Philosophy.Com

Nietzsche + the Enlightenment tradition

A useful insight into ethics in modernity from the last chapter of R. Kevin Hill's Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of his Thought entitled 'The Ruins of Reason?' He says:

...modernity shares a commitment to Enlightenment morality, to the empowerment of the individual cut free from the authoritative moorings of tradition and religion. Not only does the Enlightenment seek to champion human freedom lacking such moorings, it sees the moorings as bonds to be broken. The problem of how to structure a community that does not dissolve into anarchy in the face of this individualism leads to Kant’s notion of morality as a neutral framework for preventing the clash of wills from destroying each other. Though Kant is not the only figure to articulate these themes, he is arguably the most persuasive, and in his later incarnation as Rawls, among the most popular.

He argues that Nietzsche hardly rejects all of Kant’s ethical project. Underneath his rejection of morality as a neutral framework embodying egalitarian values lies a commitment to the unfettered subjectivity of human ends and a valorization of human freedom. Even his attempt to reanimate a kind of ancient virtue ethic has to be seen in the context of what such virtue serves: the empowerment of the individual. Hill adds:

To commit to the Enlightenment’s valorization of human freedom and autonomy while abandoning its egalitarianism is to move eccentrically within the orbit of the Enlightenment rather than to shear away from it.

Hill's argument is that Nietzsche fits badly the notion of a postmodern rupture with the past, despite his emergence from Kant, the quintessential modern. The debts to Kant are too great. Nietzsche, like Hegel, was still operating within a universe of discourse whose terms are defined by the late eighteenth century and their repetition in the late nineteenth. This is no shame.But it is ironic in a figure who so thoroughly cultivated a ‘pathos of distance’ from modernity.