However, Nietzsche does not merely disapprove of Hegel’s Christian influences; his entire approach to philosophy is denounced by Nietzsche. “I mistrust all systematizers,” Nietzsche scorns, “The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”25 It could hardly be denied that Hegel was indeed nothing if not a systematizer. In Hegel, we don’t just witness the entirety of History, but reality itself, crammed into a neatly organized system which proclaims to have adequately and conclusively discovered and sorted out nearly everything there is to know about existence. Hegel’s grandiose metaphysical speculations are wholly rejected by Nietzsche, who sees the folly in their efforts. Indeed, metaphysics in general—any systematic inquiry into the nature and structure of reality—is nothing but an exercise in futility, and even a sign of weakness. As Nietzsche puts it: “The true world—unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it—a consolation.”26 Thus, Nietzsche represents a radical departure from the type of philosophy Hegel is engaged in. Hegel’s philosophy seeks “repose and happiness in contemplation and in getting to the bottom of things.”27 Nietzsche scoffs at such efforts. “Pure truth” Nietzsche warns, is “quite incomprehensible” and “not at all worth aiming for.”28 It wouldn’t be appropriate to say that the content of which Hegel approves of but Nietzsche rejects is only pertaining to the particularities of the Christian faith. What Nietzsche so fervently rejects in the Hegelian system, in Christianity, and in religion and metaphysics generally is the notion that “truth is divine,”29 or that behind the world of appearance there is some ultimate reality which can be known. This is the content Nietzsche rejects.
To Nietzsche, reality is constituted solely by appearances; “any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable” because reality, as we experience it, is completely shaped by our mental processes, leaving any reality independent of those processes unreachable.30 Although this line of thinking initially sounds to be implying something of a Kantian flavor, it’s not; “Kant,” Nietzsche notes, still distinguished “between a ‘true’ and ‘apparent’ world,”31 of which Nietzsche makes no distinction. The “thing in itself,”32 to Nietzsche, couldn’t even in principle ever be demonstrated to be real, and isn’t worth even bothering with. Nietzsche’s idea isn’t Hegelian either, though by rejecting Kant’s thing-in-itself he’s at risk of being interpreted—wrongly—as positing something in the vein of Hegel’s idealism. After abolishing Kant’s thing-in-itself, Hegel doesn’t proceed to reduce the whole of reality down to mere appearance, as Nietzsche does, but instead anthropomorphizes reality as something living, moving, and conscious: as Spirit. Belief in an underlying truth about the real is still maintained by Hegel. Nietzsche decidedly rejects this, and settles instead on the world of appearances as all that there is.