Hegel and Nietzsche on thought, freedom, and ‘the labour of the negative’

Abstract

The argument advanced in this essay is that Hegel and Nietzsche’s method of critical enquiry is not only consonant but embraces a concept of practical freedom that for both philosophers tethers the affective will to the empty formalism of the Kantian rational will. Defining his own philosophical practice as a ‘yea-saying to opposition and war’ ( Ecce Homo), Nietzsche engages in a rigorous discipline of thought that proceeds on the dialectical principle of affirmative negation, thereby recuperating what Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit refers to as ‘the labour of the negative’. Contrary to Deleuze’s emphatically anti-Hegelian reading of Nietzsche, it is contended that Nietzsche’s yes is the fruit of a cruel and resolutely dialectical no – a no that not only undergirds his affirmative ideal but constitutes the sine qua non of his ethical project of self-overcoming.