The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century
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In relation to Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death, one could say that the ugliest man suffers from what Kierkegaard considers to be the lowest form of despair, a despair of weakness. The ugliest man lives his life in quiet lostness (Either/Or, 1843, EO), that is, as if his life was not his life, and despairs at not willing to be himself. This means that he knows he is in despair, but he does not understand what the real cause is: ‘what he says is in a sense true, only not in the way he says it. He stands with his face inverted, and what he says must be understood backwards’.61 This is a passive form of despair and there is no consciousness of the (infinite side of the) self: ‘It despairs and swoons and then lies quite still as though lifeless, […] like certain lower animals whose only weapon or defense is to lie quite still and feign death’.62
What is interesting about this interpretation is that it shows fundamental affinities between Nietzsche’s and Kierkegaard’s critiques of certain life-negating ways of living. In other words, the parallel reading of these passages shows the extent to which their philosophies have to be understood as an attempt to answer the question: what does it mean to be really alive? And for both philosophers this has to do with learning to love life and to affirm human existence with all its contradictions, complexities, and pains. Or, as Camus would write in his Myth of Sisyphus (1942): ‘one does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness’.63
In a sense we find a similar pattern in Schelling’s Ages of the World (1811, WA), when he describes the difference between having a ‘real’ past (eigentliche Vergangenheit) and being trapped in one’s own past. Whereas the first is only possible through an active self-differentiation (Scheidung von sich selbst), which also implies a certain capacity to confront and overcome one’s own past, the second is like living without living.64 It’s like not having or being any temporality at all: no real past, no present (= no real presence), and no future. Needless to say, this concern with what it means for us to be really alive or to have a real presence and a real temporality is a reason for including these authors among the so called existentialists.65
Conversely though, one might consider the despair of Nietzsche’s ugliest man to be what Kierkegaard calls a demonic despair, which is the most potentiated form of despair and is described as a will that hopelessly ‘wills to be itself’. In this case, the ugliest man has already comprehended the structure of his self, namely that he is the self-relation of a synthesis (i.e. a synthesis between freedom and necessity, the infinite and the finite), but in spite of this, he wants to be what he thinks is his real, concrete self. He knows he is in despair, but he wants to stay in despair, because this has become the only thing he can hang on to:
[…] he prefers to rage against everything and be the one whom the world, all existence, has wronged, the one for whom it is especially important to ensure that he has his agony on hand, so that no one will take it from him, for then he would not be able to convince others and himself that he is right. This finally fixes itself so firmly in his head that he becomes frightened of eternity […] in case it should take away from him what […] gives him infinite superiority over other people, what […] is his right to be who he is.66
For Nietzsche, the problem of the ugliest man lies in his pettiness and his petty sorrows, that is: in his failure to overcome himself and to see himself as a ‘bridge’ for something better. For Kierkegaard, the problem has to do with him not being able to accept his dependency on or his relation to something much greater than him, namely God (i.e. Kierkegaard’s God). It is the ‘leap to faith’ that is lacking. But, despite the differences, the structure Nietzsche and Kierkegaard (as well as Sartre) are criticizing is essentially the same. Both Nietzsche’s ‘ugliest man’ and Kierkegaard’s ‘man who desperately wants to be himself’ are unable to let go of their torments, for they have become identical to them. In both cases the problem lies in having mistaken the art of ‘becoming who we are’, with the desire to be something fixed, concrete, easy to grasp and to understand. But, as Sartre says: ‘an existentialist will never take man as the end, since man is still to be determined’.67 Or in Kierkegaard’s terms: ‘a self, every moment it exists, is in a process of becoming; for the self [kata dynamin—potentiality] is not present actually, it is merely what is to come into existence’.68
15.3 BECOMING WHO YOU ARE
That ‘man is still to be determined’, the idea that the essence of human existence will always remain unknown, because we are constantly becoming and defining ourselves a posteriori, goes hand in hand with the notion of absolute freedom: ‘there is no determinism—man is free, man is freedom’, Sartre writes.69 We find an almost identical formulation in Kierkegaard, when he says that ‘the self is freedom’.70 But, for Kierkegaard, in order to attain this freedom, in order to become this true freedom (which is not to be confused with liberum arbitrium), the self first has to become itself, and this means that human freedom can only be achieved ‘through despair’,71 for ‘those who claim to be free of despair have not discovered themselves as a self’ yet.72 This does not mean, however, that we are not free before we become conscious of ourselves as ‘selves’, but it does mean that there are different levels of freedom and that our task is to act in a way that may enrich our freedom: to choose freedom. Moreover, because the task of becoming itself ‘can only be done in the relationship to God’ (SD),73 to become truly free, for Kierkegaard, means to accept the fact that the self is grounded in the Power which posited it,74 that is, it means to accept ‘the fact that there is a God, and that he himself, his self, exists before this God’ (SD).75 The realization of freedom implies, thus, to affirm necessity, for it is only by affirming our forsakenness that we will be able to overcome the despair that arose precisely from trying to fight against it.
On the other hand, if, as Kierkegaard argues, despair is the absence of true faith, then it should also be considered as a sin. Despair is the original sin, and this leads us to the question about the necessity of sin for the realization of human freedom. This is certainly a central theme in Kierkegaard’s writings, such as The Concept of Anxiety (1844), but one could also argue that it constitutes an important theme in Camus’ The Rebel, where he raises the question whether it is possible to act without committing an offence.76 Without wanting to go as far as Lev Shestov, who in the introduction to his book Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy (1934) compares the ‘killing of God’ in Nietzsche with the problematic of the original sin in Kierkegaard,77 it is still meaningful to ask the question whether such a form of freedom (the realization of which is only possible through the acceptance of having willingly participated in something which presents itself as being totally unavoidable) is not also characteristic of Nietzsche’s philosophy. This is indeed Camus’ interpretation when he writes: ‘total adherence to total necessity—thus is his [i.e. Nietzsche’s] paradoxical understanding of freedom’.78
The problem of freedom in Nietzsche’s philosophy (or the tension between fatalism and self-creation) has certainly been a key factor when it has come to deciding whether or not to include him among the existentialists.79 And still, it is important to underline that what makes Nietzsche’s or Kierkegaard’s concept of freedom interesting for authors such as Sartre or Camus is precisely its paradoxical nature.
Nietzsche’s amor fati (GS, §276) is probably the most obvious instance in which freedom is depicted as the affirmation of necessity. Nietzsche presents his amor fati as his ‘dearest wish and thought’; a thought or a perspective which will enable him to ‘see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them’ and, hence, to become a true ‘yes-sayer’.80 We find a very similar pathos in GS, §341, where Nietzsche introduces the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same and presents it as a transforming thought which, if it does not destroy us, will prove that we are ‘well disposed’ enough ‘to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal (ewigen Bestätigung und Besiegelung)’.81 The yes-sayer is also
the one who can say as Zarathustra: ‘Was that life? Well then! One more time!’82 And this is exactly the attitude Camus highlights and admires from the myth of Sisyphus, the highwayman:
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. […] At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.83
Sisyphus is stronger than his fate, because he affirms it, and by doing so it becomes not a result of strange forces acting upon him, but a result of his own free choice.
But there is also another sense in which the acceptance of necessity constitutes an essential moment for the realization of freedom in Nietzsche’s philosophy. It is the freedom that arises from reinterpreting our past (with all our more or less unconscious mistakes, faults and misjudgments) as the result of our own (conscious) free will. It is what Zarathustra calls his redemption (Erlösung): ‘To redeem that which has passed away and to re-create all “It was” into a “Thus I willed it!”—that alone should I call redemption’.84 In more Schellingian terms, the problem Nietzsche is trying to solve here is the mixed feelings we have when regarding our own past: on the one hand, we know we acted freely, as Schelling says in a turn of phrase that will evoke passages quoted already from Sartre, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: ‘the essence of man is fundamentally his own act’ (Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 1809, FE).85 On the other hand, though, it sometimes feels as if something else had acted through us, as if we had never had a real choice, as if we had been determined from the beginning to be and act as we do:
As incomprehensible as this idea may appear to conventional ways of thinking, there is indeed in each man a feeling in accord with it as if he had been what he is already from all eternity and had by no means become so first in time.86
Schelling then gives the example of Judas:
That Judas became a betrayer of Christ, neither he nor any creature could change, and nevertheless he betrayed Christ not under compulsion, but willingly and with complete freedom.87
In a sense, Schelling’s interpretation of Judas’ betrayal here is similar to his interpretation of Oedipus’ fate in his Philosophy of Art (1802): the only way in which Judas and Oedipus can affirm their freedom is by recognizing their own deeds, even if these deeds become totally alienating to them; even if, in the case of Judas, the alienation is so strong that he will have to take his own life. What is interesting about this interpretation is that the process they have to go through in order to maintain and affirm their freedom according to Schelling is practically the same process Nietzsche describes as Zarathustra’s redemption. It is a process of internalizing necessity in such a way that it may be reinterpreted as the fruit of free will. For Schelling, though, this necessity does not come merely from the fact that past actions are irreversible. The necessity or the fatality Schelling refers to is of another order. It is the ‘inner necessity’ that Judas feels at the very moment of his betrayal—as if he could not do otherwise—although he knows that no one else can be held responsible for his actions. Indeed, he decides, and yet it seems as if the decision had been made before he even knew.
The way in which Schelling explains the possibility of this form of identity between freedom and necessity (FE)88—which in the end has to do with the problem of determining the extent to which our entire being (i.e. not only our actions, but also our character and our desires) is the result of our free choices—is by supposing that these decisions were made by us with absolute freedom, but at another moment in time before, namely before time, and hence, in a totally pre-conscious and pre-temporal way (which does not mean that they have not marked or do not still mark our consciousness and our whole existence again and again, as if the decisions determining us were always renewed):
Man is in the initial creation, as shown, an undecided being—(which might be portrayed mythically as a condition of innocence that precedes this life and as an initial blessedness)—only man himself can decide. But this decision cannot occur within time; it occurs outside of all time, and hence, together with the first creation […] The act, whereby his life is determined in time, does not itself belong to time but rather to eternity: it also does not temporally precede life but goes through time as an act which is eternal by nature.89
One could argue that Schelling is only creating more problems with this idea of a decision made ‘outside of all time’. But perhaps this is the only way in which a paradox can be approached, namely through a paradox. In this sense, this passage is not so different from Nietzsche’s when he writes in Gay Science §125 that: ‘deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen and heard’ (GS §125).90 In both cases, the acknowledgement of having consciously committed certain actions is always necessarily delayed. But everything depends on this acknowledgement; our freedom depends on it. In both cases freedom (as the possibility of choosing the Good in Schelling or the creation of new values in Nietzsche) is only possible through a process of self-knowledge in which the ‘subject’ of knowledge (such as Oedipus or the ‘men at the market place’) has to recognize himself in the ‘object’ of knowledge (the ‘murderer of Laius’ or the ‘murderers of God’ resp.). Indeed, Schelling is not giving us the ultimate ‘true’ answer to the question about the nature of human freedom, but he is giving us a thought that will enable us to understand that the only way in which we can maintain and affirm our freedom is by imagining that we are in fact the result of our (past) ‘choices’, and hence, that we must accept them and acknowledge them as ours; even if we do not remember them, even if we could not possibly remember having made them. Our task is to become aware of the ‘decisions’ that constitute us, that is, to become aware of who we are: this is our freedom. Or in Kierkegaard’s terms: ‘The more consciousness, the more self; the more consciousness, the more will, and the more will the more self. Someone who has no will at all is no self. But the more will he has, the more self-consciousness he has too’.91
In his lecture on existentialism from 1946, Sartre said that: ‘existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position’.92 In this sense, Nietzsche could be seen as the true predecessor of existentialism. And yet, as we have seen here, there are many ways in which the most existentialist moves in Nietzsche’s philosophy are already present in Kierkegaard and Schelling. The latter are definitely not atheists, but they certainly question the way in which we should think of God. In fact, one of the features these three authors seem to have in common is the urge to rethink some of the concepts that have traditionally been at the centre of philosophical discourses—such as God and freedom—in order to understand them from a totally new perspective, namely from the perspective of existence, of human existence. Freedom is not just an abstract concept, but something we feel we have and lack at the same time.
On the other hand, though, it is important to stress the way in which both Schelling and Nietzsche present these thoughts. For Sartre it seems to be unquestionable: man is ‘condemned to be free’,93 and therefore, ‘even if God existed that would make no difference’.94 The problem with this sentence is that it considers that it knows exactly the true conditions of human existence: we are alone and confronted with our absolute freedom. In this respect, both Schelling’s and Nietzsche’s positions are much subtler, for they are always aware of the fact that this way of understanding human existence is the result of a certain interpretation. It is a decision one may make or not, but they never attempt to talk from a standpoint of absolute truth, unless of course veiled (and somehow undermined) under a manifestly mythological language or a figurative character such as Zarathustra. For this and many other reasons (such as the importance of opening up different possibilities for the realization of philosophy), it seems important to confirm that although these authors may have prepared the path for existentialism, their thought does not necessarily end there. On the contrary, in many respects it goes bey
ond it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Texts
Camus, Albert, L’homme révolté. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1951.
Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus, and other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Heidegger, Martin, ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God is dead” ’. In: Martin Heidegger. Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 157–99.
Kierkegaard, Søren, The Sickness unto Death: a Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and Awakening by Anti-Climacus, trans. Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin Books, 1989 (edition 2004).
Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhyme and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus spoke Zarathustra: a Book for Everyone and Nobody, trans. Graham Parkes. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2005.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes. London: Routledge, 72003.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet. London: Methuen, 1948.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Huis Clos. Introduction and Notes by Keith Gore. London: Routledge, 1987 (edition 2000).