NIETZSCHE AND KANT: SELF-LEGISLATION AND THE RATIONAL WILL IN ZARATHUSTRA’S ETHICS

Abstract

Friedrich Nietzsche’s wonted derision of Immanuel Kant has long-obscured striking parallels between the two philosophers’ moral thought. In this essay it will be argued that the autonomous, self-legislating, rational will is as pivotal to the ethical project at the heart of Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ as it is to Kantian ethics. Indeed, it will be seen just how closely Kant’s concept of the ‘good will’ can be mapped onto Zarathustra’s vision of a creative will that, through the faculty of discernment (‘Erkenntniss’) and its attendant powers of judgment and understanding, has not only the ability and the right to devise and implement new values but the discipline to obey its self-imposed, rationally-guided laws. By means of a radical re-evaluation and re-appropriation of the three Christian ‘evils’ of voluptuousness (‘Wollust’), lust for power (‘Herrschsucht’), and selfishness (‘Selbstsucht’), Zarathustra teaches how the genuinely free man can assume sovereignty over subjective motivation and direct his will towards an uncompromised and uncompromising ethical goal.

Keywords:

• Kant
• Zarathustra
• good will
• will to power
• discernment
• self-legislation
• rational will

Notes

1 Unless otherwise stated, all Nietzsche citations are taken from Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980). Arabic numerals after Nietzsche citations denote section number not page number; arabic numerals after Kant citations indicate the page number in J. H. von Kirchmann, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Berlin: Heimann, 1870).

2 In his essay ‘Nietzsche’s Kantian Ethics’ (International Studies in Philosophy, 35·3 (2003), 5–27 (pp. 7–9)), Tom Bailey contends that while the Kantian notion of an autonomous will is central to Nietzsche’s account of moral agency, the requirements of equality and universality (entailed in Kant’s categorical imperative) are clearly incompatible with Nietzsche’s view of the ‘souveräne Individuum’ as one who, in possession of his own ‘Wertmass’, has the ability to will and more importantly to discharge a future act and hence the right to make promises (Zur Genealogie der Moral, II, 1–2). Such an autonomous agent, claims Nietzsche, would denounce the injustice of ‘Die Lehre von der Gleichheit’ and demand ‘“Den Gleichen Gleiches, den Ungleichen Ungleiches”’ (Götzen-Dämmerung, ‘Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen’, 48). Garrath Williams also contrasts Kant’s ethical universalism with Nietzsche’s elitism, arguing that while Kantian morality is one to which all humans have access through the exercise of their reason, Nietzsche restricts his idea of a higher, autonomous morality to ‘the very few’ (‘Nietzsche’s Response to Kant’s Morality’, The Philosophical Forum, 30 (1999), 201–16 (p. 204)). Against Williams’ differentiation, however, one could also postulate agreement on the grounds that the moral imperative which for Kant is necessarily given to reason is yet only graspable by an affectively unbiased form of reasoning that, as Nietzsche is at pains to point out, is necessarily the preserve of those who possess superior powers of discernment and judgment and have thereby achieved sovereignty over their affects. The same issue of universalizability is addressed by R. Kevin Hill, who in the final chapter of his book Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of his Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 216, argues that ‘in appropriating Kant’s notion of autonomy while rejecting its link to the categorical imperative and the “formal constraints” interpretation of morality, Nietzsche creates his own ideal of the autonomous individual, an individual who in self-legislating transcends moral constraints altogether’. This statement is dangerously misleading, for if one grants Mark Timmons’ lucid gloss on the three formal constraints implicit in the universalization formulations of the categorical imperative, then Nietzsche’s autonomous, self-legislating individual, as projected in Zarathustra and expounded upon in the following essay, indubitably subjects himself to such constraints. Timmons’ gloss is as follows: (1) the ‘Law-like character of moral reasons’, which for Kant accords with the common sense notion of duty whereby ‘moral requirements hold necessarily for all rational beings as such’; (2) the ‘Supremacy of moral reasons’, according to which ‘the moral law itself has normative supremacy or [what Kant refers to as] “commanding authority”’; and (3) the ‘Proper object of respect’, which for Kant is a worth that impinges upon ‘self-love’ and ‘inclination’. See Mark Timmons, ‘The Categorical Imperative and Universalizability’, in Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. by Christoph Horn and Dieter Schönecker (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006), pp. 158–200 (pp. 187–89).

3 Hereafter referred to as ‘Zarathustra’ and ‘Grundlegung’ respectively.

4 It is interesting to note that in his book L'Impératif catégorique, Jean-Luc Nancy, who is also a Nietzsche scholar, asserts in respect of the Kantian imperative that ‘the law is addressed to a freedom, and is not founded by that freedom. Conversely, freedom consists not of following one's own law [...] but of initiating something by oneself: it is a freedom to inaugurate, in advance of any law. And yet it is this very freedom which is, from the very beginning, engaged by the law. In short, there are always two “origins” here, which do not overlap and each of which seems endlessly, in its turn, to take precedence over the other: the address by the law and the free beginning’ (cited in Walter Lowe, Theology and Difference: The Wound of Reason (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 110). This is precisely the point Zarathustra is making here when he asserts that freedom to ‘set up thy will as a law over thee’ presupposes a ‘ruling thought’ inaugurated by a rigorous (pure, objective, untrammelled) analytical drive for truth. As Nancy goes on to claim, ‘to act as pure reason is to make law’ (Lowe, Theology and Difference, p. 110).

5 Zarathustra might also have vomited his contempt over the venerable heads of the bishops, archbishops, cardinals and secular godhead of the Pope — an ecclesiastical hierarchy flagrantly at odds with the Church’s valorization of humility and equality.

6 Hereafter abbreviated to ‘ZV’.

7 In Theology and Difference, Lowe points out that the Kantian concept of the ‘highest good’ is ‘only a conception, only an idea’, something thought rather than known (125). Accordingly, if the will is to be impelled by such an idea it will need affective support: ‘[Kant] knows full well that while the formal imperative (and the will which is determined to act according to the imperative) must be the basis for an act’s morality, they are not enough to assure the act’s accomplishment. To accomplish the act, the will must needs enlist the cooperation of desire; and for that, right principles are not enough. If desire is to be stirred, there must be an object’ (113). It is, I would argue, at the stirring of desire that the contrapuntal force of Zarathustra’s rhetorical flights and corrosive contempt is aimed.

8 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967).

9 Cf. ‘Es ist kein Zweifel: diese Kommenden [der Philosophen der Zukunft] werden am wenigsten jener ernsten und nicht unbedenklichen Eigenschaften entrathen dürfen, welche den Kritiker vom Skeptiker abheben, ich meine die Sicherheit der Werthmaasse, die bewusste Handhabung einer Einheit von Methode, den gewitzten Muth, das Alleinstehn und Sich-verantworten-können; ja, sie gestehen bei sich eine Lust am Neinsagen und Zergliedern und eine gewisse besonnene Grausamkeit zu, welche das Messer sicher und fein zu führen weiss, auch noch, wenn das Herz blutet’ (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 210).

10 It is a curiosity of Nietzsche scholarship, and one to which I have elsewhere drawn attention, that both R. J. Hollingdale and Walter Kaufmann, two early but authoritative Nietzsche translators, render ‘das klügste Thier’ as ‘the wisest animal’. Curious because throughout Zarathustra these two quite distinct adjectives are invariably employed in contexts where ‘shrewd’ for klug and ‘wise’ for weise is the obvious, if on occasion ironic, meaning intended. See my article ‘Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Promethean Pretensions and Romantic Dialectics’, Romanticism, 15 (2009), 254–64, where my argument for the cleverness, as opposed to wisdom, of Zarathustra’s serpent is reinforced by the Langenscheidts Grosswörterbücher (1982) synonyms for klug: intelligent, clever, shrewd, sensible, and prudent.

11 The ideality of the Übermensch, evinced in the metaphorical language to which Zarathustra resorts in his depiction of the same, brings to mind Lowe’s emphasis on the necessarily abstract nature of Kant’s ‘highest good’ (see note 6 above). As Lowe contends, ‘This necessary […] indirectness of the notion of the Highest Good is of cardinal importance because it thwarts the human, all-too-human impulse to give content to the notion by looking to what one happens to find fulfilling; by hitching one’s wagon to whatever “inevitable march of history” is currently in vogue’ (Lowe, Theology and Difference, p. 125). Lowe’s borrowing of Nietzsche’s term ‘human, all-too-human’ as the self-interested element expressly excluded in Kant’s (and Nietzsche’s) notion of the ‘highest good’ lends further support, albeit unwittingly since Lowe draws no parallels between Kant and Nietzsche, to my claim of commonality in the ethical thought of both philosophers.

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Francesca Cauchi

Francesca Cauchi is currently teaching in the Department of English Language and Literature at Yas¸ar University, Izmir. Her research interests are Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra in particular), Romanticism, and Modernist poetry and drama. Recent publications include essays on Nietzsche and Rilke, Blake's The Four Zoas, Shelley's Alastor, and Pirandello's Henry IV.