On Nietzsche, Postmodernism and the New Enlightenment

Abstract

In spite of Nietzsche’s enormous and apparently ever-increasing influence, it is notoriously difficult to spell out the essence and precise implications of his position. This is evidently due partly to his poetic and rhetorical style; but in my view there is a more important reason than this. I would maintain that his thought, when taken as a whole, is rather like a carpet which cannot be laid straight unless you cut off one or other of two bits. To make Nietzsche consistent, you have to reject or downplay one of two elements in his thought. If you reject one, what you get is cognitive and moral nihilism; if you reject the other, you end up with what I want to call the new enlightenment. In these respects the postmodernists, as represented at any rate by Michel Foucault, are Nietzsche’s true successors.When in nihilistic mood, Nietzsche seems to imply that it is true that there are no truths, that it is really morally good to act as though there were no such thing as moral goodness. In the course of considering this self-destructive tendency of one strand of Nietzsche’s thought, Walter Kaufmann remarks that consideration of problems like these was not Nietzsche’s strong suit. Now the basis of the new enlightenment is epistemological, and turns on theses and arguments which directly address such problems. These may be summarized as follows: (1) Denial that our judgments are ever true is self-destructive (is it supposed to be true that we never speak the truth?); and so is denial that we ever have good reasons for our judgments (do we have good reasons for this particular judgment?).