Nietzsche’s Critique of Kant’s Priestly Philosophy
Paul S. Loeb
At the start of The Antichrist, Friedrich Nietzsche offers his final assessment of Immanuel Kant’s philosophical achievement: “The Protestant minister is the grandfather of German philosophy. [. . .] Kant’s success is just a theologian’s success” (A 10). Although there has been a lot of discussion recently about the influence of Kant’s critical philosophy on Nietzsche’s evolving thought, very little attention has been paid to this provocative statement. Most historians of philosophy would probably dismiss it as typically hyperbolic and leave it at that. But in this chapter I want to take this statement seriously, and I want to ask to what extent it helps us gain a deeper understanding of Kant’s first Critique and of Nietzsche’s view of the relation between philosophy and religion.
My argument in this chapter is organized as follows. First, I summarize Nietzsche’s genealogy of the Protestant roots of Kant’s idea of a critique of pure reason. Next, I explore Nietzsche’s general account of the priestly type, with a special focus on his claim that this type needs to exert its will to power through lies and deception. After that, I turn to Nietzsche’s earlier text, GM, so as to examine his account there of the historical emergence of philosophers who had to camouflage themselves as priests to avoid being persecuted by the established society. I then return to The Antichrist so as to consider Nietzsche’s view that these philosophers used their natural drives and virtues to defend the priestly lies that they internalized while disguised as priests. Next, I explain why Nietzsche offers Kant as an example of this kind of priestly philosopher. His implied contrast is himself, and other philosophers like himself, whose strength, he says, allowed them to turn their skeptical talents against their internalized priestly lies. I then look to Kant’s debate with Hume in the first Critique as an illustration of Nietzsche’s idea that there must be a confrontation between those weak-willed philosophers whose reason remains corrupted by priestly deception and those strong-minded philosophers who are able to emancipate themselves from priestly manipulation. Finally, I consider how Nietzsche might have criticized Kant’s decision to conclude his first Critique with a moral theology.
1 Kant’s idea of a critique of pure reason
In a strange twist to the conclusion of the Age of Enlightenment, Kant famously declares in his Critique of Pure Reason that he has found it necessary to deny knowledge so as to make room for faith (Bxxx, A745/B773, Kant (1929)).1 What he means by this is that he has devised a new “critical” employment for the human intellect that allows him to demonstrate that this same intellect can never know anything about the world as it really is. Geometers and mathematicians (such as Thales, Euclid, and Descartes) and natural scientists (such as Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton) had all simply assumed that their theories concerned the world as it really is. But Kant argued that these theories actually concerned only the world as it is constructed by the human mind on the basis of some kind of sensory input. For example, Newton believed that he had discovered a law of gravitation that explained and predicted the movements of diverse parts of the mind-independent structure of the universe—the falling apple, the swelling ocean tides, and the orbiting moon. According to Kant, however, what Newton had actually discovered was merely a new law of the human mind that allows us to organize and synthesize diverse sensory inputs into an experiential whole (A256-8/B312-4). Ironically, then, Kant’s “Copernican” revolution in philosophy demoted the Copernican revolution in astronomy from a claim about the spectator-dependent movements of mind-independent celestial bodies to a claim about the human mind’s arrangement of its own representations (Bxvi-xvii, Bxxii n.).2
According to Kant, this “critical” idealism allowed him to make room for faith because no one would now be able to use these mathematically informed scientific theories to challenge faith-based religious and moral claims about the world as it really is—that is, claims about God, freedom, and immortality. He imagines being asked what kind of treasure he has left to posterity with this new invention of a “critical” use of the intellect. How has he benefited humankind by showing that it cannot discover any knowledge about the real world? How has the human intellect profited by demonstrating its own impotence? In reply, Kant cites the influence of Socrates’s elenctic method: “[T]he inestimable benefit, that all objections to morality and religion will be forever silenced in Socratic fashion, namely, by the clearest proof of the ignorance of the opponents” (Bxxxi). This is a benefit to humankind, he argues, because it keeps the schools of philosophy from thinking that they have some special insight into matters of universal human concern—matters that “are equally within the reach of the great multitude (ever to be held by us in the highest esteem)” (Bxxx). When these schools of philosophy therefore limit themselves to studying grounds of proof that are universally comprehensible and sufficient for moral purposes, “then not only do these latter possessions remain undisturbed, but through this very fact they acquire yet greater authority” (Bxxx). From this it follows that the true job of philosophers is to protect the masses, the public, and even the clergy from their own potentially corrupting influence. They must keep themselves under close surveillance to ensure that they do not trespass the rights of speculative reason and start philosophizing about the world as it really is. For this is what leads them to pervert their teachings into universally injurious doctrines like atheism and freethinking (Bxxxiii-xxxv). In perhaps the most startling passage from his new Preface to the first Critique, Kant even suggests that his philosophy should be regarded as a kind of police that will guard against trespassing philosophers who might threaten to destroy the moral employment of pure reason (Bxxv).
2 The Protestant roots of Kant’s idea
Throughout his publishing career, Nietzsche spent more time thinking about Kant than about any other figure in the history of philosophy except Plato and Schopenhauer. But his most intense, sustained, and definitive confrontation with Kant appears in one of the last works he prepared for publication, The Antichrist. Here Nietzsche locates “Kant and so-called German philosophy” in the context of Luther’s Reformation and of “the most unclean kind of Christianity there is, the most incurable, the most irrefutable: Protestantism” (A 61).3 Indeed, Nietzsche writes, it was precisely this Protestant obsession with irrefutability that led German scholars—of whom three-fourths were the sons of Protestant ministers and teachers—to greet Kant’s first Critique with jubilation:
The theologian’s instinct in the German scholar guessed just what was possible once again . . . . A secret path to the old ideal lay open, the concept “true world,” the concept of morality as essence of the world (—these two most malignant errors!) were now once again, thanks to a wily and shrewd skepticism, if not provable, then at least no longer refutable. . . . Reason, the right of reason, does not extend that far. . . . Reality had been made into an “appearance”; a completely mendaciously-fabricated world, that of being, was made into reality. . . . Kant’s success is just a theologian’s success: like Luther, like Leibniz, Kant was one more impediment to an already unsteady German integrity– – (A 10)
According to Nietzsche, that is, Kant’s “critical” idealism was simply a theologically inspired lie. His distinction between the world of things in themselves (the world of morality, God, freedom, and the soul’s immortality) and the world of appearances (the world described by Copernicus and Newton) was merely a means of reinstalling the old theological dichotomy (A 17).4 As with past theologians, the former world is a mendacious fabrication and the latter world is actually the only reality there is. But instead of following past theologians in their futile attempt to prove the existence of this fictitious supernatural world of morality and religion, Kant hit upon the idea of turning the human intellect against itself to prevent it from even wanting to doubt this fictitious world. The key to making this happen was to have reason itself discover that this fictitious world could never be known by reason:
Even Kant, with his categorical imperative, was on the same path: his reason became practical in this matter.—There are questions in which human beings are not entitled to a decision about truth and untruth; all the supreme questions, all the supreme value problems, are beyond human reason. . . . To comprehend the limits of reason—only this is truly philosophy. (A 55)
Or, as Nietzsche puts it in the 1886 Preface to his earlier work Dawn, Kant was so worried about reason’s power to expose the theological fabrication that he directed reason to establish the limits of its own power. Not coincidentally, these were limits that declared precisely this fabrication out of bounds by showing it to be indemonstrable, irrefutable, and incomprehensible:
[I]n order to make room for his “moral realm,” [Kant] found himself obliged to posit an indemonstrable world, a logical “beyond”—it was precisely for this reason that he needed his critique of pure reason! In other words: he wouldn’t have needed it if one thing hadn’t been more important to him than anything else: to render the “moral realm” invulnerable, better yet, incomprehensible to reason—he felt too powerfully just this vulnerability of a moral order of things to an assault by reason! (D P: 3)5
In Nietzsche’s view, then, Kant’s new idea of a critique of pure reason was a kind of intellectual defense system designed to keep logicians, mathematicians, scientists, and especially the schools of philosophy from discovering, exposing, and debunking the lies of his Protestant faith. When Kant said that he was denying knowledge to make room for this faith, what he really meant is that he was prohibiting knowledge to protect these lies. And when he said that his first Critique would serve as a kind of police to keep citizens from doing mutual harm to each other, what he really meant is that it would police the intellectuals in the community, especially the philosophers, so as to keep them from doing harm to the ruling interests of its religious and moral leaders—the priests.
3 Priestly power and priestly lies
In The Antichrist, Nietzsche identifies the priests, the theologians, the priestly type, the priestly peoples, the priestly races, and the priestly organizations, as the source of all the biggest lies and falsehoods in human history. This includes priests in the Eastern traditions as well as in the Western traditions (A 20–23, 55), in ancient times as well as in modern times (A 57–61), and pagan priests as well as Christian priests (A 55–57). According to Nietzsche, the whole key to understanding priests and founders of religions is to recognize that they are “gruesome hybrids of sickness and will to power” (EH P: 4). They are filled with an overwhelming lust to rule (A 26, 42) at the same time as their distressed physiological health robs them of the strength needed to simply command and compel obedience. As Nietzsche explains in GM this psychological dilemma of being impotent while desperately craving power makes priests evil enemies and great haters:
From the start there has been something unhealthy in such priestly aristocracies and in the habits prevailing there, that shy away from action and are partly brooding, partly emotionally explosive, and whose consequence seems to be an intestinal disease and neurasthenia that has almost invariably afflicted priests throughout the ages. [. . .] As is well known, priests are the most evil enemies—but why is this so? Because they are the most impotent. From their impotence their hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests, also the most ingenious haters—compared with the spirit of priestly revenge all other spirit barely merits consideration. (GM I: 6–7)
The priests’ solution to this dilemma can be found in the fact that their will to power prevents them from admitting to themselves that they are unhealthy and impotent. According to Nietzsche, lying is “wanting not to see what you see, wanting not to see it the way you see it,” and “the most common lie is the one you tell yourself” (A 55). So priests lie to themselves about their illness and “instinctively deny that sickness is sickness” (A 51):
“Faith” means not wanting to know what is true. The pietist, the priest of both sexes, is false because he is sick: his instinct demands that truth not be conceded at any point. (A 52)
More extravagantly, priests are driven by their lust for power into deceiving themselves that the entire despised world in which they are sick and impotent does not really exist and that the “true” world, a preferable world they mendaciously fabricate, is a world in which they are not sick or impotent at all:
This purely fictitious world distinguishes itself from the world of dreams, very much to its disadvantage, by the fact that the latter mirrors reality, whereas the former falsifies, devalues, and negates reality. . . . this whole fictitious world is rooted in a hatred of the natural (of reality!), it is the expression of a profound dissatisfaction with reality. . . . But this explains everything. Who are the only people with a motive to lie their way out of reality? Those who suffer from it. But to suffer from reality means to be a piece of reality that is a casualty . . . (A15)
However, once priests have come to believe the lies they have told themselves, they discover that they can tell these same lies to others with perfect innocence and honesty (A 55; GM III: 19). And they discover as well that when they do this they are able to gain the kind of power over others that they have always so desperately craved. In particular, as Nietzsche explains at more length in his GM, they are able to gain power over other sick people who need to hear just these same kind of lies. Because priests are hybrids of sickness and great will to power, they are instinctively drawn into the role of shepherds who form, organize, guide, and tyrannize herds of people who are sick like themselves but who have very little will to power:
[A]nd now we have and hold in both hands the meaning of ascetic priests. We have to regard ascetic priests as the predestined saviors, shepherds, and advocates of the sick herds: only then do we understand their monstrous historical mission. Dominion over the suffering is their kingdom, that is where their instinct directs them, in this they possess their most distinctive art, their mastery, their kind of happiness. They must be sick themselves, they must be fundamentally related to the sick and the misfits in order to understand them; but they must also be strong, master of themselves even more than of others, that is, unscathed especially in their will to power, so as to be trusted and feared by the sick, so that they can be their support, resistance, prop, compulsion, taskmaster, tyrant, and god. (GM III: 15; cf. also GM III: 13, 18 and A 42)
According to Nietzsche, the vast majority of human beings are sick, so priests are able to gain immense power over most of the human population (A 17, 51). To their lies about the “true” world in which they and their followers are not sick at all, they now add a new lie about supremely powerful inhabitants of this world who speak directly to the priests and who command total submission and obedience to the priests. Since priests do not have the strength to command this on their own, they aim to convince others that they are in direct touch with supernatural rulers who do have this strength. One of their most effective means of doing this is to pretend that they have found a “holy” book, which they themselves have secretly written, in which these “divine” commandments are “revealed.”
In The Antichrist, Nietzsche offers “the Jewish priesthood” as an outstanding illustration of all these general points:
[A] parasitical type of person, thriving only at the expense of all healthy forms of life, the priest, uses the name of God in vain: he calls a state of affairs in which the priest determines the value of things “the kingdom of God”; he calls the means by which such a state is attained or maintained “the will of God”; with cold-blooded cynicism he measures peoples, ages, individuals, according to whether they profited or resisted the overlordship of the priests. [. . .] One step further: the “will of God,” that is, the conditions for the preservation of priestly power, must be known—to this end a “revelation” is required. In plain language: a great literary forgery becomes necessary, a “holy scripture” is discovered. [. . .] Disobedience of God, that is, of the priest, of “the law,” is now called “sin”; the means for “reconciliation with God” are, as is fitting, means that merely guarantee a still more thorough submission to the priest: the priest alone “redeems.” . . . Psychologically considered, “sins” become indispensable in any society organized by priests: they are the real levers of power, the priest lives on the sins, it is essential for him that people “sin.” . . . Supreme principle: “God forgives those who repent”—in plain language: those who submit to the priest. (A 26)
4 Priestly anti-intellectualism
According to Nietzsche, priests also know, on an instinctive and unconscious level, that they must do all they can to prevent the detection and exposure of the lies they have told themselves and their sick flock. Such exposure would shatter their falsified self-image and ruin their dominance over the human herd. So they add the further lie that it is not possible for them to lie because they are speaking about matters that are beyond human comprehension:
Moral: priests do not lie—the question “true” or “untrue” in the matters that priests speak about does not permit any lying at all. For in order to lie one would have to be able to decide what is true here. But this is just what human beings cannot do; so the priest is only God’s mouthpiece.—Such a priestly syllogism is by no means only Jewish and Christian; the right to lie and the shrewdness of “revelation” belong to the priestly type, to the priests of décadence as much as to the priests of paganism. (A 55)
Of course, it is not true that the subject matters of priestly lies are beyond human comprehension. So the priests must lie again, claiming that the supernatural rulers forbid the priests’ followers from questioning anything they say: “But when faith is needed above all else, then reason, knowledge, and inquiry must be discredited: the path to truth becomes the forbidden path” (A 23). In an extended set of passages toward the end of The Antichrist (A 47–49), Nietzsche outlines the priests’ mortal hostility against “the wisdom of this world,” which means natural science. The priests are especially opposed to philology and medicine because both can lead to emancipation from the priestly rule. The former can expose all the swindles in the priests’ “revealed” texts, while the latter can detect the priests’ incurable physiological sickness. As an illustration, Nietzsche offers his interpretation of the Hebrew Genesis story that begins what he calls “the priestly book par excellence”:
[I]t is all over with priests and gods if humans become scientific!—Moral: science is the forbidden in itself—it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the germ of all sins, the original sin. This alone is morality.—“Thou shalt notknow”—the rest follows. [. . .] all thoughts are bad thoughts . . . . Human beings shall not think. (A 48)
Finally, Nietzsche explains how it is that priests get people to stop thinking.6 Their strategy, he argues, is to teach their followers the new lie that their reason, their thinking skills, and their intellectual values are all something sinful. Priests are especially focused on teaching this lie to those of their followers who have the strongest and healthiest intellects and who are therefore best positioned to see through their lies. Although the priests cannot intellectually overpower these followers, they can use their priestly lies to manipulate them into cursing their own intellects.7 Here are a couple of passages from The Antichrist in which Nietzsche cites especially the Christian theological teachings that inform Kant’s philosophy:
[Christianity] has corrupted the reason of even the intellectually strongest natures by teaching human beings to feel the supreme values of intellectuality as sinful, as misleading—as temptations. The most pitiful example—the corruption of Pascal, who believed his reason had been corrupted by original sin when it had been corrupted only by his Christianity!—(A 5)
Christianity also stands opposed to all intellectual well-being—it is only able to employ sick reason as Christian reason, it sides with everything idiotic, it utters a curse against the “intellect,” against the superbia of the healthy intellect. Because sickness belongs to the essence of Christianity, the typical Christian condition, “faith,” also has to be a form of sickness, all straight, honest, scientific paths to knowledge have to be rejected by the church as forbidden paths. Doubt is already a sin . . . (A 52)
Before turning next to Nietzsche’s concept of priestly philosophers, it is important to understand the source of his objection to priestly lies and deceptions. Obviously, we cannot interpret this as a moral objection to lying in general, since Nietzsche would then be identifying with the priestly type that he thinks is the originator of all moral thinking—including the moral prohibition against deception and self-deception (GS 344; GM III: 27). Indeed, one of Nietzsche’s insights is that priests are always forced into a hypocritical violation of their own moral prohibition against lying. This is because they need to resort to the “holy” lie or pia fraus in order to manipulate people into behaving morally (TI “Improvers” 5; AC 55). Nor should we think that Nietzsche’s objection to priestly deception derives from a commitment to the unconditional value of truth. For this would also mean identifying him with the priestly type that he thinks is the originator and chief proponent of the ascetic ideal (GM III: 11, 24). Finally, we can rule out the idea that Nietzsche objects to priestly lies because they are the means by which priests achieve bad ends. This is because he doesn’t think that all priests use their lies to accomplish objectionable goals. Nietzsche cites the pagan priests, in particular the priests who wrote the laws of Manu, as using their lies to accomplish good life-affirming ends that contrast sharply with the bad life-negating ends of the decadent Christian priests (A 55–58).
So, leaving all these plausible suggestions aside, why does Nietzsche object to priestly lies? The answer, as is usually the case with Nietzsche’s criticisms in his mature philosophy, has to do with origins. In his view, priests simply don’t have the strength that is needed to command obedience, so they are forced to tell lies that will trick people into obeying them. Thus, priestly deception always has its origin in the priestly type’s weakness and impotence. Moreover, as he announces at the start of The Antichrist, everything that comes from weakness is bad (A 2, 57). Thus, Nietzsche doesn’t object to lying in general, or on moral grounds, or because he is driven by the ascetic will to truth, or because he thinks priestly lying always has bad consequences. He only criticizes the kind of deception, like the priests’, that is motivated by weakness and impotence, and he does so on the grounds that it contradicts his power-centered values. Elsewhere he praises lies, deception, and manipulation that are inspired by strength and power—as for example with Machiavelli’s paradigm princely warrior type, Cesare Borgia (A 46, 61).
5 Philosophical virtues and priestly philosophers
According to Nietzsche, there has always been a close relationship between the priestly and philosophical types of human beings. Among nearly all peoples, he writes, the philosopher has been just a further development of the priestly type (A 12). Here Nietzsche is alluding back to his account in GM of the historical emergence of philosophers (GM III: 5–10). From the start, he argues, philosophers were dealing with emergency conditions in which their survival was imperiled because their typical drives and virtues posed a danger to the established society and its traditions:
Draw up a list of the separate drives and virtues of the philosophers—their drive to doubt, their drive to deny, their (“ephectic”) drive to wait and see, their drive to analyze, their drive to investigate, to seek, to dare, their drive to compare, to balance, their will to neutrality and objectivity, their will to every “ sine ira et studio”—is it not already sufficiently clear that for the longest time all of them contravened the basic demands of morality and conscience? (not to mention reason generally, which Luther loved to call “Mistress Clever the clever whore”). That a philosopher, if he were to become aware of himself, would have been compelled to feel himself to be precisely the embodiment of “nitimur in vetitum ”—and consequently guarded against “feeling himself,” against becoming aware of himself? (GM III: 9)
Thus, in order to be able to exist at all, philosophers had to avoid self-awareness and to pretend to themselves and to others that they were something other than what they were. More specifically, Nietzsche writes, “at first the philosophical spirit always had to use as a disguise and cocoon the previously established types of the contemplative human being—as priest, magician, soothsayer, in general as a religious human being” (GM III: 10). This priestly camouflage served philosophers well because both types share similar ascetic tendencies and preferences. For example, they both tend to be hermits, they both tend to be chaste, and they both have little taste for fame and luxury. But Nietzsche is quick to point out that the two types have very different reasons for their ascetic orientations. In the case of the priestly type, these represent a misguided idea of a remedy for their illness (GM I: 6) and a genuine rejection of the real world in favor of a mendaciously fabricated world. But in the case of the philosophical type, these represent its “optimum of favorable conditions under which it can completely expend its strength and achieve its maximal feeling of power” (GM III: 7). In choosing an ascetic lifestyle, philosophers are not rejecting the real world, but are rather simply affirming themselves—their independence, their freedom, their creative work (GM III: 7–8).
Nevertheless, Nietzsche argues, from the beginning of history until the most modern times, the philosophers’ will to survive has required them to convince themselves and others that their typical ascetic inclinations were exactly the same as those of the priests: “[T]he [priestly] ascetic ideal for a long time served philosophers as a form in which to appear, as a precondition of existence—they had to represent it so as to be able to be philosophers, they had to believe in it so as to be able to represent it” (GM III: 10). Notice Nietzsche’s emphasis here on the philosopher’s need to believe in the priestly ascetic ideal so as to be able to be a philosopher. This is important because it means that most philosophers throughout history who succeeded in being philosophers were priestly philosophers, that is, philosophers who believed in the priest’s reasonsfor their ascetic orientations. Thus, the emergency conditions surrounding the historical emergence of philosophers were the same conditions that led to the emergence of priestly philosophers who misunderstood themselves and their own reasons for having ascetic inclinations:
The characteristic aloof stance of philosophers, world-denying, hostile to life, disbelieving the senses, de-sensualized, a stance which has been maintained into the most recent times and in the process almost gained currency as the philosophical attitude as such—it is above all a result of the emergency conditions under which philosophy emerged and survived at all: since for the longest time philosophy would not have been possible at all on earth without an ascetic wrap and cloak, without an ascetic self-misunderstanding. (GM III: 10)
It is only now, Nietzsche writes, in the most modern times, that it is perhaps finally possible that philosophers like himself (A 1, 13, 36) are able to leave behind their grim and repulsive priestly cocoons and unveil themselves as what they really are:
Has this really changed? Has the colorful and dangerous winged creature, that “spirit” which this caterpillar concealed within itself, really been defrocked at last and released into the light, thanks to a sunnier, warmer, brighter world? Has enough pride, daring, courage, self-confidence, will of the spirit, will to responsibility, freedom of will already become available today, so that henceforth on earth “the philosopher” is really—possible? (GM III: 10)
On Nietzsche’s account, then, the history of philosophy is a record of several layers of self-deception. In order to survive, philosophers convinced themselves that they were priests. And to do this properly, they convinced themselves that the priests’ self-deceiving beliefs were true. Nevertheless, the figures in this history were still philosophers, not priests, and they possessed all the appropriate philosophical drives and virtues. Priestly philosophers were different than priests because priests don’t question, doubt, criticize, analyze, investigate, reason, prove, or refute. But they were also different than true philosophers because they did not employ these drives and virtues for their own sake, but only to defend the priestly lies which they needed to believe while camouflaged as priests. Thus, instead of questioning, doubting, criticizing, and denying the priestly lies of supernatural beings and alternative realities, priestly philosophers aimed to prove these lies and to refute the doubts of anyone who challenged these lies. Similarly, instead of asserting and promoting the value of their own intellectual capacities, priestly philosophers were led to question, doubt, criticize, deny, and refute this value.
In this way, Nietzsche suggests, philosophers who internalized their protective priestly facade also absorbed the priestly type’s anti-intellectualism and became philosophical anti-intellectuals. To be sure, this new kind of anti-intellectualism was somewhat dangerous for the priests, since the attempt to prove the priestly lies also raised questions about the veracity of these lies and stimulated a competitive urge to refute these proofs. But this development was also incredibly useful for the priests because the priestly philosophers were now challenging, undermining, and corrupting their own dangerous gifts and talents. On their own, priests would have been easily defeated by the critical abilities and passions of true philosophers. But with the help of the co-opted priestly philosophers who criticized their own kind, the priests obtained an incredibly effective means of countering this threat and of extending their power further than ever before. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche mentions this kind of alliance as structures of philosophical-priestly dominion (philosophisch-priesterlichen Herrschafts-Gebilde) (A 55).
6 Kant the priestly philosopher
Returning now to Kant, we can see why Nietzsche thinks he was a priestly philosopher. In fact, in both places where he offers his account of the priestly philosopher, Nietzsche cites Kant as his chief example. After finishing his account in GM, he imagines what it would be like if ascetic priest’s “incarnate will to contradiction” were induced to philosophize. He then offers two illustrations, the ascetics of the Vedanta philosophy and Kant:
For example, like the ascetics of the Vedanta philosophy, it will downgrade physicality to an illusion; likewise pain, multiplicity, the whole conceptual antithesis “subject” and “object”—errors, nothing but errors! To renounce belief in one’s ego, to deny one’s own “reality”—what a triumph!—now no longer merely over the senses, over what appears to the eyes, but a much higher kind of triumph, a violation and cruelty against reason: a voluptuous delight that reaches its pinnacle when reason’s ascetic self-contempt, self-mockery decrees: “there is a realm of truth and of being, but reason is excluded from it!” . . . (Incidentally: even in the Kantian concept of the “intelligible character of things” something remains of this lascivious ascetic discord that loves to turn reason against reason: for “intelligible character” signifies in Kant that things are so constituted that the intellect comprehends just enough of them to know that for the intellect they are—utterly incomprehensible.) (GM III: 12)
Nietzsche’s critique of Kant here is not as pointed, as extensive, or as profound as his later remarks in The Antichrist. Nevertheless, with his account of the Vedanta philosophy, he offers a clear parallel to Kant’s strategy in the first Critique of protecting the priestly fabrication of a “true” supernatural world of religion and morality by inventing a theory of “critical” idealism that downgrades everything in the natural world to an arrangement of mental representations. In response to this comparison, Kant would say that he hasn’t shown the actual world to be a mere illusion, as the priestly philosopher “bishop Berkeley” did with his empiricist subjective idealism. He would say that he was concerned with a priori representations like space and time that are necessarily shared by all human beings (A28–30/B44–45, B69–71). So Nietzsche should argue more precisely that Kant, as a priestly philosopher, downgrades the actual world to a collectively experienced virtual reality.
In this passage, Nietzsche also describes Kant’s philosophical anti-intellectualism. As we have seen, the ascetic priests are anti-intellectual in the sense that they fear and despise human reason as a kind of threat to the priestly lies that enable them to stay in power. But they are not philosophers, so they don’t express this anti-intellectualism in intellectual terms. This is where Kant, the priestly philosopher, makes an innovation: his philosophical inclinations lead him to use reason, but his priestly indoctrination leads him to turn this reason against itself. As Nietzsche puts it, Kant uses his reason to argue that the human intellect comprehends just enough about the “real” world to know that it cannot comprehend anything about it. In this way, the priestly philosopher employs his philosophical propensity, in a self-mocking and self-contemptuous fashion, to reinforce the priests’ prohibition against the human intellect knowing anything about the fictitious supernatural world they have invented.8
The other place where Nietzsche cites Kant as his best example of the priestly philosopher is the section in The Antichrist where he says that among nearly all peoples the philosopher is merely the next development of the priestly type (A 12). What he means by this, as we have seen, is somewhat complicated. He means, first of all, that the priestly type preexisted the historical emergence of philosophers. And, second, he means that philosophers took on the protective camouflage of this priestly type so that their natural skeptical tendencies would not seem threatening to the established order. In this section, Nietzsche contrasts “a few skeptics—the decent type in the history of philosophy” with Kant and the rest of the canonical figures—all of whom, he claims, “are ignorant of the basic requirements of intellectual integrity.” Nietzsche’s suggestion here is that true philosophers like himself no longer believe in the priestly lies that came along with their priestly disguise. They are decent and intellectually honest because their natural skeptical tendencies are no longer being used to defend these priestly lies but rather to investigate, expose, and refute them. Later in The Antichrist, Nietzsche reintroduces these intellectually honest philosophers, identifying them with “strong, emancipated intellectuals” (des starken, des frei-gewordnen Geistes) and even with his alter ego Zarathustra:9
One should not let oneself be misled: great intellectuals are skeptics. Zarathustra is a skeptic. The strength, the freedom that comes from the strength and super-strength of the mind, proves itself through skepticism. [. . .] An intellectual who wants greatness, who also wills the means to it, is necessarily a skeptic. Freedom from every sort of conviction is part of strength, being able to see freely . . . . Grand passion, the foundation and the force of his being, even more enlightened, even more despotic than he is himself, takes his whole intellect [Intellekt] into its service; it makes him unhesitating; it gives him the courage even for unholy means; it allows him convictions under certain circumstances. Conviction as a means: there is much that is achieved only by means of a conviction. Grand passion uses, uses up convictions, it does not submit to them—it knows itself sovereign. (A 54)10
Here, that is, Nietzsche implies that Kant and the rest of the canonical philosophers remained priestly because they did not have the strength of mind needed to be able to see freely and because they did not have the grand passion that would put their whole intellect to use.11 In the rest of this section, Nietzsche implies further that these philosophers were actually weak-minded and weak-willed and that this is why they continued to need their faith and their obedience to the priestly rule.12 They were dependent and self-abnegating philosophers who prospered under priestly compulsion and who needed priests to use them up as a means. So they were always on the side of priests no matter what and they had a strict and necessary priestly perspective in all questions of value. Instead of unleashing their natural skeptical talents and freeing themselves from their self-imposed bondage to priestly lies, they became advocates of these priestly lies and enemies of the truth.
7 Kant’s criticism versus Hume’s skepticism
Nietzsche’s praise of philosophical skeptics might seem odd in connection with his earlier description of Kant as a kind of skeptic (A 10). But, as we have seen, this earlier description refers to a kind of skepticism that can be traced back to Kant’s Protestant obsession with irrefutability. We should also recall that Kant’s most important skeptical opponent in the Critique is his Enlightenment counterpart, David Hume (A764–68/B792–96). In the context of Nietzsche’s critique, we should therefore read this book as a struggle for power between the corrupted skepticism of the priestly philosopher Kant and the liberated skepticism of the genuine philosopher Hume.13 In this book, that is, Kant initiates a systematic “critical” doubt regarding the pioneering doubts raised by Hume against the foundations of the Christian belief system (A758–64/B786–92).14 This strategy comes into play explicitly in the second half of the Critique that is devoted to the transcendental ideas of God, freedom, and immortality. But the strategy also informs the first half of the book, insofar as Kant’s arguments in the second half rely on his earlier results. Or rather, as Nietzsche would say, these earlier results were concocted by Kant with his later strategy in mind (D P: 3; TI “Skirmishes” 16).
With respect to the transcendental idea of God, Kant rehearses Hume’s skeptical critique of the argument from design.15 His direct response is that this critique is successful if it is targeted at a misguided empirical conception of God, but that it cannot in any way affect the properly metaphysical conception of a God that is inaccessible to human experience. Or, put in Nietzsche’s terms, Kant simply reasserts the priestly lie of some kind of incomprehensible supernatural existence in order to refute Hume’s naturalistic doubts about the anthropomorphic features of a divine creator and ruler of the universe. At a deeper level, Nietzsche would argue, Kant is especially concerned to cut off the skeptical suspicion that the impotent and weak-minded Judeo-Christian priests have projected themselves into the figure of an omnipotent and omniscient supernatural ruler who commands total obedience to their own priestly rule.16 The cost of this defensive strategy for Kant is that he must concede to Hume that it is impossible to prove such an incomprehensible supernatural existence. Of course, for Hume the choice between a flawed anthropomorphic God and a perfect incomprehensible God is supposed to pose a fatal dilemma for the argument from design. But Kant is happy to pick the latter horn and even to join Hume’s further skeptical efforts to undermine the two most celebrated a priori proofs of God’s existence, the ontological and cosmological arguments (A592–620/B620–48). As Nietzsche writes in The Antichrist, Kant’s success here is merely a Protestant theologian’s success: thanks to his wily and shrewd skepticism, God’s existence, if not provable, is at least no longer refutable (A 10). Thus, as a priestly philosopher, Kant’s anti-intellectual skepticism leads him to argue that the priestly lie of a supernatural guarantor of priestly power is immune to any rational treatment and therefore safe from Hume’s irreligious skeptical assaults.
With respect to the transcendental idea of immortality, Kant reviews Hume’s skeptical critique of the claims that there exists an immaterial human soul, that this soul is separable from the body and can survive the body’s death, and that this soul will be appropriately rewarded and punished in some eternal future state. Kant’s response is that Hume’s critique is successful if by the human soul we mean, as Hume does, the object of psychological introspection. But he argues that this is not at all what we should mean when we speak of these various doctrines, but rather only the metaphysical self, the “intelligible character,” which is inaccessible to human experience and therefore irrefutable. Or, put in Nietzsche’s terms, Kant simply reasserts the priests’ lie that their followers have supernatural souls which survive the death of their bodies in order to be eternally rewarded or punished in accordance with their obedience to the priestly rule during their earthly lives. At a deeper level, Nietzsche would argue, Kant is especially concerned to divert the skeptical suspicion that the impotent priests have simply invented a fictional means of enticing and threatening their followers into self-monitoring obedience. This is because they have no way to keep track of all their followers’ thoughts and actions and no way to appropriately reward or punish their follower’s selves and bodies while they are alive.17 Hume hints at this point in his essay on the immortality of the soul:
There arise, indeed, in some minds, some unaccountable terrors with regard to futurity: But these would quickly vanish, were they not artificially fostered by precept and education. And those, who foster them; what is their motive? Only to gain a livelihood, and to acquire power and riches in this world. Their very zeal and industry, therefore, are an argument against them. (Hume 1985: 599)
Nietzsche makes the same point much more explicitly in The Antichrist: “‘[I]mmortality of the soul,’ the ‘soul’ itself; they are instruments of torture, they are systems of cruelties by virtue of which the priest became master, remained master” (A 38; also A 41–43). Again, the cost of this defensive strategy for Kant is that he must concede to Hume that it is impossible to prove any of these claims about the human soul. But, again, Kant is happy to do this, and he is happy to join Hume in his efforts to undermine all past a priori attempts to prove these claims. And again, thanks to his wily and shrewd skepticism, Kant argues that these claims, if not provable, are at least no longer refutable (A741–42/B769–70). Which means, in Nietzsche’s terms, that Kant, the priestly philosopher, was determined to use his enslaved skeptical intellect to safeguard the levers of priestly power from the assaults of Hume’s liberated skeptical intellect.
8 Hume’s interruption of Kant’s dogmatic slumber
Freedom is the third transcendental idea and, in Kant’s view, the most endangered by Hume’s skeptical doubts. This is because Kant thinks that freedom means a different kind of causality than the causality of nature.18 In his Preface to the Prolegomena, Kant famously says that Hume’s doubt about causality awoke him from his dogmatic slumber (cf. also A757/B785). The surface meaning of this remark, as he explains, is that he had always taken for granted the idea that we can have knowledge about the world independently of experience. So Hume’s doubt about our a priori causal knowledge led him to wonder about all the rest of our claims to such a priori knowledge and from there to conceive his idea of a critique of pure reason (B4–5, B19–20, A760/B788). However, with Nietzsche’s critique in mind, we can now understand Kant’s famous remark to have a deeper underlying meaning that does indeed specifically concern the issue of causality. What Kant really meant is that he was feeling secure about his religious and moral convictions until the moment when he encountered Hume’s skeptical doubt about any kind of causality other than the one we derive from experience. This is because his entire system of Christian beliefs depends on the priestly lie of an imaginary causality that can never be derived from experience. As Nietzsche writes in The Antichrist,
In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. Nothing but imaginary causes (“God,” “soul,” “I,” “spirit,” “free will”—or even “unfree will”); nothing but imaginary effects (“sin,” “redemption,” “grace,” “punishment,” “forgiveness of sins”). Relations between imaginary beings (“God,” “spirits,” “souls”); an imaginary natural science (anthropocentric; total absence of the concept of natural causes). (A 15)
In fact, Nietzsche argues, the Christian priestly lie about God dispensing rewards and punishments to morally free agents was invented in opposition to all previous conceptions of natural causality and in support of a new kind of “anti-natural” causality that then undergirds everything else that is unnatural:
[The concept of God] becomes a tool in the hands of priestly agitators, who now interpret all happiness as reward, all unhappiness as punishment for disobeying God, for “sin”: that most mendacious mode of interpretation, of a supposed “moral world order,” through which the natural concept, “cause” and “effect,” is turned upside down once and for all. When they use reward and punishment to purge natural causality from the world, they then need an anti-natural causality: now everything else that is unnatural follows. (A 25)
Thus, Nietzsche would argue, Kant understood what the first Judeo-Christian priests warned about at the start of their Bible—that the one great danger to the entire edifice of Christian priestly lies would be the restoration of a sound and scientific conception of causality:
The beginning of the Bible contains the entire psychology of the priest.—The priest knows only the one great danger: that is science—the sound concept of cause and effect. [. . .] The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrine of “grace,” of “redemption,” of “forgiveness”—lies through and through and without any psychological reality—were invented to destroy people’s causal sense: they are an attempt to assassinate the concept of cause and effect! [. . .] When the natural consequences of an action are no longer “natural,” but are rather conceived as effected by the conceptual specters of superstition, by “God,” by “spirits,” by “souls,” as exclusively “moral” consequences, as reward, punishment, warning, lesson, then the precondition of knowledge has been destroyed—then the greatest crime against humanity has been committed. (A 49; cf. also TI “Errors” 1, 2 and 6)
What so alarmed Kant, then, is the fact that Hume had used his philosophical propensity for skeptical questioning to liberate himself from the priestly lie of anti-natural causality. From Kant’s perspective as a priestly philosopher, Hume’s effort to reinstate a purely experiential concept of causality was a dagger aimed at the heart of the Christian system of priestly deceptions. This is the secret reason why Kant was so proud of his “refutation” of Hume’s doubt (Prolegomena §§27–30).19 Using his own philosophical talent for skeptical analysis, Kant challenged Hume’s experiential derivation of causality by introducing an a priori concept of causality that dictates the necessary and irreversible temporal order of our mental representations (A189–211/B232–56). But this a priori concept can apply only to our collectively experienced virtual reality. So the causality of nature that we experience, and that science formulates as a law, can never concern the world as it really is. This means that neither experience nor science can contradict or refute the transcendental idea that a person’s timeless “intelligible character” is free to act in such a way that it can be praised or blamed for the morality of its actions.20 Hence the causality of freedom lies beyond the limits of human reason and beyond the possibility of refutation. Again, in line with his wily and shrewd skepticism, Kant is eager to add that this also means that the transcendental idea of freedom can never be rationally demonstrated. But he argues that this is not a problem, because our consciousness of morality’s authority is all that is needed to show the reality of this idea (Bxxv–xxix, A806–808/B833–36). In reply, Nietzsche would, of course, challenge Kant’s conviction that we must recognize and admit this authority. He would argue that Kant’s supposedly universal and ahistorical morality was actually a system of vengeful values mendaciously fabricated by the Hebrew priests of antiquity (GM I; A 24–25, 45).
9 Kant’s moral theology
As a result of these three skeptical rebuttals of Hume’s skeptical challenges, the priestly philosopher Kant feels that he is entitled to conclude the whole Critique of Pure Reason with the following “moral theology” (Moraltheologie) that unifies his three transcendental ideas of God, freedom, and immortality:21
Morality, by itself, constitutes a system. Happiness, however, does not do so, save in so far as it is distributed in exact proportion to morality. But this is possible only in the intelligible world, under a wise author and ruler. Such a ruler, together with life in such a world, which we must regard as a future world, reason finds itself constrained to assume; otherwise it would have to regard the moral laws as empty figments of the brain, since without this postulate the necessary consequence which it itself connects with these laws could not follow. Hence also everyone regards the moral laws as commands; and this the moral laws could not be if they did not connect a priori suitable consequences with their rules, and thus carry with them promises and threats. But this again they could not do, if they did not reside in a necessary being, as the supreme good, which alone can make such a purposive unity possible. (A811–12/B839–40)
Put in Nietzsche’s terms, Kant’s moral theology is his philosophical representation of the ideological mechanism whereby priests ensure their followers’ obedience. The moral laws are, of course, whatever the priests command. But the priests know that their commands have no authority unless they are accompanied by promises of happiness delivered, or threats of happiness withheld, in exact correspondence to their followers’ obedience or disobedience. Since the priests don’t have the knowledge or the power to guarantee this kind of reward or punishment in real life, they convince their followers that an omniscient and omnipotent projection of themselves will guarantee this in a fictional future world. Also, it is important to priests that their followers don’t feel oppressed by their commands. So they convince them that their obedience is actually freedom, especially when it contradicts their own desires. Kant even imagines the case of a person who is completely indifferent to all moral laws and argues that “enough remains to make him fear the existence of a divine being and a future life.” This is because such a man “at least cannot pretend that there is any certainty that there is no such being and no such future life” since “he would have to prove the impossibility of both, which assuredly no reasonable person can undertake to do” (A829–30/B857–58). Or, put in Nietzsche’s terms, as long as the priests are convincing enough with their fictional threats, they can at least instill fear in those who are reluctant to recognize their authority.
Having explained this all-important concluding moral theology, Kant considers a potential complaint about the incredibly difficult intellectual work he has just finished in the Critique of Pure Reason:
But, it will be said, is this all that pure reason achieves in opening up prospects beyond the limits of experience? nothing more than two articles of belief [in God and a future life]? surely the common understanding could have achieved as much, without appealing to philosophers for counsel in the matter!
Kant’s surprising answer provides strong evidence for Nietzsche’s theory about the priestly character of his philosophy:
Do you really require that an item of knowledge which concerns all people should transcend the common understanding, and should only be revealed to you by philosophers? Precisely what you find fault with is the best confirmation of the correctness of the above assertions. For we have thereby revealed to us, what could not at the start have been foreseen, namely, that in matters which concern all people without distinction nature is not guilty of any partial distribution of her gifts, and that in regard to the essential ends of human nature the highest philosophy cannot advance further than is possible under the guidance which nature has bestowed even upon the most ordinary understanding. (A830–31/B858–59)
Here, that is, Kant reveals two key features of his anti-intellectualist conception of philosophy. The first is that philosophy’s most important function is to serve the interests of religion and morality (that is, the ruling interests of the priests) and that the best way it can do this is to defend religious and moral beliefs (that is, priestly lies and commands) by throwing skeptical doubt on any skeptical criticism of these beliefs. In other words, the primary mission of philosophy is to protect the priestly rule from philosophy. What this means, then, is that all of philosophy’s intellectual work, including Kant’s, derives its value from the role it can play in defending religion and morality from precisely this kind of intellectual work. Hence Kant’s second point above, that when it comes to the most important matters, even the very best philosopher can do no better, and has no more special aptitude, than the most ordinary human intellect.22
10 Conclusion
In this chapter, I have outlined Nietzsche’s genealogical framework for understanding Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as an expression of priestly philosophy. The focus of this framework is Kant’s strategy for rendering his religious beliefs irrefutable. According to Nietzsche, these beliefs and this obsession with irrefutability can be traced back to Kant’s Protestant faith. But Kant didn’t understand, or didn’t want to understand, that his religious beliefs were all lies invented by priests to help them secure and maintain their power over their followers. They were lies about a supernatural world inhabited by an omnipotent and omniscient supernatural ruler who dispenses a reward of supernatural happiness to the supernatural souls of the priests’ followers in exchange for their “freely” chosen “moral” obedience to the priestly rule. To protect these lies from being exposed, the priests told a further lie in which the supernatural ruler prohibits any skeptical thinking on the part of human beings—especially with respect to the subject matter of the priestly lies. According to Nietzsche, the reason Kant believed in these lies can be traced back to the historical emergence of priestly philosophers—that is, philosophers who had to pretend to be priests in order to survive. Some philosophers, like David Hume, were strong enough that their skeptical talents allowed them to see through the priestly lies that came with this pretense. But others were too weak and weak-willed to liberate their own minds, so they turned their skeptical skills and virtues toward the task of defending their priestly convictions. In Kant’s case, this defense consisted in the anti-intellectualist idea of having human reason prohibit itself from pursuing any inquiry into the priestly lies. Indeed, in the Critique of Pure Reason, we find Kant using just such a defensive strategy against Hume’s skeptical challenges to the priestly lies about God, freedom, and immortality. By convincing philosophers like Hume to monitor, censor, and even disable their own stronger skeptical talents, Kant hoped to come out on top as their critical judge and philosophical master (A751–54/B779–82). Despite his intricate, subtle, and sophisticated argumentative skills, Kant simply did not have the strength, curiosity, or courage to see through the priestly lies he had inherited and internalized. Or perhaps he needed to believe in these lies just like the priests did, because he was just as unhealthy and impotent as they were.
This critique of Kant’s priestly philosophy offers us some important insights into Nietzsche’s view of the relation between philosophy and religion. When Kant says that he needed to deny knowledge to make room for faith, this is usually interpreted as his attempt to reconcile the competing claims of philosophy and science, on the one hand, and religion and morality, on the other. On this reading, Kant was not joining the counter-Enlightenment movement, or initiating a new backlash against the Enlightenment, but simply moderating its critical scope so as to do justice to the claims of both sides.23 But Nietzsche rejects this reading altogether. He argues that Kant’s denial of knowledge is much more radical than it looks and is in fact a complete capitulation to the priestly demands of religion and morality.24 Not only does Kant foreclose the possibility of any philosophical or scientific questioning of these priestly demands, he also downgrades the status of all existing philosophical and scientific knowledge to mere idealism.
According to Nietzsche, and he thinks Kant believed this too, the contest between the competing claims of philosophy-science and religion-morality is actually a zero-sum game. Any gain on one side is a loss for the other side, so there is no way to balance or moderate this contest. In Nietzsche’s view, the only reason there appears to be some kind of common ground between religion and philosophy is that religion served for a while as a kind of protective cocoon that allowed philosophy to emerge, flourish, and come into its own. During that time of survival and growth, there was a preponderance of weak-willed philosophers like Kant who saw their interests as allied with those of the priests whose lies they had internalized. But a few stronger-minded philosophers like Descartes and Hume had already begun to exercise their skeptical drives so as to emancipate themselves from this inherited priestly influence. This is why the Renaissance and the Enlightenment saw a dramatic reconfiguration in the relation between religion and philosophy. Now that philosophy no longer needed to conceal its talents and ambitions, it was ready to go to war against its former ally in order to bring new wisdom and new values into the world. In his earlier book, Dawn, Nietzsche argues that the Germans and German philosophy were a special danger during this turbulent period, especially Kant with his task of making room for faith by placing limits on knowledge. But looking back now from the standpoint of his own philosophy, Nietzsche finds that he is able to breathe freely again. He sees that the hour of this danger has passed and that the very spirits conjured up by these Germans have in the long run become new and stronger genii of that very Enlightenment against which they were first conjured up. Indeed, he sees that his own philosophy is inspired by these new and stronger genii and that it is his task to continue surging forward on the great tide of the Enlightenment (D 197).
Two final questions. In the first place, Nietzsche’s critique, as I have outlined it above, will certainly seem unfair and excessive to admirers of Kant and his preeminent place in the history of philosophy. Doesn’t everyone agree that Kant made some fundamental discoveries in his first Critique, as for example in his ideas about the workings of the human mind that are now incorporated into contemporary cognitive science? In response, Nietzsche would most likely say that we are simply wrong to admire Kant so much and that we need to initiate a drastic reappraisal of his place in the history of philosophy. If Kant’s “critical” idealism is just a theological ploy, if his idea of a critique of pure reason is simply a Protestant injunction against the intellectual progress of the Enlightenment, and if his “critical” defense of religious dogmas is merely a reassertion of his Protestant faith in the face of overwhelming refutations—then why should we continue to admire his philosophy? As for the example just mentioned, Nietzsche would say it is patently absurd that Kant’s psychological account of the human mind presupposes his theologically inspired claims that time and causality do not exist in the real world. This is why those who look for Kant’s influence in contemporary cognitive science begin by explaining why we need to jettison these idealist claims.25 But of course these are the claims that Kant believed were his most important contributions; so it’s not clear why we should say that this contemporary research is indebted to his philosophical discoveries. In other words, Nietzsche might argue, a priestly philosopher like Kant would not recognize his influence on later naturalistic thinkers because he was concerned to falsify, devalue, and negate the reality that is simply taken for granted by these researchers.
But wasn’t Nietzsche himself decisively influenced by Kant’s first Critique, especially through his close study of Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Albert Lange, and Afrikan Spir? Yes, but it’s also true that Nietzsche’s philosophical development was marked by an intensified focus on Christianity and by an escalating hostility toward this religion and its influence on philosophy. His 1886 preface to his first work, BT, shows this trajectory perhaps better than anything else he wrote (BT P: 5). Besides, as we have seen, Nietzsche came to believe in the end that Kant’s success was just the success of a Protestant theologian. In this chapter, I have argued that Nietzsche would point to the text of The Antichrist as evidence of his final and definitive emancipation from Kant’s influence. Because he concludes his career with a total rejection of Christianity and all of its priestly philosophical legacy, Nietzsche’s final outlook in all matters should be regarded as resolutely anti-Kantian. To be anti-Christian is to be anti-Kantian.
Notes
1 Except for a few minor modifications, I have followed Norman Kemp Smith’s translation of Kant’s first critique.
2 Independently of Nietzsche’s reading of Kant, I think there are good reasons for accepting the traditional interpretation of Kant as a phenomenalistic idealist about the objects of human experience (cf. Van Cleve 1999). In my view, Lucy Allais’s well-received recent arguments against this traditional interpretation (Allais 2015: 37–58) depend too heavily on her assimilation of phenomenalistic idealism to Berkeley’s solipsistic idealism. They don’t take into account Kant’s distinctive claim, contra Berkeley’s empiricist standpoint, that our a priori representations allow us to share a collective and intersubjective phenomenal experience (which he calls “empirical reality”) (A26–30/B42–45, A45–46/B62–63).
3 Throughout this chapter I have consulted the standard English translations of Nietzsche’s works.
4 See also TI “Skirmishes” 16 where Nietzsche cites Kant’s “backdoor philosophy,” and TI “Reason” 6: “Fourth proposition. To divide the world into a ‘true’ and an ‘apparent’ world, whether in the manner of Christianity, or in the manner of Kant (which is, after all, that of a sneaky Christian), is just a sign of décadence—a symptom of life in decline . . .”
5 See also TI “True World” 3: “The true world, unattainable, unprovable, unpromisable, but the mere thought of it a consolation, an obligation, an imperative. (Basically the old sun, but through mist and skepticism; the idea become sublime, pale, nordic, königsbergian.)” Here Nietzsche refers to Kant’s claim that, although human beings cannot know anything about the true world, they are nevertheless able to think about it because the representation of it is at least not self-contradictory (Bxxvi–xxx).
6 Nietzsche argues that this is also a goal of the priestly laws of Manu in which followers are trained to attain the perfect automatism of instinct (A 57).
7 See also TI “Morality” 6 where Nietzsche writes of “the holy lunacy of priests, the diseased reason in priests.”
8 In his 1886 preface to his earlier book Dawn, Nietzsche points out the absurdity of Kant’s demand that an instrument of our drives and passions should criticize itself: “(—and, come to think of it, wasn’t it somewhat peculiar to demand that an instrument should critique its own excellence and suitability? that the intellect itself should ‘know’ its own worth, its own capacity, its own limits? was it not even a little absurd?)” (D P:3).
9 Notice that when Nietzsche is emphasizing and praising the philosopher’s skeptical tendencies here and in GM III: 9, he is doing so on behalf of his assault on Christianity. Pace Berry’s suggestion (2011: 9–14, 137–38, 208, 210 n. 2), I don’t think that we should infer that in these passages Nietzsche is defining genuine philosophers as skeptics. In BGE 211, Nietzsche indicates that even skeptics of the stronger German sort are philosophical laborers and instruments for the full-fledged genuine philosophers who have the great health and power that is needed for the essential philosophical task of creating, legislating, and commanding values.
10 Although Nietzsche’s important terms, “Geist” and “Geister,” usually include affective dimensions, the context of his use of these terms here and in some of the surrounding passages indicates a narrower focus on the intellectual connotations of the terms. My translation of these terms follows R. J. Hollingdale.
11 “And philosophers seconded the church: the lie of ‘the moral world order’ runs through the entire development even of more modern philosophy” (A 26).
12 Cf. D 481: “When he does shine through his thoughts, Kant appears noble and honorable in the best sense, but insignificant: he lacks breadth and power; he did not experience very much, and his way of working deprived him of the time in which to experience something—I am thinking, of course, not of crude ‘events’ impinging from without, but of the vicissitudes and convulsions which befall the most solitary and quiet life that has leisure and that burns with the passion of thinking.”
13 Notice that this is only supposed to be a comparative evaluation of the two philosophers. Compared to Kant, Nietzsche would argue, Hume was the stronger philosopher. But in his discussion of skeptics in Part VI of BGE, Nietzsche implies that philosophers like Hume are weaker than philosophers like himself who extend their skeptical challenge to morality and who go beyond mere skepticism to create, legislate, and command values.
14 For an overview and summary of Hume’s irreligious doubts, see Russell and Kraal (2017).
15 A620–42/B648–70, A745–46/B773–74.
16 As Kant writes, “This [divine] will must be omnipotent, in order that the whole of nature and its relation to morality in the world may be subject to it; omniscient, that he may know the innermost sentiments and their moral worth; omnipresent, that he may be immediately at hand for the satisfying of every need which the highest world’s best demands; eternal, that this harmony of nature and freedom may never fail, etc.” (A815/B843).
17 As Kant puts it, “[W]e must assume that moral world to be a consequence of our conduct in the world of sense (in which no such connection between worthiness and happiness is exhibited), and therefore to be for us a future world” (A811/B839).
18 A444–51/B472–79, A532–58/B561–86.
19 Nietzsche’s earlier remarks in GS 357 present a very different understanding and appraisal of Kant’s response to Hume’s doubt and of the validity and value of scientific causal knowledge. Since Nietzsche’s thought was evolving very quickly during this time, I think we should assume that his discussion of Kant and causality in The Antichrist presents his final and definitive thoughts on these matters.
20 See also TI “Errors” 7 for Nietzsche’s account of the priestly lie of “free will” as an instrument of judgment and punishment.
21 Kant refers to his moral theology at A632/B660, A641/B669, A814/B842, and A819/B847.
22 See GS 193: “Kant’s joke—Kant wanted to prove in a way that would dumbfound the ‘whole world’ that the ‘whole world’ was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in favor of popular prejudice, but for scholars and not popularly.”
23 Cf. Jonathan I. Israel: “It was in Kantianism, then, that Aufklärung and Christianity, reason and faith, were finally and decisively reconciled” (Israel 2011: 729)
24 Nietzsche would certainly challenge Kant’s claim that his idea of a critique of pure reason embodies the critical and emancipatory spirit of the Age of Enlightenment. In his famous footnote on the “Age of Criticism” in the preface to the first edition of the first Critique, Kant says that religion should not seek to exempt itself from this kind of criticism. If it does, it will “awaken just suspicion, and cannot claim the sincere respect which reason accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test of free and open examination” (Axi). But why does Kant expect that religion will eventually earn the sincere respect of reason? And why does he proudly announce in his preface to the second edition that criticism alone can sever the root of a universally injurious atheism (Bxxxiv)?
25 For example, Patricia Kitcher remarks in her study of Kant’s contribution to cognitive science: “If time is not real, then the accounts of the identity of a mind through time, and of the cognitive processes that enable us to have knowledge, are incoherent. . . . Under these circumstances I see no choice but to reject the metaphysical claim, which is, in any case, independently problematic” (Kitcher 1990: 141).
Works cited
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