2. Guyer on Nietzsche’s rejection of the categorical imperative as slavish

Nietzsche’s criticisms of Kant’s moral philosophy taken as a whole share the general form that he levels against the broader institution of Christian ‘morality’ from which, he claims – like utilitarianism, modern democracy, and socialism, and so on – it ultimately derives. These criticisms include that it claims that such a morality (i) has levelling-down effects on the perfectionist values which Nietzsche takes to characterise higher individuals and higher culture and (ii) is expressive of, and/or fosters, nihilistic feelings of disgust, ressentiment, and loathing towards life. Each of these criticisms has been given significant attention by commentators. But Nietzsche’s critique of specific elements of Kant’s ethical system – namely, the categorical imperative, as Nietzsche understands Kant to have developed and deployed it – has received much less attention.

This critique is multifaceted and complex. It includes the independent complaints that the ‘universalisability’ requirement of CI erroneously assumes a fundamental similarity across persons (see GS §335); that CI is incoherent, because it depends upon the existence of an independent rational and free faculty behind or above the various human drives, but that such a faculty is non-existent (see GM III, §12); and that CI is too difficult, and perhaps even impossible, to apply, since no two circumstances are ever exactly the same (GS §335). The criticism which I would like to focus upon is Nietzsche’s claim, and Guyer’s subsequent analysis of it, that Kant’s CI is an instance of slave morality.

Nietzsche often associates Kant’s moral philosophy with a form of submissiveness and servility (e.g., GS §5, §335; BGE §187, §199). At times, Nietzsche offers a psychological debunking argument against CI in terms of an instinct to obey. Characteristic of his general method from 1878 onwards is an attempt to best explain moral beliefs in terms of underlying affects. In one passage, Nietzsche writes that ‘Even apart from the value of such claims as “there is a categorical imperative in us”, one can still always ask: what does such a claim tell us about the man that makes it?’ (BGE §187). After distinguishing some possible functions moralities may have with respect to the psychologies of their practitioners, Nietzsche diagnoses in Kant’s CI an expression of the sentiment that ‘“What deserves respect in me is that I can obey – and you ought not to be different from me”’ (BGE §187; see also HH §96; GS §5; GM II, §6). In short, Nietzsche takes it to be the case that the moral system one adheres to has biographical value insofar as it enables us to understand at least part of the psychological profile of the adherent, and that Kant’s postulation of CI as the ground of morality is expressive of his subservient nature.

While there is much to be said about this method of critique, it is doubtful that Kantians will be particularly responsive to it – at least not without significant further argument (see Bennett Reference Bennett2018: 233). However, Guyer correctly identifies another way of understanding Nietzsche’s objection to CI as slavish, one which does not depend upon speculations about Kant’s personal psychology. As Guyer reconstructs Nietzsche’s point, CI is slavish in its essential nature because it requires a mode of living which is incompatible with genuinely free agency. More specifically, Guyer interprets Nietzsche as accusing Kant of advocating for a conception of one’s inclinations as entities which ought to be suppressed in service of a rational will which can only then autonomously posit ends. On this account, CI is expressive of (one form of) slavishness insofar as it is taken to require the ‘slavish virtue of self-abnegation and self-abasement’ (p. 351). In subjecting oneself to the moral law, one must expunge and extirpate one’s inclinations which distract from one’s duty. As a result, the moral law is only adhered to begrudgingly. For Nietzsche, this servile state is predictably symptomatic of a broader ascetic ideal at the core of contemporary morality, of which CI is a mere modern mutation.

Understood in this way, Nietzsche’s criticism of CI looks to be a version of the more general complaint of Kant’s ethical ideal, common since Schiller’s Über Anmut und Würde, that it depends upon a problematically disjointed and fragmented conception of the self (i.e., as an intrinsic tension between a valorised faculty of reason and baser inclinations). Indeed, Kant often seems to provide his executioner with the noose in this respect. In the Groundwork, he writes of the inclinations that ‘it must … be the universal wish of every rational being to be altogether free from them’ (G, 4: 428). Crucially, Kant suggests that there will inevitably be conflict between the rational and animal parts of our nature. When we put our intentions under the microscope, he writes, we will ‘everywhere come upon the dear self’ which ‘is always turning up’, and why ‘the strict command of duty … would often require self-denial’ (G, 4: 407; emphasis mine). Kant appears to continue this thought in his lecture notes of late 1793. There, he writes that ‘it is necessary … that man’s impulses should make him disinclined to fulfil the moral laws’, and that the authority of these laws ‘enjoins absolute obedience, and awakens resistance and struggle’ (LE, 27: 490-1). But he also appears to go further in endorsing the normative point that it is solely in triumphing in this struggle with inclination that agents are morally praiseworthy: ‘the moral law also engenders worth through the very compulsion that fetters us in obedience’ (27: 623).

Up to this point, Nietzsche’s aversion to CI on the grounds that it expresses a slavish obedience and facilitates the adjacent pathologies of begrudging ressentiment seems to hit its mark. Nevertheless, the shared general structure of Nietzsche’s complaint about CI with Schiller’s invites Guyer to reply with the same strategy. Specifically, Guyer offers a case for holding that ‘Kant himself … argued against a slavish conception of the moral law as a burden’ (p. 345) and presents a host of evidence that Kant’s later, settled view of the relationship between practical reason and inclination is best interpreted as one in which the latter helps facilitate the operation of duty; that the truly moral agent happily rather than begrudgingly adheres to the moral law and thus acts without (at least one form of) ressentiment (see pp. 360–1; Chapter 6).

In Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant himself shows deep concern about a ‘temperament…of virtue’ that is ‘weighed down by fear’, and rejects this ‘slavish frame of mind’ which is characterised by ‘a hidden hatred of the law’ and ‘self-torment’ (RBMR, 6: 24n). In short, Guyer argues that by bringing a wider range of Kant’s mature texts into view – culminating in the Metaphysics of Morals in 1797 – we can see that Nietzsche’s complaint that CI expresses a kind of slavishness depends upon a caricature. Kant explicitly objected, Guyer writes, ‘to any thought that morality requires self-abnegation, any form of self-flagellation, whether metaphorical or literal, or total suppression of our natural impulses’ (p. 360).

To cement this point, Guyer draws attention to how this Kantian ideal of freedom as a harmony of the inclinations with reason as opposed to their suppression is ‘not entirely remote from’ and ‘closer than [Nietzsche] realised’ to the noble form of evaluation and free agency outlined in Nietzsche’s texts (p. 346). He writes that ‘Different as their views are in so many respects, both Kant and Nietzsche take a certain kind of self-affirmation rather than self-abnegation to be central to morality’ (ibid.), and concludes that ‘in principle, Nietzsche should share the value that Kant, in his terms, places on agents getting to set their own ends’ (p. 367).

There are certainly grounds for this view. Nietzsche places little value on brute impulse, especially where there is an imbalance in one’s configuration of drives – e.g., ‘having a weak will, or more precisely, being incapable of not reacting to a stimulus, is itself just another form of degeneration’ (TI: ‘Anti-Nature’, §2) – and his positive account of freedom appears to be constituted by an achieved integration of drives which enable the self-affirmed pursuit of worthy goals (e.g., BGE §260; GM I, §11; TI: ‘Skirmishes’, §49). Guyer’s explanation for this alleged oversight on Nietzsche’s part is that ‘Nietzsche did not understand Kant’s moral philosophy very well’ (p. 346, fn. 2). However, I propose that rather than Nietzsche not having an adequate grasp on Kant’s views, at least one of Nietzsche’s criticisms of CI’s slavishness may be more subtly construed.Footnote ³

3. Ideals and realities – on the phenomenology of Kantian agency

A possible reply to Guyer’s critique might be to attempt to drive a wedge between the Kantian ideal of free agency and the possibility of manifesting that ideal in concrete life. Perhaps Nietzsche’s point is not that Kant’s aspiration for CI is slavish in and of itself, but rather that the stringent conditions CI postulates for genuine freedom as a matter of fact condemn most (and likely all) humans to slavishness. This would be the case insofar as conceiving of one’s dignity (Würde) as being tethered solely to an independent and autonomous faculty of pure reason that can liberate us from determination by the inclinations – through suppressing them or harmonising them with ‘reason’ – sets us up for failure, disappointment, and begrudging ressentiment, since in reality there will always be a struggle in inclination to do one’s ‘unconditional’ duty. For Nietzsche, the thought goes, this is guaranteed because the Kantian picture encourages belief in a (fictional) ideal version of oneself that inflates one’s aspirations and deludes one into thinking one can be something one is not.

We have just seen how, at least up until 1793, Kant endorsed the thesis that there will inevitably be a conflict between reason and inclination. Thus, Nietzsche’s complaint of CI, that it is objectionably servile in nature and will likely encourage a general experience of begrudging ressentiment, lands. Guyer, however, argues that beginning in RBMR and with his last word on morality in the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant developed an ideal of moral agency absent of an opposition between inclination and duty, instead harmonising them, with the former being a means to strengthen moral motivation, albeit in a highly complex way. In the latter work, freedom of choice is still construed in terms of an ‘independence from being determined by sensible impulses’ (MM, 6: 213), and he still considers virtue in terms of overcoming the obstacles of natural inclinations (6: 394), but Guyer points to a more comprehensive conception of ‘moral feeling’ that Kant outlines, which he takes to involve the cultivation of empirical preconditions for receptivity to the moral law. On this model of duty, ‘[a]ny sign of merely grudging acceptance of the moral law, any sign of resistance to it, shows that the agent is not really fully committed to the moral law’ (p. 361).

This interpretation certainly adds a welcome nuance to understanding Kant’s development of CI. Yet in proceeding so, Guyer effectively concedes that Kant’s views on the relationship between the inclinations and duty are not obviously clear or consistent over the course of his writing. This being the case, Nietzsche can be blamed less for ‘not understand[ing] Kant’s moral philosophy very well’ (p. 346, fn. 2) and instead can be seen to level objections to the views for which there are legitimate interpretative grounds and at the very least were received as orthodox during the period of Nietzsche’s writing. Nevertheless, it is worth exploring whether Nietzsche’s criticism can withstand Guyer’s interpretation.

First, it is worth emphasising that Kant only argues for the possibility of this kind of harmonious motivation, holding it to be an ideal of moral agency (even if we can’t ever know if we genuinely achieve it: RBMR, 6: 67). Kant does continue to say, for example, that it is ‘unavoidable for human nature to wish for and seek happiness’ (MM, 6: 387; emphasis mine), and further that since ‘sensible inclinations’ of this kind ‘tempt [human beings] to ends … that can be contrary to duty’, lawgiving reason ‘can in turn check their influence only by a moral end set up against the ends of inclination’ (6: 380–1; emphasis mine). So Kant still clings to a picture of human psychology apparent in his earlier work, namely, that freedom can only be understood in opposition to significant elements of our fundamental natures. The Nietzschean worry would be that this tension is likely going to make the ideal of harmonised reason and inclination remarkably rare if not impossible in practice. In a passage from the same section of MM, Kant imagines the strength of will in a person ‘in whom no hindering impulses would impede the law of its will and who would thus gladly do everything in conformity with the law’, tellingly describing such a person as ‘a holy (superhuman) being’ (6: 405). One way of interpreting this claim is as an admission that the ideal of harmonised moral agency that Kant endorses is practically unachievable in this life for most, if not all, human beings. Indeed, Kant holds God and immortality as necessary ‘postulates’ of practical reason insofar as the possibility of attaining the summum bonum of proportionate virtue and ‘happiness’ – i.e., the ‘complete wellbeing and satisfaction with one’s condition’ (G, 4: 393; MM, 6: 387) – requires the existence of a guarantor to facilitate it beyond earthly life in a way that empirical existence, with its inevitable tensions between inclination and reason, does not.

From here, we can begin to determine the beginnings of a possible mode of reply to Guyer’s objection to Nietzsche on CI, one which hands Nietzsche on a plate everything he wants to say about the ascetic and life-denying nihilism of CI as a form of what is essentially still slavish Christian morality merely dressed up in the garb of secular philosophy. In particular, Nietzsche might be interpreted as seeking to reveal a great irony in how Kant’s attempt to understand freedom for rational beings as such sentences most, if not all, to servility, whereby feelings of begrudging ressentiment and eventually pessimism and ascetic resignation will develop as a result of systemic failure to attain an ideal that cannot be empirically realised. One is left only with the hope of a begrudging conformity to the moral law – something which, by Kant’s own lights, would be slavish.

What interests and alarms Nietzsche the most about this state of affairs is its phenomenal character. As Guyer notes, a hallmark of slave morality for Nietzsche is a commitment to values which express a disgruntled and resentful psychology (p. 349). Slave morality is a symptom of ‘the violated, oppressed, suffering, unfree, who are uncertain of themselves and weary’. Nietzsche asks of such people, ‘What will their moral valuations have in common?’ and answers, ‘Probably, a pessimistic suspicion about the whole condition of man … perhaps a condemnation of man along with his condition’ (BGE, §260). A prominent thread of argument in On the Genealogy of Morals explores how this psychological mechanism of ressentiment and condemnation operates in the social context of downtrodden classes towards their aristocratic oppressors. But a major theme of Nietzsche’s writing, particularly explicit in the mid-late 1880s, is the existential problem of why and how forms of suffering more fundamental to our natures qua human can lead to affective nihilism: a psychological condition of general despondence and ressentiment towards life itself. This is exactly the condition which Nietzsche thinks can be triggered by an awareness of the (un)realisability of our highest values given the limits of our sensible nature, which subsequently becomes demonised as a cause of our suffering: ‘Only the human being is a heavy burden to himself! This is because he lugs too much that is foreign to him. Like a camel, he kneels down and allows himself to be well burdened’ (Z: ‘Spirit of Gravity’, p. 54; cf. GM, III, §2). In other words, Nietzsche holds that if we endorse a conception of value too alienated from our actual psycho-physiological condition, the frustration intrinsic to the mismatch between reality and ideal will likely lead to the vilification of our basic natures – i.e., our drives (Triebe) for food, sex, domination, and so on – and ultimately to ascetic resignation in some capacity.

This last point is crucial, for Guyer’s strategy for resisting Nietzsche’s association of CI with slavishness is to explicitly divorce Kant from any association with asceticism. He writes that the ‘Kantian morally worthy person may not be identical to the Nietzschean free spirit or noble, but he is far from an ascetic, at least in any normal sense’ (p. 360). But this final qualification is significant, since Nietzsche notoriously claims that the ascetic ideal manifests in complex and subtle ways deeply embedded into our cultural history and practice, and as such requires more careful psychological and sociological diagnosis. Nietzsche does not conceive of Kant as a literal ascetic of the kind Schopenhauer praised in Hindu, Buddhist, and early Christian traditions (i.e., as consciously vilifying sensibility and the inclinations in order to obtain a higher state of religious consciousness). Rather, Nietzsche considers Kant, like various other moralists, to unknowingly encourage life-denying tendencies in advocating for conceptions of value that happen to frame one’s desires and inclinations as problematic features of existence insofar as they are obstacles to moral requirements.

Guyer is right, I believe, that Nietzsche in many places thinks of Kant as an ascetic simply in taking him to set up the inclinations in opposition to reason and thus considering CI slavish insofar as one will always resentfully follow the dictates of the moral law unless the inclinations are (ideally) suppressed altogether. While it is no stretch of the imagination to read Kant this way, I believe that Nietzsche offers the resources for a subtler association of Kant with asceticism (and thus with slavishness) which acknowledges Guyer’s point that Kant may be best read as advocating for an ideal of duty gladly carried out. On this view, in circumstances where people have had their sense of self-mastery over-amplified and, as a result, inevitably fail to live up to the ideal of harmonised duty and inclination, Nietzsche offers an empirical hypothesis about the likely phenomenological experience of life to emerge. In his terms, it will amount to an experience of life pervaded by two interconnected tendencies: (1) a moralised form of ‘bad conscience’, namely, guilt; (2) pessimism about the value of life, and its accompanying pathologies of despair, weariness, despondence, and importantly, demonisation of the drives. As a result, the later views Guyer interprets Kant to espouse may not in practice differ from Kant’s claim in the Groundwork that ‘the strict command of duty … would often require self-denial’ (G, 4: 407; emphasis mine).

Yet, there would need to be more to this story in order to properly articulate Nietzsche’s target. A crucial feature of the analysis above is that the unattainability, or at least exclusivity, of the moral ideal embedded in CI is a problem on Kant’s own terms. Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or sovereign individual, for instance, is, of course, in his eyes, an unachievable ideal for the vast majority of human beings. But this doesn’t make that ideal, nor its practical reality, slavish for Nietzsche. The important reason for the difference between Kant and Nietzsche on this point is that their respective ideals are not equally egalitarian: it is a problem for Kant that few if any will attain his conception of free agency. It is not a problem for Nietzsche, since he does not advocate his ideal of freedom to be pursued by just anyone. Indeed, the vast majority, or ‘the herd’, for Nietzsche, are already condemned to slavishness of various sorts, including slavishness to their poorly calibrated instincts. In the social context, for example, some plausible readings take Nietzsche to consider the dignity of most people to be tethered precisely to their subordination to the creative aims of higher individuals (see Huddleston Reference Huddleston2014). As Nietzsche says in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: ‘There are some who threw away their last worth [Werth] when they threw away their servitude [Dienstbarkeit]’ (Z: ‘On the Way of the Creator’, p. 46; cf. BGE §257, §258). Nietzsche seems to hold that servitude to something – ideals, persons, classes – is not just inevitable for the vast majority but also wholly appropriate. Furthermore, it is good for them to be subordinated in such ways (see Huddleston Reference Huddleston2014; Hassan Reference Hassan2023: 234–5). To take but one of Nietzsche’s examples, he speaks of an ‘ennobling of obedience [Veredelung des Gehorsams]’ in the vast majority through religious practice, which he associates with ‘an inestimable contentment with their situation and type, manifold peace of the heart … and something transfiguring and beautifying, something of a justification for the whole everyday character, the whole lowliness, the whole half-brutish poverty of their souls’. This religious narrative, he goes on, can ‘spread the splendour of the sun over such ever-toiling human beings and make their own sight tolerable to them … teaching even the lowliest how to place themselves through piety in an illusory higher order of things and thus to maintain their contentment with the real order, in which their life is hard enough – and precisely this hardness is necessary’ (BGE §61).

The claim here, I take it, is that certain kinds of obedience are appropriate for those lacking the capacity for anything higher, and those individuals can be content with their submissiveness. Where obedience is difficult insofar as it demands a struggle against inclination, however, there will inevitably be the begrudging servility Nietzsche (and Kant) find objectionable. This is exactly the worry Nietzsche can be seen to have about the Kantian ideal of harmonised rational-sensible agency that Guyer identifies. The danger of CI, on this view, is that its egalitarian and universal character encourages ordinary people to reach out for a ‘holy (superhuman)’ (MM, 6: 405) ideal that, being wholly divorced from their nature, they are unsuitable candidates for obtaining. The resulting failure guarantees to foster pessimistic sentiment which will inevitably transform into ascetic vilification of our sensible nature and ressentiment towards life. CI remains ‘slavish’ (in at least one crucial respect), then, because it condemns its practitioners to disgruntled servility.

It is this point which partly explains, I think, Nietzsche’s claim that a ‘Refined servility [feinere Servilität] clings to the categorical imperative’ (GS, §5; emphasis mine): when one’s ideals are divorced from one’s reality and the threat of ressentiment festers in the face of unmeetable obligation, one must decorate one’s subordination in the garb of ‘unconditional’ devotion, giving one a semblance of ‘ennobling obedience [Veredelung des Gehorsams]’ (BGE, §61) in the only form of practical success one is capable of.