Nietzsche’s Genealogy as EnlightenmentLecture One

Dr. Peter KailSt. Peter’s College, Oxford

Two Formidable Issues

• What is ‘Enlightenment’?• What is the character of Nietzsche’s

philosophy?

The ‘Enlightenment’

• The cliché of the ‘Age of Reason’ • Paradigmatically the philosophe• Kant and Enlightenment as humanity’s

emergence from self-incurred immaturity which ‘is the inability to use one’s understanding without the guidance of others’.

Supposed Key Features

• Unbounded optimism about reason’s reach

• The fixity and uniformity of universal human nature

• Anti-traditional religion• Scientific conception of social

structures and their improvement • Individual freedom and rational relation

to authority

Scepticism about the ‘Enlightenment’

• How many ‘Enlightenments’? And where? English, Scottish, German, French….

• Reason, Scepticism, Passion• Religion and the Enlightenment

(Berkeley, Reid, Butler….)• Enlightenment and liberation (The so-

called ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ Enlightenments)

Scepticism about the ‘Enlightenment’

• How many ‘Enlightenments’ and where? English, Scottish, German, French….

• Reason, Scepticism, Passion• Religion and the Enlightenment

(Berkeley, Reid, Butler….)• Enlightenment and liberation (The so-

called ‘moderate’ and ‘radical’ Enlightenments)

Nietzsche Favourable to the Enlightenment?

• 1st edition of HAH dedicated to Voltaire• Nietzsche’s continued admiration for the

French• D 197 German Hostility to the Enlightenment• The ressentiment of the French Revolution as

anti-Enlightenment• Christianity as an unwitting contributor to

Enlightenment (GS 122)

One Enlightenment Trope

• Optimism about empirical sciences and its application to traditional philosophical concerns by its application to the human creatures

• Methodological naturalism. Knowledge of humanity depends on methods continuous with the sciences

• Obvious exemplar. David Hume

Nietzsche on Naturalism

• We must “translate humanity back into nature” [so as to] “gain control of the many vain and fanciful interpretations that have been drawn and scribbled and that have drawn over that eternal basic text of homo natura so far” (BGE 230).

• Two aspects. Getting the correct account of human nature and then gaining control

Methodological Naturalism

• Fallibilist Empiricism• [T]he procedures of science are at least as

important a product of inquiry as any other outcome: for the scientific spirit rests upon an insight into the procedures, and if these were lost all the other products of science would not suffice to prevent a restoration of superstition and folly” (HAH 1, 635)

• [S]cientific methods . . . are the essential thing, as well as the most difficult thing” a certain “factual sense, the last and most valuable of all senses” (A 59).

Methodological Naturalism II

• Leiter (2002) ‘methods continuity’• Nietzsche take[s] over from the sciences the

idea that natural phenomena have determinate causes” (2002: 5)

• NB a speculative account of human nature characterized a posteriori. Not reductionism

Substantive Naturalism

• What is the ‘nature’ of nature?• The Will to Power, lumpers and splitters• Nietzsche as translating humanity back into

nature• The human animal• Hume again. Hume’s account of human nature

drawn entirely from models of animal cognition• The “whole sensitive creation . . . [e]very thing is

conducted by springs and principles, which are not peculiar to man, or any one species of animals” (T 2.2.12.1/397)

Substantive Naturalism II

• “Formally, one has sought the feeling of the grandeur of man by pointing to his divine origin; this has now become a forbidden way, for at its portal stands the ape, together with other gruesome beasts, grinning knowingly as if to say: no further in this direction!” (D49)

• Humans nevertheless become beguiled by the sound of “metaphysical bird catchers” who sing “You are more! You are higher! You are of a different origin!” (BGE 230).

• Drives and German biology

Why Naturalism?

• We need to understand human nature so as to “gain control of the many vain and fanciful interpretations that have been drawn and scribbled and that have drawn over that eternal basic text of homo natura so far” (BGE 230).

• One key aim of Nietzsche’s Genealogy is to understand how human animals about a particular moral interpretation of themselves

• Such an interpretation has been inimical to human flourishing

Two Objections

• Doesn’t Nietzsche reject the idea that there is ‘human nature’?

• Isn’t naturalism committed to truth and its value in a way that Nietzsche is not?

Nature and History

• Nietzsche and the ‘congenital Defect of Philosophers’ who treat the human being an ‘aeterna veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of flux’ (HAH 1, 2)

• ‘There are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. Consequently what is need from now on is historical philosophizing’ (HAH 1, 2)

• The notion of a fixed human nature is at odds with its historical character.

Nature and History II

• However, Nietzsche also writes that ‘[E]verything essential [Wesentliche] in human development occurred in primaeval times, long before those four thousand years with which we are more or less familiar. Man probably hasn’t changed much more in these years’ (HAH 1, 2, Nietzsche’s emphasis on ‘essential’).

• There is a fixed set of principles against which evolutionary and cultural development takes place.

Nature and History III

• This is still naturalistic and compatible with some 18th century naturalism, especially Hume’s

• Hume has a fixed set of principles whose manifestation depends crucially on contingency and history.

• “[H]uman nature is inconstant” and “[c]hangeableness is essential to it” (T 2.1.4.3/283).

• The ‘manners of men [are] different in different ages and countries’, that they causally affect humans, ‘mould the human mind from its infancy, and form it into a fixed and established character’.

Truth Nihilism?

• The ‘falsification’ thesis and ‘perspectivism’• What, then, is truth? A mobile army of

metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically…truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are (‘On Truth and a Lie in a Non-Moral Sense’ 1873)

• What, then are man’s truths ultimately? - They are the irrefutable errors of man’GS 265

Truth Nihilism? II

• ‘Life is no argument’ (GS 121). • Through immense periods of time, the intellect

produced nothing but errors; some of them turned out to be useful and species-preserving…such erroneous articles of faith, which we passed on by inheritance, further and further, and finally became part of the basic endowment of the species, are for example: that there are enduring things; that there are identical things; that there are things, kinds of material bodies, that a thing is what it appears to be. (GS 110)

Truth Nihilism? III

• Naturalism and life no argument again. If one holds a metaphysical correspondence theory of truth and you think that concepts developed for local pragmatic concerns, then beliefs deploying such concepts unlikely to carve nature at the joints.

• Last 6 published works the falsfication thesis abandoned (after Maudmarie Clark)

• Abandonment of the metaphysical correspondence theory

‘Enlightenment’ again

• Naturalism and one strain of the Enlightenment

• Scepticism about traditional religion. Nietzsche thinks that Enlightenment has not gone far enough in as much as much as he thinks morality has come under insufficient suspicion. Naturalists ‘hate the Church but love its poison’ (GM I. 9)

• Custom and drive replace ‘reason’.