DESCARTES AND NIETZSCHE

Dèscartes and Nietzsche? But what else could you expect from my second entry in the Cartesian series? It would have been a horrific crime to ignore or even merely downplay what Nietzsche says about Dèscartes, considering that what he does say is extremely interesting and incontrovertibly pertinent to our subject at hand.

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Another note on what I like to call after Nietzsche the Mystical Commonwealth Of Ideas. It is so gratifying that, considering how highly I value Dèscartes’ Discourse on Method, as one of the greatest triumphs of human thought, my good friend Nietzsche, despite a few occasional anti-Cartesian quibbles, has included a quotation from this book in his Preface to the 1878 edition of Menschliches. Indeed, Nietzsche’s odi-et-amo relationship with Dèscartes is an example of that blessed inconsistency, of which we were talking in the preceding chapter, and elsewhere.

Nietzsche has numerous references to Dèscartes throughout his works, and he obviously considers him among the very greats. In his fanciful description of the three centuries of history (seventeenth-eighteenth-nineteenth), in the posthumous collection of his thoughts and sketches Wille zur Macht,--- as aristocratic, feministic, and animalistic,--- three philosophers are chosen to represent each:

Dèscartes, and the rule of reason; Rousseau, and the rule of feeling; and finally, Schopenhauer, and the rule of craving.

In the same work, he counts him among the greatest methodologists of history (Aristotle, Bacon, Dèscartes, Auguste Comte). In Jenseits, he mentions him as a bachelor, but puts him in an illustrious company of foremost philosophers:

“The philosopher abhors marriage as a hindrance on his path to the optimum (not to happiness, but in most cases to unhappiness). Heraclitus, Plato, Dèscartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, Schopenhauer,--- they were not married; one cannot even imagine them married. A married philosopher belongs in a comedy, and Socrates, it would seem, married ironically, just to demonstrate this proposition.”

In Ecce Homo, he praises his exceptional honesty:

“A La Rochefoucauld and a Dèscartes are a hundred times superior in honesty to the foremost Germans.”

Curiously, Dèscartes being the source of materialistic (besides idealistic) philosophy, mentioned in the last entry, is perfectly illustrated by Nietzsche in Der Antichrist, where he commends Dèscartes for being such a source, but criticizes him for not going far enough:

“As regards the lower animals, it was Dèscartes, who first had the really admirable daring to describe them as machina; our whole physiology is directed toward proving the truth of this doctrine. Moreover, it is illogical to set man apart, as Dèscartes did: what we know of man today is limited precisely by the extent to which we have regarded him, too, as a machine.”

In his earlier work Die Geburt der Tragödie, Nietzsche instructively compares Dèscartes and Euripides:

“For this reason (of credibility) Euripides introduced a prologue even before the exposition, and put it into the mouth of a speaker commanding absolute trust. Often it was a god, who had to guarantee to the public the course of the tragedy, and so remove any possible doubt as to the reality of the myth. At the end of his drama, Euripides required the same divine truthfulness to act as security for the future of his protagonists. This was the function of the ill-famed deus ex machina… Exactly as Dèscartes could only demonstrate the reality of the empirical world by appealing to God’s veracity, his inability to tell a lie.

Yet, despite his apparently very high opinion of Dèscartes’ philosophical caliber, Nietzsche will not include him among the “eight shadows” he wishes to enter the underworld to communicate with, which is, perhaps, quite easy to explain. Nietzsche, the great irrationalist, dislikes Cartesian rationalism (note that Aristotle is not included among the “eight” either, apparently, for a similar reason). In Jenseits, he famously criticizes Dèscartes the rationalist for “being superficial”:

“Plato, more noble and innocent in such matters, wanted to prove to himself that reason and instinct, of themselves, tend toward one goal,--- the good, God. And since Plato, all theologians and philosophers have been on the same track: in moral matters it has been instinct, or faith which has triumphed. Perhaps Dèscartes ought to be excepted as the Father of Rationalism who would conceded authority to reason alone; but reason is merely an instrument, and Dèscartes was superficial.”

(It must be clear now why Nietzsche prefers Plato to Aristotle [and Dèscartes]. After all, Nietzsche is as much an idealist as Plato is! …Which may be stretching the term idealism a little bit, but this is essentially only a matter of definition.)

In the following, every single instance of Nietzsche’s criticism of Dèscartes is exceedingly interesting; not that Dèscartes deserves any blame, of course, but because of a dazzling explosion of intellectual fireworks. This is like in a spectacular chess game, where the loser deserves no less credit (and sometimes even more) than the winner. Here is our first example, concerning the Cartesian definition of what is true, as raised in Nietzsche’s Wille Zur Macht (#533):

“Logical certainty and transparency as the criteria of truth (omni illud verum est quod clare et distincte percipitur, in Dèscartes): with that the mechanical hypothesis concerning the world is desired and credible… But this is a crude confusion: like simplex sigillum veri. How does one know that the real nature of things stands in this relation to our intellect?; Could it not be otherwise? That it is the hypothesis which gives the intellect the greatest feeling of power and security, that is most preferred, valued, and consequently characterized as true? The intellect posits its freest and strongest capability and capacity as the criterion of the most valuable, consequently of the true.”

This is not just philosophy, this is a case of brilliant psychology, which Nietzsche is famous for, and he obviously catches Dèscartes here in the act of basic self-flattery, which extends to the celebrated Cartesian Cogito, ergo sum, another such example of self-congratulatory conceit, where Dèscartes is at least perfectly consistent in his fallacy:

…There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are “immediate certainties”; for example,--- “I think,” or, as the superstition of Schopenhauer puts it, “I will”; as though knowledge here got hold of its object as the Ding-an-Sich, without any falsification on the part of either the subject or the object. But that “immediate certainty,” as well as “absolute knowledge” and the “Ding-an-Sich,” involve a contradictio in adjecto, we really must free ourselves from the seduction of words! In place of the immediate certainty, the philosopher finds a series of metaphysical questions: From where do I get the concept of thinking? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an ego as cause and finally of an ego as cause of thought? (Jenseits).

And now, this magnificent tirade made possible by Dèscartes’ ‘calling of fire upon himself,’ as the military expression of the World War II era puts it, runs into the following note in the Wille zur Macht collection:

There is thinking, therefore, there is something that thinks: such is the upshot of Dèscartes’ argumentation. But that means positing as “true a priori” our belief in the concept of substance; that when there is thought there has to be something that thinks, is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom of adding a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact, but a logical metaphysical postulate! Along the lines followed by Dèscartes one does not come upon something absolutely certain, but only upon the fact of a very strong belief. If one should reduce the proposition to “There is thinking, therefore there are thoughts,” one has produced a mere tautology; and precisely that, which is in question, the “reality of thought,” is not touched upon; that is, in this form the “apparent reality” of thought cannot be denied. But what Dèscartes desired was that thought should have, not an apparent reality, but a reality in itself. (#484).

Such is Nietzsche’s basic rebuttal of the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum. But should we go beyond that to refute the whole metaphysical theory of Kant, or the whole theory of any other great philosopher, we shall find it a surprisingly easy job. The reason of these greats’ greatness, however, is not with their imperviousness to a critical rout, which is never the case, but with their daring to enter, and their graciousness in inviting us to follow them, into an enchanted philosophical country, to which only folly and error can forge the key. It is for this reason that while we are free, with Nietzsche, to criticize Dèscartes, or Kant, or Schopenhauer, or anybody else at that ultimate alpine level, we cannot help, at the same time, but to admire these targets of our criticism for being capable of reaching so high, where we ourselves would never be able to reach, both for the lack of oxygen up there, and for fear of being ridiculed by posterity.