Either Kierkegaard/Or Nietzsche

Moral Philosophy in a New Key

Tom P.S. Angier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351941389
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Arguably Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche are the two most significant moral philosophers of the nineteenth century, their works showing a remarkably trenchant and penetrating awareness of key ethical issues, while demonstrating a stylistic flair that is rare in philosophical writing. Angier argues that, despite the perceived stylistic opacity of these thinkers, their work does admit of comparison and rigorous analytic scrutiny which in turn yields new and significant insights into their philosophy. In this book Angier expounds the view that Kierkegaard both anticipated, and subjected to detailed critique, Nietzsche's central arguments in moral philosophy, exposing the weaknesses of what were to become the core Nietzschean positions and realizing the powerful attraction for people that these ideas would have. Angier brings this critique to our modern attention and defends the prefigured Kierkegaardian critique of Nietzsche.

Part 1
Kierkegaard contra Nietzsche

Foreword

The structure of Part 1 is as follows. In chapter one, I explore a character-ideal central to Nietzsche’s philosophical project — that of ‘sovereign individuality’ — along with Kierkegaard’s anticipation and criticism of that ideal. I argue that this Nietzschean ideal can be understood in one of three ways: as a ‘hyper-existentialist’ ideal; as a biologistic ideal; or as a synthesis of these. Although this last alternative is philosophically the most cogent, and I think best reflects Nietzsche’s own position, I go on to argue that it remains vulnerable and ultimately cannot be upheld. My argument throughout is crucially informed by Anti-Climacus’ text, The Sickness unto Death, in which Nietzsche’s character-ideal is subject to protracted criticism.

In chapters two and three it is Kierkegaard’s characterology and axiology that come under scrutiny. For if Nietzsche can escape the charge of hyper-existentialism, it remains unclear (as yet) whether Kierkegaard himself can do so. This is because Kierkegaardian ‘choice’ is — according to Kierkegaard’s critics — criterionless, and thereby necessarily displays a fundamental arbitrariness. How can the Kierkegaardian agent claim any authority for his values, it is asked, if those values are arrived at through an act of irrational choice? Alasdair MacIntyre remains, I hold, the most forceful proponent of this criticism, and although his analysis is not wholly unfounded, I go on to argue that it is in the end untenable. Contra MacIntyre, I contend that Kierkegaard’s texts do yield criteria for recognising certain values as superior to others — criteria that are, moreover, intended to be rationally vindicatory.

Given this, I investigate the reasons Kierkegaard offers for choosing the ‘ethical’ life over the ‘aesthetic’ in chapter two, and for choosing the ‘religious’ life over the ‘ethical’ in chapter three. These investigations are intended not just to defend Kierkegaard against his recent analytical critics, but also — crucially — to support him against Nietzsche. For if Kierkegaard can show the rational superiority of an ‘ethical’ over an ‘aesthetic’ existence, and if he can show that that conception of value and the self affirmed in Nietzsche’s works tends to collapse into ‘aestheticism’, then he will also have gone a long way to showing the irrationality of choosing the Nietzschean position. Moreover, with regard to choosing between the ‘ethical’ and the ‘religious’ life, similar considerations (mutatis mutandis) apply. For although it seems that through Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard is promoting a religion of brazen irrationalism, I argue that, on the contrary, Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac yields suasive reasons for choosing religion over mere ethics. Indeed, I maintain that Kierkegaard’s analysis of the religious life ultimately demonstrates the deep vulnerability of Nietzsche’s anti-religious critique.

Chapter 1
Kierkegaard’s Challenge

1.1 Sovereign individuality: the hyper-existentialist interpretation

Although Nietzsche’s ideal of ‘sovereign individuality’ is implicit in many of his earlier writings, it is at GM 2:2 that he first gives it explicit content: ‘society and the morality of custom [will] at last reveal what they have simply been the means to: … the sovereign individual, like only to himself, liberated … from the morality of custom, autonomous and supramoral (for “autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive)’. From this it appears that sovereign individuality amounts to a stringent form of autonomy, whereby the individual is absolutely freed from the norms that inform the social order. This ideal gains support from other passages in Nietzsche’s work, where social mores and individual flourishing are set in ineluctable opposition. For example, at D 9 Nietzsche maintains that ‘the hegemony of custom, tradition, [is demanded] in spite of the private desires and advantages of the individual: the individual is to sacrifice himself — that is the commandment of the morality of custom’. At GS 21 Nietzsche writes that ‘The praise of virtue is the praise of something that is privately harmful — the praise of instincts that deprive a human being of… the strength for the highest autonomy’. And at D 108 he declares that ‘individual happiness springs from one’s own unknown laws, and prescriptions from without can only obstruct and hinder it’.

What appears to be required of the ‘sovereign individual’ — viz. a stringent form of autonomy — is what Nietzsche sometimes refers to as ‘originality’. Whereas ‘Under the dominion of the morality of custom, originality of every kind has acquired a bad conscience’ (D 9), Nietzsche’s project is (on this view) to clear the way for an originality free from moral guilt or remorse. He gives this notion of originality some content at D 104: ‘all evaluations are either original or adopted… Original evaluation: that is to say, to assess a thing according to the extent to which it pleases or displeases us alone and no one else — something extremely rare!’ Again Nietzsche’s ideal seems to be one of wholly prescinding from common value judgements, in order to establish oneself as a strictly autonomous agent. Indeed, this strongly negative conception of evaluative freedom — ‘the free human being is immoral because in all things he is determined to depend upon himself and not upon a tradition’ (ibid.) — is echoed elsewhere in Nietzsche’s work. For instance, he holds that ‘Your educators … reveal to you what the true basic material of your being is, something in itself ineducable …, bound and paralysed: your educators can be only your liberators’ (UM 129). And at WP 70, he opposes ‘the doctrine of the influence of the milieu and external causes’ to ‘the force within’, which he characterises as ‘infinitely superior’.

So it appears that sovereign individuality is a very exacting ideal, which involves asserting one’s own autonomy or originality in the face of all social norms and practices. It is this conception of sovereignty, apparently, which is expressed at HAH 286 — ‘I believe that everyone must have his own individual opinion concerning everything …, because he himself is an individual, unique thing which adopts a new posture towards all other things such as has never been adopted before’.¹ And it is this conception of sovereignty that stands in opposition to the dependency of the ‘moral man’: ‘The moral man is a lower species than the immoral, a weaker species; indeed — he is … a good copy at best — the measure of his value lies outside him’ (WP 382). Frequently Nietzsche formulates this notion of individual sovereignty in terms of individual creativity. Just as the sovereign individual is called upon to ‘posit ends’ out of himself (see AC 54), so he is required to ‘create’ his own values. For example, Nietzsche writes at WP 767 — ‘The individual is something quite new which creates new things … Ultimately, the individual derives the values of his acts from himself’. And at GS 335 he calls upon individuals to ‘create … for yourself an ideal of your own, your very own — for that could never be somebody else’s and much less that of all, all!’²

Thus Nietzsche’s ideal of sovereign individuality – whether expressed in terms of autonomy, originality or creativity — seems (as outlined so far) to entail a radical prescinding from all socially embodied norms, in order to assert a putative individual freedom. It was the stringency of this ideal — one of pure, or authentic individuality — that led me to characterise it in the Foreword as a form of ‘hyper-existentialism’. And I think it is clear that, as it stands, this character-ideal is deeply problematic. As Paul Valadier maintains, it presents the ideal agent as a species of ‘demiurge or … creator god’ (Valadier 1997, 207), who stands as ‘a solitary evaluator, capable of creating by himself and as if from nothing his own original table of values, without connection to a culture or to a history’ (ibid. 209). Yet from Nietzsche’s descriptions above it remains unclear how this radical autonomy, or ‘total sovereignty’ (ibid. 208) can be realised. For as Valadier asks, ‘has there ever existed a subject without either roots or genealogy, without a milieu and without a social role?’ (ibid.). Rather than being established apart from all social forms, it seems plausible to understand values as necessarily conditioned by such forms — yet it is precisely this understanding which Nietzsche’s ideal seems to impugn. And through impugning that understanding, it appears to assert what Valadier calls ‘an illusory subjective autarky’ (ibid.). Indeed, in striving for the ideal of total sovereignty, it seems that, far from attaining a proper freedom, an individual’s axiology will be deprived of discernible content.

Even if it is granted, for the sake of argument, that a sovereign individual could espouse values with real content, it still remains obscure what it would mean for those values to be peculiar to him. As Valadier asks, ‘what would a creation of values that no one has ever known or lived signify?’ (ibid. 211).³ Contra the hyper-existentialist ideal of sovereignty, it would seem that in order to be recognisable as such, values have in principle to be shareable. Although an agent can claim that he values an unprecedented object or class of objects, if that object or class bears no relation to what others value, or could conceivably value, then his claim would seem to lapse into unintelligibility. In the absence, that is, of justification in light of certain common axiological standards — standards that are precisely not peculiar to him — the hyperexistentialist’s evaluative claims will be deprived of the context from which they inevitably derive their sense.

In response to this line of argument, I think at least two formidable objections could be put forward. First, it could be maintained that Nietzsche’s invocation of peculiar virtues and unique ideals is straightforwardly rationalisable, as his way of referring to the qualities of the creative genius. As will be seen later on, Nietzsche praises the divergence of men like Beethoven and Goethe from their surroundings, a divergence that he takes to be in the service of unique cultural goods and personal achievements. In this sense, surely, the Fifth Symphony or Faust do constitute a ‘new posture towards all … things such as has never been adopted before’ (HAH 286), and the problem of intelligibility outlined above does not arise. All Nietzsche is doing, according to this view, is to laud outstanding cultural achievements in all their particularity, and to point out the psychological peculiarities that are requisite in those who produce them.⁴

Secondly, it could be held that the idea of unique, personal values is far from solecistic, once it is understood that valuing — according to Nietzsche — is to be understood in primarily biologistic terms. As should become clear in what follows, Nietzsche is committed to a philosophical anthropology that is strongly indebted to the emergent natural sciences, particularly the sciences of biology and physiology. And given this, he is attracted to the notion that ‘values’ are tantamount to those vital impulses that an individual tends to exhibit in behaviour. Perhaps it is these impulses that Nietzsche is referring to when he speaks of ‘the true basic material of your being … something in itself ineducable’ (UM 124), or of the ‘force within’ that is ‘infinitely superior’ to one’s milieu (WP 70). This reading, by reconceiving the sense of ‘value’ at work here, could save Nietzsche from the above criticism: creative valuing is just that strongly particularistic activity that characterises certain highly developed organisms.

While both these readings are resourceful defences of the kind of radical autonomy outlined in the extracts above, I think that under further scrutiny they do not prove convincing. The first objection is unconvincing primarily on exegetical grounds. For while it is plausible that the locus of uniqueness and peculiarity that concerns Nietzsche is solely that of creative works — rather than that of norms and values — this is hard to square with what Nietzsche’s texts actually maintain. As we have seen, the ‘new posture’ that Nietzsche urges his exemplary creators to adopt, ‘such as has never been adopted before’, is assimilated to having individual opinions, rather than creating individual works. At GS 335 he speaks of an ‘ideal’ that is peculiar to an individual, not a work, and at Z 63 Zarathustra refers to peculiar virtues, not works. Unless each of these instances is metaphorical — that is, essentially a piece of rhetoric — this first defensive reading is on weak ground.

The second objection, by contrast, is unconvincing primarily on analytical grounds. Although Nietzsche’s biologistic naturalism is, as will become clear, an entrenched part of his thought, it is not obvious that that brand of naturalism actually supports the highly individualistic form of normativity we have seen in the quotations adduced above. For even if it is the case that Nietzsche understands evaluation essentially as impulse evidenced in behaviour, would such an understanding plausibly subtend norms variegated at the level of individual behaviour? It is more plausible, surely, to think that biological and physiological investigation would tend to reveal behavioural ‘values’ that cut across individual peculiarities, which show the relative unimportance of individual divergence at the level of organic functioning. Perhaps Nietzsche envisions a far more fine-grained natural science than any available so far; but in its absence, the second line of defence does not seem sufficiently robust.⁵

All in all, then, I do not think that either of these two lines of defence carries weight. The kind of evaluation Nietzsche seems to have in mind is too individual to be captured by the biologistic analysis, and it is not confined to the production of particular works in the way required by the first objection. This leaves us once again with the hyper-existentialist interpretation of sovereign individuality, which is itself difficult to defend. Its conception of pure evaluation seems unworkable, because it effectively requires that there be a coherent construal of the idea that individuals can adopt private values. But no coherent construal of this idea appears available. It is given this interpretative dead end that what could be called a biologistic reading of Nietzschean sovereignty has been suggested. And perhaps the most thoroughgoing proponent of this reading is Brian Leiter, who develops it in Leiter 1992, 1998 and 2002.

1.2 Sovereign individuality: the biologistic interpretation

Leiter points out that a passage central to the hyper-existentialist reading of Nietzschean sovereignty - ‘We … want to become … human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves’ (GS 335) — is in fact improperly truncated at this point (see Leiter 1998, 252). For it continues: ‘To that end we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be able to be creators in this sense — while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been based on ignorance of physics or were constructed so as to contradict it’ (GS 335). This emphasis on ‘physics’, viz. everything that is ‘lawful and necessary’, as both informing and constraining the project of individual self-creation, is echoed elsewhere in Nietzsche’s work. For example, at D 130 Nietzsche speaks of ‘our extreme limitedness’, suggesting that ‘in our most intentional actions [we may] do no more than play the game of necessity’. In EH, he refers to ‘some fatality’ (301) that drove him back to Rome, and to a personal ‘instinct’ (2...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART 1 Kierkegaard contra Nietzsche
• PART 2 Truth and Communication
• Recommended Reading
• Bibliography
• Index