A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition (29 page)

Kant once said that he had criticised the pretensions of reason in order to make room for faith. How seriously he meant this I do not know: the contrast between reason and faith belongs to medieval conceptions which are too far from Kant’s transcendental idealism to cast any obvious light on it. It is certainly true, however, that there is much affinity between Kierkegaard and those thinkers who had first presented the contrast as central to the Christian vision of the world. Indeed Kierkegaard’s philosophy can be seen as a peculiarly modern, as well as a peculiarly Protestant, exposition of the famous
‘credo quia absurdum
’ of Tertullian.

Kierkegaard’s philosophy begins and ends with the individual. This individual is, very crudely, the Cartesian subject; his predicament is described by Kierkegaard as one of ‘subjectivity’. In order to characterise it more completely, Kierkegaard thinks it is necessary to develop a philosophy of existence. But, as he argues, an existential system is impossible, since any system, in abstracting from the individuality of what it describes, must ignore that which is important, namely existence itself. Like almost every philosopher who has located his subject in the unsayable, Kierkegaard goes on to say a great deal about it. He seems to accept at one point (namely in the famous
Either/Or
(1843)) the Hegelian conception of the ‘moment of consciousness’. There he argues that the essence of the individual is temporal, but that this existence in time is conditioned by an ineradicable longing for the eternal. The ‘aesthetic’ way of life, which is that most evidently available to the romantic consciousness, unites the subject with what is temporary, and fixes his soul in the immediate. The aesthetic consciousness finds its paradigm of personal life in that which is most determined by the passage of time—the erotic. ‘The essential aesthetic principle’ is ‘that the moment is everything, and in so far again essentially nothing’. The ethical consciousness by contrast recognises the destiny of the individual outside time. From the ethical point of view, individual life is an aspiration towards eternity. It therefore foreswears allegiance to the temporal. For all that, it does not lose itself in the abstractions of logical thinking, even though these represent the world, in some sense,
sub specie aeternitatis.
To have recourse to abstraction is simply to abrogate existence. It is impossible to conceive existence without movement, and therefore impossible to convey its eternal reality. The ethical consciousness finds the subject suspended between time and eternity, rejecting the former, but unable to grasp the latter without losing his identity. What then can the subject do in order both to reach to eternity and at the same time to keep hold of- and indeed establish—his reality as an individual existence?

It is here that Kierkegaard invokes his idea of faith. Reason, which produces only abstractions, negates our individual essence. This essence is subjectivity, and subjectivity exists only in the ‘leap of faith’, or ‘leap into the unknown’, whereby the individual casts in his lot with eternity in the only manner that will also guarantee his present being.

Kierkegaard was a convinced Christian, despite his lifelong reaction against the mingled bleakness and hypocrisy of his native Protestant church. He therefore devoted much of his writing to the somewhat self-defeating task of showing that the Christian faith is precisely the one which best calls forth this existential leap. In his efforts to establish this he came up with the doctrine that ‘truth is subjectivity’. The traditional conceptions of truth— either as correspondence with reality or as coherence with the system of true ideas—he regarded as equally empty, not because false, but because tautologous. Truth, like everything else, ceased to be empty only when related to the subject. And ‘for a subjective reflection the truth becomes a matter of appropriation, of inwardness, of subjectivity, and thought must probe more and more deeply into the subject and his subjectivity’.

As a literary idea, and as an invitation to exalt the individual to a position of eminence that he had never achieved before, this is fairly comprehensible. But as a philosophical theory it has the obvious weakness that the distinction between appearance and reality disappears. For truth, the concept in terms of which that distinction has ultimately to be made, has been absorbed into the realm of appearance, resulting in the following obscure definition: truth is ‘an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness’, hence ‘the mode of apprehension of the truth is precisely the truth’. We could put this more simply by saying that there is, for Kierkegaard, no longer any distinction between subject and object. The leap into subjectivity and the leap of faith are ultimately one and the same, and while Kierkegaard supposes that the individual finds himself, at the end of this vertiginous process, emerging into the full reality of the ‘ethical life’, certain of his own eternity, and yet living in time with true ‘existential pathos’, it is difficult to see how he is supposed to achieve this. The best that he can do, in his state of subjectivity, is to believe that the world is larger than himself, perhaps with that ‘romantic irony’ which Hegel described so well in his
Lectures on Aesthetics.
But to believe is not to know, and irony is no substitute for conviction.

Kierkegaard’s brilliance as a writer and critic more than makes amends for his magnificent philosophical failure. A study of a philosopher with whom he has often been compared suggests that this ethic of ‘subjectivity’ will always require literary gifts of a high order. These Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) certainly possessed. Far from using his gifts in the defence of Christianity, however, Nietzsche was guided in part by a hostility to that religion which some have considered to reflect the insanity which in later life overcame him. In retrospect, this hostility is likely to seem obsessive, if not tedious. But fortunately it is not the most significant aspect of Nietzsche’s thought.

Nietzsche was a moralist, but one capable of considerable metaphysical ingenuity. He took as his starting-point the famous apophthegm, ‘God is dead’. This remark was first given philosophical significance by Max Stirner (1806-1856), in a striking book called
The Ego and His Own
(1845). Stirner belonged to that group of ‘Young Hegelians’ who reacted against the Hegelian thesis that the individual achieves freedom and self-realisation only in the institutional forms which ‘determine’ and therefore limit his activity (
see p. 205
). Stirner was the most extreme among them, rejecting all institutions, all values, all religion, and indeed all relations, except those which the individual ego could appropriate to itself. Stirner, a kind of atheistical Kierkegaard, found, like Kierkegaard, the capacity to generate many words out of the inexpressible state of isolation which he extolled. Nietzsche, by contrast, was more succinct and more subtle.

Nietzsche’s philosophy begins, like Kierkegaard’s and Stirner’s, in the individual; but unlike his predecessors, Nietzsche remained profoundly sceptical that anything significant remained to the individual when the veil of appearance had been torn away. He accepted the doctrine that all description, being conceptual, abstracts from the individuality of what it describes. Moreover, he regarded the description and classification of the individual as peculiarly pernicious, in that it attributed to each individual only that ‘common nature’ which it was his duty to ‘overcome’. Nietzsche tried to avoid the paradoxes involved in this stance by adopting a scepticism towards all forms of objective knowledge. He repeated Hume’s arguments concerning causality, and Kant’s rejection of the thing-in-itself. (The thing-in-itself is a fabrication of that vulgar common sense with which every true philosopher must be at war.) Nietzsche sought for a ‘life-affirming scepticism’ which would transcend all the doctrines that stemmed from the ‘herd instinct’, and so allow the individual to emerge as master, and not as slave, of the experience to which he is condemned.

Nietzsche affirmed, then, the ‘master’ morality against the ‘slave’ morality. This idea was directed both against the orthodox Christian and egalitarian outlook of his day, and against the conclusion of the ‘master and slave’ argument given by Hegel (see p. 170). In
Beyond Good and Evil
(1886) Nietzsche argued that there are no moral facts, only different ways of representing the world. Nevertheless one can represent the world in, ways that express and enhance one’s strength, just as one can represent it under the aspect of an inner weakness. Clearly it is appropriate for a person to engage in the first of these activities, rather than the second. Only then will he be in command of his experience and so fulfilled by it. This thought led Nietzsche to expound again the Aristotelian philosophy of virtue, or excellence, but in a peculiarly modern form. Like Aristotle, Nietzsche found the aim of life in ‘flourishing’; excellence resides in the qualities that contribute to that aim. Nietzsche’s style is of course very different from Aristotle’s, being poetic and exhortatory (as in the famous pastiche of Old Testament prophecy entitled
Thus Spake Zarathustra
(1892)). But there are arguments concealed within his rhetoric, and they are so Aristotelian as to demand restatement as such.

First, Nietzsche rejects the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as encapsulating a theological morality inappropriate to an age without religious belief. The word ‘good’ has a clear sense when contrasted with ‘bad’, where the good and the bad are the good and bad specimens of humanity. It lacks a clear sense, however, when contrasted with the term ‘evil’. The good specimen is the one whose power is maintained, and who therefore flourishes. The capacity to flourish resides not in the ‘good will’ of Kant (whom Nietzsche described as a ‘catastrophic spider’) nor in the universal aim of the utilitarians. (‘As for happiness, only the Englishman wants that.’) It is to be found in those dispositions of character which permit the exercise of will: dispositions like courage, pride and firmness. Such dispositions, which have their place, too, among the Aristotelian virtues, constitute self-mastery. They also permit the mastery of others, and prevent the great ‘badness’ of self-abasement. One does not arrive at these dispositions by killing the passions—on the contrary the passions enter into the virtuous character in a constitutive way. The Nietzschean man is able to ‘will his own desire as a law unto himself. (Aristotle had argued that virtue consists not in the absence of passions but in a right order among them.)

Like Aristotle, Nietzsche did not draw back from the consequences of his anti-theological stance. Since the aim of the good life is excellence, the moral philosopher must lay before us the ideal of human excellence. Moral development requires the refining away of what is common, herdlike, ‘all too human’. Hence this ideal lies, of its nature, outside the reach of the common man. Moreover the ideal may be (Aristotle), or even ought to be (Nietzsche), repulsive to those whose weakness of spirit deprives them of sympathy for anything which is not more feeble than themselves. Aristotle called this ideal creature the ‘great-souled man’
(megalopsuchos);
Nietzsche called it the ‘
Übermensch
’ (‘Superman’). In each case pride, self-confidence, disdain for the trivial and the ineffectual, together with a lofty cheerfulness of outlook and a desire always to dominate and never to be beholden were regarded as essential attributes of the self-fulfilled man. It is easy to scoff at this picture, but in each case strong arguments are presented for the view that there is no coherent view of human nature (other than a theological one) which does not have some such ideal of excellence as its corollary.

The essence of the ‘new man’ whom Nietzsche thus announced to the world was ‘joyful wisdom’: the ability to make choices with the whole self, and so not to be at variance with the motives of one’s action. The aim is success, not just for this or that desire but for the
will
which underlies them. (In Nietzsche we find the Schopenhauerian will re-emerging as something positive and individual, with a specific
aim
: that of personal dominion over the world. Nietzsche’s early admiration for and subsequent passionate attack on Richard Wagner express the same ambivalent relationship to Schopenhauer.) This success is essentially the success of the individual. There is no place in Nietzsche’s picture of the ideal man for pity: pity is nothing more than a morbid fascination with failure. It is the great weakener of the will, and forms the bond between slaves which perpetuates their bondage. Nietzsche’s principal complaint against Christianity was that it had elevated this morbid feeling into a single criterion of virtue; thus it had prepared the way for the ‘slave’ morality which, being founded in pity, must inevitably reject the available possibilities of human flourishing.

To some extent we can see all this as a restatement in modern language of the Aristotelian ideal of practical wisdom. When combined with Nietzsche’s theoretical scepticism, it led to the view which is sometimes called pragmatism, according to which the only test of truth is a ‘practical’ one. Since there are no facts, but only interpretations, the test of the truth of a belief must lie in its success. The true belief is the one that augments one’s power, the false belief the one that detracts from it. This made it easy for Nietzsche to recommend belief in a metaphysical theory which presents considerable obstacles to sober thought—the theory of eternal recurrence. For, however difficult it may be to justify the assertion that everything happens again and again eternally, this belief is certainly something of an encouragement to the ‘will to power’. If you believe in eternal recurrence, it becomes easier ‘so to live that you desire to live again’. But why, in that case, stop short of that most heartening of all beliefs, the belief in an omnipotent deity of whom it is said, ‘Ask and thou shall be given’? One cannot help feeling that Nietzsche’s passionate extension of his egoism into the realm of metaphysics leads to more confusion than even his rhetorical gifts were able to hide. Moreover, a philosopher who says, ‘There are no truths, only interpretations,’ risks the retort: ‘Is that true, or only an interpretation?’