![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
Focusing on section I, 35 and I, 36 of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human, as well as other related works, this paper examines Nietzsche’s evaluation of François de La Rochefoucauld’s psychological observation in the latter’s maxims. It argues that, in Nietzsche’s view, La Rochefoucauld’s perspicacity in detecting moral psychology is crystallized both in the form of maxim and the messages derived from psychological observation that are conveyed in the maxims. It contends that the readers’ reactions to these maxims also render their passions and desires tangible and intelligible for La Rochefoucauld’s and Nietzsche’s observations of their psyche. Furthermore, by exploring Nietzsche’s contrasting assessments of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims, we can also illuminate his own theory of moral psychology.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude towards Nicholas Hammond 's and anonymous reviewers' invaluable suggestions. Pierre Force, Anthony Grafton, Melissa Lane, Alexander Nehamas, and Volker Schröder provided me with insightful suggestions and long-term support for this project.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Brendan Donnellan claims that Nietzsche’s works in the ‘aphoristic’ period, such as Human, All Too Human, engage with La Rochefoucauld’s ‘unmasking psychological approach’ by means of maxims, instead of critique of metaphysics. This observation helps us to orient our research on Nietzsche’s critique of La Rochefoucauld towards psychology as a first philosophy, instead of metaphysics, as Robert Pippin also points out. See Brendan Donnellan, ‘Nietzsche and La Rochefoucauld,’ The German Quarterly, 52.3 (1979), 303–18 and Robert Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Donnellan’s paper briefly mentions the stylistic aspects of the maxims, such as repetition, anti-systematic features, and parallelism. Nevertheless, it does not dig into the moral psychological effects caused by the pleasant features of these maxims nor elaborate on the relation between the syntax of these maxims and moral (anti-)dogmatism. Marion Faber delineates four aspects of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims that attract Nietzsche: first, maxims as ‘a psychological motivation and behaviour’, which is similar to Donnellan’s observation; second, the maxim as an unsystematic form that caters to Nietzsche’s anti-systematic response to Schopenhauer; third, the delicacy of maxims renders them ‘like the tip of an iceberg of thought’; fourth, considering La Rochefoucauld as a moraliste, whose maxims reflect his struggle with the moral framework of good and evil. Faber’s brief mention of these characteristics inspired us to dig more deeply into them in this paper. See Marion Faber, ‘The Metamorphosis of the French Aphorism: La Rochefoucauld and Nietzsche,’ Comparative Literature Studies, 23.3 (1986), 205–17.
2 I follow the standard citation format and abbreviations for Nietzsche’s published and unpublished works which are usually adopted by Nietzsche scholars: HH = Human, All Too Human, BGE = Beyond Good and Evil, TI = Twilight of the Idols, EH = Ecce Homo, NF = Posthumous Fragments. As to the English translation of these works, I refer to Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Beyond Good and Evil, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966); Twilight of the Idols, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), and Ecce Homo, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967). I translated Nietzsche’s posthumous fragments cited in this paper into English.
3 F. de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes suivi des Réflexions diverses, ed. by J. Truchet (Paris: Garnier, 1967), maxim L 256.
4 La Rochefoucauld, maxim V 145.
5 La Rochefoucauld, maxim I 262.
6 La Rochefoucauld, maxim V 203.
7 La Rochefoucauld, Réflexions diverses 2, De la Société.
8 Isabelle Chariatte, ‘Transfigurations du héros dans la culture mondaine du siècle classique. Madeleine de Scudéry, La Rochefoucauld et le chevalier de Méré,’ helden. heroes. héros. E-Journal zu Kulturen des Heroischen 2 (2014), 40–1.
9 La Rochefoucauld, maxim V 307. See Chariatte, pp. 40–1.
10 La Rochefoucauld, maxim V 203.
11 Françoise Jaouën also alerts us to the dangers of psychological tyranny lurking behind this moral flexibility based on psychological manipulation: readers can arbitrarily consent to some discourses by the criteria that ‘this discourse is true because it pleases me’ and ‘this discourse is false because I do not like it’. See Françoise Jaouën, ‘III – Les plaisirs de la morale,’ in De l’art de plaire en petits morceaux: Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyèr (Saint-Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 1996), pp. 79–118, <http://books.openedition.org/puv/7523> [accessed 4 April 2022].
12 Françoise Jaouën maintains that honnêteté indicates a person of taste, in other words, an honnête homme, that embodies a delicate style and an art of speaking well. I contend that these maxims are crystallizations of La Rochefoucauld’s honnêteté. See Jaouën.
13 La Rochefoucauld, maxim V 144. About the flattering effects of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims on readers, see Jean Lafond, ed., Moralistes du XVIIe siècle: de Pibrac à Dufresny (Paris : Robert Laffont, 1992), p. xiii. See also Dominique Bouhours, La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages de l’esprit (Paris: Vve de S. Mabre-Cramoisy, 1687), pp. 534–35.
14 La Rochefoucauld, maxim L 121.
15 La Rochefoucauld, ‘Avis au Lecteur.’
16 Translated by William David Williams, Nietzsche and the French: A Study of the Influence of Nietzsche’s French Reading on His Thought and Writing (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952), p. 194. See also Ruth Abbey’s discussion on this unpublished section in ‘Skilled Marksman and Strict Self-Examination: Nietzsche on La Rochefoucauld,’ in Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Philosophy, ed. by Rebecca Bamford (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), pp. 13–32.
17 Williams, p. 89.
18 La Rochefoucauld, Réflexions morales, epigram.
19 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, trans. by Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 159.
20 Sextus Empiricus, Sextus Empiricus: Outlines of Scepticism, ed. and trans. by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 4–5.
21 See Pierre Force’s unpublished paper ‘Pascal and Skepticism,’ Nicolich Lecture at Catholic University of America, November 2001: ‘There are philosophers who believe […] that the entire world is ruled and administered by the wisdom and reason of the gods […]. Carneades spoke abundantly against them in order to instill among those willing to make the effort a desire to search for the truth ‘sunt autem alii philosophi, […] qui deorum mente atque ratione omnem mundum administrari et regi censeant […]. Contra quos Carneades ita multa disseruit, ut excitaret homines non socordes ad veri investigandi cupiditatem.’ (Cicero, De Natura deorum, I, 4).
22 Ibid. See also the definition of protreptic in the Dictionary of Merriam-Webster.
23 Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 72.
24 See ‘moraliste’ and ‘morale’ in Dictionnaire Universel de Furetière: <http://www.furetière.eu/index.php/non-classifie/904407154-> and <http://www.furetière.eu/index.php/non-classifie/622806444-> [accessed 4 April 2022].
25 This is the definition proposed by the new edition (1701) of the Dictionary of Furetière. La Rochefoucauld was a close associate of Lamoignon, the Premier Président of the Parliament of Paris and an advocate of Jansenists’ religious rigorism, whose academy La Rochefoucauld attended frequently. As a result, after discrediting the Stoic virtue dominant at that time, La Rochefoucauld insinuates Christian morality into court society. See Jean Lafond’s Preface in François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, Présentation et Notes de Jean Lafond (Paris: Impr. nationale éditions), 1998.
26 La Rochefoucauld, maxim V 20 and I 89.
27 La Rochefoucauld, maxim V 34.
28 Barbara Spackman, ‘Machiavelli and Maxims,’ Yale French Studies 77 (1990), 141.
29 Ibid., 139.
30 La Rochefoucauld, maxim L 210.
31 Spackman, 143.
32 See also Jonathan Culler’s discussion of paradoxical features of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims, in Jonathan Culler, ‘Paradox and the Language of Morals in La Rochefoucauld,’ The Modern Language Review 68.1 (1973), 28–39.
33 La Rochefoucauld, maxim IV 172. For a systematic discussion on aristocratic virtues as disguised vices and false virtues in La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes, see the chapters related to La Rochefoucauld in Michael Moriarty, Disguised Vices: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Jean Lafond, La Rochefoucauld: augustinisme et literature (Paris: Klincksieck, 1977).
34 La Rochefoucauld, maxim V 129 and V 263.
35 Pippin, p. 183.
36 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics I.2. See also Robin Smith, ‘Aristotle’s Logic,’ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), ed. by Edward N. Zalta, <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/aristotle-logic/> [accessed 4 April 2022].
37 Nietzsche writes: ‘La Rochefoucauld and the other French masters of psychical examination (to whom there has lately been added a German, the author of the Psychological Observations) … ’ (HH, I, 36).
38 La Rochefoucauld, maxim I 260.
39 La Rochefoucauld, maxim V 202. See the analysis of the aesthetics of l’honnête homme in Lafond, La Rochefoucauld: augustinisme et literature, p. 108.
40 Michael Moriarty asserts that the reconciliation of aristocratic and Christian morality in the thought of La Rochefoucauld is crystallized in the principle of l’honnêteté. This observation is compatible with our claim that living as an authentic self and pursuing true virtues are indispensable requirements for l’honnêteté, because besides aristocratic virtues, Christian virtues are the tenors of La Rochefoucauld’s views of authenticity and true virtues. See Moriarty, p. 325. See also Lafond, La Rochefoucauld: augustinisme et literature, pp. 204–05.
41 Aristotle, Poetics, 1451a–1451b5.
42 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b15–17.
43 Edward Madden, ‘Aristotle’s Treatment of Probability and Signs,’ Philosophy of Science 24.2 (1957), 167.
44 La Rochefoucauld, ‘Avis au Lecteur.’
45 Ibid. Jonathan Culler contends that these modifiers such as ‘souvent’ or ‘presque toujours’ ‘undermine the categories which the maxims use’, instead of softening the maxims and catering to readers’ psychological needs. See Culler, p. 37. La Rochefoucauld’s ‘Note to the Reader’ of the first edition of 1664 testifies to the reassuring effects of these modifiers on readers, which render the maxims more acceptable. Moreover, Culler’s definition of moral categories falls into the framework Aristotelian ‘scientific deduction’ (apodeixis), which rejects any exception, but I believe La Rochefoucauld adopts probabilistic arguments regarding moral issues and decorum that I discussed in this paper.
46 Ibid.
47 La Rochefoucauld, maxim L 245.
48 La Rochefoucauld, maxim V 498.
49 Jill Marsden, ‘Nietzsche and the Art of the Aphorism,’ in A Companion to Nietzsche, ed. by Keith Ansell-Pearson (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2013), pp. 23–4.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jiani Fan
Jiani Fan defended her dissertation, Pleasure as a First Principle? Nietzsche and the French Moralists (Pascal, La Rochefoucauld and Montaigne) on Morality and Religion in the Comparative Literature Department of Princeton University. It has been supported by a Laurence S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellowship and a Josephine de Karman Fellowship, among others. She published papers on Pascal and La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche and ancient Skepticism, Augustine and Speech Act, the aesthetic concept of Stimmung (paper accepted) , Nietzsche and Pascal on skepticisms and honesty in English and French in peer-viewed journals, among other published papers. She is now assistant professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Tsinghua University.