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The enlightenment—a stranded project? Habermas on Nietzsche as a ‘turning point’ to postmodernity
Hurory Printed
of European Ideas. Vol m Great Bntam
I I, pp
743-750,
0191-659909 $3 00 + 0 00 Pergamon Press plc
1989
THE ENLIGHTENMENT-A STRANDED PROJECT? HABERMAS ON NIETZSCHE AS A ‘TURNING POINT’ TO POSTMODERNITY LUDWIG NAGL* In his recent book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Jiirgen Habermas examines at some length Nietzsche’s influence on ‘postmodern’ thought.’ He shows in which way Nietzsche’s aesthetic mode of world interpretation became of central importance for Heidegger’s and Derrida’s critique of the Enlightenment, and for Bataille’s and Foucault’s attempts to deconstruct reason. Nietzsche’s ‘perspectivism’, and his ‘genealogical’ subversion of the language of ‘good and evil’ by means of a theory of power, introduce into contemporary discourse, so Habermas, the seductive idea of an ‘unmasking critique of reason that sets itself outside the horizon of reason’ (PD, p. 96). In Habermas’s view Nietzsche’s work is ridden by methodological paradoxes: his aphoristic style of thought differs radically from the more consistent forms of philosophical self-criticism which accompanied modernity since its beginning. Nietzsche’s rhetoric tries to undermine all attempts to stablise (by resort to ‘Vernunft’) the incipient ‘dialectic of enlightenment’: he is especially hostile to Kant’s ‘practical reason’, and to Hegel’s idea of reconciling the fragmented modern reality by dialectical speculation. Habermas tries to show that Nietzsche’s vision of an aesthetic ‘escape route from modernity’ (PD, p. 94) entails dangerous simplifications: the complexity of modern societies-which goes hand in hand with its structural tensionsforbids, as Habermas argues, all one-dimensional solutions. For him, modernity ultimately rests on the interplay of a plurality of value spheres: Kant’s three ‘Critiques’ anticipated in a philosophical way the modern institutionalisation of clearly separated expert cultures, which deal with science, law and taste, and which have different learning modes that allow for a continuous re-evaluation of traditional beliefs and practices. It is this explosion of the need for ‘justifiable’ knowledge claims, for ‘rational’ practical rules, and for ‘exemplary’ aesthetical experiences, which creates tensions in modernity between the newly created ‘systems’ and traditional ‘lifeworlds’ on the one hand, and-immanently-between the various fields of differentiated value spheres themselves on the other. The way in which the plural claim systems interact cannot be stabilised once and for all but has the tendency to become imbalanced: there always exists a possibility that one of the value domains is pushed into predominance and thus starts to marginalise the other spheres of modern experience: this tendency becomes manifest in those contemporary world views that seek to ‘scientise’, to ‘moralise’, or to ‘aesthetisise’ our modern world: all such simplifications of our complex post*Institut fiir Philosophie Stock, Austria.
der Universitlt
Wien,
1010 Wien, UniversitltsstraDe
7, 2.
743
744
Ludwig Nagf
Enlightenment reality are dangerous, as Habermas shows: there is no way back to a less reflective (neo-substantialistically integrated) premodern identity once the learning process of enlightenment has started. The inner tensions between ‘system’ and ‘lifeworld’ can neither be overcome in a regressive recourse to archaic origins, nor by nourishing hopes in utopian myths as the ‘other of reason’. Habermas, on the very contrary, insists ‘that enlightenment can only make good its deficits by radicalised enlightenment’ (PD, 84). In his view, therefore, Nietzsche’s violent attacks on two ofthe value spheres that constitute modernity, on truth-related scientific knowledge claims, and on the universalism ofpractical reason, mark a dangerous ‘turning point’ insofar as these attacks seek to undermine the onereal‘turning point’ of our epoch: the turn, it is, that is based on the Enlightenment’s belief that reason in the long run can overcome not only those social habits and institutions that in its light appear as unjust, but that it additionally can compensate for those deficits which result from the disintegrative processes of rationalisation itself. The ambiguous rhetoric, and the false and vicious political goals that occured in the aftermath of what Habermas sees as Nietzsche’s attempt to ‘bid farewell to the dialectic of enlightenment’ (PD, p. 86), makes him very suspicious about all postmodern discourses that receive central impulses from Nietzsche’s aesthetically ‘totalised’ world view. In the following we will deal with four related problems: first we try to explain how Habermas criticises Nietzsche’s endeavor to ‘enthrone taste, “the Yes and No of the palate” (PD, p. 96). Secondly some connections of this ‘aesthetic turn’ with Nietzsche’s theory of power and his Dionysian hopes will be analysed. Part three of our paper contrasts Habermas’s interpretation of Nietzsche with the reading of this author by Alexander Nehamas:2 in light of this comparison we finally (4) try to reconstruct one of the motives of Nietzsche’s attack on moral vocabularies, his insistence that is, that the ‘free spirit’ has to invent his individuality rather than to follow costumary (public) rules. We read this thought as an excessively and dangerously radicalised post-Kantian version of autonomy. Our interest in one aspect of this thought implies indirectly a questioning of the marginalisation of individuality which characterises Habermas’s transformation of the essentials of practical, theoretical and aesthetical reason into an inrersubjective ‘discourse theory’. This interest in Nietzsche’s polemical impulses does not weaken, however, our sympathy for the more general aspects of Habermas’s critique of Nietzsche’s (potentially ‘totalising’) aestheticism.
NIETZSCHE’S ENTHRONEMENT OF TASTE: LIBERATION OR REGRESSION? In dealing with the fragmentations of modernity Nietzsche avoids all trust in absolute philosophy as a medium of reconciliation. He stays away not only from Hegel, however, but also from the post-Hegelian, neo-Kantian option to inventively construct a weaker conception of the subject as the point of reference for a theory of modernity. In an ultramodernist turn Nietzsche instead seeks, so Habermas, to escape from modern age by upgrading the sphere of aesthetic experience in ways which far surpasse Schelling’s (and the romantics) trust in the
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reconciling power of art. Nietzsche, SO Habermas, thus becomes ‘the first to conceptualize the attitude of aesthetic modernity before avant-garde consciousness assumed objective shape in the literature, painting and music of the twentieth century’ (PD, p. 122). His experimenting, deconstructive attitude, liberating as it clearly is within the bounds of aesthetic experience proper, becomes reductionist, however, the very instant it gets expanded into a general characterises this deep philosophical account of the world. Habermas ambivalence which is implicit in Nietzsche’s thought, in the following way: ‘The subversive force of aesthetic resistance that would later feed the reflections of Benjamin.. . already arises from the experience in Nietzsche of rebellion against everything normative. It is this same force which neutralises both the morally good and the practically useful’ (PD, p. 123)(Emphasis added, L.N.). Already in his early book The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche proclaimed, so Habermas, a ‘peculiar’ kind of theodizy (PD, 94): that the world can be justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. The peculiarity of this thought results from an antagonistic conjuction: on the one hand it is based on a concept of art that distances ‘Vernunft’ as a medium of constriction, and on the other it continues to employ the (reason-centered) idea of justification. On closer examination this tension threatens to render impossible Nietzsche’s ‘metaphysics for artists’. Why is this so? For one thing, Nietzsche’s ‘perspectivist’ account of the world tries to undermine all truth claims and all claims to goodness: ‘The world appears as a network of distortions and interpretations’, so Habermas about Nietzsche’s Artistenmetaphysik, ‘for which no intuition and no text provides a basis. . . art counts as man’s genuine activity because life itself is based on illusion, deception, optics, the necessity of the perspectival and of error’ (PD, p. 95). Nietzsche seeks to support the ‘aesthetic turn’ by unmasking the semantics of truth claims in a pragmatist manner,3 and by deconstructing the vocabulary of practical reason (‘good’ and ‘evil’)-via his ‘genealogy’ -as a masked vocabulary of (‘noble’ or ‘common’) subject preferences. Secondly, and in contradiction to these thoughts, Nietzsche continues to claim plausibility for his own (aesthetico-deconstructive) description of the world, and he explicitly uses the concept of ‘justification’ as a defining part of his ‘peculiar theodicy’. He thereby employs a notion which-within the frame of reference of his thought-would need a careful reinterpretation: such a reconstruction is nowhere given, however. Habermas exposes this paradox when he writes that Nietzsche, after having enthroned taste, ‘cannot legitimate the criteria of aesthetic judgement that he holds on to’(PD, p. 96). Nietzsche himself seeks to avoid questions concerning the consistency of his ‘aesthetic turn’ by taking recourse to a concept of power which gets attributed the status of a ‘condition of possibility’ for all kinds of truth claims and claims to goodness.
NIETZSCHE’S POWER ANALYSES: TENSIONS BETWEEN A THEORY OF SUBJECTIVE PREFERENCES AND THE DIONYSIAN DE-DIFFERENTIATION OF THE SUBJECT ‘Genealogical’
reflection
and ‘aesthetical’
speculation
are the constitutive
746
Ludwig Nag/
components of Nietzsche’s theory of power. They allow him to deal with ‘practical reason’ in two ways: First, Nietzsche attempts to undermine the universal form of practical value claims by showing that they ultimately rest on (more or less conscious) subjective preferences which-if analysed on a deep level-do not allow for a general justification: they are nothing more than expressions of the individuals ‘will’. This genealogical deconstruction makes possible Nietzsche’s second strategy, which is closely linked to his ‘metaphysics for artists’: our motives, so Nietzsche, cannot be ‘evaluated’ by recourse to universal (i.e. external) systems of rules, but can be assessed exclusively with regard to the immanent criteria of the individuals ‘will to power’ itself: they deserve to be esteemed if they do not distort an individuals full self-realisation: ‘Precisely this shall be called greatness: being capable of being as manifold as whole, as ample as fu11.‘4 This aesthetico-monadic concept of Nietzsche’s ‘will’-interesting as it is in ways which will be pointed out later (section 4)-marginalises, however,the core social problem: how to coordinate in a satisfactory way the multiplicity of divergent ‘wills to power’. This question is either subject to deliberately cynical and rationally irreconstructible comments in Nietzsche (as f.i. in Beyond GoodandEviZ where he writes: ‘Egoism belongs to the nature of a noble soul-1 mean that to beings such as “we are” other beings must be subordinate by nature and have to sacrifice themselves.‘S Or it is displaced from practical discourse altogether, and resituated in an artistic speculation which seeks to provide metaphysical foundations for the genealogical attack: Nietzsche’s aestheticism, by nourishing the hope for a post-Christian implementation of a Dionysian world, longs thus for an extra rational mode of ‘justification’. Habermas characterises the ‘anti-utopian’ image of a futurewhich is envisaged by Nietzsche as the liberating return of an archaic form of world experience-in the following way: Nietzsche appeals-as to a counterauthority of ‘Vernunft’-‘to experiences of self-disclosure of a decentered subjectivity, liberated from all constraints of cognition and purposive activity, all imperatives of utility and morality’ (PD, p. 94). It is this Dionysianpicture of dedifferentiation, this Schopenhauerian ‘break-up of the principle of individuation’ which-according to Habermas-forms the very heart of Nietzsche’s speculations about the free social interaction of a plurality of ‘noble wills to power’. This center of an ‘aestheticism beyond good and evil’ is rendered instable, however, by the paradox that it contains (without plausible mediation) two principles which stand in radical opposition to each other: extreme subjectivity as the point of origin of a.11preferences on the one hand, and ‘Entgrenzung’, de-subjectivisation (or annihilation of the subjects complex systems of ‘distance’ and ‘distancing’) on the other. It is thus not only the-often cynical, cruel and rationally unjustifiablegenealogical decomposition of the vocabulary or good and evil into the dichotom!c systems of noble/common and active/reactive which poses problems: Nietzsche’s escape route from modernity looks quite inviable also, if we focus on the paradoxes which are implied in a Dionysian theory of power that nourishes the hope in a de-differentiation of the very subjectivity which is presuppos,ed in the constitution of a radically subjectivised ‘locus’ of all ‘noble’ preferences.
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CAN WE OVERCOME THE INCONSISTENCY OF NIETZSCHE’S AESTHETICISM IF WE INTERPRET THE ‘WILL TO POWER’ AS OUR WILL TO BECOME ‘THE POETS OF OUR LIFE’? (NEHAMAS VERSUS HABERMAS) In Habermas’s view Nietzsche’s writings mark undubitably a ‘turning point’ for the worse: Nietzsche is seen as the philosopher who first introduced a style of thinking into contemporary discourse which makes almost no effort to avoid the paradox state of a radical, self-referential critique that argues for a devaluation of aN truth- and value-related arguments. According to Habermas, Nietzsche’s dangerous intellectual negligence (which is accompanied by a seductive rhetoric) was adopted and imitated by much of French and American ‘postmodern’ writing. Habermas’s negative assessment of Nietzsche could claim further support from the analyses of Nietzsche’s aesthetical deconstruction of morality that were carried out by Arthur Danto (Nietzsche as Philosopher, 1965), and from a recent remark about Nietzsche by Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History, 1981). Their criticisms were summed up in four points in Alexander Nehamas’s book: First, Nietzsche’s views on morality are vague, since they make it ‘persistently difficult to describe in positive terms the character of the “new philosopher” he Secondly, if we substract the negative rhetoric, Nietzsche’s envisages’. suggestions turn out to be rather banal. But even worse: on closer logical scrutinising it looks as if Nietzsche’s position were also, thirdly, inconsistent with his own perspectivist view of knowledge, and, finally, even internally incoherent (N, p. 223). As Putnam writes: ‘Many thinkers have fallen into Nietzsche’s error of telling us that they had a better morality than the entire tradition’. But, so Nehamas with Putnam: ‘If morality is to be rejected in its entirety, then it seems that nothing that formerly belonged to it can be salvaged and used to construct a better system instead’ (N, p. 223). At this point we have to raise the question, however, whether it really is the case that Nietzsche’s aestheticism forces us to invent a new, post-moral ‘system’ (or a ‘Theory’ of morality ‘with a big T’)? Do the inconsistencies that Habermas and Putnam point out not disappear swiftly, if we read Nietzsche as an author who merely deconstructsethics and epistemology, and who does not offer positive answers himself? Nehamas hopes to be able to defend Nietzsche’s central intuitions by interpreting him in this way: he thus chooses a defense strategy which closely resembles Richard Rorty’s attempt to find a ‘view above the battle’ in regard to classical philosophical dichotomies.6 Nehamas writes: Nietzsche’s ‘ambitious aim is to undermine the moral tradition. But he is afraid that if he.. . offers a direct alternative to that tradition, he will only succeed in perpetuating it. Yet he cannot ignore it completely, for in that case he will not have provided an attack against it at all’ (N, p. 228). In order to avoid this dilemma Nietzsche introduces an artistic model which suspends all theoretical and practical ‘absolutes’ and focuses instead on negativity, on the creative dissolution of rules. To take a position ‘beyond good and evil’ means, so Nehamas with Nietzsche, that we shall be governed by the desire to become ‘the poets of our life’.’
748
Ludlz,ig Nagl AUTONOMY ‘BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL’? NIETZSCHE’S (EXCESSIVELY RADICALISED) KANTIANISM
Nietzsche’s attempt to aestheticise practice-even if it is fraught with inconsistencies and (as Habermas, Putnam and Danto showed) cannot free itself from extremely dangerous imperatives-nevertheless entails motives which deserve to be exempt from an all too sweeping counterattack against the onesided ‘enlightenment bashing’ of postmodern discourse: in his critique of morality Nietzsche emphasises a vision of practical se/f-creation the Enlightenment-related core of which is easily overlooked due to Nietzsche’s fullblown rhetoric against all moral vocabularies. One could pointedly say that the center of Nietzsche’s ‘immoralism’ is an (excessively radicalised) version of Kant’s ‘autonomy’, situated in an artistically redesigned Leibnizian world: the creative ‘individual.. . which today.. , still has to be made possible’, so Nietzsche in it is an Twilight of Idols,’ is the one that ‘is rich in internal oppositions’;9 individual that breaks the rules (of heteronomy. of unreflected customs, as Kant might say) and reorganises his life according to selfinvented ideas that are made compatible in a unique way. It is this emphasis on the creative side of a subjects self-production which from Kant onwards formed the very core of any ‘modern’ notion of practice; as Kant puts it in Foundations of the Metaphysisics of Morals: it exclusively is the law that we impose upon ourselves which defines our ‘duty’.‘O which Nietzsche’s excessive attacks on “the great Chinese of Konigsberg presuppose an all-too narrow, obedience-centered reconstruction/deconstruction of Kant’s concept of ‘Pflicht’, tends to detract the readers attention from the more obvious parallels between the central idea of Kant’s ‘autonomous’ ethics, creativity, and Nietzsches ‘immoralistic’ ethical aestheticism. Nehamas occasionally mentions the thought-provoking fusion of monadological traits, and of creativity-centered motives, in Nietzsche: ‘A true individual is precisely one who is different from the rest of the world, and there is no formula, no set of rules.. . that we can follow in order to become, as Nietzsche wants us to become, unique.. . . To be beyond good and evil is to combine all one’s features and qualities, whatever their traditional moral value, into a controlled and coherent whole’ (N, p. 225 ff.). It certainly is true-and it makes an enormous difference-that Kant’s concept of autonomy is much more carefully and responsibly constructed with regard to the crucial question of a social compatibility of all non-heteronomous maxims, than this is the case in Nietzsche’s highly polemical ‘aesthetic immoralism’ which restricts compatibility merely to a personal level. ‘I However, in view of some of the duller contemporary reconstructions (or rather: distortions) of Kant’s ‘practical reason’ (that either lead to neo-Kantion or to analytic theories of-and games with-mainly the calculutory parts of ‘universalisability’) Nietzsche’s ethically charged antimoral aestheticism dramatically re-emphasises that in all post-traditional interpretations of practice since Kant-if properly understood-the aspect of the individuals inventiveness forms the center of the ‘modern’ impulse to ‘create one’s own individuality’. Even if Nietzsche’s rhetoric is in need of incessant critical attention (as Habermas, Putnam and Danto clearly pointed out), it is hardly convincing to interpret Nietzsche’s thought-which certainly is not free from
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altogether irrationalistic and anti-Enlightenment. self-contradiction-as Nietzsche’s work is deeply ambivalent. In some respects it must, indeed, be read as a ‘turning point’ from emancipated reason to dubious forms of regression (as Habermas suggests). But Nietzsche-as f.i. the lasting interest in his ‘opus’ by authors like Sigmund Freud and Thomas Mann shows-is also a radical heir to the impulse of insubordination that constitutes modernity, and not predominantly Enlightenment’s stubborn and determined foe. Whether this adds to the attractiveness of his thought, or whether it forces us to be even more cautious when we try to evaluate his writings, depends on our overall assessment of the merits (and the deep and dark shadows) of those modern ideas that-for better or worse-constitute the depth structure of our present age.
Ludwig
Nag1
Institut fiir Philosophie der Universi’tiit Wien
NOTES 1. Jiirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press, 1985) (quoted as PD). See especially Chapter IV, ‘The Entry into Postmodernity: Nietzsche as a Turning Point’, pp. 85-105. 2. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche, L&e as Literature (Harvard: University Press, 1985) (quoted as N). 3. That Nietzsche’s ‘pragmatism’ is rather specific, and not as close to core assumptions of American Pragmatism as sometimes thought, was recently shown by Nehamas (N, pp. 52-54). 4. Nietzsche, Friedrich Beyond GoodandEvil, trans. W. Kaufmann(New York: Vintage Press, 1966), p. 212. 5. Ibid., p. 265. 6. For this ‘post-analytical’ pattern of argumentation see R. Rorty ‘Beyond Realism and Anti-Realism’ in Wo steht die AnaIytische Philosophie heute? eds L. Nag1 and R. Heinrich (Wien/Miinchen: Oldenbourg, 1986), pp. 103-115. 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Press, 1974), p. 229. 8. Trans. W. Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1954), Section IX, No 41. 9. Ibid., Section V, No 3. 10. One of the reasons why we feel ‘reverence for the law’ is, so Kant, that the law ‘considered as self-imposed is a consequence of our will’ [Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H.J. Paton (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1964), p. 69 footnote]. 11. If this essential difference is repressed (as was the case in Martin Heideggers assessment of the relationship between Nietzsche’s and Kant’s thought) ‘outrageous’ simplifications do result, as K.O. Ape1 pointed out recently: Heidegger, so Apel, committed the ‘Ungeheuerlichkeit, in Nietzsches “Willen zur Macht” die konsequente Weiterentwicklung der kantischen Konzeption des transzendentalen Subjekts zu sehen, in dem doch immerhin die universale, intersubjektive Konsensfahigkeit von Giiltigkeitsanspruchen formal antizipiert ist.’ [K.O. Ape1 ‘Zurtick zur Normalitat? Oder konnen wir aus der nationalen Katastrophe etwas Besonders gelernt haben? Das
750
Ludwig Nag1 Problem des (welt-) geschichthchen ijbergangs zur postkonventlonellen Moral in spezifisch deutscher Sicht’, in Zerstiirung des moralischen Selbstbewufitsteins: Chance oder Gefiihrdung? Praktische Phdosophie in Deutschlandnach dem Natlonalsozialismus, ed. Forum fiir Philosophie Bad Homburg (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1988), p. 103.1
of European Ideas. Vol m Great Bntam
I I, pp
743-750,
0191-659909 $3 00 + 0 00 Pergamon Press plc
1989
THE ENLIGHTENMENT-A STRANDED PROJECT? HABERMAS ON NIETZSCHE AS A ‘TURNING POINT’ TO POSTMODERNITY LUDWIG NAGL* In his recent book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Jiirgen Habermas examines at some length Nietzsche’s influence on ‘postmodern’ thought.’ He shows in which way Nietzsche’s aesthetic mode of world interpretation became of central importance for Heidegger’s and Derrida’s critique of the Enlightenment, and for Bataille’s and Foucault’s attempts to deconstruct reason. Nietzsche’s ‘perspectivism’, and his ‘genealogical’ subversion of the language of ‘good and evil’ by means of a theory of power, introduce into contemporary discourse, so Habermas, the seductive idea of an ‘unmasking critique of reason that sets itself outside the horizon of reason’ (PD, p. 96). In Habermas’s view Nietzsche’s work is ridden by methodological paradoxes: his aphoristic style of thought differs radically from the more consistent forms of philosophical self-criticism which accompanied modernity since its beginning. Nietzsche’s rhetoric tries to undermine all attempts to stablise (by resort to ‘Vernunft’) the incipient ‘dialectic of enlightenment’: he is especially hostile to Kant’s ‘practical reason’, and to Hegel’s idea of reconciling the fragmented modern reality by dialectical speculation. Habermas tries to show that Nietzsche’s vision of an aesthetic ‘escape route from modernity’ (PD, p. 94) entails dangerous simplifications: the complexity of modern societies-which goes hand in hand with its structural tensionsforbids, as Habermas argues, all one-dimensional solutions. For him, modernity ultimately rests on the interplay of a plurality of value spheres: Kant’s three ‘Critiques’ anticipated in a philosophical way the modern institutionalisation of clearly separated expert cultures, which deal with science, law and taste, and which have different learning modes that allow for a continuous re-evaluation of traditional beliefs and practices. It is this explosion of the need for ‘justifiable’ knowledge claims, for ‘rational’ practical rules, and for ‘exemplary’ aesthetical experiences, which creates tensions in modernity between the newly created ‘systems’ and traditional ‘lifeworlds’ on the one hand, and-immanently-between the various fields of differentiated value spheres themselves on the other. The way in which the plural claim systems interact cannot be stabilised once and for all but has the tendency to become imbalanced: there always exists a possibility that one of the value domains is pushed into predominance and thus starts to marginalise the other spheres of modern experience: this tendency becomes manifest in those contemporary world views that seek to ‘scientise’, to ‘moralise’, or to ‘aesthetisise’ our modern world: all such simplifications of our complex post*Institut fiir Philosophie Stock, Austria.
der Universitlt
Wien,
1010 Wien, UniversitltsstraDe
7, 2.
743
744
Ludwig Nagf
Enlightenment reality are dangerous, as Habermas shows: there is no way back to a less reflective (neo-substantialistically integrated) premodern identity once the learning process of enlightenment has started. The inner tensions between ‘system’ and ‘lifeworld’ can neither be overcome in a regressive recourse to archaic origins, nor by nourishing hopes in utopian myths as the ‘other of reason’. Habermas, on the very contrary, insists ‘that enlightenment can only make good its deficits by radicalised enlightenment’ (PD, 84). In his view, therefore, Nietzsche’s violent attacks on two ofthe value spheres that constitute modernity, on truth-related scientific knowledge claims, and on the universalism ofpractical reason, mark a dangerous ‘turning point’ insofar as these attacks seek to undermine the onereal‘turning point’ of our epoch: the turn, it is, that is based on the Enlightenment’s belief that reason in the long run can overcome not only those social habits and institutions that in its light appear as unjust, but that it additionally can compensate for those deficits which result from the disintegrative processes of rationalisation itself. The ambiguous rhetoric, and the false and vicious political goals that occured in the aftermath of what Habermas sees as Nietzsche’s attempt to ‘bid farewell to the dialectic of enlightenment’ (PD, p. 86), makes him very suspicious about all postmodern discourses that receive central impulses from Nietzsche’s aesthetically ‘totalised’ world view. In the following we will deal with four related problems: first we try to explain how Habermas criticises Nietzsche’s endeavor to ‘enthrone taste, “the Yes and No of the palate” (PD, p. 96). Secondly some connections of this ‘aesthetic turn’ with Nietzsche’s theory of power and his Dionysian hopes will be analysed. Part three of our paper contrasts Habermas’s interpretation of Nietzsche with the reading of this author by Alexander Nehamas:2 in light of this comparison we finally (4) try to reconstruct one of the motives of Nietzsche’s attack on moral vocabularies, his insistence that is, that the ‘free spirit’ has to invent his individuality rather than to follow costumary (public) rules. We read this thought as an excessively and dangerously radicalised post-Kantian version of autonomy. Our interest in one aspect of this thought implies indirectly a questioning of the marginalisation of individuality which characterises Habermas’s transformation of the essentials of practical, theoretical and aesthetical reason into an inrersubjective ‘discourse theory’. This interest in Nietzsche’s polemical impulses does not weaken, however, our sympathy for the more general aspects of Habermas’s critique of Nietzsche’s (potentially ‘totalising’) aestheticism.
NIETZSCHE’S ENTHRONEMENT OF TASTE: LIBERATION OR REGRESSION? In dealing with the fragmentations of modernity Nietzsche avoids all trust in absolute philosophy as a medium of reconciliation. He stays away not only from Hegel, however, but also from the post-Hegelian, neo-Kantian option to inventively construct a weaker conception of the subject as the point of reference for a theory of modernity. In an ultramodernist turn Nietzsche instead seeks, so Habermas, to escape from modern age by upgrading the sphere of aesthetic experience in ways which far surpasse Schelling’s (and the romantics) trust in the
The Enlightenment-A
745
Stranded Project
reconciling power of art. Nietzsche, SO Habermas, thus becomes ‘the first to conceptualize the attitude of aesthetic modernity before avant-garde consciousness assumed objective shape in the literature, painting and music of the twentieth century’ (PD, p. 122). His experimenting, deconstructive attitude, liberating as it clearly is within the bounds of aesthetic experience proper, becomes reductionist, however, the very instant it gets expanded into a general characterises this deep philosophical account of the world. Habermas ambivalence which is implicit in Nietzsche’s thought, in the following way: ‘The subversive force of aesthetic resistance that would later feed the reflections of Benjamin.. . already arises from the experience in Nietzsche of rebellion against everything normative. It is this same force which neutralises both the morally good and the practically useful’ (PD, p. 123)(Emphasis added, L.N.). Already in his early book The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche proclaimed, so Habermas, a ‘peculiar’ kind of theodizy (PD, 94): that the world can be justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. The peculiarity of this thought results from an antagonistic conjuction: on the one hand it is based on a concept of art that distances ‘Vernunft’ as a medium of constriction, and on the other it continues to employ the (reason-centered) idea of justification. On closer examination this tension threatens to render impossible Nietzsche’s ‘metaphysics for artists’. Why is this so? For one thing, Nietzsche’s ‘perspectivist’ account of the world tries to undermine all truth claims and all claims to goodness: ‘The world appears as a network of distortions and interpretations’, so Habermas about Nietzsche’s Artistenmetaphysik, ‘for which no intuition and no text provides a basis. . . art counts as man’s genuine activity because life itself is based on illusion, deception, optics, the necessity of the perspectival and of error’ (PD, p. 95). Nietzsche seeks to support the ‘aesthetic turn’ by unmasking the semantics of truth claims in a pragmatist manner,3 and by deconstructing the vocabulary of practical reason (‘good’ and ‘evil’)-via his ‘genealogy’ -as a masked vocabulary of (‘noble’ or ‘common’) subject preferences. Secondly, and in contradiction to these thoughts, Nietzsche continues to claim plausibility for his own (aesthetico-deconstructive) description of the world, and he explicitly uses the concept of ‘justification’ as a defining part of his ‘peculiar theodicy’. He thereby employs a notion which-within the frame of reference of his thought-would need a careful reinterpretation: such a reconstruction is nowhere given, however. Habermas exposes this paradox when he writes that Nietzsche, after having enthroned taste, ‘cannot legitimate the criteria of aesthetic judgement that he holds on to’(PD, p. 96). Nietzsche himself seeks to avoid questions concerning the consistency of his ‘aesthetic turn’ by taking recourse to a concept of power which gets attributed the status of a ‘condition of possibility’ for all kinds of truth claims and claims to goodness.
NIETZSCHE’S POWER ANALYSES: TENSIONS BETWEEN A THEORY OF SUBJECTIVE PREFERENCES AND THE DIONYSIAN DE-DIFFERENTIATION OF THE SUBJECT ‘Genealogical’
reflection
and ‘aesthetical’
speculation
are the constitutive
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Ludwig Nag/
components of Nietzsche’s theory of power. They allow him to deal with ‘practical reason’ in two ways: First, Nietzsche attempts to undermine the universal form of practical value claims by showing that they ultimately rest on (more or less conscious) subjective preferences which-if analysed on a deep level-do not allow for a general justification: they are nothing more than expressions of the individuals ‘will’. This genealogical deconstruction makes possible Nietzsche’s second strategy, which is closely linked to his ‘metaphysics for artists’: our motives, so Nietzsche, cannot be ‘evaluated’ by recourse to universal (i.e. external) systems of rules, but can be assessed exclusively with regard to the immanent criteria of the individuals ‘will to power’ itself: they deserve to be esteemed if they do not distort an individuals full self-realisation: ‘Precisely this shall be called greatness: being capable of being as manifold as whole, as ample as fu11.‘4 This aesthetico-monadic concept of Nietzsche’s ‘will’-interesting as it is in ways which will be pointed out later (section 4)-marginalises, however,the core social problem: how to coordinate in a satisfactory way the multiplicity of divergent ‘wills to power’. This question is either subject to deliberately cynical and rationally irreconstructible comments in Nietzsche (as f.i. in Beyond GoodandEviZ where he writes: ‘Egoism belongs to the nature of a noble soul-1 mean that to beings such as “we are” other beings must be subordinate by nature and have to sacrifice themselves.‘S Or it is displaced from practical discourse altogether, and resituated in an artistic speculation which seeks to provide metaphysical foundations for the genealogical attack: Nietzsche’s aestheticism, by nourishing the hope for a post-Christian implementation of a Dionysian world, longs thus for an extra rational mode of ‘justification’. Habermas characterises the ‘anti-utopian’ image of a futurewhich is envisaged by Nietzsche as the liberating return of an archaic form of world experience-in the following way: Nietzsche appeals-as to a counterauthority of ‘Vernunft’-‘to experiences of self-disclosure of a decentered subjectivity, liberated from all constraints of cognition and purposive activity, all imperatives of utility and morality’ (PD, p. 94). It is this Dionysianpicture of dedifferentiation, this Schopenhauerian ‘break-up of the principle of individuation’ which-according to Habermas-forms the very heart of Nietzsche’s speculations about the free social interaction of a plurality of ‘noble wills to power’. This center of an ‘aestheticism beyond good and evil’ is rendered instable, however, by the paradox that it contains (without plausible mediation) two principles which stand in radical opposition to each other: extreme subjectivity as the point of origin of a.11preferences on the one hand, and ‘Entgrenzung’, de-subjectivisation (or annihilation of the subjects complex systems of ‘distance’ and ‘distancing’) on the other. It is thus not only the-often cynical, cruel and rationally unjustifiablegenealogical decomposition of the vocabulary or good and evil into the dichotom!c systems of noble/common and active/reactive which poses problems: Nietzsche’s escape route from modernity looks quite inviable also, if we focus on the paradoxes which are implied in a Dionysian theory of power that nourishes the hope in a de-differentiation of the very subjectivity which is presuppos,ed in the constitution of a radically subjectivised ‘locus’ of all ‘noble’ preferences.
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CAN WE OVERCOME THE INCONSISTENCY OF NIETZSCHE’S AESTHETICISM IF WE INTERPRET THE ‘WILL TO POWER’ AS OUR WILL TO BECOME ‘THE POETS OF OUR LIFE’? (NEHAMAS VERSUS HABERMAS) In Habermas’s view Nietzsche’s writings mark undubitably a ‘turning point’ for the worse: Nietzsche is seen as the philosopher who first introduced a style of thinking into contemporary discourse which makes almost no effort to avoid the paradox state of a radical, self-referential critique that argues for a devaluation of aN truth- and value-related arguments. According to Habermas, Nietzsche’s dangerous intellectual negligence (which is accompanied by a seductive rhetoric) was adopted and imitated by much of French and American ‘postmodern’ writing. Habermas’s negative assessment of Nietzsche could claim further support from the analyses of Nietzsche’s aesthetical deconstruction of morality that were carried out by Arthur Danto (Nietzsche as Philosopher, 1965), and from a recent remark about Nietzsche by Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History, 1981). Their criticisms were summed up in four points in Alexander Nehamas’s book: First, Nietzsche’s views on morality are vague, since they make it ‘persistently difficult to describe in positive terms the character of the “new philosopher” he Secondly, if we substract the negative rhetoric, Nietzsche’s envisages’. suggestions turn out to be rather banal. But even worse: on closer logical scrutinising it looks as if Nietzsche’s position were also, thirdly, inconsistent with his own perspectivist view of knowledge, and, finally, even internally incoherent (N, p. 223). As Putnam writes: ‘Many thinkers have fallen into Nietzsche’s error of telling us that they had a better morality than the entire tradition’. But, so Nehamas with Putnam: ‘If morality is to be rejected in its entirety, then it seems that nothing that formerly belonged to it can be salvaged and used to construct a better system instead’ (N, p. 223). At this point we have to raise the question, however, whether it really is the case that Nietzsche’s aestheticism forces us to invent a new, post-moral ‘system’ (or a ‘Theory’ of morality ‘with a big T’)? Do the inconsistencies that Habermas and Putnam point out not disappear swiftly, if we read Nietzsche as an author who merely deconstructsethics and epistemology, and who does not offer positive answers himself? Nehamas hopes to be able to defend Nietzsche’s central intuitions by interpreting him in this way: he thus chooses a defense strategy which closely resembles Richard Rorty’s attempt to find a ‘view above the battle’ in regard to classical philosophical dichotomies.6 Nehamas writes: Nietzsche’s ‘ambitious aim is to undermine the moral tradition. But he is afraid that if he.. . offers a direct alternative to that tradition, he will only succeed in perpetuating it. Yet he cannot ignore it completely, for in that case he will not have provided an attack against it at all’ (N, p. 228). In order to avoid this dilemma Nietzsche introduces an artistic model which suspends all theoretical and practical ‘absolutes’ and focuses instead on negativity, on the creative dissolution of rules. To take a position ‘beyond good and evil’ means, so Nehamas with Nietzsche, that we shall be governed by the desire to become ‘the poets of our life’.’
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Ludlz,ig Nagl AUTONOMY ‘BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL’? NIETZSCHE’S (EXCESSIVELY RADICALISED) KANTIANISM
Nietzsche’s attempt to aestheticise practice-even if it is fraught with inconsistencies and (as Habermas, Putnam and Danto showed) cannot free itself from extremely dangerous imperatives-nevertheless entails motives which deserve to be exempt from an all too sweeping counterattack against the onesided ‘enlightenment bashing’ of postmodern discourse: in his critique of morality Nietzsche emphasises a vision of practical se/f-creation the Enlightenment-related core of which is easily overlooked due to Nietzsche’s fullblown rhetoric against all moral vocabularies. One could pointedly say that the center of Nietzsche’s ‘immoralism’ is an (excessively radicalised) version of Kant’s ‘autonomy’, situated in an artistically redesigned Leibnizian world: the creative ‘individual.. . which today.. , still has to be made possible’, so Nietzsche in it is an Twilight of Idols,’ is the one that ‘is rich in internal oppositions’;9 individual that breaks the rules (of heteronomy. of unreflected customs, as Kant might say) and reorganises his life according to selfinvented ideas that are made compatible in a unique way. It is this emphasis on the creative side of a subjects self-production which from Kant onwards formed the very core of any ‘modern’ notion of practice; as Kant puts it in Foundations of the Metaphysisics of Morals: it exclusively is the law that we impose upon ourselves which defines our ‘duty’.‘O which Nietzsche’s excessive attacks on “the great Chinese of Konigsberg presuppose an all-too narrow, obedience-centered reconstruction/deconstruction of Kant’s concept of ‘Pflicht’, tends to detract the readers attention from the more obvious parallels between the central idea of Kant’s ‘autonomous’ ethics, creativity, and Nietzsches ‘immoralistic’ ethical aestheticism. Nehamas occasionally mentions the thought-provoking fusion of monadological traits, and of creativity-centered motives, in Nietzsche: ‘A true individual is precisely one who is different from the rest of the world, and there is no formula, no set of rules.. . that we can follow in order to become, as Nietzsche wants us to become, unique.. . . To be beyond good and evil is to combine all one’s features and qualities, whatever their traditional moral value, into a controlled and coherent whole’ (N, p. 225 ff.). It certainly is true-and it makes an enormous difference-that Kant’s concept of autonomy is much more carefully and responsibly constructed with regard to the crucial question of a social compatibility of all non-heteronomous maxims, than this is the case in Nietzsche’s highly polemical ‘aesthetic immoralism’ which restricts compatibility merely to a personal level. ‘I However, in view of some of the duller contemporary reconstructions (or rather: distortions) of Kant’s ‘practical reason’ (that either lead to neo-Kantion or to analytic theories of-and games with-mainly the calculutory parts of ‘universalisability’) Nietzsche’s ethically charged antimoral aestheticism dramatically re-emphasises that in all post-traditional interpretations of practice since Kant-if properly understood-the aspect of the individuals inventiveness forms the center of the ‘modern’ impulse to ‘create one’s own individuality’. Even if Nietzsche’s rhetoric is in need of incessant critical attention (as Habermas, Putnam and Danto clearly pointed out), it is hardly convincing to interpret Nietzsche’s thought-which certainly is not free from
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altogether irrationalistic and anti-Enlightenment. self-contradiction-as Nietzsche’s work is deeply ambivalent. In some respects it must, indeed, be read as a ‘turning point’ from emancipated reason to dubious forms of regression (as Habermas suggests). But Nietzsche-as f.i. the lasting interest in his ‘opus’ by authors like Sigmund Freud and Thomas Mann shows-is also a radical heir to the impulse of insubordination that constitutes modernity, and not predominantly Enlightenment’s stubborn and determined foe. Whether this adds to the attractiveness of his thought, or whether it forces us to be even more cautious when we try to evaluate his writings, depends on our overall assessment of the merits (and the deep and dark shadows) of those modern ideas that-for better or worse-constitute the depth structure of our present age.
Ludwig
Nag1
Institut fiir Philosophie der Universi’tiit Wien
NOTES 1. Jiirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press, 1985) (quoted as PD). See especially Chapter IV, ‘The Entry into Postmodernity: Nietzsche as a Turning Point’, pp. 85-105. 2. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche, L&e as Literature (Harvard: University Press, 1985) (quoted as N). 3. That Nietzsche’s ‘pragmatism’ is rather specific, and not as close to core assumptions of American Pragmatism as sometimes thought, was recently shown by Nehamas (N, pp. 52-54). 4. Nietzsche, Friedrich Beyond GoodandEvil, trans. W. Kaufmann(New York: Vintage Press, 1966), p. 212. 5. Ibid., p. 265. 6. For this ‘post-analytical’ pattern of argumentation see R. Rorty ‘Beyond Realism and Anti-Realism’ in Wo steht die AnaIytische Philosophie heute? eds L. Nag1 and R. Heinrich (Wien/Miinchen: Oldenbourg, 1986), pp. 103-115. 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Press, 1974), p. 229. 8. Trans. W. Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1954), Section IX, No 41. 9. Ibid., Section V, No 3. 10. One of the reasons why we feel ‘reverence for the law’ is, so Kant, that the law ‘considered as self-imposed is a consequence of our will’ [Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H.J. Paton (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1964), p. 69 footnote]. 11. If this essential difference is repressed (as was the case in Martin Heideggers assessment of the relationship between Nietzsche’s and Kant’s thought) ‘outrageous’ simplifications do result, as K.O. Ape1 pointed out recently: Heidegger, so Apel, committed the ‘Ungeheuerlichkeit, in Nietzsches “Willen zur Macht” die konsequente Weiterentwicklung der kantischen Konzeption des transzendentalen Subjekts zu sehen, in dem doch immerhin die universale, intersubjektive Konsensfahigkeit von Giiltigkeitsanspruchen formal antizipiert ist.’ [K.O. Ape1 ‘Zurtick zur Normalitat? Oder konnen wir aus der nationalen Katastrophe etwas Besonders gelernt haben? Das
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Ludwig Nag1 Problem des (welt-) geschichthchen ijbergangs zur postkonventlonellen Moral in spezifisch deutscher Sicht’, in Zerstiirung des moralischen Selbstbewufitsteins: Chance oder Gefiihrdung? Praktische Phdosophie in Deutschlandnach dem Natlonalsozialismus, ed. Forum fiir Philosophie Bad Homburg (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1988), p. 103.1