Habermasian Passion and the Nietzschean Contagion

Abstract

This citation from Nietzsche’s Nachlaß ^l suggests the principal difficulty obstructing any assessment of Habermas’s relation to Nietzsche’s thinking, especially as evidenced in the afterword to his 1968 collection Nietzsches Erkenntnistheoretische Schriften,² but also in Habermas’s more widely received The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, first published in 1985. For neither knowledge nor philosophy can be supposed to be fixed points of reference in terms of which Habermasian analysis and Nietzschean thinking might be brought to bear on one another. The shift of emphasis between 1968 and 1985, between Habermas’s two responses to Nietzsche, also poses a problem for assessing Habermas’s relation to Nietzsche, but of a less extreme kind. The earlier response is the more conciliatory, praising Nietzsche and yet placing him within a characteristically Habermasian overview of significant forerunners. The latter has a more polemical tone, identifying Nietzsche and perhaps more importantly Nietzscheanism as the main source for a collective surrender of the ideal of modernity, the pursuit of justice in the name of reason. In this discussion I shall look first at the differences between these two responses and then at the more philosophically significant question of the absence of shared points of reference between the two thinkers.

Disputing Metaphysics

The principle of identity has as its underlying reason the appearance to the eye, that there are equivalent things. A world in becoming could not in the strict sense be comprehended, be known: only in so far as the “comprehending” and “knowing” intellect finds an already created, crude world, constituted from mere semblances, which become fixed in so far as this kind of semblance retains life, only thus far is there something like knowledge.

— Friedrich Nietzsche