The allegorical work is often considered Nietzsche's most influential work. Lots of popular interpretations of him are based on an isolated reading oThe allegorical work is often considered Nietzsche's most influential work. Lots of popular interpretations of him are based on an isolated reading of this book. To achieve a more concrete understanding, however, it is necessary that we place the book back into a broader context.
The first thing to note is that the book is a parody of The Bible. The purpose of Zarathustra's teaching, however is the inverse of that of Christianity. While Christianity promotes virtues of humility, Zarathustra wants people to be stronger and lighter in spirit, to affirm rather than to negate life.
The setting of the story is dominated by the event that "God is dead", killed by his pity for human. The message of God's death, however, has not yet reached people's ears. Already weakened by the morality of Christianity, they have turned into "the last men", who are essentially nihilists and care only about preserving their being in an agreeable way. To them, any call of being truthful to one's own existence gets levelled down to idle chatter and thus ignored or ridiculed. Faced with this almost hopeless situation, Zarathustra moves back and forth, somethings ambitious to "save" people from mediocrity by encouraging them with his own example, sometimes weary enough to recoil into his own solitude. In this way he gathers strength, so as to elicit something higher in man - the overman [Übermensch]. The overman is not a fixed ideal for people to pursue and realize, but a reminder that man is never man's sole end - for man is meant for something higher than man, albeit this "higher" has to be developed intrinsically out of humanity and should never be superimposed from without.
One striking aspect of the story is that what Nietzsche criticizes and what he comments are usually quite close, even indistinguishable. Zarathustra has to navigate his speech carefully, to fend himself off "the spirit of gravity" occasionally. After all, his own teachings can sometimes appear ponderous. In the whole process Nietzsche never tries to conceal Zarathustra's weakness. In a sense it is precisely because man is vulnerable that he is capable of something great.
Nietzsche is sometimes classified as an existentialist. One of the reasons is that he writes extensively about an authentic mode of life. It is notable that he has a peculiar conception of temporality implied in the process of becoming authentic. In "At Noon" (4th Part), Zarathustra takes a sleep under a tree when the hour of noon comes. His soul "stretches out long, long - longer". But when he wakes up, "the sun still stood straight over his head" (pages 388-390 in The Portable Nietzsche). This indicates that authentic experience takes no cosmological time (it does not fit in). However, it unfolds itself internally in an indefinite manner. This also ties to the temporality in the famous eternal recurrence. For if we only consider cosmological time, the eternal recurrence does not make any sense, or at least it makes life at once meaningless. However, if we consider time primarily in terms of the ecstatic temporality disclosed in authentic experience, then the awareness of the eternal recurrence magnifies the meaning of the present and especially of one's choices. What recurs is actually the emergence of events.
The last point I want to comment on is about the role of solitude. Zarathustra seems to suggest that one can only be authentic when left alone. But we should pay equal attention to the fact that Zarathustra has to "go down" [Untergehen] again and again. Even in a world where authentic communities are impossible, authentic individuals still has to take the detour of inauthentic communities. Maybe this is the only way....more
These excerpts record how Nietzsche distanced himself from Wagner. Composed near the end of his career, it is also an expression of Nietzsche's most fundamental convictions. As Nietzsche claims in the Preface: when the passages are "read one after another, they will leave no doubt either about Richard Wagner or about myself: we are antipodes." (page 662 from The Portable Nietzsche)
As a first approximation, we can interpret Nietzsche's disagreement with Wagner with respect to Hegel's distinction (in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Art) between classical and romantic art. While Nietzsche champions the art that is imbued with vitality and that is an active constituent of the world of meaning, Wagner's art is "sick", reflective, and overwhelmed by uneven expression. In this sense, Nietzsche's Wagner-critique can be situated within his reaction against the Romantic movement in general.
According to Nietzsche, the Romantic movement grows out of the soil of decadence and sickness. This is manifest, not through sufferings, but through the lack of it, through the urge to make life easier, to mild and mediocre. For Nietzsche, this is the taste of the unartistic mass, and its major problem is boredom. Because the mass is bored in enjoyment, it now craves for exaggeration, overabundance and excessiveness. Romanticism (and especially Wagner's music) meets this demand by appealing unregulatedly to the senses and by subjecting the music and the drama to the "pose". The result is that the aesthetic activity of the audience is disturbed, so that they can only "swim and float" in chaotic feelings.
To be sure, Nietzsche admits that Romanticism is a great movement. But it is a "swan song", that which emerges when a culture is at its decline. Though we can still admire Wagner, we have to be aware that his music is a witness, not a role model.
It is not quite clear why Nietzsche has to base his distaste for Wagner on these reasons. After all, it could be due to Wagner's anti-Semitism, his conversion to Christianity, or the fact that he appeals to the mass. The difference in style - the criterion Nietzsche seems to set in order to distinguish himself from Wagner - does not tell much: levity is sometimes cheerfulness, self-assurance and the ability to dance, sometimes mediocrity, hedonism and the inability to carry burden; ponderance is sometimes seriousness and more endurance, sometimes contrived sorrow and artificial pessimism. The decisive moment is rather the intensity of life: does the art come from a strong spirit or a weary one? But, when Nietzsche imposes this criterion on Wagner's works, he may be inventing some gap in it that is not understandable to Wagner himself. What if "Dionysian tragedy" and "Romantic pessimism" were in Wagner the same thing? (After all, these two categories were never his own.) And then who is Nietzsche to decide how much vitality is involved in the works?
Anyway, Nietzsche's message is clear. Art is art because of vitality, tout court. Strangely, this reverberates Hegel's controversial claim about the "end" of art: art can no longer enjoy supreme vitality in an age of reflection; it is no longer sacrosanct to a people, but instead has become superfluous "culture" or "expression".
What is no less interesting about the book is that it attests Nietzsche's transition of attitude toward Wagner, which implies a model of authenticity. By taking sides against himself, Nietzsche finds the way to himself, "that hidden and masterful something for which we long do not have a name, until finally it proves itself to be" (677). The authentic self, so to speak, remains nameless until disclosed, but whenever disclosed appears to have always already been lurking there.
Another point that worths attention is that, at the end, Nietzsche wants to balance the project of disclosure with the perseverance of hiddenness. "We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn"; "we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and 'know' everything." (682) When everything is brought present-at-hand (to borrow Heidegger's term), no secret remains and the truth must be plain and boring. The content of truth may remain, but the dynamicity is lost - but only the latter is what makes truth truth. Accordingly, Nietzsche advises us "to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance" (683). Knowing the secret, keeping it a secret, and presenting it as a secret: this is the most noble way of unconcealment. The appearance is divine; preserving its magic and wonder is precisely the destiny of art....more
This is a fantastic demonstration of Kierkegaard's conception of the aesthetic and the ethic stages. Each has a corresponding avatar, both of which arThis is a fantastic demonstration of Kierkegaard's conception of the aesthetic and the ethic stages. Each has a corresponding avatar, both of which are interesting in unique ways.
The aesthetic man exhibits an obsession with immediacy. Worldly concerns are suspended in order to enable a pure experience of enjoyment. The seducer, i.e. the "author" of the Diary, is keen on the experience of love, which, unstable as it were, can only be found in the process of seduction. When the seduction reaches its goal, however, love is disenchanted, so that the only thing the seducer can do is to withdraw from it. This reminds me of the psychoanalytic model of desire, for which the object is impossible while the pleasure lies in the delusory pursuit.
For Kierkegaard, however, this is not the end of the story. For the aesthetic man only instantiates one mode of temporality, of "having time". This is what the ethic man calls "romantic love": that which concentrates itself so much within a particular moment that it cannot extend itself over time. The eternity it claims to seek to supposed to be found in nature, which makes that "eternity" essentially temporal. Hence though the aesthetic man promises eternity in love, that eternity is but an intention of extension; and because he is actually unable to extend his identity in time - his attention to immediacy makes him change all the time - the promise of eternity can never be fulfilled.
The ethic man, on the other hand, is by no means one of the kind that the aesthetic man despises, namely the people of mediocre morality. He attends to the eternal as well, yet neither in calculation like the mediocre man, nor in whimsical promises like the aesthetic man. He has the patience of realizing eternity in time. In other words, he does not dismiss temporal, successive devotion to love because of the superficial gap between the temporal and the eternal, for he understands that eternity is another kind of temporality, and, for that matter, can be present everywhere in temporal efforts.
As love is always in becoming, it is not a refutation of it if it fails to be represented atemporally. More important than a seemingly eternal expression is the inner enjoyment - and at the end of the day it is only this that is able to endure time. The aesthetic man always fails in his delusory pursuit of eternal love, because the "object", the ideal of love, is itself already dead for him. In trying in vain to "return" to some ideal love, the agent forgets that the ideal can also change, and is changing all the time. The solution is thus the ability to wait, to make room for the inherent creativity of time.
The continuity of life history, therefore, can only be realized by means of constant renewal: the renewed is the past in a sense, and is the future in another.
Corresponding to the ethic man's new notion of temporality is a new attitude towards duty. Unlike the aesthetic man, who dodges duty lest it threatens his freedom, the ethic man finds freedom in duty. For the latter, duty is a self-imposed intention to extend one's moral identity in time, a resolution. This is the genuine sense of the "shall" - an imperative not from the outside, but from within. By contrast, it is revealed that the aesthetic man, in his avoidance of duty, bears a deep inconfidence in his love, so that he does not dare to let his love confront anything that seems hostile, and in this inconfidence he is bound to lose it.
The "stages" of life are initially intended to denote successive periods or states that lead into the next. However, in this book we can also interpret them as dramatic stages, each with its own character, its own mode of experience, and its own temporality....more
This book is mostly known through its central claim that "truth is subjectivity". How it is so, however, is far from clear.
We shall begin by dismissinThis book is mostly known through its central claim that "truth is subjectivity". How it is so, however, is far from clear.
We shall begin by dismissing the common accusation on Kierkegaard of "subjectivism". He does not mean that anyone can create whatever he likes and then claim it to be the truth. For sure, Kierkegaard does say that truth involves, even necessarily, a degree of "objective uncertainty", namely that, objectively speaking, that which one believes to be the truth may well turn out to be mistaken. Yet this is not the point Kierkegaard is making here. What he is claiming, rather, is that truth lies not so much in the content of a proposition as can be observed objectively (the "what"), than in the way one approaches that proposition (the "how"): does he dare to risk being objectively uncertain, or even wrong, so as to cling to the proposition? Without this passion in risking, a truth would be indifferent, and would not make sense anyway, despite its being certainly true.
Put otherwise, for Kierkegaard truth lies in subjectivity, or more precisely in one's relation to what is true. The subjective cannot be conceived as a receptacle of beliefs and thus reduced to part of the objective; instead, subjectivity is virtually empty: it is but a pole to which the relations cling. The affinity to Heidegger's account of truth as a-lethia is evident here.
Moreover, Kierkegaard expresses an uncompromising distrust in language, especially conceptual or speculative language. Everyone must has his own truth, and is the only judge of his truth. Superficially, one in truth is indistinguishable from another outside. It is equally futile to attempt to "convey" the truth, unless the receiver, in a totally individual process, makes the truth his own.
This is especially relevant regarding religion. Behind Kierkegaard's ironic attack on the vanity and hypocrisy of modern Christians, there is a conviction that Christianity cannot be confined to a doctrine. For a doctrine is necessarily universal, and hence does not suffice for one's individual transition. The Christian faith lies rather in the leap in the face of absurdity, in the "offense" it makes to common sense. And this faith is more a movement than a state, more a repetitive effort than a possession that can be achieved once and for all.
Everything comes to a particular, historical faith-event, that God has come into time and into this world. However, as modern men we are too distracted and too disparate in life to accept this truth. We have already entered the age of the universal, and nothing can simply be reversed. Interestingly, instead of monastery life (a withdrawal from the Present Age), Kierkegaard recommends living humanly as we are, being aware of our limits, and face up to the guilt we thus call upon ourselves before God. This attitude is commendable because, at least, in it one no longer dodges what one really is - a finite existence, and hence sins much less than those who do.
There are a bunch of moments that are reminiscent of Hegel. For example, the interest in the paradox that "the eternal truth has come into being in time", and its relevance to personal responsibility, are properly Hegelian. The characterization of the impossible relationship between spiritual beings and of the consequence that "one of the parties has ceased to be spirit" is quite close to what Hegel says in his famous account of the master-slave relationship in Phenomenology of Spirit. However, Kierkegaard is not always candid on his debt to Hegel. Hegel is for him usually a straw-man on which he targets his attack on speculative systems. Kierkegaard is brilliant in emphasizing the subjective in the Hegelian legacy, but sometimes he goes so far that he forgets that the system is also dynamic and, embodied as a historical community, bears values that are at once irreducible to the Kierkegaardian individual....more
This short novel by Tolstoy is an unequaled depiction of the experience of death. It comprises elements of religion, existentialism, are criticism of This short novel by Tolstoy is an unequaled depiction of the experience of death. It comprises elements of religion, existentialism, are criticism of modernity, yet at the same time exceeds them all.
The whole story is set against a background of banality. Everyone, including Ivan Ilych himself, were living within a "constant flight" from true life. They tried to get along well with others, to be unreproachable, only in order to conceal from themselves the fact that all these are ultimately meaningless.
Just as there is nothing that life is for, neither is there anything that death is for. Death is meaningless - an this constitutes the most horrible moment of Ivan Ilych's reflections. His suffering is just suffering, without a goal, without an end.
The feeling that it is easier to accept the death of others than that of one's own reverberates Heidegger's claim that everyone must die his or her own death. The solitude of Ivan Ilych facing death might not be a common emotion, but by all means still a disclosive one.
The everyday world, together with its customary solutions to problems and its devices of distraction, now appears absurd and futile. Even medicine won't really help: the impending of death cannot be identified with the lesion of a couple of organs. Between the two lies an insurmountable gap: the detached understanding of physical states presupposes good health, and hence cannot contribute to the experience of death; they are usually ridiculous distractions. The "limit case" of fatal disease reveals the premise that underlies life right from the start. The contrast with "healthy" people surrounding Ivan Ilych, then, astonishingly demonstrates our "tricks" of evasion.
Reading this dense, even suffocating narration is like experiencing death's breath by oneself. Both fear and expectation dominates the time that gets unrolled with the ruthless, objective development of the disease. Here Tolstoy employs a calm, even indifferent, tonality that he is always good at, and it brings the absurdity to its peak.
Curiously enough, the book ends with Ivan Ilych's feeling that "death is passed - there will be no more death". Considering the fact that death is not really a temporal event in life, but rather an impossible limit of it, one may ask what kind of temporality belongs to someone who's "passed" death. Is this a temporality of eternity (as Tolstoy's religious background suggests)? If so, how exactly does one experience it? These are questions that a novel is not supposed to solve on its own....more
This is a spiritual text which can have interesting significations for philosophers as well. It deals with tow kinds of relation to things and personsThis is a spiritual text which can have interesting significations for philosophers as well. It deals with tow kinds of relation to things and persons other than oneself, showing that the nature of the relation has determining implications on what kind of entities are disclosed in such a relation.
The relations are signified by two "basic words": I-You and I-It. With these Martin Buber is able to address a critique of the modern tendency of objectification, under which people reduce their encounter with things or others to "experiences" available for disinterested reflection. Though the theme itself was not that new ( Kierkegaard, for example, had already dealt with it), Buber's critique proceeds in a quite figurative way, making his writing accessible and impressive to everyone.
Besides such a general assessment, I also have the intuition that, when Buber writes on religion in the second and third part, he has in mind a quite Hegelian model. God is the One and the Truth, but still it has to disclose itself to human beings, to enter a reciprocal relation with them, i.e. an I-You relation. This "determination" (using Hegel's term) of God may involve mistakes, distortions and strays, yet in a sense all these are part of the "way" by which God develops itself and eventually becomes reconciled in human community. The "I-You" relation to God has to manifest itself in the "I-You" relation among living people. The only difference I find is that Buber has a notion of the "merely spiritual", i.e. the situation in which an individual person becomes excessively confident of herself and believes she is not in need of her community as the genuine locus of her spirituality.
Considering this broader theological project, Buber's distinction between "I-It" and "I-You" relations serves as a stopper when he argues against prioritizing the identity of man and God as well as the corresponding reclusive tendency. According to Buber, such a tendency stems from a confrontation with the "It"-world. If the "It"-world is the whole story of the world, it seems that authentic human being has no other way out except to recoil from that world, to retreat into "lonesomeness" so to speak.
However, if the "It"-world is but a caricature of the world, being a recluse might not be the best choice. If we give up relations altogether just because a specific type of relation (I-It) fails, and if we thus turn to the abstract identity of man and God, we take the risk of becoming "merely spiritual", of missing the opportunity to develop the concept of God in a more concrete manner. For Buber, believing in God does not require us to withdraw from "this-world", but to dwell in it in a more authentic way, i.e. in an "I-You" relation to the world.
In this scenario, God exists at once beyond and inside the world: we find him nowhere else except in out world-experiences, yet we fail to find him if we stick to what we recognize within the world. Buber's effort here can be regarded as distancing from the Platonic or Gnostic tradition in favor of a more communal version which pays more attention to this-world.
When Buber accomplishes this project, he also develops some interesting ideas concerning the relation between authentic and inauthentic modes of life. Fallenness in inauthenticity is not an occasional fault, but a fate of human being, though this is not completely negative: in more corruption hides a return that is more fundamental. Authenticity thus consists in allowing more corruption and at the same time being able to overcome it nevertheless....more
This is not a typical philosophical work, but rather a loose collection of thoughtful notes that take on a philosophical stand.
Roughly speaking, CamusThis is not a typical philosophical work, but rather a loose collection of thoughtful notes that take on a philosophical stand.
Roughly speaking, Camus can be viewed as in line with Nietzsche as regards the morals. What Camus calls "the absurd reasoning" is not really a coherent way of reasoning, but a movement, an orientation that necessitates paradoxes, self-negations, or, as Camus himself calls, revolts. It is a refusal to yield, in the face of absurdity, to absolute sources of meaning such as God or universal reason.
For Camus, the source of absurdity of human life is a radical discrepancy between 1) man's strive for familiarity and unity ("nostalgia") and 2) the meaninglessness and unreasonableness of brute nature. Instead of construing this discrepancy as established upon its two terms, Camus bears an insight, essentially phenomenological, that the tension precedes both terms. What he suggests, then, is that we preserve and nurture this tension as much as we can.
Following Nietzsche, Camus considers the ability to endure the productive tension a sign of strength in thought, whereas the haste to "leap" to a "solution" to the tension only shows one's weakness and lack of theoretical integrity. Based on this, Camus criticizes 1) religious existentialism (Chestov, Kierkegaard) and 2) phenomenology (Husserl). While both are able to realize the limits of human reason, religious existentialism concludes, in a hurry, that reason is utterly futile, and that irrationality should be reified and even deified. Phenomenology, on the other hand, claims another absolute reason beyond human existence (a misreading of Husserl, interesting though). Religious existentialism "leaps" to irrationality reified as a God, while phenomenology finds consolation in universality that persists despite human fragility.
However, as both sides reach something absolute that resolves all, they let go the very tension, the ambiguity, that arouses the question of meaning in the first place. Instead of confronting the tension as a tension, they already dismiss it before they say anything about it. Because the tension is lacking in their reasoning, their solutions are prescribed from a detached and indifferent perspective, and hence bear little relevance to the real question.
By contrast, Camus' absurd reasoning is intended to work within this tension of absurdity, trying to enhance it so as to comprehend it from within. Then, in terms of modes of temporality, the present becomes exclusively important for Camus. The past and the future can be distractions from the intensification of the tension itself. Projection into the future (including, significantly, "hope"), for example, usually puts an end to one's doubt about the meaninglessness of the world, for projection itself provides a semblance of meaning. To suspend all such flights, one has to purposively attend to and remain within "the subtle instant that precedes the leap", the "dizzying crest" (p. 50). One thus lives in the present.
With a bunch of role models (the seducer, the actor, the conqueror, the creator), Camus demonstrates that the ability to preserve the tension is measured, to an extent, by the quantity (i.e. diversity) of life. A man who is able to undergo more kinds of passions is supposed to be stronger in character, for otherwise he would be ruined by the conflict of those passions (a Spinozean claim stood on its head). Death, however, is the ultimate insult to this quantity. Hence the question of suicide that is raised at the beginning of the book is answered. A genuine actor, for example, never opts for premature death. This sounds a bit ironical from Camus’ mouth though.
I shall now attempt at a substantial critique on Camus’ basic ideas in the book. First, it is not meaningless to note that he prescribes the preservation of the tension only for an inquiry into absurdity, and not as a maxim of usual life. Usual life, he concedes, does not care about meaning. But then it seems that precisely the attitude Camus suggests in the detached one. In order not to detach himself from the tension of absurdity, he detaches himself from everyday life, which usually does not appear absurd. On the other hand, both religious existentialism and phenomenology find a way of reconciliation with life: the former encourages an immersion, though at a different level, within the smoothly-ongoing life featured by perseverance of the past (tradition) and projection into the future (hope); the latter recognizes the variety of life-experience and accordingly assumes a “transcendental” reason that saves the world from falling into irrationality. Camus’ absurd reasoning, by contrast, makes the ambiguity into something absolute by means of sticking to it.
One way out for Camus is to say that, in spite of all his entire obsession with the “the subtle instant”, at the end of the day a “leap” is just inevitable. Accordingly, the absurd reasoning signifies by all means a transitional process in which the absurd man tries to remain but fails eventually. This is evident especially till the end of the book. A rewarding way to read Camus’ claim at the very end that “one must imagine Sisyphus to be happy” is to attend to the word “imagine” – even for Camus, the imaginary has to come into play so as to distract us from the fearsome Real (borrowing Lacanian terms).
We can also ask: why does one have to “stick to” absurdity, and what does the “subtle instant that precedes the leap” point at? What does “to precede” mean? At first glance, Camus is talking about an interval within chronological time, and his insistence is to prolong this interval as much as possible. But that amounts to the hesitation before the leap, and it is neither sufficient nor necessary for the nurturing of the tension. Instead, one can well reflect on the tension without being eternally trapped in undecidedness.
So maybe the instant is not an actual one? Camus construes it as a “now”, but what he ends up with is not so much a temporal “now”, which restlessly become what it is not, than an extra-temporal “now”, or at least a “now” that does not belong within chronological time. Its distinctive feature is not to elapse, but rather to stay, to prolong itself as far as it can, and to pretend to be eternal.
Indeed this was Camus’ leitmotif. What he proposes is a desire to postpone the satisfaction of the leap, to preserve the tension as far as one could. This desire is extremely helpful in reminding us of the impending “now”, so that we do not take a hasty flight in the face of it – in the present age, we are too well equipped with second-hand solutions without even facing absurdity ourselves. Camus helps in this respect to save us from the absolute solution. But that with which he confronts the absolute cannot itself be made into the absolute, namely, some “objective” chronological interval that can be observed regardless of the context. Rather, we can only refer his “now” to Kierkegaard’s “Augenblick”, or more properly to what Heidegger calls ecstatic temporality, the Kairos. As ecstatic temporality, it does not ask one to actually stay in it or prolong it. Instead, it signifies a super-concentration of awareness which discloses that life has always been absurd. It changes the world by altering the mood [Stimmung] in which it is encountered. There is some sense in preserving its tension, but that only means not dismissing it too early, and does not entail that it should – or even could – be prolonged in chronological time. Camus himself did not reach this point, because he largely employs the chronological concept of time, and because he considers the world as irremediable “brute facts”, while actually it can be altered, even retroactively, by the temporality of Kairos....more
This book is more systematic and also more consistent than most of Nietzsche's other works. The currents of thought that ran tOn Twilight of the Idols
This book is more systematic and also more consistent than most of Nietzsche's other works. The currents of thought that ran through his writing, varying restlessly for a satisfying expression, came to a pause in this volume. Therefore, it serves as a "snapshot" of Nietzsche's mature thinking.
The first thing to note is about the subtitle. One should not under the "hammer", as popular interpretations tend to do, to be a symbol of smashing, dismantling, nullifying. In the Preface Nietzsche says it's a tuning hammer, used just to test the sounds of the idols; at the end he only calls upon the hammer's virtue of hardness, not that of destructiveness. The subtle distinction here is the key to the whole book. What Nietzsche promotes is affirmation (hardness) instead of negation (destructiveness). Though he admits that hardness would at times unavoidably involve the destruction of the less hard, he insists that the point be the priority of affirmation - one does not become hard because one destroys, but quite the opposite.
This suffices to distance Nietzsche from those "improvers of human", from the moralists that he criticizes. Superficially, both are unsatisfied with the current condition of human beings, and both ask them to get "beyond" themselves. However, Nietzsche does not mean to negate human in favor of some ideal, as moralists do. He only wants people to enhance their strength of life, so that they are no longer betrayed by the morals that are meant to make people sick.
Here Nietzsche develops his notions of the master moral and the slave moral, which he put forward in Toward a Genealogy of Morals. The former rejoices at one's own strength, while the latter relies upon denigrating others in the imaginary realm so as to satisfy oneself. The "idols" are problematic, precisely because they are products of the slave moral, intended to make the stronger feel sick - the only way the weaker can defeat them.
So the idols are illusions with purposes. Then what about reality? Though Nietzsche is careful not to pin it down like scientists do, in many places of the book he seems to suggest that the reality concerns the strength of life, and everything else is a mere result of it - an one-way causation. The one-wayness of the causation also shows why it is futile simply to imitate people who were living in an era one admires, for what they exhibited was merely the result of greater strength in life, and imitation of the result does not give rise to its cause, but to a pathetic counterfeit. From the perspective of life, Nietzsche is able to re-estimate all the values, asking whether they are result of strength or of weakness.
Nietzsche also challenges the claim of objectivity by arguing 1) that there is an irreducible sense of subjectivity attached to it, even as the positing pure consciousness, and 2) that objectivity is a disguise for someone who hates creation and strong emotions, who wants to spare no one but himself.
The metaphysics that is implied in the book is one of becoming. It does not matter so much what a doctrine says (the content) than how it says (the tension of life underlying the claim). Anything that gets conglomerated into absolute judgments is harmful and decadent, while good thinking knows to preserve the creative tension, to play joyfully with the productive ambiguity - though standing all these calls for lots of strength.
There are also comments on Nietzsche's contemporaries, on German education, and on ancient culture, the significance of which I feel difficult to assess.
On The Antichrist
This was intended to be the first part of a book called The Revaluation of All Values [Umwertung aller Werte]. This helps us understand why Nietzsche appears to be more polemic in the book.
The fact that a critique of Christianity is the prelude to the revaluation of all values implies that Christianity has been the foremost corruption of values. Following his own discovery of the master and the slave ("chandala") morals, Nietzsche tracks down the development of Christianity in terms of its "psychological types" and, accordingly, its degrees of vitality, or lack of vitality. Generally, Christianity negates life and nature, and all its conceptual devices, such as sin, redemption, God's will and immortality, have been developed in order to make life sick. Specifically, it was the Jews who introduced this negation because of their uncompromising will to survive at any price (they chose to become incapable of conflict by means of denying the real existence of this world). This culminated in Jesus, who was a self-contradictory type out of the Jews, utterly innocent, incapable even to negate. But his unavoidable death was soon contaminated by Paul, the grand character of revenge, so as to accommodate the lower class of his time. The cross became a symbol of sanctified suffering, and the corruption of life continues despite its counter-movements, Islam and Renaissance.
Nietzsche claims that the presupposition of Christian faith is the abolition of healthy reason. For example, the preference for natural causation is replaced by a moral order of reward and punishment due to the extent of one's obedience to God, or to the priests. He also reveals how Christianity is against this world on the one hand (in the sense that it appeals to the world "beyond" and to immortality), and confined within this world on the other (in the sense that redemption and judgment is conceived in chronological time).
Clearly, here the will to master trumps logical coherence. The significance of the whole work lies thus mostly in its employment of the "psychological" perspective, its attention to the underlying personality and living condition of Christianity. There is also an interesting comparison between Buddhism and Christianity as two types of nihilism: the former as a result of overly-refined sensitivity, the latter as a vulgar attack on anything that is natural and noble.
Yet all these insights do not compromise the feeling that this is one of Nietzsche's less great books. This is primarily due to its polemic tonality and, consequently, its lack of consistency - but also due to the compression, one may even say dogmatization, of what was vivid in Nietzsche's earlier works. Sometimes he comes to a conclusion that allows his own arguments to backfire. But such discrepancy is by no means occasional: for a reader careful enough, it is at least as productive as Nietzsche's better presentation of the same topic....more
This anthology covers almost all of Kierkegaard's key writings, both philosophical and religious, with the probable exception of The Concept of DThis anthology covers almost all of Kierkegaard's key writings, both philosophical and religious, with the probable exception of The Concept of Dread. Excerpts are made carefully so that, put together, they enable a rich picture of Kierkegaard's thought. The introductory passages by the editor are also usually helpful.
A significant aspect of Kierkegaard's writings is that he uses lots of pseudonyms. To understand this, the first step is to know about his purpose. According to Kierkegaard himself, the task is to revive genuine Christianity ("of the New Testament") in an age of Christendom, where faith has become routine and no longer involves any risk or struggle. However, Kierkegaard does not consider himself a saint or a prophet, someone who conveys the absolute truth, but rather a "poet", namely someone who ridicules the status quo and hence elicits religiosity by aesthetic and philosophical means.
Consequently, there are two modes of writing in Kierkegaard: a discursive disclosure of the insufficiency and self-contradiction of mundane pursuits, and a more positive account about what true religion means. Pseudonyms are only used for the former, and usually it is the former type that interests readers, especially those who read him as a philosopher. There his talent of irony is exhibited in a full-fledged manner.
However, one should not forget Kierkegaard's own insistence that there is no "transition" in his career from an aesthetic stage to a religious one, as his terminology may sometimes suggest. Rather, the religious concern is always implied in aesthetic writings, and, conversely, even when he deals directly with religious themes, the aesthetic apparatus is never absent. Their relation is like that between Hegel's determination and absolute idea - the former has the latter as its ultimate aim, while the latter every time has to be exhibited, albeit imperfectly, through the former. The aesthetic has independent yet limited value.
As I have already commented on the philosophical writings elsewhere (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show..., https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), this time I want to focus on the less-noted religious writings as presented in this anthology, and especially to talk about Kierkegaard's peculiar conception of modes of temporality other than clock/cosmological/chronological time.
Kierkegaard's conception of time is based on a widely-accepted distinction between the eternal and the temporal. God by default belongs to the former, man to the latter. However, Kierkegaard gives this distinction a new twist, for he does not conceive God and man as static within their respective orders, but as capable to transposing between the two.
Let us begin with a characterization of the temporal and the eternal. A thing in the temporal order is considered to be incapable of preserving its identity on its own. Rather, it can at most enjoy "continuance" (as opposed to "immutability"), which involves an urge to constantly become itself again and again. The reason for its "instability", quite contrary to how tradition metaphysics conceives it, is that "temporal existence is divisive in itself, and the present cannot be contemporaneous with the future, or the future with the past, or the past with the present." ( Works of Love, 295 (of this anthology - henceforth the same), my italics) A temporal thing essentially tends to become its other, and this constitutes the distance between the past, the present and the future. In this sense, there is history only because things are historical, there is time only because things are temporal - that is, prone to change and self-alienation.
By contrast, the eternal is absolutely contemporaneous, which is another way to express its atemporality. Not only is it contemporaneous with itself, so that its identity is not an identity against change, i.e. a contingent achievement, but something a priori; it also "is the only thing [which can be and become and continue contemporaneously with every age" (Ibid.). As an extreme pole, the eternal witnesses all temporal occurrences without the temporal differences that separates them. Kierkegaard's example is that a genuine Christian is contemporaneous with Christ's life: he lets Christ's example influence him immediately (as if Christ were present), rather than considering Christ a historical figure and assessing his greatness in terms of the influence he left behind. It is clear that the contemporaneousness implied in Kierkegaard's account of the eternal is far from a coincidence between two events on the chronological scale.
Now that we have understood what those two orders (the temporal and the eternal) refer to, we can try to answer the question as to how man (or God) transposes himself between the orders, or - objectively speaking - how one order "interrupts" the other.
The concept associated with the transposition of man into the eternal is "the moment" [det øjeblik]. Though the moment "is transient as all moments are" when considered in terms of chronological time, "it is decisive, and filled with the eternal" ( Philosophical Fragments, 161). The fullness of eternity is compressed into a moment infinitely brief, because the eternal does not belong within the temporal order; yet the moment is capable of completely transforming man's temporal existence; it extends this transformation not only into the future but also into the past, as exhibited in the experience of conversion ("I have sinned"). As Kierkegaard says in Either/Or, the moment "constantly drags itself back inwardly" and "constantly drags along in time" (89). Inwardly the moment is infinitely abundant, since it is the entrance of the eternal into the temporal. For this very reason, the moment cannot be represented temporally, i.e. abbreviated, without essential loss (Ibid.). The temporal seems undisturbed at all, not even capable of retaining the moment when it proceeds, i.e. becomes its other.
On the other hand, the eternal remains impotent unless it enters the temporal order. This indeed is paradoxical: Christianity is peculiar in that, in its doctrine of the Incarnation, the eternal (God) enters history. The difficulty involved in this doctrine never loses Kierkegaard's attention. On the title page of Philosophical Fragments he asks: "is an historical point of departure possible for an eternal consciousness" (153)? Interestingly, it was the same problem that troubled and motivated Hegel, Kierkegaard's imagined opponent.
Kierkegaard approaches the problem first by suggesting the need of the eternal to enter the temporal. When he argues against the charge that mistakes Christ's exceptionality for pride, Kierkegaard explains that exceptionality appears to be pride when leveled down to a lower order, i.e. the temporal. But the point is that, unlike a talented child who finds himself in a lower class, Christ cannot just switch to a higher class - for otherwise his effort of saving all would be in vain. In other words, the eternal has no entrance into the world, or into Being in the proper sense, except through the temporal order. ( The Point of View for My Work as an Author, 338)
Second, the eternal by itself is incapable of becoming. According to Kierkegaard, the temporal life is the only chance for man to become a Christian, for otherwise he would be "standing in eternity" as a pagan as soon as he dies, "where it is impossible to become a Christian" ( The Attack upon "Christendom", 436). From this we can infer that the only change for what is eternal to really become something is to go through the temporal and to borrow from the self-alienation (i.e. the characteristic of becoming its other) that is peculiar to the temporal order. Now perfection is an activity that necessitates becoming. Consequently, a perfect God has to enter history (and he wills it), to become vulnerable as a worldly man (Jesus), so as to become even more perfect.
A God that is eternally and absolutely self-identical, by contrast, is empty. Interestingly, this attaches to what Kierkegaard says of romantic love: fearing the "metamorphosis" and hence sticking to the initial spot characterizes a bad eternity, which is contrary to creation. (Either/Or, 95)
Put together, the mutual interruption of the eternal and the temporal constitutes two aspects of the same event: from the perspective of man, it is the ascent from the temporal to the eternal in "the moment"; from the perspective of God, it is the descent from the eternal to the temporal via the Incarnation. Kierkegaard's purpose is to preserve the dynamicity in this dialogue, as opposed to reducing it either to the plane of the eternal (Spinozism) or to the plane of the temporal (historism). Jesus' life on earth is not just a chronological event ( Training in Christianity, 375); nor is it something totally alien to history. Being ever present in time, while affording to give men the time needed for becoming ( Unchangeableness of God, 476) - this is the full meaning of Christ's "contemporaneousness".
There are still other remarks that, though sporadic and not necessary for the picture above, nevertheless enriches our understanding of various elements within that framework. For example, in a passage in his Journals that interprets freedom, Kierkegaard writes: "Freedom really only exists because the same instant it ([as] freedom of choice) exists it rushes with infinite speed to bind itself unconditionally by choosing resignation, in the choice of which it is true that there is no question of choice. [...] But alas, man is not so purely spirit. It seems to him that since the choice is left to him he can take time and first of all think the matter over seriously. What a miserable anti-climax. [...] He does not notice that he has thus suffered the loss of his freedom." (428, Kierkegaard's italics)
Though his focus here is rather on the compatibility of freedom and destiny and the vanity of "taking time" to think of one's choices (which nullifies the gist of freedom in its immediate resignation and instead avoids genuine choice in a gesture of hesitation and withholding), we can nevertheless inter that, were man making authentic choices all the time, there would be no chronological time at all, since all is immediate. Conversely, one precondition of our having chronological time is that we hesitate, we direct ourselves away from genuine choices, and we suspend ourselves in a comfortable impasse.
Now it is easier to understand why someone occupied with writing does not "notice" (this is only phenomenal) the elapse of time until he is no longer able to endure the increasing tension of spirit writing entails and decides to take a rest, reflect upon the possibilities ahead of him, or let himself be distracted by something else....more
As another collection of critical engagement with existentialism from various perspectives, this book goes a bit deeper than most others such as A ComAs another collection of critical engagement with existentialism from various perspectives, this book goes a bit deeper than most others such as A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (Blackwell). The main part of the book comprises articles on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. They are generally helpful in that both the common ground of these philosophers and the loci of their disagreement are marked out.
Specifically, I find the following chapters comparatively more helpful:
Steven Crowell's "Existentialism and its legacy" is a proper introduction, as it brilliantly sketches out the span of existentialism as a philosophical movement, makes necessary distinctions (so that the volume does not appear too broad to stay in focus). Crowell is also effective in fending existentialism from popular understandings, especially its images as solitary, anti-social frenzy.
Richard Schacht's and Lawrence Hatab's articles on Nietzsche are disclosive of Nietzsche's distance from the mainstream of existential philosophy (especially with regard to his "naturalism") as well as of the interconnection between the concepts Nietzsche employs, such as nihilism, the will to power, perspectivism, amor fati, and eternal recurrence. Hatab's article is especially well composed to fulfill the second point.
Karsten Harries' "The antimony of Being: Heidegger's critique of humanism" is an interesting study on the discrepancy, mainly in terms of philosophical orientation, between Heidegger and Sartre. Harries is sensitive enough to discover that, although Heidegger downplays humanism, he nevertheless has a clear and enduring conception - one may even say ideal - of humanity; it is just the acceptance of Nietzsche's claim "God is dead" that distances him from any version of humanism that is essentially metaphysical. Harries also brings to the fore the relevance of Heidegger's Kehre to the topic here. But, in following Heidegger's judgment, he might be simplifying Sartre by identifying him with enlightenment humanists.
In contrast, Crowell's "Sartre's existentialism and the nature of consciousness" does justice to the phenomenological element in Sartre, instead of simply dismissing him as neo-Cartesian. The anti-Cartesian nature of Sartre's thought is preeminently exemplified by what Crowell calls "non-positional self-awareness". The problem with Sartre lies rather in his Hegelian use of negation in order to accommodate an insight - the temporal nullity of the self - that the concept "negation" is incapable of on its own.
Taylor Carman's "Merleau-Ponty on body, flesh and visibility" amounts to a clear introduction to later Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the flesh. By emphasizing that one is "of the same flesh as the world one inhabits and perceives" (p. 280), Carman makes Merleau-Ponty's essential breakthrough evident enough.
Robert Bernasconi's "Racism is a system: how existentialism became dialectical in Fanon and Sartre" engages with a productive dialogue between the two philosophers. It is especially helpful in excavating the less-renowned notions of inorganic inertia, being-outside-themselves-in-the-other, and the serial flight of alterity in Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason. Bernasconi is also successful to show how racism can exist as a system even nobody really holds its ideas, and how Fanon's and Sartre's proposed solutions differ from each other.
Generally, the whole volume is arranged with a properly "existentialist" taste, instead of pointedly (and meanwhile pointlessly) attempting to dialogue with "analytic" philosophers. The only chapter that shows the tendency is Ratcliffe and Broome's "Existential phenomenology, psychiatric illness, and the death of possibilities", but that is a decent work at least. An existential philosopher would not end up with nausea in reading the book through....more
