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Nietzsche For and Against the Enlightenment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 December 2008

Graeme Garrard
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Abstract

This essay explores Nietzsche's attitude to the Enlightenment, which the author argues underwent a major reversal between his so-called middle works and his later writings. The author examines the nature of this change and considers some of the reasons behind it. In the process, some of Nietzsche's “postmodern” admirers are taken to task for appropriating his criticisms of the Enlightenment without acknowledging his ambivalence toward it. Furthermore, the radical change in Nietzsche's view of the Enlightenment is taken as evidence of the periodization of his thought, which some prominent Nietzsche scholars (e.g. Walter Kaufmann) have disputed.

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Type
Research Article
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The Review of Politics , Volume 70 , Issue 4 , Fall 2008, pp. 595 - 608
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2008

Introduction

If there is a thinker one would expect more than any other to have come out all guns blazing against the Enlightenment, it is Friedrich Nietzsche, the Dionysian “prophet of extremity” who has given inspiration to generations of opponents of modernity, progress, reason, and morality. This is most apparent in our time in the postmodern appropriation of Nietzsche; many of his admirers in the second half of the twentieth century have been very critical of the Enlightenment, and this has disposed them to see Nietzsche as an ally in their struggle against “metanarratives” such as the Enlightenment.Footnote 1 As one writer explains it: “Many postmodernist philosophers also felt that they were presiding over the final disintegration of the European Enlightenment project, so confidently predicted by Nietzsche.”Footnote 2

Yet things are not as straightforward as they may seem at first glance. Nietzsche had some difficulty knowing what to do with the Enlightenment in his epic schema of history and ended up reversing his position on it. He initially took his stand with the Enlightenment against the French Revolution, which he at first viewed as its antithesis. However, Nietzsche later changed his stance entirely, adopting the much more conventional view found among many liberals and conservatives that the Enlightenment and the Revolution were linked in some basic way. I call this latter view the “continuity thesis” of the eighteenth century—the belief that the Enlightenment and the Revolution were fundamentally connected, as cause and effect, for example, or as crime and punishment. Despite his volte face on the Enlightenment, Nietzsche always remained a consistent admirer of seventeenth-century French culture and an unbending opponent of the French Revolution. But he showed no such consistency in his treatment of the grey zone of the Enlightenment that lay between these two fixed points in the ideological topography of his thought. Initially, Nietzsche assimilated the Enlightenment to the aristocratic spirit of his beloved seventeenth-century France, only to repudiate this view with the same vehemence with which he had previously championed it, now depicting the Enlightenment as continuous with the French Revolution that restored the slave morality of Christianity that Nietzsche consistently abominated. Ironically, as Nietzsche's views became more radical from the middle of the 1880s, his attitude toward the relationship between the Enlightenment and the Revolution became much more conventional with his embrace of the traditional continuity thesis.

In what follows, my interest is primarily in Nietzsche's evolving attitude to the historical period we now call the Enlightenment in English (die Aufklärung in German), rather than to the general concept of enlightenment (Aufklärung).Footnote 3 I take the Enlightenment (definite article, capital “E”) to be one particular historical instantiation of the general idea of enlightenment, which has taken many forms and had many interpretations throughout history and across cultures. Nietzsche used both terms. I will focus on his use of the historical term die Aufklärung, by which he meant the eighteenth-century movement of ideas in France most commonly associated with thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau.Footnote 4 His conception of the Enlightenment during his “middle period” was elitist and Francocentric. Although he ultimately turned against this historical movement in his later work, when he came to associate it with the base values and levelling outlook represented by the French Revolution, he did not reject “enlightenment” as such. Indeed, he always regarded his own works as rare sources of enlightenment for those few, brave souls who were equipped to receive it. In the end, he came to see the Enlightenment as not a form of real enlightenment at all.

Nietzsche: Child of the Enlightenment

Many Nietzsche scholars now distinguish between his middle works—Human, All Too Human (1878), “Assorted Opinions and Maxims” (1879), “The Wanderer and His Shadow” (1880), Daybreak (1881), and The Gay Science (1882)—and his later writings—Zarathustra (1883–1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), The Genealogy of Morals (1887), Ecce Homo (written 1888, published 1908), Twilight of the Idols (1889), and the Nachlass, unfinished notes that were published posthumously.Footnote 5 But this conventional division is disputed, not least by the eminent Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann. In his seminal study Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950), he writes:

[Richard] Oehler, however, has suggested—and most of the literature has followed him—that Nietzsche's writings are to be divided into three stages of which the second, with its enlightened views, represents a temporary departure from true Nietzscheanism. This untenable dogma was intended to explain away Nietzsche's break with Wagner, his repudiation of nationalism and racism, and his vision of the “Good European.” All the ideals of Nietzsche's so-called “middle period,” however, can also be found in his later writings and actually receive their most extreme formulation in the last works of 1888. State worship, for example, is denounced in the essay on Schopenhauer in the “early” period; in the aphorisms of the “middle” period; then, even more vehemently, in the chapter “On the New Idol” in Zarathustra; and finally in Götzen-Dämmerung and Ecce Homo. Just as persistent are his antiracism, his appreciation of the Enlightenment—and his admiration for Socrates.Footnote 6

So for Kaufmann, Nietzsche remained consistently committed to the Enlightenment, just as for many postmodernists he is simply its enemy. For both, there is a “single, unchanging Nietzsche,” at least on the subject of the Enlightenment.Footnote 7 Neither position allows for the very abrupt change of heart he underwent in his attitude towards the eighteenth century, itself symptomatic of a broader shift in his overall outlook. Kaufmann's dismissal of the “middle/late” division in Nietzsche's works as mere “dogma” belies the very striking reversal in his view of the Enlightenment, from enthusiastically pro to stridently anti. Initially, Nietzsche sharply opposed the Enlightenment to the French Revolution, taking his stand with the former. In this epic clash, he stood foursquare behind the Enlightenment and called for it to be rescued from the Revolutionary cause with which it had become erroneously and disastrously associated. In fact, as Nietzsche later claimed, the “semi-insanity, histrionicism, bestial cruelty, voluptuousness, and especially sentimentality and self-intoxication, which taken together constitutes the actual substance of the Revolution” actually set the Enlightenment on its head.Footnote 8

During these “middle” years, Nietzsche's thought underwent a major transformation corresponding to dramatic changes in his life. The late 1870s and early 1880s was a period of transition to his mature works, starting with Thus Spoke Zarathustra, published between 1882 and 1885. Nietzsche abandoned his academic career as Professor of Classical Philology at Basel University, from which he resigned in 1879, and was crippled by chronic and debilitating physical and mental ailments that would torment him until the full onset of insanity in 1889, from which he never recovered. Nietzsche also broke with his hero Richard Wagner at this time, partly to preserve his own independence and partly from revulsion at his mentor's nationalism, anti-Semitism and embrace of Christianity in his opera Parsifal (premiered at Bayreuth in 1882) in which a disgusted Nietzsche smelled “the spirit of the Counter-Reformation.” In reaction to the Romantic Bayreuth cult to which Nietzsche had subscribed until then, the writings of his “middle period” represent a turn “from German romanticism to the French enlightenment, and from Wagner to independence,” as he felt his way to his own philosophy.Footnote 9 Nietzsche's embrace of the Enlightenment at this stage was a key aspect of his rejection of Wagnerian Romanticism, and was a necessary step in the formation of his own, distinctive intellectual identity, which he had to assert against “the Master.” He believed that philosophy is always “a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.”Footnote 10 This is apparent in his treatment of the Enlightenment, which he picked up during his “middle” years and used as a weapon to help free himself from what he came to see as just another herd mentality, only to turn violently against it just as quickly in his later works when it had served this intellectual purpose. This in no way implies that his “use” of the Enlightenment was at all disingenuous or ironic.

In his middle period works, Nietzsche depicts the Enlightenment as a continuation of the golden age of seventeenth-century France, which he saw as an aristocratic civilization worthy of the highest admiration and a rare exception to the general decline and decadence of modern European culture. It was a period in which naturally “higher types” were still sovereign over “the herd” and an elevating culture of nobility was predominant. This view is most apparent in Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human, the first edition of which he dedicated to Voltaire, “one of the greatest liberators of the human spirit.”Footnote 11 It is an acerbic book in the style of Voltaire in which the French rather than the Germans are depicted as the true modern heirs of ancient Greek culture and the new home of Vornehm (natural nobility). As such, it is a work that seems designed to annoy the nationalistic Wagner and his Bayreuth cult. Nietzsche enthusiastically commends the Enlightenment for its attacks on Christianity and its elitist disdain for la canaille, as Voltaire sometimes contemptuously referred to the masses.Footnote 12 At this time, the Enlightenment was an irresistible weapon that Nietzsche used to “philosophize with a hammer” against his enemy du jour—Wagner's Christianized Romanticism.

For Nietzsche, the Enlightenment was a French affair. With the exception of Kant, whom he viewed as an enemy of the Enlightenment at this time, he completely ignores the German Aufklärung in his attacks on the eighteenth century, which he looked upon as essentially French, unlike the nineteenth century, which he regarded as basically German. Nietzsche's later turn against the Enlightenment was therefore not motivated by either post-1870 German nationalism, which he attacked with a passionate intensity, or Francophobia, since he was a consistent admirer of the French for their wit, aristocratic sense of style, and worldly savoir vivre, with much to teach other Europeans, above all his vulgar compatriots, as he viewed them.

Although Nietzsche does make some critical comments on the Enlightenment during this “middle” period, they are few and relatively minor. In Human, All Too Human, for example, he quibbles that “in the period of the Enlightenment [In der Periode der Aufklärung] the significance of religion was not adequately appreciated,” just as in the reaction that followed it religion was appreciated much too highly.Footnote 13 Such a criticism amounts to praising the Enlightenment with faint damns. And in his next book, Daybreak, Nietzsche remarks in passing that truth by itself is utterly powerless, “whatever flatterers of the Enlightenment may be accustomed to say to the contrary!”Footnote 14 He also depicts Germany as so fundamentally hostile to the Enlightenment—for him a French phenomenon—that even its natural scientists “paid homage to romanticism and had renounced the spirit of the Enlightenment [dem Geiste der Aufklärung abgeschworen hatten].”Footnote 15 As a consequence, a “cult of feeling” replaced the Enlightenment's “cult of reason” in Germany for the Francophile Nietzsche. Fortunately, he thought, the very spirits that the Germans invoked in the name of Counter-Enlightenment obscurantism and reaction actually thwarted their intentions to the benefit of “that very Enlightenment [ebenjener Aufklärung] against which they were first conjured up.”Footnote 16 As in Human, All Too Human, he concludes that it is “the Enlightenment we must now carry further forward.”Footnote 17

In The Gay Science, the last major work of Nietzsche's “middle period,” he claims that Christianity unintentionally “made a great contribution to enlightenment [einen grossen Beitrag zur Aufklärung],”Footnote 18 even though he argues elsewhere that the “growth of the Enlightenment [die wachsende Aufklärung] undermined the dogmas of religion and inspired a fundamental distrust of them.”Footnote 19 This inadvertent, self-defeating Christian promotion of enlightenment was caused by the moral skepticism it released when it sought to destroy other faiths. Fortunately, Nietzsche thought, the “worm” of Christian skepticism eventually spread “to all religious states and processes,” eventually undermining Christianity itself and thereby promoting secular enlightenment in the eighteenth century.Footnote 20 He here associates the Enlightenment with a healthy skepticism that is actually supportive of powerful institutions, such as the medieval church, even if it was fatal to the content of Christian belief. Nietzsche had earlier expressed his grudging admiration for the strength, tactical skill, and self-discipline of the Jesuits, whose methods and outlook “we children of the Enlightenment [wir Aukgeklärten]” would do well to imitate.Footnote 21

Nietzsche viewed the French Revolution during these years as a Counter-Enlightenment movement, a violent explosion of repressed Christian ressentiment that overwhelmed and destroyed the last flowering of the noble, skeptical culture in Europe in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France.Footnote 22 It was essentially a secularization of the slave morality of Christianity, despite the deceptive anti-Christian mask that the Revolutionaries chose to wear.Footnote 23 The moral ends of the Revolution—liberty, equality and fraternity—are for Nietzsche the principles of the herd no less than Christian morality is. For Nietzsche, the French Revolution is “the last great slave revolt”Footnote 24 and “the daughter and continuation of Christianity—its instincts are against caste, against the noble, against the last privilege.”Footnote 25 In Human, All Too Human, he argues that the French Revolutionaries, inspired by the utopian dreams of “political and social fantasists” such as Rousseau, undertook “a revolutionary overturning of all social orders” in the naïve belief that this would liberate the supposed natural goodness of human beings from corrupt and repressive social and political institutions and practices. In reality, it merely brought about “the resurrection of the most savage energies in the shape of the long-buried dreadfulness and excesses of the most distant ages.”Footnote 26 It was not Voltaire's moderate and skeptical nature but the “passionate follies and half-lies” of his arch-enemy Rousseau that called forth the destructive force of the Terror. It was Rousseau who diverted the Enlightenment in a fanatical direction, leading to revolution; otherwise, the eighteenth century would have ended on a tranquil note, rather than in a nihilistic fury of destruction. Nietzsche concludes by noting that the revolutionary spirit “has for a long time banished the spirit of the Enlightenment [der Geist der Aufklärung] and of progressive evolution: let us see—each of us within himself—whether it is possible to call it back!”Footnote 27

[T]he Enlightenment [die Aufklärung], 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 been content to address itself only to the individual: so that it would have transformed the customs and institutions of nations only very slowly. Now, however, tied to a violent and impulsive companion, the Enlightenment itself became violent and impulsive. Its perilousness has thereby become almost greater than the liberating illumination it brought to the great revolutionary movement. He who grasps this will also know out of what compound it has to be extracted, of what impurity it has to be cleansed: so as then to continue the work of the Enlightenment in himself, and to strangle the Revolution at birth, to make it not happen.Footnote 28

This is as complete a rejection of the “continuity thesis” as it is possible to find, one that Nietzsche would soon utterly disown when he turned violently against the Enlightenment in his later works. It is a very unorthodox view, as both those who supported the Revolution and those who opposed it agreed in seeing it as in some way continuous with the Enlightenment.

As Nietzsche saw it, the only good that came out of the French Revolution was Napoleon, who embodied the elitist ideals of antiquity in modern garb. In that sense, he was closer to the Enlightenment than he was to the Revolution. The latter created Napoleon, who then devoured it. He was in the aristocratic tradition of the French and Italian Renaissance, a descendant of Cesare Borgia, whom Nietzsche esteemed, rather than an heir to Rousseau, whose embittered and resentful personality led him and his Revolutionary epigones to call for the overthrow of everything that made early modern France great. Against the Revolutionaries' calls for “priority for the majority” Nietzsche interpreted Napoleon as the herald of a higher path whose “enchanting” counter-slogan was “priority to the few.”Footnote 29

Even when Nietzsche was a partisan of the Enlightenment (as he understood it) during his middle period, he was violently hostile to Kant, who stood in his “great divide” with Rousseau and the French Revolution against Voltaire and the Enlightenment. This is because he was, for Nietzsche, an essentially religious man, with a fanatic's temperament, who had been “bitten by the moral tarantula Rousseau,” as a consequence of which he came to harbor in his soul “the idea of that moral fanaticism whose executor another disciple of Rousseau felt and confessed himself to be, namely Robespierre, ‘de fonder sur la terre l'empire de la sagesse, de la justice et de la vertu’ [to establish the empire of wisdom, justice and virtue on earth].”Footnote 30 This view is echoed often in Nietzsche's later works as well, such as the Nachlass, in which Kant is derided as a “moral fanatic à la Rousseau; a subterranean Christianity in his values; a dogmatist through and through” who was heir to Luther and the antithesis of Voltaire's light, joyous, skeptical spirit.Footnote 31 Also, Kant was German and, as we have already seen, for Nietzsche the Enlightenment was French, and therefore—to his mind—anti-German.Footnote 32

Making War Against the Enlightenment

Nietzsche underwent a complete volte face on the Enlightenment in his later works, where he depicts it in quite conventionally conservative terms reminiscent of counter-revolutionary writers such as Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre and Augustin Barruel—all devout Christians. This turn against the Enlightenment is not at all surprising given Nietzsche's radical questioning of all notions of reason, justice, and progress, even though it put him in the company of Christian traditionalists on this matter (if on nothing else). Whereas previously he had portrayed the Enlightenment as the antithesis of the Revolution that he consistently rejected, he later called for Europe to “wage war” against the entire eighteenth century, to which he now attributed a basic unity. In these later works, he writes in terms of the eighteenth century in general, encompassing both the Enlightenment and the Revolution, which he had earlier contrasted in the starkest possible terms. He now claims that disgust for the Enlightenment is “noble”Footnote 33 and declares that his goal is to “to overcome the eighteenth century” in its entirety.Footnote 34 This later tendency is apparent in a passage from Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche claims that “there have already been two grand attempts to relax the bow [of spirit], once by means of Jesuitism, the second time by means of democratic Enlightenment [die democratische Aufklärung].”Footnote 35 Nowhere in his earlier works had he referred to the Enlightenment as “democratic,” an attribute he had previously assigned to its antithesis: the Revolution. The Enlightenment has now entirely lost its aristocratic character and therefore its value in Nietzsche's eyes. This clearly indicates a significant darkening of his view of the Enlightenment and marks a major step in the direction of earlier conservatives, who saw a basic continuity between the Enlightenment and the Revolution.

When the leaders of the French Revolution canonized Voltaire and Rousseau (by putting them in the Panthéon in Paris, in 1791 and 1794 respectively), counted the Marquis de Condorcet among their enthusiastic supporters (at least until they sentenced him to be guillotined), and made basic Enlightenment themes such as reason, progress, anticlericalism, and emancipation central to their own revolutionary vocabulary, it was inevitable that a backlash against the Revolution would fuel opposition to the Enlightenment as well.Footnote 36 By the 1790s in Germany, the term “Jacobiner” was practically synonymous with “Aufklärer.”Footnote 37 In France, the idea that the Revolution was “la faute à Voltaire, la faute à Rousseau” had become deeply entrenched and widespread among both its advocates and its opponents by the early 1790s, despite the fact that Rousseau admitted to having “the greatest aversion to revolutions” and Voltaire preferred government for the people rather than by the people.Footnote 38 With the establishment of this link in the minds of so many, the violent excesses of the Revolution tainted the Enlightenment and spawned a new generation of enemies, beginning with Edmund Burke, whose popular and influential Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) rages against the philosophes for corroding the delicate fabric of ancien régime France with their radical ideas, and blames a cadré of zealous revolutionaries for violently imposing wild theories inspired by the philosophes on an innocent and unsuspecting public. In the French-speaking world, the former Jesuit and émigré writer Augustin Barruel (1741–1820) took this argument even further in his best-selling Mémoires pour servir a l'histoire du jacobinisme (Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, 1798), which makes the case that the Revolution was the result of a deliberate conspiracy hatched by a coalition of philosophes, freemasons and the Order of the Illuminati to overthrow throne, altar and society in Europe.Footnote 39 The Catholic counter-revolutionary Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821)—an admirer of Burke's, but not of Barruel's—saw the hand of God rather than that of human in the terrible events of the 1790s and depicted the Revolution as divine punishment for the sins of the philosophes in his Considerations on France (1797). All of these traditional conservative writers subscribed to what I have called the continuity thesis, emphasizing the close connection between the Enlightenment and the Revolution, a link that has been an important article of faith among counter-revolutionaries ever since. Although no conservative himself, Nietzsche was an implacable enemy of the Revolution who eventually came to share the counter-Enlightenment views of many traditional Christian conservatives such as Burke, Barruel, and Maistre when he turned against the Enlightenment in his later work. Like them, he ended up condemning the entire eighteenth century, and declaring war against it.

In his Nachlass Nietzsche essentializes the centuries of modernity, ascribing a basic character and unity to each. He speaks approvingly of the seventeenth century, as he always had, for being rational and aristocratic (epitomized by Descartes and French moralistes such as the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, whom he greatly admired and whose style he consciously emulated), dismisses the eighteenth century as feminine, moralistic, and soft (represented by Rousseau), and describes the nineteenth century as animalistic and gloomy (symbolized by the pessimistic Schopenhauer). “The eighteenth century,” he explains with breezy self-assurance, “is dominated by woman, given to enthusiasm, full of esprit, shallow, but with a spirit in the service of what is desirable, of the heart, libertine in the enjoyment of what is most spiritual, and undermines all authorities; intoxicated, cheerful, clear, humane, false before itself, much canaille au fond, sociable.”Footnote 40 In a section written “against Rousseau,” Nietzsche compares the “domineering will” of great Renaissance men like Cesare Borgia with the “tender and moralized” spirit of the effeminate men of the eighteenth century.Footnote 41 At times, he emphasizes the Enlightenment dimension of the eighteenth century. For example, he refers to how “the feeble-optimistic eighteenth century had prettified and rationalised man.”Footnote 42 At other times, its revolutionary side is stressed, with no less contempt.

Surprisingly, Nietzsche's high regard for Voltaire survived his later turn against the Enlightenment, despite Voltaire's being for many its most representative figure. In his writings after the mid-1880s he not only continued to oppose the vulgar plebeian Rousseau to that aristocratic “grandseigneur of the spirit” Voltaire,Footnote 43 but actually intensified his identification with the latter. He did this by simply removing Voltaire from the Enlightenment, just as he had done with Kant during his middle period. Voltaire's positive image was preserved by distancing him from the age in which he actually lived, so that in Beyond Good and Evil he becomes the “dying echo” of the “noble culture” of seventeenth-century France that Nietzsche admired, just as Rousseau heralded the coming of the “bloody farce” of the French Revolution that he never lived to witness (having died in 1778, one month after his old enemy Voltaire).Footnote 44 Voltaire still stands for the spirit of elite, anticlerical libertinism Nietzsche had previously associated with the Enlightenment, in contrast to Rousseau, who represents the fanatical slave morality of the herd that he associated with the Revolution that overthrew the aristocratic free spirit of philosophes like Voltaire. Nietzsche praises Voltaire for his moderation, tolerance, and anti-clericalism, calling him in his Nachlass a “Missionary of culture, aristocrat, representative of the victorious, ruling classes and their valuations.”Footnote 45

In the Nachlass, Nietzsche traces what he calls the still-unresolved “problem of civilization” back to the “fight between Rousseau and Voltaire” that began in the middle of the eighteenth century.Footnote 46 He paints an apocalyptic picture on a vast canvass pitting Christianity, Luther, Rousseau, Kant, the French Revolution, Romanticism, democratic egalitarianism, nationalism, morality, and the Enlightenment, on the one hand, against the seventeenth century, religious skepticism, nobility, Voltaire and all other “free spirits” on the other. According to Nietzsche, the “aristocratic” Voltaire defended civilization as a victory over the barbarism of nature and man's innate bestiality, whereas the plebeian Rousseau—“beyond a doubt mentally disturbed”—inspired the revolutionary overthrow of all social orders in the name of the natural goodness of man. He thought that Voltaire had correctly realized that man is a “beast of prey” and that civilization is a “tremendous triumph” over his bestial nature. That is why Voltaire felt “the mitigation, the subtleties, the spiritual joys of the civilized state,” unlike Rousseau, whose idealized conception of nature led him to cast a “curse upon society and civilization.”Footnote 47 This clash was decisive not only for Voltaire personally, but for European civilization as a whole. From that moment, Voltaire ceased to be a mere “bel esprit” and became “the man of his century” whose intense envy and hatred of Rousseau drove him on to the heights of greatness.Footnote 48 Ironically, this bold reading of Rousseau clearly owes much to the philosophes, particularly Voltaire, whose famous quip about Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality was the first in a very long line of depictions of him as an antisocial primitivist. “I have just received your book against the human race,” Voltaire sarcastically wrote to Rousseau in 1755. “Never has so much wit been used in an attempt to make us like animals. The desire to walk on all fours seizes one when one reads your work.”Footnote 49

Conclusion

Nietzsche's views on the Enlightenment tell us a great deal more about him than they do about it. First, he does not appear to have made any serious or systematic study of eighteenth-century thought. His views on the Enlightenment are at best sketchy, impressionistic, contradictory, and frequently superficial. As works of serious scholarship (as we understand it now), little can be said for them. By contemporary standards he would be judged a signal failure as an intellectual historian, something that he would probably take as a mark of honor. He had abandoned the cautious, pedantic scholarship of professional academic life even before he resigned his post at the University of Basel in order to liberate his imagination and to satisfy the increasingly pressing needs of his own tortured psyche. This gave him a license with thinkers, texts, and historical periods that allowed him to promote his own psychological agenda and to paint pictures in his writing that are more aesthetically satisfying than a fair and balanced presentation of the facts would allow. He thought of himself as an intellectual “free spirit” with no compunction about twisting, distorting, exaggerating, simplifying, complicating, and caricaturing the ideas of others to suit his own purposes, which is what he does with figures like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant. This explains (in part) how he could alter his view of the Enlightenment so radically, as it was not really anchored in a detailed knowledge of the period or its leading writers.

Second, when set against the background of his attitude to the Enlightenment, the distinction between a “middle” and “late” period, Nietzsche does not appear quite so preposterous as Walter Kaufmann would have us believe. Given just how symbolically charged the Enlightenment was for Nietzsche, and how intensely partisan his treatment of it was (first enthusiastically for, then passionately against), it is difficult to see the dramatic change in his views on it as anything other than evidence of a fundamental shift in his outlook in the 1880s. That is why we must be wary of the postmodern conscription of Nietzsche into its campaign to overthrow the “metanarrative” of the Enlightenment. To the extent that Nietzsche's postmodern devotees have simply taken him to be a straightforward enemy of the Enlightenment, they must be challenged no less than Kaufmann, since Nietzsche was both for and against the Enlightenment.

References

1 Lyotard, Jean-François famously defined postmodern as “incredulity toward metanarratives” (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Bennington, G. and Massumi, B. [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997], xxiv)Google Scholar. Among the “two great legitimizing ‘myths’ or narrative archetypes” of modernity which have lost their credibility Lyotard includes “the tradition of the French eighteenth century and the French Revolution” (ix).

2 Robinson, Dave, Nietzsche and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Icon Books, 1999), 35Google Scholar. Among writers commonly associated with “postmodernism,” Nietzsche's influence is most apparent in the works of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Mann and Richard Rorty. For a very good overview of the arguments for and against the postmodern appropriation of Nietzsche, see Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra, ed. C. Koelb (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 1990). Also, see Thiele, Leslie Paul, “The Agony of Politics: The Nietzschean Roots of Foucault's Thoughts,” American Political Science Review, 84, no. 3 (1990): 907–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holub, Robert, “Nietzsche as Postmodernist,” Postmodern Culture, 2, no. 2 (January 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sadler, Ted, “The Postmodern Politicization of Nietzsche,” in Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory, ed. Patton, P. (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1993)Google Scholar; Schrift, Alan, “Nietzsche's French Legacy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Magnus, B. and Higgins, K. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 323–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gemes, Ken, “Post-Modernism's Use and Abuse of Nietzsche,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62, no. 2 (March 2001): 337–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See Schmidt, James, “Inventing the Enlightenment: British Hegelians, Anti-Jacobins, and the Oxford English Dictionary,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 64, no. 3 (2003): 421–43Google Scholar, and Schmidt, James, ed., What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Questions and Twentieth-Century Answers (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

4 For an examination of Nietzsche and the general concept of enlightenment, as opposed to the Enlightenment, see Sedgwick, Peter, “The Nietzsche Legend: A Genealogy of Myth and Enlightenment,” in Ecce Opus: Nietzsche-Revisionen im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Görner, R. and Large, Duncan (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2003), 181–92Google Scholar, and Sedgwick, Peter, “Nietzsche, Normativity and Will to Power,” Nietzsche-Studien, 36 (2007), 201–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Ruth Abbey traces the classification of Nietzsche's works into three periods—early, middle and late—back to Lou Salomé's Friedrich Nietzsche in Seinen Werke, published in 1894 (Nietzsche's Middle Period [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], xii).

6 Kaufmann, Walter, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 400Google Scholar. Kaufmann also writes: “The notion, however, that Nietzsche sympathized with the Enlightenment, admired Socrates, despised nationalism, and advocated race mixture only in his middle period, while he later broke with this tradition, became a racist, espoused a ‘psychologism’ and became close to Nazism, is entirely unwarranted” (295).

7 Abbey, Nietzsche's Middle Period, xiii.

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10 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, part 1, section 6, 19.

11 “He [Nietzsche] originally dedicated the first part of Human, All Too Human to Voltaire, and on the reverse of the title-page appeared a graceful acknowledgment of his debt to the Frenchman and his desire to signalize the centenary of his death (30 May 1778), but this was cut out of later editions. . . . The dedication of the first book to Voltaire is coupled with a compliment to him inserted in brackets at the end of section 407 (originally the last section) of Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche during its printing. But while correcting the proofs Nietzsche erased these words and substituted the famous ‘Hadesfahrt’ section (IX, 174 f) which makes no mention of Voltaire” (Williams, W.D., Nietzsche and the French: A Study of the Influence of Nietzsche's French Reading on his Thought and Writing [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952], 42, 51–52Google Scholar).

12 Nietzsche uses Voltaire's famous anti-Christian exhortation “Écrasez l'infâme [crush the infamous thing]” in Ecce Homo, 335.

13 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, section 110, 61–62.

14 Nietzsche, , Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, ed. Clark, M. and Leiter, B., trans. Hollingdale, R.J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, section 535, 212.

15 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, section 110, 61–62.

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18 Nietzsche, , The Gay Science, trans. Nauchkhoff, J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, section 122, 117.

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22 Nietzsche singled out the revolutionary Comte de Mirabeau as a rare exception for his transcendence of ressentiment. (See The Gay Science, section 95, p. 92 and On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. K. Ansell-Pearson, trans. C. Diethe [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], essay 1, section 10, 24).

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36 The French revolutionary government decreed that a statue of Rousseau be erected in the National Assembly with the inscription “La Nation Française Libre à J.-J. Rousseau.” At the Festival of Triumph on 14 July 1790, a bust of Rousseau, carved from Bastille stone and crowned with laurels, was borne through the streets of Paris, attended by 600 white-gowned girls and troops of Guardsmen, their firearms wreathed with flowers. The revolutionary cult of Rousseau peaked in 1794, when his remains were ceremoniously transferred to the Pantheon in Paris and laid to rest next to the other great “heroes of the French Revolution” such as Voltaire, despite the fact that they detested each other. See Blum, Carole, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue (Ithaca, NY, London: Cornell University Press, 1986), 280Google Scholar. On the “pantheonisation” of Voltaire in July, 1791, see Leith, James, “Les trios apotheoses de Voltaire,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 236 (1979), 161–209Google Scholar.

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46 Nietzsche, , The Will to Power, section 123 (1887), 75Google Scholar. A major influence on Nietzsche at this time in his thinking on the problem of civilization and the way he construes it in terms of an opposition between the spirit of Voltaire and that of Rousseau was Ferdinand Brunetiere's Études critiques sur l'histoire de la littérature française (Paris: Hachette, 1887). For a discussion of this, see Kuhn, E., “Cultur, Civilization. Die Zweideutigkeit des ‘Modernen,’” Nietzsche-Studien 18 (1989): 600–627CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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