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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.

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

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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).

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