Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays

by Alastair Hannay

  One might with justice say that here it was Habermas who was rationalizing away. In typical rationalist vein he is reducing the aesthetic to a series of moments, to psychological events, to an 'other' that could not possibly fill the old terms with life. In criticizing Nietzsche for 'enthroning' taste as the 'organ of a knowledge beyond true and false, beyond good and evil',10 Habermas refers slightingly to this other as the 'yes and no of the palate'. But isn't Habermas simply restating his own archaically Cartesian conception of what he refers to just as dismissively as the 'philosophy of consciousness', in which the 'experiencing subject' remains 'the last court of appeal'?11 Doing justice to Nietzsche means at the very least revaluing the negative role ascribed to experience in Habermas as in much other current philosophy and, if possible, both revitalizing and transforming the philosophy of consciousness in a way that can balance Habermas's enlarged concept of reason, to let aesthetic ability compete fairly in the job of reconstituting our concepts of 'being' and 'sovereignty'. To see in what direction such a critique might start, we can look usefully to Kierkegaard, whose pseudonymous writings designedly address the sensibilities of their readers. In addressing the subject's inner dispositions, Kierkegaard aims to enrich his reader's sensibilities so that the narrow yes and no of the palate gives way to a sense for the kinds of considerations upon which choices and rejections of whole ways of life depend. There is in Kierkegaard also a significantly Nietzschean reason for directing the appeal to these sensibilities: in the communication of what counts here, there is nothing else to address. The attempt to appeal, for instance, to objective reason, argument, revelation or any authority at all is simply a strategy of flight – what Nietzsche calls servitude and reluctance to exercise the will to power but which for Kierkegaard is dispirited self-protection from the agonies, though also priceless opportunities, of

  personal choice. In both thinkers, the strategy is not simply personal, it is a feature of the human context, one that history in its creation of values has embodied in public morality and its institutions.

  Because one does not normally think of Kierkegaard as a naturalist, the comparison with Kierkegaard may seem importantly limited. But if there is a limit it is not here. For philosophical purposes, naturalism is the view (naturalists themselves will call it the realization) that reason is not independent of nature, that rationality does not confer autonomy upon the human being; in brief, that reason is no short-cut to satisfaction, truth, harmony and justice but just another human faculty with a history subject to a psychological and social dynamic. Nietzsche the naturalist offers a history of the traditional topics of rationalist philosophy; he gives us a history in which reason itself appears not as the guarantor of truth, goodness and freedom but as a condition of life, a factor in the fight for survival and self-assertion. Truth is not the route to cognitive salvation but 'the kind of error without which a certain species could not live'.12 None of this is inconsistent with Kierkegaard's own focus on the dynamics of despair in bourgeois society. Nor need Kierkegaard object to Nietzsche's view that the source of value is history rather than philosophy, let alone the mental gyrations of late nineteenth-century German genius. Nietzsche's history of the ways an inability to control their situation physically leads people to invent an ideal of fulfilment to which they then enslave themselves is fully complemented by Kierkegaard's nosology of the ways people compress their spiritual possibilities into a manageable one-dimensionality. So when we finally do reach the limit, it is quite plausible to argue that the way Kierkegaard's transcendentally based value expresses itself in the hidden will of the exceptional individual is directly mirrored in the way the value with which Nietzsche stems the nihilist drift of history reaches its conspicuous apotheosis immanently in the Overman (Übermensch).

  Nietzsche's Overman is really Hegel's Subjektivität writ large. No longer having to realize itself in das Allgemeine, subjectivity can now take on the weight of Substantialität all on its own. But that, contrary to what many suppose, does not mean that the universal is done away with. Nietzsche's alleged farewell to philosophy is premised on the un-Nietzschean assumption that the universal belongs to reason. But for Nietzscheans the question is where now to look for the universal in reason's so-called other. The clue lies in the fact that although dispensing with the universal in its Socratic form means dropping the idea of a Gattungswesen, we are still equipped with one very crucial species-specific ability: the ability to create our own exemplars.

  Compare the naturalization programme instigated by Quine, a pragmatist variant of Vienna positivism well illustrated in his expressed hopes for the successful theoretical reduction of Geist to physicalistic science.13 The naturalization of philosophy – of epistemology in particular – is presented as an apocalyptic vision based on assumed theoretical successes already achieved. It leaves no room for 'first philosophy' or for the deployment of concepts of human fulfilment. Though Nietzsche would be in total agreement with Quine's view that philos

  ophy has been unnecessarily hamstrung by its preoccupation with traditional problems in the theory of knowledge, Nietzsche's own thought is normative through and through. The death of God is still part of philosophical business.

  The real threat to our concepts of human value (and disvalue) is not Nietzschean naturalism but the naturalizing tradition, which, having removed values from the discourse of science, confines itself and its values to the latter. But banishment of value from the discourse of truth and error is a radically ambiguous affair. To leave value judgements in the limbo of 'mere' subjective taste can of course be an effective way of simply striking them off the philosophical agenda. But it might equally be a way of freeing value from enslavement to science, including a pseudo-science of Geist. So, given the alternatives, in his dedication to 'reactive' forces out of which all that is active must emerge, the naturalizing positivist is merely replacing one slave culture with another.14 If, again from this viewpoint, there is still a theoretical task for philosophy, it is to return values to where they belong, to within the compass of human experience. Naturalized philosophy sides with science, mechanizes man, and then pitifully leaves us with a still impotent 'Overman' who has freed himself from the resentments of first philosophy only to settle for the unexamined values propelling the scientific project. Proponents proclaim this as the virtue of 'living within our means',15 but we may ask whether human experience might not provide additional means to which a naturalized philosophy that settles for scientific virtues is culpably blind.

  One way of dealing with this possibility is Habermas's: grasp the world in which we are all parts as a world not of things, states of affairs and processes but, first and foremost, of potentially open discourse. In that way, values are still negotiable, and the unexamined values that propel science can be rationally examined. But this suggestion, as we saw, ignores the potential of experience, and the Nietzschean, who also proclaims the virtue of living within our means, is committed to seeing what hitherto suppressed means are still to be recovered from that quarter. Demotically and least ambitiously, Nietzsche's Overman symbolizes freedom from enslavement to decontextualized reason and prejudice. As potential Overmen, we are left to make original attempts to shape life, in the first instance our own lives. The question is then whether, having overcome morality, the shape we give our lives can still be, in some extended sense, moral. Is Nietzsche's aesthetically based naturalism any better placed in this respect than Quine's?

  Whatever answer we give on Nietzsche's behalf, we cannot expect it to be in terms of some predetermined paradigm of human being. All we have to start with is the species-specific ability to create images in some form or other, and oneself in those images. On the other hand, the form in question can be one that, from the perspective of a certain cultural time and place, appears as a paradigm of human excellence – as it were a local Gattungswesen, something more than the simple presentation of one of many forms of virtuoso-though not yet specifically virtuous performance. That more is the sense pr
ovided by this local exemplar that, here and now at least, this is how human excellence looks. And although it will not look like the paragons paraded before us in the religious and moral past, we should note

  that Nietzsche in effect requires of the wise judge of human form a depth born of a past love of religion.16 So the universal returns, one might say, in the guise of the wise judgement that this image, or this personality, is worth following – not in the dictator's sense (where following requires the obedience of the sycophant) but in the sense of emulation, as in imitation of the example of Christ.

  Needless to say, there are questions. First, we face the apparent conundrum of how, in a contingent universe, to create value at all. Yet if we are just a little bit Hegelian on Nietzsche's behalf, the sheer contingency of nature can serve as an unsurpassable 'immediacy' but against the background of which the essentially human thing, the creative thing, takes place. If we think this is meaningless and that there must be some criterion of objectivity corresponding to the goals of a Quinean account of what there is and how we know it, then the Nietzschean will say that that is because we have not yet learned the lesson that values have their origins in us and our histories and do not exist in some abstract state of suspended animation beyond our natural lives.

  Secondly, to the complaint that there is as yet no moral or political component laid down in this notion of natural human spirituality, Nietzsche could well say that this objection is born of the prejudice that essentially human ideals must always have an openly social face, where social and universal mean practically the same thing. But 'moral excellence' is as contextual as any other value, and in a world where social reality was expressed effortlessly, even spontaneously, the salient excellences could well be of the Greek kind: people would honour their athletes as their exemplars. Although this indeed invites the rejoinder that Nietzsche's nostalgic classicism has blinded him to the evident fact that in the modern world society cannot take care of itself, that would be a feeble and patronizing and therefore totally un-Nietzschean defence, a mere excuse. There is a better defence. It is that Nietzsche considered the problem of society's being taken care of beneath the level of the concerns whose value he was trying to promote. Commenting on the experimental nature of the task of re-creating values, he wrote: 'We are conducting an experiment with truth. Perhaps mankind will perish because of it. Fine!'17 A monstrous utterance in the post-Holocaust age, but looked at more discerningly it effectively questions the high priority given so obsessively in our time to the very idea of human survival. Ears attuned to Nietzschean possibilities will find something suspiciously defensive, negative, indeed totally abject, in that. Kierkegaard remarked once that if all human suffering were remedied but without compassion, this 'would be a greater misery than all temporal need'.18 In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche says that morality is 'first of all a means of preserving the community and warding off its destruction' and then 'a means of preserving the community at a certain height and in a certain quality of existence'. Its 'motive forces' are, he says, 'fear and hope'.19 Might we then not say for Nietzsche, following Kierkegaard, that although fear and hope may be what keep a society together, and perhaps nothing else can, unless a society thus held together contained individuals motivated by ideals higher than fear and hope, this would be a greater misery than were society not held together at all?

  The slogan 'better nothing than nothing gained' might well serve for both our thinkers, at least at their most provocative and in the guises that most readily invited contemporaries to see them as 'freaks'. But contemporaries would hardly be predisposed to hear that they had bartered ideals the given world offers them the opportunity to fulfil for the weak-kneed aim of the survival of the means. But there is this common feature in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. For both of them the satisfactions of selfhood are to be conceived as prior to those of the 'universal' conceived in this negative way. However differently they conceive the relation between selfhood and subjectivity, the satisfactions of subjectivity require, in both cases, that merely immediate and temporal fears and hopes be transcended and, on the way there, scorned.

  There are further parallels. They include, for instance, the rejection of other traditional but degenerative virtues such as pity.20 One can also say that for both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche pain and suffering become part of the struggle out of which alone true individuality and fulfilment can be sustained. There is also a shared opposition to prudentialism and to social programmes which presuppose in their beneficiaries, as Nietzsche puts it, fear, insecurity and self-interest.

  Yet the differences in conception of subjectivity are vast. If Nietzsche really does hold out the promise of a new morality, it is conceived in terms of the means we have, a naturalism. If we have the makings of a naturalist spirituality, transcending the everyday, in Nietzsche's version it implies a confidence in the ideals of classical Greece. He looks back at what humanity lost through enslavement to reason and religion. Kierkegaard's guiding pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, however, hypothesizes that the project the Greeks set in motion requires more than human means. Not the philosophical project, for philosophy, if not by definition then at least in practice and by implicit agreement, confines itself to what, from time to time, it conceives to be those means. The project in question is morality. Kierkegaard talks of it in terms of truth, human truth, what Socratic irony might open the way to. But the possibility of going beyond Socrates, in the full consciousness of what that implies, is just what Climacus urges us to contemplate. The whole Kierkegaardian corpus can indeed be seen as a continuation of Kierkegaard's early concern to rescue religion from philosophy. Reason, for Kierkegaard, as for Nietzsche, is not the organ of divine or even human truth. As merely a human instrument, reason can be as efficient in the causes of self-deception and enslavement as in that of discerning truth. Nietzsche uses reason, embedded in a good deal of rhetoric – appropriately enough given its new-found freedom – to uncover and persuade us of this latter truth. Climacus uses it with less rhetoric to impress upon us what it means to exceed Socrates, while the other pseudonyms are designed to convey the truth-seeking reader beyond the bounds of sense to the locus of religion: the subject's unmediated relationship to God.

  In short, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are in such fundamental disagreement on the matter that interests them most that it is closer to the truth to describe any apparent similarities and parallels ultimately as differences. Let me conclude by trying to support this strong claim.

  In Kierkegaard there is a notion of human fulfilment which responds to a certain challenge which I have nowhere seen expressed in Nietzsche. It is the challenge of that experience of perfect singularity which is reserved for self-conscious beings, like us. It is part of what Kierkegaard considered his most important contribution, the notion of the category of the singular individual, or the particular individual. What being perfectly singular means is that what one essentially is, if anything, lies beyond and above, and is therefore no longer protected by, any finite role or character description. Human nature rebels, naturally, against this upsetting feature of human life; human society – at least as exemplified in early nineteenth-century Copenhagen – is a set of institutions in which human beings cower and protect themselves by playing out roles, including some called religious, Christian, and so on; and most people, perhaps all, and Kierkegaard included himself, fail to face their awful singularity and the only form of fulfilment possible from that position – absurd or paradoxical Christianity.

  From that point of view most of Nietzsche can probably be written off as a form of Kierkegaardian despair, and the will to power (and the will to will) as a form of spiritual weakness. Had Nietzsche, on the other hand, read The Sickness unto Death, especially the last few pages of Part One, he would probably have dismissed Kierkegaard's apparent advocacy of self-annihilation there as a despairing surrender of humanity, the last gasp of a slave morality. The problem for us is that the forms of fulfilment that correspond to Kierkegaard's Particular
Individual and to Nietzsche's Overman are mutually exclusive and therefore, if we take them along with the rest, confront us in the form of a stark choice. We may, of course, choose neither, perhaps regarding both ideals as symptoms of their authors' straitened psychological circumstances; but then we should leave them both behind rather than do them the disservice of suggesting they are part of a conversation in which this choice is not on the agenda, and when what we are really proposing is then simply that a certain kind of conversation we are now having may be enriched by introducing into it some concepts or categories gleaned from these authors' texts.

  A related form of disservice is to discuss fulfilment in very broad terms and assign Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to separate but not mutually exclusive departments: Nietzsche looks after politics and the externals while Kierkegaard takes care of inwardness. The tendency to do this is again encouraged by the many surface parallels, not least the notion of struggle. But the struggle Kierkegaard writes about is that of obtaining selfhood through the eye of the needle of singularity, while Nietzsche's is about channelling Dionysian chaos into creative order, and converting mutually destructive forces into constructive activity.21 What we have here are not two sides of the same thing but alternative views of human fulfilment. There is the common notion, you might say, a metaphor – as usual, and as Nietzsche was so fond of pointing out – in this case one of energies which otherwise work divisively, and in the ends of power, being harnessed into socially creative ends. But Kierkegaard and Nietzsche give it quite different applications. These are such that Kierkegaard's agon is – for us today, given the distinctions we