Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
"[Nietzsche] could not follow Schelling and Kierkegaard in accepting an entire revealed religion on faith. Nietzsche's fundamental attitude and method barred him from this course: for Kierkegaard not only failed to question an incidental premise but abandoned philosophy altogether to 'leap'-- as he himself put it-- into religion."
(Kaufmann 125).
Perhaps I should say something quickly about what Kaufmann is referring to by Nietzsche's "method." Nietzsche criticized philosophical systems and systematizing philosophers because he believed all systems relied on unquestioned premises. This is part of what he is getting at in many points where he refers to systems as the "ego" of the philosopher. What a philosophical system is, at bottom, is a betrayal of the biases or needs of the philosopher constructing it (this is similar to the "center" of structures). The truth value of these premises cannot be established within the system itself. Instead they must be ignored, or "lept over" as Kierkegaard suggests.
When these premises are removed we are faced with a massive gap in the system, you can call this gap "absurdity" if you like. Nietzsche's method was to question every premises, "to look out of this window, now out of that." It is a perspectivist approach that relies on accumulating many perspectives, and, where necessary, allowing your "will to truth" overpower your need for comfort by facing the absurd. That is a very incomplete re-hash, and I have skipped over the role of dialectics, which is rather important, but I think it suffices for the time being.
Nietzsche's response to this kind of Kierkegaardian "leap" was made without being acquainted with the particular philosophy of Kierkegaard:
"Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want any more: this created all gods and other worlds."
(Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra).
Wow! Maybe I just need to get out more (ok, we all know I need to get out more), but isn't it great when two thinkers seem to speak to each other without knowing it. In any case, this is a problem of fundamental importance to me. Is it "poor ignorant weariness" that causes people to make these leaps? Is it perhaps that our minds are designed in such a way that we cannot deal with absurdity, or spaciousness? Perhaps we have just been taught and brought up in a manner where we refuse to see, or cannot see, the possibility of the absurd? In other places Nietzsche seems to attribute this move to a lack of intellectual integrity, and in others, to a psychological need for comfort.
Here is the real question I was struck with after reading this section: could it not require immense courage to make this leap? Maybe it is weariness on Nietzsche's part, or panic even, that leaves him on one bank denying the existence of the other. In my study of Nietzsche up to this point, and its really just beginning, I find myself asking, and often out loud, "what would you have us do Friedrich?" Am I just asking him to sprout wings and carry me across?
1 Comments:
Interesting post considering that I was just thumbing through "Schopenhauer as Educator" and noted a part where he claims Schopenhauer as one of the most honest thinkers, second only to Montaigne.
Schopenhauer had his form of comfort (passive nihilism, as I read it--see the amazing final passage of WWR) but it's a paradoxical one--a paradox that resolves itself into nothingness within his system.
Nietzsche's rejection of this "out" has always been problematic for me, as you know. But maybe my understanding of Nietzsche is too tainted by Heidegger at this point, that is, I see Nietzsche as proposing a reverse metaphysics in the end. He wants us to be stronger than we are...
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