the-german-enlightenment-knowledge-and-the-passion-of-knowledge-2020

115 5 The German Enlightenment, Knowledge, and the Passion of Knowledge1 As Nicholas Martin has pointed out, in the eyes of many of his adherents as well as opponents, Nietzsche has been treated as an anti-Enlightenment irrationalist; however, in fact, Nietzsche takes the Enlightenment very seriously: as a cultural critic of the late nineteenth century he cannot afford to escape it and its legacy.2 One of the reasons why a study of Dawn as one of Nietzsche’s free-spirit writings is important is because it can further illuminate why the anti-Enlightenment interpretation of Nietzsche is a caricature of his thought, if not an outright distortion. Nietzsche is hostile to the French Revolution, but seeks in his writings to sever the link between enlightenment and revolution. This is because he suspects that revolution breeds fanaticism and is a throwback to a lower stage of culture. Nietzsche is an admirer of the critical and rationalist spirit of the Enlightenment, by which we mean both the eighteenth-century version found in the writings of Voltaire and Lessing, and earlier incarnations of this spirit identifiable in the thinking of Epicurus, Petrarch, and Erasmus. In Dawn, as we show, Nietzsche shares a number of the key ideas and commitments of the modern Enlightenment, including attacks on superstition, religious dogmatism, rigid class structures, and outmoded forms of governance and rule. The fundamental aspect of the modern Enlightenment with which Nietzsche concerns himself is one of demystification, of liberation of the human from its chains (WS 350), and as Martin has claimed, of seeking “to provide the individual with the critical tools to achieve autonomy, to liberate himself from his own unexamined assumptions as well as the dictates of others.”3 Nietzsche is an Enlightenment thinker, then, in this specific sense: his overriding aim is to foster the development of his readers, particularly of readers’ autonomy and maturity. In this respect, Nietzsche is an inheritor of Kant, as he acknowledges in Dawn, in an aphorism in which Nietzsche presents himself as being even more faithful to the rational spirit of Enlightenment than Kant was with his obscurantist residues, Nietzsche’s Dawn: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Passion of Knowledge, First Edition. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Rebecca Bamford. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

116 Nietzsche’s Dawn such as the thing in itself and the categorical imperative that retains “occult qualities” (see D 142; see also D 207). To develop this view, Nietzsche contrasts the virtue of antiquity — personal distinction — and what he deems an appropriate Mediterranean “little bit of skepticism for each and every thing,” with German virtue — the subordination of oneself, or “categorical obedience,” whether such following is secret or public (D 207).4 As an example of German virtue, Nietzsche aligns what he calls Kant’s eventual “detour through morality” for the purpose of “arriving at obedience toward a person” with Luther’s earlier proof of God’s existence as the necessary existence of a person whom we can trust (D 207). At the end of the aphorism, contrasting the past with the possible future Dawn aims to sketch out, Nietzsche asks us to imagine what might become of German virtue if “disobedience” and a position for a German “where he is capable of great things” were possible — something that, as Nietzsche suggests, would involve overcoming morality (D 207). Nietzsche’s remark on his Kantian inheritance should not surprise us, given that Kant famously defines enlightenment as a human being’s emergence from their self-incurred immaturity, or the courage to use their own understanding without the guidance of another.5 With this distinctive sense of Nietzsche as an Enlightenment thinker in mind, let us examine Nietzsche’s relation to German philosophy and the Enlightenment in greater detail, in order to understand Nietzsche’s view in Dawn within the wider context of his free spirit writings. In Human, all Too Human 463 Nietzsche exposes what he takes to be a delusion in the theory or doctrine of revolution. The error, he contends, belongs to Rousseau, namely, that buried within the accrued habits and vices of civilization there lies concealed an original or primordial but stifled human goodness: There are political and social visionaries who ardently and eloquently demand the overthrow of all social order in the belief that the most splendid temple of a beautified humanity would immediately be raised, as if by itself. In these dangerous dreams, we can still hear an echo of Rousseau’s superstition (HH 463) Not only is there a stifled human goodness buried underneath the weight of civilization, but the blame for such stifling is to be leveled squarely at the institutions of culture, such as those we find embodied in state, society, and education. Nietzsche holds that historical experience teaches us an important lesson, namely, that revolutions bring with them, “a new resurrection of the most savage energies in the form of the long-buried horrors and excesses of the most distant ages” (HH 463). He does not deny that revolutions can be a source of vital energy for a humanity that has grown feeble, but he contests the idea that it can work as an organizer and perfecter of human nature. He thus appeals to Voltaire over Rousseau,

German Enlightenment, Knowledge, and Passion that is, in his eyes to a nature that knows how to organize, purify, and reconstruct, as opposed to a nature that is full of passionate follies and half-lies. Against the optimism of the spirit of revolution, Nietzsche wishes to cry with Voltaire, “Écrasez l’infâme!” (EH “Destiny” 8). It is the spirit of revolution that frightens off the spirit of enlightenment and “of progressive development” — and it is this spirit Nietzsche calls upon his readers to cultivate and nurture. Nietzsche locates in the French Revolution’s “histrionicism” a “bestial cruelty,” as well as a “sentimentality” and “self-intoxication,” and holds Rousseau responsible for being its intellectual inspiration and for setting the Enlightenment on “its fanatical head.” He sees the Enlightenment as alien to the Revolution, which — if it had been left to itself — he thinks would have “passed quietly along like a gleam in the clouds and for long been content to address itself only to the individual” (WS 221). Nietzsche is not opposed to reform or institutional change; it is rather that he thinks customs and institutions can be changed slowly and diligently. The task, he says, is to continue the work of the Enlightenment, in each and every individual, but also “to strangle the Revolution at birth” and ensure it does not happen (WS 221). In Dawn, Nietzsche argues contra Rousseau that it is our “weak, unmanly” societal notions of good and evil, and the way these notions dominate over body and soul today, that are making all bodies and souls weak and shattering the ­“pillars of a strong civilization” (D 163). For Nietzsche, strength in civilization can only reside in unfettered individuals, who are self-reliant and independent (D 163).6 The extent to which Nietzsche is an astute and informed reader of Rousseau is debatable. Martin explains that Nietzsche’s critical perspectives are more palatable if one sees his use of proper names as signifying psychological states and ideological positions rather than historical individuals.7 In places in his middle writings Nietzsche reveals he has a more subtle appreciation of Rousseau than is usually taken to be the case (see D 427, D 481). Ruth Abbey has shown that while Nietzsche’s mention of Rousseau as an influence may seem surprising (see AOM 408), as we tend to think of Nietzsche as “reviling” Rousseau, this view is really the result of scholarship having given Nietzsche’s middle writings a limited role in shaping our image of “Nietzschean” philosophy.8 What is clear is that Nietzsche strongly allies himself with progressive forces promoting the development of strong individuals — but that he also insists that desirable social transformation ought to be pursued patiently: for him there is no “miraculous” solution to human ills, and the chief enemy to transformation, as noted, is fanaticism. With this in mind, we shall move on to consider Nietzsche’s attitude toward German philosophy at this time. When Nietzsche discusses his favorite authors and books, it is usually at the expense of German authors and German philosophy. In The Wanderer and His Shadow 214, for example, he mentions some of his favorite reading, which includes the likes of Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle, and Chamfort. The works of these authors “constitute an important link in the great, still continuing chain of the Renaissance” (WS 214). What 117

118 Nietzsche’s Dawn Nietzsche admires about them is that they are above the changes and vagaries of “national taste” and also above the “philosophical colouring” that every modern book radiates as a matter of rule and does so if it wishes to become famous. Moreover, these books “contain more real ideas than all the books of German philosophers put together” (WS 214). German philosophy books are characterized by “obscurity” and “exaggeration.” Even Schopenhauer, who has affinities in his style of writing with the French moralists, wanders among images of things rather than among the things themselves (WS 214). What Nietzsche admires about the French writers is their “wittiness of expression” and their “clarity and delicate precision.” Moral philosophy, Nietzsche contends, has taken a wrong turn with German thought, notably with Kant’s moralism (which, he notes, comes from Rousseau and the reawakened Stoicism of ancient Rome), and the moralism of Schiller too (WS 216). Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, a “stream of moral awakening has flowed through Europe” with “virtue” becoming eloquent and teaching human beings to discover “unforced gestures of exaltation [Erhebung] and emotion” (WS 216). The ultimate source of this development for Nietzsche is Rousseau — but the mythical Rousseau, that is, the one constructed out of the impression produced by his writings and confessions. What worries Nietzsche is that this “moral awakening” has resulted in “retrogression for knowledge of moral phenomena,” or genuinely scientific inquiry into the sources and nature of morality. Against this development of retrogression, he champions the unfashionable (then and now) likes of Helvetius who sought to treat morality like all the other sciences, “founded on experiment, as well as natural philosophy”: What is the whole of German moral philosophy from Kant onwards … ? A semi-theological assault on Helvetius and a rejection of the open views or signposts to the right path which, gained by long and wearisome struggle, he at last assembled and gave adequate expression to. Helvetius is in Germany to the present day the most reviled of all good moralists and good men (WS 216) Nietzsche picks up this theme again in Dawn, with section 197 being the most important place in which he develops his views on it (but see also D 190, 193, 207, 481). This aphorism is entitled “The German’s hostility to the Enlightenment” (D 197). In it, Nietzsche wishes to take note of the intellectual contribution Germany, including German philosophers, have made to culture at large. He identifies German philosophy of the first half of the nineteenth century as a retrogressive force: “they retreated to the first and oldest level of speculation, for, like the thinkers of dreamy ages, they found satisfaction in concepts rather than in explanations — they resuscitated a pre-scientific type of philosophy” (D 197).

German Enlightenment, Knowledge, and Passion Nietzsche sees similar retrogressive forces operating in German history and German science (D 197). In the former, a general concern was to accord honor upon primitive sensibilities, especially Christianity, but also folk-lore and folklanguage, oriental asceticism, and the world of India. In the natural sciences, German scientists struggled against the spirit of Newton and Voltaire and, following Goethe and Schopenhauer, “sought to erect once again the idea of a divine or a daemonic nature suffused with ethical [ethischen] and symbolic significance” (D 197). From this, Nietzsche infers that the proclivity of the Germans runs contrary to the Enlightenment and to revolution in society. The German spirit is antiquarian: “piety toward everything then in existence sought to metamorphose into piety towards everything that once had existed in order that heart and spirit might once again grow full and no longer have any room for future, innovative goals” (D 197). German culture has, Nietzsche suggests here, erected a cult of feeling at the expense of a cult of reason with German composers — Nietzsche surely has in mind Wagner among others — being artists of the invisible, of raptures, and of the fairy-tale. Nietzsche objects to this cultural development, it is important to note, for one key reason that is directly in keeping with his admiration of Enlightenment spirit as discussed earlier, that it serves to retard, or even suppress, the development and acquisition of knowledge. This recalls Kant’s famous words to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787) that he has found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith and thus to draw up the limits of knowledge. Nietzsche makes it clear that he champions the genuine Enlightenment against all the forces of obscurantism (see also AOM 27): And strange to say: the very spirits that the Germans had so eloquently invoked became, in the long run, the most injurious for their invokers — history, understanding of origin and evolution, sympathy with the past, the newly aroused passion for feeling and knowledge, after having for a time appeared to be beneficial companions of the spirit of rapturous obscurantism and reaction, assumed one day by a different nature and now fly on the widest wings above and beyond their earlier invokers as new and stronger geniuses of that very Enlightenment against which they had been invoked. This Enlightenment we must now carry on — unperturbed that there has a existed a “great Revolution” and then again a “great reaction” against it, that indeed both still exist: they are, after all, the mere ripple of waves in comparison to the truly great tide in which we surge and want to surge! (D 197) As Mazzino Montinari points out, a note written in the spring of 1881 — that is, just prior to the publication of Dawn — provides additional clues for deciphering 119

120 Nietzsche’s Dawn Dawn 197.9 In this note, Nietzsche portrays the nineteenth century as one of reaction in which a conservative and preservative frame of mind predominates. The note runs as follows: 19th century, Reaction: people sought the basic principles of everything that had lasted, and sought to prove it was true. Permanence, fruitfulness and good conscience were seen as indices of truth! This was the conservative mentality: they called everything that had not yet been shaken; they had the egoism of the possessors as their strongest objection to the philosophy of the 18th century: for the non-possessors and malcontents there was still the church and even the arts (for some highly talented individuals there was also the worship of genius by way of gratitude if they worked for the conservative interests). With history [Geschichte] (new!!!) people proved things, they became enthusiastic for the great fruitful complexes called cultures (nations!!!). A huge part of the zeal for research and of the sense of worship was thrown at the past: modern philosophy and natural science forfeited this part! — Now a backlash! History [Historie] ultimately proved something other than what was wanted: it turned out to be the most certain means of destroying those principles. Darwin. On the other hand sceptical historicism as aftereffect, empathy. People became better acquainted with the motivating forces in history [Geschichte], not our “beautiful” ideas! Socialism has a historical foundation, similarly national wars for historical reasons! (KSA 9, 10 [D 88]) 10 What the note shows is that, for Nietzsche, then, it is “history” that serves as the means of destroying the conservative principle, and this history includes Darwin’s theory of evolution. What we need to learn and take cognizance of are the real forces operating in history, and not our beautiful ideas. Everything that comes into existence — for example, socialism — plants its own foundations in history. As Nietzsche presents it in Dawn 197, the basic idea is that the “enlightenment” project that he proposes is to make its claim, “not against but rather beyond a great revolution (socialism) and a great reaction, beyond the conservative frame of mind.”11 It is thus an error in Nietzsche’s account of the story to conceive of the Enlightenment as the cause of the Revolution, a misunderstanding that is the “reaction” itself. On Nietzsche’s account so understood, it would be equally an error to conceive the continuing enlightenment as the cause of socialism. As Montinari points out, the new great reaction in the form of the conservative mentality consists in this error, and as he further remarks, from 1878 onwards, Nietzsche considers a new enlightenment as the noble task for the free spirit of his own times.12 There have been, to date, two great historical periods in which an enlightenment has sought to flourish but has been halted by a paired revolution and reaction: first,

German Enlightenment, Knowledge, and Passion the enlightenment of Italian and European humanism, or the Renaissance (exemplified in the work of Petrarch and Erasmus), but followed by the German Reformation and the Counter-Reformation; second, the enlightenment of France, exemplified by the work of Voltaire, with the French Revolution and German romanticism as the corresponding revolution and reaction. Nietzsche proposes a third enlightenment, conceived by him as a “new” enlightenment that contrasts itself to both the great revolution and great reaction of modern times, socialism and conservatism (see HH 26).13 Nietzsche claims in Human, All Too Human 26, entitled “Reaction as progress,” that in the previous two enlightenments the new “free spirited” tendencies were not powerful enough to withstand the appearance of impassioned but backward spirits who conjured up once again a bygone phase of humanity. This is the case with Luther’s Reformation in which “all stirrings of the freedom of spirit were still uncertain, delicate, youthful” and “science could not yet raise its head.” It is the case in the nineteenth century where Schopenhauer’s metaphysics showed “that even now the scientific spirit is not yet strong enough”: in spite of the achieved destruction of Christian dogmas in Schopenhauer’s doctrine, the whole medieval Christian world-view once again celebrated its resurrection. Although there is in Schopenhauer “a strong ring of science” this does not master his thinking; rather, it is the metaphysical need that does. But even in this reaction there is progress to be had, Nietzsche suggests: It is surely one of the greatest and inestimable advantages we gain from Schopenhauer that he sometimes forces our sensations back into older, powerful ways of viewing the world and people to which no path would otherwise so easily lead us. The gain for history and justice is very great: I believe that without Schopenhauer’s assistance, nobody now could easily manage to do justice to Christianity and its Asiatic relatives: to do so on the basis of present-day Christianity is impossible. Only after this great success of justice, only after we have corrected in so essential a point the way of viewing history that the Age of Enlightenment brought with it, can we once more bear the flag of the Enlightenment farther (HH 26) As Martin points out, Nietzsche wants an “enlightenment of the Enlightenment.”14 Nietzsche sees this task as a never-ending critical process; the problem with revolution as it is typically conceived of is that it aims at the achievement of an imagined end, and this longing for finality and resolution is ultimately seen by Nietzsche as a symptom and defining characteristic of nihilism.15 Given what we have said with regard to Nietzsche’s thinking on the German Enlightenment and on knowing, we can now ask with regard to Dawn: What is it according to Nietzsche in this text, to know the world and to know ourselves? How is such knowledge possible? What is the status of such knowledge? How do 121

122 Nietzsche’s Dawn we pursue knowledge and who is best equipped to pursue it? Many aphorisms in Dawn reflect on these (and related) questions, and consider various solutions given to them in the history of philosophy from the ancients to the moderns, from Plato to Schopenhauer. One thing is immediately evident: to see the world anew, we may need to be shocked into thought or forced to think. This is one reason why Nietzsche begins Dawn with the contention that many things that have become saturated with reason in the course of history began their existence in unreason (D 1). Nietzsche’s new enlightenment in his free-spirit writings, including Dawn, demands a process of thinking against our customary habits of thought, which are radically ahistorical and nonhistorical and which tend to assume that things come into existence as if designed for some end or purpose (and as motivated by divine reason). It also demands a revival of the Mediterranean “freedom of feeling” understood as guarding against “unconditional trust,” and as holding back in the last recess of the heart “a little bit of skepticism for each and every thing, be it god, human, or concept,” which he affirms in Dawn 207, as we discussed earlier. Already in Human, All Too Human Nietzsche had commenced his free-spirited period of thinking by calling for “historical philosophizing” — and with it the virtue of modesty, a taste he was not to eschew, and which he affirms once again in the Preface to Dawn: “our taste is for more modest words,” he writes contra “morality” (D Preface 4). His basic idea is that if everything has become, which Nietzsche holds to be the case, then there are no eternal facts or absolute truths (HH 2). This is a deeply unsettling idea — has not even our faculty of cognition itself evolved? Is not everything that comes into existence historically conditioned? The fundamental task that Nietzsche outlines for philosophy is that of undertaking a “history of the genesis of thought” (HH 17–18). The scientific spirit is to be cultivated and at the expense of our inherited metaphysical need. In the opening section of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche raises the question of how something can originate in its opposite, and sets up a contrast between “metaphysical philosophy” and “historical philosophy.” The former answers Nietzsche’s question, by appealing to a miraculous source such as the thing in itself to explain the origin of something held to be of a higher value (this “in itself” denotes something unconditioned that resides outside the conditions of life — change, evolution, becoming, etc.). The latter, by contrast, which Nietzsche insists can no longer be separated from the natural sciences and which he names as the youngest of all philosophical methods, seeks to show that there are no opposites — but rather, that all things arise from and are implicated in a process of sublimation [Sublimirung]. On this basis, Nietzsche calls for a “chemistry of concepts and sensations” (chemistry being the science of change) (HH 1). He reinforces this by exploring how notions such as strictly nonegoistic actions or purely disinterested contemplation are “only sublimations, in which the fundamental element appears to have almost evaporated and reveals its presence only to the keenest observation”

German Enlightenment, Knowledge, and Passion (HH 2). The human animal is the product of a pre-historic labor going back thousands of years. What humanity is now is not what humanity has been destined to be from time immemorial. An important consequence of this is, as Nietzsche contends, that one sign of a higher culture is its estimation of the small and unpretentious truths that are founded by the adoption of rigorous methods over the “blissful and blinding errors” that arise from metaphysical and artistic ages and peoples (HH 3). Nietzsche paints this contrast as one between sobriety and intoxication. We are to “hold onto” knowledge that has been laboriously acquired and that is certain and endures, and to do so in a way that demonstrates our valor, simplicity, and temperance. For millennia, Nietzsche thinks, the spirit or intellect was under no obligation to think rigorously and its seriousness consisted in “spinning out symbols and forms,” and it is this worship of “forms,” which in turn provides the measuring stick for the beautiful and the sublime, that will mock the esteem accorded to unpretentious truths (HH 3). However, this is now all changing. Nietzsche thinks: the earnestness shown to the symbolic is becoming regarded as a sign of a lower culture. We now judge differently — the arts are becoming ever more intellectual and our senses ever more spiritual: “a spirited glance can be worth more than the most beautiful structure or the most sublime construction” [erhabenste Bauwerk] (HH 3). In short, what is changing is how we conceive the human in relation to the cosmos: the human is becoming decentred as Nietzsche makes clear in the next section on “Astrology and Related Things” (HH 4). These passages from Human, All Too Human show that, for Nietzsche, it is through moral, religious, and aesthetic demands, along with their blind inclination, passion, and fear and their reveling in habits of illogical thinking, that the world has become what it is for us, namely, something colorful, meaningful, and soulful, and that we have been the colorists. In other words, Nietzsche thinks it is the intellect that makes appearances appear, and then carries over these intellectual errors into things (e.g. we feel ourselves to be originators of our acting in the world and so we conceive the world as following an entirely free course, as something that knows what it wants and that executes a plan). This important aspect of his earlier claims carries directly over into his project in Dawn. In this text, Nietzsche calls explicit attention to the way we construct and color the world for ourselves in an effort to wake us up from our dogmatic slumbers. In an aphorism entitled “Everything has its day,” he notes how the German language attributes a gender to all nouns, and writes: When human beings first ascribed a gender to every single thing, they did so in all seriousness, believing they had gained a profound insight — only very late, and perhaps to this day not yet fully, have they admitted to themselves the enormous scope of this mistake. — In just the same way humans 123

124 Nietzsche’s Dawn have conferred on everything that exists a relationship to morality and have laid upon the world’s shoulders an ethical significance. One day this too will have just as much, and no more, value as the belief in the masculinity or femininity of the sun has today (D 3) Nietzsche’s point, commensurate with his interest in a new enlightenment, is that it is through knowledge that we may conquer these delusions and rid the world of the many types of false grandeur that have been bestowed upon it. We can therefore be grateful that, as he notes, the “greatest achievement of humankind” so far is to have attained a state of awareness where “we need no longer be in constant fear of wild animals, barbarians, the gods, and our dreams” (D 5). Moreover, we can appreciate how the modern sciences are teaching us how to learn a different sense of space (D 7). As Nietzsche eloquently develops this point: Have real things or imaginary things contributed more to human happiness? It is certain that the breadth of space between highest happiness and deepest despair has been established only with the aid of imaginary things. Accordingly, the influence of the sciences is constantly diminishing this type of spatial sense: just as science has taught, and continues to teach us to experience the earth as small and the solar system even as a mere dot (D 7) And as Nietzsche also points out, the astonishment afforded to us by the sciences should be contrasted to that presented by “the conjurer’s art”: where the conjurer disguises complex causality with simplicity, the sciences compel us “to relinquish our belief in simple causalities at the very moment when everything seems so selfexplanatory and we are being the fools of what is before our very eyes” (D 6). The simplest things, Nietzsche asserts, “are very complicated” — and as he remarks, “one can’t marvel enough at that!” (D 6). Dawn continues, then, the critical and deflationary lines of new enlightenment inquiry established in Human, All Too Human, and advances a conception of plural modes and methods of knowledge. For Nietzsche, knowing is no longer a question of philosophers estranging themselves from sensory perception and exalting the mind to abstractions, in which we would then inhabit the palest images of words and things, playing with invisible, intangible, and inaudible beings and out of disdain for the physically palpable. In order to know, philosophers can no longer rely on Platonic admiration for the dialectic as our sole method and as practiced by the good, desensualized, person. Rather, we need to appeal to a multiplicity of faculties, methods, and procedures, as Nietzsche suggests: The thinker needs fantasy, the leap upward, abstraction, desensualization, invention, presentiment, induction, dialectics, deduction, critique,

German Enlightenment, Knowledge, and Passion compilation of material, impersonal mode of thought, contemplativeness and comprehensiveness, and not least of all, justice and love towards everything present (D 43) Through adopting a multiplicity of new and refined practices of observation and self-observation, we as human beings — largely unknown to ourselves at the present time — retain the potential to become our own experiments. In order to do so, we would become strangers to our ordinary and habitual selves, by viewing ourselves afresh as experiments of living and feeling as well as of knowing. Nietzsche points out that the current notion of “human being” is a bloodless fiction, and “society” is a general concept (D 105). What his account in Dawn points towards is a new way of understanding humans and society, in part through a revised, broader, understanding of experimentation. It is important to note that Nietzsche holds scientific knowledge, as well as other ways of knowing — including self-knowledge — to depend on the revised conception of experimentation that he explores in Dawn.16 As well as making positive claims about what the sciences can offer us with respect to knowledge, Nietzsche points out that there is no one and only scientific method that leads to knowledge (D 432). Moreover, the sciences are themselves developing: for example, Nietzsche claims, the sciences of “physiology, medicine, sociology, and solitude” are not yet ready to construct “the laws of life and action anew,” and therefore, instead of simply turning over our thinking to science without question, we need to “be as far as possible our own reges and found little experimental states” (D 453). Nietzsche’s view here entails that the need to “proceed experimentally with things” explicitly involves forms of affective as well as conceptual engagement, in which we become “sometimes angry, sometimes affectionate” toward things and “allow justice, passion, and coldness toward them to follow one upon the other” (D 432). As one of us has shown elsewhere, according to Nietzsche in Dawn, engaging experimentally is a fundamental philosophical strategy of his new enlightenment: it supports critical engagement with past dogmatic understanding of inquiry, and promotes “critical, reflective, and creative or imaginative engagements with how we acquire knowledge of the world,” as well as with the value that we attach to knowledge and the behaviors that are involved with our pursuit of it.17 An important issue is raised by Nietzsche’s speaking in Dawn of “our” task as wanting to be experiments, as part of his appeal to a collective need to deploy diverse methods for knowing (D 432, 453). Who, exactly, are the “we” to whom he appeals? We suggest that, on this point, Nietzsche is best read as appealing to future free spirits, the moral — or immoral — innovators who will lead society into new ways of thinking, feeling, and existing. It is these free spirits that may be capable of regarding themselves as experiments: but in what sense are such free 125

126 Nietzsche’s Dawn spirits experiments? The character of Nietzsche’s thinking on this particular point is complex: it is not immediately clear, for example, whether he is thinking of an evolutionary condition, and, if so, how to understand this. At one point in the text he argues against referring to evolution in terms of conceiving goals for humankind — since evolution aims not at happiness but at evolution and nothing more — and points out that, given this view of evolution, it is a presumption that the unconscious goal in the evolution of every conscious being is its highest happiness (D 108). This suggests that when Nietzsche claims that “we are experiments” in which our chief task is to want to be such, he is referring to a newly found existential condition: this is how “we” — understood as developing ­creatures — could now historically view ourselves. Put another way, “our” condition is a historical — and historically creative — one rather than some ahistorical or finite conception of human development. In keeping with this historically situated, creative, commitment to experimentation, Nietzsche affirms what he calls “the passion of knowledge” in Dawn. Just what does it mean to pursue knowledge as the object of a passion? To answer this question let us consider, in connection with Nietzsche’s conception of the passion of knowledge, Cornelius Castoriadis’ claim that passion is affirmed when an object of pleasure is transformed into a necessary object, that is, it is present when the object can no longer be lived without, “when the subject can no longer conceive of its life without possessing the object, without pursuing it, being absorbed in it.”18 This is certainly at work in Nietzsche’s thinking about the passion of knowledge, and it becomes especially evident in his remarks on this passion in The Gay Science. For example, Nietzsche imagines an “all-coveting self” that wants to “appropriate many individuals as so many additional pairs of eyes and hands” and “bring back the whole past” in terms of its own unique “possession.” He writes with great passion about such a free spirit: “‘Oh, my greed is a flame! Oh, that I might be reborn is a hundred beings!’ — Whoever does not know this sigh from firsthand experience does not know the passion of the search for knowledge” (GS 249). In The Gay Science 283, Nietzsche once again emphasizes how “the search for knowledge” reaches out for us and takes hold of us: “it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!” (GS 283). Indeed, he goes so far as to envisage a “heroism of knowledge,” one that “will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences” (GS 283; on the nature of “possession” see GS 14). It’s also in The Gay Science that Nietzsche seeks to clarify for his readers some of the features of the passion of knowledge. In The Gay Science 123, for example, he notes that science (Wissenschaft) can well be promoted without this new passion and that, in fact, this is how the modern state, and formerly the church, understands knowledge, that is, as “a mere condition or ‘ethos’” (GS 123). For scholars who need to make use of their leisure the scientific impulse is merely “their boredom,” and in which simple curiosity is felt to be sufficient for the exercise

German Enlightenment, Knowledge, and Passion or practice of knowledge. In this aphorism, Nietzsche also refers to antiquity — for example, the Stoic school of philosophy — in which, as he sees it, the “dignity and recognition of science” were “diminished by the fact that even the most zealous disciples placed the striving for virtue first,” so knowledge is essentially subordinated to ethical questions about the nature of the good life (see also HH 6–7). For these different reasons, then, Nietzsche is alerting us to the fact that today, “It is something new in history that knowledge wants to be more than a mere means” (GS 123). Nietzsche’s conception of the passion of knowledge adds important insights to Castoriadis’ model of this passion and in two respects. First, he thinks that new courageous human beings — in effect, new free spirits — have to be prepared for and encouraged to exist as beings who “know how to be silent, lonely, resolute, and content and constant in invisible activities.” These are human beings who wish to seek “in all things for what in them must be overcome” (GS 283). This new seeker after knowledge, then, “lives and must live continually in the thundercloud of the highest problems and the heaviest responsibilities,” and this means they are no disinterested observer, “outside, indifferent, secure, and objective” (GS 351). Second, Nietzsche holds that, although the commitment of the new seeker of knowledge is to Wissenschaft, philosophy is needed so as to “beautify” it and in the process provide humanity with a glimpse of future virtues and ideals, so it is philosophy in fact that provides knowledge with this elevated type of passion (see D 427 and 551; see also GS 3). Of course, it can be acknowledged that there have been examples in the history of philosophy of exemplary skeptical and experimental thinkers who have construed the motivation for philosophizing as residing in a passion of knowledge and driven by the curiosity of an intellectual conscience (Hume readily springs to mind as an example of such a philosopher).19 However, it seems clear that Nietzsche is demanding something more from the thinker who lives and thinks in accordance with this passion. As we have seen, he couches this in the language of sacrifice, and he returns to this discourse of sacrifice in aphorism 351 of The Gay Science, which is from book five of the text that he added for the second edition published in 1887. In this aphorism, Nietzsche is contesting our idea of the sage, which has become prevalent among “the common people”; he insists that the true philosopher is a very different kind of creature. It is a mistake, he claims, to conceive the philosopher as one who is simply “clever,” who is “bovine” and “pious,” seeking only peace of mind and the “meekness of country pastors that lies in the meadow and observes life seriously while ruminating” (GS 351). Nietzsche is keen to mark a sharp distinction between the philosopher and the sage or “priestly type,” and he insists here that the true philosopher is driven by a “great passion.” In alerting his readers to the character of the true philosopher and what motivates him or her, Nietzsche is also keen to argue, interestingly and revealingly so, that 127

128 Nietzsche’s Dawn in ancient Greece “it was modesty [Bescheidenheit] that invented the word ‘philosopher’,” so leaving “the magnificent overweening presumption in calling oneself wise to the actors of the spirit” (GS 351). Nietzsche insists upon modesty here, since he holds that a fundamental part of being a philosopher is that he or she recognizes that it is insufficient to have the “belief” or “superstition” that one is a human being of knowledge. The philosopher is not entitled to the “presumption” of knowledge, but needs to continually go in search of it and to practice knowing as a “passion” in accordance with various intellectual virtues, such as courage, magnanimity, and honesty or integrity.20 Much of this processual passionate pursuit of knowledge is first heralded in Nietzsche’s corpus in Dawn. A further question can be asked: What is at stake in the passion of knowledge? Castoriadas answers this question by declaring the answer to be obvious: it is “truth,” in which truth is related to the results of knowing.21 This insight is, in fact, anticipated by Nietzsche: “for truth … no sacrifice is too great” (D 45). Castoriadis makes an important point relevant to our appreciation of Nietzsche when he notes that the researcher of truth needs to avoid intellectual narcissism — of identifying him or herself with the results of their research to the point where they stop questioning — and an obsession with system-building. Systems serve to inhibit questioning and tend to enslave the mind. As Castoriadis notes, the chief dangers to be avoided are dogmatism and fanaticism, and it is a concern over them that guides Nietzsche’s projects, including the passion of knowledge, in his middle writings and so evident in Dawn, and indeed it continues well into his late writings (see BGE Preface and AC 54). Finally, it is necessary to acknowledge that the ideal of truth to be posited in this conception of the passion of knowledge is one where we give ourselves over to questioning without limitations. There is an obvious risk here, one that Nietzsche stages for his readers in Dawn. Castoriadis writes, “we run the risk of forgetting that this infinite questioning will leave us as if suspended in mid-air because we lack any fixed markers.”22 Although this finds an echo in the famous parable of the madman announcing the death of God in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, it is evident in the imagery of seafaring he employs in Dawn, including the final aphorism on “we aeronauts of the spirit,” in which Nietzsche writes: Where is it tearing us toward, this powerful craving that means more to us than any other pleasure? Why precisely in this direction, toward precisely where heretofore all of humanity’s suns have set? Will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too, steering toward the west, hoped to teach an India — that it was, however, our lot to shipwreck upon infinity? (D 575) When Nietzsche writes with such passion about the passion of knowledge, he is acutely aware of the need not to be fanatical about its pursuit. In the final aphorism

German Enlightenment, Knowledge, and Passion of book two of The Gay Science, for example, he expresses an “ultimate gratitude to art.” As a “cult of the untrue” art allows for “the good will to appearance” in which we discover not only the hero but also the fool in our passion for ­knowledge. Nietzsche writes: “we must occasionally find pleasure in our folly, or we cannot continue to find pleasure in our wisdom” (GS 107). This complex insight is prefigured in Dawn 507 entitled “Against the tyranny of the true.” Nietzsche’s worry is that residing only in the domain of truth will make human beings “boring, powerless, and tasteless” (D 507). Yet it is only in his subsequent writings, starting with The Gay Science, that Nietzsche becomes bolder in his conception of the passion of knowledge, envisaging the waging of spiritual wars for the sake of new ideas and their consequences, and ultimately leading to his conception of the philosopher as legislator in Beyond Good and Evil (BGE 211; see also BGE 209 on the passion of knowledge). In affirming the passion of knowledge in Dawn, Nietzsche speaks in glowing terms of those great philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle from the ancients and Descartes and Spinoza from the early moderns, who found in “knowledge,” that is, “in the activity of a well-trained, inquisitive, and inventive understanding,” and not in intuition, the highest happiness: as he notes, such thinkers “must have enjoyed knowledge!” (D 550). Nietzsche appears keen to contest the claims made by appeals to intuition and intuitive knowledge, especially the kind of “intellectual intuition” sought by the German idealists (see D 544). What Nietzsche opposes here is the notion that through such intuition one is genuinely searching for knowledge, and that examination of intuition is the sum total of the philosopher’s methodology in seeking knowledge: one may be searching, it can be conceded, but is one motivated by a philosophical drive or by a religious one in so doing? Nietzsche re-emphasizes this point in the Preface he appended to the initial aphorisms of Dawn, when he writes that faith in reason is “as faith, a moral phenomenon” (D Preface 4). While we should note the potential unfairness of these comments toward philosophers of intuition outside of the context of Nietzsche’s critical engagement with morality in Dawn, Nietzsche’s remarks in these aphorisms are nonetheless important because they clarify his wider philosophical commitments in this text. As Montinari (a commentator who had a rather intimate acquaintance with Nietzsche’s corpus) notes, Nietzsche “wanted nothing to do with flashes of inspiration.”23 Montinari cites from a passage to be found in a notebook of the summer of 1880 in which Nietzsche remarks that bits of knowledge arrived at through intuitions have as little reality as an hallucination (KSA 9, 4 [321]). Montinari emphasizes the following from Nietzsche: the “burning hot feeling of the enraptured … is an illness of the intellect, not a path to knowledge” (KSA 9, 4 [152]). As Montinari goes on to note, it is one of the distinctive qualities of Nietzsche’s style of philosophizing “that he does not for an instant abandon the knowledge given 129

130 Nietzsche’s Dawn solid ground by historical and scientific standards and at the same time draws the limits of this sort of knowledge.”24 In Dawn, Nietzsche explores how an experimental approach to knowing and to knowledge involves us in adopting different ways of being toward things in the world, as well as toward ourselves and our experiences, and in using associated diverse methods of inquiry.25 As he recommends, pursuing knowledge involves that with regard to things in the world, we become: sometimes angry, sometimes affectionate towards them and allow justice, passion, and coldness towards them to follow one upon the other. One person converses with things like a policeman, another as father confessor, a third as a wanderer and curiosity seeker. Sometimes one wrings something from them through sympathy, sometimes through violent force; reverence for their mysteries leads one person forward and eventually to insight, whereas another employs indiscretion and roguery in the explanation of secrets (D 432). Knowing, on this account, is critically dependent upon experience as well as on conceptual understanding. Nietzsche explicitly prioritizes the importance of developing new experiences when he counsels us to encourage, and to avoid, both immoral and moral actions, claiming that he does not: deny that it is best to avoid and to struggle against many actions that are considered immoral; likewise that it is best to perform and promote many that are considered moral — but I maintain: the former should be avoided and the latter promoted for different reasons than heretofore. We must learn to think differently — in order finally, perhaps very late, to achieve even more: to feel differently (D 103).26 Nietzsche’s methodological claims on knowing in Dawn 103 and 432 encourage us to consider how our diverse affective responses to things and indeed to experiences might play an important role with respect to conducting experimental research, whether scientific, social, individual, conceptual, or affective in focus. He characterizes experimental researchers as roguish, piratical characters, because their morality is distinctive: experimental morality explicitly affirms risk taking, and is a “daring morality [verwegenen Moralität]” rather than a fearful, socially reinforced one (D 432).27 In a note from the end of 1880, Nietzsche writes that without the passions, the world is reduced to being simply “quantity and line and law and nonsense,” presenting us with “the most repulsive and presumptuous paradox” (KSA 9, 7 [226]). By the time of Dawn, the pursuit of knowledge has become a passion for him, if not the overriding one.

German Enlightenment, Knowledge, and Passion For Marco Brusotti Nietzsche’s new emphasis on the passions represents a ­far-reaching break with the ideal of moderation and repose of soul that he had previously espoused in Human, All Too Human; as Brusotti claims, “[t]he concept of the ‘passion of knowledge’ … marks a clear turn in his interpretation of the free spirit. Dawn is the book in which this turn takes place.”28 While this might seem to exaggerate the difference between the texts, according to Paul Franco in a recent appreciation of the texts of the middle writings — is not the free spirit in Dawn characterized by detachment, moderation, and mildness? — it is important to note this point, as it indicates an important change in Nietzsche’s outlook.29 Franco rightly points out that while references to the moderating effect of knowledge are still to be found in Dawn, what catches our attention most is Nietzsche’s appeal to the passion of knowledge. As he eloquently puts it: “There is nothing utilitarian or bourgeois about the quest for knowledge for Nietzsche, and this gives his appropriation of the Enlightenment its peculiar, one might say romantic quality. He celebrates an Enlightenment that has been deepened by the experience of Tristan and Isolde.”30 Knowledge is not simply an idle activity for Nietzsche, or a quantity that one acquires, but something to be pursued as a “passion,” which requires a cheerfulness or serenity in the face of its highs and lows, its ecstasies and disappointments. As Nietzsche will later express the point in The Gay Science, life itself is to be treated an “an experiment of the seeker for knowledge,” and not as a duty, a calamity, or a piece of trickery (GS 324). Knowledge for some can be a diversion or a form of leisure, but for the passionate seeker it offers “a world of dangers and victories,” one in which “heroic feelings” can find places to dance and play. With the principle of “life as a means to knowledge” lodged in one’s heart it is possible to live both boldly and gaily, and to laugh gaily too: “who knows how to laugh anyway and live well if he does not first know a good deal about war and victory?” (GS 324). Nietzsche regards the drive for knowledge as young and raw; when compared to the older and more richly developed drives, the knowledge drive is ugly and offensive (which all drives have been at some point in their development). However, he confides that he wishes to treat it as a passion, “as something with which the individual soul can work side by side, so that it can look back on the world in a helpful and conciliatory fashion: in the meantime, we need a non-ascetic renunciation of the world again!” (KSA 9, 7 [197]) Nietzsche places the passion of knowledge in the service of a philosophical project that aims at disabusing humanity of its consoling fictions — for example, concerning the uniqueness of its origins and destiny — and encouraging it to pursue new truths and a new kind of philosophical wisdom. Through observing ourselves and our interactions with the world with the requisite passion of knowledge, we human beings can become our own experiments of living, feeling, and knowing. It is important that we retain the Mediterranean skepticism toward ourselves (D 207) even given the passion of 131

132 Nietzsche’s Dawn knowledge.31 For Nietzsche, we are problematically caught up in a phantom understanding of the ego that forms in the heads of others and is communicated to us; not only the ego but habits and beliefs are “foggy” and only partially formed (D 105). In contrast to this, Nietzsche imagines a “real” ego that is accessible and fathomable, and that would counter the effects of the fog of opinion in which we live (D 105). Foucault puts the point similarly in his reflections on the passion of knowledge: as he writes, the critical task is to break with accustomed habits of knowing and perceiving, so that one has the chance to become something different than what one’s history has conditioned one to be, to think and perceive differently. For Foucault, this gives us, in fact, a definition of philosophical activity today, which consists in the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself. Instead of legitimating what is already known, the task is to think differently, and this is an essential part of philosophical activity conceived as an askēsis.32 In 1881, Nietzsche had made an important discovery: he had a precursor. He was not to feel completely isolated and alone in his task as a teacher of humanity. This precursor is, of course, Spinoza. Indeed, a Spinozist inspiration hovers over the first sketch of the eternal recurrence of the same drafted in the summer of 1881, and which, like The Ethics, is a plan for a book in five parts, culminating in a meditation on beatitude (KSA 9, 11 [141]). In a letter to his friend Franz Overbeck postmarked July 30, 1881, on the eve of the experience of the eternal recurrence, Nietzsche enumerates the points of doctrine he shares with Spinoza, such as the denial of free will, of a moral world order, and of evil, and also mentions the task of “making knowledge the most powerful affect [die Erkenntniß zum mächtigsten Affekt zu machen]”; KSB 6: 111).33 In a note Nietzsche also writes on Spinoza and himself as follows: “Spinoza: We are only determined in our actions by desires and affects. Knowledge must be an affect in order to be a motive. I say: it must be a passion to be a motive” (KSA 9, 11 [193]). Nietzsche first writes of the passion of knowledge (Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis) in his published writings in Dawn. In Dawn 429, he notes that the drive to knowledge has become so strongly rooted in us that we cannot now want happiness without knowledge. Knowledge has become a deep-rooted passion that shrinks at no sacrifice. Indeed, such is now our passion for knowledge that even the prospect of humanity perishing of this passion does not exert any real influence on us. However, as Edwin Curley has pointed out, to speak of knowledge as affect (or passion) is probably inexact from Spinoza’s point of view since it is not clear that Spinoza would count knowledge as an affect at all. What is important here is the power Spinoza ascribes to knowledge over the things he would count as affects, while recognizing that human power over the affects is limited.34 This raises the question: Why does Nietzsche want knowledge to be practiced as a “passion”? It seems that this passion is an intrinsic part of what it is for Nietzsche to practice the new science he outlines for his reader, “the gay science.”

German Enlightenment, Knowledge, and Passion What is the character of Nietzsche’s investment in the passion of knowledge, which is clearly a curious passion? What hopes and expectations did he have with respect to practices of knowledge? One thing can be said for sure: with his attachment to the passion of knowledge Nietzsche wanted to become a different kind of philosopher to Schopenhauer, one less hemmed in by the fears and frailties of personality and genuinely open to the world and its enigmas. Unlike Schopenhauer, Nietzsche will not cling to the need of metaphysics and the need for a metaphysical “system.” Indeed, Nietzsche deliberately cultivates the passion of knowledge contra Schopenhauer, whom he regards as superficial in psychological matters: he neither enjoyed himself much nor suffered much; a thinker should beware of becoming harsh: where would he get his material from then. His passion for knowledge was not great enough for him to suffer on its behalf: he barricaded himself in. His pride, too, was greater than his thirst for knowledge, in revoking, he feared for his reputation (KSA 9, 6, 381]) Franco has rightly argued that although Nietzsche rejects Schopenhauer’s ideal of pure, will-less knowing, he is defending the life of knowledge and science, including their contemplative aspects. However, for Nietzsche, contemplation “does not mean passive reception but active, passionate experimentation.”35 This is why Franco suggests that Nietzsche advises, in his middle writings, the “prudent management of the passions”: such management is necessary if the passions are to be employed for the sake of knowledge. Again, Franco puts it well: “knowledge does not involve eliminating the affects or passions — that would be to castrate the intellect — but it does require that one be able to control the affects or passions so that one can deploy them in a productive way.”36 Nietzsche’s free-spirit writings, including Dawn, are works of a particular kind of enlightenment project that works against all expressions of fanaticism, especially religious and moral, and in an effort to temper emotional and mental excess. As he puts it in Human, All Too Human: shouldn’t we, the more spiritual human beings of an age that is visibly catching fire in more and more places, have to grasp all available means for quenching and cooling, so that we will remain at least as steady, harmless, and moderate as we are now, and will thus perhaps become useful at some point in serving this age as mirror and self-regulation? (HH 38) These texts are notably different to the stance adopted in The Birth of Tragedy with respect to matters of life and knowledge, as even Nietzsche acknowledges.37 In an unpublished note of 1877, he confides, in fact, that he has abandoned “the metaphysical-artistic views” of his early writings (KSA 8, 23 [159]). In particular, he 133

134 Nietzsche’s Dawn wants to overcome what he calls his “deliberate holding on to illusion” as the foundation of culture (KSA 10, 16 [23]). Nietzsche was seeking to overcome what he called “Jesuitism,” which he located in his predecessors in German philosophy and himself. In the words of Mazzino Montinari, this means not allowing the uncovering of the limits of human knowledge to be conducted in such a way that the task also gives free rein to metaphysics.38 A different focus emerges with the publication of Human, all Too Human, one where Nietzsche’s principal concern is with the search for knowledge and, through it, the attainment of a new serenity and sobriety. Robert Hull has argued that Nietzsche’s love of knowledge is part of “an ongoing therapeutic praxis” designed to work against the seductions of philosophical and epistemological rhetoric, and this resistance may explain “why he also enlists a fresh vocabulary to express himself, one free of the hazardous emotional baggage of traditional philosophy.”39 As part of this search Nietzsche gives the impression of wishing to reduce all passions, with their “raptures and convulsions” (AOM 172), to their minimum articulation. Nietzsche speaks of their conquest, mastery, and overcoming and at this time he adopts Christ as a model. In an imitation of Christ, for example, he admonishes us not to judge but to be just (AOM 33). In The Wanderer and His Shadow 88 he writes of the “spiritually joyful, luminous and honest (aufrichtigen) human being” that has overcome its passions, while in aphorism 37 of the same text he invites his reader to “work honestly [redlich] together” on the task of “transforming the passions [Leidenschaften] of mankind one and all into joys” [Freudenschaften; this task is elaborated upon in the discourse “Of Joys and Passions” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra].40 In The Wanderer and His Shadow 53 Nietzsche makes it clear that he regards the overcoming of the passions as a means and not an end in itself: the aim is to overcome them so as to enter into possession of the most fertile ground. Nietzsche’s primary commitment in Dawn is to experimentation in which the love of, or passion for, knowledge gives humanity back its right to engage in selfexperimentation. He invites us to replace the dream of immortality with a new sobriety toward existence, as he makes clear in an important aphorism: With regard to knowledge [Erkenntnis] the most useful accomplishment is perhaps: that the belief in the immortality of the soul has been abandoned. Now humanity is allowed to wait; now it no longer needs to rush headlong into things and choke down half-examined ideas as formerly it was forced to do. For in those days the salvation of poor “eternal souls” depended on the extent of their knowledge acquired during a short lifetime; they had to make a decision overnight — “knowledge” took on a dreadful importance (D 501) Nietzsche argues that we are now in a new situation with regard to knowledge and as a result we can conquer anew our courage for making mistakes, for experimentation,

German Enlightenment, Knowledge, and Passion and for accepting things provisionally. Without the sanction of the old moralities and religions, individuals and entire generations “can now fix their eyes on tasks of a vastness that would to earlier ages have seemed madness” (D 501). The passion of knowledge that Nietzsche envisages is strange and curious, and operates like an unrequited love; it presents tasks that run ahead of humanity that then has to prove equal to it, and humanity may perish of it if humanity experiments as Nietzsche hopes will become the case. In a note from 1880, Nietzsche seems sure that we shall meet our demise with this peculiar passion: Yes, we shall be destroyed by this passion! But that is not an argument against it. Otherwise, death would be an argument against the life of an individual. We must be destroyed, as humans and as humankind! Christianity showed the only way, through extinction and the denial of all coarse drives. Through the renunciation of action, of hatred of loving, we get to that point on the path of passion for knowledge. Contented spectators — until nothing more is to be seen! Despise us for that reason, you who act! We shall take a look at your contempt —: go away from us, from humankind, from thing-ness, from becoming (KSA 9, 7 [171]) Nietzsche seeks a new defense of the vita contemplativa, as he discusses explicitly in Dawn, in keeping with his interest in a new enlightenment. He raises the question whether the philosopher of the morning is really renouncing things or gaining a new cheerfulness or serenity: To relinquish the world without knowing it, like a nun — that leads to an infertile, perhaps melancholic solitude. This has nothing in common with the solitude of the thinker’s vita contemplativa: when he elects it, he in no way wishes to renounce; on the contrary, it would amount to renunciation, melancholy, downfall of his self for him to have to endure the vita practica: he relinquishes the latter because he knows it, knows himself. Thus he leaps into his water, thus he attains his serenity. (D 440) In light of this, it is important to point out that Nietzsche’s emphasis on the passion of knowing leads to a concern about the epistemic status of what we claim to know. Nietzsche himself questions whether knowledge is really anything more than a personal drive toward his personal prejudices (D 553). Aphorism 335 of The Gay Science provides further evidence that the direction of the philosophy of the morning developed in Dawn is already fixed on purification of our opinions and evaluations in pursuit of authentic law-giving, and on the creation of our own new tables of values.41 Keith Ansell-Pearson has previously argued that, for this reason, aphorism 553 of Dawn is a particularly important example of intellectual integrity on Nietzsche’s part.42 Nietzsche’s thinking on becoming an authentic 135

136 Nietzsche’s Dawn law-giver is already clearly developed in the text: writing from a possible future, Nietzsche considers what it might mean to be able to exercise the law-giver’s power over oneself and suggests that it critically involves “freeheartedness, greatness and imperturbability” (D 187). Yet even given such a sketch of self-rule, Nietzsche admits that many people will struggle to achieve the experiences required for an account of self-rule that takes drive psychology into full account — or, if they do have such experiences, accomplished philosophers may ultimately falter in their experimental vigor and seek instead to become institutions (D 539, 542, 547).43 Earlier we noted the affinity Nietzsche experienced with Spinoza. However, as Yirmiyahu Yovel has pointed out, there are important differences between Spinoza and Nietzsche in their conceptions of knowledge. For Spinoza, the immediate affective tone of knowledge is joy (a feeling of the enhanced power of life), whereas in Nietzsche the painful nature of knowledge is repeatedly stressed (indeed, Nietzsche measures the worth of a person by how much “truth” they can bear and endure). For Nietzsche, then, pursuing knowledge — in the sense of critical enlightenment and disillusionment — is a source of suffering and primarily a temptation to despair, and this means that the gay science, or joyful knowledge, is “a task and goal,” not the “normal outcome” of inquiry.44 The passion of knowledge is neither a naïve nor a risk-free passion — and it is important that we affirm this for the sake of the experimentation Nietzsche advocates in Dawn that will enable us to know. In a revealing note from 1880, Nietzsche writes: People have warbled on to me about the serene happiness of knowledge — but I have not found it, indeed, I despise it, now I know the bliss of unhappiness of knowledge. Am I ever bored? Always anxious, heart throbbing with expectation or disappointment! I bless this misery, it enriches the world thereby! In doing so, I take the slowest of strides and slurp down these bittersweet delicacies (KSA 9, 7 [165]) For Nietzsche, the pursuit of knowledge in his new enlightenment must have its hazards and dangers — it cannot be a secure, risk-free, enterprise and still meet its purpose of assisting us in the countering existing values. This sentiment deeply informs the project of the gay science that we see prefigured in Dawn, in which life itself is understood as an experiment for the seeker of knowledge, and which rarely, if ever, disappoints. Nietzsche expresses this idea in a note from 1881 as follows: “I no longer want any knowledge without danger: let there always be the treacherous sea or the merciless high mountains around the seeker of knowledge” (KSA 9, 7 [165]). He develops this idea in Dawn, claiming that seekers of knowledge should not be discouraged from their task by the disapproval of others, even and especially if the passion of knowledge involves a challenge to social or intellectual conventions: “Like

German Enlightenment, Knowledge, and Passion all conquerors, discoverers, navigators, adventurers, we researchers are of a daring morality and have to put up with being considered, on the whole, evil” (D 432).45 The new enlightenment that Nietzsche heralds in Dawn, in which humans affirm their passion for knowledge and pursue knowledge using multiple, complementary, methods of inquiry, is hence at root one that involves a substantial moral question. In order to square his critical inheritance of the German Enlightenment with his call for affirmation of the passion for knowledge, Nietzsche needed to engage critically with morality itself. This is why Nietzsche’s fundamental campaign in Dawn makes morality its prime target, but why he also could not avoid incorporating epistemological inquiry into his campaign. Notes 1 This chapter develops material that was first published in Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy: On the Middle Writings (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2018), and Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche on Enlightenment and Fanaticism: on the Middle Writings,” in The Nietzschean Mind, ed. Paul Katsafanas (London: Routledge, 2018), 11–27. 2 Nicholas Martin 2008. “Aufklärung und Kein Ende: The Place of Enlightenment in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thought.” German Life and Letters, 61(1): 79–97. 3 Martin, “The Place of Enlightenment in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thought,” 80. 4 For a discussion of skepticism in Nietzsche’s wider philosophy, see also Jessica N. Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 5 See Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” (1784) in Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, 54 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For Kant it is “religious immaturity” that is “the most pernicious and dishonourable variety of all” (Kant, Political Writings, 59). “Laziness and c­ owardice,” Kant writes, “are the reasons why such a large proportion of men, even when nature has long emancipated them from alien guidance … nevertheless gladly remain immature for life.” Compare the opening to Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer as Educator. For an instructive comparison of Kant and Nietzsche on enlightenment see David Owen. 2003. “The Contest of Enlightenment: An Essay on Critique and Genealogy.” The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 25(1): 35–57. 6 On free and fettered spirits, see Christa Davis Acampora, “Being Unattached: Freedom and Nietzsche’s Free Spirits,” in Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), 189–206; and Christa Davis Acampora. 2014. “Senses of Freedom of the Free Spirit.” Pli: Warwick Journal of Philosophy 25: 13–33. 137

138 Nietzsche’s Dawn 7 Martin, “The Place of Enlightenment in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thought,” 94. 8 Ruth Abbey, Nietzsche’s Middle Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 144. 9 Mazzino Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge’,” in Montinari, Reading Nietzsche, trans. Greg Whitlock (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2003), 51, 57–69. 10 Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge’,” 57–69. This note is not translated in Montinari’s essay and was prepared for Keith AnsellPearson by Duncan Large. 11 Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge’,” 52. 12 Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge’.” 13 We adopt this schema of enlightenment in Nietzsche’s thought from Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge’,” 52. See also Martin, “The Place of Enlightenment in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thought,” 89–90. 14 Martin, “The Place of Enlightenment in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thought,” 89. 15 Martin, “The Place of Enlightenment in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thought,” 94. 16 As Katrina Mitcheson has argued with regard to GS 110, Nietzsche rejects inquiry understood as involving only a fixed and single method, or strictly demarcated areas of inquiry that inhibit certain forms of investigation. See Mitcheson, “The Experiment of Incorporating Unbounded Truth,” in Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, ed. Rebecca Bamford (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 139–56. 17 Rebecca Bamford. 2016. “The Ethos of Inquiry: Nietzsche on Experience, Naturalism, and Experimentalism.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47(1): 9–29, 25. 18 Cornelius Castoriadis. 1992. “Passion and Knowledge.” Diogenes 160: 76. 19 For insight into Hume’s conception of a passion of knowledge see James A. Harris, Hume. An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 102–03. 20 On Nietzschean intellectual virtues, see Bernard Reginster. 2013. “Honesty and Curiosity in Nietzsche’s Free Spirits.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 51(3): 441–63; Mark Alfano. 2013. “The Most Agreeable of All Vices: Nietzsche as Virtue Epistemologist.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21(4): 767–90; Rebecca Bamford. 2019. “Experimentation, Curiosity, and Forgetting.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 50(1): 11–32; and Mark Alfano, Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 21 Castoriadis, “Passion and Knowledge,” 76. 22 Castoriadis, “Passion and Knowledge,” 78. 23 Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge’,” 61. 24 Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge’,” 61. On knowledge and boundaries of inquiry, particularly the incorporation of truth and knowledge and the possibility of an unbounded truth in Nietzsche, see also Keith Ansell-Pearson, ‘The Incorporation of Truth: Towards the Overhuman’, in

German Enlightenment, Knowledge, and Passion A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Malden and Oxford: Carlton Blackwell Publishing, 2006); Horst Hutter, Shaping the Future: Nietzsche’s Regime of the Soul and Its Ascetic Practices (Lanham and Oxford: Lexington Books, 2006); Katrina Mitcheson, Nietzsche, Truth, and Transformation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Mitcheson, “The Experiment of Incorporating Unbounded Truth.” 25 Bamford, “The Ethos of Inquiry,” 15. 26 Bamford, “The Ethos of Inquiry,” 15. 27 Bamford, “The Ethos of Inquiry,” 15. 28 Marco Brusotti. 1997. “Erkenntnis als Passion: Nietzsches Denkweg zwischen Morgenröthe und der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft.” Nietzsche-Studien 26: 199–225. For insight into the “passion of knowledge” in Nietzsche see also Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge’,” 57–69. 29 Paul Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment: The Free-Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 61. 30 Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 91. 31 On Nietzsche and skepticism, see Jessica N. Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). While Berry does give some attention to Dawn as part of her analysis of Nietzsche’s engagement with ancient skepticism, she does not discuss Nietzsche’s allusion to Mediterranean skepticism in D 207. 32 Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality volume 2, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 8. 33 Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Christopher Middleton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), 177. 34 Edwin Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method: A Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 128–09. 35 Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 97. 36 Franco, Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, 97. In noting Franco’s point on the passions here, we do not claim that for Nietzsche, it is always possible to control all subjective drives. For further discussion of drives, see Chapter 6. 37 See Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Peter Poellner, Nietzsche and Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). 38 Montinari, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy as the ‘Passion for Knowledge’,” 60. 39 Robert Hull. 1990. “Skepticism, Enigma and Integrity: Horizons of Affirmation in Nietzsche’s Philosophy.” Man and World 23: 375–91. 40 For further insight see Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche on Transforming the Passions into Joys: On the Middle Writings and Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” Nietzsche, penseur de l’affirmation. Relecture d’Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra, sous la direction de C. Bertot, J. Leclercq et P. Wotling (Louvain: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2019), 73–90. 139

140 Nietzsche’s Dawn 41 Ansell-Pearson. 2010. “Nietzsche, the Sublime, and the Sublimities of Philosophy: An Interpretation of Dawn.” Nietzsche-Studien 39(1): 20132. Rebecca Bamford, “Daybreak,” in A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Paul Bishop (Rochester: Boydell & Brewer [Camden House], 2012), 139–58. 42 Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche, the Sublime, and the Sublimities of Philosophy.” 43 On Nietzsche’s use of the ad hominem strategy in Dawn, see Abbey, Nietzsche’s Middle Period, and also Bamford, “Daybreak,” 139–57. 44 Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Adventures of Immanence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 106. 45 Bamford, “The Ethos of Inquiry,” 15.