1
Traditional social theory
begins with “the individual” taken from an ontogenetic standpoint – almost as
if that “in-dividual” could exist independently of the species and indeed of
the environment with which the species interacts. It is understandable, then,
why the passage from individual to society is so fraught with antinomies and
antitheses and contradictions – and why only a “transcendental” approach can
help fill this hiatus. What we are seekng to do here is to develop an “immanentist”
approach to social theory that takes a phylogenetic approach to society and its
“members” – an approach that treats “human beings”
as “aspects of being human”.
Hobbes and Hegel started from
the fear of death in order to escape the state of nature and secure the
rational salvation of Christian-bourgeois society through the deus mortalis or the Welt-geist, the State. The negatives Denken despairs of the rational State and liberal Christian-bourgeois
society; hence, it turns back to the pre-comprehension of the individual
ontological dimension of the Da-sein (being
there, bare existence) that precedes “civil society” – back toward an “authentic”
state of being which is its own “state of nature”. Heidegger’s
“pre-comprehension” of the Da-sein is
perhaps the archetypal manner of escaping the alienated ontic world of liberal Christian-bourgeois
society to return to the Hobbesian “neutral state”, or to what Schmitt called
provocatively “the Political” (cf. Leo Strauss’s review of Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political) –
indicating that the liberal State only deludes itself into thinking that it has
eliminated conflict from Christian-bourgeois civil society. Heidegger and
Schmitt utilize their revulsion at the “inauthenticity” of Christian-bourgeois
civil society, at the “facticity” of its “reification and alienation”, at its
“quantification and spatialisation of time” so as to revert to a
phenomenological and existential “pre-comprehension” of it that leads straight
to the “authenticity” of the “resoluteness toward oneself”, of “freedom before
death”, to “the Political of friend and foe”, to “the decision in anticipation
of death”, to “the decision stemming from nothing” (auf Nichts gestellt). Heidegger and Schmitt revive Kierkegaard’s
“anguish before death” (an echo of the Schopenhauerian “renunciation”) to
reject the liberalism of bourgeois society, its “mask”, its pretended
“homologation” of all tension and conflict, its fear of contra-diction, and therefore its faith in the necessity of logic and science, and ultimately in the rational reconciliation of
Politics and Economics in the liberal State.
Yet, what Heidegger followed by
Schmitt will want to re-formulate later as an ontological difference, and Hobbes and Hegel wanted to reconcile
with a social synthesis, Nietzsche
criticizes immanently from the
perspective of the Will to Power which (contrary to Heidegger’s effort to place
him within Aristotelian-German Idealism) deploys a new ontology to formulate a
new “negative theory” (as opposed to a syn-thesis) devoid of inter esse, whether rational-mechanical
(Hobbes) or idealistic (Rousseau) or teleological (Hegel).
Marx himself remained, of
course, within this rationalist uni-verse despite inverting Hegel’s dialectic
to a “historico-materialist” basis: – although his inter esse is not the dialectically unfolding Ratio of the “free
will” or of “self-consciousness”, it is still what he perceived as the “scientific”
foundation of “socially necessary
labour time” (which, like Hobbesian mechanicism and Hegelian dialectics, turns
the “freedom of the will” into a
[Schopenhauerian] quest for “freedom from
the will”).
It is
worth recalling here that the Marxian “necessity” of social labour does not
refer only to the overall “re-production” of society”, but also to the “theft of labour time” on the part of the
bourgeoisie against the proletariat – which is a way of saying that “pro-ducts”
belong to social labour in a causal sense. The worker appears
here as the “creator ex nihilo” of
“value”.
This is another aspect of
“necessity” that Nietzsche flatly rejects. From Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard
through to Nietzsche and Heidegger, although in each case from different premises,
the negatives Denken “de-structs”
this social syn-thesis first by de-structing the Sub-ject of the con-vention,
and then by attacking the “causal nexus” of the subiectum. Chief target of this de-struction is the “work” of “actu-ality” [Wirk-lichkeit], the ergon
of energeia, the opus of the operari: not
just for the “subjectity” of the notion of “work” (Arbeit), its “active” part, its being the foundation of the social
synthesis; but also for its inevitable “self-dissolution” (Selbst-aufhebung, Nietzsche’s term applied to Christianity in the Genealogie) in “objectivity” and
“reification” - in nihilism. Schopenhauer attacks the “futility” of the operari, its aimlessness, its
evanescence at the point of satis-faction,
of ful-filment and com-pletion; Kierkegaard attacks its
“irrelevance” to the fundamental question of existence, of the human condition;
Nietzsche attacks its “causality”, its “value”; and Heidegger its “facticity”,
its “Zuhandenheit”. All are dis-satisfied, dif-ferently, with the apparent
social syntheses of liberalism (utility) and socialism (labour) – with their Value, which is the central concept of
“economic science”.
2
Well-known is the distaste and
revulsion that Nietzsche spews out at regular intervals in his oeuvre against an exclusively
“political” thinker to whom many of his contemporaries attributed the
ideological origins of the French Revolution – as well as his contempt for this
epochal event that, to his mind, gave comfort to all those philosophasters
(chief among them Hegel but also Hobbes) deprecable for being “crazy for the
State” (Human, All Too Human), for
that “idol” (Twilight of the Idols)
on which Nietzsche endlessly pours scorn. That “political” thinker par excellence is, of course,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And yet, for all the antipathy that the German feels for
the Frenchman, it is rewardingly instructive to compare and contrast
Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies with
the famous dictum with which Rousseau begins his Du Contrat Social: - “L’homme
est ne’ libre, mais il est partout dans les fers.”
There is a well-nigh universal
tendency to read this Rousseauean cri de
coeur in a historical dimension as evidence of his glorification of “the
noble savage”, of a primitive human being living in an idyllic, innocent “state
of nature” from which he has been banished by the rise of “society”, and most
damnably by that “private property” that characterized the rise of the
capitalist bourgeoisie throughout northern Europe especially from the beginning
of the seventeenth century. Human beings were
once, in the remote past, “free” because they belonged in primitive small
communities over whose destiny and direction they had full political control
because they retained a measure of personal independence such that their
natural self-interest did not interfere with or override the self-interests of
other members of the community. It was the rise of commercial society, of the
“exchange” of the fruits of one’s labour and personal exertions with those of
other humans that made possible the development of the institutions of “private
property” and, with them, the ability of some human beings to command the
labour, the living activity, of others. This is how human beings who “are born
free” eventually end up “everywhere in chains” – the chains of dispossession
and alienated labour. “Freedom” here means for Rousseau the ability and
possibility for a human being to live in accordance with its own abilities and
potential and inclinations consistently
with the “freedom” of other human beings. This “freedom” then has a
“rational” element in that it postulates an “interest common to all human
beings”, an inter esse, a common
being and goal that is both innate and accessible to every human being through
the power of reason. For these two reasons, the “freedom” of the individual and
its rational foundations, Rousseau is both a product of Romanticism and of the
Enlightenment.
But beside this
historico-political dimension, comforted by Rousseau’s anthropological
reflections (cf. the Discours sur l’Origine
de l’Inegalite’ parmi les Hommes), there is also and preponderantly a
metaphysical core to his thought – a point highlighted by Rousseau’s use of the
passe’ simple tense: the phrase “Man was born [est ne’] free, but everywhere he is in chains” does not necessarily revert to the time immemorial of
humanity but can refer instead to each individual human birth. Each human
being, to enucleate Rousseau’s meaning, is free by virtue of its very “birth”,
just as St. Augustine had said (and Hannah Arendt reminded us), by virtue of
the fact that each human being is “a new beginning”. But this birth-right of existential “freedom” has
no element of “contingency” about it (as it does, for instance, in Heidegger’s
notion of Da-sein [“being there”]).
Rather, Rousseau’s notion of freedom, like Kant’s, is also subordinate to
“reason” in such a way that the “freedom” of the individual gifted with the
power of “reason” must also be consistent with the “freedoms” of other
individuals. This is the essence of Rousseau’s jus-naturalism.
It is in this transition of freedom from its
metaphysical origins in the individual to its translation into social
con-ventions that its potential alienation
becomes problematic and indeed a historical fact that Rousseau seeks to explain
with a full-fledged social and political theory. The “historical-political”
dimension of Rousseau’s philosophy and his explanation for the social
alienation of individual freedom is based on his confusion of human
phylogenetic intersubjectivity and interdependence - the fact that human beings are not simply,
with Marx, “species-conscious
beings”, but are rather “aspects of
human being” – with the “exchange” by
individual human beings seen as “in-dividuals”, as atoms, of “their individual labours”, that is, social
co-operation that can be parceled (but how?) into individual tasks whose
pro-duct “belongs” (but how, and why?) to the individual worker, with that of
others through “specialization” in the process of production aimed at the
“reproduction” of society – meaning by this, in the paradigm of Classical
Political Economy, a quantifiable “socially necessary
labour time” (again, why “necessary”?) required for “society to reproduce itself”; and finally that
this “exchange” necessarily entails
the creation of private property.
Of course, what Rousseau (or
Adam Smith, who follows Rousseau in this crucial respect, see Ch.2 of The Wealth of Nations – v. L. Colletti, Ideologia e Societa’) fails to grasp is that it is not the
“exchange” of pro-ducts between individuals that entails private property; nor
is it “exchange” that encourages “specialization”. Instead, it is the
artificial parcelisation of social labour into “individual labours” and the
consequent attribution of legal possessive
ownership of “pro-ducts” to the individual labourer that already
presupposes private property and the “exchange” of the now commodified products
of human living labour (what we call “dead objectified labour”) between
“individual labourers”! Only through this misconception could Rousseau confuse
capitalism with “exchange and specialization” and come to believe in a mythical
“original” form of free association in which humans merely co-operated and
shared simple unspecialised tasks
that they could choose to perform singly, independently of others.
Yet for Rousseau the fact that
such an original “natural state of freedom” was historically possible and has
since been “lost” to private property means also that it can be re-constituted
politically through the application of human reason to a re-founded polity or
State – precisely because each individual “is born free” despite the fact that
the present state of society places it instantly “everywhere in chains” (recall
here Weber’s “iron cage” and his preoccupation with preserving “human dignity”
against the Rationalisierung).
Rousseau sees no “necessity” – historical or teleological – in the advent
either of “society” or indeed of capitalist industry itself. For him, the
“alienation” of the individual’s labour in advanced societies from its original,
pristine freedom in the state of nature is simply an accident or an ab-erration of history due to a series
of contingent historical circum-stances. There is no “necessity” in society and
no “necessity” in alienation and exploitation. Rousseau’s existing bourgeois
society is a “state by historical acquisition”. Only his advocated republic is
a “state by institution”, but one that, unlike Hobbes’s, is entirely
“voluntary”. For this reason, Rousseau always viewed with diffidence “the
social synthesis” of bourgeois society, the interdependence of human beings in
society through symbolic exchange, as “dissimulation”, as that “hypocrisy” that
Mandeville first, though not Hobbes who saw civil society as “necessary”, and
then Nietzsche will later condemn as an artificial departure from the
genuineness (or “authenticity”, to echo Heidegger) of the pre-social “state of
nature”.
It simply does not occur to
Rousseau that his notion of “exchange” may be flawed because it presumes that
human beings are capable of existing in-dividually, that is to say
onto-genetically, not only separately as “egos”, but even separately as
“bodies”. This atomistic view of “man” (human being as “a human being” [recall Leibniz: “a being must be a being”] rather
than as “being human” – humans seen ontogenetically rather than
phylogenetically) explains the “singular” mode of Rousseau’s dictum: “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains”. Again, this confirms
the “metaphysical” or ontological dimension of Rousseau’s philosophy that
exists side by side with the exquisitely “political” one. The “freedom” with
which “man is born” then becomes not just a “political independence” from other
human beings but also an ontogenetic and existential freedom – the fact that as
sheer “possibility” human being is characterized by free choice and by the
possibility of establishing a society or community compatible and in harmony
with the “intelligible or rational freedom” of that choice.
There are obvious similarities
here with Heidegger’s concept of Da-sein
(in Being and Time), except that
Heidegger founds human freedom on the possibility of non-being, of nothingness,
of death – on sheer contingency. His is a “freedom before death” that has few
and certainly no obvious political implications – only “existential” ones;
freedom as “condition humaine”
(Pascal). And there are similarities also with Hobbes’s political theory,
except that in Hobbes the social contract founded on the common-wealth, does not spring from the need of human beings to
objectify and realize that innate “freedom” that has been distorted by society,
but rather from their rational ability
to curtail socially their antagonistic “free-dom” in the state of nature – so
that Hobbes’s contractum unionis
turns instantly into a contractum
subjectionis through the relinquishment or alienation of individual
“free-dom” to the Sovereign with the rational
aim of avoiding violent death in the state of nature. (But we may ask, with
Nietzsche and Heidegger, what is “rational” about preserving life?)
So rationally mechanical indeed is Hobbes’s transition from the state
of nature to the civic state that, contrary to his jusnaturalist premises, the
latter appears to be a “state by historical acquisition” rather than “by
contractual institution” – because on Hobbes’s own theoretical premises his
state of nature could never exist historically given that such a state would
instantly self-destruct unless it turned instantaneously
into a civic state!
Unlike Heidegger, Rousseau sees
“freedom” as a function of the basic rational equality of human beings – “equal
in reason”. It is by virtue of this “equality in reason” and “freedom as
birthright” – by virtue of their “universality” (recall “The Universal Declaration of the Rights of
Man and of the Citizen”) – that it is possible for Rousseau to postulate the
existence of a consensus, of a general
will (volonte’ generale) upon
which the new republic can be erected. Thus, unlike Hobbes’s “free-dom”,
Rousseau’s “freedom” is not antagonistic and in contradiction to that of other individuals but is in harmony with theirs by virtue of the
fact that “rational equality” is an intrinsic part of the definition of
“freedom”: freedom and justice and reason co-exist in Rousseau as “la volonte’ generale”, but they are contra-dictory
in Hobbes who believes that “free-dom” must be curtailed by an external force,
the Sovereign, elected by common consent, on
pain of death. Where Rousseau sees in the concept of “freedom” an original harmony now lost yet recoverable
rationally and contractually in the new republic through a “total
constitutional order” (the phrase belongs to Habermas, in Theorie und Praxis), Hobbes’s “free-dom” denotes an irresoluble
conflict and contra-diction that only
an external will - not a “general will” (Rousseau), a will made “general”
by shared human reason, but rather the mechanical
State - can resolve. Where Rousseau sees the possibility of a State founded on free choice of individual wills guided and
unified by Reason, Hobbes sees the State as the bitter fruit of “dire
necessity”, imposed mechanically on individual free wills by their rational self-interest in avoiding violent death
in the state of nature.
3
Returning to Nietzsche, we have
seen how he opposes his physio-logical
metaphysics of art (art intended as “intuition”, as the life of the instincts)
to Rousseau’s rationalist metaphysics of freedom. Against Rousseau, Nietzsche
follows Hobbes in seeing “freedom” – the Freiheit
of German Idealism - as “free-dom”, as an antagonistic, inharmonious state –
one to which “contradiction” cannot apply, but the fear of contra-diction, which is the foundation of logical and
scientific “necessity”, certainly can. He does not see the “rationality”,
either mechanical (Hobbes) or spontaneous-innate (Rousseau) or teleological
(Hegel), of this freedom and of its ultimate expression in the State. Instead,
he postulates an inevitable contrast and conflict between the “rational man”
who lives in fear of “necessity”, and
the “artistic man” who combats “need-necessity” through artistic creativity and
dissimulation or mimesis.
There are ages, when the rational and the intuitive man stand
side by side, the one full of fear of the intuition,
the other full of
scorn for the abstraction; the latter just as irrational as the former
is inartistic.
Both desire to rule over life; the one by knowing how
to meet the most important needs with prediction, ingeniousness,
regularity [Weber’s ‘Kalkulation’]; the other as an "over-joyous"
hero by ignoring those needs and taking that life only
as real which
simulates [imitates, mimes] appearance and beauty. Wherever intuitive
man, as for instance in the earlier
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 191
history of Greece, brandishes his weapons more
powerfully and
victoriously than his opponent, there under favourable
conditions, a
culture can develop and art can establish her rule
over life.
In this optic, the rational man
is simply a distortion of the human artistic “instinct” to create metaphors to
interpret life and the world – one without which human beings cannot be
conceived of as “human” – for the purpose of making their lives more “secure
and safe”. The rational man believes that “necessity is the mother of
invention” and that logic and science are the tools with which this “necessity”
can be explored and be known absolutely as a cosmos. And all this, this “crystallization and sclerosis” of
artistic metaphorical invention and dissimulation, is the product of fear. The
rational man also dissimulates, for this is the essential metaphysical activity
of human beings: but the dissimulation of the rational man differs from that of
the artistic man in that now this dissimulation becomes “fixed”, so as to
crystallise and “freeze” the creative instinct of artistic man. Free
dissimulation becomes now entirely subordinate to “necessity”, to a regular and
predictable form of symbolic exchange, to a system of concepts, to “science”
and “Truth”.
There is no Rousseauean
“freedom” in Nietzsche, because there is no “purpose” or “reason” or “rationality”
in human needs – and least of all any scientifically established “necessity” –
that can constitute a telos and a ratio (a nomos or Law) in life and the world. There is at best, Nietzsche
claims, the limited Hobbesian “free-dom” that is allowed to individual wills by
their coming into conflict with other wills. For Nietzsche, “freedom” in the
rationalist sense is not only unattainable, but also inexistent. In Nietzsche
we find only conflict between and
even within human beings: the
artistic man and the rational man represent here different but conflicting
complementary facets of human being. There are, to be sure, “instincts for
freedom”, but these express a “need-necessity” in the sense that they are
purely physio-logical and in no sense
physio-logical. Put differently, for
Nietzsche it is simply absurd to see any “necessity” in needs because their
“satisfaction” can be arranged in literally infinite or indefinite ways!
“Necessity” is the invention of “science” – it is the belief that there is only
one way, or even several “scientific” ways (as in the mathematical case of
“multiple equilibria”), in which needs can be satisfied. (Weber’s concept of ‘Wert-rationalitat’ is victim precisely
to this fallacy that Nietzsche exposes: although he accepts that there are
infinite “chains” of scientific causation, Weber does not see that this fact
destroys the “causality” of the “chains”.)
That dissembling [dis-simulation, mimicking], that denying
of neediness, that splendor of metaphorical notions and
especially that
directness of dissimulation accompany all utterances of
such a life [that is, one in which art rules]. Neither the house of man, nor his way
of walking, nor his clothing,
nor his earthen jug suggest that necessity
invented them; it seems as if they all
were intended as the expressions
of a sublime happiness, an Olympic cloudlessness, and as it were
a playing at seriousness.
It is not “necessity” that is
“the mother of invention”, then, but it is rather “necessity” that rigidifies
and deadens artistic invention: it is artistic invention (by no means to be
read as “artistic freedom”!) that
falls prey to this fictitious notion of “necessity”. Needs are so important and even “unconscious” for Nietzsche that
he eschews and negates the entire notion of “freedom” rationally accessible to
“the individuum”, in favour of “the instincts
[Triebe, drives] for freedom” where
these instincts are a function of “free-dom” and not the other way around –
that is, “freedom” is not an innate, perhaps divine, function or property of
the human will, of the “soul”, but rather the will is “free” because there is
conflict, because there is no order or sense or “Value” (moral or scientific or
metaphysical) in life . (This view of the will as a function of free-dom rather
than freedom as a function-goal of the will was first expounded in Schelling’s Essay on the Freedom of the Will.)
“Free-dom” in this sense is not
a telos as in Hegel but rather a struggle (Kampf)
as in Schopenhauer (cf. his Essay on the
Free Will). Unlike Schopenhauer, however, Nietzsche also negates and
decries the social trans-formation of
“needs” into “necessity” that can and must be dealt with “scientifically” –
what he calls “the instinct for truth” - when in fact this “necessity” is
merely a product of fear: - fear that results ultimately in the nihilism of
Schopenhauer’s determinism and “renunciation” [Entsagung] of life and the world and indeed in the
“self-dissolution” and nihilism of Christian-bourgeois society (cf. final part
of Genealogie der Moral). Sheer folly
for Nietzsche is Schopenhauer’s promotion of art as a refuge from the Will to
Life. On the contrary! Far from being a refuge from life and the world, art is
for Nietzsche the very essence of intuition, the very proof that we are alive, the
“happiness” of existence, that without which human being would be
inconceivable! (“What! Thou livest still, Zarathustra?” in ‘The Dance Song’, Zarathustra.)
Needs there are, but these are
not and cannot be “rational”, nor can they be “rationally known” and “rationally
met” – contrary to what was soon to become the central thesis of Weber’s entire
lifework. (Like Nietzsche, Weber also “renounces’ the finality of “values” – their “ab-soluteness”, their suprasensible
“quality”, their “objectivity”. But precisely because for Weber “science”
cannot be “objective”, because it cannot sanction and justify “values”, it is
possible for it to be extricated from “values” to the extent that it becomes
“aware” of these “values” and thus achieve a limited measure of “wert-freiheit”.
Much in the way of Schopenhauer’s principle of sufficient reason [cf. Piana’s
essays on Schopenhauer], Weber the scientist, unlike Nietzsche, simply could
not entirely jettison the notion of “rational” science [cf. Lowith’s essay on
this].) These needs are “physio-logical
instincts” that form part of life and the world (of the physis as opposed to the ordered cosmos) as exploitation, as struggle.
There is then in Nietzsche
neither a theory of in-dividuality in the sense of subject-ity, of ego-ity or Ich-heit, nor a theory of inter esse, of common being or comunitas, but rather a “duality of
instincts” – the instincts for freedom
of the artistic man and the instinct for
truth (or science) of the rational man which is a product of “fear”. The
former represent the original intuitive artistic
invention of human existence through “the construction of metaphors”, while
the latter represent the rationalist
mortification of this intuition and the “crystallization and sclerosis” of
metaphors through the “hardening” of these metaphors into concepts, into
Platonic “primal forms” that erect an unreal suprasensible world of ideas
linked by logical necessity in philosophy, as well as a false reality dictated
by physico-mathematical necessity (“necessity is the mother of invention”) in
science.
…Surely every human being who is at home with
such contemplations [i.e. the rational man] has felt a
deep distrust against
any idealism of that kind [by the artistic man], as
often as he has distinctly
convinced himself of the eternal rigidity, omnipresence, and infallibility
of nature's laws [Naturgesetzen]: he has arrived at the conclusion that as
far as we can penetrate the heights of the telescopic and the depths of the
microscopic world, everything is quite
secure[!], complete, infinite, determined, and continuous.
Science will have to dig in
these shafts eternally
and successfully and all
things found are sure to
have to harmonise and not to contradict one another. (p186)
Nietzsche’s “instincts for
freedom” are not in search of a “freedom” that is innately and rationally given
and that constitutes a human inter esse:
they are rather a conflictual,
Eristic “struggle for free-dom” – the will to power. They do not converge to
agreement (homonoia) but diverge into
conflict, into civil war (stasis) –
the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes.
The rational State as a “deus mortalis”
imposed either externally by subjection (Hobbes’s Sovereign) or internally by
union (Rousseau’s general will) or teleologically as the extrinsication of
human reason (the dialectic of self-consciousness, the expression of “Objective
Spirit”, Hegel) is im-possible; it is a contradictio
in adjecto because State and rationality, State and com-unitas or inter esse,
are as antithetical as godliness and mortality. The State can exist only as
Police in the interest of those who exercise power and command in its name (cf.
Schopenhauer, Part 4 of Die Welt, and Weber, Politik als Beruf), not as a neutral entity super partes.
Nor are these instincts
“historical”, even though they are certainly physiological rather than
metaphysical – and therefore retain a measure of immanentism. For Nietzsche, the
instincts are removed from history intended as a linear, cumulative process; he theorizes them instead in an abstract
cyclical or “epochal” sense (“There
are ages when…”). There may be “history” for Nietzsche in the Greek
pre-Socratic and Thucydidean sense of a-methodon
hyle (shapeless matter) or even in the Herodotean sense of istorein (“inquiry”); but there most certainly
is no “progress” – because there is no “science” and no “necessity” that
attaches to the human choice over different courses of action, however much
these may be prompted by “need-necessity”, that is, by physio-logical instincts
(with the emphasis on “physis”).
It is important to note that
Nietzsche does not identify “the state of nature” as a Rousseauean idyll (see
Vattimo reference in Piu’ in la’ del
Soggetto): – far from it, given his acceptance of the Hobbesian bellum civium! (- Albeit not as a
historical state, as we have seen, but only as a paradigmatic one) Nietzsche’s account
of the state of nature is not a romantic throwback to “the noble savage”: nor
is there any trace here of that rationalism, Hobbesian mechanical or
Rousseauean idealistic, that necessitates
or enables, respectively, the transition to the social contract.
Much rather and almost explicitly, it is a Mandevillean satire of Christian-bourgeois
society, but one that engages in a fundamental critique of the rationalist
bases of both the Hobbesian and Rousseauean versions of the state of nature.
Even at this early stage, Nietzsche envisages the state of nature paradigmatically
(not historically) as a “neutral state”, as a spontaneous state of ir-responsibility (Unverantwortlichkeit), of “un-consciousness”(Un-bewusstheit) and “oblivion” (Vergessen),
one in which “values” such as “truth” and “falsehood” do not apply – only “the
extra-moral sense” applies, and it is against the stark background of the
“inaccessible and undefinable X” of this “state of nature” that “truth and
falsehood” must be “under-stood”. But Nietzsche’s emphasis here is less on
“hypocrisy”, as with the Hobbesian
Mandeville, and more on the fear, the
“need for protection”, the regularity
and predictability of human life based on “science” rather than on “art” as
“the splendor of metaphors”. The origin of this “fear” is to be found in the
very “conflictuality” of “free-dom”. – Which is why to Nietzsche the Hobbesian,
Rousseauean, Hegelian and Marxian call for a “rational State or society founded
on freedom” must have sounded like the zaniest of absurdities.
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