A Brief History of Thought

The second fundamental ethical conclusion to be derived from the thought of Rousseau and his disciples is linked directly to the first, and concerns the ideal of the common good, on the universality of moral actions transcending individual private interests. The good is no longer linked solely to my own personal interest, or that of my family or tribe. It does not exclude these, of course, but it must also accommodate the interests of others, even of humanity as a whole.

Here, too, the link with freedom is explicit: nature is by definition specific and particular; I am a man or a woman; I have a particular body with its own tastes, desires and inclinations which are not necessarily altruistic. Were I always to follow my animal nature, it is likely that the common good and the general interest would have to wait a long time before I paid them any attention. But if I am free, I can resist my animal nature, even in small doses, because I distance myself from myself, in a way – I can draw closer to others, enter into solidarity with them, and take account of their requirements. Which is, surely, the minimum condition for a mutually considerate and harmonious shared life.

Freedom, the virtue of disinterested action (‘good will’), and concern for the general welfare: these are the three key concepts which define the modern morality of duty, and which Kant was to express in the form of absolute commandments, known as categorical imperatives. Given that it is no longer a question of imitating nature, of taking nature as our guide, but actually resisting nature (and our innate egotism), it becomes clear that the achievement of the good, of the general interest, does not happen of its own accord, but that on the contrary it encounters resistance.

If we were naturally inclined towards the good, there would be no need for absolute commandments. Most of the time we have no difficulty in recognising what we ought to do in order to act well, yet we constantly make exceptions, for the simple reason that we place ourselves before others. This is why the categorical imperative invites us to ‘make an effort’, to constantly try to improve ourselves.

Within this new morality is the notion of merit: we all have difficulty in doing our duty, in following the commands of morality, even as we recognise their validity. There is therefore merit in acting well, in preferring the general interest to our private interest, the common good to egoism. The reason for this is simple: while we are unequal in terms of our innate talents – strength, intelligence, beauty and so on – in terms of merit we are all equal. For, in Kant’s perspective, it is merely a question of motive, of ‘good will’. And this is the property of all of us, strong or weak, beautiful or ugly.

Aristocratic and Meritocratic Models

To understand the novelty of this modern ethos, we need to see what is new about the meritocratic model of virtue, as opposed to older and aristocratic versions. In 1755 in Lisbon an earthquake wiped out several thousand people in a matter of hours. It had a devastating effect across Europe, and many philosophers questioned the meaning of natural catastrophes: should it be this version of nature, hostile and malevolent, that we should take for our guide, as instructed by the Ancients? Not only does nature no longer seem remotely good, most of the time men find themselves having to oppose the natural order to arrive at any notion of good. And this is as much the case within ourselves as around us.

If I listen to my inner nature, it is an uninterrupted and insistent babble of egotism that speaks, urging me to follow my private interests to the detriment of others. How could I for a moment imagine connecting with the common good if I content myself with listening exclusively to the demands of my own nature? With one’s inner nature others can always wait.

The crucial question confronting ethics in modern life is how do we remake a coherent world between humans without involving nature – which is no longer a cosmos – or a divinity, which has no meaning other than for its followers?

The answer, which defines modern humanism ethically as much as politically or juridically, is as follows: such a world must be founded solely upon the will of men, provided that they agree to restrain themselves, to limit themselves by acknowledging that their individual freedom must sometimes stop where that of others begins. It was only from this voluntary restriction of our desire for expansion and conquest that a peaceful and reciprocal relation could be created between men – ‘a new cosmos’, one might say, but this time ideal rather than natural, and socially constructed rather than preexisting. Kant would designate this ‘second nature’, this fiction of coherence devised by the free will of humans in the name of collective values, ‘the kingdom of ends’. In this ‘brave new world’, the world of the will rather than of nature, humans would be treated finally as ‘ends’ rather than ‘means’: as beings possessed of dignity who were not raw material in the service of supposedly higher objectives. In the ancient world, the human individual was no more than an atom among atoms, a fragment of a far superior reality. Now, the individual was the centre of the universe, and the creature beyond all else entitled to absolute respect.

To fully understand how revolutionary Kantian morality was, it is worth comparing it to classical ethics, specifically the notion of ‘virtue’. Ancient commentators characteristically defined virtue or excellence as an extension of nature; as a realisation, more or less perfect, for each being, of what constitutes its nature and thereby indicates its ‘function’ or its purpose. In this given nature of every being could be read its final destiny. Which is why Aristotle begins the Nicomachean Ethics by reflecting on what is the final purpose of man among other creatures: ‘For just as for a flute-player, a sculptor, or any artist, and, in general, for all things that have a function or activity, the good and the “achieved” is thought to reside in their function, so it would seem to be for man, if he has a function.’ This being so, it would be absurd to suppose ‘that a carpenter or a tanner have certain functions and activities, but that man has none, and is born without a function.’ (1097 b 25)

Here we are in the presence of a nature that fixes the purposes of man and gives a direction to ethics. The philosopher Hans Jonas noted that, in the ancient idea of the cosmos, ends are ‘domiciled in nature’, hard-wired in nature. Which does not mean that in the accomplishing of his specific task, the individual does not encounter difficulties, that he does not need to exercise will and the faculties of judgement. But it remains the case, for moral as for all other activities – learning to play a musical instrument, for example – that practice may make better, but above all else talent makes perfect.

While the aristocratic order did not completely exclude a notion of the individual will, only natural gifts could indicate the way forwards and remove the obstacles with which it was strewn. This was why ‘virtue’ (or ‘excellence’, the terms here mean the same) was defined as a ‘just measure’, a middle way between extremes. In terms of fully realising our natural destiny, it was clear that this could only be found in an intermediate position: for example, courage was to be found equidistant from cowardice and recklessness, just as good eyesight lay between near-sightedness and long-sightedness. The just measure had nothing to do with taking a ‘centrist’ or moderate position; it was a search for perfection. In this sense it could be said that an individual realises to perfection its nature or essence when it is equally remote from poles which, because they are at the limit of their definition, verge upon monstrosity. The monstrous is that which, by its ‘extremism’, ends by distorting its proper nature, an unseeing eye, for example, or a three-legged horse.

Early on in my philosophy studies I had great difficulty in understanding how Aristotle could speak seriously of a horse as having a ‘virtuous’ eye. The text in question, from the Nicomachean Ethics, perplexed me:

We may remark, then, that every virtue or excellence both brings into good condition the thing of which it is the excellence, and makes the work of that thing to be done well; e.g. the excellence of the eye makes both the eye and its works good; for it is by the excellence of the eye that we see well. Similarly the excellence of the horse makes a horse both good in itself and good at running and at carrying its rider and awaiting the attack of the enemy.’ (1106 a 15)

I could not see what the notion of ‘virtue’ con tributed to this case. In an aristocratic perspective, however, such a proposition held no mystery: the ‘virtuous’ individual is not one who attains a certain excellence thanks to openly acknowledged effort, but one who functions well, even excellently, according to the nature and purposes which are innately his. And this principle applies to things and animals as much as to humans whose happiness is linked to this accomplishing of self.

At the heart of such an ethical vision, the question of limits thus receives its ‘objective’ solution: it is in the order of things, in the reality of the cosmos, that we must seek instruction; just as a physiologist seeking to understand the function of organs and limbs simultaneously recognises the limits within which each exercises its function. Just as we would not exchange a liver for a kidney, without injury, each of us in society must find his proper place and confine himself to it; otherwise the law will intervene to restore order and harmony, and render – in the famous formula of Roman law – ‘to each his own’.

The difficulty, for us nowadays, is that such a ‘cosmic’ reading became impossible; for lack of a cosmos to interpret and for lack of a nature to decipher. One could therefore describe the cardinal distinction between the cosmological ethics of the Ancients and the meritocratic, individualist ethics of republican Moderns, beginning with the anthropology of Rousseau, as follows: for the Ancients, virtue, understood as excellence of its kind, is not opposed to nature; it is none other than the successful fulfilment of an individual’s natural aptitudes. For the philosophies of human freedom, most notably for Kant, virtue takes a different form, as the struggle for release from what is natural within ourselves.

Our nature inclines us naturally to egotism, and if I wish to give a place to others, if I wish to attune my freedom to being in accord with the freedom of others, I must make an effort – or restrain myself – and it is on these terms alone that a new order of peaceful coexistence between individuals becomes possible. Here is the future of virtue, no longer in the fulfilment of a well-endowed natural self. It is through the exercise of a new virtue alone that a new cosmos, a new order of things, becomes possible; one founded on man and not on a pre-existing cosmos or a divinity.

On the political plane, this new order of things was to display three characteristic features, directly opposed to the aristocratic world of the Ancients: categorical equality of status, individualism and the assignation of value to the idea of work.

If we identify virtue with natural endowments, all individuals are not equal. From this perspective, it is logical to create an aristocratic order, in other words an unequal world; not just a natural hierarchy of beings, but one in which the best are on top and the rest below. But, if we locate virtue in freedom – rather than in nature – all individuals are equal, and democracy becomes inevitable.

Individualism is a consequence of this reasoning. For the Ancients, the cosmos is infinitely more significant than its constituent parts. This can be described as ‘holism’, deriving from the Greek holos (‘all’, ‘everything’). For the Moderns, there is no longer anything sacred about the All, since there is no longer any divinely ordained and harmonious cosmos within which we must find our place. Only the individual counts: we no longer have the right to sacrifice the individual in order to maintain the universal (the All), for the latter is no longer anything other than an aggregate of individuals, within which each human being remains ‘an end in himself ’.

So, the term individualism is far from meaning egotism, as is commonly thought; on the contrary, it is the birth of a moral sphere within which individuals – persons – are valued by their capacity to break free of the logic of their natural egoism, in order to construct a man-made ethical universe.

Finally, in the same perspective, work becomes the defining activity of man: a human being who does not work is not merely poor – without income – but impoverished, in that he cannot realise his potential and his purpose on Earth. His aim is to create himself by remaking the world, to transform it into a better place by the sheer force of his ‘good will’. In the aristocratic world-view, work was considered to be a defect, a servile activity – literally, reserved for slaves. In the modern world-view, it becomes an arena for self-realisation, a means not merely of educating oneself but also of fulfilment and improvement.

We have seen how modern science exploded the very idea of a cosmos and obedience to divine injunctions, and how ancient systems of morality ran into difficulties. The new definition of man proposed by modern humanism – notably by Rousseau – prepared the way for the birth of a new morality, beginning with that of Kant and French republicanism.

I began my account of modern philosophy with Rousseau and Kant – eighteenth-century philosophers – whereas the true rupture with antiquity occurred in the seventeenth century, specifically with Descartes. Descartes is the true founder of modern philosophy, and it is important that we have some idea of the reasons why he represents both a point of rupture and a point of departure.

The Origin of Modern Philosophy

Cogito ergo sum – ‘I think therefore I am’ – is one of the most universally celebrated and significant of philosophical utterances, and rightly so, since it draws a line in the history of Western thought, and inaugurates a new epoch; that of modern humanism, at the centre of which is what we shall refer to as ‘subjectivity’. What exactly do we mean by subjectivity?

At the start of this chapter, we saw how the verses of John Donne (‘’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone’) epitomised the state of mind of an age of uncertainty, in which everything had to be reconstructed: a theory of knowledge, a new ethics and, perhaps most of all, a doctrine of salvation. For this, a new first principle was required, which was neither cosmos nor divinity. This was to be none other than man, or, as the philosophers would say, the ‘subject’.

It was Descartes who ‘invented’ this new first principle, prior to its application by Rousseau and Kant. It was Descartes who transformed the doubt linked to the disappearance of ancient certainties into a formid able tool for reconstructing from scratch the entire edifice of philosophical thought. In his two fundamental works, The Discourse on Method (1637) and the Meditations (1641), Descartes conceives, under various guises, a form of philosophical fiction (or ‘method’, as he terms it). He forces himself to call into question each and every one of his ideas, without exception, even the most settled and self-evident truths; such as, for example, the existence of objects outwith myself, that I am seated on a chair etc. In order to be certain about doubting all certainties without exception, he even imagines the hypothesis of an ‘evil genie’ who amuses himself by deceiving Descartes about absolutely everything.

Descartes adopts an attitude of total scepticism, taking nothing on trust … except that, at the end of the day, there does remain a certitude which resists everything and vigorously stands its ground, a conviction that holds good under even the most extreme doubt. And this is the certitude that, according to which if I am thinking these things, even in a state of uncertainty, I myself must therefore be something that exists! It may well be the case that I am continually making errors, that all my ideas are false, that I am permanently deceived by an evil genie – but in order for me to be deceived, or to deceive myself, I must at the very least be something that exists! A conviction remains that is resistant to all doubt, however general, and it is the certainty of my own existence. From which comes the formula with which Descartes concludes his investigations: ‘I think therefore I am’.

The experience of radical doubt which Descartes depicts – and which may strike you initially as outlandish – offers three new ideas, which make their appearance for the first time in the history of thought. These three ideas were destined for a remarkable posterity and they are of fundamental importance to modern philosophy.

First: each time Descartes stages a new drama of doubt, it is not merely an intellectual game; it aims to arrive at a new definition of truth. By examining close up, and with scrupulous care, the only certainty which categorically resists every challenge – the cogito, in effect – he will arrive eventually at a reliable truth-criterion. We can even say that this method of reasoning will lead to a definition of truth as that which resists doubt, as that of which the individual subject can have absolute certainty. Thus a state of subjective consciousness – certainty – becomes nothing less than the new criterion of truth. And this will give you an idea of how central the category of subjectivity becomes for the project of Modernity. It is henceforth exclusively in terms of the ‘subject’ that the surest measure of truth is to be found (whereas the Ancients defined truth in objective terms; for example, when I say it is night, this proposition is true if and only if it corresponds to objective reality, to the facts themselves, whether I am certain of myself or not). Of course, the subjective criterion of certainty was not unknown to the Ancients – it is discussed in the dialogues of Plato – but with Descartes it was to take on a primordial authority and override all other criteria.

Second: even more decisively, in political and historical terms, was the idea of the ‘tabula rasa’ – the absolute rejection of all preconceptions and all inherited beliefs deriving from tradition. By putting in doubt all received ideas, without distinction, Descartes at a stroke invented the modern notion of revolution. As the nineteenth-century political thinker and historian Alexis de Tocqueville was to remark, the men who started the French Revolution of 1789, and who we refer to as the ‘Jacobins’, were in fact ‘Cartesians’ who had left school and taken to the streets.

One could say that the revolutionaries repeated in the historical and political sphere what Descartes had initiated in the sphere of abstract thought. The latter declared that all past beliefs, all ideas inherited from family or state, or indoctrinated from infancy onwards by ‘authorities’ (masters, priests) must be cast in doubt, and examined in complete freedom by the individual subject. He alone is capable of deciding between true and false. In the same way, the French revolutionaries declared that we must cast aside all the paraphernalia of the Ancien Regime; as one of them, Rabaut Saint-Etienne, declared, in a wholly ‘Cartesian’ maxim which came to stand out as a milestone, the Revolution could be encapsulated in a single sentence: ‘Our history is not our destiny.’

Just because we have lived since time immemorial in a regime that is an aristocracy and a monarchy, with established privileges and inequalities, we are not for ever obliged to continue doing so. Nothing compels us to continue to observe traditions for ever. On the contrary, when they are not good, we must reject them and change them. We must know how to ‘make a blank slate of our past’ in order to create from scratch – just as Descartes, having cast all prior beliefs in doubt, undertook the total reconstruction of philosophy upon a solid basis: namely an immovable certitude, that of a subject who takes responsibility for himself, and who trusts henceforth to himself alone.

In both cases – with Descartes as with the revolutionaries of 1789 – the human subject becomes the foundation of all thought, and the agent of all change: through the decisive experiment of the cogito, the democratic and egalitarian abolition of the privileges of the Ancien Regime and the (entirely unprecedented) declaration of the equality of all men.

Note that there is a direct link between the two ideas above; between the definition of truth as certitude of the subject and the founding of a revolutionary ideology. If we must make a tabula rasa of the past and subject to the most rigorous process of doubt all those opinions, beliefs and preconceptions which have not undergone minute examination, this is because it is proper to believe, to ‘admit to credence’ (in Descartes’ words) only that of which we can be absolutely certain in our own minds. From which also proceeds a new version of nature, founded on individual conscience rather than tradition, of a unique certitude which compels recognition before all other kinds: that of the individual subject in his relation to himself. Thus it is no longer belief or faith which enables us to reach an ultimate (Christian) truth, but awareness of self.

Third, an idea whose unprecedented revolutionary power in the age of Descartes is hard for us now to imagine: whereby we must reject all ‘arguments from authority’. The expression ‘arguments from authority’ means all beliefs with a claim to absolute truth imposed externally by institutions endowed with powers that we have no right to dispute: family, schoolmasters, priests and so on. For example, if the Church decrees that the Earth is not round and does not travel around the Sun, you must do likewise, and if you refuse, you run a high risk of ending up burned at the stake or being compelled to confess publicly that you are in the wrong, like Galileo, even if you are entirely in the right.

It is these arguments from authority that Descartes abolished, with his radical doubt. With his invention of the ‘critical spirit’, freedom of thought, he is the rightful founder of modern philosophy. The idea that one must accept an opinion because it is maintained by external authority, of whatever kind, became so repugnant to the Modern spirit as virtually to define Modernity. It is true, we sometimes extend our trust to a person or an institution, but the gesture has ceased to have any of its traditional meaning: if I agree to follow another’s judgement, it is because I have formulated good reasons for doing so, not because this other imposes its authority externally without my assent.

I hope that you can now grasp a little more clearly how one can say that modern philosophy is a philosophy of ‘the subject’ – a humanism – with man at the centre of everything. And, finally, a few words about the new doctrines of salvation: in the absence of a cosmos or a God, according to strict humanism principles, the idea of salvation would seem virtually unthinkable. It is difficult to see where any notion of salvation might rest, in order to circumvent the fear of death. So difficult, in fact, that, for many people, the question of salvation was to vanish completely. Or it became confused with the question of ethics. This confusion is so frequent, even today, that I shall attempt to dispel it before embarking on the modern responses to the ancient question of salvation.

From Ethical Questions to the Question of Salvation

To reduce to their essentials these new ideas, we could define secular morality as an ensemble of values, expressed by obligations and imperatives, which ask us to pay a minimum of respect to others without which a shared and peaceful coexistence becomes impossible. What our societies – which make an ideal of the rights of man – ask us to respect in others is their dignity as our equals, their right to freedom, notably freedom of opinion, and their right to wellbeing. This is described in the famous maxim, ‘My freedom stops where that of another begins’.

No one can doubt that moral laws should be indispensable and rigorously applied, for in their absence a war of everyone against everyone else begins to loom on the horizon. Such laws appear therefore to be the necessary condition of that peaceful coexistence which favours the emergence of a democratic order. They are not sufficient in themselves, however, and I aim to convince you that ethical principles, however precious they may be, have no purchase whatsoever on the great existential questions that were formerly taken care of by the doctrines of salvation.

I would like you to imagine that you own a magic wand which allows you to arrange matters so that everyone in the world today begins to observe to the letter the ideal of respect for others embodied in humanist principles. Suppose that, everywhere in the world, the rights of man were scrupulously observed, with everyone paying respect to the dignity of everyone else and the equal right of each individual to partake of those famous fundamental rights of freedom and happiness. We can hardly begin to comprehend the unprecedented revolution that such an attitude would introduce into our lives and customs. There would be no wars or massacres, no genocide or crimes against humanity. There would be an end to racism and xenophobia, to rape and theft, to domination and social exclusion, and the institutions of control or punishment – police, army, courts, prisons – would effectively disappear. So, morality counts for something, and this exercise suggests the degree to which it is essential to our common life; and, at the same time, how far we actually are from its realisation.

Yet, such a miracle would not prevent us from getting old, from looking on helplessly as wrinkles and grey hairs appear, from falling ill, from experiencing painful separations, from knowing that we are going to die and watching those we love die. In the end, nothing will save us from getting bored and finding that everyday life lacks zest. Even were we saints, immaculate apostles of the rights of man and the republican ethos, nothing would guarantee us a fulfilled emotional life. Literature teems with examples of how the logic of morality and that of love obey contradictory principles. Good morals have never saved anyone from being deceived or abandoned. Unless I am much mistaken, none of the love stories recounted in the classic novels proceed from humanitarian motives. If the implementation of the rights of man makes possible a peaceful coexistence, these rights do not of themselves give meaning or purpose or direction to human existence.

This is why, in modern life as in the ancient world, it was necessary to devise something – beyond morality – to take the place of a doctrine of salvation. The difficulty is that, in the absence of a cosmos or a God, it becomes especially difficult to think this through. How do we confront the fragility and finiteness of human existence, the mortality of all things in this world, in the absence of any principle external to and higher than humanity? This is the problem which the modern doctrines of salvation have tried to solve – for better or worse – and, it has to be admitted, usually for the worse.

The Emergence of Modern Spirituality

To reach this point, the Moderns turned in two main directions. The first – I will not hide the fact that I have always found it faintly ridiculous, but it has acquired such predominance over two centuries that we cannot ignore it – are what we might call the ‘religions of earthly salvation’, notably scientism, patriotism and communism. Unable to continue believing in God, the Moderns invented substitute-religions, godless spiritualities or, to be blunt, ideologies which, while usually professing a radical atheism, cling to notions of giving meaning to human existence, or at least justifying why we should die for them. From the scientism of Jules Verne to the communism of Marx, passing via the nineteenth century’s brand of patriotism, these grand human – all too human – utopias have all at least shared the merit (albeit a doomed merit) of attempting the impossible: resuscitating great notions without stepping outside the frame of humanity – as the Greeks did with their cosmos or the Christians with their God. Here are three ways of saving one’s life, or justifying one’s death, which come to the same thing, by sacrificing it for a nobler cause: whether that means the revolution, the home-land or the truths of science.

With these three ‘idols’, as Nietzsche would term them, the essentials of faith were rescued: to consecrate and if necessary sacrifice one’s life to an ideal was to preserve the conviction of being ‘saved’. To give a grotesque example, I will quote a low point from the history of the French press. It concerns an article in France nouvelle, the weekly organ of the communist party, published on the morning after the death of Stalin. Stalin was then the head of the Soviet Union, the pope of world communism, so to speak, and considered by the faithful as a hero, despite his crimes.

On 14 March 1953 the French Communist Party composed the newspaper’s front page in terms that seem today incredible, but which capture perfectly the abidingly religious idea of death at the heart of a doctrine which nevertheless saw itself as radically materialist and atheist. Here is the text:

The heart of Stalin, illustrious comrade-in-arms and renowned successor of Lenin, the chief, the friend, the brother of workers everywhere and in all countries, has ceased beating. But Stalinism lives on, and is immortal. The sublime name of the inspired master of world communism will shine with blazing clarity across the centuries and shall for ever be pronounced with love by a grateful humanity. To Stalin we shall remain faithful for evermore. Communists everywhere will endeavour to deserve, by their untiring devotion to the sacred cause of the working class … the honorary title of Stalinists. Eternal glory to the great Stalin, whose masterly and imperishable scientific works shall help us to rally the majority of humanity. (

France nouvelle

, 14 March 1953)

As you can see, the communist ideal was so powerful, so ‘sacred’ in the words of the otherwise entirely atheist editorial of France nouvelle, that it defeated death itself, and justified laying down one’s life without fear or remorse. It is no exaggeration to say that here was a new version of the doctrine of salvation. Even today, as a last vestige of this religion without Gods, there are national anthems which extend this hope to their citizens, provided that they sacrifice their destiny as individuals to the higher cause, since ‘to die for the homeland is to enter into eternity’.

Of course, we can also find on the right of the political spectrum equivalent forms of patriotism which go by the name of ‘nationalism’ – the notion that it is worthwhile to lay down one’s life for the nation of which one is a member.

In a style that is fairly close to communism and nationalism, scientism furnished its followers with reasons for living and dying. If you have ever read Jules Verne, you will recall the degree to which ‘scientists, explorers and builders’ (as they used to be called when I was at primary school) are convinced that by discovering an unknown land or a new scientific law, or by inventing a machine for exploring the sky or the sea, they are inscribing their names in the eternity of historical progress and thereby justifying their entire existence. Good for them.

I remarked a few pages earlier that I have always found these new religions absurd – sometimes grossly so. Communism and nationalism caused the deaths of many people, it is true, but it is also their naivety that disconcerts me. The evidence suggests that salvation of the individual life is not the same thing as the salvation of humanity as a whole. Even if we devote ourselves to a ‘higher’ cause, in the conviction that the ideal is infinitely superior to the individual, it remains true that in the end it is the individual who suffers and dies. Faced with the entirely personal nature of death, communism or nationalism or scientism (or any otherisms we might substitute for them) strike me as desperately empty abstractions.

As the great ‘postmodern’ thinker, Nietzsche was to ask: is not the passion for ‘grand designs’ that are supposedly superior to the mere individual, superior even to life itself, merely the final ruse of those religions that we hoped we had left behind? And yet, however derisory these last-ditch attempts at a doctrine of salvation may seem, they represented nonetheless a revolution of considerable scale. For what was hatched by these false religions and their platitudes was nothing less than the secularisation or humanising of the world. In the absence of cosmic or religious first principles, humanity came to be endowed with sacred properties. After all, no one can deny that humanity in its global aspect is, in a sense, superior to the sum of the individuals who compose it, just as the general interest must in principle prevail over that of individuals. This is clearly the reason why these new godless doctrines of salvation succeeded in convincing and converting so many.

But modern philosophy also succeeded, and far more profoundly, in arriving at a different way of formulating the question of salvation.

It was Kant, in the wake of Rousseau, who first launched the notion of ‘enlarged thought’ to make sense of human life. Enlarged thought was for Kant the opposite of a narrow-minded spirit; it was a way of thinking which managed to disregard the subjective private conditions of the individual life so as to arrive at an understanding of others. To give a simple example, when you learn a foreign language you come to establish some distance both from yourself and from your particular point of origin – that of being English, for example. You enter into a larger and more universal sphere, that of another culture, and, if not a different humanity, at least a different community from that to which you belonged formerly, and which you are now learning not to renounce but to leave behind. By uprooting ourselves from our original situation, we partake of a greater humanity. By learning another language, we can communicate with a greater number of human beings, and we also discover, through language, other ideas and other kinds of humour, other forms of exchange with individuals and with the world. You widen your horizon and push back the natural confines of the spirit that is tethered to its immediate community – this being the definition of the confined spirit, the narrow mind.

Beyond the particular example of languages, the whole realm of human experience is open to you. If to know is to love, then it is also true that by enlarging your horizons and improving yourself, you enter a dimension of human existence which ‘justifies’ life and gives it a meaning and a direction.

What is the purpose of ‘growing up’, we are sometimes tempted to ask, and what idea could save us? Let’s say that it at least gives a sense to the business of facing death, and we shall return to this ‘enlarged’ thought later, to flesh it out as it deserves, and to give you a better idea of how it took over from the ancient doctrines of personal salvation. But for the moment we must pass through another stage: that of ‘deconstruction’ – the critique of pre-existing constructions of the world, their illusions and naiveties. And at this point Nietzsche enters – the master of suspicion, the most abrasive thinker – a man who marked a turning point, philosophically speaking, for all that came afterwards. It is time for us to understand why this was the case.

Chapter 5

Postmodernity: The Case of Nietzsche

In contemporary philosophy, we call ‘postmodern’ those ideas which, from the mid-nineteenth century, were to set about dismantling the humanist creed of modernity, in particular the philosophy of the Enlightenment. In the same way that the latter broke with the grand cosmologies of Antiquity and brought about a new critique of religion, so too postmodernity was to set about demolishing the two strongest convictions of the Moderns from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries: the belief that the human individual is at the centre of the world – which came to form the basis of all moral and political values; and the belief that reason is an ir resistible force for emancipation and that, thanks to the progress of ‘Enlightenment’, we are going to become ever freer and happier.

Postmodern philosophy contested both of these ideas. It was to offer both a critique of humanism and a critique of rationalism. And, without any doubt, it is with Nietzsche that postmodernity arrived at its zenith. While there remain many reservations concerning Nietzsche, the radical aspect and the violence of his assault upon the idols of modernity are equalled only by the genius with which he was able to marshall his forces.

But – as the great contemporary philosopher Heidegger asked – why this need to pull down or ‘deconstruct’ what modern humanism had taken so much trouble to erect? Why turn yet again from one vision of the world to another? On what grounds did the gains of the Enlightenment come to seem insufficient or illusory; what reasons could seem important enough to provoke modern philosophy to want to ‘go even further’?

The answer is quite simple, if we stick to essentials. Modern philosophy, as we have seen, had deposed the cosmos and turned its back on religious authority, replacing them with reason and individual freedom; the democratic and humanist ideal of moral value founded upon man’s humanity to man – based on what made man different as a species from all other animals. However, as we have also seen, this was achieved on the basis of radical doubt introduced by Descartes. In other words, by making the critical spirit ‘sacred’, a freedom of thought which went so far as to make a tabula rasa of the entire past, its intellectual legacy and traditions. Science was itself so thoroughly imbued with this spirit that nothing could stop it in its quest for truth. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice who unleashes forces which soon escape his control, Descartes and the Enlightenment philosophers unleashed a critical spirit which, once in motion could not be stopped, somewhat like an acid that continues to eat into the materials with which it comes in contact, even after water has been thrown over it.

As we have seen, modern science, the fruit of the critical spirit and of scientific method, laid waste to the preceding cosmologies and greatly weakened, initially at least, the foundations of religious authority. This is a fact. Even so, as we saw at the end of the preceding chapter, humanism was far from dismantling the underlying religious assumptions: the opposition between the here and the hereafter, of paradise as opposed to earthly reality, or, if you prefer, of the ideal set against the real. This is why, in Nietzsche’s eyes, even if the republicans who inherited the mantle of Enlightenment pronounced themselves atheists, or materialists, they continued in effect to be believers! Not, of course, in the sense that they still prayed to God, but in the sense that they revered their new illusions, since they continued to believe that certain values were superior to life itself and that we must transform reality to make it conform to higher ideas: the rights of man, science, reason, democracy, socialism, equal opportunity and so on.

Now this vision remains fundamentally theological, even if it does not realise the fact and thinks of itself as revolutionary or anti-religious. Briefly, to postmodern eyes, and for Nietzsche above all, Enlightenment humanism remained a prisoner of the underlying religious structures. Which is why modernity was going to have to endure the same critique that it had unleashed upon the supporters of cosmologies and religious belief systems.

In the preface to Ecce Homo, one of his rare works which takes an overtly confessional form, Nietzsche describes his philosophical attitude in terms which describe perfectly his rupture with modern humanism. The latter was still proclaiming its belief in progress, its conviction that the diffusion of science and technology would bring happier days and that history and politics must be shaped by an ideal. This was precisely the type of belief, this godless religion, or – as Nietzsche expresses it in his very idiosyncratic vocabulary – the type of ‘idol’ which he proposed to deconstruct, by ‘philosophising with a hammer’. Let us listen to him for a moment:

Improve mankind? That is the last thing that

I

of all people will promise to do. Don’t expect new idols from me; let the old idols learn what it costs to have feet of clay. To

overthrow idols

– my word for ‘ideals’ – that rather is my business. Reality has lost its value, its meaning, its veracity, and an ideal world has been

fabricated

to take its place … The

lie

of the ideal has hitherto been the curse on reality, through which mankind itself has become mendacious and false down to its deepest instincts – to the point of worshiping the

opposite

values to those which alone could guarantee it prosperity, a future, the exalted

right

to a future. (

Ecce Homo

)

It is no longer a case therefore of piecing together or reconstituting a human world, Kant’s ‘realm of ends’, where men are at last equal in dignity. To postmodern eyes, democracy, whatever content it is assigned, is merely one more religious illusion among others; one of the worst, in fact, since it usually dissimulates itself under the appearance of a break with the religious world, pretending to a free ‘laicity’ (the state of being of the people, not members of the clergy). Nietzsche never ceases to return to this, with the greatest lucidity, as in this passage from Beyond Good and Evil:

We who hold to a different belief – we who consider the democratic phenomenon to be not merely a decadent form of political organisation, but a decadent (that is to say, diminished) form of the human being, one that reduces him to mediocrity and debases his value – where are we to pin our hopes?

Not on democracy, clearly! It is undeniable: Nietzsche is wholly against democracy, and, unfortunately, it is not entirely by chance that he was taken up by the Nazis as one of their inspirations. But if we want to understand Nietzsche, before condemning him, we must go further: if he abhorred ideals as such, if he wanted to smash the idols of modernity with his philosophical hammer, it is because they all derive from a negation of life, from what he termed ‘nihilism’.

Before advancing further, we need to understand this central tenet in Nietzsche’s deconstruction of modern moral and political utopias. It was Nietzsche’s conviction that all ideals, whether explicitly religious or not, whether coming from the right or the left, conservative or progressive, spiritualist or materialist, possessed the same configuration and the same purpose: fundamentally, they are all the product of a theological world-view, because they all persisted in assuming a hereafter that is better than the here and now, in offering values supposedly superior and external to life itself; or, in philosophical terms, values that are ‘transcendental’. In Nietzsche’s eyes, such a fabrication was always animated, covertly of course, by ‘wicked intentions’; its true purpose being not to help humanity, but only to judge and finally condemn life itself; to deny actual truth in the name of false realities, instead of accepting the real as it is.

This negation of the real in the name of the ideal was what Nietzsche meant by ‘nihilism’. Thanks to this fiction of supposed ideals and utopias, we place ourselves beyond reality, beyond life, whereas the heart of Nietzsche’s thought is that there is no transcendence, that all judgement on life is a symptom, a product of life, and can never situate itself outside of life. If you can grasp this, nothing can hold you back from reading him: that there is nothing outside this reality, no beyond, no above, neither in heaven or in hell; and all the fine ideals of politics, ethics and religion are merely ‘idols’, metaphysical projections, fables that turn their back on life prior to turning against life.

You can see why postmodern philosophy was destined inevitably to criticise the Moderns as being excessively in thrall to religious utopia. The Moderns invented the critical spirit, the practice of doubt, the lucidities of reason … only for all the weapons essential to their armoury to be turned against them. The principal post-modern thinkers, Nietzsche of course, but also to varying degrees Marx and Freud, have been justly described as ‘masters of suspicion’: their purpose is to deconstruct the illusions with which classical humanism deluded itself. These philosophers adopted as a first principle the sixth sense that, behind the curtain of traditional beliefs and ‘good old-fashioned values’ which pretend to beauty, truth and transcendence, lurks always concealed interests, unconscious choices, and deeper (for the most part inadmissible) truths. As with psychoanalysis, postmodern philosophy learnt above all else to distrust self-evidence, received ideas; to look behind, above and sideways if necessary to bring to light the hidden agendas which underpin all values.

This is why Nietzsche dislikes grand solutions, and ‘consensus’, and why he prefers shortcuts, sidelines, contention. Like the founding figures of contemporary art, such as Picasso or Schoenberg, Nietzsche is an avant-gardist, someone who intends above all to innovate and make a clean sweep of the past. What was to define the postmodern mood, above all else, was its irreverence, its impatience with fine sentiments and bourgeois values: everyone who prostrated themselves before scientific truth, reason, Kantian morality, democracy, socialism, republicanism. The avant-gardists, with Nietzsche in the lead, took it upon themselves to smash everything, so as to expose to full view what was concealed behind. They were, you might say, hooligans (albeit sophisticated ones)! As far as they were concerned, humanism had lost all its creative and destructive energies: this attitude explains the radicalism, the brutality and even the more frightening aspects of postmodern philosophy. Yes, we must acknowledge without contention that it is no accident that Nietzsche became the cult philosopher of the Nazis, in the way that Marx became so for Stalinists and Maoists. However, Nietzsche’s thought, intolerable at times, is also inspired. One might not share his ideas – one might even detest some of them – but one cannot think in the same way after reading his work. This is a sure sign of genius.

To indicate the principal features of his philosophy, I shall continue to follow the three grand axes of enquiry to which we have become accustomed: theoria, praxis, and doctrine of salvation.

Some admirers of Nietzsche believe that it is pointless to try and find anything as organised as a theoria in the writings of one who was beyond all others the destroyer of rationalism and a tireless critic of what he called ‘theoretical man’ – driven by ‘the passion for knowledge’. It seems sacrilegious – it would have made Nietzsche laugh – to search for a ‘morality’, given that Nietzsche never stopped describing himself as an ‘immoralist’, or to seek wisdom in the works of one who died insane. And what sort of doctrine of salvation might we expect from a thinker who had the audacity to compare himself to the Antichrist and to deride all forms of ‘spirituality’? In reply to which I would say, do not listen to everything you are told, and always judge for yourself. Read the works of Nietzsche – starting with Twilight of the Idols, particularly the brief chapter entitled ‘The Problem of Socrates’. Then make up your own mind.

It is as plain as day, from the first reading, that you will not find in Nietzsche a theoria, a praxis, or a doctrine of salvation in the sense that we have encountered in discussing the Stoics, the Christians or even Descartes, Rousseau and Kant. Nietzsche is truly what might be termed a ‘genealogist’ – it is the name he gave himself – who spent his life dismantling the illusions of traditional philosophy.

Does this mean, then, that you will not find in his work a body of thought which takes the place of the ancient certainties it comes to bury, and which substitutes for the ‘idols’ of traditional metaphysics? As we shall see, Nietzsche does not deconstruct Greek cosmology, Christianity or Enlightenment philosophy merely for the pleasure of destruction; he is clearing the way for radical new thoughts which truly constitute a new theoria, praxis and even philosophy of salvation. It is nothing less than a new way of thinking. In which case it remains a philosophy.

A ‘Gay Science’: Free from Cosmos, God and the ‘Idols’ of Reason

Let us remind ourselves of the two key aspects of philosophical theoria. There is the theion and the oraio; the divine that we are seeking to locate within the real, and the act of seeing that contemplates it: there is that which one tries to understand and that with which one tries to accede to understanding (the instruments one employs to get there). Theory always combines a definition of the essence of being, of what is most important in the world around us (what we call ontology – ontos deriving from the Greek word for being) and a definition of vision, the means of apprehension which will enable us to grasp it (what we refer to as a theory of knowledge).

We shall trace these two components of theoria in the thought of Nietzsche, in order to see the distortions to which he subjects them, and how he overhauls them in an unprecedented fashion. As you shall see, his theoria is in fact an ‘a-theoria’ – in the sense that one says of a man who does not believe in God that he is a-theist: literally, without God (the Greek prefix ‘a-’ meaning ‘without’). Because for Nietzsche, the innermost essence of being partakes neither of cosmos nor divinity; knowledge itself is no longer a category of vision, analogous to the Greek orao. It is not an act of contemplation, or a passive spectacle, as it was for the Ancients. Nor is it, as it was for the Moderns, an attempt to elaborate against all odds the sum of relations between phenomena, so as to discover a new order and a new meaning. To Nietzsche, knowledge is an act of ‘deconstruction’, hence the name ‘genealogy’, as mentioned earlier. The word is eloquent: as with the activity that consists of tracing the different branches of a family tree, true philosophy according to Nietzsche brings to light the hidden origins of values and ideas which pretend to be untouchable, sacred and handed down from on high, so as to bring them down to Earth and disclose their nature (and all too often earthly – one of Nietzsche’s favourite words – origins).

A Theory of Knowledge: Genealogy Replaces Theoria

Nietzsche’s most profound insight, and one that will underpin his entire philosophy is that there does not exist, categorically, any perspective external to or higher than life itself, any point of view privileged enough (for whatever reason) to abstract itself from the tissue of forces which are the ground of the real, and are therefore the innermost essence of being. Consequently, no judgement on existence in general has any sense, other than illusory, or symptomatic of the condition of the vital forces of the individual concerned.

This is how Nietzsche sets out his argument in a decisive passage from The Twilight of the Idols:

Judgements, value-judgements on life, whether for or against, can ultimately never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they can be considered only as symptoms – in themselves such judgements are foolish. We must really stretch out our fingers and make the effort to grasp this astonishing refinement:

that the value of life cannot be assessed

. Not by a living person because he is an interested party, is indeed even the object of dispute, and not the judge; nor by a dead person, for a different reason. For a philosopher to find the

value

of life problematic is therefore an objection against him, a question mark against his wisdom, a piece of unwisdom. (

II

, 2)

For the deconstructionist, for the genealogist, there can be no ‘objective’ or ‘disinterested’ value judgements – independent of the vital interests of the speaker – which devastates the classical conceptions of law and ethics – and there can be neither autonomous and dis interested judgements, nor objective and universally valid ‘facts’. All our judgements, all our utterances, all the sentences we employ, all our ideas, are expressions of our vital energies, emanations of our inner life and in no sense abstract entities, autonomous and independent of the forces within. The whole project of genealogy is to prove this new truth.

According to one of Nietzsche’s most celebrated statements, ‘There are no facts, only interpretations’. In the same way that we can never be autonomous and free individuals, transcending the real at the heart of which we must live our lives, but are solely the product of historical forces, entirely immersed in the reality that is ours – by the same token, and contrary to what is claimed by the positivists or scientists, there are no ‘facts in themselves’. The scientist always says: ‘These are the facts!’ – whether to remove an objection or merely to express what he feels, faced with the constraints of ‘objective truth’. But the ‘facts’ to which he claims to submit, as if to an abstract and incontrovertible reality, are merely – on a deeper level – the product (itself changeable) of history, and of the forces that comprise life at a particular moment.

True philosophy leads us towards an abyss: the deconstructive activity of the genealogist ends in the realisation that underlying the business of judgement there is no foundation but a void: behind the ‘other-worlds’ of traditional philosophy there recede yet more other-worlds, for ever imperceptible. Alone and cut off from the ‘herd’ of society, the true philosopher must undertake henceforth the agonising task of facing into the abyss:

Indeed the hermit … will doubt whether a philosopher is even

capable

of having ‘final and true’ opinions, whether at the back of his every cave a deeper cave is lying, is bound to lie – a wider, stranger, richer world behind every surface, an abyss beneath his every depth, and beneath his every abyss an inmost depth. ‘Every philosophy is a façade-philosophy’ – such is the hermit’s judgement … Every philosophy also

conceals

a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding-place; every word is also a mask. (

Beyond Good and Evil

, 289)

If knowledge can never reach absolute truth, if it is for ever pushed back, from one horizon to the next, without ever touching down on solid ground, this is because the real itself is a chaos which no longer resembles the harmonious order of the Ancients or the more or less ‘rationalisable’ universe of the Moderns. Through this new idea we penetrate to the heart of Nietzsche’s thought.

The World as a Chaos Without Cosmos or Divinity

If we want to fully understand Nietzsche, we have to start from the idea that he imagines the world in a manner almost directly opposed to the Stoics. Nietzsche considered the world – organic and inorganic, within us as much as outside of us – to be a vast field of energies, a web of forces and drives whose infinite and chaotic multiplicity cannot be reduced to unity. In other words, the cosmos of the Greeks was in his eyes the supreme untruth – a pretty piece of make-believe, with no purpose other than to console and reassure us:

And do you know what ‘the world’ is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy without beginning or end, a rigid quantum of forces, unyielding as bronze, becoming neither greater nor smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself … a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, in perpetual flux. (

The Will to Power

, 1067)

Of course the cosmos of the Greeks had already been exploded by the Moderns, by Kant and Newton, so how can Nietzsche take things further in dismantling the idea of universal harmony? The most succinct answer is that while Kant or Newton strove to find a coherence, an order in the world, by attempting to inject it with rationality, with logic – remember Claude Bernard and his rabbits – for Nietzsche such an enterprise was an utter waste of time and effort. It remained trapped inside fantasies of reason, meaning and logic, because no unification of the chaos of natural forces is possible. Like the Renaissance thinkers who saw the cosmos collapsing beneath the blows of the new physics, we are now in the grip of terror, and ‘consolation’ is no longer possible:

The world has once again become infinite to us … Once again the great shudder is upon us – but who would want to start deifying all over again in the old manner this monster of an unknown world? … Alas, too many ungodly possibilities of interpretation are included in this Unknown; too much devilry, stupidity, foolishness of interpretation. (

The Gay Science

, 374)

The scientific rationalism of the Moderns is a mere illusion, and is no more than a way of keeping faith with the illusions of the Ancients – an all too human ‘projection’ (Nietzsche was already using terms that were soon to be adopted by Freud); in other words a way of substituting our desires for realities, a way of procuring for ourselves the semblance of power over inanimate nature, multiform and chaotic, which in reality escapes our grasp on all sides.

I mentioned Picasso and Schoenberg earlier, as founders of contemporary art who are fundamentally attuned to Nietzsche. If you look at these paintings or listen to this music, you will see that it too delivers us up to a world that is destructured, chaotic, fragmented, alogical, deprived of the ‘beautiful unity’ which perspective and the rules of harmony conferred upon works of art in the past. This will give you an accurate image of what Nietzsche was attempting to think towards, fifty years earlier – and it is worth noting that philosophy, even more so than the arts, is again ahead of its time.

In these circumstances there was little chance for philosophy to stay in the business of contemplating a divinely ordained universe, of any variety. It becomes impossible for philosophy to take the form of a theoria, in the strictest sense, as a ‘vision’ of the ‘divine’. However, Nietzsche does remain a philosopher. He strives to understand this reality that surrounds us, to grasp the underlying nature of a world within which, even if it is a chaos, we must absolutely learn to situate ourselves.

But rather than trying at all costs to discover a logic to this chaos, this tissue of contradictory forces that is the universe – which he designates as ‘Life’ – Nietzsche was to distinguish between two quite distinct types of force – or, as he was to say, two ‘drives’ or ‘instincts’; on the one hand, ‘reactive’, and, on the other, ‘active’. It is upon this distinction that his thinking is founded. Reactive forces, on an intellectual level, are modelled upon the same ‘will to truth’ that animates classical philosophy and science; in politics they attempt to realise the democratic ideal. Active forces, on the contrary, are essentially called into play by art, and their natural sphere is that of aristocracy.

The Negation of the Visible World

Reactive forces: those forces which can only deploy themselves in the world and achieve their full effect by repressing, annihilating or distorting other forces. In simpler terms, they succeed only by opposing; they belong to the realm of ‘no’ rather than ‘yes’, of ‘against’ rather than ‘for’. The model here is the classical search for truth, since this always triumphs more or less negatively, by setting itself to refute errors, illusions, false opinions. This applies as much in philosophy as in the positivist sciences.

The example Nietzsche uses, and which he has in mind when he speaks of reactive forces, is that of the great dialogues of Plato. You need only be aware here that these dialogues almost always take the following form: the readers – or rather, listeners, for they frequently take place before a public, like theatrical performances – witness an exchange between a central figure, usually Socrates, and his interlocutors, who are sometimes well-disposed and somewhat pliable, sometimes hostile and in a quarrelsome frame of mind; notably so when Socrates takes on those who were called the ‘Sophists’ – the masters of public speaking, of ‘rhetoric’. The Sophists made no attempt, unlike Socrates, to seek the truth, but only to instill the best means of seducing and persuading by the art of oratory.

Having settled on a philosophical theme for discussion, of the ‘What is courage?’ or ‘What is beauty?’ variety, Socrates would propose that they survey together the ‘commonplaces’, the current opinion on the topic in question, as a point of departure, with a view to elevating the discussion, point by point, and if possible arriving at the truth of the matter. Once this opening survey was concluded, discussion could take place; what is known as the ‘dialectic’, the art of dialogue, in the course of which Socrates proceeds to ask his inter-locutors a stream of questions, usually to show that they are contradicting themselves, that their initial ideas or convictions do not hold water, and that they must reflect more if they are to get any further.

You must also know one more thing about Plato’s dialogues before we return to the ‘reactive forces’ of Nietzsche: the exchanges between Socrates and his inter-locutors are always in reality unequal. For Socrates always takes up a position at an angle to whomever he interr ogates. He makes a show of not knowing. He likes to play the innocent – let’s say there is an Inspector Columbo side to his personality. But in truth he knows exactly where the interview is heading. This is not a level playing field: Socrates is pretending to be equal, whereas he has the advantage, that of the master over his pupil. It was this that the German Romantics christened ‘Socratic irony’ – because Socrates is playing a game; he is not merely at an angle to those who surround him, but above all towards his own beliefs, since he is perfectly aware – contrary to appearances – that he is playing a role.

And it is this attitude that Nietzsche considered to be essentially negative or reactive: not only does the truth which Socrates is seeking reveal itself only in terms of a refutation of others, but Socrates himself affirms nothing: he takes no risk, reveals nothing, proposes nothing positive. He merely contents himself with placing his interlocutor in difficulty, leading him to contradict himself, as a way of inducing him to give birth to the truth.

In one of his dialogues, Socrates describes himself as a torpedo fish – he paralyses his prey. For it is in refuting others that the dialogue advances, in order to arrive at a better idea of things. You will now see the link which exists in Nietzsche’s mind between the Socratic passion for the true, the will to find the truth – whether philosophical or scientific – and the idea of ‘reactive’ forces. For Nietzsche, the search for the truth reveals itself to be doubly reactive: true knowledge is not to be had solely through a combat against error, bad faith and untruth, but more generally, through a combat against the illusions inherent in the sensible world. Philosophy and science are only able to function in effect by opposing ‘the intelligible world’ to the ‘physical world’ in such a manner that the second is always devalued in relation to the first. This is a crucial point for Nietzsche, and it is important that we understand it fully.

Nietzsche accuses all the grand scientific, metaphysical and religious systems – Christianity in particular – of having systematically ‘despised’ the body and the senses in the interests of reason and rationality. It might seem strange to you that he puts religion and science in the same basket. But there is no inconsistency here. Despite all that separates and even opposes metaphysics, religion and science, they share in common a claim to accede to ideal truths, to intellectual realities, entities that are not available to the senses, and to notions which do not partake of the corporeal world. It is therefore ‘against’ corporeal reality – here again the idea of ‘reaction’ – that these systems strive, because (as everyone knows) we are ceaselessly deluded by them.

To take one example, if we confine ourselves strictly to the evidence of the senses – to sight, touch and so on – water, for example, appears to us in a variety of guises, often contradictory (boiling water, cold rain, soft snow, hard ice etc.), whereas it is always ‘in truth’ one and the same substance. Which is why we are told we must attempt to rise above the sensible world, and even to think against the senses – reactively, as far as Nietzsche is concerned – if we wish to attain ‘the intelligible’, to apprehend ‘the idea of water’.

From the point of view of the ‘will to truth’, as Nietzsche puts it, the scientist or philosopher who wishes to attain true knowledge must consequently reject all those impulses which rely too exclusively on the evidence of the senses, of the body. In effect, then, philosophy and science would have us mistrust everything that is essential to the creation of art. And Nietzsche’s suspicion, of course, is that behind this ‘reaction’ lurks an agenda whose concern is quite other than the search for truth alone; namely, a hidden prejudice in favour of ‘the beyond’ as against ‘the here and now’.

If we challenge not merely the ‘search’ for truth, but also the fellow-travelling ideals of democratic humanism, then the critique of modern philosophy and the ‘bourgeois values’ on which it is based, as far as Nietzsche is concerned, is now complete. For the truths which science endeavours to attain are ‘intrinsically’ democratic: they are those which claim that one value applies to all, at all times and in all places. A formula such as 2 + 2 = 4 knows no barriers of social class, of space or time, no frontiers of geography or history; it lays claim to universality. Thus the truths of science are at the heart of humanism; or, as he would prefer to say, they are ‘plebeian’ and profoundly ‘anti-aristocratic’.

Here too, moreover, is what scientists (usually republican, as far as Nietzsche is concerned) prize about science: it addresses the weak as much as the powerful, the poor and the rich, commoners and kings. Nietzsche amuses himself by reminding us of the plebeian origins of Socrates, inventor of philosophy and science, and the first to promote reactive forces idealising ‘the truth’. I shall quote a passage from the chapter on Socrates (in Twilight of the Idols) which links the will to truth with the legendary ugliness of the hero of Plato’s dialogues, who signalled the end of an aristocratic order imbued with ‘distinction’ and ‘authority’:

Socrates belonged by origin to the lowest rung of the people: Socrates was rabble. We know, we can even still see, how ugly he was … Was Socrates actually even a Greek? Ugliness is often enough the expression of a stunted development, hampered by cross-breeding … With Socrates, Greek taste switched over to dialectics: what is actually going on here? Above all it means that a

noble taste

has been defeated. With dialectics, the rabble comes out on top. Before Socrates, dialectical manners were disapproved of in polite society … Whatever needs first to have itself proved to be believed is of little value. Wherever it is still good manners to have authority, and people do not ‘reason’ but command, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon: he is laughed at, he is not taken seriously. Socrates was the buffoon who

got himself taken seriously

.

It is difficult, today, to ignore what is disagreeable about this passage. All the ingredients of fascist ideology seem to come together: the cult of beauty, a ‘distinction’ from which the ‘mob’ are by nature excluded; the classification of the individual according to social origins; the equivalence between the populace and ugliness; the valuing of the nation-state (ancient Greece, in this case); and an unsavoury suspicion about cross-breeding relating to social decadence. Nothing is missing. But let us not judge by first impressions. This account fails to do justice to what is nonetheless profound in Nietzsche’s interpretation of the character of Socrates. Rather than reject it outright, we might examine the meaning of his propositions and tease out a deeper significance.

Before doing so, we need to increase our understanding of another aspect of Nietzsche’s thought, namely those ‘active’ forces which balance the reactive, and which together complete his version of the world, his attempt upon reality.

An ‘Aristocratic’ Vision of the World

Contrary to all that is reactive, the active forces take effect in the world and do their work without needing to disfigure or repress other energies. It is in art, and not in philosophy and science, that these forces find their natural home. Closer examination will allow us to understand Nietzsche’s fearsome verdict upon Socrates and see how his ‘ontology’ fits together, by which I mean his complete account of the world as an ensemble of reactive and active forces.

Contrary to the ‘theoretical man’ – the philosopher or scientist of whom we have been speaking – the artist is the figure who, above all others, imposes values without discussion, opens up perspectives and invents worlds without needing to demonstrate the legitimacy of his propositions, still less to prove them by a refutation of those works which preceded his own. Like the aristocracy, the artist commands without arguing with anyone or anything – and note that it is in this sense that Nietzsche declares: ‘Whatever needs first to have itself proved to be believed is of little value.’

Clearly you can like Chopin, Bach, rock music or techno, the Dutch painters or contemporary art, without it occurring to anyone to require that you choose one of these to the exclusion of the others. In the realm of seeking truth, on the other hand, at some point or other you must make a choice: Copernicus is right and Ptolemy was wrong; Newtonian physics is demonstrably truer than that of Descartes. In this way truth establishes itself only by progressively removing the errors which in effect constitute the history of science (with whose corpses the stage is littered). The history of art, on the contrary, is a space where different and even radically opposing works can coexist. Not that tensions and quarrels are absent; aesthetic conflicts have often been of the most violent and passionate nature. Nonetheless, they are not settled in terms of ‘who is right and who is wrong’ – they remain unresolved, and they always leave open – at least in retrospect – the possibility of an equal result for their respective protagonists. Nobody would dream of saying, for example, that Chopin is right and Bach wrong, or Ravel mistaken in comparison to Mozart. All of which connects with the fact that, since the dawn of philosophy in Greece, two kinds of discourse, two conceptions of words and their use have clashed with each other.

On the one side sits the Socratic and reactive model, which seeks the truth through debate and dialogue, and in order to get there, takes its stand against the various faces of ignorance, stupidity or bad faith. On the other side sits the model of the Sophists, which makes no attempt to seek the truth, but seeks merely to seduce, to persuade, to effect an audience with almost physical intensity, and win over by the power of words alone. The first procedure is that of philosophy and science: where language is solely an instrument in the service of a higher reality, the intelligible and democratic Truth which will one day impose its reign upon each and every one. The second is that of art, of poetry: words are no longer simply means, but ends in themselves, which possess intrinsic value from the moment they produce an aesthetic effect upon those capable of experiencing it.

One of the tactics employed by Socrates, in his oratorical sparring with the Sophists, illustrates perfectly this opposition. Whenever a great Sophist, Gorgias or Protagoras, for example, had just finished a dazzling speech before an audience still under the spell of enchantment, Socrates would feign incomprehension, or, even better, deliberately arrive too late, after the spectacle was over. This provided him with an excellent pretext to ask the speaker to give a summary of his speech – to reformulate, briefly if possible, the salient points. As you can imagine, for the Sophist, this is virtually impossible – which is why Socrates’ request is, for Nietzsche, the product of pure malice! As easy to reduce a conversation between lovers to its ‘kernel of sense’, or ask Baudelaire or Rimbaud to summarise one of their poems! ‘The Albatross’? About a bird struggling to achieve lift-off. ‘The Drunken Boat’? Concerns a sea-going vessel in difficulties. Socrates has no difficulty in keeping the score: as soon as his adversary commits the blunder of taking up the challenge he is lost, because as far as art is concerned, all the signs suggests that it is not the truth-content that matters but the emotional logic, and the latter, of course, has no defence against the reductivism of a summary.

We begin to see finally what Nietzsche means, in the passage describing ‘the ugliness’ of Socrates, when he links him with democratic ideology, or when he denounces, a little further on, ‘the rabble’s resentment’ which takes pleasure in wielding triumphantly against its interlocutors ‘the knife-thrusts of the syllogism’. Rather than fascist noise, what speaks here is Nietzsche’s aversion towards the will to truth (at least in its rationalist and reactive forms – for we must not forget that Nietzsche is himself also a searcher after truth).

Similarly, when he speaks of ‘stunted development’ and associates the idea of cross-breeding with degeneracy, let us ignore the apparent stench of racism. However ambivalent or distasteful it may appear, he is setting his sights on something profound, referring to a phenomenon which we shall need to clarify: namely, the fact that forces which collide, which constantly thwart each other – what Nietzsche refers to here as ‘cross-breeding’ – dilute life and make it less intense, less interesting.

In Nietzsche’s eyes – perhaps to Nietzsche’s ears, rather, since the whole vocabulary of sight, of vision, of theoria is so contaminated – the world is not a cosmos: neither a natural order, as it was for the Ancients, nor an order constructed by the will of man, as it was for the Moderns. The world is a chaos, an irreducible plurality of forces, instincts and drives which ceaselessly clash. This being so, the problem presents itself as follows: by their constant jostling, these forces (within us, as much as in the world outside) are in constant danger of thwarting each other, and at worst of creating a blockage, a diminution or weakening. In this state of conflict, therefore, life languishes, becomes less vibrant, less unbounded, less spirited, less strong. In this respect Nietzsche heralds the coming of psychoanalysis, in which our unconscious psychic conflicts and internal battles prevent us from living a full life, make us ill and prevent us from ‘playing and working’, to use one of Freud’s terms.

Many recent commentators on Nietzsche have committed the same grave error in respect of his thinking: they have hastily concluded that, to render life more free and more spirited, Nietzsche proposed to reject the reactive forces in order to give free play to the active forces alone – to liberate the physical and corporeal, by rejecting ‘the cold and dry reign of reason’. At first sight this might seem logical enough, but let us remember that such a ‘solution’ is typical of what Nietzsche called ‘stupidity’: because, clearly, to reject all reactive forces is merely to founder upon another kind of reaction, since it would in turn mean setting oneself against reality in one of its forms. Nietzsche is not inviting us to follow him into some version of anarchy, or emancipation of the senses, or ‘sexual liberation’, but is leading us on the contrary towards a more intense, more dialectical experience and mastery of the multiple forces that govern life. It is this that Nietzsche refers to in the phrase ‘the grand style’. And it is with this notion that we reach the ethical core of this self-styled immoralist.

Beyond Good and Evil

There is of course something paradoxical about searching for a morality in the thought of Nietzsche – just as there was about searching for a theoria. You will recall the violence with which he rejects all attempts to improve the world. He is for ever characterised as the ‘immoralist’ par excellence, who railed against charity, compassion and altruism in all their guises, whether Christian or otherwise.

As I have said before, Nietzsche detested the notion of the ideal, and was among those who contested the first tentative steps of modern humanitarianism, in which he saw merely a watered-down, feeble version of Christianity:

To proclaim a universal love of humanity is, in practice, to acknowledge the

preferment

of all that is suffering, ill-constituted, degenerate … For the wellbeing of the species, it is necessary for the ill-constituted, the feeble, the degenerate to perish. (

The Will to Power

)

Sometimes, his anti-charitable passion, or his relish for catastrophe, border on delirium. At one point, according to friends, he could not contain his joy when a minor earthquake destroyed some houses in Nice – where he nonetheless liked to spend time – and his dismay that the disaster was not as serious as originally thought. Happily, he learnt shortly afterwards that a major cataclysm had ravaged the island of Java. (Writing to his friend Paul Lanzky: ‘Two hundred thousand wiped out at a stroke – how magnificent! What we need is the total destruction of Nice and all who live there’).

Is it not therefore an aberration to speak of a Nietzschean ‘morality’? And what might it consist of ? If human life is merely a web of blind forces tearing each other apart, if our value judgements are merely arbitrary, more or less compromised according to the case, but necessarily devoid of any significance other than as symptoms of our vital spirits, why would we expect any ethical consideration whatsoever from Nietzsche?

One hypothesis, it is true, which has appealed to certain ‘leftist’ Nietzscheans (an unlikely category, perhaps, and one that would have driven Nietzsche even closer to the edge) runs as follows: if the reactive forces may be thought of as ‘repressive’, and the active forces as progressive and emancipatory, must we not simply overcome the former in the interest of the latter? Should we not go further and proscribe all norms, insist that it is ‘forbidden to forbid’ (to use a 1968 student motto), that bourgeois morality is the invention of clerics – and so forth, so as to liberate those drives which are operative in art, in the body, in our emotions?

So it might seem. Certainly, Nietzsche was read in this lurid light during the student revolutions of 1968: as a rebel, an anarchist, an apostle of sexual liberation and the emancipation of the body. But it suffices merely to read Nietzsche to see that this hypothesis is not merely simplistic and absurd, but directly antithetical to his beliefs. That Nietzsche was anything but an anarchist, and that he insisted upon this fact loudly and clearly, can be seen for example in this passage:

When the anarchist, as the mouthpiece of social interests

in decline

, waxes indignant and demands ‘rights’, ‘justice’, ‘equality’, then he is merely feeling the pressure of his lack of culture, which is incapable of equipping him to understand

why

he is in fact suffering, and

in which respect

his life is impoverished … There is a powerful causal drive within him: someone must be to blame for feeling bad … And waxing indignant makes him feel better, too: all poor devils take pleasure in cursing, it gives them a little rush of power. (

Twilight of the Idols

,

IX

, 34)

One might disagree with Nietzsche’s analysis here, but we cannot make him bear the responsibility for the libertarian passion and idealist indignation of a phenomenon such as the Paris riots of May 1968, which he would undoubtedly have considered a prime example of ‘the herd instinct’. Whatever our sympathies, we cannot deny his aversion to all forms of revolutionary ideology, whether socialist, communist or anarchist.

That the simple-minded idea of ‘sexual liberation’ would have frozen him with horror is equally evident: what a true artist, a writer worthy of the name, must seek above all is economy. According to one strand of Nietzsche’s thought, ‘Chastity is the artist’s economy’, which he must practise constantly, since ‘the force that is expended in artistic creation is the same as that expended in the sexual act: there is only one kind of force’ (The Will to Power). Besides, Nietzsche does not have words strong enough to proscribe the flood of emotionalism that characterises modern life in the wake of Romanticism, and which he regards as catastrophic.

We must therefore read Nietzsche, before pronouncing on his views or making him the mouthpiece of our own. If we wish to understand him, we must add this rider, which will be clear to any true reader of his work: that any ‘ethical’ attitude which consists in rejecting some part of our vital energies – corresponding to the reactive forces – in favour of another, wholly ‘active’ though this may be, is inevitably and by definition counter-productive. This is not merely a corrective to his definition of reactive forces as mutilating and castrating, but is also an explicit and constantly reiterated thesis, as seen in this passage from Human, All Too Human:

Let us suppose a man who loved the plastic arts or music as much as he was moved by the spirit of science [is seduced therefore by both visages of force, active and reactive], and who deemed it impossible to resolve this contradiction by destroying the one and completely unleashing the other power; then, the only thing remaining to him would be to make such a great edifice out of himself that both powers can inhabit it, even if at opposite ends; between which are sheltered conciliatory powers, provided with the dominant strength to settle, if need be, any quarrels that break out. (

Human, All Too Human

,

I

, 276)

It is this reconciling that is, for Nietzsche, the new ideal, the ultimately credible ideal. Because, unlike all others before, it is not at a false remove from life; it is, on the contrary, explicitly lashed to the cargo of life. And it is this, precisely, that Nietzsche refers to as ‘grandeur’ – a key term for him – the sign of the ‘edifice’ of culture, at the heart of which opposing forces, because they are finally harmonised and hierarchised, attain the greatest intensity as well as the most perfect elegance. It is only through this harmonising of opposing forces, even the reactive ones, that our human powers can flourish and life cease to be diminished, mutilated. Thus, wherever a great civilisation developed, whether one thinks of an individual or an era, ‘it was its task to force opposing forces into harmony through an overwhelming aggregation of the remaining, less irreconcilable powers, and yet without suppressing or shackling them’ (Human, All too Human 1, 276).

To the question ‘What is Nietzschean morality?’, then, the following is one answer: the good life is the most intensely lived because it is the most harmonious, the most elegant life (in the sense that one speaks of a mathematical solution which does not take unnecessary detours, or expend needless energy). Which is to say, a life in which the vital forces, instead of acting against each other, tearing each other apart and thereby cancelling each other out, instead learn to cooperate with each other, under the mandate of the active forces rather than of the reactive forces. And this, according to Nietzsche, is ‘the grand style’.

On this point Nietzsche’s thought is utterly clear, and his definition of ‘grandeur’, throughout the mature writings, is of an unwavering consistency. As is explained very well in a fragment from his posthumous work, The Will to Power, ‘the greatness of an artist is not mea sured by the “fine sentiments” that he excites’, but resides in ‘the grand style’, which is to say his capacity ‘to master the chaos within himself, to compel his chaos to become form: to become logical, simple, unambiguous, math ematical, to make oneself the law – that is the grand ambition.’

It needs to be said again, that those who are surprised by these texts commit the error, as inane as it is commonplace, of seeing in Nietzsche a purveyor of anarchism, of ‘leftist’ slogans which anticipate the libertarian movements of our own time. Nothing is more false, since the virtues of ‘mathematical’ precision, of clear and rigorous reasoning, have their important part to play in the tangle of life-forces. Let us recall once again the reasoning: if we acknowledge that ‘reactive’ forces are those which can only operate by denying other kinds of force, we must also agree that the critique of Platonism, and more generally of moral rationalism under all its forms, however justified this might be in Nietzsche’s eyes, cannot lead to a pure and simple elimination of rationality. Such an eradication would itself be ‘reactive’. We must, if we are to arrive at that grandeur which is the sign of a successful fusion of life’s forces, harness them in such a way that they cease to block each other. And, in such a hierarchy, rationality must also find its place.

Nothing can be excluded, and in the conflict between reason and the passions, the latter cannot be privileged to the detriment of the former, without sinking into ‘stupidity’, as Nietzsche repeatedly insists: ‘All passions have a period in which they are merely fateful, in which they draw their victims down by weight of stupidity – and a later, very much later one, in which they marry the spirit, ‘spiritualise’ themselves. (Twilight of the Idols, V, 1)

As surprising as it may seem to libertarian readers of Nietzsche, it is precisely this ‘spiritualising’ that he converts into an ethical category, and which allows us to accede to a ‘grand style’ by enabling us to harness the reactive forces instead of ‘stupidly’ rejecting them – together with all that is to be gained by integrating this ‘enemy within’, instead of exiling it and as a result weakening ourselves. Nietzsche expresses this in a most straightforward manner:

The spiritualisation of sensuality is a great triumph over Christianity. A further triumph is our spiritualisation of

enmity

. This consists in our profound understanding of the value of having enemies: in short, our doing and deciding the opposite of what people previously thought and decided … Throughout the ages the church has wanted to destroy its enemies: we, the immoralists and anti-Christians, see it as to our advantage that the church exists … Even in the field of politics, enmity has become spiritualised. Almost every party sees that self-preservation is best served if the opposite number does not lose its powers. The same is true of

Realpolitik

. A new creation, such as the new Reich, needs enemies more than it does friends: only by being opposed does it feel necessary; only by being opposed does it

become

necessary. Our behaviour towards our ‘inner enemy’ is no different: here, too, we have spiritualised enmity; here, too, we have grasped its

value

. (

Twilight of the Idols

,

V

, 3)

In this context, Nietzsche (the self-styled Antichrist and unremitting enemy of Christian values) does not hesitate in asserting, loud and clear, that ‘the continuation of the Christian ideal is entirely to be desired’ because it offers us, through confrontation, a sure means of becoming greater:

I have declared war on the anaemic Christian ideal (along with all those things closely associated with it), not with the intention of destroying it, but simply to put an end to its

tyranny

, and to clear the ground for new ideals,

more robust

ideals … The continuation of the Christian ideal is one of the most desirable things there is – if only for the sake of those ideals that wish to show their worth alongside it, or even above it – for they need adversaries, and

strong

adversaries, if they are to become strong. Which is why we immoralists need the

power of morality

: our instinct for self-preservation wants our

enemies

to stay strong – it merely wants to achieve

mastery over them

. (

The Will to Power

)

If we have understood the distinction between reactive and active forces, the above passages from Nietzsche – so obscure and contradictory to novice readers – become intelligible. And of course it is ‘grandeur’ which constitutes the beginning and end of ‘Nietzschean ethics’, and which should guide us in our search for the good life, and for a reason which becomes gradually clearer: because it alone enables us to integrate all forces within ourselves, thereby authorising us to lead a life that is more intense, more richly diverse, but also more ‘powerful’ – in Nietzsche’s sense of ‘the will to power’ – because it is more harmonious. Harmony here is not the harmony of the Ancients, that con dition of peaceful contentment, but harmony as the most vigorously tested strength, deriving from the avoidance of those conflicts which exhaust us and the self-hurt which depletes us.

The Will to Power

The notion of a ‘will to power’ is so central that Nietzsche places it at the heart of his definition of the real, the crowning point of what we have called his ‘ontology’. Or, as he repeatedly describes it, the will to power is ‘the innermost essence of Being’.

Here we must avoid a major and frequent misunderstanding: the will to power has nothing to do with a lust for power in the world, a desire to occupy some important position or other. It refers to something quite different. It is the will to intensity of experience, the will to avoid at all cost the internal wrenchings that I have described, which by definition diminish us, so that our powers cancel each other and the life inside us stagnates and weakens. The will to power is not the will to conquer, to have money and influence, but a profound desire for a maximum intensity of life, for a life that is no longer impoverished and torn apart by self-division, but on the contrary lived to the full.

By way of example, let us consider the feeling of guilt, when, as the phrase goes: we ‘hold something against ourselves’. Nothing is worse than this internal conflict; this condition from which we are unable to find an exit, which paralyses us to the point of removing all joy. And we must think too of the thousands of minor ‘unconscious feelings’ of guilt, which pass un noticed, but which produce their own equally devastating effects upon our ‘powers’. Rather as, in certain sports, we can be said to ‘pull our punches’ rather than ‘let fly’ – in deference to some buried remorse, an unconscious fear inscribed in the body.

The will to power is not the will to have power, but, as Nietzsche also phrases it, ‘the will to will’ – the will that seeks to exercise itself, and which is not enfeebled by internal strife, guilt and unresolved conflicts, but which realises itself in ‘grand style’, in a version of life in which we have done finally with fear, remorse and regret – all internal conflicts which ‘weigh us down’ and prevent us living with a lightness of being. Let us examine in detail what this might mean.

A Concrete Example of the ‘Grand Style’

We have only to think of what must be done when practicing a difficult sport or art to arrive at a perfect execution. Think of the arc of the bow along the strings of a violin, the fingers on the chords of a guitar, or a serve in tennis. When you observe the trajectory of a shot played by a champion, it is of a disconcerting simplicity and facility. Without apparent effort and a graceful fluidity, the player dispatches the ball with astounding velocity: the forces in play in performing this gesture are perfectly integrated. They are in perfect harmony, are fully coordinated, without division, without loss of energy, without consequent ‘reaction’ in Nietzsche’s sense of the term. The consequence of which is an admirable reconciliation of grace and power as can be seen already in the very young, provided they are endowed with a little talent.

On the contrary, the player who has started too late will display an incurably chaotic movement, uncoordinated, or, as we say ‘hampered’. He pulls his punches rather than following through … And he never stops criticising himself, muttering self-accusations each time he misses a shot. Conflicted at every turn, he plays against himself rather than his adversary. Not only has his rhythm departed, but his power has disappeared: for the simple reason that the forces in play, instead of cooperating, thwart and block each other.

This is what Nietzsche proposes to go beyond, in the moral life. Which is not to say that he is proposing a new ‘ideal’, a new idol – which would be self-contradictory, for the model he sketches is, unlike all previously constructed ideals, wedded to life itself as it unfolds. It does not in any sense aspire to ‘transcendence’, located above or beyond the present, in some superior or exterior relation to it. Rather it is about imagining to oneself what a life might be that took as its model ‘the free gesture’, the gesture of a champion or an artist which unites the greatest diversity to achieve the greatest compression or harmony of forces, without laborious effort, without loss of energy. This is in effect the ‘moral vision’ of Nietzsche, in whose name he denounces all ‘reactive’ versions of morality which, since Socrates, have extolled a resistance to life, a lessening of life.

Opposed to ‘the grand style’, therefore, are ranged all those habits which work against mastery of self – a mastery made possible only by harmonising and hierarchising the chaos of forces within us. In this respect, the unleashing of passions which certain ‘liberationist’ creeds have tried to promote represents the worst of worlds, since it always involves an internal and reciprocal conflict of forces and a consequent ascendancy of all that is reactive.

Such a mutilation of self exactly defines what Nietzsche refers to as ‘ugliness’; the latter manifesting itself whenever passions that are unleashed jostle and weaken each other. ‘When there is contradiction, and insufficient coordination of internal desires, there is a diminution of the organising power, of the will …’ (The Will to Power); under which conditions, the will to power languishes and joy gives way to guilt and resentment.

The example I gave of ‘the grand style’, as the reconciling of active and reactive forces which alone permits access to the ‘power’ within us – the backhand return of a tennis player – is not Nietzsche’s example. But he has many other images which illustrate the idea, and you should be familiar with at least one of these, which he regarded as the most important. It concerns the opposition between classicism and romanticism.

To simplify matters, we could say that classicism refers to ancient Greek art, but equally to French art of the seventeenth century, whether the drama of Molière or Corneille, or the art of landscape gardening, with its trees shaped into geometrical patterns. When you visit the wing of a gallery or museum dedicated to antique sculpture, you will notice that the Greek statuary – perfect embodiments of classical art – has two dominant and typical characteristics: the figures are consummately proportioned, as harmonious as one could wish, and the faces are absolutely calm and serene. Classicism is a style which accords pride of place to harmony and reason. It deeply distrusts the unleashing of emotions which, on the contrary, constitutes so large a part of romanticism.

It remains a constant with Nietzsche that the ‘logical simplicity’ of classicism is the best approximation to the hierarchical synthesis achieved by the grand style. The classical style is essentially a representation of calm, simplification, abbreviation and concentration. He makes no mystery of this:

‘Becoming more beautiful’ is a consequence of enhanced strength; it is the expression of a

victorious

will, of increased coordination, of a harmonising of all strong desires. Of an infallibly perpendicular stress and balance. The simplifications of logic and geometry are a necessary consequence of the enhancement of strength. (

The Will to Power

)

We should acknowledge, again, how Nietzsche catches off-guard those who would see him as an enemy of reason, an apostle for the emancipation of the senses from the primacy of logic. He proclaims the opposite, loud and clear: ‘We are the adversaries of sentiment and emotion!’ The artist worthy of the name is one who cultivates a ‘hatred of sentiment, of sensibility, of finer feelings, a hatred for what is inconstant, changeable, vague, superstitious …’ For, ‘to be classical one must possess all the strong, seemingly contradictory gifts and desires – but in such a way that they advance together under one yoke’ (The Will to Power); what is required therefore is ‘coldness, lucidity, hardness and logic, above all else.’ (The Will to Power)

This could not be clearer: classicism is the perfect incarnation of ‘the grand style’ in morality. Which is why, as against Victor Hugo, whom he takes to be a sentimental romanticist, Nietzsche restores the claims of Corneille, in his eyes a Cartesian rationalist, like one of those

poets of an aristocratic civilisation … who made it a point of honour to

submit their senses

, however vigorous,

to a concept

, and impose upon the brutal claims of colours, sounds and forms the law of a clear and refined intellectuality; in which respect they seem to me to have followed in the steps of the ancient Greeks. (

The Will to Power

)

The triumph of classicism, Greek or French, consists in victoriously combating what Nietzsche again refers to as ‘the plebeian sensuality’ with which ‘modern’ – romantic – painters and composers so eagerly fill their works. Contrary to the classical spirit, the romantic hero is usually depicted as someone devoured and therefore diminished by his internal passions. He is unhappy in love; he sighs and weeps; he tears his hair; he leaves the torments of passion only to fall back into those of creation. Which is why, in general, the romantic hero is ill and pale, and invariably dies young, sapped from within by those forces which possess him and undermine him with their failure to harmonise: this is what Nietzsche abhors, and it is why he comes to detest Wagner and Schopenhauer, and why he always prefers Mozart to Brahms – in other words, prefers classical and ‘mathematical’ to ‘romantic and sentimental’ music.

Here in fact is an essential aspect of all philosophy, that the practical dimension must join the theoretical, that ethics is not separable from ontology; for in this morality of grandeur it is intensity which counts for most, the will to power which prevails over all other considerations. Which goes to show that there are values, there is an ethics of the immoralist.

Like the disciple of martial arts, the exponent of ‘the grand style’ moves in a sphere of grace, at a furthest remove from any apparent effort. He does not perspire, and if he moves mountains, he does so with serenity. Just as true knowledge – ‘the gay science’ – mocks theory and mocks the will to truth, in the name of a different verity, so Nietzsche mocks morality in the name of a different morality. The same is true of the doctrine of salvation.

A New Idea of Salvation

Is it vain to seek a doctrine of salvation in Nietzsche? It is true that doctrines of salvation, of whatever kind, are in his eyes the final expression of nihilism – by which he means the negation of life’s here and now in the name of some ‘ideal beyond’ or hereafter. Mocking the promoters of such doctrines, Nietzsche suggests that, of course, none of them will openly admit to being a nihilist, to preferring extinction to life:

Of course, one doesn’t say never say ‘extinction’, one says ‘the other world’, or ‘God’, or ‘the

true

life’, or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness … This innocent rhetoric, from the realm of religio-ethical balderdash, appears

a good deal less innocent

, however, when one reflects upon the tendency that is concealed beneath these sublime words: the tendency to

destroy life

. (

The Antichrist

, 7)

To find salvation in God, or in whatever figure of transcendence one might wish to put in his place, means to ‘declare war on life, on nature, on the will to live! God becomes the formula for every slander upon the “here and now”, and for every lie about the “hereafter”.’ (The Antichrist, 18) You can see from these declarations how directly Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism confronts the doctrine of salvation, confronts the project of seeking a ‘beyond’ of whatever variety, an ‘ideal’ which would ‘justify’ life, give it a sense, and thereby in some sort save life from the misfortune of being mortal. But does this mean that every impulse towards wisdom or blessedness must, in Nietzsche’s eyes, be discarded? Nothing could be further from the truth, since Nietzsche, like every true philosopher, is a seeker after wisdom.

Read the opening chapter of Ecce Homo, ‘Why I Am So Wise’. This wisdom is progressively entrusted to readers in Nietzsche’s late works, and becomes enshrined in his famous – if initially obscure – doctrine of ‘eternal recurrence’. This has given rise to so many interpretations and misunderstandings, it is worth our while reviewing its essential outlines.

Recurrence: A Doctrine of Salvation without Gods or Idols

It needs to be said that Nietzsche barely had time to formulate his notion of eternal recurrence before illness prevented him from developing it as fully as he would have wished. Nevertheless, he was wholly convinced that it was in this final doctrine that his most original thought was to be found, his true contribution to the history of ideas.

Its central question is one that concerns us all – or at least all of us who are no longer ‘believers’. If there is no longer an elsewhere – a hereafter, a cosmos, a divinity – and if the founding ideas of Enlightenment humanism are themselves compromised, how are we to distinguish between good and evil, and (more profoundly), between what is worth living for and what is second-rate? To implement this distinction, do we not need to lift our eyes towards some heaven or other in order to find a transcendent answer here below? And if the sky is hopelessly empty, where shall we turn?

It was to provide a response to this question that Nietzsche formulated the doctrine of eternal recurrence; to afford us quite simply a criterion, of a terrestrial and this-worldly kind, finally, for deciding what is worth living for, and what is not. For those who are believers, this will naturally go unheeded. But for the rest of us, who no longer believe in another world, or for whom this-worldly engagement of whatever kind – political activism, for example – no longer suffices, Nietzsche’s answer is worth hearing.

As to whether it corresponds to a doctrine of salvation, or not, of this there can be no doubt. We have only to consider for a moment the manner in which Nietzsche presents his theory, in relation to traditional religion. It offers, he says, ‘more than all the religions, which have taught us to despise life as transitory, and to look longingly towards another life’, so that it will become ‘the religion [par excellence] of the freest and most serene spirits’. Nietzsche goes so far as to propose placing ‘the doctrine of eternal recurrence in the place of ‘metaphysics’ and ‘religion’ – just as he replaced theoria with genealogy, and replaced the ideals of morality with ‘the grand style’. We must ask ourselves how he applies them to his own philosophy.

What does the doctrine of eternal recurrence teach us? In what sense does it provide a new answer to the questions of wisdom and of salvation? I suggest a brief answer to these questions. If there is no longer transcendence, or ideals, or possible escape into an elsewhere, however ‘humanised’ – after the death of God – in the form of moral or political utopias (‘humanity’, ‘fatherland’, ‘revolution’, ‘republic’, ‘socialism’ etc.), then it must be at the core of this life on earth that we learn to distinguish between what is worth living for and what must be allowed to perish. It is here and now that we must learn to separate forms of life that are failed – mediocre, reactive, weakened – from forms of life that are intense, grandiose, courageous and rich in diversity.

The first lesson to retain, therefore: that salvation according to Nietzsche cannot be other than resolutely earthly, sewn into the tissue of forces that are the fabric of life. Nor can salvation have anything to do with inventing a new ideality, a new idol through which to judge and condemn existence – yet again – in the name of some principle supposedly superior to and exterior to it. All of this is clearly suggested in a crucial text, the Prologue to Thus Spake Zarathustra, one of the last things which Nietzsche wrote. In his distinctive style, he invites the reader to the notion of blasphemy upside down:

I entreat you, my brothers,

remain true to the earth

, and do not believe those who speak to you of extraterrestrial hopes. They are poisoners, whether they know it or not … They are destroyers of life, atrophying and self-poisoning, of whom the earth is weary: so let them be gone! … To blaspheme against God was formerly the greatest blasphemy. But God died, and his blasphemers died likewise. The most dreadful offence now is to blaspheme the earth, and to prefer interpreting the entrails of the unknowable more than the meanings of the earth.

In a few lines Nietzsche sets down, as no one else had done, what would become in the twentieth century the agenda of every materialist-inspired philosophy; the agenda of all thinking resolutely opposed to ‘idealism’, understood as a philosophy which would impose ideals superior to the reality that is lived life, or, in Nietzschean terms, our human will to power. Blasphemy here changes its meaning overnight: in the seventeenth and even as late as the eighteenth century, whoever made a public profession of atheism could be thrown in prison, and in some cases put to death. Today, says Nietzsche, the converse should be the rule: to blaspheme is no longer to claim that God is dead, but on the contrary, to succumb yet again to the metaphysical and religious inanities which insist that there is a ‘beyond’ consisting of higher ideals – however irreligious these might be, such as socialism or communism – in whose name we must ‘transform the world’.

Nietzsche explains all of this with great clarity in a fragment dating from 1881, where, in passing, he amuses himself by parodying Kant:

If, in all that you wish to do, you begin by asking yourself: am I certain that I would wish to do this an infinite number of times? This should be for you the most solid centre of gravity … My doctrine says, the task is to live your life in such a way that you

must

wish to live it again – for you will

anyway

! If striving gives you the highest feeling, then strive! If rest gives you the highest feeling, then rest! If fitting in, following and obeying give you the highest feeling, then obey! Only make sure you come to know what gives you the highest feeling, and then spare no means. Eternity is at stake! This doctrine is mild in its treatment of those who do not believe in it. It has neither hell nor threats. But anyone who does not believe merely lives a

fugitive

life in the consciousness of it. (Extract from Nietzsche’s 1881 notebook)

(Compare also The Gay Science, IV, 31, as well as the celebrated passages in Zarathustra where Nietzsche extolls his doctrine, according to which ‘all joy [Lust] wants eternity’.)

Here, at last, the significance of eternal recurrence becomes clear. It is neither a description of the way of the world nor ‘a return to the Ancients’, as has foolishly been suggested, not is it yet a prediction. At bottom, it is nothing more than a criterion for deciding which moments in a life are worth living and which are not. Thanks to it, we are enabled to examine our lives so as to avoid pretence and half-measure, all those small acts of weakness, as Nietzsche says again, those concessions to ‘just this once’, where we give in to the easy exception to any rule, without really wishing to.

Nietzsche invites us to live in such a manner that regrets and remorse have no place and make no sense. Such is the life lived according to truth. Who, after all, would wish that all the instants of mediocrity, the petty struggles, the futile guilt, the hidden weaknesses, the lies, the cowardice, the little arrangements with oneself – that all of this should recur for all eternity? And, by extension, how many instants of our lives would happen in the first place were we to apply, honestly and rigorously, the test of their recurrence? A few moments of joy, no doubt; a few moments of love, of lucidity, of serenity …

You might think that this is all very interesting, and possibly useful and true, but appears to have no connection to religious belief, even of a radically new kind, nor to the question of salvation. How exactly can it prevent me from suffering the mortal fear which we examined at the outset of this book? How does it connect to human mortality and its anguish, which the doctrines of salvation attempted to address? Perhaps the notion of eternity will set us on the right track. For you will note that, even in the absence of God, there is eternity just the same; and to attain it, we must, Nietzsche insists – strangely, because the assertion seems almost Christian – have faith and cultivate love:

Oh, how not to burn with longing for Eternity and for the wedding-ring of rings – the ring of Recurrence? Never yet have I found the woman by whom I should like to have children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love thee, O Eternity! For I love thee, O Eternity! (‘The Seven Seals’,

Thus Spake Zarathustra

)

The poetry of such passages does not always increase their clarity, I admit. If we wish to understand them and to understand the sense in which Nietzsche revives the doctrines of salvation, we need to realise how close his ideas are to one of the more profound intuitions of ancient philosophy: according to which the good life is that which succeeds in existing for the moment, without reference to past or future, without condemnation or selection, in a state of absolute lightness, and in the finished conviction that there is no difference therefore between the instant and eternity.

Amor fati (Love of What the Present Brings)

We have seen how central this theme was to the Ancients, as to the Buddhists. Nietzsche returns to it in this magnificent passage:

My formula for greatness in a human being is

amor fati

: to want nothing to be other than as it is, neither in the future, nor in the past, nor in all eternity. Not merely to endure what happens of necessity, still less to hide it from oneself – all idealism is untruthfulness in the face of necessity – but to

love

it … (

Ecce Homo

, ‘Why I Am So Wise’)

Not to wish anything to be other than it is! The maxim could have been written by Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius – whose cosmology Nietzsche never ceased to hold up to ridicule. And yet, Nietzsche clings to it stubbornly, for example in this fragment from The Will to Power:

An

experimental philosophy

such as I live anticipates even the most extreme nihilism … But it wants rather to cross over to the opposite – to a

dionysian affirmation

of the world as it is, without subtraction, exception or selection. It wants the eternal cycle: the same things, the same logic and illogic of entanglements. The highest state to which a philosopher can attain: to stand in a dionsyian relationship to existence – my formula for this is

amor fati

. Which perceives not merely the

necessity

of those aspects of existence hitherto

denied

, but their

desirability

. (

The Will to Power

, 1041)

To hope a little less, regret a little less, love a little more. Never to loiter in those unreal corridors of time – the past and the future – but try on the contrary to live in and embrace the present as much as possible (with a ‘dionysiac affirmation’, a reference to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, festivity and joy – who above all other deities loved life).

Why not? But you may raise a few objections. We can admit, just, that the present moment and eternity resemble each other if neither is ‘relativised’ and fore-shortened by reference to past or future. We can also accept, together with the Stoics and Buddhists, that he who succeeds in living entirely in the present can find in such an attitude the means to escape the anguish of dying. So far, so good. But there remains a troubling contradiction between the two messages which Nietzsche is preaching: on the one hand, in the doctrine of eternal recurrence, he requires us to choose what we are live and are willing to relive, given that this will be repeated unavoidably; on the other hand, he urges us to love the real, whatever the case, without picking and choosing, and above all without wishing anything to be other than it is. The doctrine of recurrence invites us to select to live only those instants that we would be willing to live with over and over again, in infinite recession – whereas the notion of amor fati, which says yes to destiny, makes no exceptions, but comprehends and accepts all of experience within the one perspective: namely, love of the real. How do we reconcile these two positions? By admitting, as far as is possible, that this embrace of destiny kicks in only after the application of the highly selective requirements of eternal recurrence: were we to live under the auspice of eternity, were we finally to discover ourselves in and through ‘the grand style’, everything that happens to us would be good.The slings and arrows of fortune would no longer have any significance, no more than the happy outcomes. Because we would finally be living reality as a whole, as if each moment were eternity – for a reason that Buddhists and Stoics alike had also grasped: if everything that occurs is necessary, if the real in effect means the present moment, past and future lose their capacity to burden us with guilt, to persuade us that we might act differently, and therefore must act differently. This explains our attitudes of remorse, of nostalgia, of regret – but equally of doubt and hesitation in respect of the future – which lead to so much inner torment and self-conflict, and therefore to the victory of reaction, since these attitudes inevitably lead our vital forces into mutual confrontation.

The Innocence of Becoming

If the doctrine of eternal recurrence echoes that of amor fati, the latter in turn culminates in the ideal of an existence entirely free of guilt. As we have seen, guilt is the essence of what is reactive, the direct outcome of inner torment and self-division. Only the wise man who practises the grand style and lives by the rule of eternal recurrence can attain to true serenity.And this is precisely what Nietzsche means by the expression ‘the innocence of becoming’: ‘to situate oneself beyond every kind of praise and blame, to make oneself independent of everything connected with yesterday and today – so as to pursue my own aim in my own manner’. For it is by this means alone that we can experience salvation. But saved from what? As always: saved from fear. By what means? As always: through serenity. For this reason:

We who desire to restore innocence to becoming, would like to be the missionaries of a cleaner idea: that no one has given man his qualities, neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself – that no one is to

blame

for him. There is no being who can be held responsible for the fact that someone exists, that someone is thus and thus, that someone was born into certain circumstances, into a certain milieu. –

And it is a tremendous restorative that such a being is lacking

… There is no place, no purpose, no meaning, onto which we can shift responsibility for our being, not our manner of being … And, to say it once again, this is a tremendous restorative; this constitutes the innocence of all existence. (

The Will to Power

, 765)

Unlike the Stoics, clearly, Nietzsche does not believe that the world is harmonious and rational; the transcendence of the cosmos no longer holds. But like the Stoics, he invites us to live inside the moment, to be responsible for our own salvation by accepting everything that is the case, to obliterate in ourselves the distinction between happy and unhappy events, to emancipate ourselves above all from these inner conflicts fatally nurtured by a misunderstanding of time: remorse bound up with a indeterminate vision of the past (‘I should have acted differently’), hesitation in the face of the future (‘Should I not act differently?’). For it is in freeing ourselves from this insidious double bind of reactive forces (all inner conflict is in essence reactive), in freeing ourselves from the burdens of past and future, that we shall attain to serenity and to eternity, here and now, because there is nothing else, no more reference to ‘possibility’, which would relativise present existence and would sow in us the poisonous weeds of doubt, remorse or hope.

Nietzsche: Criticisms and Interpretations

I have tried to place Nietzsche’s thought in the best light, without seeking to criticise. I believe that we must understand before making objections, and that this process takes time, sometimes a lot of time; but also and above all, I believe that we must learn to think with the help of others, and through them to attempt to think for ourselves.

However, there is one specific object – concerning Nietzsche – I must raise, so that you may understand why, despite my considerable interest in the work of Nietzsche, I am unable to be a Nietzschean. This objection concerns the doctrine of amor fati which is found in several philosophical traditions, notably Buddhist and Stoic, and also resurfaces in contemporary materialist philosophy (in the next chapter). The notion of amor fati sits on these principles: to regret things a little less, to hope for the future a little less and to love the present a little more, if not completely! I can understand perfectly that there can be serenity, relief, solace – everything Nietzsche describes so compellingly – in ‘the innocence of becoming’. But this injunction really only applies to the more painful aspects of existence: to enjoin us to love what is already lovable about reality would make little sense, since we do so anyway. What the wise man must manage to realise in himself is the love of whatever happens; otherwise he merely resembles everyone else in liking what is likeable and not liking what is not likeable! And here is the problem: if we must say yes to everything, without ‘picking and choosing’, but must shoulder whatever comes our way, how do we avoid what one contemporary philosopher and disciple of Nietzsche, Clément Rosset, has so aptly referred to as ‘the hangman’s argument’. This can be summarised as follows: there exist on Earth, since time immemorial, hangmen and torturers. They are indubitably part of the real; consequently, the doctrine of amor fati, which urges us to love whatever is the case, likewise must urge us to love torturers.

Another contemporary philosopher, Theodor Adorno, asked whether, after Auschwitz and the genocide perpetrated against European Jews, mankind could still be urged to love the real as it is, without reserve or exception. Is such a thing possible, even? Epictetus, for his part, admitted that he had never in his life met a single Stoic sage, if by this is meant someone who loved the world as it is, under all aspects, however atrocious, and who under all circumstances could refrain from either regret or hope. Must we see in this failure a temporary wobble, a difficulty with the demands of wisdom – or is it not a sign that the theory falters, that amor fati is not merely impossible but on occasion obscene? If we must accept everything that occurs, as it is, in all its tragic sense or lack of sense, how can we avoid the accusation of complicity, even of collaboration with evil?

There is more. If loving everything that is the case turns out not to be truly feasible, neither for Stoics nor for Buddhists nor for Nietzsche himself, does it not immediately risk taking on the abhorrent form of a new ideal, and, consequently, a new figure of nihilism? Here, in my own opinion, is the strongest argument against the long tradition running from the most ancient practices of Oriental and Occidental wisdom to the most up-to-date philosophical materialism. What is the good of pretending to have finished with ‘idealism’, with all ideals and ‘idols’, if this proud philosophical programme of amor fati remains itself an ideal? What is the good of holding up for derision all theories of transcendence, old and new, and invoking the wisdom of things as they are, if this love of the real is itself in thrall to transcendence and remains an objective that becomes radically inaccessible whenever the going gets even mildly difficult?

Wherever such questions lead, they cannot undermine the historical importance of Nietzsche’s responses to the three challenges confronting all philosophy: genealogy as a new theoria, the ‘grand style’ as a new morality, and the innocence of becoming as a doctrine of salvation without God or ideals. These form a coherent whole. In its claim to dismantle the very notion of the ideal, Nietzsche’s thought opened the way for the great materialist philosophies of the twentieth century.

I would like to suggest three ways in which the work of Nietzsche has been interpreted. First, we can trace the development of a radical anti-humanism, an unprecedented dismantling of the ideals erected by the Enlightenment. In fact, it is generally accepted that progress, democracy, the rights of man, republican and socialist ideals – all of these idols and more were denounced by Nietzsche, so that when Hitler met Mussolini it was not entirely by chance that he presented him with a handsome bound edition of Nietzsche’s complete works. Nor is it an accident that Nietzsche has also served in a context that is different but related – in its hatred of democracy and humanism – namely as a model for the cultural leftism that emerged in the 1960s. We can also see Nietzsche as a paradoxical continuation of Enlightenment philosophy, a progenitor of Voltaire and the French moralists of the eighteenth century. There is nothing absurd about such a thought. In many respects Nietzsche continued the work inaugurated by their critique of religion, of tradition, of the Ancien Regime, and indeed in his tireless exposure of the interests and hypocrisies concealed behind the arras of their great ideals.

Finally, we can read Nietzsche as accompanying the birth of a new world, in which notions of the real and the ideal were replaced by the overriding logic of the will to power. This was to be Heidegger’s conclusion, as we shall see in the next chapter, who saw Nietzsche as the ‘thinker of technology’, the first philosopher to destroy – entirely and without leaving the smallest trace – the notion of ‘purposes’: the idea that there was a meaning to be sought for in human existence, objectives to pursue, ends to achieve. With ‘the grand style’, the only remaining criterion by which to define ‘the good life’, is indeed one of intensity, of force meeting force, to the detriment of all higher ideals. But – once the pleasure of destruction is over – would this not condemn the world to pure cynicism, to the blind laws of the market and unbridled competition?

Chapter 6

After Deconstruction: Contemporary Philosophy

But first of all, a question for philosophy: once again, why go further? Why not stay with Nietzsche and his corrosive lucidities? Why not rest satisfied, as many have done, with developing his project, with filling the still empty compartments of his thought, and elaborating upon the theses that he has handed down to us? And if we do not like some of them, if we find that his thought flirts uncomfortably with cynicism and with fascist ideologies why not rewind a little, to the Rights of Man, to the idea of the Republic, to the Enlightenment?

These questions cannot be dodged even by the simplest history of philosophy. For to consider the transition from one epoch to another, from one vision of the world to another, is from now on part of philosophy itself. I will state the matter as simply as possible: the deconstruction of the idols of metaphysics revealed too many things for us not to take account of them. It is not possible, even were it desirable, to go backwards. Versions of ‘a return’ to a prior dispensation never make much sense: if the earlier positions were so feasible and so convincing, they would not have been abandoned, would not have laid themselves open to the rigours of criticism, would never have ceased being in season. The desire to regain lost paradises always proceeds from a lack of historical sense. We can of course try to bring back school uniforms, blackboards and chalk; we may prefer to go back to the Enlightenment, or re-embrace the Republican ideal, but this can never be more than a posture, a performance that ignores time’s passage, as if the latter were null and void – which of course is not the case. The problems of advanced democracies are not those of the eighteenth century; our communitarianism has changed, human aspirations have changed, as have our relations with authority and our habits of consumption; new rights and new political actors (ethnic minorities, women, children) have emerged, and there is no point in pretending otherwise.

The same applies to the history of philosophy. Whether we like it or not, Nietzsche asks questions which we cannot pretend have not been asked. We do not think in the same way after him as we did before, as if he had not occurred, as if his famous ‘idols’ were still standing bolt upright. This is simply not the case.An upheaval has occurred – not only with Nietzsche, but with the whole of what can be called postmodernity: the avant-gardists have passed through, and we can no longer think, write, paint or play music quite as we did before. Poets no longer extol moonlight or sunsets. A certain disenchantment with the world occurred, but was accompanied by new forms of lucidity, and new freedoms. Who today would seriously wish to return to the time of Dickens’ Oliver Twist, when women lacked the vote, where workers went without holidays, where tiny children laboured, where the countries of Africa and Asia were colonised one after another. Nobody would wish for a return to this, which is why the nostalgia for lost paradises is a display of desire rather than an act of will.

Where does this leave us? And if, Nietzsche is so ‘unignorable’, why not rest there and content ourselves, as have so many of his disciples (Michel Foucault or Gilles Deleuze, among others) with continuing the work of the master? This is one possibility, and we find ourselves today caught between alternatives which might be summarised along these lines: whether to continue along a path opened up by the founders of deconstruction, or to take once more to the high road.

A First Possibility for Contemporary Philosophy

It is of course possible to carry on up the path set out by Nietzsche, or, more generally, that of deconstruction. I say ‘more generally’, because Nietzsche is the greatest but by no means the only ‘genealogist’, the only ‘deconstructor’, the only nemesis of idols. There are also Marx and Freud, and since the beginning of the twentieth century, these three have had an extended progeny. And these philosophers of suspicion have been joined by the massed ranks of the human sciences, which have broadly pursued the deconstructive work of the great materialists.

An entire wing of sociology, for example, has undertaken to show how individuals who think of themselves as autonomous agents are in fact entirely determined in their choices, whether ethnic, political, cultural, aesthetic or even sartorial – and by ‘class habitus’, which is to say, determined by the family and social milieu into which they are born. The hard sciences themselves joined in – starting with biology, which can be used to demonstrate, in Nietzschean mode, that our famous ‘idols’ are merely a product of the entirely physical functioning of our brains, if not a mere by-product of the necessity of progressive adaptation to its environment by the human species over the course of its history. To take one example, our prejudices in favour of democracy and the rights of man are to be explained, in the final analysis, not by a disinterested intellectual choice, but by the fact that there is more at stake, for our survival as a species, in cooperation and harmony than in conflict and war.

We can continue to think and theorise in the philosophical style inaugurated by Nietzsche, and this essentially has been the path followed by contemporary philosophy. Not that this style speaks with one voice, by any means. It is in fact rich in diversity, and one would be hard pressed to reduce it to the business of pure de construction. We should mention, for example, the Anglophone tradition of ‘analytical philosophy’, which is concerned above all with the functioning of the sciences, and which is regarded by some as all-important, even if it is not much spoken about on the Continent. In another sphere of activity, philosophers such as Jürgens Habermas, Karl-Otto Appel, Karl Popper or John Rawls have attempted, each after their fashion, to pursue the work of Kant, both modifying and extending it to embrace contemporary questions such as social justice and the ethical principles which should regulate discussion between free and equal citizens; or the nature of science and its proper relation to the democratic idea.

In France, and also to a great extent in the United States, it has been deconstruction which has, at least until recent years, prevailed over other currents of thought. As I said, the ‘philosophers of suspicion’, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, have had numerous disciples. The names of Althusser, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and others less known, belong within this configuration, however various their methods. Each has attempted to unmask the idols in which we believe, the concealed and unconscious logic which imprisons us without our knowledge. Following Marx the focus has been upon economic and social relations; following Freud it has been upon language and buried subconscious instincts, and following Nietzsche upon our nihilist tendencies and submission to reactive forces in all their forms.

Where is it going – this interminable trial of the ‘idols’ of humanism, conducted in the name of lucidity and the critical spirit? What purpose does it serve? And where is deconstruction itself coming from? Beneath its bold and avant-gardist shell, under the claim to be elaborating a ‘counter-culture’ in order to thwart the ongoing ‘idols’ of the bourgeoisie, there is the paradoxical risk of making absolutely sacred the real as it is. Which would be entirely logical: by disqualifying these famous ‘idols’, by refusing to accept that there can be any other horizon of thought than that of ‘philosophising with a hammer’, we can only end, as Nietzsche does, with his amor fati, by prostrating ourselves before the real as it is.

How, in these circumstances, do we avoid the fate of those former revolutionary activist converts to the laws of the market-place, who turned into ‘cynics’ in the most debased sense of the term: disillusioned, shorn of all ambition other than that of an efficient accommodation to the terms and conditions of reality? And must we resign ourselves, in the name of an increasingly problematic notion of lucidity, to paying our last respects to the ghosts of Reason, Liberty, Progress and Humanity? Does nothing remain in these words, which were once so charged with the light of hope, that can escape the rigours of deconstruction and survive demolition?

How to Move Beyond Deconstruction

If deconstruction tips into cynicism and the critique of ‘idols’ enshrines things as they are, how do we move beyond deconstruction? For me, these questions open up another path for contemporary philosophy. Not that of a turning back towards Enlightenment, reason, the republic, humanism – which would make no sense – rather, an attempt to rethink them, not ‘as before’ but after deconstruction, and in its light.

Not to make such an attempt is to risk submitting to things as they are. In which case deconstruction, which set out to liberate minds and break the chains of tradition, has involuntarily turned into its opposite – a new form of adaptation, disillusioned rather than clear-sighted, to the hard reality of a globalised universe. We cannot hedge our bets for ever; on the one hand advocating with Nietzsche amor fati and good riddance to all ‘higher ideals’, but at the same time shedding crocodile tears for the disappearance of utopian aspirations and the harshness of a rampant capitalism.

To become fully aware of this predicament, I need to enlist the thought of Martin Heidegger, who remains in my view the most important contemporary philosopher. He too was one of the founding fathers of deconstruction, but his thought is not a version of materialism and is not hostile to the idea of the transcendental. He is to my mind the first to have given the contemporary world – what he refers to as ‘the world of technology’ – a reason why we cannot remain content with being Nietzscheans, if we do not wish to become complicit with a reality which today takes the form of capitalist globalisation. Despite its extraordinarily positive aspects – formidable economic growth and wider distribution of wealth than ever before – it also has devastating effects upon the life of the mind, on the political sphere and, fundamentally, on our existence.

By way of an introduction to contemporary philosophy, I would like to begin by exploring this fundamental aspect of Heidegger’s thinking. First of all, because it is an inspired and brilliant body of thought, and one which sheds incomparable light upon the present. Second, because it equips us to understand not only the economic, cultural and political landscape which surrounds us, but also to grasp why the tireless pursuit of Nietzschean deconstruction can at this point lead only to the hallowing of the realities – however trivial and un-sacred they may be – of a liberal universe given over to accommodation.

Many people say as much today, ecologists in particular, or those who describe themselves as ‘alter-globalists’. But the originality of Heidegger and his critique of ‘the world of technology’ is that it does not content itself with the habitual criticism of capitalism and liberalism. Usually, the latter are reproached indiscriminately for increasing inequality, destroying regional cultures and identities, reducing biological diversity and the species-count, widening the gap between rich and poor, and so on. All of which is not only highly questionable but misses the essential. (It does not follow, for example, that poverty increases in the world if inequality widens, nor that rich countries are unconcerned about the environment. On the contrary, developed societies are infinitely more concerned than poor countries – for whom the necessities of development take precedence over those of conservation – just as they are also the first to see public opinion become truly preoccupied with the preservation of local identities and cultures.)

All of the above can be debated at length, but what is certain and what Heidegger enables us to understand, is that liberal globalisation is in the process of betraying one of the most fundamental promises of democracy – how collectively to make our own history, to participate in it and have our say about our destiny, and to try and change it for the better – because the world which we are entering not only ‘escapes’ us on all sides, but turns out to be devoid of sense: stripped of meaning and of direction.

Each year, your mobile phone, your MP3 player and computer games change, along with everything else around you: their functions multiply, they become smaller, their screens get bigger or become coloured, and so on. And you know that a product which does not keep in step is going to fail. Unless it follows suit. It is not a question of taste, of one choice among others, but a necessity without choice, in which survival is at stake.

In this sense, we could say that in today’s world of globalised capital which places all human activities in a state of perpetual and unending competition, history is moving beyond the will of men. Competition is becoming not only a form of destiny, but, what is more, there is nothing to suggest that it is moving in the direction of what is better. Who can seriously believe that we shall have more freedom and be happier because in a few months the weight of our MP3 players will have halved, or their memory doubled? In accordance with Nietzsche’s wishes, the idols are all dead: no ideal, in effect, animates or disturbs the course of things, only the absolute imperative of change for the sake of change.

To use an ordinary but suggestive image: as a bicycle must keep going in order not to topple over, or a gyroscope must keep spinning to remain on its axis, we must ceaselessly ‘progress’; but this mechanical progress induced by a struggle for survival can no longer be integrated within a grand design. Here too, the transcendental bias of the great humanist ideals Nietzsche mocked has well and truly disappeared – so that in a sense it is indeed Nietzsche’s programme that has been accomplished to perfection by globalised capitalism – as Heidegger suggested was the case.

The difficulty is not so much that globalisation supposedly impoverishes the poor in order to engorge the rich, as ecologists and alter-globalists suggest, but that it dispossesses us all of any purchase on history, and divests history itself of all purpose. Dispossession and directionlessness are the terms which best characterise it – in which respect again it fulfils perfectly, in Heidegger’s eyes, the philosophy of Nietzsche: a body of thought which assumed, as no other has ever done, the complete eradication of all ideals at the same time as the logic of historical direction.

The Advent of a ‘World of Technology’ and the Retreat of Meaning

In a brief essay entitled Overcoming Metaphysics, Heidegger described the domination of technology which char-acterises the contemporary universe as the result of a process which took root in seventeenth-century science and spread slowly into all areas of democratic life.

I would like to offer the principle aspects of this argument in simple language, for those who have not yet read any Heidegger. I should warn you, however: what I am going to say will not be found in this form in Heidegger. I have added various examples which are not his, and I present his technical argument in my own non-technical fashion. Nevertheless, the central idea is certainly his, and what matters here is not the provenance of any particular concept, but the idea to be drawn from Heideggerian analysis: according to which, the project of mastery of nature and history which accompanied the birth of the modern world and which gives all its meaning to the democratic idea, can be seen to turn finally into its exact opposite. Democracy promised us the possibility of taking part in the collective construction of a free and fair world. Yet today we are losing almost all control over the course of the world in which we live – a supreme betrayal of the promises of humanism, implicit in democracy, and one which raises many questions.

The first moment of the process Heidegger describes coincides with the birth of modern science, which broke with ancient philosophy at every point and which saw the emergence of a project of domination over Earth, of its total mastery by the human species. According to the famous formula of Descartes, scientific knowledge would permit man to make himself ‘as if the master and owner of nature’: ‘as if ’, because he was not yet entirely alike to God, his creator, but almost. This aspiration to scientific domination takes a dual form.

It was to express itself first on a straightforwardly ‘intellectual’ or theoretical level: that of knowledge about the world. Modern physics was entirely founded on the premise that nothing, in the world, occurs without reason. In other words, everything must be rationally explicable, sooner or later; every event has its cause, a reason for being, and the role of science is to discover these reasons. Scientific progress became merged with the progressive eradication of the mystery that, in the Middle Ages, was believed to be part and parcel of nature.

A second impulse to domination emerges behind that of the need for knowledge; this time an entirely practical dominance, proceeding not from the intellect but from the will of men. If nature is no longer mysterious or sacred but on the contrary can be reduced to an inventory of merely physical phenomena entirely devoid of meaning or value, then there is nothing to prevent us from harnessing nature in whichever way seems appropriate for our ends. To take an example, if the tree growing in the forest is no longer (as it was in the fairytales of our childhood) a magical being, likely to transform itself into a witch or a goblin during the night, but merely a piece of wood devoid of a soul, nothing prevents us from turning it into furniture or chucking it on the fire to warm ourselves. Nature as a whole loses its spell, and becomes a vast warehouse on which humans can draw at will, without restriction other than that imposed by a conceivable need to keep something back for the future.

For all that, with the birth of modern science we have still not quite arrived at what Heidegger would call ‘the world of technology’, which is to say a universe in which the preoccupation with ends – with the ultimate purpose of human history – has totally disappeared, in the interests of an overriding and exclusive preoccupation with means. In seventeenth-and eighteenth-century rationalism – in the thought of Descartes, or the Encyclopedists, or Kant, for example – the project of a scientific mastery of the universe still possesses an emancipatory purpose, by which I mean that, in its principles, it remains subject to the fulfilment of certain ends and objectives considered to be beneficial for humanity. We are not as yet exclusively interested in the means which will enable us to dominate the world, but in the objectives which such domination might enable us to realise. In this respect, clearly, human interest in domination has not yet become purely technological. If this means dominating the universe both theoretically and practically, through scientific knowledge and the exercise of will, it is not merely for the pleasure of domination or a fascination with our own powers. The project is not about mastery for mastery’s sake, but about understanding the world and, if necessary, being able to exploit it in order to reach certain higher objectives, which ultimately can be grouped under two headings: liberty and happiness. In this sense, it becomes clear that at its birth modern science had not yet been reduced to pure technology.

From Science to Technology: the Disappearance of Ends and the Triumph of Means

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, science still rested on two convictions which underpinned an Enlightenment optimism in human progress. The first conviction is that science will allow us to liberate our spirit, to emancipate humanity from the shackles of superstition and medieval opposition to new knowledge. Reason will emerge triumphant from its combat with religion and, more generally, from the combat against all forms of argument based on the monopoly of authority. And in this sense, as we have seen in connection with Descartes, modern rationalism prepared the way intellectually for the French Revolution. The second conviction is that mastery of nature will liberate us from the ills and natural servitude to which we are heir, and turn them to our advantage.You will recall the emotions provoked by the famous Lisbon earthquake of 1755 which, in a matter of hours, killed thousands of people, and set in train a debate between philosophers as to the ‘wickedness’ of a natural order which bore no relation to received ideas about a harmonious and well-intentioned cosmos. Virtually everyone at the time concluded that science would save us from the tyranny of nature. Thanks to science, it would be possible finally to foresee and therefore prevent the catastrophes so regularly visited upon us by nature. Here the seeds of the modern idea of happiness dispensed by science, of wellbeing made possible by mastery over the world, make their first appearance.

And it is on account of these two convictions or purposes – freedom and happiness, which together define the idea of progress – that the development of the sciences appears as the vector of another idea, that of civilisation and its march. No matter that such a vision strikes us as naïve or otherwise. What counts is that the will to mastery over nature is still linked to higher objectives and motives, and in this sense cannot be reduced to a purely instrumental or technological rationalism.

For this vision of the world to become thoroughly technological required only one more step; that the project of the Enlightenment be integrated and ‘docked’ with the world of competition, so that the engine of history – the evolutionary principle – ceased to be linked to any vision or ideal, to become instead the mere outcome of competition.

The Passage from Science to Technology: The Death of the Great Ideas

In this new perspective, that of generalised competition – which we refer to today as ‘globalisation’ – the idea of progress changes its meaning completely: instead of being inspired by transcendental ideals, the progress of society (or, more neutrally, its forward movement) is gradually reduced to meaning no more than the automatic outcome of the free competition between its constituent parts.

At the core of businesses, but also of scientific laboratories and research centres, the unceasing imperative to measure oneself against others (what is today known by the awful term ‘benchmarking’), to increase productivity, to develop expertise and above all to apply the fruits to industry and the economy – consumption, in other words – has become an absolutely vital imperative. The modern economy functions like Darwinian natural selection: within the logic of globalised competition, a business which does not ‘progress’ each day is quite simply doomed to extinction. But this advance has no other end than itself – to stay in the race with the other competitors.

Hence the fearsome and incessant development of technology, tethered to and largely financed by economic growth, and the fact that the increase of human power over nature has become completely automatic, uncontrollable and blind, because it everywhere exceeds the conscious will of the individual. And this is, quite simply, the inevitable result of competition. In which sense, contrary to the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which aimed at emancipation and human happiness, technology is well and truly a process without purpose, devoid of any objectives: ultimately, nobody knows any longer the direction in which the world is moving, because it is automatically governed by competition and in no sense directed by the conscious will of men collectively united behind a project, at the heart of a society which, as recently as the last century, could still think of itself as res publica: ‘the common weal’.

In the technological world, which from now on means the world as such, since technology is a planetary phenomenon without limits, it is no longer a question of dominating nature or society in order to be more free or more happy, but of mastery for mastery’s sake, of domination for the sake of domination. Why? For no end, precisely, or rather: because it is quite simply impossible to do otherwise, given the nature of societies entirely governed by competition, by the absolute imperative to ‘advance or perish’.

Now we understand why Heidegger calls the universe in which we live ‘the world of technology’, or the technical world, and let us think for a moment of the significance assumed by the word ‘technique’ in current usage. It generally designates the ensemble of means required in order to achieve a given end. It is in this sense, for example, that we say of a painter or pianist that he or she possesses a ‘good technique’, to indicate that they master their art sufficiently to be able to paint or play whatever they wish. It is important to note that, before all else, technique concerns means and not ends, that is, it can be placed in the service of different ends, but does not of itself choose them: essentially the same technique will serve a pianist playing classical or jazz, traditional or modern, but the question of choosing which works to play does not in any sense derive from technical competence. The latter operates in a world of ‘if this … then that’. ‘To achieve this, you must do that’, it says – but never does it tell us what to choose as an objective, or why. A ‘good doctor’, in the sense of a good technician of medicine, can both kill or cure his patient – the first perhaps more easily than the second. But the decision to kill or to cure is indifferent as far as the logic of technique is concerned.

It is equally legitimate to say that the universe of globalised competition is, in a broader sense, ‘technical’. For there too, scientific advancement well and truly ceases to have ends in view that are exterior to or higher than itself, but becomes a kind of end in itself – as if the proliferation of means, of power and mastery of mankind over nature have become their own finality. It is precisely this ‘technicalisation of the world’ which occurs in the history of thought, according to Heidegger, with the Nietzschean doctrine of ‘the will to power’, which deconstructed and even destroyed all ‘idols’, all higher ideals. In reality – and no longer merely in the history of ideas – this mutation occurs in the advent of a world where ‘progress’ has become a process automated and divested of purpose, a sort of self-regulating mechanism from which human beings are totally dispossessed. And it is just this disappearance of ends in the interests of an overriding logic of means that constitutes the victory of technology.

Here is the final difference, the gulf separating us from the Enlightenment and dividing the contemporary world from that of the Moderns: no one can be reasonably convinced any longer that this teeming and disruptive evolutionary impulse, this incessant movement unconnected by a common project, leads infallibly towards what is better. Ecologists are sceptical, as are critics of globalisation, but equally republicans and even liberals become nostalgic for a time that is still recent yet seems irrevocably of the past. From which comes a sense of doubt. For the first time in the history of life, a living species holds the means to destroy the entire planet, and this species does not know where it is going. Its powers of transformation and, if need be, of destruction, are by now unbounded, but like a giant with the faculties of an infant, they are totally dissociated from any capacity for reflection – while at the same time philosophy itself withdraws from engagement with such questions, likewise seized by a passion for the technical.

No one today can seriously claim to believe in a guarantee of survival for our species, and many are troubled, but no one knows how to take the reins: from Kyoto protocols to ecological summits, our heads of state participate impotently, brandishing a rhetoric crammed with pious hopes but with no real power to control even those scenarios most clearly identified as potentially catastrophic. The worst does not always come to pass, and nothing prevents us of course from remaining optimistic, but this is more an act of faith than having any basis in reason. Hence the Enlightenment ideal gives way to a diffuse and multiform anxiety, always at the ready to focus upon this or that particular threat, in such a way that fear is slowly becoming the characteristic democratic emotion.

What lessons are to be drawn from such an analysis? First, that the genealogical and technical attitudes are, as Heidegger thought, two sides of the same coin: the first is the close-fitting philosophical double of the second, which is merely its social, economic or political equivalent. There is a paradox here, of course. On the surface, nothing could seem further removed from the technical world – with its democratic mandate, insipid and collectivist, at the opposite pole to any notion of a ‘grand style’ – than the aristocratic and poetic formulations of Nietzsche. However, by smashing all our idols with his hammer, and delivering us – in the guise of clear-sightedness – bound and gagged to the world of whatever is the case, Nietzsche’s thought serves however unintentionally the incessant flux, the hither and thither of modern capitalism.

From this point of view Heidegger is correct, and Nietzsche is well and truly ‘the thinker of technology’ – the philosopher who, like no other, sings the disenchantment of the world, the eclipse of meaning, the disappearance of higher ideals in the interest of the single-minded logic of the will to power. That Nietzsche was held up as something of a radical utopian during the 1960s is one of the great blunders in the history of misinterpretation. Nietzsche is an avant-gardist, of course, but certainly not a thinker of utopias. Quite the opposite, he is their most ardent and effective denigrator.

The risk is therefore great that the indefinitely prolonged and inexhaustible pursuit of deconstruction will only be laying siege to a door that is already fairly wide open. The problem is no longer, regrettably, that of breaking yet again the poor ‘clay feet’ of those unfortunate ideals that no one can manage any longer even to identify, so fragile and uncertain have they become. The urgent need is certainly no longer to challenge concealed ‘powers’ by now so invisible as to be non-existent, so mechanised and anonymous has the course of history become; but on the contrary, to enable new ideas and even new ideals to arise vigorously, so as to regain a minimum of control over the shape of things. For the real problem is not that history is in the covert hands of figures of ‘authority’, but on the contrary that it now eludes all of us, authorities included. It is no longer power that inhibits us, but the absence of power – so that the desire to keep on deconstructing idols, to keep on discovering yet again the hiding places of ‘Power’ with a capital ‘P’, is not so much to work for the emancipation of mankind as involuntarily to conspire with a blind and demented globalisation.

The priority, in our current situation, is, as we have said, to take the reins: to attempt if possible to ‘keep our mastery in check’. For his part, Heidegger did not believe that this could be done, or rather did not believe that democracy was equipped for such a challenge – which is no doubt one of the reasons why he embraced instead the worst authoritarian regime mankind has ever known. He believed, in effect, that democracies are fatally wedded to the structures of the technical world. Economically so, because they are intimately bound to the liberal creed of competition. And this system, as we have seen, of necessity triggers an unlimited and automatic proliferation of productive forces. Politically, likewise, because elections also take the form of organised competition which imperceptibly tends towards a logic whose fundamental elements – that of the popular vote and the supremacy of the ratings poll – are the very essence of the technical world, the society of globalised competition.

Heidegger therefore chose Nazism, convinced without any doubt that only an authoritarian regime could prove equal to the challenge to humanity posed by the technical world. Subsequently, in his later writings, he distanced himself from all voluntarism, all attempts to transform the world. Although understandable, either of these positions is unpardonable, even absurd – which proves that tragically mistaken conclusions may be drawn from an analysis of genius. A large part of Heidegger’s work is for this reason desperately disappointing, and sometimes unbearable, although the essence of his conception of the technical world is extraordinarily illuminating.

Two Possible Avenues for Contemporary Philosophy

In the technical world, philosophy can take two very different directions. First, we can make of philosophy a new ‘scholasticism’, in the proper sense of the term: a discipline confined to school and university. The fact is that after an intense historical phase of ‘deconstruction’, inaugurated by Nietzsche’s hammer and pursued under diverse guises, philosophy, itself in thrall to technique, divided itself into specialised categories: philosophy of science, of logic, of law, of morals, of politics, of language, of environment, of religion, of bioethics, of the history of ideas (Occidental and Oriental), Continental or Anglophone philosophy, philosophy by historical periods, by country … In truth, there is no end to the ‘specialisms’ which students are required to choose in order to be considered ‘serious’ and ‘technic ally competent’.

In research organisations, young people who do not work on a rigorously specialised subject – ‘the brains of leeches’, as Nietzsche already joked – have no chance of being considered true researchers. Not only is philosophy required to ape at all cost the model of the ‘hard’ sciences, but these hard sciences have themselves become ‘techno-sciences’, in other words often more preoccupied by the economic or commercial spin-offs of their activity than by fundamental questions.

When university philosophy wants to take the broader view – when for example a philosopher is asked to pronounce as an ‘expert’ upon this or that question concerning society – it maintains that its true role is to diffuse a critical and ‘enlightened’ spirit on questions which it has not raised of its own accord, but which are of general interest. According to which the highest purpose for philosophy would ultimately be a moral purpose: to clarify public debate, promote rational argument in the hope that by so doing we will keep moving in the right direction. And to arrive at this point, philosophy believes, out of intellectual probity, that it must specialise in very particular areas – subjects in which the philosopher (a professor of philosophy), ends by acquiring a particular competence.

Today, many universities throughout the world interest themselves in bioethics or ecology, with the aim of studying the impact of positivist science upon the evolution of human societies, so as to furnish answers as to what it is advisable to do or not to, to authorise or prohibit, on topics such as cloning, genetically modified organisms, eugenics or medically assisted procreation. Clearly there is nothing unworthy about such a role for philosophy. Quite the contrary, it can have its uses, and I would not dream of denying these. It is nonetheless dreadfully reductive, when one thinks of the ideals which were common to all the great philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche; none of whom had renounced to this extent their responsibility for pondering what is meant by the good life – or persuaded themselves that critical reflection and moral pronouncement were the ultimate horizons of philosophy.

Faced with this development – not in my view to be confused with progress – the great philosophical questions can seem like the sentimental films of yesteryear, at least as far as these new specialists in seriousness are concerned. No more discussion of meaning, or of what constitutes doing and living well, or the nature of wisdom, or (even less) of salvation! Everything that for several millennia had constituted the essence of philosophy would seem to have been written off, to leave room only for erudition, for ‘reflection’ and ‘the critical spirit’. Not that these attributes are not qualities, but in the end, as Hegel said, ‘erudition begins with ideas and ends with ordures’. Everything and anything can become an object of erudition, bottle tops as much as concepts, so that technical specialisation produces forms of expertise that are closely allied to the most arid absence of meaning.

As for ‘critical reflection’, I have already had occasion to explain, in the opening pages of this book, what I think of this indispensable faculty: that it is an essential requirement in our egalitarian world, but that in no respect whatsoever is it the prerogative of philosophy. Every human being worthy of the name reflects upon his work, his love life, the newspapers, politics and the places in which he finds himself, without thereby becoming a philosopher.

This is why some of us today prefer to set up shop at a discreet distance from the great avenues of academic thought, and likewise from the diagonal crossways of deconstruction. And we would wish, not to restore the old questions – as I have suggested, dreams of ‘return’ never make sense – but to revisit them, so as to rethink them afresh. It is in this perspective that authentically philosophical discussion remains alive. After deconstruction, and to one side of empty erudition, philosophy sets off once more towards different horizons – more promising ones, in my view. I am convinced that philoso phy can and must – more than ever before, given the technical universe in which we are immersed – keep alive the philosophical questions, not only concerning theoria and ethics, but also the question of salvation, even if this means renewing the latter from top to bottom.

We can no longer be content today with a philosophical practice that is reduced to the status of a specialised university discipline, nor stick to the logic of deconstruction alone, as if its corrosive clarity were an end in itself. Erudition stripped of meaning is not enough, and the much vaunted critical spirit, even when it serves the ideals of democracy, is merely a necessary but not a sufficient condition of philosophy: it enables us to shake off the illusions and innocence of classical metaphysics, but does not in any sense offer a response to the existential questions which the search for wisdom inherent in the very notion of philosophy used formerly to place at the core of its doctrines of salvation.

We can of course turn our backs on philosophy. We can proclaim loudly and clearly that it is dead, finished, definitively ousted by the human sciences. But we cannot remain content with the dynamic of deconstruction alone and by making an impasse out of the notion of salvation (in whatever sense we intend it). And if we prefer not to yield to the cynicism of amor fati we must try to go beyond philosophical materialism. In other words, for whoever is not a believer, for whoever refuses to content themselves with fantasies of a return to a golden age, or confine themselves to philosophising with a hammer, it is necessary to take up the challenge of a wisdom or a spirituality that is post-Nietzschean.

Such a project supposes keeping one’s distance from contemporary materialism, of course, with its rejection of all transcendental ideals and their relegation by genealogy to nothing more than the illusory by-products of history and nature. We must show how materialism, even at its most persuasive, does not answer satisfactorily the questions of knowledge or spirituality. I would like to explain this in more detail before suggesting how a post-Nietzschean humanism can succeed in rethinking theoria, morality and the problematic question of salvation – or what might stand in its place.

The Failure of Materialism

Even when it chooses openly to address ethics, or indeed a doctrine of salvation – which Nietzsche, for example, only ever attempted to do surreptitiously – contemporary materialism seems unable to command sufficient coherence to be persuasive. Which does not mean that there is no truth in the materialist position, nor compelling intellectual principles, but rather that the attempts to have done with humanism end in failure.

I would like to dwell for a moment on this renewal of materialism – which has similarities with Stoicism, with Buddhism and of course with the thought of Nietzsche – because through its failure, indirectly, as I have suggested, a new humanism may be conceivable.

In the context of contemporary thought, the French philosopher André Comte-Sponville has probably pushed furthest and with most rigour the attempt to found a new ethics and a new doctrine of salvation, on the basis of a radical deconstruction of the claims of humanism to transcendency of ideals. In this sense, even if Comte-Sponville is no Nietzschean – and strenuously rejects the fascistic overtones to which his philosophy is sometimes prey – he shares with Nietzsche nonetheless the conviction that the ‘idols’ of authority are clay-footed, that they need to be deconstructed, traced back genealogically to their origins, and that the only possible wisdom is one of radical (this-worldly) immanence. His thought, too, culminates therefore in one of the numerous versions of amor fati, in an appeal for reconciliation with the world as it is, or, if you prefer, in a radical critique of hope. ‘Hope a little less, love a little more’ – such is, at bottom, the key to salvation for Comte-Sponville. For hope, contrary to what is commonly thought, far from helping us to live better, in effect makes us forego the essence of life, which is here and now. As for Nietzsche and the Stoics, hope is manifestly a misfortune rather than a virtue. In a maxim as encompassing as it is terse Comte-Sponville summarises: ‘To hope is to desire without consummation, without knowledge, without power.’ It is therefore a blight, and not an attitude which can give any zest to life.

This maxim describes hope, first and foremost, as to desire without consummation, for by definition we do not possess the objects of our hopes. To wish to be richer, younger, healthier and so on, is necessarily not to be in possession of these things. It is to place ourselves in a relation of absence to what we would wish to have or be. But hope also means to desire without knowledge: if we knew when and how the objects of our hopes were to be realised, we would no doubt content ourselves with waiting for them – and waiting has a different meaning to hoping. Finally, hope means to desire without power since, self-evidently, if we had the capacity or the power to act out our wishes, here and now, we would not deprive ourselves but would put them into effect without the preliminaries of hoping for them.

This reasoning is faultless. Frustration and impotence are the salient properties of hope, from a materialist point of view – in which respect Comte-Sponville’s critique shares a kinship with the spirituality of Stoicism and Buddhism. From Greek wisdom the materialist doctrine of salvation freely borrows the famous notion of carpe diem – ‘seize the day’ – that is, the conviction that the only life worth the pain of living is located in the here and now, in our reconciliation with the present. According to which the two evils which ruin human existence are nostalgia for a past which no longer exists and the expectation of a future which has yet to exist; thus, we miss life as it is, the only life with any validity: a present moment which we must finally learn to embrace for what it is. As with the Stoic message, but also as with Spinoza and Nietzsche, we must endeavour to love the world, and ascend to the level of amor fati – this being the final word on the subject from what we might call, paradoxical though it may sound, a materialist ‘spirituality’.

Nor can its invitation leave us entirely cold. I am convinced that it has its own truth, which corresponds to an experience we have all had: those moments of ‘grace’ in our lives, when, by good fortune, the world as-it-is ceases to seem threatening, vile or ugly, but on the contrary benevolent and harmonious. This might arise through a walk along a riverbank, the natural beauty of a landscape, or even – within society – when a conversation or an encounter overwhelms us. All of these examples I have borrowed from Rousseau. Each of us can remember for ourselves such moments of weightless happiness, when we experience a sense that the real is in no need of transformation or improvement, through our hard work, but is there to be savoured for the sake of the moment, without past or future – in joy and contemplation rather than in the hope of better days.

It is clear that, in this sense, materialism is a philosophy of happiness; and when all is going well, who would not willingly yield to its charms? A philosophy for the good times, in short, but can we still follow its lead when the weather turns nasty? This is precisely where our materialist guide might be of some assistance, but suddenly he slips from our grasp – which is what the greatest philosophers, from Epictetus to Spinoza, have been forced to concede: the true sage is not of this world, and beatitude remains, sadly, inaccessible. Faced with imminent catastrophe – a sick child, the rise of fascism, an urgent political or military decision – I know of no materialist sage who does not instantly turn into a vulgar humanist, weighing up the alternatives, suddenly convinced that the course of events must in some sense depend on his free choices.

That we must prepare for misfortune, even anticipate it, as has been said, in the mood of the future perfect tense (‘When it comes, I will at least have been prepared for it’), I wholeheartedly agree. But that we must embrace what happens under whatever circumstances seems to me quite simply impossible. What meaning can the imperative of amor fati have confronted with the fact of Auschwitz? And what value can our revolutions and our acts of resistance have if they are inscribed for all eternity in the real, alongside and undifferentiated from everything to which they are opposed? I have yet to encounter a materialist, ancient or modern, who was able to provide an answer to this question. Which is why, all things considered, I prefer to commit myself to the path of a humanism which has the courage fully to take on the problem of transcendence. For this is what is at stake: our logical incapacity to put aside the notion of liberty as we have encountered it in Rousseau and Kant – the idea, in other words, that there is within us something in excess of nature or history.

Contrary to what is claimed by materialism, we are unable to think of ourselves as totally determined by history and nature; we are unable to eradicate the sense that we can detach ourselves sufficiently to be able to look upon them critically. One can be a woman and yet refuse to be determined by what nature appears to have planned in the matter of womanhood: child-rearing, family life; one can be born into a socially disadvantaged milieu and yet transform oneself, thanks to education perhaps, and enter worlds quite different to those which a social determinism would have programmed for us.

To convince yourself of this, reflect for a moment upon a logic which you have undoubtedly experienced, which we all experience whenever we make a value judgement. To take a particular example: like more or less everyone, you cannot help but feel that the Bosnian Serb armed forces which ordered the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica were wicked. Before the slaughter, they amused themselves by terrifying their victims, shooting them in the legs, making them run before mowing them down, cutting off their ears, torturing and then murdering them. I cannot see how one can think about the perpetrators of these acts other than as wicked. When I say this, it is self-evidently because I presume that, like other human beings, these men could have acted differently; they possessed freedom of choice. If the Serb generals responsible for these acts of genocide were bears or wolves, I would not think of bringing a value judgement. I would merely deplore the massacre of innocent men by wild beasts, but it would not occur to me to judge from a moral point of view. If I do so, it is precisely because generals are not wild beasts but human beings, to whom I attribute the capacity to choose between alternatives.

From a materialist perspective, one might of course argue that such value judgements are illusory. One could trace their ‘genealogy’, show their direction of origin and bias, how they are determined by a particular history, milieu, education and so on. The problem, however, is that I have yet to meet anyone, materialist or otherwise, who was able to dispense with value judgements. On the contrary, the literature of materialism is peculiarly marked by its wholesale profusion of denunciations of all sorts. Starting with Marx and Nietzsche, materialists have never been able to refrain from passing continuous moral judgement on all and sundry, which their whole philosophy might be expected to discourage them from doing. Why? Quite simply because, without realising it, they continue to attribute to human beings a freedom in everyday life which they deny to them in philosophical argument – to such a degree that we can only conclude that the illusion resides less in the idea of liberty than in the theses of materialism itself, which quite simply prove to be unsustainable.

Beyond the moral sphere, all judgements of value – from a remark about a film you have enjoyed to some music that has affected you – implies that you believe yourself to be free, that you represent yourself as speaking freely rather than as a being in the grip of unconscious forces which talk across you, so to speak, without your being aware of the fact.

What must we trust, then? Your own sense of yourself as acting freely, which is implicitly the case whenever you utter a judgement? Or the materialist, who tells you (freely?) that you are nothing of the kind – while himself continuing to scatter value judgements whenever the occasion arises, all of which presuppose his own freedom? It’s your choice, so to speak.

For my part, I would prefer if possible not to exist in a continuous state of self-contradiction. To which end, I attribute to myself – even if it remains a mysterious business, like life – a faculty of self-removal from both nature and history: the faculty which Rousseau and Kant called liberty or perfectibility, even if this occupies a position of transcendence in respect of the historical and biological codes within which materialism would imprison us. I would add for good measure, and to explain the simple reflex of value-judgement which I have been describing, that there exists not merely a transcendence of liberty, so to speak, within us, but also values which reside outside us: that it is not we who invent the values which guide and animate us; not we who invent, for example, the beauty of nature or the power of love.

Let me make myself clear: I am not saying that we ‘need’ transcendence, as a somewhat inane modern habit of thought is given to proclaiming (that we ‘need’ meaning, that we ‘need’ God). Such formulas are problematic, because they instantly rebound on those who use them: it is not our need for something that proves its existence. Quite the contrary: there is a strong likelihood that the need pushes us to invent the thing, and then to defend it, with all the arguments of bad faith at our disposal, because we have become attached to it. The need for God is, in this respect, the greatest argument against His existence that I know of.

I am not saying, therefore, that we ‘need’ the transcendence of being free agents, or the transcendence of values. I am saying that we cannot dispense with them, which is quite a different matter; that we cannot think about ourselves, or our relation to values, without positing the hypothesis of transcendence. It is a logical necessity, a rational constraint, not an aspiration or a desire. What is being debated here is not a matter of our comfort, but of our relation to truth. Or, to put the matter differently: if I am not convinced by materialism, it is not because it seems uncomfortable, or lacking in solace. Quite the contrary. As Nietzsche said, moreover, the doctrine of amor fati is a source of solace like none other, the ground of an infinite serenity. If I feel obliged to go beyond materialism, to try and push things further, it is because I find it literally ‘unthinkable’ – too full of logical contradictions for me to settle down with intellectually.

To outline once again the principal ground of these contradictions, I will say that the cross of materialism is that it never quite succeeds in believing what it preaches, in thinking its own thought. This may sound complicated, but is in fact simple: the materialist says, for example, that we are not free, though he is convinced, of course, that he asserts this freely, that no one is forcing him to state this view of the matter – neither parents, nor social milieu, nor biological inheritance. He says that we are wholly determined by our history, but he never stops urging us to free ourselves, to change our destiny, to revolt where possible! He says that we must love the world as it is, turning our backs on past and future so as to live in the present, but he never stops trying, like you or me, when the present weighs upon us, to change it in the hope of a better world. In brief, the materialist sets forth philosophical theses that are profound, but always for you and me, never for himself. Always, he reintroduces transcendence – liberty, a vision for society, the ideal – because in truth he cannot not believe himself to be free, and therefore answerable to values higher than nature and history.

From which arises the fundamental question for contemporary humanism: how to formulate transcendence under both aspects – within ourselves (as liberty) and outside ourselves (as values) – without falling immediately back into the clutches of a materialist genealogy and a materialist deconstruction. Or: how to formulate a humanism which is finally relieved of those metaphysical illusions which it was carting around with it right from the start, at the birth of modern philosophy.

Towards a New Idea of Transcendence

Contrary to materialism, to which it is diametrically opposed, the post-Nietzschean humanism of which I dream in these pages – a long tradition which has its roots in the thought of Kant and flowers in that of one of his greatest twentieth-century disciples, Husserl – rehabilitates the idea of transcendence. But it also affords it, notably on a theoretical level, a new meaning which I would like to try and explain here. For it is through this new emphasis that it manages to escape the criticisms of contemporary materialism and situate itself in a philosophical space which is not ‘pre-’ but ‘post-’ Nietzschean.

We can distinguish three key conceptions of transcendence. The first is that which was employed by the Ancients to describe the cosmos. Fundamentally, of course, Greek thought is a philosophy of immanence in that the perfect order of things is not an ideal, a model which is located elsewhere than in the universe, but is on the contrary wholly incarnated within its fabric. As you will recall, the divine principle of the Stoics, as distinct from the God of the Christians, is not a Being external to the world, but is so to speak its very organ-ising principle. However, as I have already indicated in passing, we can also say that the harmonious order of the cosmos is nonetheless transcendent in relation to humans, in the specific sense that they have neither created it nor invented it. On the contrary, they discover it as a reality that is external to and superior to them. The word ‘transcendent’ here means in relation to humanity, designating a reality which exceeds us, without however being located elsewhere than in the universe. A transcendence on earth rather than in heaven.

A second conception of transcendence, quite different and even opposed to the first, applies to the God of the major monotheistic religions. It refers simply to the fact that the supreme Being is – contrary to Greek divinity – ‘beyond’ the world which He made, both external to and superior to creation as a whole. Contrary to the Stoic conception of divinity, which merges with the harmony of the natural order, and is consequently not located outside of it, the God of the Jews, Christians and Muslims is entirely ‘supernatural’. Here is a transcendence not merely relative to humanity (like that of the Greeks), but also relative to the universe itself, conceived entirely as a creation whose existence depends upon a Being exterior to it.

A third form of transcendence, different from the two versions described above, can also be formulated. It already takes root in the thought of Kant, and follows its course through the phenomenology of Husserl. It can be summarised in Husserl’s ‘transcendence within immanence’.The formula may not be elegant, but within it is concealed an idea of great profundity. Here is how Husserl himself apparently preferred to describe it to his students – for, like many of the great philosophers, Husserl was first and foremost a remarkable teacher. He would take a cube or rhomboid – a box of matches, for example – and hold it up before his students, making them observe the following: that however we try to arrange the cube in question, one can never see more than three sides at one time, although we know there are in fact six sides. You may well reply, ‘So? Why does this matter, and what can it contribute to philosophical purposes?’ To which there is an answer: that first and last there is no such thing as omniscience, no absolute knowledge, since everything that is visible (the visible as symbolised by the three exposed faces of the cube) rests on a foundation of invisibility (the three hidden faces of the cube). All presence supposes an absence; all immanence supposes a hidden transcendence; all visible sides of an object suppose a side that is invisible.

Clearly this example is no more than metaphorical. What it signifies is that this transcendence is not a new ‘idol’, an invention of metaphysics or belief, nor is it make-believe about a world beyond, the purpose of which is to belittle the real in the name of the ideal. Rather, transcendence is a fact, a deduction, an undeniable dimension of human existence, inscribed at the heart of our common reality. And it is in this respect that transcendence – or, more specifically, the notion of transcendence here-and-now – cannot be merely trodden underfoot by the classic critique of idols as formulated by materialists and other adherents of deconstruction. In this sense, it is not metaphysical, and it is post-Nietzschean.

To define more precisely this new idea of transcendence – before moving on to some examples – a fruitful approach is to reflect, Husserl suggested, on the notion of a horizon. When you open your eyes to the world, objects always offer themselves against a background, and this background, as you proceed further into the world which surrounds us, continually displaces itself rather as the horizon does for a sailor, without ever resolving itself into a final and impassable background. Thus, from background to background, from horizon to horizon, you can never succeed in grasping on to anything which you can hold as a final entity, a supreme Being or a first cause which might guarantee the real in which we are immersed. And it is in this respect, precisely, that there is transcendence, something which always escapes us at the very core of what we are given, of what we see and touch – at the core of immanence itself.

Like the cube, whose several faces I can never see simultaneously, the reality of the world is never presented to me as transparency, as mastery. In other words, if we confine ourselves to the point of view of human finiteness, to the idea – as expressed by Husserl, again – that ‘all consciousness is a consciousness of something’, that all consciousness is therefore limited by a world external to itself and consequently, in this sense, finite; then we must correspondingly admit that human knowledge can never attain to omniscience, can never coincide with the point of view which Christians accord to God.

It is therefore by its refusal of closure, by its rejection of all forms of ‘absolute knowledge’, that this third type of transcendence does indeed seem to be a ‘transcendence within immanence’, willing only to confer rigorous meaning to human experience as formulated by a humanism freed from the illusions of metaphysics. It is truly ‘within me’, in my thought or in my sensibility, that the transcendence of values manifests itself. Although they are situated within me (‘immanent’), everything unfolds nonetheless as if values impose themselves (‘transcendent’) upon my subjectivity from without – as though they come from elsewhere.

Consider for a moment the four great settings in which the fundamental values of human existence are played out: truth, beauty, justice and love. All four of which, whatever the materialists say, remain fundamentally transcendent for the particular individual, for you and me, as for everyone else. Let us simplify a little more: I cannot invent mathematical truths, nor the beauty of a work of art, nor the imperatives of the moral life; and when I ‘fall’ in love, as the phrase so accurately describes it, I cannot choose deliberately to do this. The transcendence of values is in this sense patently real. But it is also housed in concrete experience, not in a metaphysical fiction, nor in the form of an idol such as ‘God’ or ‘Paradise’ or ‘Republic’, or ‘Socialism’. We can construct a ‘phenomenology’ of this experience, a simple description which starts from the sense of an inescapable necessity, from the awareness of not being capable of thinking or feeling differently on a particular subject: I can do nothing about it, 2 + 2 = 4, and this is not a matter of taste or subjective choice. The necessities of which I speak impose themselves on me as if they come from elsewhere, and yet, it is inside myself that this transcendence is present, and palpably so.

In the same way, the beauty of a landscape or a piece of music imposes itself, ‘bowls me over’, transports me, irrespective of choice. And in the same way, I am not at all persuaded by the argument that I merely choose ethical values, that I decide for example to be anti-racist: the truth is rather that I cannot think otherwise, that the idea of a common humanity asserts itself with its attendant baggage of notions of justice and injustice.

There exists, well and truly, a transcendence of values, and this is the proposition embraced by a humanism without metaphysics (as opposed to a materialism which claims to explain everything by reducing everything, and without ever succeeding). Not embraced out of impotence, but in full awareness, because the experience of it is sovereign, and no materialism can arrive at an adequate explanation of it.

But if there is transcendence, why must it be ‘within immanence’? Quite simply, because from this point of view, values are no longer imposed upon us in the name of authority nor deduced from this or that metaphysical or theological fiction. It is true that I discover – rather than invent – the truth of a mathematical proposition, the magnificence of the ocean or the legitimacy of the rights of man, but nonetheless it is unquestionably within me that these things are discovered, and nowhere else. There is no longer a heaven of metaphysical ideas, no God – or at least I am not obliged to think so in order to accept the idea that I am in the presence of values that are at once beyond me, yet nowhere to be found except within me, manifest only inside my consciousness and conscience.

Let us take another example. When I ‘fall’ in love, there is no doubt that, unless my name is Narcissus, I am wholly in thrall to a being exterior to myself, an other who eludes or is distinct from me, and whom I come to depend upon. In this case, too, there is transcendence. But it is also clear that it is in myself that I sense this transcendent reality of the other. It is located, so to speak, in that part of my person that is most intimate and private, in the sphere of feelings or, as we say, in ‘the heart’. One could not find a more beautiful metaphor for immanence than this image of the heart. For the latter is at once the place of transcendence – of love for another as something irreducible to myself – but also of the immanence of love as the emotion most inward to myself. So, transcendence within immanence.

Materialism would reduce my experience of transcendence to the material realities which supposedly underlie it; whereas a humanism which has shed the naïve baggage still carried by modern philosophy (as described earlier), can offer instead a practical description without preconceptions: a ‘phenomenology’ of transcendence, as something settled at the core of my sense of self.

This is therefore why humanist theoria proves itself to be above all a theory of knowledge centred upon self-knowledge or, to use the language of con temporary philosophy, upon ‘auto-reflection’. Contrary to materialism, which as I have suggested never succeeds in thinking its own thought, contemporary humanism sets itself to reflect upon the meaning of its own assertions, to become fully aware of them, to criticise and evaluate its own propositions. The critical spirit which already characterised modern philosophy from Descartes onwards must take a further step: instead of describing others, it will finally and systematically set about describing itself.