Existentialism as a philosophical paradigm shares at least one distinctive feature with the system it was attempting to overcome, the Enlightenment. This feature is that of revolution. The Enlightenment was a revolt against the various dogmas of the Roman Church, a revolt started by Martin Luther on October 31, 1517. With his posting of the Ninety-Five Theses on the doors of the church at Wittenberg, Luther set in motion the autonomy of reason, and opened up the floodgates of individualism. No longer shackled by a rigid monopoly, reason was supposedly free to explore the nature of truth apart from any presuppositional framework, and the individual was now to seek his relation to God from the vantage point of his subjective conscience. So, whereas the Enlightenment sought freedom from the oppressive confines of religious dogma, the birth of existentialism came about to allow man to break free from the shackles of the universality of reason pressed upon the individual. Reason, for the existentialist, is a tool that points oneself to reflect upon oneself in experience. When reason oversteps it bounds in this regard, it becomes yet another oppressive system that dictates meaning. This is why, whilst birthing the scientific revolution and some of the greatest philosophers ever to live, the Enlightenment was nevertheless in due time seen by many as a new monopoly that needed to be revised and or destroyed.
Such is the stance of the two so-called fathers of existentialism, Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche; the former fathering the theistic branch of existential thought, the latter, atheistic. For both men, reason, as was briefly mentioned above, plays a part in the human condition, but does not sit on the proverbial throne. They each attempted to answer questions concerning the meaning of life outside of the rigidity imposed on subjective experience by universal reason. This rigidity made humankind a situated self-making process, or a confined self-referential becoming. They questioned how man could become or self-make in closed quarters. Thus, they each set out, albeit very uniquely, to free humankind from this oppressive state in order to allow humans the liberty to become by means of a free self-referential experiential existence. For Kierkegaard, this meant that man was to find meaning in his individual relation to the Absolute (God) by means of faith. For Nietzsche, this meant overcoming the rationalistic veneer of human society and tapping into the primal and instinctual desire for more, or the Will to Power.
Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard, a melancholy and devout man, wrote concerning the hypocrisy he saw stemming from the church of his homeland, The Church of Denmark. He saw and was angered that while almost everyone he encountered was a registered member of the Church, few if any lived out the spirit of its precepts, if those precepts were lived out at all. Most participated in the rituals of the church, but exhibited no outward signs of any inner spiritual reality. Kierkegaard blamed this hypocrisy on the rationalism generated by the Enlightenment in general, and by the dominating philosopher of his day, G.W.F. Hegel in particular. Kierkegaard believed that if religion had been properly handled, that is to say, if it had not consisted solely of what he considered empty ritualistic acts based on doctrine derived from human reason (which he believed did nothing for the condition of the soul), the Enlightenment wouldn’t have needed to come about. The fact remained and remains, however, that the Enlightenment did occur. But Kierkegaard did not see this mishandling of religion as a reason to falsify and disregard religious experience. In fact, he saw it as further proof that doctrine derived from human reason was the sole source of what went wrong with religion. It is against this concept that Kierkegaard revolted, and in doing so he saw himself as the defender of religion against the religious.
How did Kierkegaard revolt against this rationalism? He first rejected the Kantian and Hegelian view of morality and religion as being grounded in reason. In Kant, morality is grounded in reason by way of the Categorical Imperative, one formulation of which reads thusly: “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” In a gross over simplification of this concept, I would define this idea of the categorical imperative as an action from duty that is in direct opposition to one’s instinctual personal desires, done for the sake of the greater good of humankind universally. For an action to be deemed moral, it must coincide with the formulation as outlined above, for if an action is done from instinct or desire, it is amoral and thus non-rational. This then deems the principle a must for morality (hence it is an imperative), and all men are bound to it at all times and in all situations (hence, it commands categorically). So then it seems that we have the basis for morality down, but what, the reader may ask, does that have to do with religion? This is a most fair question. I will answer it by stating that this lends to the religious in Hegel, who thought that the sole purpose of man, or to put it in terms germane to the present topic, the sole meaning in man’s moral existence, is to reject the individualistic components of humanity in order to be absorbed into the ethical, which is universal. This could be seen as a religious quest of self-denial for the greater good of humanity, which can easily be seen as a lifelong pursuit. This concept is further expounded by Kierkegaard when he speaks thus, “The single individual, sensately and physically qualified in immediacy, is the individual who has his τέλοϛ in the universal, and it is his ethical task continually to express himself in this, to annul his singularity to become the universal.” For Kierkegaard however, accepting this would mean that a man could live his life ethically, but in the end have no sense of purpose or meaning. He would, in effect, remain unfulfilled. Kierkegaard did not unequivocally reject the ethical, as we shall soon see, but he did strive to find something more. That being the case, he had to ground religion not in reason, but in faith, the fundamental nature of which he rethought. For Kierkegaard, faith is not merely belief, as this would leave a solely rationalistic foundation for faith, which is exactly what he was attempting to refute. This also means that Kierkegaard did not see the moralism of his day as being grounded in religion, but in reason. How then does one have a religious experience? This is the question we shall now attempt to answer.
For our present purposes, we will look at Kierkegaard’s works Fear and Trembling, Repetition, and The Sickness Unto Death to better understand his anti-Hegelian worldview. We will look at Abraham as the quintessential knight of faith, who transcends the realm of the ethical in order to find his meaning in relation to God by willingly offering up his beloved son Isaac as a sacrifice. Firstly however, and in order to set up what shall be discussed, it must be stated that for Kierkegaard, there are three stages of development for Man: The Aesthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious. The Aesthetic, examined in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, is the developmental stage in which man learns his place in the social matrix. It is here that he develops an understanding of himself through sense experience. He learns his likes and dislikes, abilities, limitations, and so on. This then segues into the second developmental stage, which is that of the Ethical. It is here that reason has her place. In the legislation of morality, the aesthetic man may be forced to put aside those personal desires accumulated and understood in the first stage of his development in order to contribute to the greater good of society. The ethical trumps the aesthetic, so to speak. It is this concept that was very briefly explicated in the preceding paragraph, and it is also where Kierkegaard had a tremendously hard time stopping in his quest for meaning. This resignation is the first of two movements towards becoming a knight of faith in the Kierkegaardian worldview, which might better be explained as an existential act of infinite resignation on the part of the knight bearing that same title. However, this knight of infinite resignation, also called the tragic hero, is still residing in the domain of the ethical, which, as has been stated, is not the religious domain for Kierkegaard. He is still within the bounds of reason. To explain this, Kierkegaard gives the examples of Agamemnon, who sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia so that the Greeks could win the Trojan War; Jephthah, who sacrificed his daughter because he promised God a sacrifice if he should defeat the Ammonites; and Junius Brutus, who put his sons to death for plotting against the Roman state. In each case, these fathers kill their children for the good of their people as a whole, and can thus be understood and wept for as tragic heroes, but not as knights of faith akin to Abraham. On this, Kierkegaard writes:
The difference between the tragic hero and Abraham is very obvious. The tragic hero is still within the ethical. He allows an expression of the ethical to have its τέλοϛ in a higher expression of the ethical; he scales down the ethical relation between father and son or daughter and father to a feeling that has its dialectic in its relation to the idea of moral conduct. Here there is no question of a teleological suspension of the ethical self.
These tragic heroes knew the consequences of their actions in such a manner that they could well articulate them. They committed public acts for the public good within the bounds of the universal, and were able to stare what made them grieve directly in the eyes and come to terms with it. This is why they can be understood and wept for. But faith is ineffable. As Kierkegaard says, “Abraham remains silent—but he cannot speak. Therein lies the distress and anxiety.” What does this mean, except that a true religious experience is something that transcends the ethical, and is completely ineffable? How could Abraham possibly communicate to Sarah his wife that he was to take their only son, whom they had waited so patiently for, and sacrifice him on Mt. Moriah? There is no purpose or greater good that he could intelligibly offer to her as a justification for his action, other than “God told me to,” the likes of which she would respond to with an understandable incredulity. The whole idea seems the height of irrationality, which is the domain in which faith resides in the Hegelian worldview. In Hegelian terms, faith is completely irrational and is to be overcome by rational discourse. In these terms, Abraham, who, like everyone else in a Hegelian system would not have been able to escape the universal, would thus be deemed a murderer. But for Kierkegaard, “Faith is namely this paradox that the single individual is higher than the universal—yet, please note, in such a way that the movement repeats itself, so that after having been in the universal he as a single individual isolates himself as higher than the universal.” This is the ineffable and absurd. This is where Abraham, willing to sacrifice his beloved, made the double movement from aesthetic man to knight of infinite resignation, and from resignation to knight of faith. By virtue of the absurd, he transcended the universal ethical by heeding God’s call to sacrifice his son. He gained back that which was lost by a leap of faith, and gained not only perspective but also meaning. Kierkegaard explains this when he writes:
Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so that anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation do I become conscious of my eternal validity, and only then can I speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith. Now let us meet the knight of faith on the occasion previously mentioned. He does exactly the same as the other knight did: he infinitely renounces the love that is the substance of his life, he is reconciled in pain. But then the marvel happens; he makes one more movement even more wonderful than all the others, for he says: Nevertheless I have faith that I will get her—that is, by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are possible. The absurd does not belong to the differences that lie within the proper domain of understanding. It is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen. The moment the knight executed the act of resignation, he was convinced of the impossibility, humanly speaking; that was the conclusion of the understanding, and he had sufficient energy to think it.
This is radically different from the Hegelian dialectic of synthesis by way of mediation, and is all of Kierkegaard’s repetition; it is the means of a happy and fulfilling life marked by the regaining, by virtue of the absurd, that which was lost so as to enjoy it anew. It is through this courageous act of the will that the knight of faith avoids perishing in a state of meaninglessness. This is why both the double movement and the faith it entails are ineffable. There can be no rational mediation, not even the mediation of thought. This is solely experiential and existential, which is why the individual’s search for meaning in relation to God must be done alone and in a manner that no language, person, or set of circumstances can aid in the process. This is precisely the reason that Kierkegaard wrote under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio (John of Silence) a work titled Fear and Trembling. It is a frightening experience because of its relation to the unknown, and it can never be articulated coherently. This is a lonely endeavor for the knight of faith, and wrought of paradox. This experience transcends the ethical realm in which the knight of infinite resignation acts, which is why Kierkegaard writes, “The tragic hero does not know the dreadful responsibility of loneliness.” Expounding on this paradox, Kierkegaard writes, “Now we are face to face with the paradox. Either the single individual as the single individual can stand in an absolute relation to the absolute, and consequently the ethical is not the highest, or Abraham is lost: he is neither a tragic hero nor an esthetic hero.” This is a paradoxical scheme because the universal is subjugated to the individual, the understanding of which comes about by showing that the individual is lower than the universal.
So ends, at least for Kierkegaard and his disciples, the reign of Hegel’s ethical universal. As the self wills repetition, it shows that a synthesis is not merely a production of a thesis and antithesis through mediation in the universal and ethical world of ideas, but is instead a renewal of that which has already been attained and lost by virtue of the absurd. Faith, instead of being of the lower order of thought, is instead the only way by which an individual can have a sense of purpose and create meaning. It is the vehicle by which the self relates itself to itself, and by doing so shows clearly the one who empowers it, namely God. This vehicle, faith, allows man to avoid the eternal despair of what Kierkegaard calls “ruination,” or “The sickness unto death,” and to seek God, the author and giver of all meaning.
Nietzsche
In radical opposition to Kierkegaard’s Christian influenced existentialism, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche wrote that the meaning of life is not to be found in relation to any external source, but instead is to be found within oneself. In order to further explore this concept, we shall look at one of Nietzsche’s first works, The Birth of Tragedy, as well as one of his last, The Genealogy of Morals. While I am not aware of any concrete evidence of Nietzsche reading and or commenting on Kierkegaard’s work, I think it is safe to say that he would have thought his worldview to be delusional and wrought of weakness. On this I shall comment shortly, after a brief overview of the two works at hand.
Nietzsche’s father was a Lutheran minister who died when Nietzsche was just five years of age. This event is of no small significance, as I believe it to be the point where the seeds of his discontent with the Christian worldview were first sown. At any rate, Nietzsche would go on to become a professor of philology, which brought him into close proximity with the classic works of ancient Greece. As such, his brilliant young mind grasped the intricacies of Greek culture, which provided a firm foundation for his budding philosophical views. It is in this context that his first published work, The Birth of Tragedy takes shape. The Birth of Tragedy looks at questions concerning the meaning of life in the context of what Nietzsche calls the “Apollonian-Dionysiac duality.” Nietzsche is insinuating, nay, boldly declaring, that art really does imitate life. With this in mind, Nietzsche goes on to say that, “It is by those two art-sponsoring deities, Apollo and Dionysos, that we are made to recognize the tremendous split, as regards both origins and objectives, between the plastic, Apollonian arts and the non-visual art of music inspired by Dionysos.” To aid in the grasping of the concepts that he is putting forth, Nietzsche further comments that these opposing views are represented as a dream realm, which is the Apollonian, and a realm of intoxication, which is the Dionysiac, as Dionysos is the Greek god of wine and festivals. What he means by this is that what the Apollonian view represents is the general view of Greek culture, embodied by logic, reason, and order, while the Dionysian represents irrationality, instinct, and drive. The Apollonian for Nietzsche, is a thin veneer by which the underlying instinctual desires of man are suppressed in order to perpetuate a more cohesive and agreeable society, free from lewd and licentious behavior. The Dionysian view, in contradistinction, represents the innate animalistic instincts of man to pursue life unabashedly free from any external coercion. This marks Nietzsche’s divorce from the rationalistic principles defined by the modernity of the Enlightenment, which he, like Kierkegaard before him, found to be obstacles that needed to be overcome in the pursuit of meaning. As Nietzsche saw it in this early period of his philosophical speculation, this duality was essential in deriving meaning from existence. Concerning the ontological reality of this inherent duality in man Nietzsche writes:
As a moral deity Apollo demands self-control from his people and, in order to observe such self-control, a knowledge of self. And so we find that the esthetic necessity of beauty is accompanied by the imperatives, “Know Thyself,” and “Nothing too much.” Conversely, excess and hubris come to be regarded as the hostile spirits of the non-Apollonian sphere, hence as properties of the pre-Apollonian era—the age of Titans—and the extra-Apollonian world, that is to say the world of barbarians…The effects of the Dionysiac spirit struck the Apollonian Greeks as titanic and barbaric; yet they could not disguise from themselves the fact that they were essentially akin to those deposed Titans and heroes.
What Nietzsche is saying is that it is a mistake to completely rationalize human experience, because underneath the rational self lays an inherent irrationalism that modernity doesn’t account for. This sublimation of the will tends to a suppression of passion, which denies the very source of life and meaning. This yearning for freedom from an overly stringent rationalism is what drove Nietzsche to embrace the Romanticism of Richard Wagner. The Romantics brought emotion back onto the field of play, with emotion playing the part of the unbridled life force that manufactures meaning where it previously did not exist. For Nietzsche, the Greeks were not overly optimistic people, but dark and pessimistic people who invented the Apollonian spirit to hide the unsightly characteristics of irrationality. The Romantics represented for Nietzsche an embracing of this primal irrationality, which is where the self wills life and meaning. This early Nietzsche did not however, completely abandon the Apollonian spirit as he would in his later works. He felt that that it played an integral part in the process of self-awareness. He says that man’s view of himself is wrought of two reflections, one being his primal state of pain, suffering, and chaos, and the other being the redemptive illusion of the dream state. It is after this occurs that “The ‘I’ thus sounds out of the depth of being.” So while rejecting a wholly Apollonian rationality, the early Nietzsche nevertheless saw it as an integral part of the self-becoming.
This embracing of the aforementioned Apollonian/Dionysian dualism was non-existent in Nietzsche’s later works. In The Genealogy of Morals, a work in which the mutability of morality is suggested in the title, Nietzsche no longer looks to harmonize these antithetical viewpoints, but instead seeks to answer the question “Under what conditions did man construct the value judgments good and evil?” In asking this question, Nietzsche is boldly asserting that he no longer teeters on the balance of the Apollonian/Dionysian duality. He has fully embraced the Dionysian view, and is now intent on continuing his attack on both the Enlightenment and Christianity. Nietzsche believes that man must act in a manner consistent with his worldview. He says, “Our thoughts should grow out of our values with the same necessity as the fruit out of the tree.” So then, if God is dead, and the Apollonian view of rationalism and objective morality is false, then “We need a critique of all moral values; the intrinsic worth of these values must, first of all, be called in question.”
On this subject, Nietzsche argues in three essays, entitled Good and Evil, Good and Bad; Guilt, Bad Conscience, and Related Matters; and What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean? that morality was born out of the clever trickery of the defeated underclass, and as such is not an objective reality. Before going further, it is of some importance to note that Hegel, in his Master/Slave dialectic, showed the human condition to be that of aggression versus aggression in the battle for self-assertion. This battle has been coined “The Battle of Recognition,” and “The Battle to the Death.” The result of this battle is a dominant social class and a corresponding social underclass. Once this is established, the social underclass is forced to perform work that is essential to the overall society. In doing so, the worker is forced to work not only on the products of work, but also on the cultivation of themselves through the discipline of work. The master is not afforded this opportunity of self-cultivation, because he is too busy enjoying the fruit of the slave’s work. As such, the end result is that the slave, at least in some sense, inevitably becomes the master. All of this is important to note, because while it was the dominant philosophy of history in Nietzsche’s Germany at the time, he completely disagreed with it. He instead thought that the will to power was a driving force for total domination by means of more and more power. As an aside, I should also like to mention that by ascribing to this view he was in disagreement with others, such as Darwin, concerning the presence of an objective morality in the survival of species, which was predicated on an innate desire for the preservation of life made manifest through compassion and compromise. Regardless of this fact, it is important to reiterate that Nietzsche did not believe that Hegel’s assessment was correct. Instead, Nietzsche saw that the aristocracy dominated the underclass, and saw them as being “bad.” This terminology is used not to denote the evil or the wicked, but instead to denote concepts such as poverty and ignorance. The inability of the underclass to rise up and overthrow the aristocracy by means of war then gives way to intellectual trickery. This is represented for Nietzsche by the priestly caste of Christianity. Nietzsche himself makes this distinction clear when he writes:
The chivalrous and aristocratic valuations presuppose a strong physique, blooming, even exuberant health, together with all the conditions that guarantee its preservation: combat, adventure, the chase, the dance, war games, etc. The value system of the priestly aristocracy is founded on different presuppositions. So much the worse for them when it becomes a question of war! As we all know, priests are the most evil enemies to have—why should this be so? Because they are the most impotent. It is their impotence which makes their hate so violent and sinister, so cerebral and poisonous. The greatest haters in history—but also the most intelligent haters—have been priests.
This is the embodiment of a reactive mode of valuation. The priests now despise the power of the nobility and learn to call them not bad, but evil. The priests subdue the strong by inventing the concept of guilt under the pretense of God and his moral commandments, which are taught to the children of the nobility by the church, who answered the call to tutor them. With education firmly entrenched as the church’s responsibility, the idea of the immortal soul is taught with the purpose of scaring the nobility out of acting on their natural desires in this world for the promise of the next. The concept of sublimation previously discussed is then put into practice by way of the ascetic ideal, which forces the guilt ridden to act contrary to their nature by way of a learned behavior which entails self-denial. Nietzsche sees this as a devious practice that kills the life force and drive of man, which in turn results in the quest for meaning and life, which is derived from life itself, being lost. While Nietzsche hates this ideology of deception, it is remarkable to note that he says that because of it, “man has been able to develop into an interesting creature.” He believes the priest to be interesting because of his ability to make the ascetic ideal a concrete reality, a reality that is fundamental to who we are and what we must overcome to find meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. So, Nietzsche’s overall views of the role of the Apollonian view in man’s quest for meaning is radically overturned, and it can be plainly seen that he was calling for a revolt over and against any form of rationalism and or organized religion so that man could freely act out his primal desire to will from the will, by means of an insatiable yearning for life and power. Thus ends my brief explication of a few of the main points found in the thought of these two great and learned men.
In summation then, I hope to have made it apparent that while these two thinkers had diametrically opposed views concerning the existence of God and the τέλοϛ of man, they both advocated a revolution of sorts in order to allow for subjective man to be free from any external rigidity in his quest for meaning. As such, they both desired for man to be self-making, the process of which may be seen as the focal point of any existential philosophy.
