Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche

Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche

Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche deserve our attention for their role of dealing with the aesthetic and religious extremes of nineteenth-century thought. Both exercise a lasting influence until today. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen in 1813, the youngest of seven children. He died relatively early, at the age of 42, in 1855. His upbringing was strictly Lutheran-pietistic and following the directions of his father, Michael Pederson Kierkegaard, whose influence upon his son would be problematic throughout his life, Kierkegaard began his studies with Theology at the University of Copenhagen. Soon disappointed by the rational theology he encountered there he became increasingly interested in philosophy, which in Denmark at that time was heavily influenced by German Romanticism in general and by Hegel’s dialectical Idealism in particular. Hegel, however, would become the central philosophical adversary in the unfolding of Kierkegaard’s own thought. Hegel the ‘objective’ thinker, and the architect of seemingly endless and yet programmatic systems, provoked Kierkegaard’s equally extreme ‘subjective’ tendencies, which eventually earned him the dubious, because all too simplifying, title of the founder of modern existentialism. Following his father’s death he finished his studies in Theology in 1840 and the same year became engaged to marry Regine Olson, an engagement that he dissolved a year later. This event would become the other life-consuming preoccupation in Kierkegaard’s work, the third being his constant struggle with the Danish Church and its official representatives. Kierkegaard’s biographers have long since speculated about the reason for Kierkegaard’s breaking off his engagement with Regine Olson and his subsequent dealing with his decision. We must be content with the explanation that a severe feeling of Protestant guilt, an acute sense of spiritual crisis, were responsible for this fateful decision.

Having successfully finished his dissertation on Socrates and on the concept of irony, which according to the standards of his time he delivered in Latin, he left for his first visit to Berlin to become more closely acquainted with Hegel, listening also to the lectures of the aging Schelling, whom he at first admired, only to reject him violently later. He returned to Copenhagen in 1842 and began to write in quick succession a large part of his most influential books, while keeping an extensive diary and notebook at the same time. Within the years of 1843 to 1846, he published ten books, most them under a pseudonym, although everybody in Copenhagen knew the identity of the author: Either/Or (1843, ps. Victor Eremita); Fear and Trembling (1843, ps. Johannes de Silentio); The Repetition (1843, ps. Constantin Constantius); in 1844 he published The Concept of Dread and Philosophical Fragments, followed by Stages on Life’s Way; the next year saw the publication of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript; and in 1849 he published The Sickness unto Death . Apart from these major works, Kierkegaard also published some minor writings, mainly addressing questions of religion, reflecting his barely hidden anger at the Danish state Church, which he would attack violently after the death of bishop Mynster, who had been a friend of the family. By that time Kierkegaard had not only emerged as a serious philosopher, not fully understood by his contemporaries, but

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also as one of the greatest literary stylists of the Danish language, and he had become— unavoidably in the Copenhagen of his time—a figure of public interest; a highly controversial one, the target above all of the leading satirical magazine The Corsair, which published highly uncomplimentary caricatures of the slightly hunch backed Kierkegaard. Why is it worth looking at Kierkegaard’s life to such an extent? In many ways it reflects the most lasting parts of his work, in fact is often extremely difficult to separate Kierkegaard’s life from the content of his thought. Nevertheless, his religious revolt against the temptations of even the most advanced form of pantheism relies on its own and highly specific conceptualizations of the drama of existing under the verdict of separation.

Most of his writing concentrates on the essence of human existence as expressed by the work of being. His profound aversion against Hegel was based on the idea that the Hegelian system was endlessly removed from the realities of human life. The title of his first major publication, Either/Or, can also be seen as an ironic comment on what he perceived as Hegel’s eternally moving from the positive to its negation and then back again, even if it were on a higher level of comprehension. What seemed so natural to Hegel, if we read the introduction to Phenomenology of Spirit even today, namely that human knowledge and experience is based on necessary contradictions that can only be overcome by negation in the sense of what Hegel calls Aufhebung—the final goal being to make philosophy superfluous, at a stage where the world-spirit would have reached its final stage of self-realization—seemed to Kierkegaard the attempt to put mankind into the position of God. Life as Kierkegaard saw it in Either/Or is not the ever ongoing mechanism of dialectical movement, it is a question of choice. In Either/Or Kierkegaard juxtaposes the aesthetic way of life with the ethical. A fundamental, an existential choice, because as Kierkegaard elaborates, the seemingly free aesthetic mode of existence, devoted as it is to a full exploitation of the senses and Romantic imagination, leaves the individual incomplete, void of a sense of real purpose. This sense of purpose cannot be conjured into life by thinking about it, what it takes is a decision. The ethical way of life accepts this commitment, even if it implies a leap into the unknown. In the end—no great surprise given Kierkegaard’s theological and religious background—the ultimate decision is the choice of committing the self to faith. In a breathtaking, literary tour de force, Kierkegaard in Either/Or plays out the persona of Don Juan (representing the aesthetic stage of consciousness) against Socrates, representing the opposite. The predicament of human existence, as Kierkegaard demonstrates, does not end here. A commitment to ethical principles, as in the case of Socrates, may in the end have grave consequences, but there is something strangely archaic about it in so far as it lacks understanding of its own true nature. Kierkegaard has to come to terms with the very same insufficiencies that Hegel ascribed to the ‘unhappy soul’. The lack of the tragic heroism of the merely ethical consciousness is absence of a definite understanding of sin. Socrates did choose to put his principles before his life, but when defending himself against his judges, he evoked Achilles as an example of following ones principles! To resolve this insufficiency of the tragic it takes the final, and irrevocable, commitment to God, to a faith that alone can overcome its opposite, despair, the ‘sickness unto death’. It is obvious that Kierkegaard’s opposition to Hegel was not really based upon an internal criticism of Hegelian philosophical assumption, but on a rejection of what he perceived as the failure of Hegel’s ‘system’ as a whole, regardless of its genealogy or method. Kierkegaard must

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have realized that the appeal of Hegel’s grand design had outlived itself—too many abstractions drew away the attention from the real needs of the living individual. At the same time a more literary approach in philosophy seemed possible. A brief look at Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms will explain this sudden outbreak of the individual and often idiosyncratic voice in philosophy. We have seen that the names he chose for authorship were not really pseudonyms in a literal sense, for they did not hide Kierkegaard’s identity. Their function was often programmatic, as for example in the case, to pick just two of many, the Johannes de Silentio of Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric is the persona of the ultimate paradox of Christian faith, as exemplified in the variations of the story of Abraham and Isaac; that is, variations on a theme. The theme itself is the nature of faith about which philosophy must be silent. As Johannes de Silentio knows ‘Even though one were capable of converting the whole content of faith into the form of a concept, it does not follow that one has adequately conceived faith and understands how one got into it, or how it got into one.’ And yet the silence is the origin of so many words even if they come from someone who describes himself as ‘poetice et elegenter, an amateur who neither writes the System nor promises of the System, who neither subscribes to the System nor ascribes anything to it’. Johannes is the child of revelation, part of a secret, just as mysterious as God’s temptation of Abraham. By putting the far from one-dimensional figure of Johannes de Silentio between himself and his text Kierkegaard also tries to achieve what in a different context he defines as ‘authorship without authority’ He goes all the way back to his dissertation on Socrates and the concept of irony so as to evoke the advantages of the maieutic attitude as the golden way from the aesthetic stage of life to the religious as the telos, in order to reclaim the notion of authorship as being a stage rather than an end. Hence also the programmatic implications of a pseudonym like that attached to the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments: A Mimical-Pathetical-Dialectical Compilation, an Existential Contribution by Johannes Climacus. The origin of this particular pseudonym is the Greek monk St John Climacus, (c.525–606), author of Klimax tou Paradeisou, translated as Scala Paradisi, in English as Ladder of Paradise, a collection of spiritual aphorisms (plakes pneumatikai) containing advice to other monks of how to achieve Christian perfection. Kierkegaard’s Climacus himself is, however, not an accomplished Christian, but someone in transition; he rejects the idea of logical procession in matters of faith, where nothing allows for the Hegelian dialectical movement, there is only the choice to take the decisive, existential ‘leap’, as Kierkegaard puts it. What all of this eventually entails, apart from Kierkegaard’s literary achievements, is that he clearly saw what many contemporaries, more familiar with the genealogy of Hegel’s thought out of the religious background of the early time spent in Tübingen, tended to overlook, namely the fact that Hegel, whatever his choice of words might be, could not be seen as concerned with the plights of theology or lived religion. His Absolute was not, in the end, the equivalent of the transcendent Christian God.

Given Kierkegaard’s life-long preoccupation with misconceptions of the Hegelian system, it is not at all surprising that his legacy would first and above fall on fertile ground in the context of German ‘existential’ theology as exemplified by Karl Barth and his followers, just as he profoundly influenced the phenomenological existentialists ranging from Heidegger to Sartre.

Entries A-Z 409 At the other spectrum of violent, seemingly totally subjective reaction against the great

architects of philosophers we see Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. He was born in 1844, the son of a Lutheran pastor, who died when Nietzsche was in his childhood. He was brought up by his mother and sister, and while attending Gymnasium very early discovered his love for ancient philosophy. He became a professor of Classical Philology at a very early point in his life, at the age of 24, but—influenced by the work of Schopenhauer—soon fell out with his peers in the field and turned to philosophy. By that time he had already broken with Christianity and in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist der Musik, 1872) he pitted what he called the Apollonian versus the Dionysian spirit in Greek life and thought, deducing from it, as would become his habit, a whole set of critical insights into European culture. Already the moralist and polemicist—which he would soon become in the content and style of his writing—he praised the qualities of Wagner’s music as aspiring to be what we today call a Gesammtkunstwerk and condemned his philistine critics for what he perceived as their misunderstanding of an expression of true genius. Nietzsche’s aim can be understood as nothing less than the attempt at a transformation of all the values of his time. He set out to do so by writing his Untimely Meditations (Unzeitgemä βie Betrachtungen, 1867–73), the last of which also marked his break with Wagner. At this time Nietzsche drew heavily on the ideas of the French Enlightenment, only to drop this particular influence in order to propagate his own two central ideas, that of the ‘eternal return’ and of the ‘Übermensch’, the powerful, creative human being, who has managed to rise above the constraints of ordinary civilization. Given his tendency to aphoristic and fragmentary thinking, it is not easy to do full justice to this highly idiosyncratic philosopher, who professed to be an ardent admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson. (He integrated extensive passages from Emerson’s Essays into his own writings.) But against all the invitations of being misconstrued, there is a passionate effort in his thought, at the core of which we find the desperate attempts to include Life, with all its torturing self-contradictions, into his philosophy.

Nietzsche abandoned his Basel professorship in 1879, and although the victim of chronic illness began to publish in quick succession the core of his work. What seems most interesting, here, is Nietzsche’s concept of truth and his idea of life as opposed to any form of limitation. Truth, as Nietzsche affirms most emphatically in Beyond Good and Evil (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 1887), and the writings of that period, which was planned as a work on the philosophy of the future, is just as instrumental as knowledge itself. Absolute truth is therefore a fiction. As he came to claim in the notes, published after his death as The Will to Power, truth serves the purpose of the force of life, no less than any other human activity. In a way that many of his followers and exploiters hardly realized, Nietzsche was willing to undercut his own positions just as radically as he attacked the beliefs of others. So he knew that whatever he had to offer even as criticism was in itself provisionary—a prelude at best for things to come. It stands to reason that Nietzsche can not be seen as the founder of a specific philosophical school, but would, as already in his lifetime, find his admirers mainly among critics of culture and aesthetically inclined sceptics in general.

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