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An outline of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche’s key ideas and their contribution to the development of social thought.

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Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche are two important intellectuals whose thoughts are integral to the development of social thought in Europe and North America.

Immanuel Kant’s thoughts have enriched a wide variety of disciplines within humanities, including theology, political science and sociology. But Kant’s work does not fit easily into any particular disciplinary paradigm.  Of late, Kant’s thoughts have regained eminence in the study of international politics.  Contemporary proponents of Kant’s relevance to international politics espouse the view that democracy leads to peace. But this position contradicts the philosophic foundations of Kant’s works.  Hence there is not straightforward account of how Kant’s works have influenced subsequent social thought.  The infiltration of Kant’s ideas into later scholarship is at places overt and at others subtle.  Neither is the influence uniform and unidirectional for contradictions abound. (Rossi, 2010, p.79)

Later generation of scholars studying Kant’s works have rejected the “overly constraining the republicanism, internationalism, and individualistic humanism that obviously inform Kant’s political writings.” (Franke & Franceschet, 2001, p. 713) Perceiving these liberal political concepts to be anachronistic and outdated, scholars have tried to fit Kant to the postmodern understanding of politics. Kant had espoused liberal universalism, but its premises have proven to be limited and contestable.  To redress this drawback in Kantian thought, modern philosophers have tried to “cultivate a political scepticism that is ethically attentive and responsive to the Other, whoever or whatever he or she may be.” (Franke & Franceschet, 2001, p. 713) Though this a sound position to take with respect to international politics, the key question is how we go about acting upon and institutionalizing such ethical responsibility and respect globally?

Kantian thought has been a strong source of support for theologians of last two centuries.  That theology needed this support from outside is a reflection of the waning influence of religion – especially organized religion.  Moreover, the 18th century Age of Enlightenment had significantly undermined the hold of religious superstition and dogma over people’s lives.  That Kant’s life coincided with the upheavals of the Enlightenment can be interpreted as the philosopher’s attempt at reconciling his personal faith with looming currents of doubt created by rationalism. (Caird, 1889, p.56)  Hence there is a degree of merit to the view that theological presuppositions are present within Kant’s work.  A key term here is “theological horizons”, which served as a set of analytic frameworks for Kant’s argument of his theses. Such theological horizons function,

“in the first instance, on Kant’s own part, inasmuch as the critical philosophy articulates its account of human finitude over against a robust sense of transcendence. For Kant, fundamental to the conceptual space of the human–i.e., to the articulation of an account of what distinctively constitutes our humanity–is the orientation of that space to transcendence as it delimits the contours of our properly human finitude. In affirming human finitude–for which his trope is “the limits of reason”–as marked out by radical difference from transcendence, Kant stands within the theological horizon to which the reflective traditions of Abrahamic monotheism have oriented themselves in affirming “God” as the proper name for the transcendence humanity encounters in radical Otherness.” (Rossi, 2010, p.80)

Kant’s major thrust was not so much against pure reason as against our perception of the ‘real’.  Kant found the founding principles of the Enlightenment problematic for they put reason and scientific inquiry as the sole medium for understanding reality. Kant argued against this eminence for human intellect by suggesting that reality as perceived by humans might be very different to absolute reality.  That disillusioned reality that lies beneath what is merely apparent to us is unknowable.  Hence there is the material reality founded by homocentric perception and the true reality.  Kant makes a technical distinction between the two by calling the former the ‘phenomenal world’ and the latter the ‘nuomenal world’.  Thus “our human minds have a built-in disposition toward illusion: the illusion that reality must be exactly the way we experience it. When we presume that our experience corresponds to reality, we are making an unjustified leap. We have absolutely no way to know this.” (Dahlen, 2011)

While Immanuel Kant’s influence was most pronounced during the 19th century, his successors, including Friedrich Nietzsche were taking centre stage at the beginning of the twentieth century.  Nietzsche is an important intellectual, for he can be credited with ushering the era of postmodernism.  Even prior to this retrospective understanding of Nietzsche, he was a pioneer of the Existentialist philosophical movement.  Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus’ contribution to existentialist thought is a follow up in the direction shown by Nietzsche. Just as Nietzsche’s importance is established, his legacy is undermined by persistent rumours about his alleged anti-semitism, pro-Nazism, misogyny, anti-morality and even insanity (during his last years).

In order to comprehend Nietzsche’s body of work, one has to look at his sources of inspiration and influence.  Some of the earlier philosophers who influenced Nietzsche’s work include Socrates, Wagner, Kant, Schopenhauer; and to a lesser extent Luther and Darwin.  But the influence is not always as a result of agreement with the earlier masters.  For example in the case of Kant, Nietzsche’s relationship was polemical.  Nietzsche’s body of work is closely associated with ‘virtue-ethics’. (Adam, 2001, p.324) The deeper one delves into various aspects of Nietzsche’s political philosophy, the clearer it becomes that Nietzsche’s political philosophy “merits reconstruction not only in broad historical terms. If we succeed in understanding the political perspectivism of Nietzsche’s ideas, we might also be able to contribute substantially to the received canon of political philosophy.” (Kiss, 2001, p. 373)

To grasp how Nietzsche’s ideas contributed to the development of social thought one need to take the historical context into account.  Nietzsche’s life and work came at the back of half a century of Marxist dominance in socio-political discourse.  In many ways, the fall in prominence of the Marxist paradigm directly aided the revitalising of Nietzsche’s political philosophy.  In contrast to Marxism, Nietzsche’s political philosophy, especially his theory of democracy, “rests on a notion of society located within the conceptual framework of the sociology of knowledge and culture. Precisely this difference gave Nietzsche’s political thought the semblance of being antiquated as long as the Marxist paradigm remained dominant.” (Kiss, 2001, p. 373)

While Nietzsche has offered fresh perspectives to philosophy and has proved to be a worthy source of scholarly research, his influence on society is not accepted as altogether positive.  Allan Bloom wrote in his influential 1987 book ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ that Nietzsche has caused detriment to the academia and the society at large through the new set of vocabulary he introduced.  Allan Bloom contends that Nietzschean terms such as charisma, life-style, commitment and identity have been co-opted by the youth to evade responsibility to the nation and to their own character development.  Criticisms of Nietzsche also emanate from Church officials.  The Archbishop of Canterbury, for example, had accused Nietzsche of undermining morality. He deplored the fact that

“the traditional vocabulary of moral discourse – virtue, sin, good, bad, right, wrong, moral, wholesome, godly, righteous and sober – have come under acute contemporary suspicion. And he made a fierce attack on the development of moral relativism, a world in which there are no firm ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ except what we as individuals deem to be true for ourselves.” (Gott, 1996, p.86)

Though Nietzsche was not a household name during most of his lifetime his legacy started to grow toward the end of his life. It is ironical that by the time he achieved fame he was descending fast into the world of madness.  His condition was so acute that he was kept under lock and key by his sister during the last 10 years of his life.  It is a mark of Nietzsche’s contribution to social thought that every important artist, musician, writer and playwright in Europe paid him homage. These included Gustav Mahler, George Bernard Shaw, Pablo Picasso, Thomas Mann, August Strindberg, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud and many others.  It’s not difficult now to understand the appeal and influence that Nietzsche had then, for he

“proclaimed the death of God, he was hostile to the stifling bourgeois morality of the era, and he glorified in the intense feelings of the senses, exalting music, dancing, sexual excitement, making love, giving birth, hatred, fighting, and war. Not for nothing was he a powerful influence on the futurists and the vorticists. Even today his enthusiasms can seem intensely modem as well as modernist. Yet he is also perceived as the high priest of the postmodern. He speaks across the century to the specific concerns of our fractured times.” (Gott, 1996, p.87)

But there is a blotch to his legacy, albeit not one of his own making. After his death, the emergent Nazi Party in Germany misappropriated and misrepresented his thoughts to suit their narrow political ends.  As a result, especially in the Anglo-American view he went into disgrace and scholarly neglect in the years immediately following the Second World War.  But in recent decades, Nietzsche’s true contributions to philosophy is being acknowledged and celebrated once again.  According to noted Nietzsche scholar Hollingdale, “he’s a philosopher who has a lot to say about contemporary conditions.The important thing about Nietzsche is that there is no dogma. He says dogmatism belongs to the past and he argues that we simply don’t know enough to know what’s right or wrong.” (Adam, 2001, p.323) The big challenge now is the relativisation of values, for under Nietzschean system, basic moral values are seen to be under attack.

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