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On Nietzsche, Postmodernism and the New Enlightenment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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In spite of Nietzsche’s enormous and apparently ever-increasing influence, it is notoriously difficult to spell out the essence and precise implications of his position. This is evidently due partly to his poetic and rhetorical style; but in my view there is a more important reason than this. I would maintain that his thought, when taken as a whole, is rather like a carpet which cannot be laid straight unless you cut off one or other of two bits. To make Nietzsche consistent, you have to reject or downplay one of two elements in his thought. If you reject one, what you get is cognitive and moral nihilism; if you reject the other, you end up with what I want to call the new enlightenment. In these respects the postmodernists, as represented at any rate by Michel Foucault, are Nietzsche’s true successors.
When in nihilistic mood, Nietzsche seems to imply that it is true that there are no truths, that it is really morally good to act as though there were no such thing as moral goodness. In the course of considering this self-destructive tendency of one strand of Nietzsche’s thought, Walter Kaufmann remarks that consideration of problems like these was not Nietzsche’s strong suit. Now the basis of the new enlightenment is epistemological, and turns on theses and arguments which directly address such problems. These may be summarized as follows: (1) Denial that our judgments are ever true is self-destructive (is it supposed to be true that we never speak the truth?); and so is denial that we ever have good reasons for our judgments (do we have good reasons for this particular judgment?).
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- Copyright © 1995 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Cf. Kaufmann, W., Nietzsche (Cleveland and (New York, 1956), 15Google Scholar.
2 The use of the term in this sense is due to Professor Fred Lawrence. The most complete account known to me of the nature and implications of the new enlightenment is to be had in Lonergan, B.J. F., Insight. A Study of Human Understanding (Toronto, 1992)Google Scholar. The crucial ambiguity in Nietzsche's own position is nicely caught in a passage in The Antichrist (6, first half), where he at once excoriates human depravity as he conceives it, and denies that he is making any moral judgment in doing so.
3 One may compare the delightful remark attributed to T. H. Huxley, to the effect that, if he thought that science showed that there was no such thing as real moral goodness, he would feel it Ms duty to say so.
4 Kaufmann, 177–8. That Nietzsche ‘never worked out an entirely satisfactory theory of knowledge’ (loc. cit.) appears to me to be a considerable understatement.
5 The Perfumed Garden of the Shaykh Nefzawi. Translated by Burton, Richard (London, 1963)Google Scholar.
6 Cf. Science, Perception and Reality (London, 1963)Google Scholar.
7 The point has been shrewdly made in recent writings of Hilary Putnam; cf. Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, Mass, 1991)Google Scholar, and Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1992)Google Scholar. The pretension of scientism to be uniquely representative of rationality is one of the most influential frauds of our time; in fact it is not, for the reasons which I have sketched, even consistent with it.
8 For this paragraph and the following, see Lonergan, op. cit., passim; Theology, Method in (London, 1971)Google Scholar, chapter 1.
9 Cf. Popper, K. R., Objective Knowledge (Oxford, 1972)Google Scholar, passim.
10 Cf. Laing, R. D. and Esterson, A., The Families of Schizophrenics (London, 1964)Google Scholar.
11 I have been told this by Lorraine Williams, in conversation.
12 It is notable that both the liberal and the Marxist Utopia are envisaged along these lines; but the liberal believes, whereas the Marxist does not, that it can usually be brought about without violent revolution.
13 I have been enormously assisted, stimulated and encouraged in my work on this subject by conversations with Dr. Drury.
14 The concepts of oxygen, plesiosaur and white dwarf star are social constructions, which need a society of considerable sophistication to develop; but it remains that, if things of these kinds exist at all, they exist independently of human societies and their constructions.
15 This may be defended in a relatively sophisticated manner by reference to fallacious arguments in the work of David Hume and G. E. Moore; cf. Freud, Hugo MeynelL, Marx and Morals (New York, 1981)Google Scholar, chapter 6. But usually it has no firmer basis than the prejudice that science and science alone is the measure of what is ‘objective’; and that good and bad cannot be isolated in the laboratory, and in consequence must be'subjective'.
16 Fortunately scientism is only one strand of the old enlightenment; another strand, represented by Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill, has been at least equally influential. For Mill, the greatest happiness of the greatest number provides an objective criterion for ethics; for Kant, the universalizability of the maxim according to which an action is performed. The ethics of the new enlightenment are in effect based on a blend of both criteria (see Lonergan, Insight, chapters 6,7, and 18; Method, chapter 2). A less reputable offshoot of the old enlightenment is what might be labelled ‘crass utilitarianism’, which maintains that for good to be real it must be measurable, typically in terms of economic production or consumption. This tends to make ‘standard of living’ the only effective criterion of ‘quality of life’, of which of course it is in fact only one aspect. The net result is not only a restless accumulation of gadgets which cannot satisfy, but a corruption and despoliation of the natural environment which bids fair to destroy the very conditions of life on earth.
17 See Kaufmann, chapters 7 and 8.
18 Thus Ludwig Klages alluded disparagingly to what he called ‘the Christian in Nietzsche’ (Kaufmann, 186).
19 Kaufmann, 222.
20 See Kaufmann, loc. cit.: “The weak, lacking the power for creation, would fain shroud their slave souls in a royal cloak and, unable to gain mastery of themselves, seek to conquer others.' That both barbaric force and political clout are for Nietzsche inferior forms of power is made clear by such an aphorism as no. 548 of Dawn (Kaufmann, 1 70).
21 John x 10.
22 Kaufmann, 193–4. Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, 197; The Twilight of the Idols, ix, 37. 23 Cf. Laing and Esterson, 47, 52; Laing, The Divided Self (Harmondsworth, 1965), 181, 183Google Scholar.
24 Cf. Zarathustra's harangue as quoted by Kaufmann: '“Will to truth” you call it… ? A will to the thinkability of all being: this I call your will. All being you want to make thinkable: for you doubt, with well–founded suspicion, whether it is thinkable. Yet it shall yield and bend for you… That is your entire will… a will to power–also when you speak of good and evil and valuations' (Thus Spake Zarathustra, ii, 12). The same applies to philosophy, including, presumably, Nietzsche's own: ‘Philosophy is this tyrannic urge itself, the most spiritual will to power’ (Beyond Good and Evil, 9; Kaufmann, 176). According to the new enlightenment, of course, there is excellent reason for believing that ‘being’ is intrinsically ‘thinkable’, since it is nothing other than what true judgment is actually or potentially about, and well–founded judgment tends to be about It should be added that the vast bulk of both Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, as indeed of Nietzsche's work as a whole, belongs unequivocally to Naetzsche.
25 One can, of course, mouth phonemes, syllables and even words; what are definitely ruled out are ordinary indicative sentences, to the effect that something is the case. Questions also appear impossible, so far as they are about whether something is the case; and commands and requests, so far as they are attempts to get someone to make something to be the case. Even doubts, as Augustine pointed out, seem to be put out of court, since they only make sense as concerned with whether something is the case (Contra academicos, in Writings of St. Augustine, vol. I, ed. L. Schopp (New York: Cima Publishing House, 1948), 154).
26 If Naetzsche is an outstanding prophet of the new enlightenment, the contemporary influence of Noetzsche is to be found especially in Jacques Derrida and his deconstructionist disciples. For a devastating critique of this preposterous movement, see Ellis, John M., Against Deconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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