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## Intro - Nietzsche supported pluralistic readings of his work - Both use fragmented authorship, but Kierkegaard's is untraditional even compared to Nietzsche ## The Hyper-Existential Interpretation - Nietzsche's ideal self, the 'sovereign individual', has the requirement of originality and the assertion of one's autonomy. - Nietzsche frequently formulates it in terms of creativity and says the individual must 'create' their own values - 'The individual is something quite new which creates new things … Ultimately, the individual derives the values of his acts from himself' - '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!' - Angier styles this as a 'hyper-existentialism'; it remains unclear how this radical autonomy can be realised in actuality - Paul Valadier asks ‘has there ever existed a subject without either roots or genealogy, without a milieu and without a social role?’ - Supposing that an individual can espouse values with real content, it still remains unclear what makes those values peculiar to themI - Two realistic options based on a reading of Nietzsche: either that we are talking about the traits of 'creative genius' or vital impulses as according to biology ## The Vitalist Interpretation - ‘at the bottom of us, “right down deep”, there is … something unteachable, a granite stratum of individual fate … an unchangeable “this is I"' - Nietzsche also denies free will, leading to a fatalistic interpretation - Nietzsche often claims that the self and body are co-existensive and that the drives are mainly bodily - ‘the “spirit” … is … merely an aspect of… metabolism’ - 'man’s “sinfulness” is not a fact, but merely the interpretation of a fact, namely of physiological depression’ - ‘the spell of definite grammatical functions is in the last resort the spell of _physiological_ value judgements and racial conditions’ - Leiter says this informs Nietzsche's "Doctrine of Types", that ‘Each person has a fixed psycho-physical constitution, which marks him or her as a particular “type” of person’ - Accordingly, once the ‘type-facts’ about an individual’s general physiological constitution have been established, that individual will know within what limits his self-development can take place. - However this reading undermines Nietzsche's love of creativity and individuality ## The Valadier/May Sovereign Individuality Interpretation - Valadier notes that Nietzsche says creativity is a need and not a want, it is borne out of a desire to survive and differentiate one's self from others - According to Valadier and May, creation is a form of self-fashioning out of the material one is given by the context of one's life - '‘_One thing is needful._ — To “give style” to one’s character — a great and rare art! It is practised by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye’' - Valadier and May thus manage to avoid the pitfalls of both hyper-existentialism and biologism. According to May, Nietzsche’s ideal consists in ‘becoming what one is’ - May takes it to involve actively finding and following ‘the most life-enhancing way(s) in which someone with one’s own particular endowments of nature, nurture, and lifecircumstances … could live’ - Nietzsche calls this Selbstaufhebung (self-overcoming) - Nietzsche says in praise of scepticism: for example, ‘The vigour of a mind, its freedom through … superior strength, is proved by scepticism … Freedom from convictions of any kind, the capacity for an unconstrained view, pertains to strength … Grand passion uses and uses up convictions, it does not submit to them — it knows itself sovereign’ - ‘the Nietzschean self is not a single fixed telos waiting to be actualised, but rather a set of potentialities that themselves evolve under the pressure of changing nurture and life-circumstances’ ; consequently, ‘prematurely attempting to define “what one is” is to arrest the … evolution of those potentialities and … to fail to discover what one could have been’ (May 1999, 192) ## Anti-Climacus' Criticism of Sovereign Individuality - Anti-Climacus repeatedly criticises something called 'the defiant self' (in despair wanting to be one's self) - Climacus’ initial description: ‘The self wants … to rule over himself, or create himself, make this self the self he wants to be, determine what he will have and what he will not have in his concrete self. His concrete self… has indeed necessity and limits, is this quite definite thing, with these aptitudes, predispositions, etc., in this concrete set of circumstances, etc. But … he wants … to undertake to refashion the whole thing in order to get out of it a self such as he wants … and it is in this way he wants to be himself - That this inheritance is both naturally and socially informed is further suggested by Anti-Climacus’ invocation of a given set of ‘aptitudes, predispositions’ and ‘concrete … circumstances’, which structure the defiant self. - Not only does Anti-Climacus use the verb ‘refashion’, his notion of creating the self qua ‘determining what one will have and … not have’ in that self surely prefigures Nietzsche’s idea that ‘One can dispose of one’s drives like a gardener’ (D 560), and thereby ‘fit them into an artistic plan’ (GS 290). - Anti-Climacus claims that the defiant self embarks upon the project of self- fashioning ‘in order to get out of it a self such as [it] wants’. This emphasis on selfsatisfaction as the telos of the defiant self also, I think, has distinctly Nietzschean overtones. For instance, in the famous section on ‘“giv[ing] style” to one’s character’ (GS 290), Nietzsche declares that ‘one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold’. And at Z 211, Zarathustra avers that ‘One must learn to love oneself with a sound and healthy love, so that one may endure it with oneself’. - Anti-Climacus says the defiant self is constantly relating itself to itself experimentally and with perseverence, but can only conjure forth an appearance of seriousness - From Nietzsche: ‘We ourselves wish to be our experiments and guinea-pigs’ - Nietzsche also has great respect for perseverence 'possessors of an unbreakable will' - Anti-Climacus claims that these experiments merely end up as simulacra of 'genuine virtues' - 'In the whole dialectic in which the defiant self acts there is nothing firm; … The negative form of the self exerts the loosening as much as the binding power, it can … start… all over again and, however far an idea is pursued in practice, the entire action is contained within a hypothesis. So, far from the self succeeding increasingly in being itself, it becomes increasingly obvious that it is a hypothetical self' - In other words, the defiant self’s claims to perseverance and fortitude — and by implication, the claims of Nietzsche’s ideal self to the same — are somehow belied by their actual mode of action - The experimental values the self creates it is truly ambivalent towards, a disinterested devotion, and this constitutes a disunity of self - Harry Frankfurt says unity of self is a 'primitive human need' - It is hard to see how this experimentation and ambivalence towards values could ever yield the confident creativity Nietzsche envisions - The perpetuity of fluid values deteriorates the individual's confidence in themselves - For it should be recalled that Nietzsche not only countenances, but also actually endorses ‘the perpetuation _in infinitum_ of the fluid condition of values, tests, choices’ - Nietzsche may argue that a sovereign individual tempers their drives- but this is precisely the ascetic ideal he rallies against - Moreover, if dispositions and drives are at best only semivoluntary and semiconscious, what if they are — instead of being settled and disciplined — constitutionally unstable and unruly? - It might be said that because the projects are in service of becoming what one is, that the will is capable of ensuring broad consistency of its objects - ‘We have no right to _isolated_ acts of any kind … Rather … our ideas, our values … are related … each with an affinity to each, … evidence of _one_ will’ - But Climacus writes ‘All the defiant self’s experimental virtues look very splendid; … such self-discipline, such imperturbability, such ataraxy, etc. … The self wants … to savour to the full the satisfaction of making itself into itself, of developing itself, of being itself; it wants to take the credit for this … masterly project, its own way of understanding itself. And yet what it understands itself to be is in the final instance a riddle’ - What AC means to say is that the telos remains opaque. May admits this by saying that each sovereign individual has only a broad personal telos which is fluid insofar as circumstances evolve - Although Nietzsche makes reference to ‘some fundamental certainty which a noble soul possesses in regard to itself', this is in tension to his claim that ‘To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion of _what_ one is’. - Without any deliberative grasp of one’s _telos_, it is hard to see how the ‘certainty’ mentioned above could be grounded - Only a weak individual would want to know the exact contours of Nietzschean sovereignty in any particular instance - But on the contrary without telos the self has no idea in what direction to proceed - Anti-Climacus continues: 'the defiant self is content with taking notice of itself, which is meant to bestow infinite interest and significance on its enterprises, and which is exactly what makes them experiments. For even if this self does not go so far … as to become an experimental god, no derived self, by taking notice of itself, can make itself more than it already is’ - Kierkegaard might be saying values can't be create 'de novo' (from novelty), but it is subtler still- the defiant self may rearrange and rearrange its contents, it still cannot give significance to the 'shape' achieved. - As Anti-Climacus puts matters — ‘no derived self, by taking notice of itself, can make itself more than it already is’ - Any rearrangement of the self must be laid out under the terms given, and finds themselves in a web of socially established values - Nietzsche allows that the sovereign individual is an inheritor of various historical and cultural traditions, on the basis of which alone he can be creative himself. - Nietzsche is aware that his exemplars are dependent on widely acknowledged norms in their creative, self-affirmatory projects - AC continues ‘Perhaps, while taking his bearings provisionally from the concrete self, an experimenting self … stumbles upon some difficulty or another, … a basic fault, whatever that may be. The negative self… may begin by altogether rejecting this, pretending that it is not there, having nothing to do with it. But it does not succeed, this far its experimental abilities do not reach …; … the … negative self feels itself nailed to this restriction in its powers to dispose over its own property. Accordingly, it is a passive self - Nietzsche suggests the drives are subject to volitional control, seems to see the difficulties of self-overcoming as externally composed - But this emphasis on voluntary control surely exists in deep tension with Nietzsche’s own stress on the importance of the drives, which are sub voluntary, and on their being thus beyond conscious control - Although Nietzsche is aware of the difficulties inherent in ‘self-overcoming’, in practice, he understands these difficulties as largely _externally_ imposed, rather than as the result of an inherently recalcitrant psycho-physiological constitution - Anti-Climacus’ stress on the inevitable volitional passivity of the defiant self looks not unwarranted: for once that self has forgotten any ‘restriction in its powers to dispose over its own property’, it will, it appears, mistakenly assume that it has unrestricted control also over the ‘property’ of others. - AC concludes 'Then comes this humiliation of having to receive unconditional help, in whatever form, of becoming like a nothing in the hands of the “helper” … having to give in to some other person, to give up being oneself as long as one is asking for help … there is much, even prolonged and agonising suffering in this way of which the defiant self does not complain, and which it therefore fundamentally prefers so as to retain the right to be itself… for what… gives him infinite superiority over other people, … is his right to be who he is' - The defiant self is unwilling to admit its dependence on others - Nietzsche says ‘Independence of soul! — … No sacrifice can be too great for that: one must be capable of sacrificing one’s dearest friend for it, even if he should also be the most glorious human being,… — if one loves freedom of great souls and he threatens that freedom’ - ‘the feelings of devotion, self-sacrifice for one’s neighbour, the entire morality of self-renunciation must be taken mercilessly to task … are they not perhaps — _seductions_? … They give _pleasure_ — to him who has them and to him who enjoys their fruits, also to the mere spectator’ - But in reality the sovereign individual is dependent on others and this humiliates it - it may be said as a defence that although it is improbable to be utterly self-sufficient it is not impossible. - 'Did not Beethoven declare that his friends were ‘merely … instruments on which to play when I feel inclined … I value them merely for what they do for me’' - Beethoven was dependent on a host of other people who made his greatness possible, and without whom he would (as Anti-Climacus puts it) have been ‘nothing’ - More on this later stay tuned ## From Aestheticism to Ethics - In place of Nietzsche's sovereign individual, Kierkegaard recommends 'self-choice' - Kierkegaard must show that choices are crucial, and also provide reasons for choosing one rather than another option ## The Choice Between Ethical and Aesthetic Examined - ‘Rather than designating the choice between good and evil, my Either/Or designates the choice by which one chooses good and evil or rules them out’ (E02 169). - In other words, the ethical/aesthetic opposition is not meant to be identical with the opposition between good and evil. Rather, an ethical life is one in which the distinction between good and evil has force, and an aesthetic life is one in which it lacks force. - The indifference to good and evil is an indifference to the ability to make genuine real choices - Hegel's dialectics negate difference, but Kierkegaard wants to uphold contradiction to ground ethical choice - But aestheticians also make choices don't they- simply amoral ones? - The reason Judge Vilhelm contends that aestheticism is no choice is that by rejecting absolute constraints on will, the aesthetic's will shows disunity over time, - Why? For one an ethical choice is repeated, but an aesthetic choice is arbitrary - The aesthete himself in E/O describes his character as a 'storm of moods' - the aesthetic condition is described as ‘manyness’, as entailing a ‘dispersed’ or ‘divided’ mind, which thus precludes being ‘at one with oneself' - Kierkegaard thinks it cannot impose coherence on its life - *Internal Note* Why do we care about unity of self? I don't really see why we should care other than this nebulous claim that it's giving our lives coherence and meaning. Who gives a shit... Schizophrenia is literally fine :) why not an Aristotlean golden mean anyway... or why not just have fun. Nihilism baby. Well I guess it's because of that stuff about the self needing some direction about what to do and when. - Another constraint on lack of unity is presentism. Given unwillingness to abide by a set of values, he is vulnerable to being swayed by present stimuli - ‘can you think of anything more appalling than … the disintegration of your essence into a multiplicity, so that you … lose the binding power of the personality?’ - Judge Vilhelm commends continuity through time: both because he takes integrated selfhood to be an overriding good per se, and because he holds continuity over time to be a necessary condition for leading a full and flourishing life. As he says at E02 195, ‘if there is to be meaning in it life must have continuity, and this your life does not have’ ## The Nietzschean Self Unmasked as an Aesthetic Self - Just like the aesthete, Nietzsche disregards the difference between good and evil - Nietzsche explicitly lauds 'the extraordinary privilege of responsibility' and 'tasks' as means for extending the will across time, but also claims to hate enduring habits. Nietzsche also celebrates the plurality of the soul - The Nietzschean self is thus gladly prone to fragmentation - *Internal Note* so I think at this point in the text I am partial to both views in that I think both are nice to have, thought both of them are to an extent life-denying for rejecting the other. We need ethical choice because repetition is a lovely aesthetic experience and provides unity of self which is necessary to create art, but we also need aesthetic experimentation so that we can discover ethical choice and for its own aesthetic value. Dionysian/Apollonian. Nonetheless I'm still not sure about the criticisms that a disunified self are bad because we 'need' some coherent unified self or something. I suppose coherence of the self is just an unavoidable truth and it needs to be nurtured in its own way through the grounding of choice - Nietzsche's doctrines of fluidity of values and the 'unbreakable will' are certainly in conflict ## The Aesthetic Self and the Value of Moral Constraints - Kierkegaard argues that one should will one thing regardless of whether it be good or evil - What if Nietzsche wants to cultivate hardness through the strain of plurality? - Whilst Judge Vilhelm argues that aestheticism leads to loneliness, this is not a good argument. - Nietzsche criticises stoicism but underneath he is attracted to those virtues - Nietzsche includes a ‘stoic severity and self-constraint’ among his list of ‘noble’ qualities - 'You say that the morality of pity is a higher morality than that of stoicism? Prove it!' - ‘let us remain hard, we last of the Stoics!’ - *Internal note* This is more ascetic idealism isn't it? :/ bad Nietzsche ## Kierkegaardian Religion Put to the Question/Kierkegaard Religion Upheld - Kierkegaard's notion of religion is to put something particular above ethical universals - The leap of faith seems like an arbitrary hyper-existentialism at first glance - Abraham does *not* will to kill Isaac, but resigns his own moral will, admitting he has no right to Isaac - The ethical sphere is preserved and transcended in its suspension - What is the telos of this suspension? - The ethical sphere is prone to corruption of will, preferential love - Radical voluntary self-sacrifice with the expectation of getting more back than what one gave up is the goal - The individual has absolute responsibility before God - Kierkegaard is advocating choosing sacrifice and giving up one's own will unconditionally for others, and to find joy in it - And as Anti-Climacus writes, ‘it is pitiable if a person … has never felt the loving urge to sacrifice everything for love … as love always is joyful, especially when it sacrifices everything’ ## Nietzsche's Critique and Inversion of the Religious Ideal - Nietzsche hates self-sacrifice; but simultaneously holds it in high regard with the provision that it serves genius and the self - For Nietzsche, neighbourly love is justified if it does not diminish one's strength, erecting a self-regarding ethic - Nietzsche celebrates *solitude* ‘the strong are as naturally inclined to _separate_ as the weak are to _congregate_’ - ‘we are bom, sworn, jealous friends of _solitude_… we free spirits!’ - Zarathustra is simultaneously desiring companionship and needs solitude- May admits that Nietzsche lacks a politics that supports his own life-enhancement - On the other hand Kierkegaard makes it clear that living ‘as an individual’ has the force not of being impervious to the needs of others, but rather of being ethically _integrated_ as a self. - He never condemns relations of social dependence _per se_, and is careful to propose an alternative religious form of social organisation — one he calls ‘the congregation’ ## Truth - Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche think Hegelian objectivism leads to self-frustration (objective knowledge cannot give you subjective passion) - Kierkegaard says it obscures the proper ethical nature of action by attempts to negate difference - Kierkegaard's statement that subjectivity is truth first appears hyper-existential - *Internal Note* it's important to note here that the Postscript is written by a pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, and is more or less an attempt to show the failures of objective knowledge by reductio ad absurdum. Climacus makes an attempt to describe the primacy of subjectivity in objective terms, but it's important to note in my eyes that Kierkegaard doesn't do it under his own name because he doesn't believe this can be done without absurdity and paradox... just some important context. Clare Carlisle's "Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Becoming" shows that Climacus ultimately fails to describe it rationally, it's really just a correlationist depiction - There's a suggestion of solipsism a la Nietzsche's perspectivism, but at least Nietzsche presents man as having a unique subjectivity and set of possibilities and presents the higher man as having epistemic authority over the subjective nature - But Climacus is is endorsing true radical ataraxia, full-on extreme cartesian doubt, and seems to be advocating subjective idealism/solipsism. This is the same criticism Deleuze gives of Kierkegaard - ‘_Objectively the emphasis is on **what** is said; subjectively the emphasis is on **how** it is said_’ - '_When the question about truth is asked subjectively, the individual ’s relation_ to an object of cognition _is reflected upon subjectively. If only the how of this relation is in truth, the individual is in truth, even if he in this way were to relate himself to untruth_' ## Subjectivity is Truth Upheld - Climacus speaks of being in truth whilst apprehending a falsehood - Climacus admits the existence of independent truth and falsehood - Gilbert Ryle argues that ethical knowledge cannot be construed in terms of objective knowledge because ethics requires personal engagement - 'Truthfulness' requires real engagement; ‘imagination, feeling, and dialectics in impassioned existence-inwardness are required. But first and last, passion, because … it is impossible to think about existence without becoming passionate’ - Passionate self-reflection leads to an understanding of truth and one's own higher values - The privateness of conscience is what gives values their origin- the emotional structure of the passions change over time - *Internal Note* naw I prefer Anthony Storm and Clare Carlisle's interpretation, Angier has fundamentally misunderstood the pseudonym for talking for Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard can't explain it himself objectively because he's a nihilist at heart. His goal is to make life harder for everyone, this is I think merely a portrait of why faith is important but it can't get you there (the objective makes you indifferent + it is nothing but approximation). There is nothing more to be stated after, Kierkegaard simply wishes to wash his hands of all objective knowledge (hence the pseudonyms). But at the very least Kierkegaard provides some signposts for what any object of faith must be (it has to allow the religious and ethical spheres) but as we will see Angier has a different interpretation - 'Several commentators have endorsed this critique of Climacus’ position. Yet all of them, I shall argue, mistake the fundamental force of the ‘paradox’ in Kierkegaard’s writings, a force that does not become fully apparent until Kierkegaard’s own Practice in Christianity. In PC it becomes clear that the salient aspect of this ‘paradox’ lies in an ethical or existential contradiction, rather than in a logical one. ' - There is something about Jesus’ life that embodies an ethical paradox, one that Kierkegaard considers so important that Climacus’ whole conception of ‘subjective truth’ is founded on it. - Christianity judges imitation to be integral to personal development, and moreover – if properly directed – to be universally and truly fulfilling - As God-Man, Jesus is a paradox- the object of imitation which can never truly be imitated due to the perfect nature of the object, which makes it the perfect object of struggle and self-overcoming - The specific virtues Kierkegaard espouses across all his texts as ones leading to an integrated coherent existence are the same ones found in christianity, and this is why the Nietzschean self falls into disunity ## Abraham's Communicative Failure / Narrative Theory Explored - There are many accounts of why Abraham was unable to communicate his faith (boring) - The narrative is the way in which our lives are understood - Abraham is deprived of a narrative that makes his actions intelligible - Kierkegaard often makes use of indirect communication - The sheer particularity of Abraham's existence renders him without tools to explain anything - Silence in the abstract is necessary for a true ethical narrative to form through conversation - Nietzsche also shows an interest in silence - 'Every word is a prejudice' - *Internal Note* this chapter is a yawn fest to be honest ## Equality and Power - Nietzsche despises equality and upholds will to power (the ability to bring form to will) - Kierkegaard states that mastery over possibility is impossible, by disavowing power and status we avoid the anxiety of luck and accident - Kierkegaard acknowledges that we are all equal in suffering, he criticises external equality as levelling (herd mentality/slave morality) - By acknowledging dependence and commonality of suffering we are able to maintain kinship ## References 1. Either Kierkegaard/Or Nietzsche by Tom Angier ## Tags #philosophy