unjust state.
Human rationality also implies for Enlightened thinkers an attempt to gain knowledge and understanding of the natural world. As Norman Hampson writes, "human reason, operating by means of careful observation and checking its conclusions by further observation or experiment, could for the first time in the history of man reveal the mechanism of the natural world in which he had lived for so long like a fearful and wondering child."6 In many ways, the extreme rationalism of Descartes, its traditional alternative, empiricism, and the debate between them constitute the part of the Enlightenment which had the greatest influence in the nineteenth century. Darwin owed much of his faith in science and scientific progress to his Enlightened forebears, and Spencer's Enlightened politics acquired their distinctive character only when he added to them a very Enlightened kind of science.
Finally, the Enlightened thinkers were generally confident in their belief that they could use rational principles to solve problems of social interaction, just as they used rationality to understand and control the natural world. This belief lead to the Enlightened faith in social progress and a corresponding optimism that the ideals of the Enlightenment would eventually culminate in a utopian society. Hampson refers to this as an "unprecedented optimism concerning the nature of man and his ability to shape his material and social environment to his own convenience."7 As we shall see, Nietzsche opposed this Enlightened faith in progress as naive; however, it was here that he had the most trouble eluding the influence of Enlightenment. It was the Enlightenment's utopianism that remained with Nietzsche even through his most radical critiques.
My first chapter is a brief sketch of Nietzsche's Enlightenment, by which I mean the Enlightenment that he encountered, criticized and ultimately reproduced. It may seem strange to find that Nietzsche is largely absent from the pages of this sketch, but that is intentional. The goal of this chapter is to set the stage for Nietzsche's critique through a discussion of the six Enlightened thinkers mentioned above. I discuss Descartes as the author who instituted both the Enlightenment's faith in reason and the rational, autonomous individual subject who is at the heart of Enlightenment discourse. I then turn to Rousseau as a representative of the political Enlightenment, using his concepts of the general will and the social contract to articulate a tension in his work between the needs of the community and those of the autonomous individual. Turning to Kant, I discuss the attempt to construct an Enlightened morality based entirely on rationality, which nonetheless ironically reconstructs the Christian morality it claims to supersede. I then turn to the Enlightenment of the nineteenth century, discussing Mill as a political thinker confronted, much as Rousseau was, with a tension between individual and society, a tension which Mill resolved in favor of the individual. I discuss nineteenth century Enlightened science, describing Darwin as a thinker who translated the Enlightened faith in reason and progress into a workable scientific paradigm. I conclude this chapter with an examination of the work of Spencer, whose attempt to incorporate reason and progress, science and individuality into a single, unified theory in many ways represents the culmination of nineteenth century Enlightenment thought.
The following three chapters form my account of Nietzsche's critique of this Enlightenment tradition. Chapter Two deals with his attack on the origins of Enlightenment. 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. I then examine those parts of Nietzsche's corpus which he labeled Nietzsche contra Rousseau; here I attempt to explain Nietzsche's hostility to Rousseau's politics. As I hope to make clear both here in this chapter and the one that follows it, I feel that this hostility derives from Nietzsche's conviction that the autonomous subject of Enlightened political discourse is hopelessly inadequate. The third critique I explore in Chapter Two is Nietzsche's critique of Kant; Nietzsche felt that Kant's rational version of Christian morality was an abomination that only prolonged the kind of Christian malaise that Nietzsche felt was impeding true human progress.
Chapter Three takes us into the world of nineteenth century politics. Here I examine Nietzsche's vitriolic attacks on the political systems of his time, in which I include liberalism, socialism, nationalism and anarchism. I then place these critiques within the broader context of a more fundamental attack that Nietzsche made on the very concept of the Enlightened subject. These critiques constitute, in my view, a refutation of the dominant conception of the individual subject available to a nineteenth century European intellectual. I conclude this chapter with an examination of Nietzsche's critique of Mill, which I take to be a case study of Nietzsche's rejection of nineteenth century political forms. The importance to nineteenth century political thought of liberalism in general and Mill in particular make a consideration of this theorist to whom Nietzsche referred as a "blockhead" imperative.
In Chapter Four I turn to the question of science. Here I examine Nietzsche's attack on nineteenth century rationality and the scientific method. For Nietzsche the unquestioning faith in the ability of rational science to address and solve the problems of the world was unsustainable. It represented, furthermore, an illusory solution that concealed what Nietzsche felt were the real paths to progress: self-overcoming and the overman. Here the two targets of Nietzsche's wrath are Darwin and Spencer. Nietzsche's objection to Darwin was that he promoted through his theory of evolution a false idea of progress based on the rationality and science that Nietzsche rejected. Nietzsche's problems with Spencer ran deeper, for Spencer adopted the kind of Darwinian science that Nietzsche has already denounced, but he added to it a politics of liberal individualism that was quite at odds with Nietzsche's concept of human existence.
Nietzsche gives us, then, a detailed and sustained critique of the Enlightenment on several levels. He attacked both the early Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the later Enlightenment of his own nineteenth century. He attacked the Enlightened ideal of rationality and the rational, autonomous subject; he went on to critique the politics of that subject. He added to this critique an attack on scientific rationalism and the cult of progress.
What Nietzsche did not do, however, was escape Enlightenment. Though he was constantly critical of the Enlightenment's tendency to privilege rationality above all else, Nietzsche frequently expressed a grudging and sometimes enthusiastic appreciation for the possibilities of a less exclusive kind of rationality. His relentless assault on conventional ideas of Enlightened subjectivity did not prevent him from developing a radically new concept of individual selfhood, which he named overman. His attack on the world view of Enlightened scientists did not preclude his use of scientific rigor in his own work. And on the issue of progress, Nietzsche's critique was especially limited. Nietzsche had his own concept of progress, and it was a very Enlightened kind of idea. The goal of his philosophy, especially in Zarathustra, was to improve and perfect humanity. This attempt to create a utopia or ideal society was, of course, a very Enlightened project. The irony of Nietzsche's relationship with the Enlightenment, then, is that despite his virulent and profound critique of its rationality, its politics and its science, he retained its faith in progress and its desire to construct a better world. Chapter Five discusses the dimensions of Nietzsche's utopian project and makes clear the extent to which he retained Enlightened ideas on this issue.
This is a work of intellectual history, by which I mean that I intend to explore Nietzsche's thought within a historical context. In this case, the context that concerns me is that of the major intellectual ethos that Nietzsche wrote within and against: the Enlightenment. I feel that Nietzsche's work cannot fully be understood without reference to an intellectual ethos that prompted him to expend such intellectual energy attempting to refute it, and that in the end trapped him within its discourse. 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. This is not a book about the Enlightenment; rather it is a book about a brilliant thinker's struggles with Enlightenment. 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.
Chapter One: Nietzsche's Enlightenment
Nietzsche saw the Enlightenment as broad and bold, powerful and terrifying. He believed that it spanned several centuries and that it encompassed most of Western Europe. It was, for him, an arrogant intellectual ethos that made troubling universal assertions about the nature of human existence and society. The Enlightenment that Nietzsche found insisted that humans were rational, autonomous subjects, that they deserved and could attain political freedom. 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. Nietzsche attacked the Enlightenment on each of these points, though he ironically retained profound sympathies for many aspects of Enlightened thought. Neither his critiques nor the limitations of those critiques can be understood fully, however, without a brief consideration of the tradition that Nietzsche confronted. Here, then, is Nietzsche's Enlightenment.
Descartes
The priority of reason in the Enlightenment is one of its most essential features; this priority provides the basis for many of its other characteristics. It seems only sensible, then, to begin our exploration of the Enlightenment with the man who defined the Enlightenment as rational: RenŽ Descartes. Descartes's faith in reason is present throughout his works; it is apparent explicitly but also (and perhaps more significantly) at the deeper level of method. Descartes's method is one of the enduring contributions he made to the intellectual tradition that is the Enlightenment. This contribution is most clear, perhaps, in his Discourse on Method. Here he develops rules of intellectual procedure: "the first [is] never to accept anything as true that I [do] not know to be evidently so: that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to include in my judgments nothing more than what presented itself so clearly and distinctly to my mind that I might have no occasion to place it in doubt."1 This emphasis on "clear and distinct" perceptions pervades Descartes's work; it represents an attempt to exclude from consideration any sensory data, concept or idea that might be illusory, uncertain or irrational. Descartes also vows "to conduct [his] thoughts in an orderly way, beginning with the simplest objects and the easiest to know, in order to climb gradually, as by degrees.Ê.Ê."2 Here he is stating his intent to reorder the very way in which his mind works, if necessary, to enable him to pursue things rationally. The trick , of course, is that Descartes didn't really believe that much reordering would in fact be necessary, since he felt that rationality is how a human mind works anyway. What the Discourse represents more than anything else is a manifesto for rationality, a radical claim concerning the universal applicability of reason and a statement that reason will from now on be the primary criterion of knowledge. Thus Descartes writes: "what satisfied me the most about this method was that, through it, I was assured of using my reason in everything, if not perfectly, at least to the best of my ability."3 The Discourse announced to intellectual Europe that reason had arrived.
Reason in Descartes is granted a priority over other possible sources of knowledge, such as sensory data. 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."4 Descartes believed that we simply have no choice of whether or not to accept reason as our primary source of knowledge. Loeb writes: "the priority of reason over sense-perception ultimately rests on the greater irresistibility of reason."5 Reason and only reason, Descartes claims, can lead to absolute certainty. This insistence on the priority of reason had clear and important implications for late seventeenth century intellectual life. As John Cottingham notes, "Philosophy, including physical science, became in Descartes a self-contained discipline, guided by the light of reason; it has no need to be supplemented by revelation, scripture, or ecclesiastical teaching."6 Here we see the profundity of Descartes's project: he was creating reason as a substitute for revealed religion. He was establishing a new first principle, something in which he hoped new thinkers could believe as strongly as older thinkers had believed in the power of revelation. We must not underestimate the importance of this move: as Peter Schouls writes, "reason is autonomous [in Descartes] in the sense that its own trustworthiness, no less than the trustworthiness of the results obtained through its use, is not established through the introduction of elements which, themselves, are not 'rational;' that, for example, it is not elements furnished by faith which allow one to trust reason."7 Reason in Descartes's thought is entirely independent and autonomous; it is the foundation upon which the structure of Enlightenment is to be built.
One is tempted to ask at this point: why reason? What is it about rationality that Descartes believed made it a suitable candidate for the lofty position of first principle? That Descartes had an extremely strong faith in his method and in reason in general is clear; as Evert van Leeuwen notes, the Discourse "has a rhetorical function: it must persuade everybody that the Cartesian method is the only one in which the mind can be perfected."8 Yet what explains the particular character of the Cartesian method? What made him choose reason?
The answer has to do, I think, with the second great pillar of Cartesian thought: science. Reason is essential to Descartes not simply as an end to itself, but as that which permits science. As Gary Hatfield notes, the mature Descartes envisioned "a comprehensive, unified physics of the entire universe, in which all explanations of natural phenomena are reduced to a few principles governing matter in motion."9 What is important to realize here is that Descartes began his intellectual career as a scientist and only later turned to philosophy as a source of metaphysical justification for his scientific pursuits. Science was and continued to be of primary importance for him; indeed it often seems to have been more important to him than were his philosophical ideas. As Wayne Cristaudo writes, "the dualism and the epistemology are underlaborers to physics [in Descartes].Ê.Ê. one has to get on with the business of scientific practice which cannot proceed without the rules and ideas supplied by the mind."10 Rationality, then, derives its importance as a necessary condition for scientific pursuits.
We can go further than this and specify what kinds of scientific pursuits Descartes meant to justify. 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."11 Descartes is seeking in the Discourse the metaphysical underpinnings of a practical philosophy. Margaret Jacob notes that Descartes "sought to convert practical, but educated men of business and trade, among others, to the new mechanical philosophy."12 Descartes represents the beginnings of the primacy of reason in Enlightened thought, but just as importantly, he represents the beginnings of practical science. "The reward Descartes promises for those who follow his scientific method is nothing less than mastery over nature," as Jacob notes.13 It was this reward that would inspire thinkers such as Darwin and Spencer to pursue the Cartesian scientific project into the nineteenth century. 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. As Walter Soffer puts it, Descartes, along with Francis Bacon, "inaugurate[s] the Enlightenment notion of a science-society harmony dedicated to perpetual progress."14 With the trinity of reason, science and progress, Descartes lays the cornerstone of Enlightenment.
There is one final aspect of Cartesian thought that we must consider as we explore the ways in which Descartes contributed to the foundations of Enlightenment, and that is the Cartesian subject. Descartes's writing is the birthplace of the rational/autonomous individual who becomes the subject of most if not all Enlightenment discourse; as such Descartes's work has profound implications for the political and social thought of the Enlightenment. We can trace the birth of this new kind of subject to the Cartesian cogito of the Meditations on First Philosophy. Descartes writes: "Even though there may be a deceiver of some sort, very powerful and very tricky, who bends all his efforts to keep me perpetually deceived, there can be no slightest doubt that I exist, since he deceives me; and let him deceive me as much as he will, he can never make me be nothing as long as I think that I am something."15 This is the very heart of the Cartesian rational subject: I think, therefore I am. Descartes goes on to emphasize how fundamental thought is to a human being: "thought is an attribute that belongs to me; it alone is inseparable from my nature."16 Thought, and specifically rational thought, is for Descartes what constitutes us as individuals, as we can clearly and distinctly see from these passages. A thinking being is for Descartes "a being which doubts, which understands, which conceives, which affirms, which denies, which wills, which rejects, which imagines also, and which perceives."17 These are the characteristics of rationality and of rational beings as Descartes defines them; they are not only what we do, they are who we are. 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. As Walter Soffer notes, "the hallmark of Descartes' self-instruction is rational autonomy. His goal is not to become part of an asymptotic progress towards truth, but rather to establish a definitive, ahistorical, unalterable new beginning--'firm and lasting' foundations."18 And to a large extent he accomplished this. He gave the Enlightenment its beginning by giving it a subject for its discourse, a subject who relies not on God but on reason. Rational autonomy was Descartes's gift to those who followed, and it was a gift they used well.
Rousseau
It is in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that the political implications of the new Cartesian subjectivity begin to become apparent. At first glance, it may seem odd to think that Rousseau advocated an Enlightened politics, since he was in fact quite critical of many other aspects of Enlightened thought. In the "First Discourse," for example, he attacks science, claiming that "astronomy was born from superstition.Ê.Ê.geometry from avarice; physics from vain curiosity.Ê.Ê.Thus the sciences and arts owe their birth to our vices; we would be less doubtful of their advantages if they owed it to our virtues."19 It is clear right away that Rousseau is no Descartes. Gone is the unquestioning faith in reason and science; it has been replaced by an extreme skepticism about the moral qualities and effects of these Enlightenment concepts.
What does not receive criticism in Rousseau's work, however, is the autonomous Enlightenment subject. Indeed, the primary goal of his political philosophy is to articulate a politics that will account for this individual and its freedom. The two concepts which define Rousseau's political thought are the social contract and the general will. Taken together, these two concepts form the heart of Rousseau's political philosophy. Although the status of these two ideas is somewhat controversial, I want to argue that they represent two principles of radical freedom, and that they rely upon and develop the concept of the autonomous subject.
The social contract is for Rousseau an historical or pseudo-historical phenomenon, and at first glance its purpose seems to be to create a strong community. He writes: "Now, as men cannot create any new forces, but only combine and direct those that exist, they have no other means of self-preservation than to form by aggregation a sum of forces which may overcome the resistance, to put them in action by a single motive power, and to make them work in concert."20 Here the social contract sounds less like a principle of individual freedom and more like a principle of community harmony, an attempt to ensure social cooperation made necessary by the exigencies of human life in its pre-social form. Of course, whether the social contract ever really developed in the way he describes is largely irrelevant to Rousseau; his point is simply to construct a persuasive model of human society. 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.
However, if we consider the reasons that Rousseau gives us for the establishment of the contract, we emerge with a very different picture. The motivation for postulating the social contract is outlined in the Second Discourse, in which Rousseau describes the origins of human inequality. He writes: "from the moment one man began to stand in need of another's assistance; from the moment it appeared an advantage for one man to possess enough provisions for two, equality vanished; property was introduced; labor became necessary; and boundless forests became smiling fields, which had to be watered with human sweat, and in which slavery and misery were soon seen to sprout out and grow with the harvests."22 Here we get a very different picture of Rousseau's views on society; society is now described as that which destroys the equality and freedom of the state of nature, replacing it with slavery. "The new society thus became the most horrible state of war: Mankind thus debased and harassed, and no longer able to retrace its steps, or renounce the fatal acquisitions it had made.Ê.Ê."23 Here society is not a unifying but an alienating force which oppresses and destroys the individual.
The social contract, then, is meant to remedy this by creating a just society to replace the corrupt, oppressive society that has developed as mankind has moved away from the state of nature. It is still quite possible, of course, to read the contract as a principle of social unity rather than one of individual freedom; Rousseau might simply be criticizing one kind of social structure--the unjust one of the Second Discourse--and trying to replace this with a just social institution. However, if we examine the actual formulation of the social contract principle, it quickly becomes clear that Rousseau intends for freedom to be a fundamental part of this principle. He seems to want "'to find a form of association which may defend and protect with the whole force of the community the person and property of every associate, and by means of which each, coalescing with all, may nevertheless obey only himself, and remain free as before.'"24 Rousseau is seeking a just society, to be sure. He is searching for a valid "we," as Strong suggests. But what makes that "we" valid for him is that it shows a proper respect for the "I:" Rousseau's criterion for the just society is that it must maintain and preserve the freedom that humans enjoyed in the state of nature, before society. "What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to attain anything which tempts him and which he is able to attain; what he gains is civil liberty and property in all that he possesses."25 It is Rousseau's fervent hope and belief that this civil liberty will be sufficient to make up for the real and terrifying loss of natural liberty.
The freedom of the social contract is provided and ensured by the general will. "The unvarying will of all the members of the State is the general will; it is through that that they are citizens and free."26 It seems odd at first that such an "unvarying," almost dictatorial principle could at the same time be a principle of freedom; nonetheless, this is the claim that Rousseau makes. He goes on to claim that the general will is infallible: "the general will is always right and always tends to the public advantage."27 The general will is not the only will that a citizen possesses; rather it is the will that can see beyond particular, private interests and put these aside for the good of the community. 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. After all, why else would he de-emphasize particular interests to such an extent, while insisting that the will of the community should dominate? Yet the situation is more complex than this, as Andrzej Rapaczynski notes: "the replacement of the unjust social order based on inequality with an institution of legitimate political authority is supposed to preserve an individual's freedom while ensuring the content and motivational viability of his moral system."28 Again, freedom seems to be a key part of Rousseau's political system. The form of the general will says that it is meant to preserve social harmony and promote the interests of the community, but its purpose is to preserve freedom. James Miller suggests that the general will represents for Rousseau an attempt to reconcile freedom with the social order.29 In many ways this is the most persuasive reading. Rousseau was no anarchist; he recognized the need for viable social and political institutions. Yet he was unwilling to let this need compromise the freedom of the individual citizen in any way. His commitment to an Enlightened ideal of individual freedom precluded this possibility.
What, then, is the status of Rousseau's politics? What political position finally emerges from this tension between individual and community? Jacob Talmon has argued that Rousseau's position may best be understood as "totalitarian democracy;" that is, as a philosophy in which liberty is realized "only in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute collective purpose."30 On this interpretation individual freedom only serves the interests of the community; liberty is unimportant as an end to itself. However, Judith Shklar suggests that for Rousseau, genuine authority does not in any way limit freedom, and I feel that this is the more plausible interpretation.31 Talmon has got Rousseau's motivational scheme backwards: Rousseau does seek a just social collective, but only so that it may serve the needs of the individual citizen. Maurizio Viroli argues, for example, that for Rousseau, "political liberty is more important than peace and.Ê.Ê.a reasonable degree of civic discord has beneficial effects on the political body."32 Clearly in this example the needs of the community are being subordinated to those of the citizen, or more accurately, the needs of the community are best served when the liberty of the citizen is maintained.
The key to understanding Rousseau's politics is to understand the status of the individual subject in his writings. Rapaczynski writes: "the full development of amour propre results in a world indelibly stamped with a value placed on the subject."33 As I have been arguing, it is precisely this value, which is a fundamentally Enlightened value, that distinguishes Rousseau's political thought, and that renders deeply problematic any interpretation of his politics that does not offer an account of his devotion to the sovereign, individual subject as an ideal. Rapaczynski claims that "like Descartes.Ê.Ê.Rousseau makes the self a foundation of all that is human in man."34 I believe that this is an accurate assessment. Rousseau accepts the Enlightened self as his basic unit of political analysis, and his politics, with its insistence on the precedence of individual liberty, grows out of this acceptance. Rousseau thus develops the Cartesian autonomous subject into a political entity; it is with Rousseau's work that the politics of the Enlightenment comes into its own.
Kant
Kant borrowed a good deal from Rousseau; indeed, it has been argued that there are considerable similarities between the general will and Kant's categorical imperative. Rapaczynski notes that "Rousseau's account, like Kant's, makes freedom itself the supreme moral value."35 Yet Kant also went beyond Rousseau in many ways, and his moral project was a more complex, more ambitious one.
What Kant offered with his morality was nothing less than an attempt to appropriate Christian ethics into the Enlightenment through reason. This radical secularization of Christian morality is the very epitome of an Enlightened moral project. It seeks to justify Christian ethical behavior without reference to any metaphysical force or being such as God. Instead, Kant hoped to base his morality on nothing but the light of Descartes's reason. For example, Kant uses reason to justify belief in the immortal soul; he writes in the second Critique: "infinite progress is possible.Ê.Ê.only under the presupposition of an infinitely enduring existence and personality of the same rational being; this is called immortality of the soul. Thus the highest good is practically possible only on the supposition of the immortality of the soul."36 He goes on to justify belief in God, again on the sole basis of reason: we must "affirm the possibility of the second element of the highest good, i.e., happiness proportional to that morality.Ê.Ê.by a purely impartial reason.Ê.Ê.[reason] must postulate the existence of God as necessarily belonging to the possibility of the highest good."37 The influence of Christian thought on Kant is clear here; he takes reason as his starting point, but he ends with something that is recognizably Christian. As Wayne Cristaudo writes, "in discussing Kant's moral foundations it is important not to underestimate the pervasive presence that the Christian existential vision of the human condition plays in his thinking. This vision is most conspicuous in his idea that the highest good leads us to postulate the existence of the two pillars of Christianity--a highest being who dispenses justice on the basis of merit and the immortality of the soul."38 Indeed, the categorical imperative itself, the fundamental ethical principle on which most of Kant's ethics is based, is little more than a philosophically rigorous statement of a Christian principle. "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." Kant derives, in short, all the major precepts and prerequisites of Christian ethics, but he derives them from reason alone. He thus translates Christian morality into the world of the Enlightenment, stripping away its superstition and mysticism and replacing these with a rational justification for faith that will serve Christianity well in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
There are other aspects of Christian doctrine in Kant's ethics. As Gordon Michalson notes, Kant's theory of radical evil "looks suspiciously like the Christian doctrine of original sin, just the sort of thing the thinkers of the Enlightenment normally prided themselves on eliminating from the roster of traditional ideas worthy of serious consideration."40 Yet what Michalson misses is the point that this move is quite deliberate on Kant's part: he wants to retain Christianity rather than dismissing it, but he realizes that his one chance to retain it is to turn it into something based on Enlightened rationality. Thus for Michalson "what is interesting is the way an explicitly Christian frame of reference keeps coming into view and takes considerable control at the decisive moments in Kant's account of moral regeneration."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.
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. Kant believed that moral law derives directly from human reason; he writes in the Groundwork:: "the pure thought of duty and of the moral law generally.Ê.Ê.has by way of reason alone.Ê.Ê.an influence on the human heart so much more powerful than all other incentives."42 Here we see the rationalism of Descartes returning, this time in morality. Kant's rational morality provides laws that are, he thinks, universal and valid for all rational beings.43 "A rational being belongs to the kingdom of ends as a member when he legislates in it universal laws while also being himself subject to these laws."44 This passage might almost have been written by Rousseau; it constitutes a claim that the duty of all rational beings is to use their reason to produce just universal moral laws. Reason and reason alone determines the shape and substance of these laws: "reason determines the will in a practical law directly, not through an intervening feeling of pleasure or displeasure, even if this pleasure is taken in the law itself."45
The form that rational morality takes is that of freedom. "An absolutely good will, whose principle must be a categorical imperative, will therefore be indeterminate as regards all objects and will contain merely the form of willing; and indeed that form is autonomy."46 The categorical imperative is the only moral law that reason imposes on us; it therefore grants us autonomy and free will. "What else can freedom of the will be but autonomy, i.e., the property that the will has of being a law to itself?"47 This principle is crucial for Kant; his morality cannot function without it. For him, rationality and freedom are so closely related that they are practically synonymous: "the moral law expresses nothing else than the autonomy of pure practical reason, i.e., freedom."48 Freedom has for Kant an ethical significance almost as great as that of rationality. As Henry Allison notes, "Kant regards autonomy as the principle of morality not only in the sense of being a necessary condition of its possibility but also in the sense of being one of the formulas of the categorical imperative and, therefore, as itself a first-order ethical principle."49 The categorical imperative by its very nature implies and requires freedom as well as rationality; if Kant cannot assume free moral agents, then a discussion of how they may will their maxims as universal becomes meaningless. Thus Kant's ethics, though Christian in its form, rests on a very Enlightened foundation, which Kant constructs out of reason and autonomy.
Richard Velkley suggests that "Kant arrives at his understanding of reason through an effort to resolve a crisis in the modern period concerning the end, status, and meaning of reason."50 This may well be the case; like Rousseau, Kant presents himself as someone who is already grappling with the difficulties inherent in Enlightenment rationalism, difficulties that will explode with Nietzsche. Yet it seems clear that like Rousseau, Kant is willing to abandon neither reason nor Enlightenment. Indeed, his faith in Enlightenment is so strong that when he attempts to hold onto those pre-Enlightenment concepts, such as Christian ethics, that he feels must be preserved, he does so by translating their terms into those of the Enlightenment. As Anthony Cascardi notes, "according to conventional interpretations and, more importantly, on the authority of principles explicitly stated in Kant's second Critique, the obligations we construe as ethical may be regarded as the manifestations of a law which in turn reflects the rationality, freedom and autonomy of the subject-self."51 These are, of course, the primary ingredients of Enlightenment that we have discussed so far. Kant's project, then, is profoundly Enlightened; it is the attempt to articulate the possibilities of an essentially Christian morality within an Enlightenment context. Velkley suggests that "Kant thus does not reject the emancipatory end of modern philosophy or Enlightenment but reformulates it."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. That he retained the Enlightenment's allegiance to freedom and emancipation is equally obvious. His insistence on the primacy of human autonomy as he formulates his categorical imperative makes this difficult to dispute.
***
We come now to Nietzsche's own century, the nineteenth. It is perhaps controversial even to speak of a "nineteenth century Enlightenment;" certainly one could argue that the Enlightenment makes sense as an historical phenomenon only if its temporal limits are drawn much earlier, perhaps with the French Revolution. I do not want to proceed this way, however, for two reasons. First, I feel that the pervasive influence of Enlightenment thought in nineteenth century politics and science makes it highly problematic to draw a temporally narrow definition of this movement; we could, perhaps, refer to a "neo-Enlightenment" or an "Enlightenment influence" in the nineteenth century, but I feel that this would be facetious. What we are talking about is fundamentally a continuation of the intellectual movement discussed above. Second and more importantly, Nietzsche engaged with the Enlightenment during his own century as a very real and, for him, troubling phenomenon; he made few distinctions between Rousseau and Mill or Descartes and Darwin, but attacked them all under the same banner of "Enlightenment." The Enlightenment was for Nietzsche a unified whole that went back several hundred years; to him it represented the greatest sickness of modern man.
A second possible objection would be to my choice of figures. Why have I chosen three thinkers from Victorian England? Why have I not dealt with some of Nietzsche's contemporaries in, say, France and Germany? 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. Rationality, science and an unshakable faith in human progress found their material manifestation in the Crystal Palace exhibition, while the autonomous subject-self of the Enlightenment became enshrined in the discourse of political liberalism. It is just this kind of society, as we shall see below, that Nietzsche reviled as deadly to true human progress, but before we turn to Nietzsche's critique, a closer look at the objects of his wrath will be helpful.
Mill
The political thought of Mill may be loosely characterized in terms very similar to those I used above to discuss Rousseau. Like Rousseau, Mill was confronted by a conflict between two desirable goals: the good of the community and the good of the individual. 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. I would like to note at the outset that both of these principles came to Mill via the Enlightenment; that is to say, they are both Enlightened ideas in their own way. Utilitarianism, as practiced by Jeremy Bentham, saw itself as a science of humanity, dedicated towards the betterment of the race; in short, it was a principle of social progress. Liberty, on the other hand, was formulated by Mill as a principle of freedom designed to do justice to the needs of the autonomous Enlightenment subject. Mill, an exceedingly Enlightened nineteenth century political thinker, attempted to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory positions; this attempt constitutes the bulk of his political writing.
Mill's essay "Utilitarianism" provides an eloquent interpretation and defense of the principles of utility. Here Mill argues for the prevalence of utilitarianism, in order to suggest that it is a strong theory: "the greatest-happiness principle.Ê.Ê.has had a large share in forming the moral doctrines even of those who most scornfully reject its authority."53 Mill goes on to argue that the utilitarian doctrine represents nothing less than the best chance for social progress: "no one whose opinion deserves a moment's consideration can doubt that most of the great positive evils of the world are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced within narrow limits."54 Indeed, even the utility philosophy itself is subject to constant progress: "the corollaries from the principle of utility, like the precepts of every practical art, admit of indefinite improvement, and, in a progressive state of human mind, their improvement is perpetually going on."55 Clearly, Mill believed that utilitarian philosophy had much to offer his society. Louis Zimmer claims that "in addition to the subject of individuality and these related issues, the essay On Liberty provides ample proof that Mill followed Bentham on the subject of truth and of its vital significance in the everyday lives of human beings."56 It is fairly easy to see how one might adopt this interpretation, given the evidence from Mill's writings and what we know about the personal influence that utilitarian thought had on Mill's development as an adolescent and as a young man. Clearly there was much of the utilitarian in Mill.
I want to take issue with the interpretation that Mill was a straightforward Benthamite utilitarian, however. Instead I want to argue, along with Wendy Donner, that "Mill's enlarged concept of utility overcomes the limitations of Bentham's theory without sacrificing its strengths."57 This interpretation reads Mill's philosophy as a modified utilitarianism, and one that is modified in a very specific, deliberate way, to account for liberty. As John Gray argues, "Mill's departures from the classical utilitarian view of human nature, which he criticizes so sharply in his Bentham and Coleridge, support the doctrine of liberty.Ê.Ê.Mill's conception of happiness is avowedly individualistic and pluralist."58 It was the inability of classical utilitarian theory to account for the spiritual, creative and artistic sides of human life (in short, for those parts that, as Mill saw it, made individuals important as individuals) that led to the emotional and intellectual crisis during which Mill began to question utilitarianism. As Gertrude Himmelfarb writes, "Mill decided that attention should be directed to the 'internal culture of the individual,' the cultivation of feeling, the development of the poetic and artistic sensibilities."59 He was unable to return to the utilitarian fold until he had substantially altered the greatest-happiness principle to include this "internal culture."
The importance of this divergence from conventional utilitarian theory may not be readily apparent, but in fact it represents a dramatic change. Although Mill still held maximum happiness to be the greatest good, the way in which that happiness was to be pursued, and indeed the very definition of happiness, had now been changed. Mill was unwilling to allow the legislation of happiness by anyone other than the individual whose happiness was being legislated. The justification for this major modification to utilitarian theory is simple: Mill believed that in liberty he had discovered a principle of equal importance to utility. Donner writes: "freedom is.Ê.Ê.linked to the flourishing of individuality. On Liberty is an impassioned plea for the liberty that will promote the individuality required for self-development and for the appreciation of more valuable pleasures and pursuits."60 Even in "Utilitarianism," which is his most impassioned defense of utility, Mill argues that true utility cannot interfere with liberty. "To have a right, then, is, I conceive, to have something which society ought to defend me in the possession of. If the objector goes on to ask why it ought, I can give him no other reason than general utility."61 Clearly, Mill is determined not to let a devotion to utility undermine his belief in liberty.
Mill's essay on Bentham is perhaps the best example of his modified utilitarian position. Here Mill praises Bentham for his attempt to explore social issues in a scientific way (which is again indicative of Mill's place in the nineteenth century Enlightenment).62 But he also holds Bentham responsible for failing to account for human nature and for failing to recognize the possibilities of human spiritual perfection.63 It is this tension that made Mill's political thought what it was: without either the faith in social progress that he derived from utilitarian thought or the belief in the importance of human freedom that made him question that philosophy, Mill's thought would have been incomplete.
The question of the status of Mill's politics remains. Much as in our discussion of Rousseau, we see that there are two possible interpretations of Mill's political position, which we may loosely describe as egalitarian and elitist. This now begins to emerge as a tension in Enlightened politics in general: the Enlightenment's desire for social progress encounters an equally Enlightened desire for a politics that will do justice to the needs of the rational/autonomous self, and the result is inevitably conflict. Donner provides an interpretation of Mill that emphasizes his egalitarian, socially oriented tendencies: "Mill intends to exclude as harmful not only active interference with liberty but also the failure of society to provide people with reasonable social conditions and resources to allow them to attain and exercise their liberty of self-development."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.
There is, however, a way out of this dilemma, and it is to be found in Mill's On Liberty. In this, his most famous work, he argues that the promotion of liberty is crucial in that it serves egalitarian ends through the promotion of the ideal society. Liberty is presented here as a social good. To be sure, there are passages in On Liberty that are quite elitist: "No government by a democracy or a numerous aristocracy, either in its political acts or in the opinions, qualities, and tone of mind which it fosters, ever did or could rise above mediocrity except in so far as the sovereign many have let themselves be guided by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed one or few."66 But Mill's justification for this elitist position is that it creates the circumstances in which, ironically, an ideal society will be possible. For example, Mill argues for "the necessity to the mental well-being of mankind (on which all other well-being depends) of freedom of opinion, and freedom of the expression of opinion."67 Freedom of expression is most beneficial, certainly, to the geniuses whom Mill lauds. But that doesn't change the importance of this freedom for him, since these geniuses are the ones who create the ideal society. "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?"68 The individual for Mill is a social good. Mill is thus able to reconcile two key principles of Enlightened political thought: the belief in the necessity or desirability of social progress, and the belief in the need for political forms suitable to the autonomous individual subject of Enlightenment discourse.
Darwin
Perhaps no single word better captures the essence of nineteenth century Enlightened science than "Darwin." Darwin represents the embodiment of Enlightened principles in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. His synthesis of the fundamental ideas of the Enlightenment provided a unified explanation of a large part of the natural world and earned him his place as the most influential scientist of his century. Darwin was not the first nineteenth century scientist to propose evolution as an explanation for the development of humans and other organisms--Robert Chambers, for example, argued for a similar theory in his anonymously published book Vestiges of the natural history of Creation, though his work was roundly denounced by the scientific community. What distinguished Darwin was his careful attempt to place himself soundly in the context of acceptable scientific practice, and his use of rational, scientific explanations to describe a world in which natural and social progress would be the inevitable outcome of history.
Darwin's most famous work, The Origin of Species, shows a sustained faith in the validity of the scientific method and makes an appeal to the scientific context of his time. He demonstrates a faith in the opinions of scientists: "in determining whether a form should be ranked as a species or a variety, the opinion of naturalists having sound judgment and wide experience seems the only guide to follow."69 He is careful to make clear that what he is discussing is a principle of natural law: "I mean by Nature, only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us."70 He is also quite proud of the fact that he has "collected so large a body of facts, and made so many experiments;" i.e. that he has, in his view, conducted his work in accordance with valid scientific principles.71 It is quite clear that Darwin is almost desperately eager to be accepted as a scientist; he even ends his book with an appeal to Newton's law of gravity. But Darwin was not simply a scientist in the general sense of someone who seeks knowledge about the natural world through theory and experiment. He was also a scientist in a particularly nineteenth century context. He appeals, for example, to the well-known work of Charles Lyell: "New species have appeared very slowly, one after another, both on land and in the waters. Lyell has shown that it is hardly possible to resist the evidence on this head in the case of the several tertiary stages.Ê.Ê."72 Here Darwin is placing himself in the nineteenth century debate between "catastrophists" and "uniformitarians;" that is, between those who would explain developments in the natural world with reference to sudden, dramatic change, and those who preferred an explanation based on slow, gradual change in accordance with regular laws. Darwin's evolutionary theory places him clearly in Lyell's camp as a uniformitarian, and gives his work a certain prestige. As Robert Young writes, "there were very powerful constraints on the kinds of theories for explaining the origin of the species which the scientific community would be likely to entertain at all seriously."73 It was his willingness to appeal to known and respected theorists that helped to ensure that Darwin would not languish in obscurity as Chambers did.
Michael Ruse argues convincingly that Darwin deliberately placed himself in the prevailing scientific context of his time, which was largely defined by the works of Herschel and Whewell. Ruse notes that "Herschel made clear that what distinguishes scientific axiom systems from other such systems is that the former, unlike the latter, contain laws; these are universal, empirical statements.Ê.Ê."74 It is important to note here the difference between this approach and that of the other Enlightened scientist I have discussed, Descartes. Descartes, it will be recalled, based his scientific method on strict rationality, rather than on empirical observation. How, then, does Darwin qualify as an Enlightened scientist in the sense that Descartes was one?
Here we must recall the purpose behind Descartes's privileging of rationality. His intent was not to privilege rationality simply for its own sake, but rather to use rationality to provide a justification for the nascent pursuit of scientific knowledge. 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. And indeed, the dominant nineteenth century scientific paradigm into which Darwin placed himself was one that was eminently rational in the Cartesian sense: "Were one to single out from the Herschel-Whewell philosophy the two features most likely to be manifested in any scientific theory consciously influenced by that philosophy, they would probably be: first, the hypothetico-deductive model, and secondly the use of one central mechanism or cause to explain phenomena in widely different areas. Both of these features are manifested, to a significant extent, in Darwin's theory in the Origin.Ê.Ê."75 The hypothetico-deductive model is one in which theories are developed and compared with evidence, then revised and again compared until they closely match the available data. It is a highly structured, rigorous and rational method. Darwin, in short, made explicit use of the dominant scientific approach of his time, and that approach was a rational, Enlightened one.
One of the most important implications of Darwin's theory, and one of the most Enlightened, is progress. Evolution implies that species are moving closer and closer to perfection all the time. As Robert Young notes, "in the Origin of the Species, Darwin mixed his belief in various manifestations of progress with scientific prophecy."76 Darwin offers predictions of progress in the natural world, but perhaps more significantly, he also offers both predictions and prescriptions for social progress, most notably in The Descent of Man. Here, for example, Darwin argues against the evils of primogeniture, stating that "primogeniture with entailed estates is a more direct evil, though it formerly may have been a great advantage.Ê.Ê.most eldest sons, thought they may be weak in body or mind, marry, whilst the youngest sons, however superior in these respects, do not so generally marry."77 Here Darwin is starting to broaden his theory into the realm of social reform, suggesting that there are certain institutions and social practices that do not promote the best ends for humanity. There are also passages in his work that can be read as justifications for imperialism: "as foreigners have thus in every country beaten some of the natives, we may safely conclude that the natives might have been modified with advantage, so as to have better resisted the intruders."78 Science here can very easily become ideology, and Darwin seems unwilling or unable to distinguish his scientific pronouncements from normative and political ones.
Some of Darwin's most interesting, and to twentieth century minds unsustainable, assertions are to be found in his discussion of the role of women. Darwin believes that "man is more courageous, pugnacious and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius."79 This is, he feels, due to the different roles played by men and women in the struggle for survival; as he puts it, "with respect to the differences of this nature between man and woman, it is probable that sexual selection has played a highly important part."80 Since women play the role of nurturers, they have greater tenderness and less selfishness than men; men, as hunters and warriors, delight in competition; it is for this reason, Darwin believes, that men attain higher positions as poets, scientists, scholars, etc. Here Darwin's theory of sexual selection, which is a corollary to his theory of natural selection, serves as the basis for a prescriptive attempt to legislate certain social roles for women. Darwin uses science as the basis for a gender politics that is to our minds questionable at best, but what is important for the purposes of the present work is that here Enlightened science begins to take on a political demeanor. It is in the work of Herbert Spencer that this synthesis is completed.
Spencer
It is perhaps appropriate that this chapter on Enlightened thought should end with a discussion of the work of Herbert Spencer, for Spencer represents in many ways the culmination if not the reducto ad absurdum of many of the Enlightened concepts I have been discussing. Spencer completes the synthesis of science and social theory begun by Darwin. His work contains a faith in human rationality and science that harkens back to his distant scientific predecessor, Descartes. It features the faith in progress that we have seen is common to most Enlightened thinkers. What's more, Spencer's science is intimately related with an Enlightened politics that has much in common with certain elements in Mill's thought; one of the intellectual projects to which Spencer was most devoted was an attempt to justify an extreme form of political liberty.
Let us begin with Spencer's science. It is clear that Spencer insisted on providing scientific explanations for social situations. 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. Spencer writes: "setting out with social units.Ê.Ê. the Science of Sociology has to give an account of all the phenomena that result from their combined actions."81 Spencer here is engaged in a practice of Enlightened science that should be quite familiar to us by now: he is seeking concrete, universal laws that will explain all possible occurrences. Towards the end of Volume I of his massive Principles of Sociology, Spencer apologizes that:
induction has greatly predominated over deduction throughout the foregoing chapters; and readers who have borne in mind that Part II closes with a proposal to interpret social phenomena deductively, may infer either that this intention has been lost sight of or that it has proved impracticable to deal with the facts of domestic life otherwise than by empirical generalization. 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
Gone is the tension between rationalism and empiricism in Darwin. Spencer calmly accepts his rationalist, Cartesian heritage; indeed he wears it as a badge of honor. He will be proud of his theory if it can be shown to be inductively sound, and if he can add empirical justification to it as well, then so much the better. Spencer also exhibits a clear concern for scientific objectivity: "contemplating social structures and actions from the evolution point of view, we may preserve that calmness which is needful for scientific interpretation of them, without losing our powers of feeling moral reprobation or approbation."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.
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."84 This might well be a description of the pursuits of Enlightened science in general since Descartes. Spencer represents the apex of the attempt to impose a framework of rationality upon the world of human interaction, to make all human activity explicable and predictable. As Burrow puts it, "it followed from his conception of science and of the purpose of the Synthetic Philosophy that if he could not explain social phenomena ultimately--the qualification is important--in terms of physical causation, he could not explain them satisfactorily at all."85
One specific aspect of human action that Spencer hoped to be able to describe scientifically was morality. "Morality," as J. D. Y. Peel writes, "as Spencer saw it, was to be made scientific--i.e. the conclusions were to follow as ineluctably and irrefutably from the premises as in a scientific demonstration."86 We see here some of the scope of Spencer's project: it has a descriptive component, certainly, but also an implicit normative component. One gets the impression that Spencer intended to use science as a justification for a particular kind of morality, and that the morality he advocated had a particular political slant to it. Spencer "not only believes human actions are subject to law, but that history as a whole is subject to a law of development,"87 and the choice of this evolutionary law of development was not an innocent one on Spencer's part. It allowed him to advocate and encourage certain particular beliefs about politics and society.
One of the most notable of these beliefs was Spencer's Enlightened belief in progress. As Burrow points out, Spencer's gradualism insists "on progress as a process passing through inevitable stages according to inflexible laws."88 This sounds very much like the kind of progress principle we have seen in the thought of Darwin and other Enlightened thinkers. Progress, for Spencer, was a natural and irresistible process. What's more, it was, in his mind, a desirable process. As James Kennedy notes, "he insisted not only that adaptation to social conditions would increase, but that 'progress' could not cease until 'the highest social life' was reached."89 This is the utopian component of Enlightenment; it takes the form of a sincere belief that social forces will lead inexorably to a perfect future world. As David Wiltshire puts it, "Spencerian social evolution.Ê.Ê.anticipates a future in which continuing trends culminate in perfection."90 Thus evolution for Spencer was not simply an innocent scientific theory; it carried profound implications for society and politics. Indeed, Peel suggests that Spencer was obliged to theorize a particular kind of evolution in order to be able to derive the kind of progress he wanted: "because he wants to demonstrate history's inevitable path to perfection, he needs a guarantee of direction in evolution."91 Even Spencer's much-vaunted scientific theory of evolution, then, was actually in the service of his ideology of social progress.
What, then, was the political agenda to which Spencer's theory of progress contributed? Spencer speaks in the Principles of Sociology of the ways in which society develops through stages, from lower to higher, less complex to more complex. The higher, more complex societies exhibit certain distinctive institutions. Thus, for example, "all civilized nations, characterized by definite, coherent, orderly social arrangements, are also characterized by definite, coherent, orderly domestic arrangements."92 It is no coincidence that the higher society, the "civilized nation" in this model, is almost indistinguishable from Spencer's England. Victorian English society is privileged in Spencer's account as a norm. We may thus reasonably interpret Spencer's work as a justification and vindication of the achieved Enlightenment society.
With this justification comes a particular political ideology, which we may characterize as Enlightened liberalism. Kennedy notes that Spencer "believed that through commercial liberty and unlicensed competition, social progress would spontaneously and naturally occur."93 Here once again we see the ideology of progress, but this time the ideology is being used in the service of a politics. This politics is one that is concerned with the liberation of the Enlightened autonomous subject through the refusal to allow the state to interfere with the political and social affairs of that subject. Spencer "never deserted his abstract individualism or his trust in the 'natural' economic laws of classical political economy."94 It may seem strange, at first, that Spencer combined a liberal, individualist politics with an evolutionary theory so concerned with the good of society. As we saw with Mill, however, this was hardly an unusual tension among Victorian political thinkers. And like Mill, Spencer cannot be understood unless we account for the liberal individualism that motivates his political thought. As Wiltshire points out, "Spencer was an individualist liberal first and an evolutionist second; individualism is, both genetically and structurally, the core of his thinking."95 Like Mill, however, Spencer saw no inherent conflict between an ideology of social progress and a fervent belief in individualism. For Spencer, as for Mill, the ideal society (which in Spencer's case was the future utopia that stood at the apex of evolutionary social development) was the one which would pay the most attention to individual political rights; it is significant in this context that Spencer placed the "industrial" society (of which Victorian England is again the prime example) well above the "militant" society in his scheme of development. And the industrial society was the one that did justice, more than any other society that had hitherto existed, to the needs of the individual as Spencer saw them, namely the need for free, autonomous political action independent of tyrannical government authority, and the need for free economic action in an unregulated market economy.
The historical context in which Spencer lived and wrote does much to explain his insistence on individualism. Spencer stands at the extreme end of the political Enlightenment in one way. After Spencer, "liberalism" began to acquire a distinctly different meaning; it acquired aspects of socialism and began to concern itself not with the autonomous individual of Enlightenment discourse, but with the mass proletarian subject of socialist thought. Spencer saw himself as the last true liberal, defending the pure faith against this socialist contamination. As Wiltshire puts it, "Spencer's lifelong belief was that his 'principled Liberalism' had been betrayed by the Liberal Party."96 Spencer felt that he and a few other "true Liberals"--which we may read as "Enlightenment liberals"--represented the only hope for retaining the original goals of English liberalism. M. W. Taylor refers to this as the claim that Spencer "represented the true principles of liberalism which the Liberal party was in the process of abandoning in its willingness to embrace 'socialism' and State intervention."97 Thus it is perhaps appropriate that we end our survey of Enlightened thought with Spencer.
What I have been trying to show is a strand of Enlightened thought that runs through the work of six major thinkers of the Enlightenment, spread out over two centuries. 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. I do not think that the association of these various thinkers is a spurious one. As Burrow writes, for example,
nothing shows more vividly the close kinship of the philosophic radicalism of the early nineteenth century with its parent, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, than some of Spencer's early pronouncements. True, it is now a sobered Enlightenment, harsher and more priggish...but there is still the same sense of a new dawn for humanity...man, freed at last from unreflecting subservience to immemorial customs and institutions, is about to take his future into his own hands and shape it, guided and instructed by science, in the image of rationality and justice.98
If we read "dawn for humanity" as "progress" and "justice" as "freedom," then Burrow has just listed my four principles, tied them to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and placed Spencer at the end of this tradition. It seems reasonable, then, to take these principles as the foundation for a provisional interpretation of the Enlightenment. The full nature of this version of Enlightenment will become more clear as we turn to Nietzsche's critique of it.
Chapter Two: Nietzsche's Critique of the Traditional Enlightenment
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. These figures earned Nietzsche's wrath by practicing Enlightenment in his own century. However, before we may fully understand Nietzsche's attack on the Enlightened thought of his contemporaries, it is imperative that we examine the earlier origins of this critique. Mill, Darwin and Spencer were dangerous, in Nietzsche's mind, because they continued the work begun in prior centuries by Descartes, Rousseau and Kant. Without an attack on these founding fathers of Enlightened thought, Nietzsche's anti-Enlightenment project would necessarily remain incomplete. His critique of the Enlightenment must be understood from the ground up: he began with an attack on the origins of Enlightened thought, broadened this to include the later practitioners of Enlightenment and finally, on the basis of the broader critique, mounted an attack on Enlightenment in general. In a note from the Will to Power, Nietzsche asks "what is noble?" His answer is, among other things: "Disgust for the demagogic, for the 'enlightenment,' for 'being cozy,' for plebeian familiarity."1 The way in which Nietzsche develops this disgust into a critique of the origins of Enlightened thought in Descartes, Rousseau and Kant is the subject of this chapter.
There are, however, some important limitations to Nietzsche's critique, and it is not too soon to begin to deal with those here. In Chapter One I defined Enlightenment in terms of science, reason, freedom and progress. While it is undeniably true that part of Nietzsche's anti-Enlightenment project involves a critique of the ways in which Descartes, Rousseau and Kant make use of these concepts, Nietzsche retains many of these ideas in his own thought. His vigorous attack on the Enlightened thought of these three figures cannot fully conceal his own affirmative project, which can only be described as a kind of Nietzschean Enlightenment. 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. Nietzsche's use of Enlightened categories in the service of his affirmative project will receive attention at the end of this chapter and in much more detail in Chapter Five.
Descartes
Nietzsche's critique of Descartes begins with an attack on Cartesian metaphysics and rationality. Nietzsche writes in the Will to Power: "Logical certainty, transparency, as criterion of truth ('all that is true which is perceived clearly and distinctly'--Descartes): with that, the mechanical hypothesis concerning the world is desired and credible. But this is a crude confusion. . ."2 In this note, Nietzsche attacks both the Cartesian mechanistic world view and its epistemological underpinnings, Cartesian rationality. These are two pillars of Cartesian thought; to call them into question is to undermine Descartes's entire metaphysical project. Nietzsche amplifies his attack on Cartesian rationality in his published writings, for example in Human, All Too Human: "That the world is notÊthe epitome of an eternal rationality can be conclusively proved by the fact that that piece of the world which we know--I mean our own human rationality--is not so very rational."3 Although Nietzsche does not explicitly mention Descartes here, the implications for Cartesian metaphysics are clear: if neither the world nor the humans in it are rational, then the claims of Cartesian metaphysics and epistemology cannot hold.
Nietzsche is also quite critical of the practical manifestation of the Cartesian project to total rationality, Cartesian science. Nietzsche's attack on the various aspects of Descartes's brand of physics is developed most fully in his Gay Science. It might seem quite ironic, at first, that Nietzsche should mount an attack on one of the primary founders of the modern scientific paradigm in a book whose title, at least, suggests that it will be a defense or apology for science. However, Nietzsche is always extremely careful with his language, and we must be as well. The title of the book in German is Die fršliche Wissenschaft, where fršliche connotes gay, happy or merry. It seems likely that an adherent to Cartesian science would have trouble even imagining a science that was happy rather than rational or mechanistic. The gay science, then, is a new science, a particular kind of science aimed directly against the serious, ponderous science of Descartes. As Walter Kaufmann notes, "the title of the book has polemical overtones: it is meant to be anti-German, anti-professorial, anti-academic. . .it is also meant to suggest 'light feet,' 'dancing,' 'laughter'--and ridicule of 'the spirit of gravity.'"4 It is also, I want to suggest, anti-Cartesian, and is therefore opposed to conventional Enlightened science. It is not, however, opposed to science in general, as we shall see shortly.
Traditional, Enlightened or Cartesian science is something dangerous for Nietzsche. He writes: "one thought that in science one possessed and loved something unselfish, harmless, self-sufficient, and truly innocent, in which man's evil impulses had no part whatever. . .in sum, owing to three errors."5 Cartesian science claims that it represents some kind of objective truth and that this truth will lead to the kind of progress that the Enlightenment always promises. For Nietzsche, however, science is no objective truth; rather "science also rests on a faith; there simply is no science 'without presuppositions.'"6 Nietzsche is trying to clear the way for a world view that can go beyond the Cartesian metaphysics that has dominated the intellectual world since the seventeenth century. To do this he must undermine the prevalent faith that it is Cartesian science that has the most to offer us as a way of interpreting the world around us. He writes: "a 'scientific' interpretation of the world, as you understand it, might therefore still be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning."7 Not only does science furnish an inadequate account of the meaning of the world, but it does not even necessarily fulfill its goal of providing useful knowledge about the physical world. "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. After all, this could be otherwise."8 Demonstrating contingency is one of Nietzsche's favorite modes of criticism; he employs it here with great effect against the Cartesian world view, demonstrating that there is no necessary reason to suppose that Cartesian science can provide the truths to which it claims to have access. The attack on Cartesian science is, in many ways, what the gay science is all about; Nietzsche thus speaks in a note of "the joyous [frohlockende] reaction against the rationalism of Descartes and against the skepticism of the English."9 These, then, are the terms in which Nietzsche opposes cold Cartesian rationality and its meaningless mechanistic universe: with a merry, joyful kind of science hitherto unknown in Enlightened discourse.
Another component of Nietzsche's critique of Descartes is his attack on the Cartesian method itself. This method, essential to the Cartesian project, is the method of universal doubt. Nietzsche writes in a note from the Nachla§: "Starting point. Irony against Descartes: there was at the beginning of things some deceit, out of which we came to think that universal doubt is helpful!"10 In Nietzsche's view, this method, which leads directly to the kind of Cartesian science he abhors, is in fact not helpful at all but dangerous. "We are not on guard against a trap like the will to universal doubt of the Cartesian sort, and it is precisely this Cartesian method that is the worst kind of trick, that thoroughly teases us and keeps us fools."11 Rather than contributing to true knowledge, the Cartesian method of universal doubt is actually an impediment to knowledge; it precludes the joyous science that Nietzsche wants to advocate.
Nietzsche also provides a very stringent critique of Cartesian subjectivity, and this will prove to be fundamental to many of his subsequent critiques. Nietzsche begins with the foundation of subjectivity in Descartes, the Cartesian cogito. He writes in the Nachla§: "We must be more careful than Descartes, who remains trapped in a term: Cogito is after all only a word."12 Here Nietzsche mounts an effective attack of the Cartesian cogito by claiming that it is a simple linguistic trick. Descartes attempted to establish Cartesian subjectivity merely by saying the words "I think therefore I am," but as Nietzsche points out, this simple statement in no way alters reality or creates a subject where there was none before. What Nietzsche is arguing is that Descartes has no right to claim the cogito as an absolute principle.
"There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks": this is the upshot of all Descartes' argumentation. But that means positing as 'true a priori' our belief in the concept of substance--that when there is thought there has to be something 'that thinks' is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate--Along the lines followed by Descartes one does not come upon something absolutely certain but only upon the fact of a very strong belief.13
This "very strong belief," of course, is hardly sufficient to serve as the kind of justification for subjectivity that Descartes needs. By showing that this crucial building block of Cartesian subjectivity is little more than a "grammatical custom," Nietzsche immediately undermines the foundation of the Cartesian subject and renders deeply problematic any claims made on the basis of this subjectivity. As we shall see below, this critique of the rational, autonomous Cartesian subject will serve Nietzsche very well as he expands his attack on the traditional Enlightenment into the areas of politics and morality.
In a similar vein, Nietzsche suggests that consciousness is also deeply contingent. He cites "Leibniz's incomparable insight that has been vindicated not only against Descartes but against everybody who had philosophized before him--that consciousness is merely an accidens of experience and not its necessary and essential attribute. . ."14 Nietzsche refuses to accept the claim that without a conscious subject to think our thoughts no thought can occur. "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.
Martin Heidegger offers an interesting interpretation of Nietzsche's critique of Cartesian subjectivity. Heidegger writes:
no matter how sharply Nietzsche pits himself time and again against Descartes, whose philosophy grounds modern metaphysics, he turns against Descartes only because the latter still does not posit man as subiectum in a way that is complete and decisive enough. The representation of the subiectum as ego, the I, thus the 'egoistic' interpretation of the subiectum, is still not subjectivistic enough for Nietzsche. Modern metaphysics first comes to the full and final determination of its essence in the doctrine of the Overman, the doctrine of man's absolute preeminence among beings. In that doctrine, Descartes celebrates his supreme triumph.16
On this interpretation, Nietzsche's problem with Descartes is that the former does not offer a strong enough subjectivity. 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. Heidegger writes: "Nietzsche's doctrine, which makes everything that is, and as it is, into the 'property and product of man,' merely carries out the final development of Descartes' doctrine, according to which truth is grounded on the self-certainty of the human subject."17 According to Heidegger's radical interpretation of Nietzsche's project, Nietzsche attacks only the form of Cartesian subjectivity, but leaves intact--indeed, insists upon--the idea that some kind of independent subject is necessary. "Nietzsche mistakes the origin of the 'concept of substance' because, in spite of all his criticism of Descartes, and without an adequate knowledge of the essence of a fundamental metaphysical position, he takes the fundamental position of modern metaphysics as absolutely certain and stakes everything on the priority of man as subject."18 Heidegger claims that without realizing it, Nietzsche is accepting Cartesian assumptions about subjectivity.
Of course, even Heidegger is forced to admit that Nietzsche makes some fundamental changes to Cartesian subjectivity. The most important of these is that Nietzsche posits the body rather than the soul as the seat of subjectivity. Heidegger writes: "for Nietzsche, what underlies is not the 'I' but the 'body'."19 Up to this point, Heidegger's metacritique--that is, his critique of Nietzsche's critique of Descartes--is persuasive. However, it is with the admission of the differences between Nietzsche and Descartes that Heidegger's position breaks down. Heidegger claims that the fact "that Nietzsche posits the body in place of the soul and consciousness alters nothing in the fundamental metaphysical position which is determined by Descartes."20 But in fact this changes everything. As we have seen, it is precisely the idea of the subject as conscious, rational, and thinking that Nietzsche most strongly criticizes. Nietzsche's critique of the cogito and of Cartesian rationalism is aimed against a particular brand of subjectivity, namely the kind which became institutionalized as the default form of Enlightened individualism. Heidegger is quite right when he argues that Nietzsche retains and even insists upon a kind of subjectivity. As we shall see, the Overman is definitely a kind of subject, but it is a subject of a new kind, rooted not in the conscious rationality of Descartes, but in health, the body and physicality. This emphasis on the body is precisely what distinguishes Nietzsche from Descartes and what motivates his critique of Cartesian subjectivity. I do not wish to dispute Heidegger's claim that Nietzsche's thought is a kind of metaphysics; indeed, it is a fundamental part of my argument that Nietzsche offers a transformed Enlightenment, a new brand of metaphysics. What I must contest in the strongest possible terms, however, is Heidegger's claim that Nietzsche's project is nothing more than a radicalized Cartesianism. Rather, I want to suggest that Nietzsche argues against Cartesian metaphysics and subjectivity in the name of a new kind of metaphysics and subjectivity, the dimensions of which I shall make clear presently.
Whatever its limitations, the Heideggerian metacritique raises a crucial issue: what, if any, are the aspects of Cartesian metaphysics that Nietzsche retains? To what extent is Nietzsche's critique of Descartes successful, and what are its limitations? Karl Jaspers suggests that "when Nietzsche finds methods to be the authentic basis of the compelling validity of scientific knowledge and then catches sight of the conditions under which they can be employed in the service of life. . .it seems as though he has discovered an absolute value in methodological science."21 This would seem at first to contradict my claims about Nietzsche's critique of the Cartesian method. However, Jaspers's claim must be modified somewhat, for in this initial formulation it does not account for the fact that statements of "absolute value" are rare if not nonexistent in Nietzsche's work. Alexander Nehamas refers to Nietzsche's refusal to posit absolute values as perspectivism, which Nehamas describes as "Nietzsche's famous insistence that every view is only one among many possible interpretations, his own views, particularly this very one, included."22 As Jaspers goes on to admit, "it is essential that Nietzsche recognized a kind of truth inhering in the scientific method and equally essential that, being aware of the limits of scientific truth, he did not regard such truth as final and absolute."23 If Nietzsche retains some kind of faith in scientific method, then, it is a provisional faith, and this clearly distinguishes him from someone like Descartes, whose faith in his method is absolute. Nietzsche's perspectivism is crucial here, for it stands in sharp contrast to the Cartesian method. Descartes's goal, and the goal of many Enlightened thinkers who followed him, was to locate the foundations of absolute, universal knowledge. For Nietzsche, this goal is impossible, for such knowledge is radically incoherent. Indeed, this is one of Nietzsche's most important objections to conventional Enlightenment thought: the kind of knowledge that thinkers like Descartes seek is not, for Nietzsche, a possible kind of human knowledge.
As we have seen, Heidegger offers a more radical interpretation of Nietzsche's critique of Descartes. Heidegger admits that "we do not believe that Nietzsche teaches a doctrine identical to Descartes'."24 Heidegger goes on to state, however, that "we are affirming something far more essential, to wit, that he is thinking the selfsame in the historical fulfillment of its essence."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. Heidegger writes, for example, that "in the sense of Nietzsche's metaphysics, only the Over-man is appropriate to an absolute 'machine economy.'"26 Here Heidegger is invoking Nietzsche's strongest statement of subjectivity and explicitly tying it to the Cartesian world view. Heidegger's essential question is this: "what if the positing of this basic character [of beings] became possible only on the basis of Descartes' fundamental metaphysical position?"27 In Heidegger's view, then, Nietzsche is possible only as the heir to Descartes.
I wish to argue against this. I believe that Heidegger is right when he says that Nietzsche's project is a metaphysical one, but wrong when he claims that the metaphysics Nietzsche uses is fundamentally Cartesian. It is undeniable that Nietzsche's project is in many ways a scientific one; however, as I have argued above, this is hardly the same as saying that his project is Cartesian. Rather, I believe that Nietzsche attacks the Cartesian (and in a broader sense, the Enlightened) idea of science in the name of a reformulated science, a joyous science. An aphorism from Human, All Too Human is helpful here: "And now try to assess the greatness of those exceptional Greeks who created science! He who tells of them, tells the most heroic story in the history of the human spirit!"28 Clearly, Nietzsche is no enemy of science here, but the kind of science he's advocating is hardly that of abstract Cartesian rationalism. It is a more vigorous, more lively, more noble kind of science--the forerunner of the gay science, we may suppose--and it clearly forms one of the cornerstones of Nietzsche's well-known admiration of the Greeks. It is not science that Nietzsche opposes, but modern science, science in its Enlightened, Cartesian form.
Laurence Lampert supports this interpretation in his important work, Nietzsche and Modern Times. Lampert notes that "Nietzsche came to recognize the dangers attendant on modern science and set about to remedy them with a new understanding of science based on a more adequate understanding of nature."29 Lampert recognizes and emphasizes Nietzsche's devotion to a certain kind of science; he argues against "the deeply ingrained misconception that Nietzsche is an enemy of science."30 Lampert argues, rather, that "Nietzsche is, emphatically, an advocate of science," but also claims that Nietzsche "rejected science's reigning paradigm."31 In Lampert's view, then, Nietzsche emerges as a thinker who is pro-science but anti-Cartesian, which is exactly the position I wish to take. As Lampert puts it, "Nietzsche attacks the mechanistic worldview, with its elevation of physics, its claim to certitude, and its claim to social benefit--and he does so as a friend of science."32 Against Heidegger and with Lampert, then, I wish to claim that Nietzsche does attack Cartesian metaphysics and that he does successfully criticize Cartesian science. I also want to argue, however, that Nietzsche retains some essential aspects of Cartesian thought even as he undermines the Cartesian system as a universally valid and absolute world view. 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. In this way, Nietzsche formulates a dramatic and effective critique of modern, Enlightened, Cartesian metaphysics and science, while retaining the possibility of a transfigured metaphysics and a new kind of science.
Rousseau
Nietzsche's critique of Cartesian subjectivity sets the stage for a critique of the kind of Enlightened politics that this subjectivity makes possible. Nietzsche articulates this political critique as an attack on Rousseau. Rousseau's politics assumes that individual Cartesian subjects who exist peacefully and harmoniously in the state of nature will eventually join together via a social contract. His thought contains at its very heart the same conception of human subjectivity that Nietzsche attempted to reject with Descartes. Nietzsche's critique of Rousseau's politics thus reads as an extension of the critique of Cartesian subjectivity outlined above.
Nietzsche does not directly challenge specific terms from Rousseau's political thought such as "general will" or "social contract." Rather, he mounts a more characteristically Nietzschean attack on Rousseau's political thought, attacking Rousseau's ideas at the level of fundamental foundations and first principles. Nietzsche is interested not so much in what Rousseau believes but in what Rousseau represents, and Nietzsche sees Rousseau as a symbol of the kind of politics that he most reviles: liberal, parliamentarian, democratic politics. Nietzsche writes in the Gay Science:
We are not by any means "liberal"; we do not work for "progress"; we do not need to plug up our ears against the sirens who in the market place sing of the future: their song about "equal rights," "a free society," "no more masters and no servants" has no allure for us. We simply do not consider it desirable that a realm of justice and concord should be established on earth (because it would certainly be the realm of the deepest leveling and chinoiserie); we are delighted with all who love, as we do, danger, war, and adventures, who refuse to compromise, to be captured, reconciled, and castrated; we count ourselves among conquerors; we think about the necessity for new orders, also for a new slavery--for every strengthening and enhancement of the human type also involves a new kind of enslavement.33
Nietzsche does not explicitly mention Rousseau here, but in this remarkable passage, he outlines and rejects every component of the Enlightened politics for which Rousseau symbolically stands in Nietzsche's writing: liberalism, progress, equal rights and freedom. Some of these--notably the concepts of equal rights and freedom--are indeed important components of Rousseau's political thought, and derive from his idea of the social contract. Others, such as liberalism, are extrapolations which Nietzsche makes when he establishes Rousseau as the grounding point of modern politics. In any case, it is clear that Nietzsche is offering a concept of politics which is dramatically at odds with Rousseau's egalitarian political scheme. "Danger," "war" and "conquering" certainly have no place in a Rousseauian political system, except perhaps as symbols of the unjust political structure which will be overcome when man is finally removed from his chains and permitted to enter into just political arrangements. And "slavery," which Nietzsche extols as an institution that can strengthen and enhance humanity, is the perfect antithesis of Rousseau's political project, which seeks to render individuals free in a profound new sense through the establishment of a just political order.
It would seem, then, that in place of Rousseau's egalitarian politics, with its goal of freedom for all individuals, Nietzsche favors an agonistic or conflict-based model of human political behavior. This is hardly surprising when we recall that the political system which Nietzsche most respected was that of the ancient Greeks. As Ike Okanta puts it, "the theory of conquest...presupposes neither the gradual evolution of pre-political institutions nor a fundamental agreement in the visions of men."34 Nietzsche, then, is not only critical of Rousseau's account of the evolutionary process by which the social contract developed; he also attacks the very concept of human nature which would make such an evolutionary development possible. The "gradual evolution" model favored by Rousseau presupposes a "fundamental agreement"--the social contract--between independent, autonomous subjects, and as we have seen, Nietzsche rejects this Cartesian notion of subjectivity. In places, however, Nietzsche is not above using this concept of subjectivity against Rousseauian political thought: "one tries to condition an individual by various attractions and advantages to adopt a way of thinking and behaving that, once it has become a habit, instinct and passion, will dominate him to his own ultimate disadvantage but 'for the general good.'"35 The phrase "for the general good" here echoes "for the general will," and we may suppose that this is no accident. Nietzsche is formulating here a critique of Rousseau's politics that ironically seems to be based on the very kind of individual subjectivity that Nietzsche wants to reject. There are two ways we might interpret this move. It might simply be an attempt to use Rousseau's own categories against him, even though Nietzsche explicitly rejects those very categories elsewhere. Or more plausibly, it might be one of the ways in which Nietzsche selectively challenges aspects of Enlightened thought while retaining ideas that are in fact quite Enlightened. As we shall see, Nietzsche retains a very strong commitment to a kind of subjectivity, though it is a very different kind from the Cartesian subjectivity he so ruthlessly criticizes. In any case, it seems clear that Nietzsche is adamant in rejecting ideas of the general good and general will.
Indeed, Nietzsche rejects the very theory of nature on which Rousseau's ideas of the social contract and the general good are based, and it is here that he begins to refer explicitly to Rousseau. For Rousseau, nature represents a kind of utopian ideal condition; it is the departure from this condition, as humans begin to congregate together in social groups and thus lose their independence, that is responsible for mankind's moral fall. This fall necessitates the development of political institutions which will help us to regain some of what we have lost. Nietzsche, however, advocates a theory of nature that is quite opposed to this. He writes: "Against Rousseau--The state of nature is terrible, man is a beast of prey; our civilization represents a tremendous triumph over this beast-of-prey nature: thus argued Voltaire."36 Though we may suppose that Nietzsche hardly agrees with the interpretation of civilization as a triumph over anything, it is clear that by employing Voltaire against Rousseau in this way, Nietzsche means to begin a critique of Rousseau's concept of nature.
Nietzsche finds this idea of nature to be a naive and unrealistic depiction of humanity's natural state. Indeed, he goes so far as to associate Rousseau's understanding of nature with the kind of Christian ethics he despises: "Rousseau's concept of nature, as if 'nature' were freedom, goodness, innocence, fairness, justice, an idyll--still a cult of Christian morality fundamentally."37 Rousseau's state of nature smacks too much of the Garden of Eden for Nietzsche. And by attacking this idea of nature, Nietzsche implicitly attacks the idea of political society which grows out of that idea. Rousseau's entire political philosophy assumes that individual humans in the state of nature are free and innocent, that moving into society corrupts them, and that political institutions should attempt to correct this; Nietzsche's position is quite the opposite. For Nietzsche, the natural state of humanity is brutal and savage, the best societies (such as the Greeks, with their agonistic politics) reflect this, and "Rousseau's question concerning civilization: 'Does man become better through it?'--[is] an amusing question, since the reverse is obvious and is precisely that which speaks in favor of civilization."38 The one point on which Nietzsche and Rousseau agree, then, is that civilization has a corrupting effect on mankind--but they disagree profoundly as to the value of that effect. For Rousseau, corruption requires the creation of institutions to set society straight. For Nietzsche, however, corruption must be allowed to run its course, for it represents the necessary precursor to any real improvement of the human condition.
Rousseau's tendency towards correction and reform of the ills of civilization can easily be translated into a political doctrine, and it is against this type of reform that Nietzsche offers some of his strongest rhetoric. This Nietzsche's critique of Rousseau as a revolutionary. Nietzsche writes in Human, All Too Human:
There are political and social fantasists who with fiery eloquence invite a revolutionary overturning of all social orders in the belief that the proudest temple of fair humanity will then at once rise up as though of its own accord. 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
Here Nietzsche's critique blossoms into a full-fledged attack on Rousseau as a revolutionary "fantasist." The particular form of revolutionary thought and activity with which Nietzsche associated Rousseau was, of course, the French Revolution. To be fair, as Keith Ansell-Pearson points out, Nietzsche may have too readily associated Rousseau with the Revolution, and may have attributed to Rousseau a desire to return to the state of nature that Rousseau never actually had.40 However, as I noted above, I am less interested in constructing a "true" picture of Rousseau's political thought, and more interested in developing an understanding of how Nietzsche saw that thought. I believe that for Nietzsche, Rousseau represented an avatar of modern politics, the kind of politics that received its most dramatic expression in the French Revolution. Whether or not this is a valid criticism of Rousseau, this is the way in which Nietzsche symbolically made use of Rousseau.
As Walter Kaufmann notes, "Nietzsche did not believe that by 'returning to nature' man would become good, or that Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity were close to the state of nature. His view of 'nature' was much the opposite: by returning to nature man would only become a beast of prey or a Catalinarian criminal--and people following Rousseau might find themselves transformed into a revolutionary mob thirsting for blood."41 Here we see again Nietzsche's opposition to a Rousseauian concept of nature, and something more: Kaufmann is suggesting that this rejection of Rousseau's idea of nature should be explicitly tied to Nietzsche's critique of revolutionary politics. This revolutionary politics, in turn, is fundamentally linked to every manifestation of the modern state. Kaufmann writes: "[Nietzsche] recognized in the citizen of Geneva one of the main forces contributing to the origin of the modern Nation State. 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."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.
Numerous passages from Nietzsche's works indicate that he linked Rousseau with French Revolutionary politics and thence with the modern democratic state in general. In the Will to Power, he writes: "The French Revolution as the continuation of Christianity. Rousseau is the seducer."43 By stigmatizing the Revolution as a mere continuation of what Nietzsche saw as a bankrupt ethical scheme, and by installing Rousseau as the man responsible for this continuation, Nietzsche attacks both Revolutionary politics and their putative author, Rousseau. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche explicitly cites Rousseau as the origin of the Revolution: "It is not Voltaire's moderate nature, inclined as it was to ordering, purifying and reconstructing, but Rousseau's passionate follies and half-lies that called forth the optimistic spirit of the Revolution against which I cry: 'Ecrasez l'infame!'"44 We should note here the ironic way in which Nietzsche employs Voltaire's slogan, "crush the infamous thing!," against Rousseau. Nietzsche is able to make use of this slogan, which was originally directed against the Church, precisely because he equates Rousseau's politics with the ethics of Christianity. We should also note the way in which this critique of Rousseau constitutes a criticism of Enlightened ideas about progress and optimism. However, Nietzsche, ever complex, goes on in the same text to defend Enlightenment against the Revolution: "[Rousseau] then went on with perfidious enthusiasm to set the Enlightenment too on its fanatical head, which thereby itself began to glow as though in a transfigured light: the Enlightenment, which is fundamentally so alien to the Revolution and, left to itself, would have passed quietly along like a gleam in the clouds and for long have been content to address itself only to the individual."45 Here Nietzsche seems quite nostalgic for a purer, more abstract, less politically tainted kind of Enlightenment, and this may seem surprising until we recall that Nietzsche's relationship with the Enlightenment is ambiguous in precisely this way. He cannot bring himself to mount an all-out attack on Enlightenment; too many of its ideas remain his own. But he can certainly attack specific manifestations of the traditional Enlightenment, and his critique of the Revolution is precisely this kind of critique. In his later works, Nietzsche becomes quite graphic as he develops this critique; in Twilight of the Idols, he writes: "I still hate Rousseau in the French Revolution: it is the world-historical expression of this duality of idealist and rabble."46 The Enlightenment that Nietzsche wishes to pursue is not the Enlightenment of the French Revolution and Rousseau.
This association of the Revolution with its "rabble" brings us to another important part of Nietzsche's critique, and that is his attack on Rousseau's egalitarianism. As I argued in Chapter One, Rousseau advocates a very specific kind of social equality, one aimed at providing the maximum possible amount of individual freedom in a society. So if we wish to characterize Rousseau as an egalitarian, we must qualify that term by also stating that Rousseau's egalitarian project is carried out in the name of freedom for a kind of Enlightened, Cartesian subject. 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. Keith Ansell-Pearson recognizes this reluctance on Nietzsche's part to adopt any notion of freedom or individuality which depends upon a Rousseauian politicization of Cartesian subjectivity; Ansell-Pearson goes so far as to criticize Nietzsche for failing to recognize the importance of solidarity and community in the achievement of genuine sovereign individuality.47 One could, of course, read Nietzsche as mounting an elitist critique of Rousseau's egalitarianism. We should be careful to remember, however, that two important considerations prevent us from viewing Nietzsche as an individualist in any conventional way. First, by rejecting Rousseau's egalitarianism, Nietzsche is also implicitly rejecting the individualistic motivation behind that egalitarian project. And second, as we have already seen, Nietzsche rejects the Cartesian subjectivity that is the basis for all modern understandings of the individual.
It has been suggested by some commentators that Nietzsche's rejection of Cartesian subjectivity in the specifically political context of individualistic egalitarianism should be understood as part of a much larger project. One such strand of interpretation has been to view Nietzsche's critique of Rousseau's politics in the context of a much larger cultural critique of Rousseau. Eric Blondel, for example, argues that "Nietzsche's opposition to Rousseau at first takes its origin, not in the question of the City, the state, the law, or the type of government, but in the problem of culture."48 For Blondel, the problem that Nietzsche had with Rousseau was in part political, but this was only one aspect of a deeper problem: "the problem lies elsewhere: to me, at the level of the underground basis of the question of culture, and not on the surface level of political opinions, nor even on that of political philosophy."49 While Blondel's characterization of political thought as a "surface level" is perhaps problematic, his approach is an interesting one. For Blondel, the question of particular political forms or positions is a secondary one. Blondel believes that Nietzsche was able to reject Rousseau's egalitarian politics simply by claiming that Rousseau's position represents the decadence of modern culture. Indeed, this seems plausible; as I argued in Chapter One, Rousseau's politics depends heavily on an Enlightened idea of the self. Therefore, if Nietzsche rejects this idea, as we have seen that he does, then neither Rousseau's egalitarian individualism nor any other kind of political position that relies on this kind of subjectivity will be acceptable to him. And any kind of culture based on this concept of subjectivity would naturally be open to a Nietzschean attack; in this case, Nietzsche dismisses the modern culture of individuality as decadent. Gerhardt Gamm takes a position that is in many ways similar to Blondel's; Gamm argues that Nietzsche's dialectic of Enlightenment is about the cost of the concealed Rousseauian consciousness of modernity.50 For Gamm, as for Blondel, Rousseau represents to Nietzsche a symbolism that is political only on a surface level; beneath this, Rousseau seems to signify the broader, deeper kind of cultural modernity that Nietzsche wishes to attack. And Lars-Henrik Schmidt argues that "Rousseau's social physics is only apparently a distinct political philosophy. It is, rather, an ethics. The basic tone is a reflection of the lost immediacy, this time in the field of politics."51 For these thinkers, then, Nietzsche's attack on Rousseau is only superficially political; beneath this, it is fundamentally ethical or cultural.
A look at Nietzsche's writings supports a broader reading of Nietzsche's critique of Rousseau. I want to argue, however, that it does not support the kind of anti-political reading suggested by critics such as Blondel. Although Nietzsche's critique of Rousseau may be read broadly to include ethics and culture, this by no means should cause us to underestimate the very real political significance of that critique. In the Will to Power, Nietzsche writes that "Rousseau is a symptom of self-contempt and heated vanity--both signs that the domineering will is lacking", and goes on to say that Rousseau was, "beyond a doubt, mentally disturbed."52 Clearly, Rousseau represents some kind of cultural decadent for Nietzsche. In Daybreak, he describes Rousseau as a "moral tarantula."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."54 One has little trouble imagining which route Nietzsche would prefer to take here. So clearly, there is in Nietzsche's work a critique of Rousseau's ethics and of Rousseau himself as a cultural decadent. However, this must not cause us to underestimate the importance of Nietzsche's critique of Rousseau as a political thinker. I have been arguing that Nietzsche criticizes Rousseau's political ideas and the concept of nature on which these ideas are based, as well as Rousseau's individualistically motivated egalitarianism; I believe that these are essential parts of his overall critique of Rousseau. I further believe that these political critiques are rooted in Nietzsche's hostility to the Enlightened, Cartesian ideas about subjectivity in which Rousseau's politics are grounded. Nietzsche's fundamental rejection of Cartesian subjectivity makes it impossible for him to accept any political system based on these Cartesian concepts, as the politics of Rousseau, the French Revolution and modern democracy clearly are. Through his discussion of the ways in which autonomous Cartesian subjects voluntarily join together via social contracts and try to create just political societies which will adequately protect individual freedoms, Rousseau articulates the Enlightened politics of modernity, the politics of Cartesian subjectivity. The rejection of this politics forms the political component of Nietzsche's attack on Enlightenment in its conventional form.
I now want to consider Nietzsche's critique of Kantian morality, but before doing so, I would like to use Kant to show briefly how morality and politics can combine in Nietzsche's critique of Enlightened modernity. In the Antichrist, Nietzsche asks: "Did not Kant find in the French Revolution the transition from the inorganic form of the state to the organic? Did he not ask himself whether there was any event which could be explained only in terms of a moral disposition of mankind, an event which would demonstrate once and for all the 'tendency of mankind towards the good'? Kant's answer: 'This is the Revolution.'"55 For Nietzsche, then, Kant's ethics and Rousseau's politics (that is, the politics of the French Revolution) are inextricably tied together. Both represent fundamental aspects of Enlightened modernity, which is precisely what Nietzsche means to criticize. As Olivier Reboul notes, Kant was, for Nietzsche, a plebeian, and a plebeian who manifested a Rousseauian egalitarianism.56 It is this, in addition to Kant's secularized Christian morality, which Nietzsche wished to attack.
Kant
To be sure, the Enlightenment contained important impulses towards pure secularism. But some of the most important thinkers of the conventional Enlightenment retained key elements of the Christian world-view. Descartes's metaphysics relied on a belief in God, and many aspects of Rouseau's ethical thought were recognizably Christian. Nietzsche was always quite hostile towards any manifestations of Christian thought. For example, the morality of pity, which Nietzsche associated with the Christian ethos, drew heavy scorn from him. He writes in Human, All Too Human: "All those who do not have themselves sufficiently under their own control and do not know morality as a continual self-command and self-overcoming practised in great things and in the smallest, involuntarily become glorifiers of the good, pitying, benevolent impulses, of that instinctive morality which has no head but seems to consist solely of heart and helping hands."57 For Nietzsche, this kind of herd-based ethics was abhorrent because it was detrimental to the development of healthful life; as I shall show in Chapter Five below, great health was one of Nietzsche's highest values. And one thinker stood out in particular for Nietzsche as the advocate of this decadent, "sickly" kind of ethics, namely Immanuel Kant. Kant represents for Nietzsche the attempt to translate Christian ethics into a secular, Enlightened context.
Nietzsche approached his critique of Kant by first articulating a more general criticism of morality. As Arthur Danto notes, Nietzsche had a definite goal here: he meant to ask us not to abandon moral beliefs but only the meta-ethical belief that morality can be justified.58 Nietzsche was not attacking morality as a concept, then, but was rather offering a critique of the idea of universal morality, a morality which claims to be justified in any context or situation. 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. This should not be confused with a moral relativism, which essentially denies the validity of any moral position by rendering all moral positions equivalent. Nehamas, for example, accepts "Nietzsche's view that there are no facts that are independent of interpretation and that are therefore capable of providing the common object of which all interpretations are interpretations. . . .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."59 Nietzsche does believe that there are ways to distinguish and choose between moral positions, but he does not believe that this can be done in terms of an appeal to universal truth. And Nietzsche feels that his moral perspectivism is a sufficiently strong position that it may displace the moral universalism prevalent in philosophy prior to him: "Let us not be deceived either in the Kantian or in the Hegelian manner:--we not longer believe in morality, as they did, and consequently we have no need to found a philosophy with the aim of justifying morality."60 When Nietzsche says "they," he is referring to the philosophers of universalistic morality. 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 naivetŽ of Kant, resulting from needs, mainly moral-metaphysical."61 Here Nietzsche is using another of his favorite critical tactics. By showing a philosophical position to be the simple result of a psychological need, he implies that people believe in this position not because the world really is that way, but only because they have a disposition to believe it. Thus "there are no moral actions whatsoever: they are completely imaginary. Not only are they indemonstrable (which Kant, e.g., admitted, and Christianity as well)--they are altogether impossible."62 If moral actions are imaginary, a psychological effect rather than a reflection of the way the world is, then universal morality itself becomes untenable.
The particular form of universalistic morality to which Nietzsche was most opposed, of course, was the Christian form. For him, Kant represented the prime example of how this morality had become institutionalized and secularized in the European (and especially in the German) academy. Thus in a description of Kant in the Will to Power, Nietzsche notes that Kant was "way off when it comes to great historical values (French Revolution); a moral fanatic ˆ la Rousseau; a subterranean Christianity in his values; a dogmatist through and through."63 Here we see the way in which critiques of political and ethical values combine in Nietzsche's critique of Kant, much as they did in his attacks on Rousseau. More significantly for our purposes, we see that Kant represents for Nietzsche a secret, elusive kind of Christianity. It is a Christianity smuggled through the back door, as it were, a Christianity that has disguised itself in order to render itself acceptable to the scientific, rational Enlightenment. "In the case of Kant," Nietzsche writes, "theological prejudice, his unconscious dogmatism, his moralistic perspective, were dominant, directing, commanding."64 Again, Kant's Christianity reads here like an unknown, subconscious drive. Kant may not even have realized what he was doing when he brought Christian ethics back into the Enlightenment; that is how far his Christian morality lay hidden beneath an external ven