The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  The condition of despair is not over something, as the modern man might think, but has to do with our inability to understand and accept ourselves and our true nature caught between the finite and the infinite. In other words, it has to do with wanting to be something we are not, which Kierkegaard interprets as a form of wanting to escape from ourselves without ever really being able to do so (not even through death).11 Thus, for Kierkegaard the only way of healing this disease is by recuperating our true relation to ourselves, or as he puts it, our relation to the ‘self’.

  Until here the similarities with Nietzsche are quite significant, especially if we think of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–5, Z) and the way in which Zarathustra (who is also dealing with the aftermath of the death of God) needs to return to his loneliness in order to overcome his despair in his ‘stillest hour’: ‘Oh Zarathustra your fruits are ripe, but you are not ripe for your fruits! So you must go back to your solitude: for you are yet to become mellow’.12 But for Kierkegaard, this form of solitude which puts us in relation to something we are not yet, but at the same time constitutes our truest being, is only possible if we acknowledge that this relation, this self, has somehow ‘been established by something else’ (SD).13 We can only reach the kind of solitude that will enable us to exist as individuals before God,14 so that: ‘the self is only healthy and free from despair when […] it is grounded transparently in God’ (SD).15

  This indeed seems to be totally different from Nietzsche’s approach in §125 of Gay Science, where the possibility of reestablishing our relation to God is vehemently excluded: God is dead and ‘God remains dead!’ (GS, §125).16 Or as Zarathustra will say to the last pope, God ‘is thoroughly (gründlich) dead’ (Z).17 And this means, as the last pope observes, that not even the solitary man in the forests will find Him. Solitude and reclusion from the world is not the solution for Nietzsche. The death of God has to be overcome. And yet, one could argue that the God Kierkegaard means is not so different from the ‘Stillest Hour’, who talks to Zarathustra in this passage, or from ‘life’ in the chapter ‘The Dance-Song’. Furthermore, in the same way that these constitute only ‘stages’ of Zarathustra’s particular trajectory, Kierkegaard also affirms that the process of becoming the self is a process of ‘infinitely coming away from oneself, in an infinitizing of the self, and in infinitely coming back to oneself in the finitization’.18 In any case, what is important for us now, is to see how both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard consider that they are revealing the nature of a devastating historical process which is somehow related to the fact that people do not believe in God anymore (or in more Nietzschean terms: ‘the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable’ (GS, §343)19). Moreover, they both consider that the power of this nihilistic process lies in the fact that it remains unconscious (only the madman from Nietzsche’s Gay Science is able to articulate what the men at the marketplace, in their own non-belief and cynicism, have not yet consciously realized).

  But while Kierkegaard directly refers to something we can all more or less relate to, namely the feeling of despair, it is not so easy to understand what Nietzsche means by the death of God.20 In §125 the madman describes it as the vanishing of the sea; it’s as if the horizon had been wiped away, or the earth had been unchained from the sun, so that there is no ‘up and down’ (GS)21 anymore. Likewise, in §343 Nietzsche explains how the death of God entails the downfall (einfallen) of everything that ‘was built on this faith, leaned on it, had grown into it—for example, our entire European morality’ (GS).22 One could say that the death of God means the loss of all frames of reference guiding us in our judgments and actions, or more radically, that it means the disappearance of the most basic conditions (space, water, light) for all known modes of human existence.

  In his text ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God is dead”’ (1943), Heidegger argues that, through the use of the three images—horizon, sea, and sun—Nietzsche indicates that the murder of God ‘means the elimination, through man, of the supersensory world’23 or, as he also puts it, the end of metaphysics,24 which he then understands as the ‘the fundamental structure of beings in their entirety, so far as this entirety is differentiated into a sensory and a supersensory world, the former of which is supported and determined by the latter’.25 In other words, it is not only about the loss of the ‘ground and goal of everything that is real’,26 but also, and most importantly, about the loss of the very logic sustaining the thought of grounds and goals, or in Heidegger’s terms: it is the loss of ‘the supersensory as a realm (das Übersinnliche als Bereich)’.27 And yet, however compelling it may appear (especially if we consider a preparatory note for Book III of GS where Nietzsche explicitly equates the shadows of God with metaphysics),28 the problem with Heidegger’s interpretation is that, by exchanging one obscure term (God) with another no less obscure notion (metaphysics), in the end it seems to reduce Nietzsche’s diagnosis to a one-directional claim against metaphysics. Heidegger takes Nietzsche’s word ‘God is dead’ as a univocal philosophical position and maintains that Nietzsche’s position is ‘a mere countermovement [which] necessarily remains trapped, like everything “anti”, in the essence of what it is challenging’.29 But a closer reading of some passages from Gay Science will show that this is not necessarily the case.

  The death of God challenges all our moral conceptions; it enables us to question not only the origin of moral norms and assumptions, but also their value, as he explains in his Genealogy of Morality (1887, GM).30 In this sense, Nietzsche’s singular critique of morality can be understood as the process of tracking down the consequences of the death of God. But in addition to this, Nietzsche argues that the death of God also challenges our faith in science and in truth because:

  it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests […] even we knowers of today, we godless antimetaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith […] that God is truth; that truth is divine […](GS, §344).31

  Since God is dead, the immediate consequence of Nietzsche’s insight here is that science too has become groundless. That is: not only were we (i.e. the meticulous atheistic antimetaphysicians) the ones who killed God, as the madman said,32 but with him, we also killed the possibility of science überhaupt. The only way science can survive now is, thus, by remaining blind in the face of its fundamental basis, which is nothing else than Christian morality disguised in the form of a supposedly faultless (unkritisierbarer) will to Truth (GM, III-§25).33 Otherwise—so it seems—science will become unsustainable, entering a never-ending process of self-destruction.

  In a certain sense Gay Science constitutes Nietzsche’s first attempt to overcome the auto-destructive structure of science turning against itself. And his response is to show the necessity of creating new values (= another morality) and, with this, another definition and understanding of science. For, the dismantling of the underlying assumptions that made us believe in a certain form of science does not necessarily entail the abolition of science and truth or the end of knowledge as such. On the contrary, the consequences of the death of God are:

  not at all gloomy, but much more like a new barely describable type of light, happiness, relief, enjoyment, encouragement, dawn…Indeed, at hearing the news that ‘the old god is dead’, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel touched by the light of a new dawn; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, intuitions, expectations—finally the horizon seems clear again […]; finally our ships may set again, set out to face any danger; every daring of the knower (Wagniss des Erkennenden) is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an ‘open sea’ (GS, §343).34

  Apart from its striking resemblance to a passage from Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death,35 the contrast with the dread with which the madman (GS, §125) describes the aftermath of the death of God could not be greater. The horizon, then, seemed to have been wiped out, whereas now it is wider a
nd richer than ever: ‘The world has once again become infinite’,36 as Nietzsche writes in GS, §374. And it is infinite because of the infinite interpretations it now carries within itself. Overcoming the ‘death of science’ means, hence, to understand that there are infinite ways in which we can understand and undertake our task as knowers and scientists. And this means that, far from being ‘trapped’ in its anti-ness (as Heidegger suggests), Nietzsche’s position is one that intends to open up possibilities, to create a new way of understanding and pursuing science: science-philosophy as physiology, as psychology, as genealogy…37 As Camus writes in relation to the meaning of the death of God for Nietzsche: ‘an infinite joy will arise from the absolute despair’.38 In other words, the announcement of the death of God, the diagnosis of the death of science, and the decadence of morality are not Nietzsche’s last word. He is not an existential pessimist or fatalist à la Cioran (who, precisely because of his pessimism, is hardly ever considered to be an existentialist). For Nietzsche, the realization of the death of God is only the first step of a much broader process of overcoming and self-overcoming, because, in the end, the underlying force driving his writings is that of life-affirmation.

  This affirmativeness is also more or less explicitly present in the works of Schelling and Kierkegaard, and it is precisely this way of responding to the problem of decay, untruth and insoluble error that they have in common with the existentialists. Thus—coming back to the passage quoted above—if the ‘new open sea’ stands for the infinite interpretations, then the ‘daring of the knower’ that is now ‘allowed again’ stands for the infinite questions that can now be made without fear;39 there is no fear of breaking down solid certainties and leaving firm shores anymore, because after having ‘forsaken the land and gone to sea’, after having ‘demolished the land […] there is no more land’ (GS, §124), that is, there is no need for solid unquestionable truths.40 This, once again, does not mean that knowledge is impossible. On the contrary: knowledge is now liberated from all its former prejudices.

  We find a similar line of thought in Schelling’s essay Über die Natur der Philosophie als Wissenschaft (On the Nature of Philosophy as Science) from his Erlangen Lectures (1825, EV), where he argues that philosophy must be understood as an ongoing process in which error is an essential element. Schelling also compares the philosopher to a sailor: those, who do not dare to leave the harbor, surely, won’t encounter any dangers, they won’t commit any mistakes, but they will never enable philosophy to fulfill its task either, that is, to become true philosophy.41 Like a hero (or heroine), the philosopher has to be able to leave everything behind; ‘even God’, says Schelling, ‘for at this point God is also merely an entity (nur ein Seyendes)’ (EV).42 The similarities between Schelling’s text and Nietzsche’s project in Gay Science, however, do not concern only their use of certain images (the open sea as a symbol for the ‘dangers’ the philosopher has to be prepared to confront; the necessity of abandoning all fixed beliefs and the use of God as a symbol for these certitudes and beliefs…), but also their conception of science/philosophy as the history of philosophical systems which are all necessarily wrong (curiously Schelling also refers to these ‘systems’ as illnesses). In other words, they both argue that the only possible way in which philosophy/science can attain its goal43 is to go through all the different and opposed systems, but to never stay in any of them (EV).44 Considering the intrinsic opposition and mutual exclusion of the different theories throughout the history of philosophy, or what he calls the bellum intestinum in human knowledge (EV),45 Schelling argues that one must give up hope on the possibility of ever finding a particular perspective (eine einzelne Ansicht) which would permanently overrule the others. The task is thus to enable these different systems or perspectives to coexist.46

  For Schelling, as for Nietzsche, all this entails that philosophy must become aware of and accept its finitude;47 that is, it must always integrate a moment of auto-criticism, the possibility of a different perspective (which is, by the way, also important for Kierkegaard). And although there are also many differences between them (Schelling for instance still refers to this new form of philosophy as the ultimate ‘system’ whose true subject is ‘eternal freedom’), the intention and the project for future philosophy is in both cases the same, namely to open up the space for different ways of doing and writing philosophy. However, this form of multiplying the ways in which science (Wissenschaft) should be understood and developed, the necessity of introducing as many perspectives as possible in our search for knowledge, has been considered to be a reason for not including Nietzsche among the existentialists, who generally privilege one perspective ‘over all others in the interpretation of human reality’.48 Furthermore, if we contemplate some of the readings of Sartre that emphasize the epistemological aspect of his philosophy and claim that Sartre’s main concern was to find a ‘solid basis’ to found the possibility of knowledge,49 the differences with Nietzsche could not be greater. And yet, one could argue that Nietzsche’s concept of a gay science is the result of applying to knowledge the same principle that he will apply to morality and human existence in his Zarathustra and which is certainly one of the most influential and recurrent topics among the existentialists of the twentieth century, namely the principle of creativity.

  Creativity is both for Sartre and Camus, as well as for Nietzsche the main counterforce against nihilism. Camus calls it the ‘creative revolt’.50 It is certainly a recurrent theme in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. But perhaps its relation with the death/absence of God is most clear in the chapter ‘Upon the Isles of the Blest’:

  Once one said ‘God’ when one looked upon distant seas; but now I have taught you to say: Overhuman.

  God is a supposition; but I want that your supposing might not reach farther than your creative will.

  […] Away from God and Gods this will has lured me: what would there be to create if Gods—existed!51

  One may appreciate a comparable thought in Schelling, when he says in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) in relation to God’s existence: ‘if he were to be, then we would not be (wäre er, so wären wir nicht)’.52 Although, for Schelling this does not mean that God is dead, but rather that he is still to come, that he is always becoming. The problem they are both dealing with (namely human freedom) and the way in which, for both (as well as for Kierkegaard), dealing with this problem entails a reconfiguration of our relationship to God, is very similar. Moreover, one could also argue that what makes them inspiring for later existentialist writers is precisely this.

  Nietzsche’s response to the decomposition of Christian morality is to emphasize the infinite possibilities that are now open to us. The realization of the death of God is the first step towards the creation or invention of new modes of existence. This, however, does not entail the death of morality as such, because recognizing that He is dead also means understanding that we were the ones who actually ‘put’ him there in the first place. We created those values which have lost their validity. Therefore the new task could not be to lament the loss, but rather to create new values, affirmative, life-enhancing values…but this time with the awareness that they can always be (and should be) put into question over and over again. In the end, Nietzsche’s main concern is to enable all possible forms of questioning; the driving question thus being: is there any question that has not been asked yet? Morality is, in this sense, the same as for Sartre: ‘always inevitable and impossible at the same time’.53 It is inevitable because whether we are aware of it or not, we are always acting within a certain framework of values, impossible because once we realize that ‘God is dead’, we also know that there are no eternal values, that morality as such is somehow necessarily relative.

  But if the realization of the death of God, as we have argued here, is the first step towards a new, freer, opener way of understanding science, morality, and human existence, why then is the man who killed God in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra the ‘ugliest man’? When Zarathu
stra encounters him in the ghastly valley, called ‘Serpent’s Death’,54 he immediately guesses why he killed God: ‘You could not endure him who saw you all the time and through and through, you ugliest man!’.55 But, that he could not endure this form of intrusiveness, also explains why he has taken refuge in such a deathly and isolated place, namely because he cannot stand anybody looking at him and pitying him. He believes Zarathustra honors his ugliness by not doing so and he recites some of Zarathustra’s teachings, but it is not clear whether he really understands anything, for, at the end, Zarathustra says to himself: ‘How poor is the human after all! […] How ugly, […] how full of hidden shame!’.56 The ugliest man is so terribly ugly, because he has not been able to overcome himself. He is ugly because he is not capable of dealing with the fact that, as Sartre will say about the man who suddenly realizes that God does not exist, ‘he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself […] he is without excuse.’57 He cannot deal with his own freedom. He cannot affirm his actions (= his past) and he is obsessed and trapped in the image he thinks the others have of him. We could say with Sartre that he is trapped in the ‘hell’, which is the ‘others’, like the protagonists of Sartre’s theatre play, Huis Clos (1946). Indeed: l’enfer, c’est les autres.

  Sartre’s protagonists are in hell because they are (symbolically) dead, and they are dead because they cannot break with their worries, their habits and they remain victims of the judgments of the others.58 The others, for Sartre, as well as for Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (who is constantly worrying and overcoming his worry about how the others react to him), are the only mirror we have to relate to ourselves: whatever we may say of ourselves, there is always part of the judgment of the others that comes into play.59 But this does not mean that we must always remain trapped in the images we think the others have of us. It is possible, says Sartre, to change our actions, it is always possible to come out of the circle of hell in which we live, or, in Nietzsche’s words: it is possible to overcome ourselves: ‘the human is something that must be overcome’(Z).60