Nietzsche's Alleged Farewell: The PreModern, Modern, and Postmodern Nietzsche

Abstract

According to a widely discussed recent book by Jurgen Habermas, Nietzsche's thought represents the “entry into post-modernity”; Nietzsche “renounces a renewed revision of the concept of reason and bids farewell to the dialectic of enlightenment.” This “farewell” to the hopes of the Enlightenment is seen as the decisive European “turning point” that sets the direction for the divergent “postmodernist” paths of (in Habermas's unique scheme) Bataille, Lacan, and Foucault, on the one hand, and Heidegger and Derrida, on the other. According to Habermas's somewhat tendentious history, the European dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment comes down to the failed attempt of Hegel and the post-Hegelians at a “dialectical” reformulation and completion of such hopes, and a “Nietzschean” inauguration of “irrationalism” and therewith a complete rejection of such hopes. Habermas believes this because he believes many things about Nietz sche's views that are, I think, compeletely inaccurate. (I mean his treatment of Nietzsche as a psychological reductionist in Erkenntnis und Interesse , and the simplistic position on genealogy and truth that Habermas ascribes to Nietzsche in essays like “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: ReReading Dialectic of Enlightenment .”) There is, however, something quite apposite in Habermas's pairing of Hegelian and Nietszchean dissatisfactions with modernity, an opposition that surfaces too in works of other influential writers, like Deleuze. In order to address Habermas's concerns, and to consider Nietzsche's understanding of modernity, I would, though, introduce the whole matter somewhat differently.