REASON AND THE UNITY OF EXPERIENCE: NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE
OF TRADITIONAL CONCEPTIONS OF TOTALITY

By
JAN RAYMOND SUGALSKI

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE COUNCIL OF
THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
IN PARTIAL FILFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE
DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
1976

Copyright
Jan Raymond Sugalski
1976

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank all those who have aided me in the production of
this dissertation. In particular, I wish to thank the members of my
committee Dr. Thomas Auxter, Dr. Ellen Haring, Dr. Jay Zeman and Dr.
Raymond Gay-Crosier. I am further grateful to Dr. Henry Allison,
former member of the University of Florida Department of Philosophy,
and Dr. George Tunstall, former member of the University of Florida
Department of German and Slavic Languages, for what I consider to be
invaluable assistance rendered through our many and lengthy discussions
on this and related topics.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .

111

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I HISTORICAL BACKGROUND ON THE MODERN PHILOSOPHIC

TRADITION WITH RESPECT TO THE PROBLEM OF THE UNITY
OF EXPERIENCE AND THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY

NOTES

]

5 2

CHAPTER II UNITY AND THE PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT REASON 57

NOTES 69

CHAPTER III A TRANSITION BY WAY OF SCHOPENHAUER 71

NOTES 82

CHAPTER IV GENERAL CHARACTERIZATION OF NIHILISM 83

NOTES

CHAPTER V NIHILISM AND NIETZSCHE'S AWARENESS OF THE PROBLEM

OF UNITY

NOTES

103

105

131

CHAPTER VI CONCLUSIONS . .134

NOTES 152

BIBLIOGRAPHY 154

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 159

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Council
of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

REASON AND THE UNITY OF EXPERIENCE: NIETZSCHE'S CRITIQUE
OF TRADITIONAL CONCEPTIONS OF TOTALITY

By

Jan Raymond Sugalski

December, 19 76

Co-chairmen: Ellen S. Haring

Thomas W. Auxter
Major Department: Philosophy

This dissertation is concerned to understand Nietzsche's philosophy
within the rational philosophic tradition. The point of view adopted
is not Nietzsche's and is almost certainly not one he would have ap-
proved but is an attempt to make sense of his general approach to the
tradition. There are two basic motivations for this project: (1) the
need for an account of Nietzsche's fundamental concerns in terms of the
deepest characterizations of the tradition of reason, and (2) the need
to do this in a way which remains within traditional philosophic language
and does not require an understanding of the particular ideas and
language of the person commenting on Nietzsche's philosophy, as is the
case with Heidegger's and Jasper's commentaries.

To accomplish this aim, I approach the tradition according to what
I believe is its most basic aspect. I treat the tradition as an extended
attempt to give a unified rational account of human experience as a
whole. This point of view is maintained throughout with the object of

insuring that the understanding of Nietzsche obtained will proceed on
a level commensurate with the basic concern of the rational tradition.

Within the general theme of the unity of experience, the following
basic subthemes become pertinent: (1) the movement of reason toward
unity, (2) the principle of .sufficient reason, (3) the drive to estab-
lish an unconditioned principle in philosophy, (4) Nietzsche's concepts
of nihilism and the will to power. By means of these fundamental
themes, I attempt to show the failure of the tradition of reason to
give an explication of the unity of experience, and in terms of this,
I try to gain an understanding of Nietzsche's position on nihilism and
the will to power. This approach has the added virtue of demonstrating
the intimate connection between nihilism and the will to power, a point
not generally noticed in the commentaries on Nietzsche.

The dissertation proceeds as follows. Chapter one establishes the
theme of unity in the modern philosophic tradition and represents Kant's
philosophy as the culmination of this tradition. Kant's idea of reason
as seeking unity is taken as definitive of reason's role in philosophy.
Kant's main concern with reason is taken as the concern of the rational
tradition generally, namely the attempt to give a discursive account of
the unity of experience. The second chapter is meant to carry further
an already established connection between the principle of sufficient
reason and the problem of unity. This leads to a consideration of
Schopenhauer's philosophy in chapter three by way of transition to
Nietzsche's philosophy proper. Schopenhauer is considered strictly in
terms of what Nietzsche regards as Schopenhauer's failure, viz., his
inability to give a unified view of experience, or his failure to
reconcile Kant's Ding an Sich and the phenomenal world. The

consideration of Schopenhauer's defects leads to a discussion of
nihilism, the will to power and Nietzsche's value philosophy. This in
turn leads to a discussion of Nietzsche's view of unity with respect
to nihilism in chapter five. In the final chapter, the general adequacy
of Nietzsche's position with respect to the problem of the unity of ex-
perience in the tradition is discussed. Certain methodological problems
of Nietzsche's philosophy are raised without, however, leading to a
discussion in detail. These considerations invite the conclusion,
similar to that of Heidegger, that although Nietzsche's philosophy lies
within the traditional philosophic understanding of reason, it does not
achieve unity in the form desired by this tradition.

INTRODUCTION

The present thesis is an attempt to understand the philosophy of
Friedrich Nietzsche with respect to the Western philosophic tradition.
To facilitate this project, I approach the tradition in what I believe
is its basic aspect, the attempt to give a unified rational account of
human experience as a whole. The attempt to give such an account
fundamentally characterizes the activity of reason in the tradition.
The thesis will therefore concern itself with Nietzsche's understanding
of reason in the tradition. More particularly, the leading principle
of reason, the principle of sufficient reason, is emphasized throughout
the presentation. At all times, it is intended that the closest con-
nection be made between the following three points of view: the
activity of reason in general, the problem of the unity of experience
and the principle of sufficient reason. Furthermore, as will be argued
in the first chapter dealing with Kant, the drive to establish an
"unconditioned" in philosophy in whatever form cannot be divorced from
these three points of view and becomes important for Nietzsche's
particular way of viewing the tradition. We therefore have four
primary viewpoints on the movement of the rational philosophic tradition :
the activity of reason in general, the attempt to give a unified account
of experience as a whole, the principle of sufficient reason, and the
attempt to posit an "unconditioned."

Nietzsche had much to say about the rational philosophic tradition

-1-

-2-

and furthermore had a primitive leading principle which (for him) func-
tioned at a level as basic as any in the tradition. Since the Western
rational tradition as a whole becomes an explicit theme in Nietzsche's
philosophy, Nietzsche may be legitimately regarded as a philosopher
of philosophy. This being the case, it seems appropriate to deal with
Nietzsche's philosophy at a level coincident with the deepest possible
characterization of the tradition in general. I consider this level
to be a properly metaphysical or ontological one and consequently regard
the most complete understanding of Nietzsche's position as possible only
at this level. I will not specifically argue for this position.
Nietzsche's status as a metaphysician is controversial. The standpoint
of the present thesis is simply that any philosopher who makes a problem
of the activity of reason in the philosophic tradition cannot avoid
philosophizing at a properly metaphysical level. A certain effort has
therefore been made to place Nietzsche's philosophy within the language
of the tradition. Poetic or strongly metaphorical language which one
might easily fall into while discussing Nietzsche is, as far as pos-
sible, consciously kept to a minimum. On the other hand, Nietzsche's
philosophy cannot be forced into the mold of a dry epistemology and
there has been no attempt to do so here. There are, however, concerns
which enter the philosophic tradition for the first time with Nietzsche
and therefore do not completely lend themselves to explication in
traditional terms. The most outstanding example of this is the theme
of nihilism, Nietzsche's most basic concern. Since the project is to
understand Nietzsche's philosophy in terms of the tradition and vice
versa, I have tried to present this most basic concern in traditional
philosophic categories. This, as I believe, can never be totally

-3-

successful but must be attempted for an adequate understanding of
Nietzsche's place in philosophy.

Where does the present thesis stand with respect to the Nietzsche
literature? Anyone who reads extensively in this literature will dis-
cover that it falls into two basic categories. First there is that
literature which is basically expository, takes over Nietzsche's remarks
on the tradition without much analysis, does not try to see the unity
of his thought (in fact could not since it never goes deep enough) and,
in general, leaves the reader with a lot of information on what
Nietzsche said but very little knowledge of his significance philosophi-
cally. With this type of presentation, Nietzsche's philosophy emerges
as just another position in the tradition to be placed alongside every
other. Into this first category can be placed at least ninety percent
of everything written on the subject. In the second place, we have
that literature typified by the extensive Heideggerian analysis which
while going deeply into a metaphysical critique of Nietzsche's philosophy,
depends for its understanding upon a quite thorough acquaintance with
the author's own language and philosophical position. The following
thesis tries to steer a middle course between these two approaches. It
strives to grasp the primary sense of Nietzsche's philosophy at a
nonsuperficial level yet does not do so in terms of nontradi tional
language or modes of classification. Consequently, it only focuses on
the most general significant features of the tradition arising out of
the traditional conception of reason.

Beginning with the first chapter, Immanuel Kant's philosophy will
come under discussion. There are at least three main and intimately
related reasons for this. First, with Kant reason as it was understood

-4-

by the tradition comes under an explicit critique. Whether Kant's
view of his own project as reason coming under its own gaze is valid
or not, the fact remains that the tradition comes to a culmination in
Kant's philosophy when the place of reason becomes an explicit theme.
Second, this thesis takes the position that Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason is primarily an essay on the principle of sufficient reason.
This might be guessed simply from the fact that the Critique is an
investigation of the place of reason and the principle of sufficient
reason has been represented as the highest principle of reason. Viewing
the Critique in this way has the advantage of allowing a more obvious
connection to be made with the idea of the unity of experience or the
world. Third, with Kant's phenomena/noumena distinction, we have the cul-
mination of the perennial philosophic idea, the real/apparent world
dichotomy. This separation and the question of its legitimacy became
one of Nietzsche's chief interests in his consideration of the rational
tradition .

The reader will search Nietzsche's writings in vain for a charac-
terization of his philosophy as given here in terms of the unity of
experience. Nietzsche did not present his views in any "system" of
philosophy. What is presented here is not an attempt to make Nietzsche
systematic, but an attempt to see his most basic concerns as a con-
sistent development of one line of thought. As a prime example, this
thesis tries to intimately relate nihilism as Nietzsche understands it
with his concept of the will to power. Only Martin Heidegger's
Nietzsche addresses itself in any thoughtful way to this connection.
Yet there could hardly be a more basic connection to be made in
Nietzsche's philosophy; a commentary which fails to consider this

-5-

cannot possibly claim to be dealing with Nietzsche's philosophy at its
deepest level. The standpoint of unity employed in this thesis has been
extracted from an extensive reading of Nietzsche's original philosophy
and the commentaries on it. This standpoint has also been adopted as
the result of a sustained attempt to view everyday experience in
Nietzschean terms. Finally the present approach arises from the need
to grasp the tradition in a convenient yet nonsuperf icial form so as
to make it manageable as a theme of Nietzsche's philosophy. Hopefully
generalizations of the tradition used in this thesis will not be thought
too artificial.

Because of the level at which Nietzsche's philosophy is treated
here, there has not been much concern to use supportive material from
any particular period of his development. Although cahnges in method,
emphasis and mode of expression do occur, these do not affect Nietzsche's
most basic concerns as dealt with here. At the deepest level Nietzsche's
concerns remain the same. A good deal of material has been taken from
the collection of notes never published by Nietzsche but first issued
by his sister under the title The Will to Power (Per Wille zur Macht) .
The reason for this is simply that by far most of Nietzsche's explicit
metaphysical remarks, remarks about the rational tradition and
specific references to the will to power appear in these notes. There
has been a continuing controversy for many years about the importance
of Nietzsche's unpublished notes as opposed to his published writings.
In my opinion, this controversy is completely pointless, because without
a direct statement by Nietzsche (unlikely at this late date), there are
simply no criteria by which the issue could be settled. The contro-
versy derives its force from the intial premise that Nietzsche's

writings show basic inconsistencies, however this is a premise which
has by no means been established. The most anyone need do in any case
is to read Nietzsche as a whole and attempt to see his thought as a
unity. My own position is that there is no inherent incompatibility
at all between the published and unpublished writings and that anyone
who lives with Nietzsche's thought long enough and enters into its
spirit will come to the same conclusion.

The following thesis proceeds as follows. The first chapter
establishes the theme of unity in the rational tradition and the sense
in which it culminates in Kant's philosophy. Throughout the overriding
concern is with Kant's view of reason and its drive toward unity. The
thesis takes Kant's main concern as the problem of the unity of
experience or the constitution of a world. The second chapter is meant
to carry further the connection of the principle of sufficient reason
(introduced in the first chapter) with the problem of unity. This is
all by way of a consideration of Schopenhauer's philosophy in chapter
three which strongly emphasizes the place of the principle of sufficient
reason. Schopenhauer is considered strictly in light of his failure
to give a unified view of experience; his failure to reconcile Kant's
Di"g an sich (Schopenhauer's Will) with the phenomenal world. But
Schopenhauer's failure is instructive. It leads to the conclusion that
the traditional view of knowledge and quest for unity in terms of the
principle of sufficient reason is not viable. This in turn leads to
Nietzsche's value philosophy based upon the will to power which abjures
all absolutes or unconditionals according to which the world is to be
ultimately explicated. In addition, the advent of nihilism as an
explicit philosophic theme is to be connected with the problem of unity.

-7-

At this point, the designation of Nietzsche as a philosopher of philos-
ophy should make more sense since his basic concern with nihilism will
have been connected with the basic problem of traditional philosophy.
The last chapter concerns itself chiefly with two questions. To what
extent does Nietzsche overcome the traditional problem of unity and
the related question, does Nietzsche's critique of the tradition apply
to his own philosophy? A discussion of these questions leads to a
conclusion similar to that reached by Heidegger. That is, Nietzsche's
position of perspectivism is viewed as the last one possible within the
traditional view of reason. Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power
is to be viewed as the last available means of expression for the
activity of life (which includes the activity of the philosopher) in
general. Its peculiar status lies in its self-reflexive character.
Its unconditional force stems not from its mere assertion, but from
the fact that it inherently excludes alternatives. Insofar, however,
as the will to power is autonomous, it must be vulnerable to the weak-
nesses of all causa sui principles. Consequently the will to power
does not fulfill the demand of the tradition for a discursive account
of the unity of experience, and nihilism as outline with respect to
the attempt to achieve this unity remains intact.

CHAPTER I

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND ON THE MODERN PHILOSOPHIC TRADITION WITH

RESPECT TO THE PROBLEM OF THE UNITY OF EXPERIENCE

AND THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY

In order to acquire an adequate understanding of Nietzsche's view
of the rational philosophic tradition and his place in it, this chapter
will attempt to characterize the tradition in terms of the activity of
reason. This activity is fundamentally one of a quest for unity. This
activity first comes to explicit consciousness with Kant's philosophy,
thus the Kantian philosophy may be regarded as a culmination of the
Western philosophic tradition insofar as this tradition is viewed as
rational. The present historical survey will, therefore, lead up to
a discussion of Kant's philosophy with specific reference to his
characterization of the activity of reason. Throughout, the emphasis
will be on reason and its activity as the attempt to give an account
of the unity of human experience. Having understood the course of the
modern rational tradition in terms of its fundamental activity, the
foundation will be laid for an understanding of Nietzsche's position
with respect to this tradition.

As indicated, when we speak of unity, by this is meant the unity
of experience. This unity is recognized as the basis for notions like
the "universe," "world" and ultimately, the notion of "thing" in
general. In philosophy, this recognition of unity has been the basis
for the postulation of substance, that which underlies the properties
of an object and allows us to speak of a totality or a unity in

-8-

opposition to a mere aggregate. In addition, the notion of permanence
has been connected with the idea of substance. The postulation of
substance is quite understandable if we take a certain common view of
the tradition. This view as expressed by Lucien Goldmann is as
follows :

All genuinely philosophical thought sets out
from the premiss that there is in human existence
something eternal and immutable, the search for
which constitutes the principal task of philosophy;
this point of departure thus assumes the existence
of objective truth. 1

This is a view with which Nietzsche would certainly agree. The notions
of permanence and unity persist throughout the tradition and their
power as fundamental motivating factors can be clearly seen. This is
no less true with respect to Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (Dissertation
on the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World)
where we meet the question of unity in the form of the totality vs the
aggregate. In Hume's problems with causality, the problem of unity is
further perceptible with the felt need for but lack of a necessary
connection between events. Concerning the assumption of objective
truth as Goldmann characterizes the tradition, we are principally
interested here in this as it developed from the time that ens is
essentially no longer ens creatum but becomes ens certum, indubitatum,
vere cogitatum. Truth is now no longer decided by the method of
authority but becomes dependent on the nature of thinking.

In Descartes' example of the changing characteristics of wax, we
get the explicit move toward truth as certainty based upon the thinking
substance. The thinghood of the wax leads to the unity of the thinking
substance, as its basis; "... with how much more [evidence] and dis-
tinctness must it be said that I now know myself, since all the reasons

-10-

which contribute to the knowledge of wax, or any other body whatever,

2
are yet better proofs of the nature of my mind!" The external world

serves as one gigantic piece of evidence for the existence of the

£0gi_to and the cogito then subsequently becomes the basis for the

truth of perception through the criteria of clarity and distinctness

"and I have already fully demonstrated that all that I know clearly is

3

true." "... what I perceive clearly and distinctly cannot fail to be

true." What truth is Descartes assumes we already know. He is mainly
interested in a criterion whereby we can determine what is true. The
criteria, of course, are clarity and distinctness. To perceive some-
thing clearly and distinctly is to be able to isolate it from every-
thing else, to individuate the perception from others. The criteria
of clarity and distinctness as criteria for determining truth can be
correlated with Nietzsche's view, to be discussed in more detail later,
of the activity of philosophy as imposing "upon becoming the character
of being." But this further involves a static conception of truth,
that is, a conception of truth as characterized above by Goldmann. It
is with the beginning of the modern period that this static conception
of truth becomes explicitly formulated in terms of clarity and dis-
tinctness. The notion of truth as certainty emerges with criteria for
determining certainty.

In Principle 10 of the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes says,

And when I stated that this proposition I think,
therefore _I am is the first and most certain which
presents itself to those who philosophise in orderly
fashion, I did not for all that deny that we must
first of all know what is knowledge, what is existence,
and what is certainty, and that in order to think we
must be, and such like; but because these are notions
of the simplest possible kind, which of themselves
give us no knowledge of anything that exists, I did
not think them worthy of being put on record. ^

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That which can be determined as certain is true. We already
presumably know what certainty is, but we are in need of a set of criteria
for discovering what can be taken as certain. These criteria Descartes
finds in clarity and distinctness based upon the model of mathematics.
Descartes upholds the traditional notion of man as the rational animal
with an already presupposed connection made between rationality,
thinking and certainty. Yet, it is this presupposed nature of and
emphasis upon reason as primary which conditions the attempts after
Descartes to humanly grasp (rationalize) experience as a whole.

The example of the wax which is meant to lead to the indubitability
of the cogito shows that already an idea of what will count as certain
is already operative in Descartes' thinking. There is nothing certain
in sense impressions because they are in flux, are mutable. The idea
of certainty and truth as concomitant with immutability is, of course,
an old theme. With Descartes, however, man as a thinking being becomes
capable of certainty without waiting for revelation. True, God still
waits in the background to guarantee the validity of the application
of a criterion of clarity and distinctness, however man reaches this
conclusion through his reason. Immutability, as it did traditionally,
becomes a sign for that which is most true; it becomes a basis for
knowing anything. The light of nature tells us that "no qualities or
properties pertain to nothing; and that where some are perceived there
must necessarily be some thing or substance on which they depend. And
the same light shows us that we know a thing or substance so much the
better the more properties we observe in it." We know substance as
that which supports the properties and while properties may come and
go, the substance persists and we are allowed to speak of the "same"

■12-

object. Here there is nothing at all different from the scholastic
doctrines.

Descartes' philosophy is significant because it defines the nature
of thinking which persists throughout modern philosophy; it defines the
notion of reason and its operation. Furthermore the role of reason in
man's attempt to deal with his world is emphasized. Besides the notion
of clarity and distinctness as criteria of truth, we get the notion
that thinking is always conscious thinking, a notion which is later
criticized by Leibniz. More importantly, what comes to consciousness
is most significant for Descartes; what I consciously perceive clearly
and distinctly is true. Substance itself is not perceived, but
Descartes implies it is the result of an immediate inference from a
group of properties and the "notion that nothing is possessed of no

o

attributes, properties, or qualities." But it could be objected that

this is circular reasoning because the notion of property implies its

being a property of something, therefore, properties could not be

apprehended as such. At any rate, it is significant that the mutability

of properties of the "same thing" force us to push on to something less

mutable and hence, more "real." Reality thus becomes a function of

mutability.

Of the things we consider as real, the most
general are substance, duration , order, number,
and possibly such other similar matters as range
through all the classes of real things. I do not
observe, however, more than two ultimate classes
of real things -- the one is intellectual things,
or those of the intelligence, that is, pertaining
to the mind or to thinking substance, the other is
material things, or that pertaining to extended
substances, i.e., to body.

Thinking substance and extended substance are both substances but

still only with a qualification, namely, that they have both been

-13-

created by God. Descartes says, "By substance, we can understand
nothing else than a thing which so exists that it needs no other thing
in order to exist. And, in fact, only one single substance can be
understood which clearly needs nothing else, namely, God." Yet the
notion that both extension and thinking come under the common designa-
tion substance, does not help us in understanding the interaction
between them. Furthermore, the principium individuationis and its
connection with substance is left unknown. According to Descartes
variety was presumably produced through an original motion caused by
God in extension. There is a sort of Deus ex machina in the action
of God producing variety in the world. The relation of properties of
things to the things themselves (things taken as substances) presents
a problem of unity which is never made clear.

When we come to the philosophy of Spinoza, we have several changes,
the most important of which is that there is only one substance of
which extension and thought are attributes. These two attributes may
be conceived as absolutely distinct from one another but are to be
regarded as expressions of one substance. The important point is that
the dichotomy of two substances is recognized by Spinoza as untenable.
Spinoza is concerned to avoid any kind of emanationism, therefore God
must be represented as being extended. The motion in matter is an
activity of extension as an attribute of the one substance. The Deus
ex machina involved in a distinct separation of natura naturans and
natura naturata is supposedly avoided in Spinoza, but is it really?
The Deus ex machina actually lies in Spinoza's claim that finite modes
appear out of the one substance but we don't know how this happens.
Spinoza must, as must every philosopher, face the problem of those who

-14-

favor the theory of emanationists, namely how does the finite proceed
from the infinite or multiplicity from unity. This problem does not
seem to be overcome by Spinoza. He is forced to make some attempt to
solve it by postulating an infinite series of efficient causes but
this hardly solves the problem of unity.

Descartes postulated distinct substances which obviously did not
permit an understandable unity; Spinoza made the next logical move by
developing a monism in which everything was said to be the expression
of one substance. Both of these thinkers recognized, at least implicit-
ly, the problem they were faced with; "the truth about being as such in

,, 12

totality had not been realized. In both cases a unity of experience

was recognized and multiplicity was to be accounted for. Furthermore,

certain distinctions must be taken as given absolutely. Descartes has

two absolutes in the form of the res cogitans and the res extensa which

must produce a unity. Spinoza has an absolute causa sui substance and

must account for multiplicity, that is to say: finitude. From his

initial monistic position, Spinoza must account for the emergence of

particulars while still maintaining their identity with the whole.

The philosophy of Leibniz may be looked at as an attempt to overcome

Spinoza's problems of diversity in unity. The main point of this

discussion is that Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz represent the three

logical alternatives for accounting for multiplicity out of unity

within a certain given framework, yet because of the way the problem

is set up in terms of an already given idea of reason and its role, a

Deus ex machina must always be introduced.

In the Leibnizian philosophy, totality is represented by the

totality of perspectives of the monads which are infinite and differ

■15-

from one another by no specifiable degree, however small. This is the
analogue of the principle of least difference. But this is not merely
a successive infinite like Spinoza's infinite chain of efficient causes.
Because each monad is a perspective on the whole universe, it contains
the universe in its own way while maintaining its distinctness. Further-
more, the monads are unextended, simple substances which are not subject
to external action, because strictly speaking there is no external.
Descartes had the problem of the atomists while Spinoza had the problem
of the monists. Leibniz's solution is really ingenious in that he affirms
a multiplicity of substances while maintaining that each substance
reflects all the others.

Leibniz himself seems to have seen his position as the only

alternative to the shortcomings of the Cartesian and Spinozistic philos-

13
ophies. Each monad of the Leibnizian system is a self-contained,

self-active center of force which is constantly developing new per-
spectives. This is what Leibniz calls appetition. Extension and matter
are not primary for Leibniz as for Descartes since extension implies
divisibility and therefore no simplicity, and matter is by no means
simple. Leibniz is fully aware that matter alone was incapable of
offering any ultimate explanation. Yet a substance has to be postulated
and in an absolute sense. In the New Essays Concerning Human Under-
standing, Leibniz says we postulate substance "from that which demands
a kind of knowledge of which the object does not admit."

Ingenious as Leibniz's solution of the problems of Descartes and
Spinoza is, the necessity of postulating absolute, causa sui, uncon-
ditionals shows its effects in his philosophy. In the first place, the
exact place of God as the highest monad seems impossible to clarify

-16-

within his system. We are led to God for the ultimate explanation of
things. Furthermore, God has created the infinity of monads which as
substances are ultimately distinct from one another. Each of these
monads, since they reflect the whole, must contain God although in an
obscure way. But God has a perfectly adequate, clear and distinct
perception of the whole, so the necessity for creating an infinity of
monads never becomes clear. Because Leibniz is not clear about the
position of God, he seems constantly to equivocate between God as
separate from his creation and identified with it. Indeed it seems
impossible to understand what creation could mean in this case. In
the Discourse on Metaphysics, it is said "each substance is a world by
itself, independent of everything else excepting God." But in what
the dependence on God consists is difficult to say. We always come
back to the same problem, either God is his creation or he is distinct
from it. Furthermore, in several places in Leibniz's writings we meet
the traditional notion that everything is "emanating" from God in a
continuous act of creation and is thereby held in existence. In one
place God is referred to as the "extramundane reason of things." But
the notion of "emanation" and the "reason of things" do not make the
unity of the world as we experience it any more comprehensible although
they are presumably used to express a recognized unity.

Secondly, and as an illustration of problems of unity, the peren-
nial dichotomy of contingency and necessity is preserved in Leibniz in
the form of the inability to unify the principle of sufficient reason
and the principle of contradiction. The problem becomes one of
accounting for contingent truths in a necessary universe. Although
contingent truths may be said to be certain, they cannot be said to be

•17-

necessary. Leibniz attempts his famous resolution of the problem of
contingency and necessity in his distinction between moral perfection

and metaphysical perfection, yet, as far as 1 know, no one has made

1 R
adequate sense of this distinction.

Thirdly, the postulating of absolute unconditionals implies that

Leibniz holds an absolute theory of truth. That is, there is a truth

to be attained although for the human mind the acquisition of adequate

knowledge of "external" objects would require an infinite analysis.

In a letter, Leibniz makes another kind of distinction which is more

Kantian.

Being itself and truth are not known wholly
through the senses; for it would not be impossible
for a creature to have long and orderly dreams,
resembling our life , of such a sort that everything
which it thought it perceived through the senses
would be but mere appearance. There must therefore
be something beyond the senses, which distinguishes
the true from the apparent. 19

Positing a multiplicity of absolute unconditionals causes further
problems in that Leibniz finds it necessary to postulate a preestab-
lished harmony because his monads are absolutely distinct from one
another even though their perspectives can never be entirely distin-
guished. Leibniz does not see occasionalism as a viable alternative.
But the nature of each monad consists only in perception and appetition
and its perception is a perception of the universe which includes the
other monads. Given all of this, what does it mean to say that the
monads are absolutely distinct? The problem is one of the incompati-
bility of Leibniz's principle of continuity, and his doctrine of
discrete substances. Of course this is just another statement of the
unity-multiplicity problem, and, although we can make sense of this in

-18-

ma

thematics, on the level of matters of fact, where metaphysics is
ultimately concerned to understand it, the problem seems insoluble.
The principle of continuity follows from the principle of sufficient
reason, but how do we know that this does not apply just in the order
of knowledge and not in the order of nature? Leibniz's answer would
of course be that there is no ultimate distinction between mind and
matter but this conclusion must itself be based upon the principle of
continuity.

There is no intention to go into Leibniz's philosophy in greater
detail, but what has been said of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz should
suffice to show that they all move within a certain framework of
thinking. They represent the three possible basic althernatives
within this framework. Put in its crudest form, these alternatives
are atomism, monism or both at once. From this point of view, we
recognize Liebniz as one end point in the history of Philosophy. Either
all philosophy is condemned to follow these three basic forms, although
perhaps with a greatly diversified content, or a change in the point of
view of what philosophy is to do is necessary. Yet the task of
metaphysics remains the same; to make comprehensible the unity of
experience as a whole.

While the position of the Christian God was intact, it is easy to
see that the Deus ex machina could always be employed without suspicion,,
and this makes it understandable that a position like occasionalism
could and did develop early in the history of modern philosophy. With
the occasionalists the "unreasonable" nature of this device did not
appear as an objection as it might today. With the move to the cogito
and the move toward man as the center, the comprehensibility of all

■19-

being becomes necessary because man must take over explanations pre-
viously referred to God. This is simply a characteristic of the move
out of the middle ages. This comprehension, as mentioned, is charac-
terized by a certain framework of thinking. What is this framework?
The discussions above meant to aim at the idea that the framework of
thinking beginning with Descartes is characterized by a certain
assumption as to the priority and nature of "objective" thinking.
The dominant mode of thinking has as its banner the notion of "clear
and distinct ideas." From this position the notion that thinking is
to take place in terms of well defined categories follows immediately.

As a further indication that this position is correct, the follow-
ing situation should be noted from the position of Leibniz in 1684.
Leibniz notes that there has been abuse of the criteria of clarity and
distinctness on the ground that something may appear as clear and
distinct "and turns out to be really obscure and indistinct." Leibniz
then says, "This axiom is therefore useless so long as we have not

drawn up the criteria of the clear and distinct, such as we have

„20
given. But what criteria are given or can be given? Leibniz

gave the following: "... knowledge is clear when it is sufficient to
enable me to recognize the things represented ...." Knowledge "is
indistinct as soon as I am not able to enumerate separately the
characteristics required to distinguish [note the circularity in the use
of this word] the thing from others . . . ." Furthermore "a distinct idea
... is like the one the goldsmiths have of gold . . . one based on dis-
tinctive [.?] characters and results of assayers' tests which suffice
to distinguish [? J gold from all other similar bodies." At another
place Leibniz says, "... it already becomes clear that in order to

-20-

22
have distinct knowledge, we need intuitive awareness of its content."

It seems then that we decide if our knowledge is clear and distinct by
seeing whether it is clear and distinct, and the appeal to intuitive
knowledge seems very "irrational." So we see that clarity and distinct-
ness function as an ultimate ground of truth and objective knowledge.
In the New Essays, Philalethes says, "When words are so joined in

propositions that they express exactly the agreement or disagreement as

23

it really is, it is a certainty of truth ...." Theophilus, the

exponent of Leibniz's views then says that this "kind of certainty
appears to be nothing else than the truth itself." However, the
determination of the agreement or disagreement depends upon our ability
to discriminate a situation that really is.

In summation, the foregoing treatment of Descartes, Spinoza and
Leibniz was meant to indicate the plausibility of their metaphysical
positions once given a certain way or regarding truth and being. It
was emphasized here and was emphasized by Nietzsche that this conception
has been a traditionally static and categorial one. That the framework
for deciding questions of truth was given as static follows from
Descartes' adoption of the criteria of clarity and distinctness. These
criteria only make explicit an already long-established criterion for
truth, namely, immutability. That which is mutable, that which changes
into something else is that which is confusing. It is essential that
a thing remain identical with itself and endure. That which is
absolutely true must be absolutely immutable. This points to an
unconditioned; something which is unconditionally true, something in
itself. But the notion of an unconditioned truth is by definition
irrational according to the principle of sufficient reason, because

-21-

reason depends upon the ways in which parts of our experience are not
radically distinct from others. Yet the elimination of confusion
depends upon the ability to clearly and distinctly discriminate areas
of our experience. Leibniz saw both the principle of noncontradiction
and the principle of sufficient reason as necessary but their connec-
tion is not too clear.

As a clue to the way truth was regarded in the tradition being
considered, consider the following quotation from Leibniz and also
employed by Heidegger in On the Essence of Ground (Vom Wesen des
Grundes) :

Thus a predicate, or consequent, is always present
in a subject, or antecedent; and in this fact consists
the universal nature of truth . . . This connection and
inclusion of the predicate in the subject is explicit
in relations of identity. In all other relations it is
implicit and is revealed through an analysis of notions,
upon which a priori demonstration is based.

From these things, which have not been adequately
considered due to their great simplicity, there follow
many other things of great importance. Indeed, from
them there at once arises the familiar axiom: "Nothing
is without reason," or "there is no effect without a
cause." If the axiom did not hold, there might be a
truth which could not be proved a priori , i.e., which
could not be resolved into relations of identity; and
this is contrary to the nature of truth, which is
always identical, whether explicitly of implicitly .25

The statement shows the principle of sufficient reason as
dependent upon a notion of truth as identity. It would to against the
nature of reason for there to be any beings without a reason. This
conclusion follows upon the supposition of a complete metaphysical
unity wherein a break or hiatus would be contrary to reason. Experience
forms a continuum as Leibniz thought, and if this were not the case,
human understanding of experience would be defeated from the start.
For Leibniz, this fact is expressed in the proposition with its subject-
predicate form. Every subject can ultimately be exhausted in its

-22-

predicate. Leibniz is quite correct when he views what it would mean
to possess the "truth" as understanding experience as a whole. It
must be noted, however, that a categorical way of thinking seems to
be self-defeating with respect to the project of understanding exper-
ience as a unity. In the end, we would be under the obligation to
break out of our categories in order to achieve the desired unity.
Each category would have to be shown in its essential connection with
every other and thus lose its status of a well-defined category; the
very status which was thought to be the source of its power.

In the philosophic positions discussed we recognize a "need" to
maintain at least three conflicting notions which provide the framework
in which these metaphysical positions become the viable alternatives.
These conflicting notions are experience as a unified whole, an
unconditional "substance" and the criteria of clarity and distinctness
for deciding truth. The philosophy of Leibniz is the last alternative
within this framework and in this light, at least, it is understandable
that L.W. Beck in his Early German Philosophy says, "with the exception

of Lessing, German philosophers who lived between Leibniz and Kant are

„26
now torgotten. Moreover, the foregoing makes plausible Nietzsche's

characterization of the philosopher's attempt "to impose upon becoming

2 7
the character of being ...." Again Nietzsche's statement that the

Tl 7 Pi

will to truth is a making firm, a making true and durable ..."
exhibits considerable force when we understand these althernatives of
the tradition.

The drive to the "thinkability of all being," as Nietzsche
describes traditional philosophy, implies that the philosopher must
represent human experience somehow as a totality (unity). This is

-2 3-

implied by those philosophers who see the principle of sufficient
reason as fundamental for any rational endeavor. The requirement for
a unified view, however, has further required that some "unconditioned"
be postulated and this "unconditioned" lias been traditionally repre-
sented as substance.

Now it is simply not philosophically adequate to postulate an
unconditioned immutable substance and then assert that the particulars
of experience emerge from this or exhibit this substance while at the
same time remaining identical with it. What philosophy demands is an
understanding of this permanence-in-change situation but without being
condemned to proceed strictly from one side of the permanence-flux
dichotomy or the other. To satisfy this situation would be to achieve
a philosophic unity in its most radical form.

The permanence-flux dichotomy may show up in a purely abstract way
as in considerations of change in general or it may take the form of a
split between the abstract realm as a whole and the concrete. The
split is sometimes seen under the rubric Geisteswissenschaf t/Naturwissen-
schaft. It is this latter characterization and the attempt to gain a
unified experience in terms of it which most interested Nietzsche and
Kant. Nietzsche's many remarks concerning the scholar and his remarks
on the will-to-truth as anti-life are meant to reflect the one-sided
nature of the traditional way of seeking unity. It has been the con-
tention of the presentation of this part so far to indicate that a
certain pregiven way of regarding truth in an absolute sense, in a
static, categorial, unconditioned sense, biased the search for a unified
human experience from the start. The notion of truth and what it means
to understand which reigns in the modern tradition as an abstract notion

-24-

is unsuccessful in bringing about even an adequate abstract unity much

less one which takes into account the "irrational" side of human

29
experience.

In the remaining pages of this Chapter, the discuss ion will revolve
around Kant's attempts to deal with the problem of the disunity of
experience. It will be seen that Kant retains the fundamental notions
of the tradition such that the fundamental problem of disunity remains.
Yet Kant represents an extreme solution to the problem which seems
plausible if it is granted that Leibniz represents a last alternative
within a certain given approach to the problem. As is well known,
Kant's expedient is to radically separate two aspects of experience,
the theoretical and practical. It is the contention of this discussion
that Kant's expedient is dictated by a recognition that the traditional
approach will not work and that although the notion of an unconditioned
cannot be given up, knowledge of it must be radically limited. Kant's
notion of what thinking involves, however, by no means differs from
the tradition.

In Kant's famous letter to Marcus Herz of 1772, Kant gives an
informal review of alternatives to account for the unity of experience
somewhat after the manner of Leibniz's review of his predecessors'

attempts. Kant, like Leibniz, is seen to reject any Deus ex machina

n 3D

position as the most absurd argument one could choose." Then in

The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant mentions a "middle course" between

experience making concepts possible or concepts making experience

possible.

A middle course may be proposed between the two . . .
[that is] subjective dispositions of thought, implanted
in us from the first moment of our existence, and so
ordered by our Creator that their employment is in

-25-

complete harmony with the laws of nature in
accordance with which experience proceeds — a
kind of pre format ion- system of pure reason.^

But Kant goes on to write:

. . . there is this decisive objection against the
suggested middle course, that the necessity of the
categories, which belongs to their very conception,
would then have to be sacrificed. The concept of
cause, for instance, which expresses the necessity
of an event under presupposed condition would be
false if it rested only on an arbitrary subjective
necessity, implanted in us, of connecting certain
empirical representations according to the rule of
causal relation. ^

In these lines is expressed the fundamental proposition without which
The Critique of Pure Reason would not exist and which dictates Kant's
procedure throughout, namely that there is an absolutely necessary
aspect of experience which must be accounted for. It is ultimately
the failure of all previous positions to account for this which con-
demns them. But we ask, "Where does this supposition come from?" What
is being recognized with this claim of necessity? If we read the
Critique in terms of this concern with necessity, it is easy to miss
Kant's fundamental viewpoint. The necessity that Kant has in mind is
that which goes to make up one unified human experience. The emphasis
upon necessity as Kant presents it means that all parts of experience
are in thoroughgoing interconnection and constitute a totality or unity.
Kant's viewpoint on this will be presented in the following in his
Analogies .

Certainly we cannot treat necessity in a Humean sense or in terms
of a "necessary" causal connection of the billiard ball variety. If
this is done, Kant's Second and Third Analogy concerning the reciprocity

and simultaneity of cause and effect becomes hopelessly confused or

33
even nonsense.

-26-

As a last remark on this issue of necessity, it should be noted
that Kant's objection above with regard to the "middle course" has no
force at all if he is concerned with the "necessity" of particular
events in causal connection in a Humean sense. This is so because a
theory of preestablished harmony would not at all sacrifice "the
necessity of the categories." That is, it would not sacrifice their
necessity in so far as all experience would be seen to be in con-
formity with them. What Kant really intends to convey here is that a
theory of preestablished harmony is not "reasonable;" does not allow
itself to be ultimately understood, and therefore defeats from the
start any attempt to attain a unified view.

We see what primarily concerns Kant when we look at his Inaugural
Dissertation and find that it starts off immediately with the problem
of the possibility of the recognition of a world in general. In this,
we have explicitly presented the problem of unity in multiplicity.
Kant says of the problem, "This absolute totality may bear on the face
of it the appearance of an everyday concept and one that is easily met
with, especially when it is stated negatively as happens in a definition.
Yet when we reflect upon it more deeply it is seen to constitute a crux
for the philosopher." The problem of the possibility of a "world"
is the philosophic problem par excellence. So we see once again that
Kant is essentially concerned with the basic metaphysical issue whose
last possibility of formulation was given above as articulated in the
position of Leibniz. This emphasis upon the problem of unity as Kant's
main concern is, of course, not new and may be found discussed in a
work entitled Schopenhauer's Criticism of Kant by Radoslav Tsanoff.35
It is moreover the position taken by Lucien Goldmann in his work,

•2 7-

Immanuel Kant. Note the following quotation which is representative
of the present thesis:

... it is with Kant that philosophy first
attains knowledge of one of the most important
dialectical oppositions — between empiricism and
totality, between form and content — ... Kant was
the first to set out this opposition in all its
starkness and to place it at the center of his
philosophical system. "

Note also the following:

Kant seems to me to be the first modern thinker to
recognize anew the importance of the totality as a
fundamental category of existence, or at least to
recognize its problematic character. ^7

It must be noted at the outset that from the pre-
critical period onwards the category of totality
occupies a most important place. Indeed, it-
provides the key to the development of Kant's
thought, a point which most of the neo-Kantians
failed to grasp. 38

Before going into Kant's attempt to deal with the problem of the unity
of experience, a comment is necessary in terms of the possible objection
that the empiricist approach is left out of account in this presenta-
tion. In effect, this is quite true, yet, on the other hand, the
rationalists mentioned have not been considered simply because they
are rationalists. They have been considered because it is more obvious
in their case that their prime concern has been to represent experience
as a unity or a whole. This treatment is not meant in any way as an
attempt to defend the rationalists against traditional objections to
their program. It is well known that Kant was critical of both the
so-called rational and empirical approaches, and he is sometimes
represented as attempting their reconciliation. It must be pointed out,
however, that this is once again a confirmation that Kant's ultimate
concern is that of the problem of unity. In other words, the traditional

division of method according to rationalism and empiricism both turn
out (from a Kantian point of view) to be inadequate for dealing with a
complete explanation of experience or, as characterized here, the
representation of experience as a unity. Both the rationalists and
empiricists may be represented as having the same ultimate goal yet
differing in the means of achieving it.

If we ask ourselves why so much attention was given by Kant and
others to Hume's encounter with the principle of causality, the ultimate
answer to this must come in the form of a concern to understand experi-
ence as a unity. Answers to the question in the forms: "Science
depends upon the principle," or "the work of science is put in jeopardy
by Humean skepticism," are really quite superficial from a philosophic
point of view. This is shown by the fact that the concern to "save"
science in this sense is a concern to save a way of unifying a large
part of my experience and a concern to save the hope that a sure method
of continuing the process of unification has been found. At any rate,
in the interest of completeness and to help point up its inadequacy,
a few words concerning the naturalistic-realistic approach are given
below. There will then follow a more specific treatment of Kant. The
problem of the unity of experience before Kant had more and more taken
on a psychological tendency where attention is given to the coordina-
tion of the senses and the relation of the senses to the intellect.
In speaking of this trend in English and French psychology of the first
half of the eighteenth century, Cassirer in The Philosophy of the
Enlightenment says, "Both these psychologies want to get rid of the
last remnants of dualism which had remained in Locke's psychological
principles; they want to do away with the distinction between internal

-29-

and external experience and reduce all human knowledge to a single

source." In fact, Cassirer sees as the "common center" of episte-

mological and psychological considerations at this time the problem

which Molyneux first formulated in his Optica,

Is the experience derived from one field of sense
perception a sufficient basis on which to construct
another field of perception that is of qualitatively
different content and of specifically different struc-
ture? Is there an inner connection [allowing us to make
a transition from one sense to another]. Will a person
born blind — who has acquired an exact knowledge of
certain corporeal forms by means of experience [have
the same power of discrimination without the sense of
touch if he regains his sight]. 40

Progress beyond Leibniz takes the form of a clear separation of the
sensible from the intellectual and then attempts to get them together.
This is not exactly how the problem of unity was posed for Leibniz,
but there seems to have been general dissatisfaction with Leibniz's
adjudication of mind and matter according to clear and confused per-
ception. Also, however, Leibniz's objections to Locke did not become
generally known until 1765 in the New Essays.

At any rate, because of the preoccupation with the unity of
experience in the way described by Cassirer, experiments like the
famous Cheseldon case of 1728, in which a boy born blind was given
sight, generated tremendous interest. From this point on, until the
time of Kant's reformulation, confusion reigns supreme with all kinds
of sensationalistic interpretations which get nowhere with the problem
of unity because of their realistic-psychological orientation.

It is in the form of the relation of the understanding to objects
of sense that Kant takes up the problem of the unity of experience.
But it is to be noted that Kant's perspective on the problem is deeper
than his predecessor's and in this respect he harks back to Leibniz.

-30-

For Leibniz there was a primary interest in the question of the most
basic principles of reality and of man's place in the universe. His
concerns in this sense may be properly termed metaphysical. With the
emphasis upon psychological and physiological concerns which antedate
Kant, the question of the possibility of a metaphysics, in so far as
we can characterize it as a concern with a unified experience, never
gets posed. Kant would claim that this is always the case with a
naturalistic-realistic approach. This is why Kant may be interpreted
as the only logical successor to Leibniz as was earlier indicated with
reference to L.W. Beck. Both Kant and Leibniz were concerned to
delineate those features of experience within which my experience of
a world becomes possible at all (although this was not Leibniz's way
of putting it). In terms of this situation, what do we see Hume doing
when he fails to find a necessary connection between events in terms of
the principle of causality? In essence, Hume gives up by appealing to
custom. Yet, he has no choice given the already established realistic
standpoint from which he philosophizes.

Immediately before Kant, thinkers were occupied with wondering
about the status of non-logical necessity principally in the form of
Hume's problem. Here was a necessity not determinable by the principle
of contradiction. Yet here again we are back to Leibniz and his postu-
lation of two first principles of reasoning; the principle of contra-
diction and the principle of sufficient reason. Indeed it seems that
the only way to make sense out of Kant's Second and Third Analogies is
to regard his problem there as one concerning the principle of sufficient
reason and not as one of causal connection in the billiard ball sense.
The principle of sufficient reason in Leibniz and Kant was a realization

-31-

of the unity of experience. Consequently, as mentioned earlier, the
necessity Kant is concerned with in The Critique of Pure Reason is
that of the necessary unity recognized in experience and just as this
unity is simply recognized and cannot be argued for, likewise, to
speak with Schopenhauer, "to seek a proof for the principle of suf-
ficient reason, is, ... an especially flagrant absurdity."42 We see

the same opinion expressed by Leibniz in his correspondence with

43
Clarke, and in this respect Leibniz's insight was ahead of many of

those who followed him, namely, that the principle of contradiction

alone could not be regarded as the highest principle of reason. Yet

even Leibniz did not grasp fully the insight at the basis of the post-

ulation of the principle of sufficient reason, for he says that it

applies to contingency while the principle of contradiction applies to

necessity. Necessity is taken in the sense of logical necessity. The

principle of sufficient reason in Leibniz gets tied up with possible

worlds in notions of the "best" and expressions like the following:

All contingent propositions have reason for being
as they are rather than otherwise or (what is the same
thing) they have a priori proofs of their truth, which
render them certain, and show that the connection of
subject and predicate in these propositions has its
foundation in the nature of the one and the other; but
they do not have demonstrations of necessity, since these
reasons are only founded on the principle of contingency
or the existence of things, i.e., on what is or appears
the best among several equally possible things ^4

But too much gets sneaked in here with "the connection of subject and
predicate in these propositions has its foundation in the nature of the

one and the other " It is precisely this connection as constituting

a unity which is the most interesting thing. The principle of suf-
ficient reason simply says that there must be a chain of events leading
up to any particular event we might choose such as Caesar crossing the

■32-

Rubicon and determined by the ultimate reason; that God freely chose
this world. But the real unity of this connection of events, we never
learn. The highest approach to unity is achieved by the postulation
of individual substances each of which reflects the whole universe.
But when we specifically examine the connection between subject and
predicate, we postulate that all relations reduce to the relation of
identity. For Leibniz, the principle of sufficient reason plays less
of a role in describing what is recognized when we recognize a world,
than in the question "why this world at all?"

The principle of sufficient reason after Leibniz takes on the more
explicit sense of referring to the unity of experience, and controversy
centers around whether its status is logical or ontological. However,
it is not realized that at the level of the true insight regarding the
unity of experience, that is, the true meaning of the principle of
sufficient reason, the logical/ontological distinction really doesn't
hold up. We still get the old distinction of matter and form at this
level in the discussions at the time of Kant warning not to confuse
reasons with causes. Reasons belong to thought, causes concern the
material world. While this may be a legitimate distinction, we cannot
stop with it if our task is to make the unity of experience under-
standable. But we have seen that this was indeed Kant's problem as he
expressed it in his Inaugural Dissertation and later as the unity of
the various fields of human endeavor under metaphysics. The task is
to find the highest principle of unity in experience and of course, we
mean experience as a whole.

Note the following from "The Discipline of Pure Reason" in the
Critique .

•33-

The semblance of conviction which rests upon
subjective causes of association [as opposed to a
proof which shows the necessary conditions for any
objective experience], and which is regarded as insight
into a natural affinity, cannot balance the misgivings
to which so hazardous a course must rightly give rise.
On this account, all attempts to prove the principle
of sufficient reason have, by the universal admission
of those concerned, been fruitless; and prior to our
own transcendental criticism, it was considered
better, since that principle could not be surrendered,
boldly to appeal to the common sense of mankind — an
expedient which always is a sign that the cause of
reason is in desperate straits — rather than to attempt
new dogmatic proofs. -*

It is perfectly clear from this that Kant cannot be satisfied with any
philosophical investigation which stops short of a complete explication
of experience. This passage is also confirmation of the thesis that,
in spite of only a few explicit references to it, Kant was quite con-
cerned with the principle of sufficient reason and what it represents
as an ultimate principle, namely, an expression of the recognition of
the ultimate unity of experience. As a further confirmation of Kant's
concern, the "Second Analogy" should be noted in which the only other
mention of the principle of sufficient reason occurs in connection with
the unity of time; "The principle of sufficient reason is thus the
ground of possible experience, that is, of objective knowledge of
appearances in respect of their relation in the order of time."
Furthermore, in the section entitled "Transcendental Logic" where
general logic is contrasted with transcendental logic, the principle
of contradiction is given as the highest appeal in general logic, but
no principle for transcendental logic is given. From the previous
history of philosophy we might guess that this would be the principle
of sufficient reason — and indeed, it turns out to be Kant's form of
this principle. Kant, however, no doubt to divorce himself from the

-34-

previous confusions and Leibniz generally avoids its use.

There will be no attempt here to discuss in detail Kant's "theory
of knowledge." We are interested mainly in how his doctrine relates
to the previous discussion concerning the unity of experience and what
we have called a certain way of thinking characteristic of the tradi-
tion. It is well known that Kant distinguished between the phenomenal
world with which our knowledge is concerned and the noumenal world of
which we cannot have any knowledge. Furthermore, the unity of
experience, the content of experience consisting of appearances only,
is to be accounted for by the unity of consciousness. So, "the tran-
scendental unity of apperception is that unity through which all the
manifold given in an intuition is united in a concept of the object."
This is the basis of all our "objective" knowledge and what makes a
unified experience possible. The detailed derivation of this is given
in the "Transcendental Deduction."

It is furthermore well known that Kant wanted to avoid both
transcendental realism and subjective idealism. To achieve this, it
was necessary to posit the subject as the source of objective knowledge
while still maintaining the subject/object distinction in a real sense.
The unity which Kant was ostensibly concerned to comprehend was that
concerning the question of how concepts could apply to objects; the
familiar problem of unity as we saw it formulated in the period between
Kant and Leibniz. As Kant says, "Hitherto it has been assumed that

A Q

all our knowledge must conform to objects."

The problem of unity presents itself in a number of basic ways.
On the one hand, we may confront the problem at the level of the unity
of appearances, that is, in terms of a world which appears to a subject.

•35-

On the other hand, we may confront the problem in terms of the unity
of the perceiving subject with the world that appears. Kant was, of
course, concerned to show that these are by no means isolated problems.
Ultimately, however, when no longer concerned primarily with reason
in its theoretical employment, Kant is forced to preserve a disunity
in terms of the phenomenal/ noumenal distinction. With regard to the
world as appearance and the problem of multiplicity in unity at this
level, what we require is a principium individuationis under which
unity is maintained. Kant attempts to ground the connection of
multiplicity in unity through time. This is made explicit in the
analogies of experience where Kant's fundamental use of time is equated
with the fundamental character of the principle of sufficient reason.
In this respect, it makes sense that the Analogies are the last stage
of the Critique before the treatment of the phenomena/noumena division.49
In other words, once we reach the level of the principle of sufficient
reason, at the level of appearances there is nowhere else to go.

With regard to Kant's inability to overcome all disunity, we
notice that Kant is quite unequivocal about the fact that a "manifold
of sense" is given and furthermore given as a manifold. In the
"Transcendental Aesthetic" Kant says, "Objects are given to us by
means of sensibility," very loosely speaking, of course, since as such
an "object" cannot be given. The object is given "insofar as the mind
is affected in a certain way." The subject is in this sense "recep-
tive." "Our knowledge springs from two fundamental sources of the
mind; the first is the capacity of receiving representations (recep-
tivity for impressions), the second is the power of knowing an object
through these representations "51 Through the union of the

-36-

sensible given and concepts, knowledge arises.

Although this is the way human knowledge is constituted, Kant
postulates another way of knowing which eliminates the receptive aspect
of knowledge. The distinction is between an intuitus derivativus and
an intuitus originarius. In the former case, the understanding must
wait on the manifold of sense before there can be knowledge; the con-
cepts only represent the possibility of an object. In the latter case,
a direct knowledge of the object is postulated apart from sensibility.
This knowledge would be knowledge of the thing-in-itself . For us
mortals, the understanding stands in the service of sensible intuition.
But this means that human knowledge depends upon "something" independent
of itself. The postulation of the thing-in-itself is at least
partially the result of the receptivity associated with our human
finite knowing. Kant must account for the givenness of a manifold of
sense without conceding a complete objective idealism?

In order to grasp in more detail what Kant's treatment of unity
involves at the theoretical level, and thus to confirm that Kant's
discussion in the Analogies is basically a concern with the principle
of sufficient reason, the Analogies will be discussed with reference
to A.O. Lovejoy's article "On Kant's Reply to Hume."52

Firstly, Lovejoy seems to be in basic agreement with the thesis
of the discussion so far that Leibniz is really the last figure of
great significance when we consider Kant's basic concern in the
Critique. Secondly, as a result of this, Lovejoy sees the central
importance of the Second Analogy in the Critique. Thirdly, Lovejoy
correctly sees that Leibniz did not take the principle of sufficient
reason in a more extended sense "as Kant believed that he had." The

-37-

more extended sense was meant by Kant to provide an apodictic justifi-
cation for synthetic judgments. Fourthly, Lovejoy's conclusion is that
Kant did not solve Hume's problem according to the exposition of the
Second Analogy, and as Kant presents it, we can only agree. But it
must be said that Lovejoy does not attempt to extend the concept of
the principle of sufficient reason or attempt to see what Kant is
really up to. Lovejoy himself does not totally grasp the insight
expressed in the principle of sufficient reason, but regards it accord-
ing to a Hume an model and, therefore, as noted earlier, the argumenta-
tion of Kant becomes nonsense and nonsense is relatively easy to
criticize. It will be necessary to return to this point and ask
whether in light of the previous discussion there might be necessary
reasons for the mode of Kant's presentation and therefore the resulting
misunderstanding of the Analogies.

Kant's concern, as has been insisted all along, was that of the
unity of experience, the fact that experience is everywhere inter-
connected. This interconnectedness is a characteristic which cannot
be accounted for as simply a logical unity "for although our knowledge
may be in complete accordance with logical demands, that is, may not
contradict itself, it is still possible that it may be in contradiction
[used in strange sense here] with its object." The logical connec-
tions are a sine cjua non yet not sufficient. At this point in the
present discussion, I venture a more explicit attempt to say what the
insight behind the principle of sufficient reason has been. In general
this is only open to a negative mode of expression and here the help of
Schopenhauer is enlisted. In the fourth book of the first volume of
Tne World As Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und

■38-

Vorstellung) we see :

. . . the concept of nothing is essentially
relative, and always refers to a definite something
that it negates ... considered more closely, an
absolute nothing, a really proper nihil negativum,
is not even conceivable, but everything of this
kind, considered from a higher standpoint or subsumed
under a wider concept, is always only a nihil
privativum. Every nothing is thought of as such
only in relation to something else; it presupposes
this relation, and thus that other thing also.

Thus every nihil negativum or absolute nothing, if
subordinated to a higher concept, will appear as a
mere nihil privatum or relative nothing, which can
always change signs with what it negates, so that
that would then be thought of as negation, but itself
as affirmation. ^

This should be compared with Leibniz's notion that nature makes no
"leaps," and consequently is a continuum since it is precisely the
denial of a nihil negativum which demands the postulation of a con-
tinuum. In other words, no differences in nature, however small, can
be represented as absolute differences.

The formulation above is noteworthy in connection with the present
discussion on two accounts. Firstly, we notice that Schopenhauer's
point is only capable of negative expression. This corresponds to the
procedure of Kant in his "Deductions" where the inconceivability of the
absence of something is appealed to; namely, the absence of the cate-
gories. This is a feature of any transcendental deduction in that we
must prove our point by showing that unless it is admitted, experience
as we know it is not possible. Secondly, the concern here is with a
conceptual or theoretical nothing at the level of appearances, and an
existentialist might object that this is far from what he means by the
term 'nothing.' We might note in addition that for Kant as for Leibniz,
unity is of the very essence of reason. Says Kant, "The law of reason

-39-

which requires us to seek for this unity, is a necessary law, since
without it we should have no reason at all, and without reason no
coherent employment of the understanding, and in the absence of this
no sufficient criterion of empirical truth." From this it follows,
that the notion of a nihil negativum is unreasonable, i.e., goes against
the very nature of reason which is to seek a unity. Furthermore, the
impossibility of a proof for the principle of sufficient reason claimed
by many philosophers is more comprehensible in terms of this nihil
negativum. The very nature of a proof depends upon the ability to
make smooth (comprehensible) transitions from one aspect of experience
to another or experience regarded one way to experience regarded in
another. But this is ruled out from the start if the possibility of an
absolute break (nihil negativum) is admitted.

Yet in the Second Analogy, Kant does attempt a "proof" for the
principle of sufficient reason. This amounts, for Kant, to showing
the indispensibility of a thoroughly interconnected experience. A.O.
Lovejoy's article is a good example of how commentators completely miss
the point of Kant's Analogies by considering them as a specific
refutation of Hume. There are many misunderstandings in this
article, not the least of which is that Lovejoy thinks the force of
Kant's presentation lies at a point where it does not exist at all.
For this presentation, the significance of Lovejoy's article lies in
its criticism of Kant on the basis that Kant's express purpose was to
refute Hume's specific formulation. In fact, we need not claim this
at all but merely understand that Hume's problem with causality gave
rise in Kant to the more general problem of the necessary unity (inter-
connectedness) of experience as a whole. For example, Lovejoy states:

-40-

Yet if the thesis of the Second Analogy — that
"every event follows upon an antecedent event according
to a rule" — is meant to have any relevancy to
Hume's problem, it should mean that every event has
some determinate antecedent and that it can be cer-
tainly known a priori that the same kind of antecedent

will in all instance, be followed by the same kind of

s 7
consequent . J '

But this goes much too far because the principle of sufficient reason
as Kant was trying to establish it, is by no means the principle of
causality which concerned Hume. As mentioned above in the brief dis-
cussion of Kant's understanding of necessity, the Humean conception of
causality will not work. Consequently, to accuse Kant of not refuting
Hume is simply a misunderstanding of Kant's whole concern in terms of
the thoroughgoing unity of experience. It is unfortunate that Kant
so often has recourse to the language of physical causality in his
discussion of the Analogies. However, taken in the context of Kant's
philosophy as a whole and his concern with the unity of experience,
we ought not to be misled by his language. Lovejoy says, "To Kant

himself, his arguments about causality seemed the very core of the

58
Kritik der reinen Vernunft ..." This would be absurd, however, if

Kant's concern were taken in a less basic sense than that of the

principle of sufficient reason. Indeed, if Kant's treatment of the

unity of experience is at the level of the principle of sufficient

reason, then a complete refutation of Lovejoy 's position would entail

showing that Hume's problem could not even arise unless the unity of

experience at the level of Kant's treatment were presupposed.

A full discussion of A.O. Lovejoy's article is neither intended

nor necessary. The concern has been to point to Kant's preoccupation

with the unity of experience and to further indicate that this concern

is not to be taken in any superficial sense. With the Analogies, we

-41-

reach the highest expression of unity possible at the level of the
understanding: "The general principle of the three analogies ... rests
on the synthetic unity of all appearances as regards their relation in
time.

The "unity of knowledge" or unity at the level of the understanding
does not overcome the problem of unity. After treating the under-
standing, Kant points out that a basic disunity still exists in terms
of a manifold of sense which must be "given" to a receptive subject and
the pure forms of thought. This leads Kant into a discussion of the
thing in itself which must now be considered.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant emphatically states that

human knowledge depends upon the receptivity of a given manifold of

sense which the understanding then structures. It is in terms of the

need for this receptive aspect of human knowledge that Kant gives one

of his characterizations of the thing in itself as opposed to the

object of appearance. Kant says that there might be an intuitive

intellect which does not have to depend upon the given manifold of

sense but could, as it were, "perceive" objects immediately. However,

... we cannot in the least represent to our-
selves the possibility of an understanding which
should know its object, not discursively through
categories, but intuitively in a non-sensible
intuition . °"

This way of putting the matter makes explicit the finite character of

human knowledge which is dependent upon a given sensible manifold. In

this respect, the thing in itself may be represented as a limiting

concept .

What our understanding acquires through this
concept of a noumenon, is a negative extension;
that is to say, understanding is not limited through
sensibility; on the contrary, it itself limits

-42-

sensibility by applying the term noumena to things
in themselves (things not regarded as appearances) . 61

This way of expressing the situation is obviously not meant to tell us

something about another type of nonhuman knowledge, but is designed to

characterize human knowledge. Part of the point of the Analogies was

to show how one aspect of experience can only be known in terms of some

other aspect. No one aspect can be known, so to speak, "in itself" but

only in relation to other appearances. The series of appearances with

respect to any one object can never be exhausted since, for Kant, this

would be to arrive at an appearance which was not itself conditioned

by other appearances. But an unconditioned appearance can never be a

part of my experience as Kant was concerned to show in the Analogies

and the "Antinomy of Pure Reason." From this point of view, we might

interpret the thing in itself as the object regarded as completely

determined. As Kant says in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" and Lucien

Goldmann emphasizes, "The undetermined object of an empirical intuition

is entitled appearance." From this Goldmann concludes, "It follows,

reversing the assertion, that the completely determined object of a

ft 'X

non-empirical intuition is the thing in itself." Of course, no
object is ever completely determined in this sense. Goldmann further
supports this interpretation with a quotation from the "Ideal of Pure
Reason. "

If, therefore, reason employs in the complete
determination of things a transcendental substrate
. . . this substrate cannot be anything else than the
idea of an omnitudo realitatis . . . But the concept
of what thus possesses all reality is just the con-
cept of a thing in itself as completely determined.6^

Furthermore, as Kant emphasizes in the "Antinomy of Pure Reason" and

the "Ideal of Pure Reason," the notion of a completed series of

-4 3-

appearances is coincident with the notion of an unconditioned some-
thing of which the understanding can know nothing. The interpretation
of the thing in itself which Goldmann adopts seems quite plausible and
in its briefest form says, "in the knowledge of the thing in itself,
we are dealing with the category of totality which according to Kant,
is lacking in human knowledge ...." There is, however, as mentioned
above, the other interpretation of Kant's thing in itself in terms of
the receptivity of the subject. As indicated above, Kant's discussion
of the divine intellect which does not have to depend upon a sensible
given, indicates an actual "something" apart from the subject which
supplies the sensible manifold.

We have then two ways of indicating the limitation of human
knowledge and expressing the thing in itself: first, in terms of an
unachievable totality and second, in terms of a dependence upon a
sensible manifold which must be given to a receptive subject. Both
of these interpretations can be partially reconciled by saying that,
as Goldmann indicates, the understanding always remains with an un-
determined object in terms of appearances which if allowed to reach
totality would represent the thing in itself. When Kant discusses the
thing in itself in terms of the receptivity of the subject, he does so
from the point of view of the understanding. When, however, Kant
discusses the thing in itself in terms of a totality, he is concerned
with reason per se_. Insofar as the understanding seeks unity, it must
do so in terms of appearances which are all merely conditions of
further appearances. The "understanding does not admit among appear-
ances any condition which can itself be empirically unconditioned."

-44-

... in the empirical regress we can have no
experience of an absolute limit, that is, no ex^
perience of any condition as being one that empirically
is absolutely unconditioned. The reason is this:
such an experience would have to contain a limitation
of appearances by nothing, or by the void, and in the
continued regress we should have to be able to encounter
this limitation in a perception — which is impossible.67

We here have expressed explicitly the denial of the nihil negativum as

mentioned above in the discussion of the Analogies. Every appearance

must be conditioned by another appearance. Although it is permissible

to speak of unity with regard to the function of the understanding,

this is not a unity in its most radical sense, namely a totality. It

is only permissible to postulate a totality with respect to reason,

but of course apart from the possibility of an intuition.

The unity of reason is therefore not the unity
of a possible experience, but is essentially different
from such unity, which is that of the understanding.
That everything which happens has a cause, is not a
principle known and proscribed by reason. That
principle makes the unity of experience possible,
and borrows nothing from reason, which apart from
this relation to possible experience, could never,
from mere concepts, have imposed any such synthetic
unity. 68

The highest form of unity attributable to the understanding is the
highest form of unity attributable to the series of appearances.
According to the above interpretation of the Analogies, this unity
turns out to be the principle of sufficient reason. This form of
unity, however, does not suffice for the realization of an ultimate
unity in the form of a totality. The understanding merely involves
itself in an infinite regress when it attempts to seek the totality.

The quest for the totality can ultimately only lead to an un-
conditioned, that is, to an end of the series of appearances. This is
why an unconditioned beginning for the series of appearances can never

-45-

be found. Therefore, if an unconditioned is to be found, it must lie
outside the series of appearances.

That everything which happens has a t uase is a
universal law, conditioning the very possibility of
all experience. Hence the causality of the cause,
which itself happens or comes to be, must itself in
turn have a cause; and thus the entire field of ex-
perience, however far it may extend, is transformed
into a sum-total of the merely natural. But since in
this way no absolute totality of conditions determining
causal relation can be obtained, reason creates for
itself the idea of a spontaneity which can begin to
act of itself, without requiring to be determined to
action by an antecedent cause ....69

My purpose has only been to point out that since
the thoroughgoing connection of all appearances, in
a context of nature, is an inexorable law, the in-
evitable consequence of obstinately insisting upon
the reality of appearances is to destroy all freedom.
Those who thus follow the common view have never been
able to reconcile nature and freedom. 70

But Kant's "reconciliation" amounts to creating a radical breach

between the world of appearance and the world of freedom; the phenomenal

and noumenal world. The attempt to gain the unconditioned or totality

in the realm of appearance is given up, but it is sacrificed at the

cost of the unity of our world. Was there not, however, a disunified

world present from the beginning with respect to the sensible given?

We never knew where the sensible manifold came from, and the notion of

an inside/outside distinction with regard to the knowing subject was

presupposed as basic from the beginning of the Critique. In "The

Antinomy of Pure Reason" Kant finally gets around to indicating that

the unconditioned which lies outside of the series of appearances may

be postulated as the "cause" of the appearances.

The faculty of sensible intuition is strictly only
a receptivity, a capacity of being affected in a
certain manner with representations .... The non-
sensible cause of these representations is completely
unknown to us, and cannot therefore be intuited by us
as object.

-46-

We may, however, entitle the purely intelligible
cause of appearances in general the transcendental
object, but merely in order to have something cor-
responding to sensibility viewed as a receptivity. '^

The question of the totality of appearances along with the receptivity

of the subject are both connected in terms of the unconditioned

postulated outside the realms of appearance. On the basis of the

unconditioned we can bring together the two interpretations of the

thing in itself. The question as to the ultimate origin of the given

manifold of sense and the question of the ultimate unity of the world

in terms of a totality are both referred to the unconditioned as thing

in itself.

Thus the world presents itself as an ultimate disunity from my

human standpoint. The world of appearance can never satisfy the demand

of my reason, which always seeks the unconditioned. The apparent world

as opposed to the real world (if we may so characterize it) it now

asserted to be an irreparable part of (definitive of) human knowing.

We may attempt to overcome the real/apparent dichotomy by saying that

it is actually the thing in itself which comes to appearance as the

world we know, but these would be totally empty words without some

knowledge of the thing in itself outside the realm of appearance.

In terms of the traditional problems with disunity, where does

Kant stand. When we read Kant's discussions of his predecessors, it

is obvious that his criticisms revolve around their failure to draw a

radical distinction between the world as appearance and the world in

itself. All problems stemming from the conflict of necessity and

freedom are the result of this failure. Besides ethical problems,

however, it is clear that Kant views his predecessors as attempting

-47-

to overcome problems of multiplicity in unity by seeking the solution
in the world as it appears. Thus, Kant's message to his predecessors
is basically this: the ultimate unity of the world which appears, is
not itself a piece of knowledge (in the realm of appearance). There-
fore, all previous attempts to understand the world in terms of an
overriding principle of multiplicity in unity were bound to fail,
because their authors unknowingly took appearance for the thing in
itself.

If we characterize Kant's project as the understanding of human
experience as a whole or in terms of the Inaugural Dissertation, as the
constitution of a world, we must ultimately conclude that he fails.
But Kant's project is different from all previous attempts because it
presumes to show why it must fail. To this extent a thoroughgoing
attempt to understand the constitution of the world must simultaneously
be a critique of reason. This is so because of the place occupied by

reason: "For reason is the faculty which supplies the principles of

72
a priori knowledge," and "metaphysics consists, at least in intention,

73
entirely of a priori synthetic propositions." Kant says furthermore

that "the proper problem of pure reason is contained in the question:

How are a priori synthetic judgments possible?"74 Therefore the proper

critique of metaphysics amounts to a critique of pure reason.

In terms of the concern of this chapter with the problem of unity,

we must conclude that for Kant, the overriding concern of traditional

metaphysics has been the problem of how a world is constituted as a

unity. Kant states in the "Architectonic of Pure Reason,"

The philosophy of pure reason is either a propaedeutic
(preparation) which investigates the faculty of reason
in respect of all its pure a priori knowledge, and is

-48-

entitled criticism, or secondly, it is the system of
pure reason, that is, the science which exhibits in
systematic connection the whole body (true as well as
illusory) of philosophical knowledge arising out of
pure reason, and which is entitled metaphysics . The
title 'metaphysics' may also, however, be given to the
whole of pure philosophy, inclusive of criticism, and
so as compr. hending the investigation of all that can
ever be known a. priori as well as the exposition of
that which constitutes a system of the pure philosophical
modes of knowledge of this type -- in distinction,
therefore, from all empirical and from all mathematical
employment of reason. ->

However,

Mathematics, natural science, even our empirical
knowledge, have a high value as means, for the most
part, to contingent ends, but also, in the ultimate
outcome, to ends that are necessary and essential to
humanity. This latter service, however, they can dis-
charge only as they are aided by a knowledge through
reason from pure concepts, which, however we may choose
to entitle it, is really nothing but metaphysics.^

All pure a_ priori knowledge, owing to the special
faculty of knowledge in which alone it can originate,
has in itself a peculiar unity; and metaphysics is the
philosophy which has as its task the statement of that
knowledge in this systematic unity. 77

The disunity expressed in experience as a whole and ultimately neces-
sitated by the inability of the realm of appearances to produce a
totality is reflected in the division of metaphysics into speculative
and practical; a metaphysics of nature and a metaphysics of morals. In

both cases we have a metaphysics, because we are concerned with "the

7 8
demand of reason for a complete systematic unity." The "demand" for

unity lies at the basis of the creation of all metaphysical systems,

because reason is at the basis of all metaphysical systems. Moreover

insofar as we regard metaphysics as philosophy in its most basic form,

this demand lies at the basis of all philosophy. "Metaphysics ...

alone properly constitutes what may be entitled philosophy in the

79
strict sense of the term.

•49-

The demand of reason has been behind the previous attempts to
attain a unified world view in terms of a philosophy. The tradition,
however, maintained a radical distinction between man as a thinking
being and man as a sensing being. This division is clearly set forth
in Descartes philosophy in terms of the two substances of thought and
extention. Man is set down in a world as a thinking being and then
proceeds to discover this world as it is given to him through the
senses. The project of philosophy in terms of the problem of unity is
then to get these two "substances" together to constitute a world. The
problem of the constitution of a unified experience given over to Kant
does not differ from that of the tradition. Kant, however, makes the
failure of the previous attempts at unity the basic problem of his
philosophy. Kant's predecessors failed to attain a unified account of
experience because they failed to carry out a critique of reason itself
and ascertain the limits of objective knowledge. Having carried out
the critique, what is Kant's answer as to the possibility of compre-
hending experience as a unified whole? We must conclude that Kant
denies the possibility of such comprehension. In the end, I am left
as a subject in a world which is given to me I know not how. The
traditional problem of the unity of human experience is only pushed
back one step. Regarding the world as appearance opposed to a world
in itself still maintains the old opposition between a thinking sub-
ject and a given world of which he must make sense. Put in other terms,
the realms of thinking and acting remain distinct. This is a common
theme of Goldmann.

For Kant, however, knowledge and action, theory
and practice, were almost totally separate; the impos-
sibility of uniting them constituted indeed, as I have
often repeated, the upper limit of his philosophy . 80

■50-

Through thought man gets at the truth of things insofar as he can

know it. Man is first and foremost a reasonable being: man = the

rational animal. Kant does not question the traditional equation in

terms of which reason is given the highest place; man is defined in

terms of reason. That a critique of the metaphysical tradition could

be written as a critique of pure reason, testifies to the primacy of

reason in the tradition. More than this, however, metaphysics,

. . . can be brought to completion and fixity as to be in
need of no further change or be subject to any augmenta-
tion by new discoveries; because here reason has the
sources of its knowledge in itself, not in objects and
their observation, by which its stock of knowledge could
be further increased . °1

Is this then where a critique of pure reason ultimately ends? Is

reason simply this faculty of man which presses on to an unconditioned

of which it can never have objective knowledge? Is the end of

philosophy proper to be reason's knowledge of itself? That a higher

standpoint is possible, is indicated by Kant himself in the Prolegomena.

That the human mind will ever give up metaphysical
researches is as little to be expected as that we, to
avoid inhaling impure air, should prefer to give up
breathing altogether. There will, therefore, always
be metaphysics in the world; nay, everyone, especially
every reflective man, will have it and, for want of a
recognized standard, will shape it for himself after
his own pattern. What has hitherto been called meta-
physics cannot satisfy any critical mind, but to forego
it entirely is impossible; therefore a Critique of Pure
Reason itself must now be attempted or, if one exists ,
investigated and brought to the full test, because there
is no other means of supplying this pressing want which
is something more than mere thirst for knowledge. ^2

Kant realises that what is involved is "something more than a mere

thirst for knowledge" or as some might say, "curiosity," yet he does

not pursue the issue to a higher standpoint. To make this "metaphysical

need" a problem would be to jeopardize the primacy of reason or the

-51-

primacy of thought in the tradition. Kant does not make the "need"
for metaphysics a problem; his highest appeal is to the "nature of
reason." The drive toward totality and the unconditioned in experience
is attributed to the "nature of reason" and thus remains inexplicable.
The question then arises whether reason may be regarded from the higher
perspective which would then, like Kant's critique of pure reason, make
the metaphysical tradition a problem but in a more radical and com-
prehensive way.

ABBREVIATIONS FOR
NOTES

The following reference scheme will be used throughout the notes
of the dissertation. All references to Karl Schlechta's three volume
edition of Nietzsche's writings, Werke in drei Banden, will be made as
in the following example: Schlechta, Vol. II, p. 100. This will then
be followed by a reference in parentheses to a translation (if available)
of the particular work cited in Schlechta's edition. The citation for
the translation will consist of the translator's name followed by an
abbreviation of the particular work of Nietzsche translated with
appropriate page number. Thus a complete reference might be: Schlecta,
Vol. II, p. 100. (Kaufmann, GM, p. 50).

The abbreviations for the individual works of Nietzsche cited will
be as follows:

AC The Antichrist translated by R.J. Hollingdale in Twi light of

the Idols and the Antichrist. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968.

BGE Beyond Good and Evil translated by Walter Kaufmann in Beyond
Good and Evil : Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future . New
York: Random House, Inc., 1966.

BT The Birth of Tragedy translated by Walter Kaufmann in The Birth
of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner. New York: Random Housed
Inc. , 1967.

DS David Strauss translated by A.M. Ludovici in The Complete
Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Vol. IV: Thoughts Out of
Season, Part I. Edited by Oscar Levy. New York: Russell
and Russell, Inc., 1964, pp. 1-97.

GM On the Genealogy of Morals translated by Walter Kaufmann in
On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. New York: Random
House , Inc. , 1967.

SE Schopenhauer as Educator translated by Adrian Collins in The
Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche . Vol. V: Thoughts Out
of Season, Part II. Edited by Oscar Levy. New York: Russell
and Russell, Inc., 1964, pp. 101-201.

TI Twilight of the Idols translated by R.J. Hollingdale in

Twilight of die Idols and the Antichrist . Baltimore: Penguin
Books, 1968.

UAH The Use and Abuse of History translated by Adrian Collins in
The Complete Works o_f Friedrich Nietzsche. Vol. V: Thoughts
Out of Season, Part II. Edited by Oscar Levy. New York:
Russell and Russell, Inc., 1964, pp. 1-100.

-52-

-53-

Thus Spoke Zarathustra translated by Walter Kaufmann in The
Portable Nietzsche. New York: The Viking Press, Inc.,
1967.

NOTES
CHAPTER I

1. Lucien Goldmann, Immanuel Kant, Translated by Robert Black
(London, 1971), p. 31. The basic line of thinking in this chapter is
very close to the view of Goldmann to whom I will refer throughout. My
presentation, however, is not, like Goldmann's, concerned with socio-
logical or economic factors as conditions for a particular metaphysical
point of view. It is concerned, like Goldmann's presentation, with the
problem of the individual/community unit but only in a very derivative
way, namely, as one small part of the unity problem. My presentation
is, however, in complete agreement with Goldmann's characterization of
the tradition as quoted. It is furthermore in complete agreement with
the emphasis put on Kant's pre-critical writing.

2. Rene Descartes, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Translated
by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (New York, 1955), Vol. I,

pp. 156-157.

3. Ibid. , p. 180.

4. Ibid. , p. 184.

5. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Translated by
Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York, 1967), no. 585. Here-
after abbreviated WP . Thus: WP , no. 585. Numbers refer to note numbers
rather than pages. Kaufmann 's translation of Per Wille zur Macht is
used although it follows the erroneous ordering of the original editors
because it is much more convenient than, say, Schlechta's edition for
purposes of reference.

6. Descartes, Works, Vol. I, p. 222.
Ibid.,

Ibid.
Ibid.

Ibid.

223.
240.
238.
2 39.

Benedict de Spinoza, The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza,
Translated by R.H.M. Elwes (New York, 1955), Vol. II, pp. 50-51^ Spinoza
says here, "And as it has been shown already that existence appertains
to the nature of substance, existence must necessarily be included in its
definition; and from its definition ... we cannot infer the existence
of several substances; therefore it follows that there is only one sub-
stance." Spinoza is concerned to show that if substance had a cause
outside itself, this would necessitate two absolutely distinct entities
whose reason would lie in a third thing.

12. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfullingen, 1961), Vol. II, p. 193.
All quotations from Heidegger's Nietzsche are my translations unless
otherwise specified.

•54-

13. Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz, "New System of the
Nature of Substances and of the Communication Between Them," The
Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings, Translated by RobeTt Latta
(Oxford, 1898), p. 313.

14. Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz, New Essays Concerning
Human Understanding, Translated by Alfred Gideon Langley (LaSalle, 1949)
p. 227.

15. Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz, Selections , Edited by
Philip P. Wiener (New York, 1951), p. 309. Leibniz says here, "... created
substances depend upon God who preserves them and can produce them con-
tinually by a kind of emanation ...." It is presumably this "kind of
emanation" which Spinoza was concerned to avoid. With regard to Spinoza
and the problem of emanation see Harry Austryn Wolfson The Philosophy

of Spinoza (New York, 1969), pp. 306-308.

16. "ibid. , p. 309.

17. Ibid. , p. 345.

18. For a similar opinion on this issue see Arthur 0. Lovejoy,
The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 170-175.

19. Leibniz, Selections , p. 359. Leibniz is here denying the
possibility of a radical phenomenalism. He seems to be arguing on the
basis of the principle of sufficient reason. Since we do in fact make
the real/apparent distinction there must be a reason for it which itself
does not lie in the realm of appearance.

20. Ibid. , p. 288.

21. Ibid. , p. 284.

22. Ibid. , p. 286.

23. Leibniz, New Essays, p. 453.

24. Ibid. , p. 454.

25. Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reason, Translated by Terrence
Malick (Evanston, 1969), p. 17.

26. Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy (Cambridge, 1969),
p. 392.

27. WP, no. 585.

28. WP, no. 552.

29. It will be objected that if this "irrational" side of
experience was made comprehensible, this would once again be an abstrac-
tion. What is ultimately desired is to understand the "irrational" as
irrational. It is difficult to see what could be involved here since"
there seems to be a contradiction in this notion. What the discussion
is moving toward is a way to "understand" this disunity or "irrational"
in experience.

30. Immanuel Kant, Kant : Selected Pre-critical Writings, Trans-
lated by G.B. Kerferd and D.E. Walford (Manchester, 1968), p. 113.

31. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Translated by Norman
Kemp Smith (New York, 1929), pp. 174-175.

32. Ibid. , p. 175.

33. This is a mistake made by Schopenhauer in his discussion of
the Kantian philosophy. For an account of this see Radoslav Tsanoff,
Schopenhauer's Criticism of Kant (New York, 1911), p. 36.

34. Kant, Selected Pre-critical Writings, p. 53.

35. Tsanoff, Schopenhauer's Criticism of Kant, p. 9 and p. 36.

36. Goldmann, Immanuel Kant, p. 19.

37. Ibid. , p. 36.

38. Ibid. , p. 58.

-55-

39. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Translated
by Fritz C.A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Boston, 1955), pp. 99-100.

40. Ibid. , pp. 108-109.

41. In this connection see G.W.F. Hegel, The History of Philosophy,
Translated by E.S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (New York, 1974),

Vol. Ill, pp. 428-429. Hegel criticizes Kant for being as dogmatic as
his predecessors but in the form of a "subjective" instead of "objective
dogmatism." He is also critical of Kant for leaving the concept of
necessity unexamined.

42. Arthur Schopenhauer, The Fourfold Root of the Principle o_f
Sufficient Reason, Translated by E.F.J. Payne (LaSalle, 1974), p. 32.

43. Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz, The Leibniz-Clarke
Correspondence , Edited by H.G. Alexander (Manchester, 1956), p. 95 and

p. 119. Liebniz criticizes Clarke for demanding a proof of the principle
of sufficient reason. "Is this a principle, that wants to be proved?"
At certain points, however, Leibniz does not seem too sure about the
status of the principle; he implies that it is an inductive generaliza-
tion. "It is certain, there is an infinite number of instances, wherein
it succeeds [or rather it succeeds 1 in all the known cases in which it
has been made use of. From whence one may reasonably conclude, that it
will succeed also in unknown cases ...."

44. Leibniz, Selections , pp. 94-95.

45. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 621-622.

46. Ibid. , p. 226.

47. Ibid. , p. 157.

48. Lbid. , p. 22.

49. It will be objected that the Analogies are not the last stage
before the treatment of the phenomena/noumena distinction. But, of
course, they are last with respect to the constitution of the object.

The Postulates of; Empirical Thought have to do with modalities of already
constituted objects. As Kant states on page 239 of the Critique, "No
additional determinations are thereby thought in the object itself ...."

50. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 65.

51. Ibid. , p. 92.

52. Arthur 0. Lovejoy, "On Kant's Reply to Hume," Kant : Disputed
Questions, Edited by Moltke S. Gram (Chicago, 1967), pp. 284-308~ There
is no intention of entering upon an exposition of the literature on
Kant's Second Analogy. The interpretation of this Analogy is one of

the most controversial points in Kant scholarship. Lovejoy's article
has been selected because it is an especially good example of the type
of position I am interested in denying. I am not interested in this
article per se but only as representative of a type of common misunder-
standing.

53. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 98.

54. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation,
Translated by E.F.J. Payne (New" York, 1966), Vol. I, p. 409.

55. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 538. Kant's statement here
that "... without it [reason's drive toward unity] we should have no
reason at all ...," I take to be an explicit recognition on his part of
the intimate connection between the unity of experience and the principle
of sufficient reason.

-56-

56. The Analogies can undoubtedly be regarded as a refutation of
Hume but the issue is actually much larger. I take Kant's concern to be
at the level of the principle of sufficient reason and the unity of
experience generally. Hume's function was to focus Kant's attention

at the most fundamental level of unity. Kant's mention of the principle
of sufficient reason at the very end of the Analogies of Experience con-
firms my interpretation of Kant's position.

57. Lovejoy, "On Kant's Reply to Hume," p. 301.

58. Ibid. , p. 303.

59. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 209.

60. Ibid. , pp. 272-273.

61. Ibid. , p. 273.

62. Ibid., p. 65.

63. Goldmann, Immanuel Kant, p. 134.

64. Kant, Cri tique of Pure Reason, p. 490.

65. Goldmann, Immanuel Kant, p. 134.

66. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 463.

67. Ibid. , p. 455.

68. Ibid. , p. 306.

69. Ibid., p. 465.

70. Ibid. , p. 467.

71. Ibid. , p. 441. Notice that this idea of the transcendental
object seems to contradict Kant's view elsewhere (p. 271).

51. Ibid

82

Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics,

Translated by Lewis White Beck (New York, 1950), p. 116

CHAPTER II
UNITY AND THE PRINCIPLE OE SUFFICIENT REASON

The general point of view taken in the previous discussion of Kant
was that of the unity of experience. It is important to again empha-
size the importance of this point of view and why it was adopted. If
we understand Nietzsche as a philosopher of philosophy, then an under-
standing of his philosophy is only properly grasped when it is related
to the most basic ways of characterizing the philosophic tradition as
a whole. The position of this thesis is that most basically the
problem of the unity of experience characterizes the ground movement
of philosophy. It is in fact a further assumption of this thesis that
a complete "proof" of this position would literally constitute a
recapitulation of the history of philosophy.

Because the question of the unity of experience becomes essential,
it was most expedient to focus on the principle of sufficient reason.
The principle of sufficient reason is taken as most essentially a
statement which says, among other things, that my experience insofar
as it is to be open to a rational critique or indeed understood at all
must be an interconnected whole. It must, because this at least is
involved in what we mean by understanding anything, be possible to move
from one part of my experience to any other. Put alternatively, to the
extent to which I cannot make this move or transition in experience, to
this extent any particular area of my experience I care to choose must
be said to be irrational. It is then noteworthy that the problem of

•5 7-

the unity of experience becomes simply the problem of the limits of
reason in general. Kant saw this more clearly than anyone before him.
The previous discussion of Kant arises out of the conviction that the
Critique of Pure Reason may be taken most consistantly as a treatise
on the principle of sufficient reason. Although this point may not be
immediately apparent, when we regard the principle of sufficient reason
and the Critique within the perspective of a concern with the unity of
experience, the connection becomes quite obvious.

At the most basic level of pure epistemology , of course, and as
Kant treats the subject in the Critique, the principle of sufficient
reason may merely be taken as a recognition that if "anything" is to
be part of my possible experience then there must be features of this
possible experience which it has in common with my experience as a
whole. This then becomes an admission that if I have experience at
all, this experience must be in principle demonstrably unified. There-
fore a consideration of the problem of the unity of experience is at
least as basic as a consideration of the possibility of experience in
general. Kant expresses this conclusion himself in the Critique where
the entire "Transcendental Deduction" hinges on the notion of the
synthetic unity of consciousness. Kant states, "The synthetic unity
of consciousness is, therefore, an objective condition of all knowledge.
It is not merely a condition that I myself require in knowing an
object, but is a condition under which every intuition must stand in
order _to become an object for me." It is highly significant that in
a work which for the first time makes reason an explicit philosophic
theme, Kant should find it necessary to assert the importance of the
notion of unity. It is to be expected, therefore, that the most basic

-59-

understanding of Nietzsche's position with respect to Kant and the
philosophic tradition ought to occur at the level of the unity of
experience. It is this consideration which has motivated the discussion
of this thesis so far and assures that the understanding of Nietzsche's
position will not proceed at some superficial level.

Because of the perspective of unity adopted here, the forms of
disunity recognized by the philosophic tradition become of interest.
In the historically oriented discussion of the last chapter, the con-
cern was to show the movement of the rational tradition as a progressive
attempt to overcome these disunities. To the extent that a philosophy
may be said to fail, the failure may be localized at that point where
a leap in thinking is required. At this point the position in question
may be characterized as irrational. Kierkegaard's position falls into
this category, and of course, Kierkegaard himself insisted that the
rational tradition could not accomplish its goal of unity; his entire
discussion of truth as subjectivity reflects this distinction.

In the tradition as based upon the primacy of reason, why is a

leap in thinking seen as objectionable? It is objectionable, because

we already have an a priori recognition that our experience is "one"

and feel that an account of this experience ought to reflect this

recognized unity. All this simply says that we cannot operate other

than at the level of the principle of sufficient reason. This is why

we might expect that with the inception of modern philosophy with

Descartes and the beginning of epistemology as it has come to be

understood there could be no other outcome than Absolute Idealism.

This was expressed by Leszek Kolakowski in the following way:

The development of post-Cartesian philosophy was
to a large degree a spate of imitations of the same
procedure; philosophers accepted Descartes' question

-60-

completely, and with it half his answer, and stubborn
attempts to modify the cogi to formula dragged on into
this century.

Once the consciousness of the thought process is the
ultimate datum of cognition, all of reality becomes
incapable of going outside the thought process.

The tradition may be characterized as an attempt to overcome all
oppositions in philosophic accounts of experience. Hegel of course
realized this in his periodization of the history of philosophy making
Descartes the beginning of the modern period.

The forms the disunity of experience has taken were indicated in
the cursory review of the previous chapter. Within the last 150 years,
with the emergence of an existentialist way of thinking, this disunity
has more and more come to be an explicit theme. In fact it has gained
a certain respectability and found a philosophic home of its own. The
emerging preoccupation with the fundamental problems connected with
the disunities in experience comes to explicitness with the concept of
the Nothing. It is an interesting question whether the existentialist
realization of its Nothing is not ultimately the same Nothing which
reveals itself in the many dichotomies of the rational philosophic
tradition beginning with Descartes and the subject/object distinction.
In Kant's philosophy, the Nothing reaches a hitherto unknown explicitness
in the form of the phenomena/noumena distinction, and it is in terms
of this that Kant may be viewed as a culmination of the rationalist
tradition and may conversely (as is not usually done) be viewed as the
beginning of the modern existentialist tradition. The Nothing of
concern here is of course the nihil negativum.

Where do we meet this nothingness in the existentialist tradition?
Between Kierkegaard's objective and subjective lies the Nothing.

-61-

Between the individual and mankind lies the Nothing. Between the
infinite and the finite lies the Nothing. The traditional recognition
in the phrase "the finitude of man" is the recognition of the "gap"
supposedly existing between man and a wholistic viewpoint of whose
existence he can have some awareness but cannot attain. In fact this
might be said to be the basis of the so-called "tragic world view" which
the Greeks clearly recognized. The "tragic world view" is dis-
tinguished by the recognition that man is not capable of comprehending
the totality of his experience. The tragic hero, whether he deceives
himself about it or not, is in the position of acting on inadequate
knowledge. It is usually understood that this lack of knowledge is
not simply an accidental deficiency, but an inevitable result of the
human condition. The point at which man falls short of the necessary
insight into existence represents the point at which a recognition of
the nihil negativum enters. Existentialism as it has developed in the
modern tradition has explicitly recognized this nihil negativum and
made it an explicit philosophic theme. Man's striving (specifically
man's striving for rational comprehension) may be regarded as an
attempt to overcome this recognition of the nothing. Kierkegaard has
asserted this, and as will be seen, Nietzsche described much of the
activity of modernity as an attempt to escape this recognition.
Nietzsche's use of the phrase (not unique with him) "God is dead"
labels the abyss which modern man finds opening before him and which
he desperately tries to fill. Part of Nietzsche's distinction as a
philosopher stems from taking seriously the idea that the philosophic
tradition might be one attempt to fill the abyss. This is an important
point and helps make clearer why Nietzsche put so much stress on value

-62-

considerations in his discussion of the tradition rather than preoccupy-
ing himself with traditional metaphysical and epistemological
categories. This point will be considered further in what follows.

The rational view of the world involves an explicable, systematic
whole which can be laid before us in a discursive manner. For the most
part, existentialist philosophies are interested in denying that this
program can be carried out. They usually posit in one form or another
an opaque, irreducible aspect of experience which can only be known to
exist but never described. This for example is the position of Karl
Jaspers. With respect to the concerns of the present thesis, the
point to be noticed is that the existentialist assertion of an opaque
aspect of experience is at the same time an assertion of the Nothing.
The principle of sufficient reason as it has grounded reason in the
tradition is now asserted to no longer apply. In this sense, it is
correct to view existentialism as a reaction to the rational tradition.
It is furthermore noteworthy that the concept of necessity is strikingly
absent in existentialist thought. This is obviously due to the
intimate connection between reason and necessity in the tradition.
As already mentioned, the concept of necessity is fundamental to Kant's
position and cannot be further grounded; it can no more be grounded
than the principle of sufficient reason itself can be grounded. In
contrast to the emphasis upon necessity in the tradition, existential-
ism is concerned to assert the importance of possibility and human
freedom. In a tradition based upon the primacy of reason, this would
signal the breakdown of the principle of sufficient reason. Note that
Schopenhauer, whose philosophy more than any other in the tradition
emphasizes the principle of sufficient reason, consistently denies the

-6 3-

existence of real possibility.

Let: us look at how reason is understood in terms of necessity with
Kant and two philosophers of the rationalist tradition after him;
Fichte and Hegel. In the last chapter, a close connection was made
between Kant's notion of the a priori and necessary knowledge. A priori
knowledge is the proper business of metaphysics thus metaphysics studies
the necessary features of experience. Furthermore, "reason is the
faculty which supplies the principles of a priori knowledge." It
sounds almost trivial when a point is made of the connection between
reason and necessity, because the job of reason is to show that the
world is this way and no other and this is equivalent to showing how
any particular feature of experience we care to choose is necessarily
connected with the rest of experience. According to Fichte, "Philosophy
anticipates the entirety of experience and thinks it only as necessary,
and to that extent it is ... a priori. In fact both Fichte and Hegel
explicitly criticized Kant for not showing the necessity in the
development of his philosophy at every turn, such that their advance
over Kant may be taken as finally demonstrating that necessity. In
the Lesser Logic, Hegel states, "But with the rise of this thinking
study of things, it soon becomes evident that thought will be satisfied
with nothing short of showing the necessity of its facts . ..." Hegel's
and Fichte' s philosophies are represented as absolute idealisms
precisely because they are concerned to push the idea of necessity in
knowledge to its limit; no fact may be left undemonstrated in its
necessity. With regard to this specific theme of necessity in the
rationalist tradition Hegel is to be taken as the end of the Western
rationalist tradition. It is the premium put upon necessity in the

■64-

rationalist tradition which accounts for the emphasis upon reason.
Reason is nothing without necessity.

While maintaining that what has been said of the traditional
notion of reason is the case and further maintaining the existential-
ist position on the bankruptcy of this view of reason, this by no
means destroys the deeper sense of the reasonable in terms of the unity
of experience. What is at stake is whether this unity need be taken
in the discursive sense of a thoroughgoing series of interconnections
forming a system. Furthermore, the question arises at this point in
the investigation and historically after the philosophy of Hegel
whether philosophy as it has been practiced traditionally may not
stand in the service of life in general. This Nietzschean question
could have made no sense whatever to Hegel since philosophy by defini-
tion could have nothing outside itself. Thus we are presumably at
an impasse with the traditional understanding of reason and necessity.
To move further will require no less than a new perspective on the
world; a perspective in which the place of reason is redefined. It
will be further required that reason give up attempting to ground
itself. If we believe that Hegel left any part of life unaccounted
for, then we tacitly admit that Absolute Idealism was not achieved.
Let us accept that Hegel made the fullest possible attempt to achieve
a self-grounding of knowledge. If we are then dissatisfied with his
effort, it can only be because we feel that something has been left
out of account. For Hegel, of course, it would be absurd to maintain
that some phenomenon could become part of my experience and yet remain
uncomprehended by philosophy. Yet this very fact allows one to know
what form any denial of the complete dominance of reason in the

-65-

tradition must take. Any objector to Hegel must finally assert that
the ultimately irrational, the irrational in principle, is a possible
component of experience. This could take the form of either (1) show-
ing that the rational as Hegel understands it cannot encompass experi-
ence as a whole; there is a real which is not rational or (2) showing
that in general no view of reason could be self-justifying. This,
of course, was precisely the line taken by Kierkegaard with his dis-
tinction between the radically subjective individual and the objective
world. As long, however, as one maintains the existence of a breach
in experience as a whole, the traditional rationalist will claim that
reason has more work to do, i.e., as asserted before, nothing short of
an Absolute Idealism will do.

As mentioned above, the so-called bankruptcy of reason by no means
destroys the deeper sense of the reasonable in terms of the unity of
experience. Certainly idealism after Kant was more intent than ever
to assert the criterion of unity as a measure of the rational together
with the concept of necessity which was to remain unavoidably vague.
Furthermore, as stated above, even with the advent of a philosophy
asserting ultimate irrationalities in experience, the concept of the
rational remains unchanged. Thus, looked at from the standpoint of the
unity of experience per se , the concern of philosophy remains the same
with respect to the constitution of the reasonable. Indeed, the task
of reason in terms of seeking unity remains unchanged from Kant onward.
What does historically change is the form the unity of experience is
to take. The notion of reason in its basic form remains as given by
Kant .

. . . what is peculiarly distinctive of reason in its
attitude to this body of knowledge is that it prescribes

-66-

and seeks to achieve its systemizat ion, that is,
to exhibit the connection of its parts in conformity
with a single principle. This unity of reason always
presupposes an idea, namely, that of the form of a
whole of knowledge — a whole which is prior to the
determinate knowledge of the parts and which con-
tains the conditions that determine a priori for
every part its position and relation to the other
parts. This idea accordingly postulates a complete
unity in the knowledge obtained by the understanding,
by which this knowledge is to be not a mere contingent
aggregate, but a system connected according to
necessary laws. ^2

Kant is at this point a few pages away from an oblique statement

of the principle of sufficient reason (A651, B679) . Kant puts it this

way: "The law of reason which requires us to seek for this unity, is

a necessary law, since without it we should have no reason at all, and

13
without reason no coherent employment of the understanding ...."

Further formulations follow in A659 , B687 but stated in the form of
the principle of continuity; a necessary corollary of the principle of
sufficient reason. In his formulations, however, Kant makes a typical
vacillation as illustrated by the following remark: "Such anticipa-
tions [that is, the various formulations of unity], when confirmed,
yield strong evidence in support of the view that the hypothetically
conceived unity is well-grounded . ..." "Well-grounded" at this point
refers to the idea that "nature" may be actually the way reason has
postulated it. But, of course, the postulation of an independent
reality or "nature" in this sense has no place in the whole Kantian
project and indeed could have no definite meaning attached to it. Kant
seems to be aware of this but unable to think consistently in terms of
his avowed project, consequently he follows his assertion with the
traditional qualification that "this continuity of forms is a mere idea,
to which no congruent object can be discovered in experience." It

-67-

is appropriate to point out here that reason per se has nothing to do
with truth or falsity which is the business of the understanding or the
categories. Because of this, Kant cannot legitimately talk about a
"nature" which may or may not correspond to ideas of reason. The
understanding must follow the principles of reason, but reason is not
concerned with the constitution of objects which is the work of the
understanding .

The upshot of Kant's conception of reason is this: "Unconditioned
necessity, which we so indispensibly require as the last bearer of all
things, is for human reason the veritable abyss." This has been the
condition of reason in the Western tradition for the past two millenia.
The force of the drive toward unity as it was characterized in the last
chapter may be extended to the history of philosophy as a whole as
was done by Arthur Lovejoy in his work The Great Chain of Being. The
present discussion has focused on the modern period of philosophy,
because it is in this period that the ground motivation of philosophy
in terms of the principle of sufficient reason comes to explicit
philosophical consciousness. As long as this principle remained the
highest operative principle of reason, there could be no other satis-
factory outcome for philosophy than a complete and unified description
of experience. This unity, however, which must be viewed as the hoped
for outcome of all the activity of the philosophic tradition has not
been achieved. Furthermore the suspicion grows as to whether, at least
on the traditional view of reason, the goal is achieveable at all.
The situation has recently been characterized as "epistemological
nihilism." "Men ... find that there is no truth, and that they should
continue to seek it. The will to truth drives men even further into

■68-

the void, and that they may now recognize it as void is no help."17

In the following chapter, a short discussion of Schopenhauer is
used to lead into a discussion of nihilism. Schopenhauer's philosophy
was of considerable influence on Nietzsche's entrance into philosophy
but more importantly for our purposes, it represents a significantly
different attempt within the tradition to grasp the unity of experience,
Many problems with the traditional attempts are brought to their
highest degree of explicitness in Schopenhauer's philosophy. The most
obvious example of this is Schopenhauer's explicit emphasis and
extended discussions of the principle of sufficient reason.18 Because
this principle plays such an explicitly dominant role in Schopenhauer's
philosophy, it becomes abundantly clear that the ground motivation of
this philosophy is to comprehend experience as a unity. This makes its
failure particularly instructive.

NOTES
CHAPTER II

1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman
Kemp Smith (New York, 1929), p. 156.

2. Leszek Kolakowski, Toward a Marxist Humanism, Translated by
Jane Zielonko Peel (New York, 1968), p. 21.

3. G.W.F. Hegel, The History of Philosophy, Translated by E.S.
Haldane and Frances H. Simson (New York, 1974), Vol. Ill, p. 217.

4. Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript,
Translated by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, 1941),
esp. Chapter II, pp. 67-113.

5. Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existence, Translated by William
Earle (New York, 1955), pp. 61-62". Jaspers states, "... but Existenz

is the unintelligible, standing by and against other Existenzen, breaking
up every whole and never reaching any real totality."

6. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation,
Translated by E.F.J. Payne (New York, 1966), Vol I, p. 463f. Schopen-
hauer therefore collapses the distinction between the actual and the
possible. His basic line of thinking is that if a given event were
possible it must have occurred. The fact that it does not occur proves
that, in fact, it was not possible. For a fuller development of this
position, see Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Freedom of the Will, Translated
by Konstantin Kolenda (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960).

1- Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 58.

8. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Science of Knowledge, Edited and
translated by Peter Heath and John Lachs (New York, 1970), p. 26.

9. G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel's Logic, Translated by William Wallace
(Oxford, 19 75) , p. 3.

10. For a discussion of the primacy of necessity in Kant's Critiques,
see Heinz Rottges, Nietzsche und die Dialectik des Aufklarung (Berlin, ' '
1972), p. 177ff. Here it is stated (p. 182), "... durch das Erheben des
spezifisch Kantischen Notwendigkeitsbegrif fs zum Kriterium fur
Wissenschaft und Ethik Kant eine bestimmte spekulative Voraussetzung,

die selbst nicht begriindet werden kann ...."

11. There is no intention of entering into an extended discussion
of Hegel's philosophy. Any full treatment of Nietzsche's confrontation
with the tradition will eventually have to face the difficulties in-
volved in a confrontation between Nietzsche and Hegel. To my knowledge
this has not been done in any complete way. The requisite knowledge

of Hegel's philosophy alone would be an obstacle to this kind of in-
vestigation. I believe that Nietzsche's position with respect to the
tradition will not be sufficiently comprehended until Hegel's philosophy
is understood. This is because Hegel represents the Absolute Idealist
position toward which reason in the philosophic tradition has been
tending. Hegel may be considered a culmination of the tradition but in

-69-

-70-

a sense different from that of Kant. Kant's philosophy may be
legitimately regarded as a culmination, because it asserts the limits of
reason through the use of reason. By thus making a definite assertion
about the limits of reason as understood by the tradition, Kant pro-
vided a clear statement and foundation from which the later Idealists
could assert the incompleteness of his position and attempt to go beyond.

In the sense that a move to a dialectical position was found
necessary by Fichte and a dialectical-historical by Hegel, the con-
ception of reason after Kant was new. Yet, from the deepest point of
view, I would want to maintain that Hegel's position still remains within
the tradition of reason; which has its ultimate culmination in Nietzsche's
philosophy. Here I can only acknowledge the importance of a
Nietzsche-Hegel dialogue.

12. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 532.

13. Ibid. , p. 538.

14. Ibid. , p. 544. Throughout his discussion of reason, it seems
to me that Kant desperately wants to assert a nature which is the way
reason expresses it but quite independent of reason itself. Such an
assertion would, of course, destroy the very foundations of the Critique.
See, for example, pp. 537-538.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid. , p. 513.

17. Tracy B. Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of
Transfiguration (Berkeley, 1975), p. 77.

18. Schopenhauer's doctoral dissertation was entitled The Fourfold
Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

CHAPTER III
A TRANSITION BY WAY OF SCHOPENHAUER

It is well-known that Schopenhauer maintained Kant's notion of the
thing-in-itself in the form of his doctrine of the will. In The World
As Will and Representation it is stated that our willing "is the one
thing known to us immediately, and not given to us merely in the
representation, as all else is." The will "is the point where the

9

thing-in-itself enters the phenomenon most immediately."*" Moreover,
it is Schopenhauer's contention that modern philosophy since Descartes
has operated with the division of "knowledge" into will and representa-
tion and been motivated by the problem of getting them together.

Schopenhauer represents the primary problem of philosophy as "the deep

3
gulf between the ideal and the real."

... once first demonstrated by Descartes, it has ever
since given philosophers no rest. But after Kant had
at last shown most thoroughly the complete diversity of
the ideal and the real, it was an attempt as bold as it
was absurd ... to try to assert the absolute identity
of the two by dogmatic utterances referring to a so-
called intellectual intuition.4

Schopenhauer is the interesting case of a philosopher who categor-
ically rejects all idealist philosophy between Kant and himself. He
viewed his philosophy as the legitimate successor and correction of
Kant's philosophy. Yet it must be said that his general philosophic
project is quite close to that of the idealists. A comparison on this
point will be useful in terms of an understanding of Kant. The situa-
tion may be put concisely and rather sketchily as follows.

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-72-

Both Schopenhauer and the idealists may be viewed as reacting to
Kant's philosophy. The reactions took the form of attempts to complete
the Kantian position by overcoming the dichotomies inherent in that
position. Schopenhauer and Fichte both explicitly call themselves
Kantians. Fichte sees himself as simply drawing out the consequences
of Kant's conclusions. Schopenhauer's philosophy is a constant dialogue
with Kant although this is often only very implicit. Both Fichte and
Hegel characterize their projects at various points as an attempt to
eliminate the radical breaks in Kant's philosophy which he himself took
as unavoidable for finite human reason. With Schopenhauer's main work,
we have his attempt to overcome the phenomena/noumena distinction. The
title of the work, The World As Will and Representation, betrays what
Schopenhauer's problem is. There is the recognition of one thing, a
world, which we must attempt to make sense of in terms of will and
representation. But this necessarily entails identifying the two in
some sense. Therein lies the problem. The reader sees time and again
how every discussion leads up to this connection and how Schopenhauer
fails to make it understandable. The World As Will and Representation
may without exaggeration be viewed as a long series of attempts to see
will and representation (thinking) as a unity called the world. Both
Schopenhauer and the idealists then are concerned to understand the
unity we recognize as the world. This is the way this thesis has
characterized the goal of philosophy in general. Schopenhauer's
vehement objections to the idealists are mainly at the level of method
and not of aim. It must be added, however, that even this is not too
clear. For example, Schopenhauer rejects the idealist notion of
intellectual intuition yet asserts that we do have immediate knowledge,

-7 3-

e.g. the subjective/objective distinction is given immediately thus
cannot be further grounded.

The outcome of Schopenhauer's attempts to go beyond Kant really
amounts to vacillating between two assertions which, when all is said
and done, remain at the level of mere assertion. First, the thing- in-
itself (will) is toto genere different from phenomena (representation).
Second, the phenomenal world must be seen as the world as will coming
to consciousness in representation. The root of Schopenhauer's dif-
ficulties is easy to see; he cannot make will phenomenal, because it
cannot then be seen simultaneously as will. He wants to say, "See how
the phenomena reveal the inner nature of the world as will?" But when
he attempts to display this, he finds himself pointing only to phenomena.
Schopenhauer clearly realizes his problem, but since he has one notion
of what thinking consists of, he finds no way out of his troubles.

Schopenhauer sees his own significance as a philosopher in the
following way:

... all philosophers before me, from the first to the
last, place the true and real inner nature or kernal of
man in the knowing consciousness. Accordingly, they
have conceived and explained the I, or in the case of
many of them its transcendent hypostasis called soul,
as primarily and essentially knowing, in fact thinking,
and only in consequence of this, secondarily and
derivatively, as willing. This extremely old, universal,
and fundamental error ... must first of all be set aside,
and instead of it the true state of the case must be
brought to perfectly distinct consciousness. However,
as this is done for the first time here after thousands
of years of philosophizing, some detailed account will
not be out of place. The remarkable phenomenon that in
this fundamental and essential point all philosophers
have erred ... might be partly explained ... from the
fact that all of them aimed at presenting man as dif-
fering as widely as possible from the animals. 6

That Schopenhauer's philosophy does not overcome the age-old problems

involved is illustrated by the vagaries to which he is reduced in

■74-

his description of the connection between consciousness and the will.

My philosophy alone ... puts man's real inner nature
not in consciousness, but in the will. This will is not
essentially united with consciousness, but is related to
consciousness, in other words to knowledge, as substance
to accident, as something illuminated to light, as the
string to the sounding-board ...7

In general terms, how does Schopenhauer's philosophy differ from
the tradition up to and including Kant? He basically preserves the
traditional division of willing and thinking but attempts to give a
"correct and universal understanding of experience" (the main task of
philosophy for Schopenhauer) from the standpoint of the primacy of the
will. By reversing the traditional emphasis in the division,
Schopenhauer believes he can achieve the goal of philosophy. The con-
nection, however, which was the traditional problem, remains a problem.
But says Schopenhauer,

. . . even if the root cannot be directly brought to
light, it must yet be possible to lay hold of some data
for explaining the connexion between the world of
phenomena and the being-in-i tself of things. Here,
therefore, lies the path on which I have gone beyond
Kant and the limit he set. But in doing this, I have
stood on the ground of reflection, consequently of
honesty and hence without the vain pretension of in-
tellectual intuition or absolute thought that charac-
terizes the period of pseudo-philosophy between Kant
and myself .

Anyone who reads through Schopenhauer's chief work will clearly see
that the connection is never shown. At the crucial points where one
would expect to find the connection explicitly presented, Schopenhauer
is reduced to metaphor, analogy or the mere assertion that the will is
presenting itself in such and such a phenomenal way. It might be
expected that if the primacy of thinking in the tradition could not
satisfactorily bring about the comprehension of experience as a unity
then reversing the emphasis of the thinking/willing dichotomy would be

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equally useless. The fact is that Schopenhauer takes over, in its
essentials, the traditional way of regarding the two sides of the
division. Note what he says about knowledge. "It is above all else
and essentially representation . What is representation? A very com-
plicated physiological occurrence in an animal's brain, whose result is

9
the consciousness of a picture or image at that very spot."

Schopenhauer explicitly states the traditional view of thinking as

representational thinking. This is precisely the way we later find

Heidegger characterizing traditional western metaphysical thinking.

Because Schopenhauer maintains this notion of thinking and yet
holds out the possibility of a unified view of experience, he is beset
with insoluble difficulties. The unity sought, as Kant clearly showed,
cannot be gained in a discursive way by externally related representa-
tions. To overcome his problems, Schopenhauer introduces his doctrine
of Ideas, and here a brief account of Schopenhauer's doctrine of Ideas
is in order.

The one will becomes dispersed as phenomena which constitute the
world as it is thinkable for us, i.e., the world as representation or
the world as it is subject to the principle of sufficient reason and
the principles of individuation, space and time. But the unity of the
one will cannot be faithfully given by the world as we know it, that
is, as a world of particulars. With the doctrine of the Idea,
Schopenhauer posits a phenomenal way of knowing which he asserts is not
dictated by the principle of sufficient reason. ". . . the Idea does not

enter into that principle; hence neither plurality nor change belongs
to it." Here, by the way, Schopenhauer must start equivocating
because although he must assert the Ideas to be phenomenal, up to this

-76-

point the phenomenal world has been virtually defined as that world

which is subject to the principle of sufficient reason.

With respect to the Idea, Schopenhauer says, "... it alone is the

most adequate objectivity possible of the will or of the thing-in-

itself; indeed it is even the whole thing-in-i tsel f , only under the

form of the representation." Furthermore:

When the idea appears, subject and object can no
longer be distinguished in it, because the Idea, the
adequate objectivity of the will, the real world as
representation, arises only when subject and object
reciprocally fill and penetrate each other completely.

In art, Schopenhauer tells us, we are presented with the Idea as

instantiated in some particular. We are then privy to the essentials

of a world which is normally a dispersion of particulars.

... only the essential in . . . the will's ob jectif ication
constitutes the Idea; on the other hand, its unfolding
or development [Schopenhauer means in the form of
particular objects like crystals, plants, etc.], because
drawn apart in the forms of the principle of sufficient
reason into a multiplicity of many-sided phenomena, is
inessential to the Idea . . .13

What is the Idea? "We can define it accurately as the way of con-
sidering things independently of the principle of sufficient reason,
in contrast to the ... way of science and experience."

... science ... is with every end it attains again and
again directed farther, and can never find an ultimate
goal or complete satisfaction, any more than by running
we can reach the point where the clouds touch the
horizon; art, on the contrary, is everywhere at its
goal.15

The connection of the particular object with the Idea instantiated
in it, however, is never made clear. The "how" of the instantiation is
never presented yet this is precisely what we wish to comprehend. We
have here, of course, the classic problem of the instantiation of the
universal in the particular, but with Schopenhauer's philosophy, we are

-77-

no nearer a solution. At the end of volume two of The World As Will
and Representation, Schopenhauer presents a lengthy discussion of
mysticism and attempts to confirm his own position by pointing to the
common features of previous well-known mystical experiences. These
common features, he argues, are due to the fact that "the inner essence
of all things is at bottom identical." But Schopenhauer can do no
more than assert the validity of mystical experience as a confirmation
of an underlying unity. In fact, mystical experience proper, which
betrays for Schopenhauer the basic unity of the world, is not a legiti-
mate topic for philosophy. He says with reference to philosophy in
general and his own in particular,

... it must remain cosmology, and cannot become theology.
Its theme must restrict itself to the world; to express
from every aspect what this world is, what it may be in
its innermost nature, is all that it can honestly achieve.
Now it is in keeping with this that, when my teaching
reaches its highest point, it assumes a negative
character, and so ends with a negation. Thus it can
speak here only of what is denied or given up; but what
is gained in place of this, what is laid hold of, it is
forced ... to describe as nothing; and it can add only
the consolation that it may be merely a relative, not an
absolute, nothing. For, if something is no one of all
the things that we know, then certainly it is for us
in general nothing. Yet it still does not follow from
this that it is nothing absolutely, namely that is must
be nothing from every possible point of view and in
every possible sense, but only that we are restricted
to a wholly negative knowledge of it; and this may very
well lie in the limitation of our point of view.l?

But ultimately all of this makes no sense. The above paragraph contains

internal inconsistencies and is furthermore inconsistent with what

Schopenhauer has said earlier in his presentation. As an example, it

it perfectly obvious that we cannot be dealing with a relative nothing

at this point because this is a concept of nothing based upon an

already unified experience and is completely bound to a view of the

-11

world according to the principium individuat ionis as Schopenhauer
asserts many times. A relative nothing would imply that in principle
all mystical experiences could be reduced to experiences under the
principle of sufficient reason which is precisely what Schopenhauer
is interested in denying at this point in his presentation. There is
no need to detail Schopenhauer's inconsistencies; there are many of them
throughout his philosophy. What is most instructive, however, is what
these inconsistencies reveal concerning Schopenhauer's attempt to dis-
close experience as a coherent unity. In the end he must simply assert
this unity. How the unity or underlying will of things is instantiated
in the particular phenomena or different "points of view" remains
incomprehensible. The unity cannot be directly stated, but this is
what the philosopher ultimately feels compelled to state.

Schopenhauer's problem, of course, stems from the fact that he
begins with two apparently basic aspects of experience and must make
understandable how one unified experience can contain both. This un-
fortunately usually degenerates into the attempt to reduce one to the
other and thereby seems to result in the denial of the reality of one
aspect. With respect to this problem, Stanley Rosen has said in
reference to Kant, "The Kantian philosophy attempted to avoid the

silence of monism by preserving the distinct identities of nature and

1 ft
Geist." It must be said that Schopenhauer attempted to capture the

distinction while proclaiming a monism by making nature a manifestation

of the spirit (will). As stated already however, how this actually can

occur remains incomprehensible. When the outcome is a form of monism,

it cannot be adequately stated in terms of the particulars of experience,

This is one of Rosen's main points with respect to the problem of

-79-

monistic philosophies. Schopenhauer continually wavers with respect
to how much he can positively assert. He is constantly taking back
with the left hand what he has just given with the right. This is the
situation one might expect from a philosophy which attempts to unify
two apparently mutually exclusive parts of experience. The problem of
the instantiation of the universal in the particular of which the
problem of the unity of experience is a form cannot be understood from
a reductionist point of view, because the integrity of each side of the
dichotomy must be maintained.

During the last few years of his life, Schopenhauer's philosophy
began to get the recognition he had originally hoped for it. It might
be conjectured that the attempt to develop certain lines of the Hegelian
philosophy during the intervening years had begun to wane and thus the
time was ripe for something new — even an antihegelian position. It
is well-known that interest in philosophy in Germany reached its lowest
point around the middle of the nineteenth century just before the
development of Neo-Kantianism, thus Schopenhauer seems to have filled
the space between a waning Hegelianism and a waxing Neo-Kantianism.
At any rate, Schopenhauer falls outside the mainstream of nineteenth
century philosophy, yet, as has been urged in this thesis, not in his
most basic aim but only in the way he attempts to realize this aim.
The project of philosophy still remains to understand and express the
unity of experience. The lasting contribution of the Hegelian
philosophy was "in his theory that the nature of every phenomenon of
life is to be understood historically." This is a point which was
virtually ignored by Schopenhauer but which exerted a great influence
upon Nietzsche. And although Schopenhauer strongly affected Nietzsche's

philosophy, many of Nietzsche's views on Kantianism betray the influence

of Neo-Kantian doctrines prevalent during his development; in particular

20
those of Gustav TeichmUller, Afrikan Spir and F.A. Lange.

The exhaustion which becomes explicit in the philosophy of
Schopenhauer stands as a sign from the philosophic point of view of
nihilism. The express recognition of nihilism arises with the final
unsuccessful attempts in the tradition to give a philosophical account
of the unity of human experience. Nietzsche is the first philosopher
to philosophize on the basis of the knowledge that the previous activity
of the tradition has been nihilistic. The tradition can be historically
characterized as nihilistic, hence Nietzsche accepts the view that a
general movement in history can be perceived; that patterns of develop-
ment can be recognized. He rejects the view, however, that we can know
whether or not this development has a point, a goal, a final outcome.
In light of this, he further rejects the notion that man as an indi-
vidual might view his life as meaningful in terms of a historical whole.

The problem of nihilism is often equated with the problem of
meaning. It is also equated with a crisis of values or the problem of
the ultimate justification of man's existence. These are acceptable
descriptions of nihilism but for this thesis it is most important to
insist on the connection of nihilism with the problem of the unity of
experience and with the conception of reason particularly as Kant
presents it. The explicit recognition of nihilism coincides with the
last attempts to carry out the presentation of human experience as a
unity. With this in mind, we focused upon the failure of Schopenhauer's
philosophy. This was doubly appropriate since Nietzsche entered
philosophy proper through Schopenhauer's philosophy. The stage is now

set for a philosophy which makes the phenomenon of nihilism its most
basic theme.

The following discussion of Nietzsche's conception of nihilism
proceeds from a characterization of the philosophic tradition as the
attempt to state clearly the unity of experience. In addition, the
discussion proceeds from the understanding that only within the "whole"
can the question of meaningfulness be ultimately answered. Furthermore
it should be kept in mind that the drive toward unity virtually becomes
a defining characteristic of reason for Kant. In view of this, problems
involved in our discussion of the unity of experience may be taken
literally as problems of reason in general. These considerations in
the discussion of nihilism will then allow a further understanding of
Nietzsche's position in the tradition vis a vis his doctrine of the
will to power. The progress of this thesis may then be crudely
schematized as follows:

1) The progress of reason as the drive toward unity (Kant)

2) The drive toward unity in terms of meaning and value (Niezsche)

3) The failure of the drive toward unity as a characterization of
nihilism

4) Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power with respect to
nihilism and therefore reason in the tradition.

NOTES
CHAPTER III

1. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation,
Translated by E.F.J. Payne (New York, 1966), Vol. II, p. 196.

2. Ibid. , p. 197.

3. Ibid. , p. 192.

4. Ibid.

5. This gives a clear indication of one way in which Kant may be
regarded as the culmination of the tradition. Namely, the Idealists
and their followers along with Schopenhauer all philosophize from the
same problematic ground established by Kant. With the later Neo-
Kantians, of course, the connection is explicit.

6. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, pp. 198-199,

7. Ibid. , p. 199.
p. 289.
p. 191.
Vol. 1, p. 169. Schopenhauer believed he had the

correct understanding of Plato's Ideas. He says here, "Further, I hope
that, after what has been said, there will be no hesitation in recog-
nizing again in the definite grades of the object! fication of that will,
which forms the in-itself of the world, what Plato called the eternal
Ideas . . . . "

Ibid. , p. 175.

p. 180.

p. 182.

p. 185.

8.

Ibid.

9.

Ibid.

10.

Ibid.

Vol. II, p. 610.
pp. 611-612.
Stanley Rosen, Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay (New Haven,
90. Rosen goes on to state that Kant therefore alienated
nature and Geist. Their unity remains an unachievable ideal.

19. Karl Lowith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, Translated by David E.
Green (Garden City, 1967), p. 121.

20. For an appreciation of the possible influence of these Neo-
Kantians, see Karl-Heinz Dickopp, "Aspekte zum Verhaltnis Nietzsche-Kant
und ihre Bedeutung flir die Interpretation des Willen zur Macht,"
Kant-Studien, Vol. LXI , no. 1 (1970), pp. 97-111.

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CHAPTER IV
GENERAL CHARACTERIZATION OF NIHILISM

Stanley Rosen in his work on nihilism has said "The modern project
to master nature begins in Cartesian pride and ends in the pessimism of
Schopenhauer and the nihilism of Nietzsche." Rosen's view of nihilism
is compatible with what this thesis has presented so far; his emphasis
and line of attack are, however, different. In the following develop-
ment of the concept of nihilism, there will be occasion to emphasize
Rosen's approach when it is pertinent to the presentation.

We see above that Rosen's view of Schopenhauer's position coincides
with our previous discussion. Rosen, however, uses the idea of master-
ing nature as the ground motivation of philosophy. This, according to
the context of the remark, is to make explicit the connection with
Nietzsche's will to power. Of course, it is only a short move from the
notion of mastering nature to nihilism as a crisis of reason when we
consider the influence that the idea of "knowledge as power" has played
in the tradition. Rosen, in fact, does see nihilism as a crisis of
reason. He states, "Reason has been conceived as a human project or
the instrument of a human project, but in either case it emerges from
the pre-rational stratum of desire, basically the desire to master
nature. He further states "Contemporary man desperately needs a
rational interpretation of reason. Instead, he has been furnished with
epistemologies , or technical discussions of how reason works." Because

13-

-84-

reason cannot be grounded in some "reasonable" way, nihilism arises.
This might be put in terms of the present thesis as follows: Because
the unity of experience cannot be explicated philosophically (in terms
of a reasonable account), philosophy ends in nihilism. Rosen believes

that "the problem of modern philosophy up to Kant was not dualism, but

... 4

rather its intrinsic inclination toward monistic nihilism." This con-
firms that Rosen basically shares Nietzsche's view of at least the
modern tradition. The phrase "monistic nihilism" does, however, betray
a difference. It is the fact of monism and its inability to come to
complete expression which reveals the nihilistic element for Rosen.
The problem of monistic positions in terms of nihilism will be treated
in the sequel .

At this point, let us proceed with an account of Nietzsche's con-
cept of nihilism. In his unpublished writings, Nietzsche gave a by now
famous formulation of nihilism. "What does nihilism mean? That the
highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; 'why' finds
no answer." This appears to be a very mysterious answer to the
question. The answer is framed in the form of values and furthermore
apparently makes these values autonomous or self-acting. Commentators
on the definition of nihilism have usually emphasized the devaluation
of values but not its autonomous character which, as I hope will be
shown, is a very important aspect of the concept of nihilism, partic-
ularly in connection with the will to power.

For Nietzsche, nihilism is a historical phenomenon but not in the
sense of an event within history; history is itself nihilistic.
Nihilism describes the movement of history itself. In this respect,
Nietzsche regards it as a necessary event. It makes no sense to

-85-

realistically entertain the idea of alternatives as if the progress of
nihilism thus far were an accident. History as nihilistic is a product
of the basic condition of man. The development of history is the
development and progressive working-out of nihilism. In true Hegelian
fashion, there comes a time when man becomes self-conscious enough to
realize this. Nietzsche's philosophy represents this form of self-
consciousness .

That the "highest values devaluate themselves" is a necessary
process. How is this to be understood? There are two senses in which
this might be understood one of which is more basic than the other and
relies on the doctrine of the will to power. We must be clear that the
process Nietzsche is describing is an autonomous one. There is one
process in which the establishment of values is one side and the de-
valuation the oppostie side. Furthermore, Nietzsche believes that in
order for a given value to be established it is necessary for there to
be a simultaneous devaluation. Ultimately the process manifested in
this valuing and devaluing is the process of the will to power itself.
This will be discussed later in a chapter on the will to power.

In Nietzsche's philosophy, the terms 'meaning' and 'value' may be
used synonymously. If we want to consider meaning apart from value,
this must be at some level less basic than the one with which Nietzsche
is generally concerned. Nietzsche speaks of value in many instances
where others might speak of meaning. This is a point agreed upon by
virtually all commentators, and Nietzsche's writings are filled with
examples in which the two terms might be interchanged.

With the loss of the highest values (meaning) we are sunk in
nihilism, yet the idea of nihilism does not correspond strictly with

the loss of meaning jer se, An important distinction must be made here

between two ideas of nihilism concerning which Nietzsche himself seems

sometimes ambiguous. As noted above, nihilism may refer to the complete

process of valuation and devaluation and indeed this is his deepest

understanding of nihilism.

The meaning could have been: the fulfillment of
some highest ethical canon in all events, the moral world
order; or the growth of love and harmony in the inter-
course of beings; or the gradual approximation of a
state of universal happiness — any goal at least con-
stitutes some meaning."

According to the strict understanding of nihilism the nihilist is not
one who believes in the ultimate meaninglessness of existence, but one
who recognizes the' futility of fixing any ultimate meaning on existence
because "the highest values devaluate themselves." Nietzsche believed,
in fact, that the ultimate meaninglessness of existence could not be
asserted, because the standpoint from which such a judgment must pre-
sume to be made, could never be assumed. Nietzsche often speaks of
nihilism in the sense of simply a loss of meaning thereby using the
term in its more common form. He says, for example, "The faith in the
categories of reason is the cause of nihilism." Here nihilism is
regarded as an event which can be "caused." In this context, nihilism
could simply mean a loss of value. From his more precise and compre-
hensive standpoint, however, Nietzsche could just as readily assert
that nihilism is the cause of the faith in the categories of reason.
The setting up of meaning-value is just as much a part of the total
phenomenon, nihilism, as the devaluation.

The implicit presence of nihilism as a condition is what, for
Nietzsche, allows us to grasp the ground movement of Western metaphysics.
Western philosophy as a whole presents itself as a problem for Nietzsche

17-

under the name of nihilism. In this regard, the explicit doctrines of
the various past philosophies are to be looked at as particulars and
as symptoms of the condition, nihilism. Every explicit philosophy is
conditioned by its predecessors but regarded in this way, we do not
grasp the movement of the tradition as a whole. For this the tradition
as a series of historical facts must be transcended. The philosophies
of the tradition as explicitly put forth were therefore a surface
phenomenon which must be interpreted as signs of something deeper. It
may be possible, for example, to show how a given philosophy emerges as
a reaction to its immediate predecessor, yet this would remain a self-
contained analysis by leaving the preconditions of the given type of
philosophizing unexamined. This is in fact the way most histories of
philosophy proceed. One may find a good example of Nietzsche's quite
different mode of procedure in the first part of Beyond Good and Evil.

One of the results of the implicit nihilistic character of the
tradition, is that, in a rather dialectical fashion, attempts to cure
the symptoms only bring about the opposite of what was desired. What
is meant here is not difficult to understand. At the surface level,
at the symptomatic level, certain "facts" are placed opposite each
other, let us say, as a crude example, pleasure and pain. These
"opposites" are then each made the cure for an excess of the other
without anyone's realizing that they are equally necessary from a
higher perspective. Nietzsche would speak here, however, of the re-
placement of one supreme value with another. "Believing one chooses
remedies, one chooses in fact that which hastens exhaustion; Christianity

Q

is an example; progress is another instance."

In the dialectic of "the devaluation of values," one believes that

-88-

to avoid the loss of meaning, to avoid the devaluation of values one
must set up other values. Or to eliminate one situation which arose
from "wrong" values we seek to work according to counter values. This
is a "common sense" reactive point of view which, according to
Nietzsche, never questions the process of valuing itself. "Common
sense" never entertains the possibility that the very action it takes
to eliminate its discontent is that which, in the end, promotes it.

"Are not all 'values' lures that draw out the comedy without bringing

9
it closer to a solution?"

As mentioned earlier, there comes a point when the process of
valuation/devaluation may be grasped as what it is in fact. The philos-
opher may be the individual who explicitly articulates the realization
but it will reveal itself across the whole spectrum of human concerns.
"The entire idealism of mankind hitherto is on the point of changing
suddenly into nihilism — into the belief in absolute worthlessness ,

• i ,,io

i.e., meanmglessness. Here Nietzsche uses the term 'nihilism' in
its more restricted common form. However, the whole process by which
ideals are created and destroyed may, according to the foregoing account,
also be viewed as nihilism. Idealism acquires a peculiar meaning which
applies to virtually every philosophy which attempts to make absolute
pronouncements on the character of existence. Basically all philosophy
since Plato represents idealism as Nietzsche understands it. According
to Nietzsche's famous formulation of the activity of philosophy, the
tradition has tried "to impose upon becoming the character of being."
Idealism means imposing "upon becoming the character of being." It
indicates that for mankind existence is meaningful, that is, man lives
in terms of an expressed or unexpressed interpretation of existence.

-89-

That "the entire idealism of mankind hitherto is on the point of

changing suddenly into nihilism," once again represents the dialectical

movement whereby one state of things gives rise to its opposite. The

idealism which Nietzsche sees as representative of Western metaphysics

is about to collapse. But into what?

Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones
but by extreme positions of the opposite kind. Thus the
belief in the absolute immorality of nature, in aim —
and meaninglessness, is the psychologically necessary
affect once the belief in God and an essentially moral
order become untenable. Nihilism appears at that point,
not that the displeasure at existence has become greater
than before but because one has come to mistrust any
"meaning" in suffering, indeed in existence. One inter-
pretation has collapsed; but because it was considered
the interpretation it now seems as if there were no
meaning at all in existence, as if everything were in
vain. 12

In order to move further into Nietzsche's characterization of
nihilism and his critique of philosophy generally, it is necessary now
to introduce his fundamental metaphysical conception, the will to power.
This most basic principle of Nietzsche's philosophy is difficult to
understand and the reader may feel that he never comes to an adequate
grasp of the concept. In the final chapter of this thesis, I will
discuss this problem more thoroughly and suggest there are necessary
reasons for the difficulty. For the present, however, I would like to
make the connection between Nietzsche's concept of nihilism as presented
in its most basic form above and the will to power. As far as I am
aware, this connection has been treated adequately only by Heidegger,
yet it is absolutely impera tive to understand this connection if
Nietzsche's philosophy is to be comprehended as a unity.

The will to power is an autonomous principle whose autonomy is
revealed in the process of valuation/devaluation discussed above. It

-90-

is definitive for all life; in fact, life is the will to power for
Nietzsche. He has Zarathustra say, "wherever I found life, I found
the will to power." The will to power exhibits a dialectical process
of the Hegelian type in that it represents a self-contained principle
which operates through a simultaneous process of creation and destruc-
tion. This is in fact the basis of Nietzsche's many statements
asserting that all creating whether artistic or otherwise involves a
necessary destroying. Every increase in power involves a simultaneous
decrease. One might translate this as "you can't get something for
nothing" or creation ex nihilo is not permitted. Nietzsche attempts
to make this point over and over again.

Displeasure, as an obstacle to its Tan organism's]
will to power is therefore a normal fact, the normal
ingredient of every organic event; man does not avoid
it, he is rather in continual need of it; every victory,
every feeling of pleasure, every event, presupposes a
resistence overcome . -^

Overall insight. — Actually, every major growth is
accompanied by a tremendous crumbling and passing away:
suffering, the symptoms of decline belong in the times
of tremendous advances; every fruitful and powerful
movement of humanity has also created at the same time
a nihilistic movement. It could be the sign of a crucial
and most essential growth, of the transition to new
conditions of existence, that the most extreme form of
pessimism, genuine nihilism, would come into the world.
This I have comprehended . 15

Above we saw Nietzsche characterize philosophy as imposing "upon

becoming the character of being." If this quotation is completed we

get "To impose upon becoming the character of being — that is the

supreme will to power." The philosopher, then, exercizes the "supreme

will to power." He attempts to characterize existence as a whole; he

attempts to say that things are thus and not otherwise. Of course

other people besides philosophers need to impose a stable set of

-91-

Interpretations or values on their world, but the philosopher is the

peculiar type whose job it is to make all of this explicit. For others,

the basic ways in which they characterize experience remain at a

subterranian level.

Nietzsche's concept of power is, of course, basic to his position.

It will therefore be useful to clarify this concept. To do this I would

like to develop the concept in basically the way Heidegger does in his

commentary on Nietzsche. Heidegger describes the situation as follows:

Every power is only power insofar as and so long as
it is more power, that is, power increasing. Power can
hold itself in its essence only as it climbs over and
reaches beyond an already achieved stage of power, we
say: overpowers . As soon as power remains at one stage
of power, it is already without power. (Jede Macht ist
nur Macht, sofern sie und solange sie Mehr-Macht d.h.
Machtsteigerung ist. Macht kann sich nur in sich selbst,
d.h. in ihrem Wesen halten, indem sie die je erreichte
Machtstufe, also je sich selbst iibersteigt und iiberholt,
wir sagen: ubermachtigt. )16

Power is not an entity in itself but is only recognized insofar as it

is active or has concrete effects. The point here parallels the kind

of arguments designed to eliminate the old notion of "force" in physics

as some kind of entity or substance with a status apart from some

perceivable change. Analogously, something is said to possess power

only insofar as there is an overcoming of a resistance or a movement

from one power stage to another. For Nietzsche, life as will to power

meant that, as living, an organism was in a constant state of overcoming

— generation and degeneration. From this point of view, to speak of a

power which could not manifest itself would be to speak nonsense. When

the process of constant overcoming or growth ceases, this is equivalent

to death. It is important to see in this description that, consistent

with a dialectical position, there is no question of a one-sided

-92-

interpretation of life. This theory makes life and death complemen-

taries, indeed, necessary counterparts. There is simply the process

with its two sides of overpowering and being overpowered. The

following unpublished selection may be enlightening,

My idea is that every specific body strives to
become master over all space and to extend its force
(-its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists
its extention. But it continually encounters similar
efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming
to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are
sufficiently related to it.l?

Once the dialectical character of Nietzsche's fundamental concep-
tion is understood, it becomes more understandable why "the entire
idealism of mankind hitherto is on the point of changing suddenly into
nihilism ...." If as Nietzsche asserts, the erection of ideals is a
consequence of life which is the will to power, then man's idealizing
function must participate in the dialectic manifested in the will to
power; "the highest values" must "devalue themselves." We have reached
here an explicit connection between the will to power and nihilism.
The remainder of this chapter will be concerned with nihilism and the
will to power in connection with man's idealizing function, the positing
of "values" and "truths" and the attempt to give a meaning or inter-
pretation to existence.

Nietzsche usually makes no explicit distinction between ideals,
values and truths. In general, however, we can say that "value" is used
in a more primary sense; closer to the word 'interpretation'. At times
Nietzsche uses the words 'ideals', 'values' and 'truths' in a more
common way. When reading Nietzsche, one must be careful not to confuse
the senses of these words. In On the Genealogy of Morals (Zur
Genealogie der Moral) , for example, we read, "... the value of these

-9 3-

1 H
values themselves must first be called in question." The second use

of the word 'value' refers to traditional moral interpretations while

the first refers to the condition of man as part of life or will to

power. Furthermore there are numerous instances of the following type:

"The question of values is more fundamental than the question of

certainty: the latter becomes serious only by presupposing that the

19
value question has already been answered." In addition, "... we know,

too, that reverence for truth is already the consequence of an illusion

— and that one should value more than truth the force that forms,

• I-*- u • ,,20
simplifies, shapes, invents.

In light of the possible confusion regarding ideals, truths and
values as Nietzsche presents them, it is important to be careful in
determining exactly where Nietzsche is directing his criticism of the
tradition. It is sometimes simplistically thought, for instance, that
Nietzsche condemns all valuing, idealizing and "holding for true." He
is often dismissed as a nihilist who believes in nothing, claims there
is no truth and therefore holds that "everything is permitted."

The criticism Nietzsche directs against the tradition, when viewed
correctly, is always based upon whether values or truths represent a
denial or affirmation of the will to power which means life. His
criticism cannot be directed against the establishing of truths as
such, because this would ignore value or truth-setting as a necessary
process of the will to power as described above. In this respect,
Nietzsche's criticisms are primarily directed against truths as an
attempt to "fix becoming" as "external truths." In an important section
of Thus Spake Zarathustra (Also Sprach Zarathustra) entitled "On
Self-Overcoming" Zarathustra says,

-94-

"Will to truth," you who are wisest call that which
impels you and fills you with lust?

A will to the thinkability of all beings: this I
call your will. You want to make all being thinkable,
for you doubt with well-founded suspicion that it is
already thinkable.

You still want to create the world before which you
can kneel: that is your ultimate hope and intoxication.

Your will and your valuations you have placed on
the river of becoming; and what the people believe to be
good and evil, that betrays to me an ancient will to
power .

Now the river carries your bark farther; it has to
carry it.

Not the river is your danger and the end of your good
and evil, you who are wisest, but that will itself, the
will to power — the unexhausted procreative will to life.

And life itself confided this secret to me: "Behold,"
it said, "_I am that which must always overcome itself ■ "

Indeed, you call it a will to procreate or a drive
to an end, to something higher, farther, more manifold;
but all this is one and one secret.

"Indeed, the truth was not hit by him who shot at it
with the word of the 'will to existence': that will does
not exist. For, what does not exist cannot will; but what
is in existence, how could that still want existence?
Only where there is life is there also will: not will to
life but — thus I teach you — will to power."

And whoever must be a creator in good and evil,
verily he must first be an annihilator and break values.
Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness:
but this is creative. 21

Here we have in the most condensed form possible a statement of the
will to power and its relationship to the establishing of truths. The
will to power is self-overcoming. "Holding for true" is a function of
life or the will to power. This is one of Nietzsche's most fundamental
themes .

So Nietzsche's criticism is directed against those who would lay
their "eternal truths" across existence with the belief that they are
just that. The quest for certainty in this sense has been the dominant
theme of the modern philosophic tradition ever since it was announced
by Descartes as a criterion of truth. Moreover, man has tried to
obtain certainty in areas where, even accepting certainty as a criterion

-95-

of truth in itself, truth was not possible. Judgements on existence
as a whole are of this kind. Questions of whether or not mankind is
"progressing," whether things on the whole are getting better, are
always questions which ask for the impossible standpoint of the beyond.
These presumptuous judgements to the "beyond" Nietzsche sees as a
remnant of the Christian value scheme, and he asks "to what extent
Christian presuppositions and interpretations still live on under the
formulas 'nature', 'progress', perfectability ' , 'Darwinism', under the
superstitious belief in a certain relationship between happiness and
virtue, unhappinesa and guilt." " Like Christianity, we here have
judgements on the whole which Nietzsche condemns as denials of the basic
character of life. At this point I wish to anticipate the possible
objection that Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power might come
under his condemnation of "eternal truths." This objection will be
discussed in the last chapter.

It should be noted that with the belief in "progress" and "per-
fectability" we have another possible example of how, according to
Nietzsche, philosophers perpetuate nihilism; nihilism here regarded
as simply the collapse of value. They set up so-called stable truths
"in which one can believe," but in order to gain these stable truths,
the philosopher must deny life as the will to power, thus:

... it is a self-deception of philosophers as
moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing
it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they
acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among
the most powerful promoters of decadence.23

Furthermore, "Believing one chooses remedies, one chooses in fact that

which hastens exhaustion; Christianity is an example (to name the

greatest example of such an aberration of the instincts); 'progress'

-96-

2 A

is another instance." Consequently the very act of establishing
values can be nihilistic insofar as it does not recognize the neces-
sities of life. Nietzsche calls Christianity, for example, the
nihilistic religion par excellence.

I consider life itself instinct for growth, for
continuence, for accumulation of forces, for power:
where the will to power is lacking there is decline.
My assertion is that this will is lacking in all the
supreme values of mankind — that values of decline,
nihilistic values hold sway under the holiest names. 2^

In conjunction with the above, it is well to point out the following.
"Nihilism. It is ambiguous: A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power
of the spirit: as active nihilism. B. Nihilism as decline and reces-
sion of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism."26 All life is
a manifestation of the will to power, but within this, two possible
interpretations of lif e-phenomen., uv possible. That is, all phenomena

of life are ambiguous. In actuality what we have is "one kind of life

27
in struggle with another." Of decisive importance here is whether

there is an affirming or denying of life, an affirming or denying of
the will to power.

With respect to his critique of the philosophic tradition, it is
precisely Nietzsche's realization of the character of the will to power
which places him at the end of the metaphysical tradition and gives his
critique its force. Nietzsche does not simply dismiss the tradition or
oppose it through a simple negation; this would be to make the mistake
of positing opposite values, and from the point of view of the tradition
as a whole, would be merely a perpetuation of the thinking of the
tradition itself. What Nietzsche does is point to the underlying con-
dition of the whole movement. The will to power, once recognized,
allows the break with the tradition simply because with this principle

-97-

the tradition is grasped as a whole; the tradition, particularly if we
follow the interpretation of Heidegger, reaches its culmination with
the will to power and is therefore in a position to be comprehended in
its unity. More on this in the final chapter.

As noted, Nietzsche chose to adopt the language of values when
speaking of the "truths" promulgated by the metaphysical tradition.
Even the most abstract, sterile epistemologies engage his attention
only as signs of a particular type of valuation related to the affirma-
tion or denial of life. Certainly it would have been unwise of
Nietzsche to speak in terms of the traditional categories of epistemol-
ogy when these categories, particularly the traditional notion of truth,
were being called into question. The traditional notion of truth as
certainty or truth "in itself" "as if values were inherent in things

9 o

and all one had to do was grasp them" is a falsification possible
only on the basis of a valuing antithetical to life. Nietzsche claims
that all being is being interpreted and behind this is a value-setting
based upon the essence of life as the will to power. As Eugen Fink puts

it in his commentary on Nietzsche, "Behind all value worlds stands

2 9
'life' as the great player."

There is perhaps a further reason for Nietzsche's language of

values. Traditionally we have seen the equation truth = goodness

prevailing: summum ens = summum bonum = aeterna Veritas. In the past

men have valued the truth highly, the truth has been desirable, there

have been martyrs to the truth, to tell untruths is immoral. But why?

"Why not rather untruth?" asks Nietzsche. Questions of truth have been

inextricably entangled with value questions. This was of course the

case during the church-dominated period of philosophy but was this

-98-

left behind at the inception of the modern period with Descartes?

Nietzsche doubts it. The older tradition and even Descartes was more

honest in allowing theological considerations to bear on considerations

of truth. What Nietzsche deplores is the modern preoccupation with an

"objectivity" which masks moral concerns or values.

Even Descartes had a notion of the fact that in a
fundamentally Christian-moral mode of thought, which
believes in a good God as the creator of things, only
God's veracity guarantees to us the judgements of our
senses. Apart from a religious sanction and guarantee
of our senses and rationality — where should we derive
a right to trust in existence! That thinking is a
measure of actuality — that what cannot be thought is
not — is a rude non plus ultra of a moralistic trust^
fulness (in an essential truth principle at the bottom
of things), in itself a mad assumption, which experience
contradicts every moment. We are altogether unable to
think anything at all just as it is.3^

The "truths" of our experience are the way we must assimilate that
experience .

Will to truth is a making firm, a making true and
durable, an abolition of the false character of things,
a reinterpretation of it into beings. 'Truth' is
therefore not something there, that might be found or
discovered — but something that must be created and
that gives a name to a process, or rather to a will to
overcome that has in itself no end — introducing truth,
as a processus in infinitum, an active determining —
not a becoming-conscious of something that is in itself
firm and^determined. It is a word for the "will to
power .

■ 3 1

This should be compared with Nietzsche's statement that to "impose upon

becoming the character of being ... is the supreme will to power."

From an unpublished note of 1885-1886 we read:

That the value of the world lies in our inter-
pretation ...; that previous interpretations have been
perspective valuations by virtue of which we can survive
in life, i.e., in the will to power, for the growth of
power; that every elevation of man brings with it the
overcoming of narrower interpretations; that every
strengthening and increase of power opens up new perspec-
tives and means believing in new horizons — this idea
permeates my writings . 32

-99-

The term ' perspectivism' , it must be emphasized, is not meant to intro-
duce a relativism in the any thing-is-permitted sense of the word. It
is Nietzsche's term to indicate a position which sees truth as nothing
absolute but as a condition of life. Life is evaluating and truths
are evaluations. Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole is sometimes called
perspectivism, so a clarification of this term depends upon a compre-
hensive understanding of his essential position. More will be said in
the final chapter concerning this designation. The best explicit
discussion of Nietzsche's notion of perspective can be found in Karl

Jasper's Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding ojf His

33
Philosophical Activity.

With the advent of nihilism in its modern manifestation, sometimes

known as the "death of God," man begins to lose his center of gravity.

What follows is a period of frantic activity whose duration Nietzsche

estimated at a few more hundred years and within which we now stand.

The activity of this period is characterized by the attempt to avoid

what he called the great "in vain."

One tries to hold on even to the "beyond" — even
if only as some antilogical "x" — but one immediately
interprets it in such a way that some sort of old-fashioned
metaphysical comfort can be derived from it.

One tries to find in events an old-fashioned divine
governance — an order of things that rewards, punishes,
educates and betters. 34

... to get over it by intoxication: intoxication as
music; intoxication as cruelty in the tragic enjoyment of
the destruction of the noblest; intoxication as blind
enthusiasm for single human beings or ages .... Attempt to
work blindly as an instrument of science: opening one's
eyes to the many small enjoyments; mysticism, the voluptuous
enjoyment of eternal emptiness; art "for its own sake" ...
and "pure knowledge" as narcotic states of oneself . . . some
little stupid fanaticism . . . . 35

The reader should compare this with the similar comments of Heidegger on

page 31 of the English translation of Einfiihrung in die Metaphysik.

-100-

From a higher perspective, how might the attempt to avoid the
"in vain" of nihilism be interpreted? The autonomous character of the
process of valuation/devaluation or the more basic sense of nihilism as
outlined above provides the clue to a deeper interpretation. It is an
interpretation put forward by Heidegger in his essay entitled Nietzsche's
Word "God is Dead" (Nietzsches Wort, "Gott ist tot") . Heidegger calls
nihilism "the fundamental event of western history" and states that
"Nietzsche thinks nihilism as the 'inner logic' of western history."

Furthermore "the sphere for the essence and event of nihilism is meta-

37
physics itself." With the death of God, says Heidegger, the place

which he occupied still remains and "even demands to be possessed anew
and to have the vanished God replaced by others." In other words, the
value-place remains to be filled and what content fills it is not
particularly crucial. What is crucial is that it be filled. This
scheme of Heidegger's in terms of value-places to be filled provides a
good method of describing the mechanism involved in Nietzsche's concept
of nihilism. That there must be a valuing has ontological priority here.
Since value is "the standpoint of conditions of preservation and en-
hancement for complex forms of relative life duration within the flux

,,39
of becoming, this valuing must proceed as a condition of life

regardless of its object. In connection with this, note Nietzsche's

statement at the beginning and end of The Genealogy of Morals that "man

would rather will nothingness than not will."

What is to be avoided at all costs is the loss of a content which

would be to experience nothing or the great "in vain." In this sense,

to speak with Eugen Fink, "God was the mask of the nothing." Put

another way, God provided the ultimate reason for man's existence which

-101-

otherwise might be seen as in vain.

Gradually, man has become a fanciful ["phantastischen"
— two English translations use visionary and fantastic.
Both seem wrong to me.] animal that has to fulfill one more
condition of existence than any other animal: man has to
believe, to know, from time to time wiry he exists; his
race cannot flourish without a periodic trust in life —
without faith in reason in life.^2

God functions here in the sense of Kant's "unconditioned"; the reason
which has its reason in itself. The need for this unconditioned is
ever present, just as Kant believed that the need for metaphysics would
be ever present, regardless of how its content is conceived.

In the following chapter, the problem of nihilism will be dis-
cussed in the context of the problem of the unity of experience and
specifically Nietzsche's recognition of this problem. Quite simply,
I wish to equate the inability to give a unified philosophical account
of experience with the problem of nihilism. This could already be
guessed from the discussion of Schopenhauer's failure to give the
account. We saw there that Schopenhauer was left to face "nothing";
he himself spoke of this "nothingness" in describing his dilemma. He
became, as Nietzsche says, a pessimist. Pessimism represents a form
of bad nihilism or a form of declining spirit as mentioned above.
Schopenhauer's philosophy ends in a mysticism which for Nietzsche is
one more attempt to avoid the "in vain." Even though Schopenhauer does
not accept the Christian form of transcendence, he still has his "will-
less beyond" whose main function is to deny the "becoming" of this
world. For the purposes of the present discussion, it is important
to understand that Schopenhauer's failure to encapsulate experience
within the confines of the principle of sufficient reason (and tradi-
tionally what more basic way could this be done in philosophy) leads

-102-

him to a life denying position. One should read in this regard the
chapter "On the Vanity and Suffering of Life" in the second volume of
Schopenhauer's chief work.

It is now necessary to give some direct evidence of Nietzsche's
recognition of the problem of the unity of experience.

NOTES
CHAPTER IV

1. Stanley Rosen, Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay (New Haven,
1969), p. 72. """ -■ - --

2. Ibid. , p. 56. With regard to the mastery of nature, Rosen
continues, "We are unable to explain to ourselves in a rational way
the point to our success . . . . "

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid. , p. 66.

5. WP, no. 2.

6. WP, no. 12A.

7. WP, no. 12B.

8. WP, no. 44.

9. WP, no. 55.

10. WP, no. 617. The discussion of the first chapter concerning
the role of certainty as the mark of truth is relevant here.

11. WP, no. 617.

12. WP, no. 55.

13. Schlechta, Vol. II, p. 371. (Kaufmann, Z, p. 226)

14. WP, no. 702.

15. WP, no. 112.

16. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfullingen, 1961), Vol. II, p. 36.

17. WP, no. 6 36.

18. Schlechta, Vol. II, p. 768. (Kaufmann, GM, p. 20) This con-
cisely expresses Nietzsche's radical scepticism. There are simply no
values not open to question. Under the heading "value" Nietzsche also
includes such supposedly nonevalua t ive assertions as those of the pure
epistemologi st .

19. WP, no. 588. With respect to this and the preceeding quotation,
consider Nietzsche's remark in Beyond Good and Evil: "... it is high
time to replace the Kantian question, 'How are synthetic judgments a
priori possible?' by another question, 'Why is belief in such judgments
necessary? ' — and to comprehend that such judgments must be believed

to be true ...." (Kaufmann, BGE, p. 19) """"""

20. WP, no. 602.

21. Schlechta, Vol. II, pp. 371-372. (Kaufmann, Z, pp. 225-226)

22. WP, no. 243.

23. WP, no. 435. This note is in the context of a discussion of
Plato.

24. WP, no. 44.

25. Schlechta, Vol. II, pp. 1167-1169. (Hollingdale , AC, pp. 117-
118)

26. WP, no. 22.

■103-

-104-

27. WP, no. 592. Nietzsche's meaning is clearer in context. "The
antagonism between the 'true world' as revealed by pessimism, and a
world possible for life — here one must test the rights of truth. It
is necessary to measure the meaning of all these 'ideal drives' against
life to grasp what this antagonism really is: the struggle of sickly,
despairing life that cleaves to a beyond, with healthier, more stupid
and mendacious, richer, less degenerate life. Therefore it is not
'truth' in struggle with life but one kind of life in struggle with
another. "

28. WP, no. 422.

29. Eugen Fink, Nietzsches Philosophie (Berlin, 1960), p. 122. My
translation. Fink emphasizes the role of "play" more than perhaps any
other philosopher. He has written a work entitled Spiel als Weltsymbol
(1960).

30. WP, no. 436. This quotation reveals Nietzsche's phenomenalism.
In Nietzsche by R.J. Hollingdale we find: "Nietzsche wanted to be a
phenomenalist and you fail to appreciate a whole dimension of his
greatness unless you see that his philosophy is at heart a phenomenalism."
See R.J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche (London, 1973), p. 134.

31. WP, no. 552.

32. WP, no. 616.

33. Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding
of His Philosophical Activity, Translated by Charles F. Wallraff and
Frederick J. Schmitz (Tucson, 1966), pp. 287-302.

34. WP, no. 30.

35. WP, no. 29.

36. Martin Heidegger, "Nietzsche's Wort 'Gott ist tot',"
Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main, 1957), p. 206. My translation.

37. Ibid. , p. 204.

38. Ibid., p. 208.

39. WP, no. 715.

40. Fink, Nietzsches Philosophie, p. 92

41. Schlechta, Vol. II, p. 35. (Kaufmann, GM, p. 163) This remark
opens and closes Nietzsche's critique of ascetic ideals. In conclusion,
Nietzsche says, "We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is ex-
pressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the
ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal,
and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason
itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from
all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself —
all this means — let us dare to grasp it — a will to nothingness . . . ."

42. WP, no. 517.

CHAPTER V
NIHILISM AND NIETZSCHE'S AWARENESS OF THE PROBLEM OF UNITY

If the problem of nihilism is the all-pervasive phenomenon it has
been represented to be and if the problem of the unity of experience is
intimately connected with this phenomenon, the various specific dis-
cussions within Nietzsche's philosophy ought to manifest his concern
with disunity. I intend to illustrate this concern by concentrating
chiefly on two works; On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (Vom
Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fiir das Leben) which is the second
part of Untimely Meditations (Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen) and The Birth
of Tragedy (Die Geburt der Tragodie) . The chapter will conclude with a
brief discussion of the role of reason in the tradition with respect to
the problem of unity.

The two works I have chosen to discuss, I believe most easily bring
out the theme of unity (or disunity) as a concern of Nietzsche. The
Birth of Tragedy is especially significant in that it connects most
clearly Schopenhauer's philosophy with that of Nietzsche and further-
more sets the stage for the main lines taken by Nietzsche's later
philosophy.

In section 18 of The Birth of Tragedy we read:

The extraordinary courage and wisdom of Kant and
Schopenhauer have succeeded in gaining the most difficult
victory, the victory over the optimism concealed in the
essence of logic — an optimism that is the basis of our
culture. While this optimism, resting on apparently
unobjectionable aeternae veritates, had believed that

-105-

•106-

all the riddles of the universe could be known and
fathomed, and had treated space, time and causality
as entirely unconditional laws of the most universal
validity, Kant showed that these really served only
to elevate the mere phenomenon, the work of Maya,
to the position of the sole and highest reality, as
if it were the innermost and true essence of things,
thus making impossible any knowledge of this essence,
or in Schopenhauer's words, lulling the dreamer still
more soundly asleep.

With this insight a culture is inaugurated that I
venture to call a tragic culture. ^

It is Nietzsche's opinion that Schopenhauer revealed the poverty of a

purely theoretical approach to reality by working out the implications

of the principle of sufficient reason in connection with the principium

individuationis of space and time. Moreover, Kant's merit lies in his

delimitation of the phenomenal world while admitting a human reality

beyond the phenomenal. It should be remembered that Schopenhauer saw

his philosophy as merely an extension of the Kantian and believed the

Transcendental Aesthetic of the first Critique to have been Kant's

crowning achievement. Schopenhauer says with emphasis, "Kant's greatest

2

merit is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself . . . ."

The Birth of Tragedy is a cultural critique as are the Untimely

Meditations. Beyond this they are critiques of modernity as nihilistic

although Nietzsche is not using the term "nihilism" at this point.

Nietzsche calls modern culture a Socratic culture; a culture which

worships the man of theory.

Our whole modern world is entangled in the net of
Alexandrian culture. It proposes as its ideal the
theoretical man equipped with the greatest forces of
knowledge, and laboring in the service of science,
whose archetype and progenitor is Socrates. ^

When Goethe on one occasion said to Eckermann with
reference to Napoleon: "Yes, my good friend, there is
also a productiveness of deeds," he reminded us in a
charmingly naive manner that the nontheorist is some-
thing incredible and astounding to modern man . ...^

-107-

As Nietzsche said many years later in reflecting on The Birth of Tragedy

the topic of that essay had everything to do with what the modern

emergence of science and the modern theoretical man signified from a

higher perspective.

And science itself, our science — indeed, what is
the significance of all science, viewed as a symptom of
life? For what — worse yet, whence — all science? How
now? Is the resolve to be so scientific about every-
thing perhaps a kind of fear of, an escape from,
pessimism? A subtle last resort against — truth? And,
morally speaking, a sort of cowardice and falseness?
Amorally speaking, a ruse?^

The problem of the book was that of science, but "presented in the con-
text of art — for the problem of science cannot be recognized in the

.. - «= ■ «6

context of science ....

It is not fully possible to understand Nietzsche's critique of
modernity unless one understands his conception of Socrates in relation
to the traditional view of reason. This will be considered in the last
part of this chapter. Suffice it to say here that a "Socratic culture"
is one which is divided against itself in that it has lost touch with
its basic instincts and no longer grasps life as a whole. For
Nietzsche, neither optimism nor pessimism represent a viable attitude
toward life as a whole because both fail to realize that creation and
destruction, pleasure as well as pain are necessary complements of
life. To fix on either aspect of life represents a form of degenera-
tion. This view foreshadows Nietzsche's later view regarding denial or
affirmation of the will to power as a sign of degeneracy.

Could it be possible that, in spite of all "modern
ideas" and the prejudices of a democratic taste, the
triumph of optimism, the gradual prevalence of rationality,
practical and theoretical utilitarianism, no less than
democracy itself which developed at the same time, might
all have been symptoms of decline of strength, of
impending old age, and of physiological weariness?7

-108-

The theoretical man insofar as he promotes the interpretation of the
world as phenomena is described by Nietzsche in the words of Schopen-
hauer: "Just as in a stormy sea that, unbounded in all directions,
raises and drops mountainous waves, howling, a sailor sits in a boat
and trusts in his frail bark: so in the midst of a world of torments
the individual human being sits quietly, supported by and trusting in

Q

the principium individuationis . " In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche
took Apollo as representative of the veil of illusion for the Greeks;
the veil behind which lurks the cruel Dionysian aspect of life. "... we
might call Apollo himself the glorious divine image of the principium
individuationis, through whose gestures and eyes all the joy and
wisdom of 'illusion', together with its beauty, speak to us."9 Behind
the imagery of Apollo lies the Dionysian frenzy where the principle of
sufficient reason no longer applies. "... at this collapse of the
principium individuationis, we steal a glimpse into the nature of the
Dionysian ...." With this collapse "the Greek knew and felt the
terror and horror of existence. That he might endure this terror, he
had to interpose between himself and life the radient dream-birth of
the Olympians." The world of art, here the creation of the Olympians,
was developed out of the terror of a naked existence. But both of
these aspects belong to life and it is this realization which, for
Nietzsche, gives the ancient Greeks the advantage over modern man.

With the tendency toward dialectics in the form of Socratic
reasoning, we have the end of tragedy and thereby the appreciation of
the necessary unity of the Apollonian and Dionysian. Tragedy, in which
this necessity was expressed, began to appear accidental, i.e., un-
intelligible. With the emphasis on dialectics, comprehensibility

■109-

becomes of primary concern. But the forces which gave rise to Greek

tragedy could not be extinguished; and, although Plato had to tear up

his poems in order to become a disciple of Socrates, Nietzsche says,

he was nevertheless constrained by sheer artistic
necessity to create an art form that was related to those
forms of art which he repudiated . . . and so we find
Plato endeavoring to transcend reality and to represent
the idea which underlies this pseudo-reality. Thus,
Plato, the thinker, arrived by a detour where he had
always been at home as a poet ....12

... to Socrates it seemed that tragic art did not
even "tell the truth"; moreover, it addressed itself
to "those who are not very bright," not to the
philosopher: a twofold reason for shunning it. Like
Plato, he reckoned it among the flattering arts which
portray only the agreeable, not the useful . ...13

As a consequence of the emphasis upon rationality, "The Platonic

dialogue was, as it were, the barge on which the shipwrecked ancient

poetry saved herself with all her children: crowded into a narrow

space and timidly submitting to the single pilot, Socrates, they now

sailed into a new world, which never tired of looking at the fantastic

spectacle of this procession." But now Nietzsche suspects that

Schopenhauer and Kant may be steering a different course for the first

time. This could only happen when reason undertook, as Kant says, "the

most difficult of all its tasks, namely that of self-knowledge, and to

institute a tribunal which will assure to reason its lawful claims

This tribunal is no other than The Critique o^ Pure Reason."15

But what does Nietzsche mean by "the optimism concealed in the

essence of logic — an optimism that is the basis of our culture?" Put

simply, there is optimism because there is now the hope that things can

be "figured out." In terms of the leading theme of the present thesis,

the hope that the unity of experience as a whole can reach a theoretic

•110-

expression in terms of a transparent logic:. Perhaps the questionable
character of existence which gave rise to Greek tragedy may now no
longer be questionable.

... for who could mistake the optimistic element in
the nature of dialectic, which celebrates a triumph with
every conclusion and can breath only in cool clarity and
consciousness — the optimistic element which, having
once penetrated tragedy must gradually overgrow its
Dionysian regions and impel it necessarily to self-
destruction — to the death-leap into the bourgeois
drama. Consider the consequences of the Socratic maxims:
"Virtue is knowledge; man sins only from ignorance; he
who is virtuous is happy." In these three basic forms
of optimism lies the death of tragedy.16

Even under this very early interpretation, Nietzsche sees the
motivation of The Critique of Pure Reason in an area outside its main
concern. Kant is credited with overcoming optimism precisely by
showing its basis and its poverty. If all our objective knowledge is
limited to the phenomenal realm under set laws, there is either the
possibility of comprehending everything or being involved in an in-
definite course of investigation under the same forms. No matter which
alternative occurs, man can never be satisfied. In the first alterna-
tive, we know everything once we know the forms in which things must
appear such that there is really no radically new experience possible.
In the second alternative, we are always awaiting an end product which
will justify all the activity leading up to it. Thus, Nietzsche says
of Lessing and his famous statement on striving for truth, "Therefore
Lessing, the most honest theoretical man, dared to announce that he
cared more for the search after truth than for truth itself — and thus
revealed the fundamental secret of science, to the astonishment, and
indeed the anger, of the scientific community."

Science and the theoretical man are, according to Nietzsche, the'

-Ill-

victims of a "sublime metaphysical illusion." "... the unshakable faith
that thought, using the thread of logic, can penetrate the deepest

abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of knowing being

1 8
but even of correcting it." But this illusion constantly leads

science to its limits where it "must turn into art — which, with this

mechanism, is. actually its object (auf welche es eigentlich, bei diesem

19
Mechanismus , abgesehen ist) . "

The optimism of the theoretical man, of course, does not only con-
sist in the hope of complete comprehension, but, most importantly for
Nietzsche and the present thesis, the hope that the terrible side, the
irrational side, the Nothing may be avoided. In the previous chapter
concerning the characterization of nihilism, we noted Nietzsche's
references to the attempt to avoid the "in vain"; particularly the
"attempt to work blindly as an instrument of science ...." What
becomes important is that science presents itself as something in which
one can believe. Actually any curiosity in which one could lose onself
would do. The attempt to avoid what Nietzsche calls the "tragic in-
sight" leads to diverse frantic activity with no unifying principle.
The growing awareness of this in the nineteenth century has been de-
scribed by Karl Lowith in his essay "The Historical Background of
European Nihilism." The general point of view expressed by the intel-
lectuals Lowith mentions is that of a directionless Europe which yet
persists in an almost totally unreflective frantic activity. Says
Lowith, "In the midst of frantic progress, of domination and exploita-
tion of the world my means of the new technical inventions, a feeling of

aimlessness and a spiritual pessimism casts its shadow upon Europe's

. . ,,21
finer spirits. Because of this situation, these "finer spirits"

-112-

feared the emergence of an incredibly militaristic form of government
which would be imposed by someone able to capitalize on the disunity
of the time. Goethe, Jacob Burckhardt and Nietzsche were only three of
the most prominent.

The constitution of culture was an overriding concern of Nietzsche's
throughout his productive period. In his essay on David Strauss in the
Untimely Meditations, he describes a culture as "the unity of artistic
style in every expression of a people's life." ~ The modern theoretical
man is not capable of a culture. Nietzsche had nothing but scorn for
those who spoke, for example, of modern German culture. Following his
definition of culture Nietzsche says, "Much knowledge and learnedness

is, however, neither a necessary means of culture nor a sign of it "23

This is a basic theme in the cultural critique of the Untimely Medita-
_tions. In the fourth meditation, Schopenhauer as Educator (Schopenhauer
als Erzieher) , Nietzsche says, "That educating philosopher, of which I
dream, would not only find the central force but know how to keep it
from destroying the other powers: his task would be to form the whole

man into a living, moving solar system and learn the law of its higher

u ■ ,.24
mechanism. Rant, Nietzsche has decided by the time of the

Meditations, is the opposite of this ideal. Furthermore, with reference
to Kant, Nietzsche says sarcastically, truth "is an easygoing and cheer-
ful creature, which assures all the established powers again and again,
that no one should fear any trouble from her; one who is only 'pure

reason'. Thus: I want to say, that philosophy in Germany must unlearn

,,25
pure reason ....

Schopenhauer, for Nietzsche, represents the macrocosm in micro-
cosm. The genius, as he understands him, is a self-contained entity,

-113-

hence his inevitable isolation. The genius is fragile, because he

represents a unity of delicately balanced instincts and forces which is

constantly in danger of being upset. The man of disinterested learning

is not in a position to appreciate what the genius represents nor can

he feel philosophy as vitally touching his life.

So the first danger in whose shadow Schopenhauer
lived was isolation. The second was — doubting the
truth. This danger accompanies every thinker who sets
out from the philosophy of Kant, assuming he be a strong
and complete man in his sorrows and his desires, and
not a mere clanking thought or calculating machine.

... it appears to me that only the very fewest men have
been vitally grasped and had their blood and sap changed
by Kant.

For I see unclearly that men themselves need to be
revolutionized before any realm [of thought] can be
revolutionized. As soon as Kant begins to exercise a
popular effect, we find this in the form of a dangerous
corroding and crumbling scepticism and relativism; and
only with the most active and noble spirits, who have
never rested in doubt, could that shattering and
despairing of all truth enter in its place, as was
experienced, for example, by Heinrich von Kleist.26

At this point, Nietzsche quotes Kleist's account of his experience

in which after reading Kant he concluded that we cannot decide if what

is called truth is really such. Kleist laments the fact that there may

be no such thing as a purely objective truth and that what we have

called truth may die with us. He then says, "If the point of this

thought does not strike your heart, don't laugh over one who feels him

wounded in his most spiritual inner self. My single, highest goal is

27
gone and I have no more." To this Nietzsche replys, "... when again

will men feel like Kleist, when will they learn to measure a philosophy

n o

according to their 'Holy of Holies'."

No matter what we think of Kleist's Kant interpretation, Nietzsche's
point is well taken in its attack on disinterested learning. The

■114-

scholarly type was the object of his attack throughout Nietzsche's entire
productive period. It is difficult, however, to be sure whether the
Kleist incident is meant to indicate something significant about Kant's
philosophy or not. One would think that some tribute is being paid to
Kant here as well as the complete spirits who are profoundly affected by
him. There seems to be the implication in terms of Nietzsche's critique
of German culture that the Germans simply do not measure up to Kant's
true worth but must take him in a sterile form. It is known that
Nietzsche had moved away from Kant and Schopenhauer at the time of the
Untimely Meditations, but because of the way Nietzsche uses the man he
is discussing, it is difficult to distinguish exactly what he is prais-
ing in the individual. Kant and Schopenhauer are generally taken as
types (often as representatives of Nietzsche himself) in Nietzsche's
attempt to describe a supra-historical image of the philosopher.

In his work Kant in the Judgement of Nietzsche (Kant im Urteil
Nietzsches) , Otto Ackermann thinks that Nietzsche views Kant as a

necessary precursor of Schopenhauer and sees Schopenhauer as an advance

29
on Kant. Kant is often representative of the theoretical man and

contrasted with Schopenhauer to the advantage of the latter. Schopen-
hauer represents the true philosopher who is a complete man, the
unified man as opposed to the fragmented one-sided scholarly type.

A scholar can never become a philosopher: for Kant
was not capable of it himself, but remained to the end,
in spite of the force of his native genius, in a
chrysalis stage. Whoever believes that I do Kant an
injustice with these words, does not know what a
philosopher is, namely not only a great thinker, but
a real man; and since when could a real man come from
a scholar ... a philosopher ... must take most of his
teaching from himself and he himself serves as the
image and abbreviation of the entire world. ^0

■115-

The only critique of a philosophy, which is possible
and proves anything, namely to try and see if one can
live by it, has never been taught by the universities,
but only a critique of words about words. 31

In the Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche begins more and more to tie up
his notion of culture and the complete individual with an idea of life
as a whole. Nietzsche's use of the term 'life' remains vague through-
out his philosophy, but we can at least see that in every instance of
its use, he is intent to convey the idea of unity. Nihilism, inter-
preted as the loss of the basic directing values of life, leads to an
emphasis on the particular to the detriment of the universal. This
manifests itself in the form of fetishisms which abstract from life as
a whole. Nietzsche regards the emphasis on knowledge as the pure
accumulation of information as an abstraction from life. In The Use
and Abuse of History we read,

Must life dominate knowledge, or knowledge life?
Which of the two is the higher and decisive power? There
is no room for doubt: life is the higher and the
dominating power, for the knowledge that annihilated
life would be itself annihilated too. Knowledge pre-
supposes life and has the same interest in maintaining
it that every creature has in its own preservation. 32

The culture of a people as against this barbarism
can be, I think described with justice as the "unity of
artistic style in every outward expression of a people's
life." This must not be misunderstood as if it were
merely a question of the opposition between barbarism
and "fine style." The people that can be called cultured,
must be in a real sense a living unity, and not be split
apart into form and substance. If one wish to promote a
people's culture, let him try to promote this higher
unity first .... 33

The modern man carries inside him a huge heap of
indigestible knowledge-stones that occasionally rattle
together in his body .... This rattling reveals the most
unique characteristic of the modern man: the noteworthy
opposition of an inner to which no outer corresponds
and an outer to which no inner corresponds; an opposition
of which ancient peoples knew nothing. 34

■116-

It becomes obvious through these and innumerable other of Nietzsche's
expressions what the unity of experience must have meant for him. His
question in the essay on history is, "how can history serve life?" The
constant emphasis put on "life" throughout foreshadows the later concept
of the will to power which functions as Nietzsche's primary unifying
concept. Concerning himself with respect to his critique, Nietzsche

says, "I have at all times written with my whole body and my whole life.

35
I do not know what purely intellectual problems are." The modern

theoretical man knows problems as one knows a train is passing by

feeling the vibrations. Says Nietzsche, "... your thought is not your

experience but the reverberation of the experience of others; as your

room trembles when a car passes. I am sitting in that car, and often

..36
I am the car.

While concentrating on the general characteristics of the true
culture, Nietzsche, as was seen in the example of Schopenhauer, empha-
sized the individuals who embodied these characteristics. Erich Heller
has said of Goethe that "emancipating reason from the totality of the

human person appeared to Goethe as the denial of his vision of man ....

37
He sincerely believed that this way lay catastrophe." Nietzsche

seems to agree.

What he [Goethe] wanted was totality; he fought
the mutual extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling
and will (preached with the most abhorrant scholasticism
by Kant, the antipode of Goethe) ; he disciplined him-
self to wholeness, he created himself. 38

Kant is the antipode of Goethe. "I have set up the most difficult

ideal of the philosopher. Learning is not enough.' The scholar is the

herd animal in the realm of knowledge — who inquires because he is

ordered to and because others have done so before him. Let us confess

-117-

39

how utterly our modern world lacks the whole type ...."

Kant's and Schopenhauer's philosophies maintain their merit in that
they come up against the problem of the unity of experience in an
explicit way. They fail, however, to reach a satisfactory understanding
of the constitution of this unity. Kant's failure is made quite ex-
plicit in his phenomena/noumena distinction. Human freedom, for example,
must remain beyond any possible rational explication. It exists as a
brute fact whose consequences can be seen and reasoned about, but
freedom an sich is unintelligible. Schopenhauer tried to overcome this
problem but as was seen in chapter three, he failed. Schopenhauer
expressed his frustration with the problem of unity in the following
way:

... the philocophical investigator must always feel in
regard to the complete etiology of the whole of nature
like a man who, without knowing how, is brought into a
company quite unknown to him, each member of which in
turn presents to him another as his friend and cousin,
and thus makes them sufficiently acquainted. The man,
himself, however, while assuring each person introduced
of his pleasure at meeting him, always has on his lips
the question: "But how the deuce do I stand to the
whole company?1^

In 1867, Nietzsche wrote in a note that Schopenhauer complained "in his
old age that the most difficult problem of philosophy was also not

solved by his philosophy. He meant the question of the boundaries

4 1
(Grenzen) of individuation." But this problem is precisely the problem

of the unity of experience since this explicitly concerns how the in-
dividual stands to the whole.

The problem of the unity of experience as Nietzsche presents it is
at the same time the problem of reason as it has developed within the
Western philosophic tradition. The disunity which Nietzsche outlines
from a cultural point of view in Untimely Meditations represents the

-118-

end result of the faith in reason. What has net been comprehended is
that the status of reason rested squarely on the faith in it. It is
well to recall Nietzsche's claim that "The faith in the categories of
reason is the cause of nihilism." In the first chpater, Kant was
represented as the culmination of the tradition in the sense that
reason is explicitly presented to be critiqued. It should be noted,
however, with respect to Nietzsche's remarks that Kant's philosophy
therefore also represents the point at which a decision concerning the
"faith" in reason becomes necessary. The idealisms which followed Kant
were prompted by the need to reach a decision on the status of reason.
From this point of view, Hegel or any later philosopher does not
legitimately represent the culmination of the rational tradition but
the attempt to come to terms with Kant's realization. In the fourth
chapter, Nietzsche's statement about "the faith in the categories of
reason" was discussed in the context of the loss of value and the
autonomy of the will to power. It was indicated at that place, however,
that there were at least two ways Nietzsche's statement could be under-
stood. The second way may be stated as follows: when an interpretation
of reality (existence, the world) is insisted upon long and hard
enough, it eventually becomes untenable. That is, the respect in
which it falls short of reality (which for Nietzsche is in a constant
state of becoming) will eventually show itself. This is precisely how
Nietzsche describes the death of God; the Christian "truths" must
ultimately become untenable.

Even though Kant represents a culmination of the tradition in the
sense indicated, what Kant attempted was a "piece of naivete; knowledge
of knowledge. The legitimacy of belief in knowledge is always

•119-

,,43
presupposed .... But belief in knowledge, for Kant, means the

belief in universality and necessity. For Nietzsche, it is crucial
that we are dealing with a belief; he consequently suggests that
necessity is not necessary at all in the way Kant thought. And al-
though on the traditional view of reason, necessity and universality
cannot be abandoned (a point Nietzsche would admit) , this traditional
view ought not to be presupposed in a critique of reason itself.

How does Nietzsche understand the emergence of the emphasis upon
reason in the tradition which found its culmination in Kant? The
question relates to the significance of dialectics in the life of the
ancient Greeks. By the term 'dialectics', Nietzsche presumably meant
no more than the critical give and take of the Dialogues whereby common
statements and beliefs (particularly moral ones) are considered in order
to arrive at set definitions. Nietzsche thought the need for this sort
of disputation, represented a form of decline. "Dialectics can only be
an emergency measure. One must experience an emergency, one must be

obliged to exhort one's rights: otherwise one makes no use of

,,44
dialectics. The same thought is expanded and deepened in the section

of Twilight of the Idols (Gotzendammerung) entitled "The Problem of

Socrates." In this section Nietzsche asks, "What really happened ..."

with Socrates. "Above all, a noble taste is thus vanquished; with

dialectics the plebs come to the top. Before Socrates, dialectic

manners were repudiated in good society: they were considered bad

.i . • „45

manners, they were compromising. Socrates was a peculiarity who

fascinated the Greeks with his agonistic instinct. The move toward

dialectics was a stop gap measure. If those who condemned Socrates to

death did not appreciate him, what precisely did they not appreciate in

-120-

him? For Nietzsche it was the fact that Socrates offered an alternative
to a declining life during the break-up of the polis. As H.D.F. Kitto
notes, "The Peloponnesian War virtually saw the end of the city-state
as a creative force fashioning and fulfilling the lives of all its mem-
bers. During the fourth century , Greece steadily moves towards new ways
of thought and a new way of life."

Socrates was a decadent who was forced to choose dialectics. "One
chooses dialectic only when one has no other means." The move toward
dialectics was "self-defense." Socrates, according to Nietzsche, should
not be regarded as a cause but as an effect. He comprehended that he
was only the extreme symptom of a general malady of declining instincts.

When the spirit is rich and independent, it most
resists any preoccupation with morality. How came it
that Socrates was a monomaniac in regard to morality?
In emergencies, 'practical' philosophy steps at once
to the fore. Morality and religion as chief interests
are signs of an emergency. °

The fanaticism with which all Greek reflection
throws itself upon rationality betrays a desperate
situation; there was danger, there was but one choice:
either to perish or to be absurdly rational. ^

Here we are at the decisive point which, for Nietzsche, determines
the drift of western philosophy up to the present. It is at this point
that the main division between being and becoming was determined. From
now on philosophy has as its fateful underlying presupposition, the
division of the true and apparent world. The "real" is to be appre-
hended by means of concepts which "fix" becoming and make it thinkable;
the world of the senses is changeable and deceptive and cannot give us
truth. It is this division between the two worlds which becomes one of
the fundamental forms of disunity in the Western metaphysical tradition;
a form of disunity prompted by a decline in the hitherto sure reliance

-121-

upon the instincts. With a decreasing vitality, "The impulses want to
play the tyrant; one must invent a counter-tyrant who is stronger ...
the instincts turned against each other." In the case of Socrates,
"rationality was then hit upon as the savior." Reason then tyrannizes
over the instincts. But for Nietzsche, "To have to fight the instincts
— that is the formula of decadence: as long as life is ascending,
happiness equals instinct." Under Nietzsche's interpretation,
Socrates became a curiosity only because he was the first to explicitly
perceive the degeneration which "was quietly developing everywhere."
"Old Athens was coming to an end. And Socrates understood that all
the world needed him — his means, his cure, his personal artifice of

H52

self-preservation .

Perhaps consistent with Nietzsche's interpretation, Christianity
may be looked at as a reasonable means of escape. Nietzsche's pre-
occupation with Christianity is certainly understandable when we con-
sider how the division of the true and apparent world becomes inten-
sified. Interestingly enough, we see an increasing flood of rational

53
argumentation as the Christian God becomes less and less believable.

Was this also an emergency measure? Perhaps the voluminous argumenta-
tion of the scholastics was a reaction to an emergency situation. It
seems difficult to reconcile the amount of effort expended on apolo-
getics and a firm faith no matter how much one hears about the value
of "constantly risking one's faith." Continuing this line of thinking,
perhaps science itself predominates because it represents a reaction
to an emergency situation. In chapter four, Nietzsche's position was
presented in this way.

In the Genealogy of Morals , which again picks up the problem of

-122-

science discussed in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche says,

Oh, what does science not conceal today! how
much, at any rate, is it meant to conceal! The pro-
ficiency of our finest scholars, their heedless
industry, their heads smoking day and night, their
very craftsmanship — how often the real meaning of
all this lies in the desire to keep something hidden
from oneself! Science as a means of self-narcosis:
do you have experience of that?^

Behind science stands a belief, a faith, a value, "it first requires in

every respect an ideal of value, a value-creating power, in the service

of which it could believe in itself ...." The question of value is

primary here. For Nietzsche, it is by no means coincidental that the

increasing emphasis upon science and the theoretical man in the modern

age is contemporaneous with the death of God. The value-place left by

the departing Cod must be filled; science and the illusion of progress

it promotes furnish this content.

The presupposition of scientific work: belief in
the unity and perpetuity of scientific work, so the
individual may work at any part, however small, con-
fident that his work will not be in vain.

There is one great paralysis: to work in. vain,
to struggle in vain.

56

In the modern tradition, the development of science as a consequence of
the emphasis on reason and the "quest for certainty" becomes an ex-
plicit object of concern in a way it need not have been while the
Christian God was alive and well. In this regard, it is interesting
to note that Descartes, who characterizes the movement toward an avowed
primacy of reason, involves himself in a circular argument over God's
existence. This is because he wants to let man as a reasoning being
and God have a say in the decision about truth. And although the
religious values are becoming untenable, this does not mean that the
rise of science is anti-religious. "Modern philosophy, being an

-123-

epistemological skepticism, is, covertly or overtly, anti-Christian —

although, to say this for the benefit of more refined ears, by no means

,. • ,.57
anti-religious .

Reason becomes an authority in which one can believe. With the

elevation of reason, the stage is set for the slow destruction of

reason's authority. For Nietzsche, an explicit scepticism is the

logical outcome of the emphasis on reason as Descartes developed it.

Eventually it seems as though reason can no longer believe in itself.

With the disunity evident in an extreme epis temological skepticism

reason seems at an impasse. Hume apparently reconciled himself to this

situation and took up backgammon. Nietzsche describes what happened as

follows :

The aberration of philosophy is that, instead of
seeing in logic and the categories of reason means
toward the adjustment of the world for utilitarian ends
... one believed one possessed in them the criterion
of truth and reality.

The naivete was to take an an thropocentric idiosyn-
crasy as the measure of things, as the rule for
determining "real" and "unreal": in short to make
absolute something conditioned.

This is the greatest error that has ever been
committed, the essential fatality of error on earth:
one believed one possessed a criterion of reality in
the forms of reason — while in fact one possessed them
in order to become master of reality ....58

The result of insisting on the primacy of reason leads to the blatant

separation of the real and apparent worlds. In chapter one, Hume's

and Kant's problems with causality were discussed in terms of the

possibility of a rational account of the unity of experience. The

principle of causality, however, was simply the form in which the

crisis of reason made itself explicit. It was suggested that the more

general problem concerned the principle of sufficient reason and thereby

■124-

the unity of experience. L.W. Beck indicates in his history of German
philosophy that the Germans as a whole up to Kant failed to "under-
stand the radical character of Hume's discovery.1

Kant was aware, as he expresses it in the preface to the Critique,
that man will not surrender his drive toward metaphysical knowledge in
its unlimited, unconditional sense. Metaphysics "... would survive even
if all the rest [of the other sciences] were swallowed up in the abyss
of an all-destroying barbarism ...." From a Nietzschean point of
view, Kant's statement would signal that a search was necessary for a
principle which would include this "need for metaphysics." At the very
end of the first chapter, mention was made of Kant's appeals to the
"nature of reason" when confronted with this "need for metaphysics."
For Kant there is simply no further way of understanding the activity
of reason; this "need" represents the limit of the Kantian philosophy.

The Kantian philosophy represents the point in the history of
philosophy where philosophy first attempts to acquire its own subject
matter and really show itself as the "queen of the sciences"; con-
cerning itself with the possibility of objective knowledge in general.
This attempt was absolutely necessary if philosophy was to move beyond
Humean scepticism. Yet Kant still stands firmly within the long-
established conception of reason in the tradition with his emphasis
upon universality and necessity. As Hegel states in his History of
Philosophy ,

. . . while Hume attacks the universality and necessity
of the categories ... Kant merely argues against their
objectivity in so far as they are present in external
things themselves, while maintaining them to be objective
in the sense of holding good as universal and necessary,
as they do, for instance, in mathematics and natural
science . " 1

-125-

In order to preserve the necessity supposed in the knowledge of ex-
perience, Kant had to make experience merely phenomenal. The phenomen-
ality of all knowledge under necessary laws, however, forced Kant to pay
the traditional price of enclosing himself in a necessitated phenomenal
world from which by his own principles there was no escape. But at this
point, the "in vain" mentioned earlier appears on the horizon, and
Nietzsche apparently agrees with Schopenhauer that "about those phenomena
known by us only as our representations, etiology can never give us the
desired information that leads us beyond them." As Nietzsche says,

The development of science [which of course proceeds
etiologically ] resolves the "familiar" more and more into
the unfamiliar: it desires, however, the reverse, and
proceeds from the ins tine t to trace the unfamiliar back
to the familiar.

In summa, science is preparing a sovereign ignorance,
a feeling that there is no such thing as "knowing."63

In Kantian terms, the understanding is frustrated in its attempt to

reach an "unconditioned" in the series of appearances, which is what

it ultimately desires. Moreover, it desires this goal, because it

stands in the service of reason in general whose raison d'etre lies in

the goal of unity. The hope was that once the laws of appearance were

worked out, we would enter "upon the secure path of a science" and all

would be well. But, Nietzsche claims, all is not well, because in this

way we have only succeeded in becoming explicitly aware of our ignorance.

Nietzsche implies, however, that this is precisely what Kant desired,

... in order to create room for his 'moral kingdom', he
found it necessary to add an unknowable world, a logical
'beyond' — that is why he found his Critique of Pure
Reason necessary. ^

Perhaps Nietzsche had in mind Kant's own statement: "I have therefore

found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith."65

■126-

Nietzsche seems to emphasize the role of Kant's moral concerns,
because he wants to show that behind the philosophizing of the tradition
in general stands a "need" to assert that human existence "makes sense."
Even the most abstruse and abstract epistemologies are merely ancillary
with respect to this "need." Nietzsche is not ultimately critical of
moral positions per se, but only insofar as they represent a position
which is intentionally unreflective and therefore intellectually dis-
honest .

For Nietzsche, Kant's moral position was specifically designed to
be invulnerable to a rational attack. This is an interesting position
to say the least since Kant felt that his position followed from the
acceptance of man as a rational being. At any rate, as one commentator
has pointed out, "Kant solved the problem of the vulnerability of the
questionable base of knowledge simply by concocting a basis which was,
by definition, unquestioned, since men could never know anything directly

about it. Nietzsche will not abide, though, with what he perceives as

■ i i c -i ■ ,,66

willful ignorance.

It is well here to understand Nietzsche's use of the term 'moral1
in its most general form. It will be seen that his use is actually
quite close to Kant's. Jaspers very neatly gives the essence of
Nietzsche's use as follows: "Whenever we value something unconditionally
our experience is moral, and, contrariwise, whenever our experience is
moral in nature, we are dealing with something unconditional."67 A
thorough reading of Nietzsche will reveal that this opinion is basic-
ally correct. Nietzsche's use of the term 'moral' shows why he can
bring what seem to be properly epis temological questions under a moral
critique. All that is necessary is that the position put forth absolute

•127-

claims about the character of existence. Interestingly enough the
notion of the unconditional is crucial to Kant's understanding of the
moral. In the Foundation of the Metaphysics oj^ Morals (Grundlegung zur
Metaphysik der Sit ten) we find, "What else, then, can freedom of the
will be but autonomy, i.e., the property of the will to be a law to
itself?" But, of course, this means that the will is absolutely un-
conditioned as free. Then Kant says, "Thus if freedom of the will is
presupposed, morality together with its principle follows from it by

the mere analysis of its concept." "... a free will and a will under

69
moral laws are identical." What we cannot assert in the case of Kant,

however, is that everywhere we find an unconditional we also have a
moral phenomena. Kant starts with moral phenomena as a fact and dis-
covers their essential ground in the unconditioned; namely unconditional
freedom. For Nietzsche, the unconditioned as a fact does not exist,
therefore morality as Kant presents it cannot exist.

Metaphysics is characterized by Nietzsche in terms of the uncon-
ditioned. "Senselessness of all metaphysics as the derivation of the
conditioned from the unconditioned. It is in the nature of thinking
that it thinks of and invents the unconditioned as an adjunct to the
conditioned (zu dem Bedingten das Unbedingte hinzudenkt, hinzuf indet)."70
From this we can conclude that metaphysics is to be discussed under the
heading of morals and this is indeed the case as even a superficial
reading will show. When Nietzsche considers metaphysics and the un-
conditioned as a moral question, he is not at all concerned to investi-
gate whether a certain piece of metaphysical or epistemological doctrine
is correct or not; he is always concerned with what attitude toward
life (existence) in general is betrayed by the "metaphysical need"

■128-

which the position shows in postulating its unconditioned.

As a final indication of Nietzsche's sense of the moral, I give

Heidegger's description:

By morals, Nietzsche understands in general the
system of value setting in ..Inch a supersensible world
is established as decisive and desirable. Nietzsche
always grasps "morals" "metaphysically" that is, with
respect to that in it which is determining for the whole
of being (totality of beings). (Unter Moral versteht
Nietzsche meist das System solcher Wertscha tzungen ,
in denen eine ubersinnliche Welt als massgebend und
wlinschbar gesetzt wird. Nietzsche begreift die "Moral"
stets "metaphysisch, " d.h. im Hinblick darauf, dass in
ihr uber das Ganze des Seienden entschieden wird.)71

Heidegger then gives Nietzsche's own statement of his position. "I

understand by "morals" a system of evaluations which coincide with the

72

conditions of a creature's life." ~ Commenting upon this, Heidegger

continues :

Nietzsche indeed also understands morals here
"metaphysically" in relation to being as a whole and
the possibility of life in general and not "ethically"
with regard to a "manner of living." He does not con-
sider "morals" anymore in the sense which conditions
Platonism. (Hier versteht Nietzsche die Moral zwar auch
"metaphysisch" in bezug auf das Seiende im Ganzen und
die Moglichkeit des Lebens Liberhaupt und nicht "ethisch"
hinsichtlich der "Lebensf uhrung , " aber er denkt nicht
mehr an die "Moral," die den Platonismus bedingt.)73

Metaphysics is then put in terms of life which, as mentioned in chapter
four, is essentially will to power. Evaluation, value setting is the
result of life as will to power, and metaphysical positions insofar as
they attempt to assert the character of existence, judge existence as a
whole, are manifestations of the will to power. The philosopher and
moralist, however, have not been aware of this. In Heidegger's words,
he "suspects nothing of the origin of the values to which, as uncon-
ditioned ideals, he subordinates himself (nichts ahnt vom dem Ursprung
der Werte, denen er sich als unbedingten Idealen unterstellt) . " But

■129-

here again we have the autonomous character of the will to power as
presented in the fourth chapter. Valuing itself is for Nietzsche the
will to power as life. The will to power is not something distinct
which from time to time interprets the world, the process of inter-
preting and valuing (which in Nietzsche's use are equivalent) is the
will to power itself. Consequently, for Nietzsche there can be no
position outside the will to power; there can be no position which is
not a valuation — interpretation.

And do you know what "the world" is to me? ... a
monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm,
iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or
smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms
itself ... a household without expenses or losses, but
likewise without increase or income; enclosed by "nothing-
ness" as by a boundary ... a becoming that knows no satiety,
no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the
eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying ...
my "beyond good and evil," without goal, unless the joy of
the circle is itself a goal: ... do you want a name for
this world? A solution for all its riddles? This world
is the will to power — and nothing besides! And you
yourselves are also this will to power — and nothing
besides! '->

But does this mean then that Nietzsche has achieved what this
thesis has asserted was sought all along by philosophy; a description
of human experience in its unity? Certainly this description must in-
volve some sort of autonomous principle on the order of the will to
power. But is a totally autonomous principle ultimately "comprehensible"
in any ordinary sense of the word? Furthermore, is not the principle
of the will to power itself one of the unconditional which Nietzsche
denies can be legitimately asserted? In other words, is not the postu-
lation of the will to power nihilistic? Is the traditional disunity of
appearance and reality which has been presented as reaching its

•no-

culmination in Kant's philosophy overcome in Nietzsche's philosophy?
In the sixth and final chapter these questions will be discussed if
not entirely answered.

NOTES
CHAPTER V

1. Schlechta, Vol. I, p. 101. (Kaufmann, BT, p. 112)

2. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation,
Translated by E.F.J. Payne (New York, 1966), Vol. I, p. 417. '

3. Schlechta, Vol. 1, p. 99. (Kaufmann, BT , p. 110)

4. Ibid., p. 100. (Ibid. , p. Ill)

5. Ibid. , p. 10. (Ibid. , p. 18)

6. Ibid. (Ibid.) Nietzsche's view of the
motivation for the scientific mentality is almost identical with that
expressed in Genealogy of Mojraj^s. See Schlechta, Vol. II, pp. 888ff.
(Kaufmann, GM, pp. 148ff.).

7. Ibid. , p. 13. (Ibid
8.
9.

10.
11.
12.

13. Ibid. (Ibid.)

14. Ibid. , p. 80. (Ibid. , pp. 90-91)

15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Translated by Norman
Kemp Smith (New York, 1929), p. 9.

16. Schlechta, Vol. I, pp. 80-81. (Kaufmann, BT, p. 91)

17. Ibid. , p. 84. (Ibid. , p. 95)

18. Ibid. (Ibid.)

19. Ibid. , p. 85. (Ibid. , pp. 95-96)

20. WP, no. 29. Compare this with Nietzsche's statement at the
end of the Genealogy of Morals: "... any meaning is better than none
at all ... the tremendous void seemed to have been filled; the door was
closed to any kind of suicidal nihilism ...." See Schlechta, Vol. II,
p. 899. (Kaufmann, GM, p. 162).

21. Karl Lowith, Nature, History and Existentialism (Evanston.
1966), p. 7. *

22. Schlechta, Vol. I, p. 140. (Ludovici, DS , p. 8)

23. Ibid. (Ibid.)

24. Ibid. , p. 292. (Collins, SE, p. 110)

25. Ibid., p. 299. (Ibid., P. 119)

26. Ibid., pp. 302-303. (Ibid., pp. 123-124)

27. Ibid. , p. 303. (Ibid. , p. 124)

28. Ibid. (Ibid. , pp. 124-125)

29. Otto Ackermann, Kant im Urteil Nietzsches, Dissertation
(Tubingen, 1939), p. 62. This dissertation on the whole is fairly
superficial in that it offers very little critical analysis. It is
mainly an enumeration of Nietzsche's remarks on Kant.

-131-

-132-

30. Schlechta, Vol. I, p. 350. (Collins, SE, p. 182)

31. Ibid., p. 356. (Ibid. , p. 190)

32. Ibid. , p. 282. (Collins, UAH, p. 96)

33. ibid. , p. 232. (Ibid., p. 34)

34. Ibid. (LbAd.)

35. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsches Cesammel te Werke (Munich,
1920-29), Vol. XXI, p. 81. "_ """"

36. Ibid.

37. Erich Heller, "Nietzsche and Goethe," The Disinherited Mind
(New York, 1959), p. 103.

38. Schlechta, Vol. II, p. 1024. (Hollingdale, TI, p. 102)

39. WP, no. 421.

40. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I,
p. 98. ' ""

41. Nietzsche, Ge samme 1 1 e We r ke , Vol. I, p. 395.

42. WP, no. 12B. "

43. WP, no. 5 30.

44. WP, no. 431.

45. Schlechta, Vol. II, p. 953. (Hollingdale, TI, p. 31)

46. H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks (Baltimore, 1957), p. 152.

47. Schlechta, Vol. II, p. 953. (Hollingdale, TI , p. 31)

48. WP, no. 4 35.

49. Schlechta, Vol. II, p. 955. (Hollingdale, TI, p. 33)

50. Ibid., p. 954. (Ibid.)

51. Ibid., p. 955. (Ibid.)

52. Ibid., p. 954. (Ibid.)

53. The increasing attempts to rationally overcome the difficul-
ties presented by the Christian concept of God is well-presented by
Arthur Love joy in The Great Chain of Being. See especially chapters
three through six. Lovejoy's presentation emphasizes the problem of
unity .

54. Schlechta, Vol. II, p. 888. (Kaufmann, GM, p. 147)

55. Ibid. , p. 891. (Ibid. , p. 153)

56. WP, no. 579.

57. Schlechta, Vol. II, p. 616. (Kaufmann, BGE, p. 66)

58. WP, no. 584.

59. Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy (Cambridge, 1969),
p. 425.

60. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 21.

61. G.W.F. Hegel, The History of Philosophy, Translated by E.S.
Haldane and Frances H. Simson (New York, 1974), Vol. Ill, p. 427.

62. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I,
p. 98.

63. WP, no. 608.

64. Schlechta, Vol. I, p. 1013.

65. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 29.

66. Tracy B. Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of
Transfiguration (Berkeley, .1975), p. 43.

67. Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understand-
ing of His Philosophical Activity, Translated by Charles F. Wallraff
and Frederick J. Schmitz (Tucson, 1966), p. 146.

68. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals,
Translated by Lewis White Beck (New York, 1969), p. 74.

-133-

69.

Ibid.

70. WP, no. 5 74.

71. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfullingen, 1961), Vol. II.
p. 118.

72. WP, no. 256.

73. Heidegger, Nietzsche , Vol. II, p. 119.

74. Ibid. , p. 120.

75. WP, no. 1067.

CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSIONS

Nietzsche considered traditional philosophy under the aspect of
value. Interpretations or valuations are not either true or false in
any objective sense; as if there were a state of things "in itself"
which we could grasp as observers in the world. From the viewpoint of
the will to power, traditional philosophic interpretations become means
of control; they become means of "imposing upon becoming the character
of being." Let us connect more closely the notion of value with that
of power.

A brief description of the concept of power was given in Chapter
IV. There the crucial idea was that there is only a recognition of
power (in any form) insofar as a new stage of "power" is being attained.
Put otherwise, there is only a recognition of power insofar as a
resistance is being overcome (overpowered) . "The will to power can
manifest itself only against resistances; therefore it seeks that which
resists it ...." Hence power is overpowering. The difficulty of
giving a non-circular definition becomes quite clear. This is no doubt
due to the simplicity and fundamental nature of the conception.

When a value is posited, this represents an increase of power and
at the same time a power stage from which a new increase can be initi-
ated. Furthermore, the attempt to maintain a given power stage
(interpretation) requires the constant exercise of power of the

-134-

-135-

continual presence of a resistance. If this were not the case, we

could be accused of postulating a power stage "in itself" or apart from

the exercise of power; this would be a complete absurdity since it

would contradict the very concept of power.

What are our evaluations and moral tables really
worth? What is the outcome of their rule? For whom?
in relation to what? Answer: for life. But what is life?
Here we need a new, more definite formulation of the
concept of "life." My formula for it is: Life is will
to power.

Value is the highest quantum of power a man is
able to incorporate.^

The standpoint of "value" is the standpoint of
conditions of preservation and enhancement of complex
forms of relative life-duration within the flux of
becoming .

As applied to the philosopher we have:

The inventive force that invented categories
labored in the service of our needs, namely of our need
for security, for quick understanding on the basis of
signs and sounds, for means of abbreviation: "sub-
stance," "subject," "object," "being," "becoming" have
nothing to do with metaphysical truths.

It is the powerful who made the names of things
into law, and among the powerful it is the greatest
artists in abstraction who created the categories.

If the traditional truths of philosophy are the result "of our need
for security" is this not a cessation of the process of overpowering?
Yes and no. Yes in the sense that these truths represent power stages
or points of view from which existence is interpreted, but no in the
sense that they are actively in force and actively put forth by
philosophers at a given period in history. What fails to be realized
is that if a particular set of categories were not in force, another
set would be necessary. Recall here Kant's remark concerning the pos-
sibility that man will ever give up his penchant for metaphysics. The
will to interpret, the will to truth, the will to value are all really

■136-

aspects of the one will to power. That this has not been realized
before is because "one has taken the value of these 'values' as given,
as factual, as beyond all question . ..." Nietzsche will not entertain
the objection that the sceptic in philosophy is an exception here.
"The typical philosopher is here an absolute dogmatist; if he has need

of scepticism, it is so as to be able to speak dogmatically about his

• • ,,7
mam interest.

Obviously Nietzsche cannot criticize the "will to truth" as the
postulation of unconditioned truths in philosophy if these are the
result of the necessary process of valuing in terms of the will to
power. Such a criticism would be a criticism of the will to power
itself; a manifest absurdity from a Nietzschean point of view. It
would in fact be the attempt to characterize existence as a whole; the
very attempt which brings Nietzsche's condemnation of traditional
philosophy .

Nietzsche's criticism, as has been emphasized, is consistently
directed against the unconditioned aspect of traditional philosophies.
Furthermore, it is precisely this unconditioned aspect of traditional
interpretations which brings on the devaluation which is the hallmark
of nihilism and, in terms of the leading theme of the present thesis,
brings on the disunities of the rational tradition in philosophy. It
must be emphasized that nihilism as thus conceived refers to the
develuation of the value of existence as a whole. We are not concerned
here with the devaluation of this or that particular value. Consequently.
Nietzsche's critique usually concerns itself with perspectives such as
the Christian value system in toto, or the place of the value of reason
in the tradition generally. The phenomenon of nihilism concerns only

■137-

the most complete crises of value.

At the very end of chapter four , it was suggested that "the inability
to give a unified philosophical account of experience" could be equated
with the problem of nihilism. Perhaps now this can be shown.

The attempt to give a unified philosophical account of experience,
which means a rational account, is, if we take Nietzsche at his word,
itself a manifestation of what life is, namely the will to power. What
the rational tradition as a whole has desired is to show that the human
world is thus and not otherwise. If this cannot be discovered, then the
project of reason is indeed in vain. Even if we characterize the
activity of the tradition in terms of, say, the mastery of nature, this
leads to the same conclusion. The mastery of nature would only be com-
plete on the assumption that it was comprehended in totality.

But if the attempt to characterize existence in its totality in

any categorical form is pursued to its limits, the very process of

interpreting which this manifests will give rise to disunity. As

Nietzsche asserts with respect to the Christian value scheme in a

crucial passage of the Genealogy of Morals,

All great things, we might say all unconditioned
interpretations of existence, bring about their own
destruction through an act of self-overcoming: thus
the law of life will have it, the law of the necessity
of "self-overcoming" in the nature of life -- the law-
giver himself eventually receives the call: "patere
legem, quam ipse tulisti . " In this way Christianity as
a dogma was destroyed by its own morality; in the same
way Christianity as morality must now perish, too: we
stand on the threshold of this event. After Christian
truthfulness has drawn one inference after another, it
must end by drawing its most striking inference, its
inference against itself; this will happen, however,
when it poses the question "what is the meaning of all
will to truth?"8

Here we have in its most pregnant form the mechanism of the demise of

-138-

all unconditional positing. Note that Nietzsche emphasizes the words
as a dogma. This means as unconditional.

The illusion created by the emergence of disunity is that a pre-
vious evaluation has been shown to be "incorrect" in comparison with a
"correct" appraisal. But there is no given standard in terms of which
the character of existence can be measured. The condition of nihilism
as loss of value presents itself when "one interpretation has collapsed;
but because it was considered the interpretation it now seems as if
there were no meaning at all in existence, as if everything were in
vain." But where precisely is the disunity revealed by the collapse
located? As just noted, it cannot be between a "correct" interpretation
and an "incorrect" interpretation which falls short. The main issue,
threrfore, is not one of replacing one interpretation with another.
The answer can only be that the feeling of powerlessness , the disunity
between "our" interpretation and the "real" world is ultimately trace-
able to the gulf between a given unconditional interpretation and the
implicit recognition of the will to power; the recognition that no
unconditional value will maintain itself. I suggest that it is this
realization which is at the source of the nihil negativum, the Nichtheit
of Heidegger, the "absurd" of the existentialist tradition and every
other characterization of the absolute Nothing. The world appears
absurd, because the will to power leads exactly nowhere. There is no
goal to "becoming"; there is no "aim" which could give sense to every-
thing that leads up to it. The myth of Sisyphus is undoubtedly the
most apt symbol of this situation; an action which can never cease yet
leads nowhere.

The movement of the rational tradition is only meaningful as a

■139-

goal-oriented activity; the goal has been unity, as Kant understood.
But the will to power says that the rational tradition is condemned to
a perpetual disunity, i.e., a perpetual nihilism. This is first
comprehended by Nietzsche. Thus as Camus notes, "With him nihilism
becomes conscious for the first time."11 "He recognized nihilism for
what it was and explained it like a clinical fact."12 Here nihilism is
to be taken as the total process of valuation/devaluation. When the
reaction to this realization becomes a "fleeing into a beyond," this
is also called nihilism but is also termed "pessimism" or a "pessimism
of weakness." It is this pessimism which, for Nietzsche, describes the
philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer. There is also, however, a
"pessimism of strength" whereby one resolves to live in terms of the
"in vain" character of existence. One is, of course, forced to the
conclusion that the attempt to flee the "in vain" must itself be a
consequence of the will to power, and this is exactly the basis of
Nietzsche's commentary on ascetic ideals in the Genealogy of Morals.
The attempt to avoid the "in vain" leads one to posit even more
strenuously something as unconditioned; something in which one might
lose oneself. As was seen earlier, science may function in this way.

The problem of the unity of experience has now been connected with
the phenomenon of nihilism. The rational tradition since Plato has
been nihilistic because it has established itself on the basic disunity
of the true (real) world over against the apparent world. Considered
in this way, of course, the Christian influence in philosophy was only
an intensification of the basic dichotomy. The activity of the tradi-
tion from Plato to Nietzsche represents the attempt to maintain the
real/apparent interpretation of existence. In this respect we can

-140-

agree with the Heideggerian interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy
as the logical conclusion of the metaphysical tradition. At the end
of this tradition the foremost concern of the tradition becomes the
tradition itself. The most fundamental value which man has laid across
existence collapses. As Heidegger puts it, "What does the 'end of
metaphysics' mean? Answer: the historical moment in which the
essential possibilities of metaphysics are exhausted. (Was meint aber

dann 'Ende der Metaphysik'? Antwort : den geschichtlichen Augenblick,

13

in dem die Wesensmoglichkeiten der Metaphysik erschopft sind.)"

Heidegger's own characterization of what has happened in terms of his
own categories is quite different, but the outcome in terms of the
historical place of Nietzsche's philosophy is the same. Nietzsche's
pronouncement of the death of God symbolizes that the last possibility
for a flight into a "beyond" is gone. Nietzsche is concerned to
eliminate every last vestige of transcendence and to use a favorite
saying of Karl Lowith, "to retranslate man back into the world of
nature (urn aber den Menschen in die Welt der Natur zur'uckzuubersetzen) ."
With the collapse of the traditional two-world view neither category,
true world nor apparent world, is applicable anymore. In his capsule
summary of the history of this separation in Twilight of the Idols ,
the last step reads, "The true world we have abolished. What world has
remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we
have also abolished the apparent one." What does this mean in terms
of the practice of philosophy? What are the practical results of
living in terms of a "pessimism of strength?" Nietzsche is not too
informative at this point. We can form some general conception of the
attitude of amor fati , but it is difficult to derive any specific

-141-

prescription for action in a positive sense from this. This is a
perennial complaint of commentators who wonder why Nietzsche said so
little concerning the specific characteristics of the Ubermensch.

16

There will be no attempt here to resolve these probelms which point
to the consequences of overcoming nihilism as it has been manifested in
the tradition. It is possible to suggest, however, several lines that
could be adopted with respect to these problems. First we could adopt
Heidegger's position toward his own philosophy and conclude that
fundamental ontology has absolutely nothing prescriptive to say. This
position, of course, depends upon viewing Nietzsche primarily as a
metaphysician or fundamental ontologist. The present thesis is in
sympathy with this view, however many commentators, notably Jaspers,
would disagree. For Heidegger, philosophy must remain at the level of
phenomenology, the only way that fundamental ontology can be done. It
therefore remains purely descriptive. Nietzsche's philosophy certainly
contains a great many remarks which must be construed as prescriptive,
however with the following qualification. The main concern of Nietzsche's
remarks is almost always merely designed to open up the broadest per-
spective on an issue which we may or may not use as a basis for action.
The perspective of the will to power was in fact the broadest possible
perspective on history for Nietzsche, consequently he seems to say we
"ought" to live in terms of it.

A second position which could be adopted with respect to a post-
Nietzschean world is that absolutely nothing will be different than it
would otherwise be. Nietzsche himself sometimes seems to be favoring
this position. The process of the overcoming of nihilism must work
itself out in a historically necessitated way and as products of history

■142-

we are in no position Co change its course. There are many statements,
however, which are difficult to reconcile with this historical determin-
ist view. The main difference between this and the first position is
that the former will not go this far, that is, it will not make any
prescriptive statements whatsoever. This second position is, as I
believe, that of Camus.

As a third possible approach, we have the "everything is permitted
attitude" and the "might makes right" attitude. This is probably the
most superficial of all interpretations of Nietzsche and therefore the
most easily refuted. It must be said, however, that the "everything is
permitted" attitude could be interpreted as simply meaning (although it
usually does not) the future cannot be predicted.

It might be objected, and rightly, that since all of these alter-
natives are presented as possible interpretations, this really amounts
to saying that anything follows from Nietzsche's position which in turn
says that nothing follows from it. This difficulty, however, is a
result of Nietzsche's position which completely eliminates any extra-
human aspect of the world. Man is given total freedom which, as
existentialism is fond of pointing out, means total responsibility.
But from a position of total freedom nothing follows. At this point,
man's activity must quite literally be viewed as creation ex nihilo.
The self-contained autonomy of the will to power reflects this radical
human freedom. There is no longer any realm of transcendence, in what-
ever surreptitious form, which could take over responsibility for any
action. This is reminiscent of Nietzsche's comment that "Any distinction
between a 'true' and an 'apparent' world — whether in the Christian

r or in the manner of Kant (in the end, an underhanded Christian) —

manne

-143-

is only a suggestion of decadence, a symptom of the decline of life."18
Any transcendent realm must be only a human product; it must be the
result of the autonomous will to power. The final decision as to what
a post-Nietzschean future might be like would also have to come to
terms with the problem of reconciling human freedom with historical
necessity which this thesis is not about to do. As a related issue and
with regard to the previous discussion of Nietzsche's critique of the
philosophic tradition, I would like to conclude this presentation with
some remarks about the implications of the autonomous nature of the will
to power.

Walter Kaufmann, in his commentary, calls Nietzsche a "dialectical
momst. This monism follows from the autonomous nature of the will
to power. We can only conclude that Nietzsche's principle of the will
to power functions to unify experience. Certainly Nietzsche attempts to
show the operation of the principle in many diverse areas of life. But
if the will to power is Nietzsche's principle of unity, has he not done
precisely what the will to power denies can be done and what Nietzsche
himself condemns the rational tradition for doing? Furthermore is not
a monism ultimately irrational and therefore unintelligible from the
standpoint of the traditional notion of reason?

In his commentary on Nietzsche, Karl Jaspers states that
"Nietzsche's interpretation is actually an interpretation of interpret-
ing, and for that reason different from those of all earlier, compara-
tively naive interpretations which were undertaken without awareness of
their own interpretive character."*" It seems that some answer of this
type is the only one possible. We might say instead that Nietzsche's
perspective of the will to power is the broadest one attained thus far.

-144-

It is a perspective from which all other perspectives as perspectives
are seen in their origin. Does this broadest perspective thus account
for itself? The answer is no. But let us suppose that there was a
standpoint which "accounted" for this broadest perspective. This
standpoint would be just another perspective and we would still be left
with simply a perspectivism. There is no way out of a position like
this, because it already implicitly includes any judgment on it.
Getting beyond this perspectivism would apparently mean assuming a
nonperspectival or absolute position, but there could never be any
characteristic of such a position which would allow us to distinguish
it from any other perspective. In fact no meaning can be attached to
such an absolute perspective since it seems to involve a contradictio
in adjecto. But the question arises, is not the fact that we cannot get
beyond such a position the sign that it is the "absolute" perspective?
This must be admitted but with the following qualification. It would
make no sense to ask for the "why" of such a perspectival position,
because it is not conceiveable what kind of answer would count as
answering the question. Therefore the will to power or the perspective
of perspectives acquires its unique position by default so to speak.
In terms of a "why" which is based on the principle of sufficient reason,
such a position is completely unreasonable. The upshot of this whole
line of argumentation is then that no rational account of reason can
be given if the activity of reason hitherto is presented in terms of
the will to power; the will to power itself must remain unreasonable.
Having come to this conclusion, I would like to repeat the words

of Stanley Rosen quoted at the beginning of chapter four . "Contemporary

21
man desperately needs a rational interpretation of reason." This

-145-

need can never be fulfilled on the traditional view of reason. Either
a new idea of reason must be adopted or the explanation of the tradi-
tional idea of reason must itself be accepted as unreasonable. There
are simply no other alternatives if we want to maintain any idea of
reason at all. Rosen believes that nihilism results when reason can
no longer justify itself and is silenced in the attempt. Monism, for
Rosen, is a form of silence. One consequence of this silence is that
we must be silent about the direction history will take based upon our
monism. From the standpoint of a particular history, monism says

nothing simply because it allows every possibility. It is pure pos-

22
sibility and as Rosen points out, "pure possibility is nothingness . "

ii 2 3

The nihilist's future is a creation ex nihilo ...."

Many of Rosen's conclusions are in general agreement with those of
Nietzsche, although his exposition of the nihilistic character of
philosophy differs greatly. As an important confirmation of the ap-
proach of the present thesis we may note part of Rosen's conclusion.
"As is especially evident in our own age, the fundamental feature of
nihilism is discontinuity, and particularly so in the efforts to
replace speech by immediate ecstasy or symbolic abstraction."" For
Rosen, the main source of this discontinuity occurs between man and the
world of things which confront him. Through speech, man attempts to
bridge the gap. "Men speak because they are partially detached from
things and try to overcome this disjunction with a bridge of language.

Since words, however remarkable, are not things, the disjunction between

25
the two can never be entirely overcome." Rosen has in mind "rational

speech"; this is what the present thesis has understood most basically

as the attempt to express the unity of experience in the rational

-146-

philosophic tradition. But what is most fundamentally characteristic
about rational discourse and expressed by the principle of sufficient
reason? Furthermore, how does this question reflect upon a monistic
position?

I will enlist the help of Rosen's discussion in considering these
questions. It seems I can say "Y because X" and thereby assert that
"X is a reason for Y." Yet the ability to say this does not help me
much in understanding what counts in allowing one "thing" to be the
reason for another. That is, the relation of reasonableness remains
opaque. To use Rosen's example in Nihilism, "If 'because' is onological
whereas Y and X are not, then 'because' has no internal structure; I
mean that its sense cannot be reproduced discursively, or replaced by
statements having the form Y or X." What we seek to understand is
the reasonableness of our reason and although it can be asserted that
the principle of sufficient reason is the highest source of appeal in
the unity of our experience, this principle itself cannot be said to
be reasonable. Rosen states that "because" in "Y because X" can have no
internal structure since, as ontological, it stands for the unity
recognized as existing between the things X and Y; the connection which
presumably allows us to say X is a reason for Y. If "because" itself
had a structure we would be forced to a further unifying principle and
so on thus generating a regressus in infinitum.

What all of this provisionally indicates is that when one asserts
"Y because X," the sanction for this already preexists in one's
experience as unified. Very early in chapter two this thesis stated
that the unity of our experience is always implicitly recognized. This
conclusion must still be maintained. From the point of view of the

-147-

history of philosophy, there has never been a question of constructing
experience as a unity; rather the project has always been to demonstrate
in a discursive way an already recognized unity. That the former point
of view sometimes seems to be the case is simply an illusion. But this
unity cannot be stated in a rational discourse, and this has prompted
some writers to adopt Ludwig Wittgenstein's idea of the Lebensform.

In his work On Certainty, Wittgenstein says, "You must bear in mind
that the language game is so to speak something unpredictable. I mean:
it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It

O Q

stands there — like our life." Nietzsche would certainly agree that
it would be absurd to speak of life as either reasonable or unreasonable.
In addition, since Nietzsche equates life and the will to power, it
would be likewise absurd to designate the will to power as reasonable
or unreasonable. Is the will to power then what Wittgenstein terms a
Lebensform? It would seem not since the will to power is a stated
principle in terms of which we can give a definite description of
phenomena. This could never be the case with a "form of life" as
Wittgenstein presents it and for the very reasons given in the dis-
cussion above on rational discourse. But because we can form the con-
cept of power with respect to the activity of particular phenomena, the
will to power does not assume the aspect of a completely nondescript
background as in the case of Wittgenstein's "form of life." In this
respect, Nietzsche's position cannot be represented as a pure monism.
If Nietzsche's position were one of radical monism as I take Wittgen-
stein's ultimate position to be, he would have been able to say nothing
whatever about the will to power. The will to power, however, is a
fact. It is the last fact we arrive at in the analysis of any life

-148-

phenomenon, but it is still a fact. This means that it can be regarded
as an object in some sense which, I believe, would be difficult to
state.

Nietzsche's position, however, must still be regarded as a monism,
but one which does not reduce us to silence. The position maintained
earlier in this chapter with regard to the irrationality of the will
to power still stands. The process of interpreting itself cannot be
grounded, and this is a feature of the will to power as a monistic
principle. As autonomous and self-creating it must remain irrational
since such descriptions ultimately reduce to the assertion of a creation
ex nihilo and thereby leave the principle of sufficient reason out of
account altogether. We are in fact reduced to silence if the ground
of the will to power is demanded; the will to power must be its own
ground. That the will to power must be regarded as its own ground,
means further that Nietzsche's assertion of this principle as the last
possible perspective must itself be only a perspective. This is a con-
clusion of which Nietzsche himself was aware. In the highly significant
first section of Beyond Good and Evil entitled "Prejudices of Philos-
ophers," Nietzsche states,

... and somebody might come along who, with opposite
intentions and modes of interpretation, could read out
of the same "nature" and with regard to the same
phenomena, rather the tyrannically inconsiderate and
relentless enforcement of claims of power — an
interpreter who would picture the unexceptional and
unconditional aspects of all "will to power" ... but
he might, nevertheless, end by asserting the same about
the world as you do, namely, that it has a "necessary"
and "calculable" course, not because laws obtain in it,
but because they are absolutely lacking, and every
power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment.
Supposing that this also is only interpretation — and
you will be eager enough to make this objection? —
well, so much the better. ^

-149-

With the doctrine of the will to power, we arrive at a principle which,

to be accounted for in any sense at all, must account for itself. Does

this achieve the unity which has been represented as the Holy Grail of

the philosophic tradition? Perhaps Jaspers is closer to the truth when

he states,

He [Nietzsche J rejects every determinate species
of entity that as such is supposed to express the nature
of being. Nevertheless, his world-exegesis appears in
fact to revive just the sort of specification that he
rejects .

Nietzsche arrives at something determinate as did
old-fashioned me taphysics . 30

Jaspers feels that Nietzsche did not achieve his goal which was
not in fact to remain fixed at "something determinate" but to understand
unity as unity. The will to power appears as the last interpretation
possible within a position which chooses a determinate concept to
represent the unity of experience in general. The concept of power,
as a familiar although perhaps not completely transparent concept, is
a part of ordinary experience. Jaspers believes that Nietzsche takes
over and expands this familiar part of our experience to stand for
something more. The something more, however, never gets stated. The
problem which arises is that no part of experience can function as the
unity of experience without losing its status as a piece of knowledge.
This status depends upon the fact that as a part of experience, it can
be related to other aspects of experience according to the principle
of sufficient reason. The unity of experience, however, can itself
never be regarded as an object within experience, yet we still demand
that it be made a piece of knowledge.

This basic criticism is remarkably similar in the case of Jaspers'
and Heidegger's Nietzsche interpretation. Traditionally these two

-150-

interpretations have been opposed. Heidegger, as was seen earlier,
represents Nietzsche as the end of the Western metaphysical tradition.
Without going into a detailed discussion of Heidegger's position, we
simply state that he represents Nietzsche's philosophy as the last

possible attempt to understand Being (Sein) in terms of a being (ein

31
Seiendes) . Being (Sein) is the only true representative of unity for

Heidegger; it is unity. A being (ein Seiendes) is always determinate

and therefore partial, a part of experience as a whole. Nietzsche's

will to power represents, for Heidegger, the most extreme position one

can adopt while still remaining within the realm of beings (die

Seienden) . According to Heidegger, the problem of unity will be solved

and nihilism overcome only when man is no longer preoccupied with

beings (die Seienden) but allows Being (Sein) to emerge. In this

respect not only does Nietzsche not overcome nihilism, his position

32
represents the most intense form of nihilism possible. But because

this is the case, Nietzsche is precisely the philosopher in the tradi-
tion with the best opportunity to recognize the phenomenon of nihilism.
The problem of overcoming nihilism still remains, but once again, we are
at a loss as to how to proceed. Nietzsche gives us no clues (and not

because he thought he had solved the problem as some commentators

33
imagine) nor does Heidegger. Perhaps Mikel Dufrenne is correct when

he says in The Notion of the A Priori (La Notion d'a priori) ,

Yet can philosophy agree to remain at this point?
Can it accept the Kantian verdict that, even if the need
for metaphysics is irrepressible and even if metaphysical
experience is felt , metaphysics is impossible? If phi-
losophy wants to advance further, and if it wants to
communicate the experience of a background that would
also be a radical ground [in the sense of the unity of
experience as this thesis has presented it], it must
become poetry. 34

-151-

The present thesis will not pursue this "perhaps." In terms of
Nietzsche's position regarding the philosophic tradition as nihilistic,
this thesis is at an end. The concern has been to understand
Nietzsche's philosophy vis-a-vis the rational philosophic tradition.
This has been done by emphasizing those aspects of the tradition, in
the form of specific, philosophies and general themes (such as the unity
of experience), which most fundamentally characterize it.

NOTES
CHAPTER VI

1.

WP ,

no .

656.

2.

WP,

no .

254.

3.

WP,

no .

713.

4.

WP ,

no .

715.

5.

WP,

no .

513.

drive

itself ,

the

most

Compare this with "Philosophy is the tyrannical
the most spiritual will to power, to the 'creation of the
world', to the causa prima." See Schlechta, Vol. II, p. 573.
(Kaufmann, BGE, p. 16).

6. Schlechta, Vol. II, p. 768. (Kaufmann, GM, p. 20)

7. WP, no. 44 7.

8. Schlechta, Vol. II, pp. 898-899. (Kaufmann, GM, p. 161)

9. It is well to bear in mind here the discussion of the un-
conditioned in chapter one. It was argued there with respect to Kant's
position that the concept of unity cannot be separated from the concept
of the unconditioned. Thus two unconditioned principles in a philosophy
would be an absurdity.

10. WP, no. 55.

11. Albert Camus, The Rebel, Translated by Antony Bower (New York
1956), p. 65.

12. Ibid. , p. 66.

13. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfullingen, 1961), Vol. II
p. 201.

14. Karl Lowith, Gott , Mensch und Welt in der Metaphysik von
Descartes bis zu Nietzsche (Gottingen, 1967) , p. 196.

15.. Schlechta, Vol. II, p. 963. (Hollingdale , TI , p. 41)

16. Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to J_he Understanding
of His Philosophical Activity, Translated by Charles F. Wallraff and
Frederick J. Schmitz (Tucson, 1966), p. 168.

17. Camus, The Rebel, pp. 65ff.

18. Schlechta, Vol. II, p. 961. (Hollingdale, TI , p. 39)

19. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist ,
Antichrist (Princeton, 1950), pp. 206ff.

20. Jaspers, Nietzsche , p. 295.

21. Stanley Rosen, Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay (New Haven
1969), p. 56.

22. Ibid. , p. 109.

23. Ibid., p. 141.

24. Ibid. , p. 2 30.

25. Ibid. , p. 212.

26. Ibid. , pp. 43-44.

27. As an example see Tracy B. Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the
Politics of Transfiguration (Berkeley, 1975), pp. 79-86.

•152-

-153-

28. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York, 1969), par. 559.

29. Schlechta, Vol. II, p. 586. (Kaufmann, BGE, p. 30)

30. Jaspers, Nietzsche , p. 294.

31. All of Heidegger's Nietzsche inti rpi etation is concerned to
demonstrate this position. See especially Heidegger, Nietzsche,

Vol. II, pp. 31ff.

32. For an opposite opinion see Richard Schacht, "Nietzsche and
Nihilism," Journal of the History of J'jm K>s_op__hy, Vol. XI, no. 1 (1973),
pp. 65-90. Schacht comes to the conclusion that Nietzsche was not a
nihilist in his philosophy. This, in my opinion is an erroneous con-
clusion and is due to an initially mistaken view of what nihilism is.

33. See Michael E. Zimmerman, "Heidegger on Nihilism and Technique,
Man and World, Vol. VIII, no. 4 (Nov. 1975), pp. 394-414. Zimmerman
interprets Nietzsche as claiming that he could overcome nihilism.

34. Mikel Dufrenne, The Notion o_f th_e A Priori, Translated by
Edward S. Casey (Evanston, 1966), p. 233.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Jan Raymond Sugalski was born April 10, 1943, at Schenectady, New
York. He moved to Hudson Falls, New York in 1956, and was graduated
from Hudson Falls Central School in June, 1961. In September, 1961,
Mr. Sugalski entered Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. majoring
in Chemistry. After approximately two years, he turned to philosophy
and received the degree of Bachelor of Arts in December, 1965 from
Georgetown University. Mr. Sugalski officially entered the Graduate
School of the University of Florida in September, 1966 and began working
as a graduate assistant under Dr. Charles Morris of the graduate
philosophy faculty. In August, 1967 he received the degree of Master
of Arts from the University of Florida. After serving two years in
Vietnam as a Medic with the U.S. Army, Mr. Sugalski reentered the
University of Florida to work toward the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in philosophy.

•159-

I certify that I have read this study and that in my opinion it
conforms to acceptable standards of scholarly presentation and is fully
adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy.

(i'/l

A a -\ < v

Ellen S. Haring, Co-chairman
Professor of Philosophy

I certify that 1 have read this study and that in my opinion it
conforms to acceptable standards of scholarly presentation and is fully
adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy.

pk-a-iA

T^ CL, ;-fr.

Thomas W. Auxter Co-chairman
Assistant Professor of Philosophy

I certify that I have read this study and that in my opinion it
conforms to acceptable standards of scholarly presentation and is fully
adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy.

yh

v Jay l/ Zeman ./

Professor of" Philosophy

I certify that I have read this study and that in my opinion it
cpnforms to acceptable standards of scholarly presentation and is fully
adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy.

W/f^u(rCL.

/

/

Raymond Gay-Crosier

Professor of Romance Languages

This dissertation was submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Department
of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences and to the Graduate
Council, and was accepted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

December, 1976

Dean, Graduate School

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

3 1262 08666 226 8