Nietzsche, Kant and the Self-observation. Dealing with the Risk of “Landing in Antycira”

Self-observation is the subject of paragraph 4 of Kant's Pragmatic Anthropology. Here Kant formulates a clearly negative judgment on the practice of self-observation: in fact, such pratice produces a constitutively unstable knowledge, since the transcendental point of view is exclusively based on the internal sense and carries the risk for those who practice it - on this risk Kant significantly and insistently returns - to lead into fantasy [Schwärmerei] and madness [Wahnsinn]. Even Nietzsche, like Kant, repeatedly showed a critical attitude towards the self-observation. It is a criticism that Nietzsche paradoxically turns to the heart of Kantianism, effectively reducing the Kantian criticism in a form of self-observation and reversing in this way against Kant the theoretical arguments of Pragmatic anthropology. It seems that Nietzsche wants to show how the critical inquiry is essentially based on self-observative assumptions. The critical attitude of Nietzsche about self-observation, however, does not prevent him to practice it, as evidenced, for example, by many autobiographical attempts that culminate in Ecce Homo. Last Nietzsche's work reaches the extreme limits of self-observation and seems to materialize the risks associated with that practice and evoked by Kant. The thread that ideally binds Kant and Nietzsche on self-observation is followed and grasped in some Foucault’s texts where he understands the continuity between the two thinkers, both committed to answer the question about the nature of what is human, and recovers the positive and generative aspects of Nietzsche's drift into madness: the same madness that Kant had just seen as a danger and that Nietzsche had expressed and experienced through his work, for Foucault becomes an heuristic and epistemological opportunity.