ABSTRACT
Of all the philosophic names associated with Nietzsche, the name of Kant is perhaps the most complicated. Part of this, inevitably enough, has to do with the complexities of Kant’s thought, the architectural dynamics of which makes invoking Kant a challenge for any thinker, including Martin Heidegger who dedicated two volumes to Kant, arguably framing his Being and Time thereby and matching his engagement with Nietzsche. 1 In addition, to name other philosophers who typically connect Nietzsche and Kant, there is Theodor Adorno, as well as Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, but also Jean-Luc Nancy and so on. Even without a thematic focus on Kant, there is also traditionally the question of Nietzsche and the problem of truth as Jean Granier expresses this in his book-length study, in the wake of Abel Rey’s own earlier investigations articulated with respect to the natural sciences/ physics; as well as the chemist Alwin Mittasch’s several studies of Nietzsche; and, very broadly, Hans Vaihinger on ‘fictionalism’ both in Kant and in Nietzsche (in addition to ‘will’ and interpretation as these latter emphases find expression in many later German readings, such as that of Friedrich Kaulbach, Günter Abel, Volker Gerhardt and others). 2
Reading Nietzsche in connection with Kant requires that one pay attention to the “critical philosophy” as Kant spoke of his own critique as a whole. But which Kant? And perhaps above all, which Critique? Intriguing, but this can obscure attention to the range of Kant’s philosophic influence on Nietzsche’s thought; the early Nietzsche takes his own point of departure in his very first book from Kant’s Critique of Judgment , i.e., as the German title Urteilskraft makes explicit: the critique of the ‘power’ of judgment as Nietzsche invokes the ‘science of aesthetics’ in the very first line of The Birth of Tragedy . 3
To this one must add, noting that there is a considerable literature on Nietzsche and the Kantian thing in itself, the significance of different philosophical approaches to reading Nietzsche and Kant, ranging from analytic readings 4 to what are now named historical readings, 5 all by contrast with the continental readings already invoked above. 6 In any case, Nietzsche is concerned in his first book with nothing less than the focus of Kant’s critical philosophy as such, even indeed at the transcendental level; 7
i.e., he’s concerned with the possibility of knowledge as such, including, most saliently, as he tells us: the question of science as such, an sich.
