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# Speculative Failures to Self-Overcome The primary question which must plague the self is the question of becoming a self that is greater than one's self, yet that still remains fundamentally and authentically one's self (self-overcoming). Existential philosophers hitherto have attempted to answer the question in various ways. Nietzsche has a belief in a 'sovereign individual' - ‘the most life-enhancing way(s) in which someone with one’s own particular endowments of nature, nurture, and lifecircumstances … could live’. ‘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’. Under this view the telos is opaque and requires play and experimentation to self-overcome, but then must throw the convictions away. It is a philosophy of play. Climacus says in response ‘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'. He argues that over time, the defiant self learns that it is merely a simulacra of a genuine self. The defiant self has no volitional control over where to go with its experiments, it is merely a passive rider of the drives. Climacus says 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. It cannot create something greater. Nietzsche ends up adopting a kind of ascetic ideal of 'perseverence and stoicism' which flies in the face of his descriptions of playfulness of the self. Moreover the self is fundamentally dependent on others, Climacus says, both in how its values were derived, and both in actuality (Beethoven who Nietzsche idolises was dependent on a host of people). Meanwhile Kierkegaard grounds the self in ethico-religious choice. Whilst the defiant self falls into disunity, by a repetition of the ethical act the self becomes unified. To be ethical is not simply to make the right choices, it is to have a real understanding that good and evil are in fact different (order vs. chaos). Kierkegaard goes further- to be ethical is still to be tied to what is present in the world, to be a worldly self that is subject to corruption and cannot therefore overcome. But a religious self, in renouncing its own will, renouncing both what is aesthetic and ethical, overcomes its own base desires, and transcends towards values which come not from within itself but from something greater, based on honest reflection of one's higher values. But how do we derive these values if not from ourselves and from simply by herd mentality? Well, Kierkegaard simply does not really answer. Kierkegaard simply posits the God-Man as the ideal set of values to emulate for a unified self from a psychological standpoint, christianity simply 'has' those elements, and it states that man is in sin and must ask God for grace. Faith is required. So Kierkegaard reveals himself as a kind of nihilist. This is why he wrote in pseudonyms, because he simply had no good objective defence of faith. There is no objective defence for values. There are simply values. Both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard agree on this, but it's only Kierkegaard who tried to keep his hands clean. We have failed to self-overcome by any means other than a leap of faith (philosophical suicide) or by some kind of belief in an essential psychological constitution of the subject which at its core is claimed to value 'christian' morality. So in a way, we have kind of shown the poverty of both philosophers to create a real manual for self-overcoming. Both require some kind of ascetic ideal in the end to keep coherence of the self, and that coherence cannot be shown to be valuable for any reason other than through an essentialist reading, or through sophistry. Perhaps it is telling that neither in their hearts of hearts believed we could truly simply 'play'. But it is only Kierkegaard who can provide us with a manual through that lens- whereas Nietzsche's sovereign individual's experiments and 'perseverence' only delay the inevitable disrepair of the self. But both fail to overcome nihilism, and the eventual decay of the self. Eventually the self will just have to realise that everything it built itself on is a big pot of socially-constructed nothings. ## References 1. [[Either Kierkegaard - Or Nietzsche]] ## Tags #philosophy