Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of his Thought

By R. Kevin Hill

Clarendon Press, 2003

Reviewed by Daniel Blue

In Nietzsche’s Critiques, R. Kevin Hill tackles a subject often cited but rarely explored, the extent to which Nietzsche responded to Kantian themes. Hill contends that Nietzsche not only read Kant throughout his life but that the core of his work directly addressed claims made by his predecessor. In other words, Nietzsche was not just kantian but Kantian, a characterization which many might question. Despite this problematic linkage, however, his book is so thoughtful and well-written, that the more controversial theses tend to disappear among the undeniable riches.

The author begins with an overview of the history of the Neo-Kantian movement in Germany, the ways Nietzsche was exposed to Kant, and the varieties of his responses. He then launches a sustained examination of the interplay between the two men’s philosophies. More specifically, Hill homes in on what he construes as Nietzsche’s reactions to each of the three Critiques, beginning with that of Judgment and proceeding to those of Pure and Practical Reason.

While no brief review could convey the subtlety or scope of Hill’s findings, a few highlights deserve mention. His treatment of Nietzsche’s response to the Critique of Judgment, for example, is framed by an undeniable fact. In 1865 Nietzsche read Schopenhauer and seemed to accept him wholly and uncritically. Seven years later he published The Birth of Tragedy, a work which used a Schopenhauerean vocabulary but expressed views which in key respects were not Schopenhauerean at all. What happened in the interim to motivate and explain this change?

Hill hypothesizes that Nietzsche wanted to reconcile the teleological visions of Schopenhauer with the discoveries of Darwin. To resolve this, he turned to Kant’s “Critique of Teleological Judgment” and there discovered Kant’s recourse to reflective judgments, a concept which Hill rightly views as a linchpin of the entire Critique of Judgment. Nietzsche, Hill claims, recognized that the notion of reflective judgment would protect him from certain errors that he had already recognized in Schopenhauer. It would also allow him to imaginatively expand his ontological realm without thereby indulging in dogmatic metaphysics. It was Kant, of all people, Hill claims, who allowed Nietzsche to invent the Dionysian World-Creator, that demiurge who presides, ever unseen, behind the metaphysics of The Birth of Tragedy.

Hill proceeds to a discussion of the Critique of Pure Reason and Nietzsche’s putative response to it, a display so rich and complex that it defies summary. Nonetheless, one must cite at least two achievements. Hill reinterprets Kant’s forms of judgment in terms of syntactical rules, an approach which foregrounds the functional role of the categories, and he discovers in Nietzsche a distinction between perception and truth that does not require recourse to a thing in itself.

Finally, Hill explores Nietzsche¹s confrontation with the Critique of Practical Reason, mapping three pillars of Kantian inquiry onto the three parts of The Genealogy of Morals. He also offers a fascinating account of what Nietzsche intended to accomplish through the genealogical method and shows how this eluded the genetic fallacy.

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Hill’s book throughout is stimulating, insightful, and highly readable. There are no “skippable” paragraphs in this book, less because the argument is tightly linked, than because of Hill’s intelligence: whatever the topic, he unfailingly finds something interesting to say. This is not to say that he is always right. This particular reader found himself disagreeing every third page. But Hill moves so swiftly yet smoothly on to new and fascinating topics, that any demurrals are swiftly overridden by interest in what follows. Among the book’s many pleasures one must mention his observations on Nietzsche’s place in the history of nineteenth-century philosophy, his discussion of the meaning of asceticism, and his fresh insights on objective criteria which might be used for ascription of the Will to Power.

Yet despite such successes, the book has a flaw, and this devolves on a single, constantly invoked claim which permeates the work. Hill insists that Nietzsche not only read Kant closely but devised his own views in direct response to those of his Königsbergian predecessor. There is little factual evidence for this. On the contrary, even the most assiduous of Nietzsche researchers (Thomas Brobjer, for example) can find few indications that Nietzsche read Kant’s original texts. He did not own any books by Kant. His library account records no borrowings of works by Kant. He mentions Kant in letters but never discusses particular insights or themes which would suggest that he was actively engaged in reading that philosopher. Hill bases his contention that Nietzsche engaged in “close reading” mostly on the fact that the latter occasionally copied texts or cited certain passages in Kant by page. However, this only proves that Nietzsche looked up citations. Countless undergraduates have done the same; it does not mean they have “closely” read the book. Until more tangible evidence turns up, we will have to assume that Nietzsche engaged with Kant largely, if not exclusively, through secondary sources.

A further omission haunts the first half of Hill’s work. One of his favorite tactics in “proving” that Nietzsche read Kant is to claim that if he did not get certain ideas from Schopenhauer, then he must have picked them up from Kant. This either/or reduction to two philosophers overlooks the broad spectrum of Nietzsche’s actual reading, a fact which another author has exploited to impressive effect. It is telling that when describing Nietzsche’s philosophical development between 1865 and 1872, Hill seems unaware of Claudia Crawford’s book-length examination of the same texts and issues. In The Beginnings of Nietzsche’s Theory of Language Crawford noted the same shifts in Nietzsche’s thematics, but she convincingly explained these through readings of a whole constellation of thinkers, most notably Lange and Hartmann. It may be that Hill disagrees with Crawford, but he then needs to explain why he has ignored her and how he envisions his own approach to be superior.

Such weaknesses in Nietzsche’s Critiques are not necessarily serious. Even if Nietzsche rarely read Kant, he seems to have been amply alive to the challenges posed by his predecessor. If he was not immediately influenced, he was surely mediately aware, and this weaker version of Hill’s thesis is all that he needs to justify this exceptional overview. Hill’s success at displaying and comparing the two bodies of work is generally sustained and often brilliant. Anyone interested in seeing how Nietzsche measures up against arguably the most pivotal philosopher of modern times will find this book stimulating, if only because it shows how much he and Kant had in common, even as they deeply diverged.

Review by Daniel Blue

All Rights Reserved. © Daniel Blue-Nietzsche Circle, 2006.