Stephen Houlgate published Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics 37 years ago in 1986 which formed the basis of his PhD thesis. It remains, in my opinion, one of the best works on Nietzsche within Anglo-American scholarship. Although it does not present an extensive commentary on Nietzsche’s life and work (unlike, for instance, as we find in Maudemarie Clark’s Nietzsche On Truth and Philosophy which deals with similar themes and problematics with Houlgate), it does identify the crux of what makes Nietzsche’s project intelligible, here rendered as a critique of metaphysics, and shows how Nietzsche’s theory of language fails to live up to that task. Hegel is therefore presented as the consummate figure to have overcome metaphysics caught in the trap of oppositional and verständig thinking. In this way, Houlgate inverts Heidegger’s claim that it was Nietzsche, not Hegel, who was the penultimate thinker of metaphysics. And left himself to assume the role of finally overcoming it.
The success of Houlgate’s reading comes down to his Hegelian perspective. It is also what distinguishes his from most other Anglo-American interpretations of Nietzsche, since they think Nietzsche within the bounds of Kant’s reason. In this way what Nietzsche offers is a more complicated neo-Kantianism. Whereas on Houlgate’s view, we can easily place him as a thoroughly post-Hegelian thinker. This is why Houlgate places Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics only second to Hegel’s own, and they have far more similarities than with Kant.
Before I get into some of the details I’ll provide a short-and-sweet list of Houlgate’s main contentions with Nietzsche, which is really only based on a single claim:
1 - In his attempt to overcome oppositional thinking Nietzsche fails to articulate and overcome the opposition between language and life which he presupposes.
1.1 - fails to conceptually differentiate the opposition between language and life because of his commitment to a ‘fictionalist epistemology’ which denies that life can be conceptually and propositionally represented.
1.12 - fails to appreciate the distinction between ordinary (grammatical) language and categorial (logical) language.
1.2 - relies ‘on the foundation of life to validate the proposition that necessary propositions about the world cannot be justified.’
1.21 - does not engage in immanent criticism and thus uses the category of life as an external standard of judgement.
1.22 - regresses to a pre-linguistic experience of life which can only be privately affirmed.
Houlgate places Nietzsche alongside Hegel as one of the highest critics of metaphysics. They are both strong dialectical thinkers, philosophers of life or spirit, anti-dogmatic critics of all presuppositions (or ‘prejudices’), and who aim to overcome the rigidity of conceptual oppositions by showing how they are, in fact, identical. Additionally, this means hammering the hollow foundation of all metaphysical thinking: grammar. Metaphysics is a symptom of language. Metaphysical thinking, as Houlgate says, is really a positivism. Both are reifying forms of consciousness because they treat all oppositions as comprised of given objects, which treats each object in the antithesis as having an independent, substantial existence that is either true or false. It is the snare of grammar, as Nietzsche says, which concerns itself with the reified opposition between subject and object. Or, as he says elsewhere, ‘the fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in antithetical values.’
What marks Nietzsche and Hegel as deep thinkers is in their response to the Kantian problematic of the distinction and opposition between appearance and reality. This is the problem which bewitches post-Kantian thought. Yet both thinkers attempt to overcome it in their own ways. Houlgate’s book, then, compares Nietzsche’s and Hegel’s answers and concludes by showing how it was Hegel who is the true successor to this problematic.
Why did Nietzsche fail? Houlgate frames his position by focusing on Nietzsche’s theory of language. Nietzsche is ‘bewitched by the opposition between life and thought’ (21) because of his ‘epistemological fictionalism’ which is committed to the view that language is fundamentally limited in its ability to represent reality. Because of this conceptual limitation, Nietzsche, Houlgate argues, is thus unable to conceptually distinguish the opposition between life and thought. ‘Due to this radical mismatch between language and life, there is no possibility of language ever expressing the truth of life. All linguistic propositions are falsifications of the life they try to articulate’ (77). This means not only is Nietzsche left with an opposition he cannot and does not account for, he is consequently left to one-sidedly affirming an abstract notion of life over that of language. On the face of it, Nietzsche is seen here to be monist who affirms life. But his affirmation presupposes an opposition to language which cannot adequately conceptualise the objective reality of life, since life is always in excess of language. Nietzsche must also affirm that, since life is not identical to its representation in language, it must be distinct from it albeit unconceptualisable. Life can never conceptually articulate itself qua life, it can only infinitely strive to self-reflect on its own limits to express the excess of life. This limitation to speculatively identify thought and life has social and political problems, too. Because Nietzsche is unable to provide a way for language to correspond with reality, he is not only barred from affirming a collective sense of knowledge (who each share in the universality of language), but is condemned to promote the truth of the life as his truth, his perspective. There can be no shared political life if there can be no shared truth of that life.
Houlgate moves on to compare Nietzsche’s and Hegel’s views on God in their attempt to overcome metaphysical abstraction. For Houlgate, Nietzsche remains too close to Feuerbach’s criticism of God as an external abstraction or fiction created by humans. This criticism concretises the dualistic contrast between fictions qua symptom of language with the foundation of ‘life’ which, again, Nietzsche is unable to speculatively identify. Hegel, on the other hand, sees God not as a fiction but as ‘an abstract formulation of the truth of man’ (99). Hegel discovers ‘the concrete truth inherent in abstraction by means of a process of immanent criticism (100). The content of the abstraction is developed out of thought and thus does not remain external to it. Moreover, the logic of self-consciousness is fully articulated in tragedy with which the Christian religion represents through the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection (98).
Houlgate refers to the limits of this Feuerbachian critique as the ‘positivism of metaphysics’ which ‘treats the subject matter as gegenstandlich [oppositional], as comprising the given objects (or subjects) of thought.’ Philosophers caught within the faculty of understanding can only see antitheses everywhere and stop short of sublating them. In this sense, metaphysics remains a reified form of consciousness which can only accept the infinite inversion of given antitheses. Enlightenment understanding sees its task as the infinite accumulation of knowledge of those given objects. And does so through use of external methodologies. Nietzsche succumbs to this criticism when he himself inadvertently promotes life as an external standard which cannot be conceptually justified. ‘For Nietzsche, life is the standard against which all judgements are shown to be false, but it is still the standard against which all judgements must ultimately be tested’ (112). Nietzsche is thus ultimately tautological in that he cannot justify the standard by which all other standards are made without relapsing into an empty, private, and ultimately conflicted affirmation of life. Or, in Houlgate’s words, Nietzsche is ‘relying on the foundation of life to validate the proposition that necessary propositions about the world cannot be justified.’
Houlgate concisely summarises the tragedy of intelligibility: ‘The structure of our thought and language is therefore the structure of our world, and we have no standard of reference by which to judge the truth of the ontology to which our concepts commit us which does not itself rely on those concepts or which cannot at least be adequately stated in terms of those concepts’ (122). The tragedy involves not being able to falsify conceptuality without, at the same time, conceding to it. Its concepts all the way down! If the world likewise has the structure of thought, and thought has a conceptual structure, then one can only gain an understanding of the world through the analysis of that conceptual structure which relates thought and world. ‘The truth that speculative philosophy seeks, therefore, is the proper understanding of the logical determinations which constitute our world’ (131). It is not a transcendental method which a priori applies the schema of thought to constructed experience. Instead, speculative philosophy determines the immanent character of thought and the ‘true nature of the categories.’ This is why Houlgate dedicates the latter half of his book to explicating Hegel's idea of the speculative sentence which deals with the self-determination of the categories of thought. Because it is only in language that we can understand concepts at all, positing them as fictions - even as a necessary ones - thereby forecloses the possibility of knowing the objective world. Although Nietzsche was a vehement critic of language, he failed, on Houlgate’s account, to distinguish within language the difference between ordinary-grammatical language and logical-categorial language. But Nietzsche’s refusal to accept language as adequate to representing life was true insofar as he refused judging life grammatically and propositionally. Metaphysics is in essence, for Nietzsche and Hegel, a confusion about the subject-predicate relation. This is why ‘Hegel’s analysis of the speculative sentence contains the essence of his whole critique of metaphysical philosophy’ (150).
I want to conclude not by giving an account of Houlgate’s understanding of Hegel (as it has little bearing on the force of his criticism of Nietzsche) but by providing a small response to Houlgate’s Hegelian Challenge. Its important to clarify I don’t want to solely put Nietzsche to the test of Hegel, as if Nietzsche’s value is determined by how close he gets to Hegel. Nor to presuppose that Hegel has the final word. But the point is, for Houlgate, that it requires Hegel’s speculative philosophy to achieve what Nietzsche set out to do, namely the critique of metaphysics. So any similarity between them can be explained by their shared project. I would like to go over some of those points of similarity.
Any limits to Houlgate’s understanding of Nietzsche can be explained simply to its outdatedness. And there some limits. First, Houlgate makes no mention of the fact that Nietzsche distinguishes between life qua self-preservation and life qua growth or power. The fact that Nietzsche makes such a distinction means he has a much more sophisticated idea of self-consciousness immanent to a concept of a life one aims to affirm and actualise. Second, while Houlgate references the physiological aspect of Nietzsche’s concept of life, he does not in any way explicate the significance of the body (Leib) which mediates rationality and life. Nietzsche himself refers to the body as the identity of multiplicity and wholeness. Third, Houlgate therefore does not give an account of Nietzsche’s concept of mediation, implicit in his theory of incorporation (einverleibung) or embodied rationality.
Nietzsche is explicit in denying the possibility that one can view life outside it. Life cannot be estimated because one cannot step outside life to estimate. Thus we can only ever have a ‘perspectival’ and immanent understanding of life. Yet this denial seems remarkably similar to Hegel’s own, as Houlgate presents it. ‘There is no given ‘absolute’ point of reference for Hegel, but only the claims of consciousness itself and the experience which consciousness makes about itself’ (180). Rationality is therefore produced out of the process of self-determining life. Phenomenology is the gradual ‘unfolding of the dialectical character of consciousness (180). A few lines later Houlgate even quotes Hegel’s own distinction between life qua self-preservation and life qua activity of thinking in the preface to the Phenomenology. This activity of thinking, which incorporates its object into itself and thereby takes itself as the object of self-reflection, is cunning because it is ‘looking on to see how determinateness and its concrete life takes itself to be engaged in its own self-preservation and its own particular interest and how it is actually doing the very opposite, or how it is doing what leads to its own dissolution and what makes itself into a moment of the whole.’
Some unconcluding philosophical crumbs. —
For Houlgate, Nietzsche remains a metaphysical thinker because he is caught in the vicious circle of striving to overcoming conceptual oppositions by infinitely inverting them. He cannot, unlike Hegel, articulate their identity. In this sense Nietzsche remains a neo-Kantian thinker. Even if Nietzsche fails to properly articulate or even conceive of life as rationally self-determining, Nietzsche is still able to propose ways we can reflect on life reflecting itself. This is achieved through art. Houlgate dedicates a sizeable chunk of his last chapter on the differences between Nietzsche’s and Hegel’s theory of tragedy (which I won’t get into here). Suffice to say that art (including poetic language) introduces a distinction between representing and expressing. We each, as particulars, participate in the universal expression and affirmation of life through language and art. Language expresses life. Thus there is an embodied correspondence between life and thought. A post-Hegelianism of this sort follows Wittgenstein’s maxim: the absolute cannot be said, only shown.
Crucially, Houlgate says tragedy, for Hegel, enacts in aesthetic form the actuality of his own speculative philosophy (219).
Neo-Kantians avow the distinction between the limits of language and the unknowability of objective truth. Neo-Hegelians disavow the distinction by affirming the direction expression between life and thought. It is disavowed because they still presuppose the distinction which they are unable to conceptualise yet rely on. It is also why every post-Hegelianism is a Romanticism. Or, a penultimate Hegelianism. Since they stop one moment short of articulating the absolute. Instead, art serves the purpose of expressing life. They affirm the identity between art and science. But if the absolute cannot be thought, it can at least be experienced and as such can be affirmed. Affirmation is capable of uniting the particular and the universal in experience.