Nietzsche and Hegel

Nietzsche and Hegel

Nietzsche and Hegel

“Elliot L. Jurist's Beyond Hegel And Nietzsche” is a text concerned, not to diminish the importance of these two influential and major thinkers from the history of modern philosophy, as a casual glance at Jurist's title might at first suggest, but rather to amplify it. It aims to achieve such an amplification by arguing against what is now - particularly since the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze's controversially polemical Nietzsche and Philosophy - virtually a commonplace amongst authors writing on German philosophy in the post-Kantian period: that Hegel and Nietzsche are “philosophical opposites” (p.1). More specifically, Jurist attempts to demonstrate that Hegel's and Nietzsche's thinking is commensurable and even complementary with regard to certain specific themes, not least the topics of culture and agency. This is a controversial interpretation. Nevertheless,

But let us get down to the business of expounding Beyond Hegel And Nietzsche's principal line of philosophical argument. Both Hegel and Nietzsche, Jurist claims, eschew the manner and method of the famous “armchair odyssey” (p. 18) of Descartes' Meditations in favor of seeing philosophy as integrally bound up with human culture.

But Jurist, happily, does not overplay the comparison between Hegel and Nietzsche on the topic of the self-understanding of philosophy itself, and in this regard he goes on to make the important point that in Nietzsche's case (but not of course in Hegel's) “tragedy, which has its source in music, conveys deeper truths than philosophy, which restricts communication to words” (p. 81). However, it seems to me important to point out here that this Nietzschean point is not simply anti-Hegelian but is also actively neo-Schopenhauerian. Consequently one is tempted to wonder at this point whether in so placing such a detail of the Nietzschean argument in its proper Schopenhauerian context -which Jurist does not do, though he does mention Schopenhauer's influence on Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music on p. 84 - one thereby eliminates the possibility of seeing it as only a minor skirmish with Hegel rather than as a symptomatic clash based upon profoundly different sets of metaphysical and epistemological commitments, albeit sets of metaphysical and epistemological commitments both ultimately derived from meditations upon the supposed limitations of the Kantian critical enterprise. Relatedly, Jurist's later discussion of Nietzsche's concept of the will (pp. 232-235) would, in my opinion, have benefited from a prior elaboration of Schopenhauer's own notion of the will, which forms the obvious theoretical background to Nietzsche's thoughts on the matter. (Tanner, 1994, 25)

Peter Poellner, for one, has in recent years linked Nietzsche's arguments for the will to Schopenhauer's, in a manner that seems to me to be fairly convincing And more generally, it is, perhaps, quite telling that those commentators such as Jurist who are keen to bring Hegel and Nietzsche closer to one another are also often relatively neglectful of Schopenhauer's influence upon the latter; whilst those authors - for example, Poellner and Deleuze - who attempt to take account of and explicate Schopenhauer's importance ...