Continental Philosophy, 1800-1900

Philosophy 273

Paul Fairfield, Queen’s University

© Paul Fairfield 2022

Contents

Part 1: Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

Part 2: Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. 

Part 3: Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences.

PART ONE

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)

Major works:

1843: Either/Or

1843: Fear and Trembling

1843: Repetition

1844: The Concept of Anxiety 1844: Philosophical Crumbs

1845: Stages on Life’s Way

1846: Concluding Unscientific Postscript

1847: Works of Love

1848: The Point of View for My Work as an Author

1849: The Sickness Unto Death 1850: Training in Christianity 1851: Judge for Yourself!

1851: For Self-Examination

We shall be focusing on Concluding Unscientific Postscript. I’m not going to ask you to read the book in its entirety—although that’s always a good idea—but the following chapters (pages in brackets):

Introduction (pages 11-18)

Part One: The Objective Problem of Christianity’s Truth (pages 19-50)

Part Two: The Subjective Problem. The Subject’s Relation to the Truth of Christianity, or What It Is to Become a Christian. Section Two: The Subjective Problem, or How Subjectivity Must Be for the Problem to Appear to it. Chapter 1: Becoming Subjective and Chapter 2: The Subjective Truth, Inwardness; Truth is Subjectivity. Skip the appendix (pages 107-210). And Chapter 3: Actual, Ethical Subjectivity; The Subjective Thinker (pages 252-302)

Biography

It always sheds light on a philosopher’s work to know something about the person and biography of the writer. I’m going to introduce each of the philosophers we’ll be studying in this course with some biographical material, which can be seen as background to their intellectual work, but it’s important background.

Who was Søren Kierkegaard? This man lived only 42 years and was an extremely prolific writer, although his writing career was cut short. It’s sometimes said of Kierkegaard that for someone who wrote so much about life, his own life was extremely uneventful, and indeed it was, at least outwardly. He never married or had children. He didn’t exactly have a career or a job; he was never a university professor. As an adult he lived on money that he inherited from his father. Outwardly, as an adult he lived the life of a writer—basically nothing more and nothing less. Inwardly, however, Kierkegaard lived a very rich albeit short life, and it’s no surprise that inwardness, or the inner life, would emerge as a major theme in his writings.

Kierkegaard was born in 1813 in Copenhagen, Denmark and he spent his whole life there. The only times he ever left the area of Copenhagen that we know of were a family trip to Jutland (to the south of Copenhagen) where he had some family roots, a daytrip to Sweden, and four short visits to Berlin. In Kierkegaard’s time, Copenhagen had a population of about 150,000 and the population of Denmark was about a million. The country was ruled by an absolute monarch. The economy was quite prosperous; Denmark was a trading nation and Copenhagen itself was a highly prosperous commercial center. This prosperity made possible a flourishing of cultural activities of various kinds. Denmark at this time produced an impressive array of artists, poets, philosophers, and scientists. Indeed, the period of the 1830s and 40s is known as the Golden Age of Danish literature, the principal writers including Hans Christian Anderson, N.F.S. Grundvig, and various others. Kierkegaard was certainly its most original and well-known philosopher.

Kierkegaard’s first foray into public speaking occurred during his student years at the University of Copenhagen. This was in 1835 when Kierkegaard was 22. The student union hosted a public debate between Kierkegaard and a more senior student named Johannes Ostermann, and the topic was government censorship. Kierkegaard was never very interested in political issues, but he probably agreed to this because it was a chance to test himself intellectually before an audience. Ostermann argued against censorship and Kierkegaard took the opposing view. By this time Kierkegaard had a reputation as a street and coffee-shop intellectual. A fellow student later described him as “Usually in the company of somebody and constantly on the street or in public places.” He also had a reputation for being very witty and also somewhat mocking. His talk went over well and this likely encouraged him to pursue his intellectual interests some more. He had a few mentors among Copenhagen’s cultural leaders, including especially Johan Heiberg, who dominated Denmark’s literary scene at the time, and also Bishop Mynster, a religious thinker who was probably Denmark’s most notable cultural figure at the time. His primary teacher and mentor at the University was Poul Martin Moller. The dominant philosophical influence in Denmark and Germany at the time was G. W. F. Hegel whose writings Kierkegaard knew well and had a deep influence on Kierkegaard’s thought, although most of Kierkegaard’s references to Hegel, especially in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, were thoroughly critical. From the beginning, the hallmark of Kierkegaard’s writing was a style of humorous polemic, a kind of exaggerated and sometimes overheated prose. To some extent this style of writing reflected his personality; he was known for humor, and he was also a bit of an aesthete. Other people who were important in Kierkegaard’s early life were his father Michael and his older (by eight years) brother Peter, who later became a bishop and was religiously quite conservative. Peter had also been very successful as a student at the University of Copenhagen. Universities were very small institutions in those days compared to today. The students were mainly training to become doctors, lawyers, clergy, teachers, or other state functionaries and because of the university’s small size it was possible for a student to gain a lasting reputation within it. Peter had a reputation as one of the university’s brightest graduates by the time Søren arrived. There was undoubtedly a competitive relationship between them, which later found expression in a deep disagreement between the two about Christianity, with Bishop Peter defending a more conservative form of Christianity—typical of a representative of the Danish Lutheran Church— while Søren would spend his entire writing career criticizing the church and defending a very unorthodox interpretation of Christianity. Peter was also physically large and strong while the younger Søren was slight and stooped. Søren also took his time getting through university and was not exactly a star, as Peter had been. During these years Søren and Peter still lived together with their father Michael in the family home in the center of the city. Their other siblings had all died, as had their mother. Kierkegaard’s parents had seven children together. Søren was the youngest. Five of the seven died either in childhood or by the age of 33. He was especially close to his last surviving sister Petrea, who died at the age of 33 in 1834, which was the same year their mother Anne died. Kierkegaard grew up rather well acquainted with death, and it’s no coincidence that death would become an important theme in some of his writings.

Michael was the dominant personality in the Kierkegaard family. He was said to be rather brooding and domineering. He was born of peasant stock, formally in bondage at birth. The whole family worked the land that was owned by the local priest, hence the name Kierkegaard, which means “churchyard,” primarily “graveyard.” At the age of 21 Michael was legally released from his serfdom by the priest and he entered the cloth trade. He would later become an importer of cloth, textiles, and food, and was said to be industrious and extremely hard working. Michael became a fairly wealthy and well respected citizen of Copenhagen. His first wife died after two years of marriage. His second wife Anne was a distant cousin and also his maid. Not long after the death of his first wife, Anne became pregnant. They were not married at the time, and it is very unlikely that they were in love, something that Michael felt terribly guilty about probably for the rest of his life. They did later marry and have a large family together. Through these years Michael was always a bit of a tyrant as a husband and father, insisting Anne sign a pre-marriage contract in which she was his virtual employee (she was given a salary) and was denied the usual rights of inheritance. Their marriage lasted 38 years, however.

By Søren’s early twenties he was living with his domineering father and highly successful brother—the others had all died—and the atmosphere in the family home was somber and stifling. Kierkegaard spent most of his time on the street and in cafés, spending money and running up bills which his father for some reason always paid. Kierkegaard later said that his father basically messed up his early life by insisting all his children be raised in Christianity from birth. We’ll see what he has to say about this in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (CUP). Both the Kierkegaard brothers were melancholy and given to bouts of depression, which was not made any better by the stifling atmosphere of the family home. Søren’s personality as a young man was said to be “a combination of cheeky brat and loner” (Hannay, 42). He was also probably more than a little spoiled. His father indulged him, where he clearly expected far more of Peter. Søren made very slow progress in his studies at the university, in a variety of subjects but chiefly theology, philosophy, and aesthetics. He was not much interested in what he was studying, but he was an avid reader. Immediately after graduating he enlisted for military service, only to be declared unfit for service.

At this time Kierkegaard was becoming consumed by the question of what he was going to do with his life. A biographer writes, “The most famous passage [from Kierkegaard’s letters] from that summer [1835] is the one in which Kierkegaard says that what he needs is ‘to be clear about what I am to do, not what I must know, except in the way knowledge must precede every action.’ ‘It is a question of understanding my destiny, of seeing what the Deity really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth that is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die’” (Hannay, 54). Religion had come to have a decisive importance to him by this time, and he came to view it as a personal matter, a way of life more than a set of doctrines. He was becoming very unsatisfied with the kind of Christianity he saw around him and had grown up with. There was something inauthentic, it seemed to him, about official “Christendom,” and it became his life’s task to try to understand what was wrong with conventional Christianity and what should take its place.

When his father died, he became financially independent. He inherited his father’s house and enough money that he would be able to embark on a writing career without having to earn a living at it. When Kierkegaard was 27 he became engaged to a woman of 18 named Regine Olsen. They never did marry, but this engagement would be one of the few events in his life that was outwardly notable—maybe the only one—and it had a profound effect on him. It was his choice to break off their engagement after 13 months; she later married someone else. Why he ended it had to do with his Christianity and his understanding of his mission as a writer. This was his life’s ambition: to be a writer, nothing else, and a writer of a particular kind. He came to see this as incompatible with marriage and family. A writer’s life—or the kind of writer he wanted to be—must be a solitary one, as was the spiritual quest that came to dominate his life. He also considered for many years the idea of becoming a cleric, although he never did opt for this. It would not have been easy, in his mind, to fit Regine into that kind of life, so he broke it off and then spent the rest of his life brooding over that decision and also writing about it in his journals: “As for the prospects of actual marriage, Kierkegaard saw things realistically: ‘In the course of half a year or less she would have gone to pieces. There is—and this is both the bad and the good in me—something spectral about me, something that makes it impossible for people to put up with me every day and have a real relationship with me. Yes, in the light-weight cloak in which I usually appear, it is another matter. But at home it will be evident that basically I live in a spirit world. I had been engaged to her for one year and yet she really did not know me’” (Hannay, 157).

My sense of him is that he essentially lived much of his life in his head and the world outside seemed to be a bit of a foreign place to him. He preferred for the rest of his life to be at home writing—endlessly—and he wrote at an amazingly fast pace. Writing for him was his whole life. In 1841 he completed his dissertation, which gave him a degree of “Magister,” about the equivalent of a Master’s degree today. The topic of the dissertation was Socratic irony, and he followed this up with his first two-volume book, Either/Or in 1843. This was a popular success in Denmark, and it quickly earned him quite a good reputation. He also published it under a pseudonym, but it was well known that he was the author. The intention of the pseudonym was not to hide his identity. I’ll talk about the pseudonyms later. He had several, and he sometimes wrote under his own name as well, depending on a few things. For Either/Or his pseudonym was Victor Eremita, which means triumphant recluse. The title more or less summarizes the idea of the book. He wrote to a friend that he wrote the book in a cloister, and he would do the same throughout his career. Either/Or earned him a fair degree of fame in Denmark but not beyond, and the same can be said of all his later writings, at least during his lifetime. He had especially hoped that his next book, Fear and Trembling, would bring him international fame, but it didn’t. In fact, it wasn’t until some decades after his death that his writings would become well known outside Denmark.

Fear and Trembling was about the Biblical story of Abraham and God’s command that he sacrifice his son as an act of religious devotion. Kierkegaard saw in this story an example of how religion needs to be thought of as beyond the realm of worldly morality and also philosophy. Religion especially needs to be protected from philosophy. He would often repeat the idea, from Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, that Christianity is “foolishness to the Greeks” (Corinthians 1:23), that is, it does not have what Greek philosophers would have conceived as a rational basis and it also doesn’t need one. After Either/Or, Kierkegaard became well known, but his image was that of a fashionable avant-garde figure, not a particularly religious one. Religion had been less emphasized in that book than in all his later ones. The basic idea of the book was that what he called “the existing individual,” which is each one of us in our singularity, faces a basic choice in how one is going to live: either an “aesthetic” life or an “ethical” one. He defends the ethical, in a Christian sense of the ethical. Later the accent on Christianity would become much stronger. He never exactly converted to Christianity. He was raised as one, but what would change is his understanding of what it means to be a Christian.

CUP was finished in 1846, when Kierkegaard was 33. For some time he had been convinced that he was going to die at 33. Two of his sisters had died at that age, and so did an ancient religious figure from Galilee. This is probably why he thought he was going to die at 33, although he managed to hang onto life for nine more years.

The most outwardly important event in his later life was a public dispute with a weekly magazine called The Corsair. “The Corsair affair,” as it came to be called, began with Kierkegaard writing a critique of the sort of material which that magazine published. It was a kind of gossip magazine, satirical and somewhat tabloid-ish. It was a politically liberal magazine—Kierkegaard was more conservative in his politics—but most often it published stories about local celebrities. Kierkegaard wrote to a periodical called The Fatherland, accusing The Corsair, in a mocking kind of way, of hurling abuse at public figures and pandering to a public appetite for gossip. The Corsair, he wrote, is a sign of the times—which aim to level everyone and everything down to the same mediocre level. This is typical of modern times, he thought, and it is in direct contrast with the ancient Greeks, whose basic instinct, he asserted, was to recognize excellence in its different forms and to separate it from the commonplace. Today our instinct is to ridicule what is excellent or great out of envy. (Nietzsche would later make much the same observation of the modern age.) Kierkegaard did have a point to make, although he went about making it in a very questionable way. Why write about a gossipy magazine at all, and if you are going to write about it, why not write about it in one of his many books instead—a more appropriate venue for serious ideas? The response of the magazine was very strong and rather hostile. First, it revealed Kierkegaard’s identity as the real author of his pseudonymous books. This was already pretty well known, so while this may not have been a big deal, Kierkegaard wasn’t pleased. More than this, the magazine published unflattering cartoons of Kierkegaard that created a public image of him that lasted for decades. They essentially mocked him in a moderately malicious sort of way, but the whole affair tarnished his reputation quite badly, at least in his mind, and made him even more of a social outsider. The paper’s reaction took him by surprise: “The January 2 issue [of The Corsair] carried drawings caricaturing Kierkegaard himself, his crabwise gait, his hunched shoulder, the thin legs and apparently uneven trouser legs, the cane or umbrella always in hand. Not only had The Corsair broken the unwritten code that protected pseudonymity even when an author’s real identity was known, its coverage in the months that followed made Kierkegaard a household name and fair game for the mockery of any ‘butcher’s boy’” (Hannay, 321). After this, Kierkegaard felt like he was constantly being insulted and taunted by kids in the street, although this was probably just his own paranoia. He was always inclined to be somewhat neurotic. But he continued writing for the rest of his life and doing pretty much nothing else. He was often writing personal journals and letters to friends and acquaintances, but his personal connections were few.

In his later years his criticisms of the Danish church became more frequent. Some of this was aimed directly at Bishop Mynster, whom Kierkegaard seems to have regarded as a kind of rival. He sent Mynster a copy of his book The Sickness Unto Death, which is about despair. He could have guessed the bishop wouldn’t be impressed with his attack on institutional Christianity, but he seems to have wanted to convert the bishop to his brand of Christianity—which was exceedingly unlikely to happen.

Throughout his adult life, Kierkegaard was writing non-stop. One of his biographers refers to him as a “graphomaniac.” In October 1855, Kierkegaard collapsed in the street and was taken to hospital. He had been feeling very weak and said that he knew he was dying, although of what is hard to say; it was probably tuberculosis of the spine marrow. His condition worsened over the next few weeks and he died in November. There was no autopsy.

The first German translations of his work appeared in the 1850s, but their impact was minimal. It was only in the 1930s and 40s that his writings started to get some real attention, because of his association with what was coming to be called “existentialism,” which was becoming popular at this time. His writings were translated into English and French at this time and better translations have appeared more recently. He was basically ignored by philosophers for almost a century, and today he is widely regarded as one of the most important continental philosophers of the nineteenth century.

Kierkegaard’s writing style

Kierkegaard developed a very unique and rather poetic literary style, and his style was very important to him. He would always think of himself as a kind of poet, but in what sense? What is a poet, in the sense of the word that he saw himself? He gives us an answer in Either/Or: ‘“What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music,’ like ‘the poor wretches in Phalaris’ bronze bull, who were slowly tortured over a slow fire; their screams could not reach the tyrant’s ears to terrify him; to him they sounded like sweet music’” (Ziolkowski, 16). Elsewhere he described a poet as an “imaginative thinker,” as one Kierkegaard scholar points out: “The task of the poet includes the philosophic task of casting private and shared experience into reflection, of penetrating it and grasping its internal coherence and meaning, the universally human. History and actuality are thereby transcended, and thus poetry, as well as science, art, and philosophy, deals only with possibility, ‘not in the sense of an idle hypothesis but possibility in the sense of ideal actuality.’ Therefore the poet is ‘one who makes,’ who construes, constructs, and composes hypotheses as do philosophers and scientists. What distinguishes the poet is a kind of imagination that shapes the possible in palpable form, in the form of ‘ideal actuality.’ The poet’s mode is not the discursive, demonstrative, didactic mode of the scientist and philosopher or the strict narrative mode of the historian. His mode is that of imaginative construction in the artistic illusion of actuality, or, to borrow a phrase from Climacus in Fragments, it is to construct imaginatively or to hypothesize in concreto rather than to use the scientific and philosophic mode of abstraction in his presentation. The poet in this view is an imaginative constructor who presents the possible in experiential (the two words have a common root) verisimilitude. For the existential philosopher, ‘the portrayal of the existential is chiefly either realization in life or poetic presentation’” (Ziolkowski, 21–2).

He also thought of himself as a philosopher, of course, as well as a religious thinker, but he came to the view that the best way to communicate what he had to say about human existence and especially about Christianity was in a carefully crafted aesthetic style. He was not an objective writer—one who writes such things as, If P then Q; P; therefore Q. He held a fairly low opinion of objective writing. If what we are speaking of is life, we can’t be objective, or if we are then we are only going to skim the surface of life. If we want to understand the depths of life—what it is that makes us human, how we should live, what the meaning of our existence is—we must examine these matters in a more subjective way. Kierkegaard thought of himself as a subjective thinker. What each of us is, is a subject—an “existing individual.” I am not an object, like a rock. If I were a rock then questioning my existence would proceed in an objective or empirical way.A rock exists, and I “exist,” but my way of existing is categorically different from the rock’s. My existence has a meaning, and this meaning calls for thinking. It’s not self-evident what this meaning is. I must question it. This is what the examined life is: a sustained, lifelong examination of who I am, how I am living, and what my life means. No one can really help me in this. There is a personal quality to this kind of question. There are therefore no experts to consult.

If an author is going to speak of this, they need to adopt a particular style of writing, and an objective style won’t do. It must be more aesthetic or poetic, so we find Kierkegaard using literary devices of various kinds to try to get his point across, e.g., pseudonyms, Socratic irony, humor, anecdotes, parables. Philosophers don’t usually write this way, in his own time or today. His writing is not exactly poetry, but it’s not objective either. It’s somewhere in the middle, and this is something he chose very deliberately. First-rate philosophers typically choose their writing style with some care. We’ll see this again when we get to Nietzsche, who, by the way, never read Kierkegaard. (A friend of Nietzsche’s wrote to him, toward the end of Nietzsche’s writing career, recommending that he read Kierkegaard, but Nietzsche never got around to it.)

Kierkegaard wrote exclusively in the Danish language, which only about two million Europeans spoke at the time. Kierkegaard could have had his works translated into German, or French, or English, but he didn’t. The primary languages of philosophy in the nineteenth century were these three, but Kierkegaard had a deep love of the Danish language. Now, why the humor? This was also very important to Kierkegaard, and not solely because this reflected his personality. Humor serves, he thought, a serious philosophical purpose, which is to help bring about a transformation in the reader by overcoming their purely intellectual resistance to becoming Christian and making them more receptive to a religious message. Religion, he believed, should not be humorless or deadly serious all the time. Although we often think of religion as a serious matter, a person who is authentically religious has a sense of humor, he believed. Humor and irony facilitate the transformation of the person from the ethical stage to the religious. He didn’t think of humor as just a way of keeping his readers entertained. The primary purpose of humor in a book of philosophy is to express an overall attitude to life. Humor itself is a stance toward life, a complete outlook on it, and it’s one that was Kierkegaard’s own—although he also had a tendency to be brooding and neurotic.

Why the pseudonyms? He had several (and he sometimes wrote under his own name): Victor Eremita, Johannes de Silentio, Constantin Constantius, and some others. Each pseudonym represents a particular point of view on things, and they are slightly different from each other. The author of CUP is Johannes Climacus, with Kierkegaard himself being “responsible for publication.” The name Johannes Climacus had first appeared a few years earlier as “Johannes Climacus eller De Omnibus Dubitandum est,” which means Johannes Climacus or Everything Is To Be Doubted. In his first appearance Johannes Climacus is a student whose ambition is to reach an eternal consciousness by means of philosophy. You can think of Climacus not as Kierkegaard himself but a kind of fictional philosopher whose point of view the reader might wish to adopt, and who stands to Kierkegaard himself at some distance. Climacus is somewhat more of a conventional philosopher than Kierkegaard himself was.

There are a few reasons for the pseudonyms. First, this was not uncommon in the nineteenth century; it was a bit of a convention. But there was no real secret that he was the author. Using a pseudonym allows a book to have a kind of existence independent of the writer. The writer can stand at a bit of distance from the book this way. There is also the issue of what he called “direct” and “indirect communication,” which I’ll come back to later. The basic idea is this: communication sometimes needs to be indirect. If we are writing objectively then direct communication is best, e.g., The cat is on the mat. This is a direct statement about a fact in the world. Now consider this statement: It is possible to gain eternal happiness. There is an important difference between this claim and an ordinary factual claim about something in the world. What exactly that difference is, is hard to state, but there is a difference and it’s only statements of the second kind that Kierkegaard was interested in. Christianity for him is not a theory or a hypothesis. It is more like a way of living, a possible way of experiencing life. Direct communication is not effective in getting through to a reader when we are talking about ideas like this, and it leaves us on a purely intellectual plane of thought. We need to go deeper than the intellect, into the very heart of who a person is. This is not easy for an author to access, but it is possible. Poetic language can do it, so can religious language, but philosophical language, of the conventional kind anyway, probably can’t. The latter speaks to the head, not to the whole person. It is subjective truth that he is after—the truth about the subject that I am—and this requires indirect communication. Kierkegaard wants to speak to the whole person of the reader (so will Nietzsche), and he also wants them to think for themselves rather than think they are receiving the certain knowledge of an expert. Kierkegaard didn’t think of himself as an authority, and he is not presenting a system in the sense of a total picture of what is true and what there is. He is a freethinker, which would later become a kind of hallmark of twentieth-century existentialism.

Should we care very much about the pseudonyms? There are at least two schools of thought about this. The first believes that it’s not important at all; Kierkegaard is the author, period. The pseudonyms are just a literary nicety that we should ignore, and the views expressed in these books are his own—as they definitely are. He also announces at the end of CUP (in “A First and Last Declaration”) that he is indeed the author of his previous pseudonymous books—although this was already common knowledge. This is a plausible view to take. The second view is that the pseudonyms do have some importance, essentially because again they put a bit of distance between the person of Kierkegaard and the text and give the text a kind of autonomy with respect to the writer. On this view, a book is not a direct expression of Kierkegaard’s views but a kind of vehicle that allows his readers to reach their own views. A book is not about the person of the author. It’s about the reader and their response to it; this is what matters. I’d suggest this: books in which Kierkegaard identified himself as the author are clearly “his” in the sense that the book’s ideas are straightforwardly his ideas. Books, including CUP, in which he uses a pseudonym are clearly his if the views the book expresses are consistent with views in books that identify Kierkegaard as the author. The rest are more questionable; here we can ask, is this really an expression of his view, or just a possible view that he wants the reader to entertain but that he himself is not committed to? All the books listed above are commonly regarded by Kierkegaard scholars as “his” books, but in some cases the views they express are not exactly his own. Some are views that he is experimenting with and that he wants readers to judge for themselves.

The critique of Hegel

Kierkegaard often singles out Hegel for criticism in this book. G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) had been the most important German philosopher of his time, and he was having a profound influence on European philosophy in Kierkegaard’s lifetime. Kierkegaard himself was deeply influenced by Hegel, but he came to the view that there was something fundamentally wrong with Hegel’s philosophy, and not only that philosophy but a great deal of modern, Enlightenment thought. He would have said much the same about the different forms of rationalism and empiricism. What was wrong with it, then? He found much of it objectionable not on logical grounds so much as on existential grounds. Kierkegaard is often regarded as the founder of existentialism, or as the first philosopher of existence, and so he was. He gave rise to a tradition of thought, in both philosophy and literature, that in time would include Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Albert Camus, and a great many others, most of whom were not particularly close to Kierkegaard’s most central ideas, including his Christianity.

Hegelianism—let’s say a good deal of the philosophy of the Enlightenment—is objectionable on existential grounds. What does this mean and what does he mean to put in its place? His objection goes like this: philosophy has become excessively formalized and also impersonal. Philosophy is now all about logical forms, formal categories, abstract principles and methods that don’t seem to have any connection to the person who is doing the thinking. Philosophy itself is thinking, and thinking is done not by any Cartesian thinking thing but by a particular human being who is more than a disembodied intellect or a machine. The formal “system” that a Hegel, or a Descartes, and so on, gave us would be fine if we were constituted as machines, but we are not. We are flesh and blood, unrepeatable individuals. The individual subject is unique, and so must their thinking be. Or at least, philosophy is personal, in much the way that art is, but too much of modern philosophy, including Hegel’s system, makes philosophy appear totally impersonal. The usual view in modern philosophy is that by proceeding in a wholly impersonal, objective way we are going to discover the truth about things. The subjective must be bracketed to make objective thinking possible. This likely remains the majority view in philosophy today: philosophy consists of formal arguments which can be valid or invalid, true or false, but they are objectively one or the other. Philosophy is a quest for knowledge—objective knowledge. It ideally forms a “system” which is capable of explaining the whole of reality. Kierkegaard’s reply: “there can be a logical system, but there can be no system for life itself” (92). In other words, there is a subjective side to philosophy, and it is always incomplete because the thinker him- or herself is a subject, an individual, and there is no getting away from this. When I think, it is precisely I myself—an existing individual—who is thinking, not some impersonal machine. As much as we try to deny or bury the self, our subjectivity, in our abstract reasoning, we can’t. Remember Descartes’ Meditations: who is the meditator? Does it have a name, a personal identity? Descartes would have answered: no, it is the rational being—any rational being. Kierkegaard’s reply: what is this “any”? I bring myself with me when I think, and I don’t have a choice about it. The thinking of a philosopher reflects who they are. More than this, you can judge a philosophy, or a philosopher, by their life. This will be one of the merits of Christianity, he believes: Christians live ethical lives, or some of them do, and it is going to become a large part of his project to describe the religious way of life. His question will be: how do you become a Christian in a society that professes (wrongly) to already be Christian?

What is existentialism?

This is a term that we will be seeing a lot in this course, so let’s say a bit about what it is. This is an old and rather difficult question. In courses like this, professors often like to begin with definitions, and this is usually a straightforward matter. Not so here. What makes it difficult? Several things. First, there is a caricature of existentialism that we need to be aware of. Like all caricatures, it is based on “a little knowledge” of the thing itself. Here is the cartoon version of existentialism: an existentialist is a kind of ill-tempered and brooding extremist, usually on the political left. They think of themselves as radical nonconformists, as thinking for oneself, asserting their personal freedom, standing up for what they believe in, resisting oppression, etc. Their views tend to be sloganistic, extreme, and bombastic. Now, there’s a grain of truth is all of this. It’s not completely wrong, but it tends to be so one-sided and without nuance that it ends up a complete distortion. Any philosophy can be misrepresented this way, but existentialism, for some reason (perhaps mainly its popularity), is especially susceptible to this. Second, “existentialism” is not a very well chosen term. Sartre coined the term, and it applies fairly well to his philosophy but not too well to the many other philosophies and literary works of most of the people usually thought of as existentialists. It came to be something of an umbrella term that applies very loosely to a good many writers of the latter nineteenth and early and middle part of the twentieth centuries, most of whom did not call themselves existentialists and many of whom were writing before the word was coined, and many of whom rejected the label. Third is the sheer diversity of the philosophers and philosophies in question. What, for instance, do Nietzsche and Dostoevsky have in common in terms of their ideas? Very little. In fact, on many basic issues they are diametrically opposed. For example, Dostoevsky was an ardent Christian and Nietzsche rejected Christianity with contempt. Many other existentialists were atheists too, probably a majority, although some others were Christians or religious believers of one kind or another. You could pick any two existentialists and ask what they have in common, and the answer will usually be very ambiguous or forced. By contrast, when we ask what is Marxism or positivism or anti-realism, there is a relatively straightforward answer which takes the form of a more or less unified body of doctrine, with a few commonly recognized major thinkers whose ideas others try to elaborate upon and refine. It’s not so with the existentialists. We might point to Kierkegaard or Nietzsche as a starting point of this movement, but even these two didn’t have much in common in terms of their actual philosophical positions, and some later existentialists had little use at all for these two.

If we try to identify a common set of doctrines or arguments that unites all existentialists, we won’t find one. This is a very diverse group of thinkers. Some propose to reject the term existentialism altogether and replace it with a term that reflects this diversity. “Philosophies of existence” is a good alternative because it reflects the plurality of this school of thought and because it draws attention to the question of existence—specifically human existence. If existentialists do not commonly agree on answers, they do tend to agree on questions. Philosophers of existence are all attempting to answer a similar or overlapping set of questions, beginning with the question of human existence: what does it mean to be a human being? Kierkegaard puts the basic question in exactly this way: “what it is to be a human being,” where this means “each individually” (102). What, in other words, is the human being’s characteristic mode of existence? Not just what is the human being but how is it, or how does it exist? What is its existence, or its “lived experience,” like?

The question, what is the human being, what is human nature, is as old as the Greeks. It’s a question that philosophers and theologians have asked since the beginning of the western tradition, and it is traditionally construed as a metaphysical question: what is our human essence, what kind of substance or being is the human being? If the question is formulated as a metaphysical one, the answer is also likely to take metaphysical form. Some historical examples are: man is the rational animal, the being that possesses the logos (Aristotle); the human being is a soul, an imperceptible substance that is created by God and maybe eternal; a thinking thing (Descartes); a system of matter in motion, a physical organism (Hobbes); an ego (Freud), etc. The existentialists, or most of them, reject all these answers because they reject the way in which the question is formulated. If we reject the question, we must reject the answers.

They want to reformulate the question roughly this way: from what is our essence (a substance, a deep core of being) to what does it mean to be a human being? There is a strong emphasis here on “meaning.” To be human is to be more than just a thing of a certain kind, be it biological or metaphysical. Human existence is more like a way or a mode of being, a way of experiencing ourselves and our world. We are something more than our thingly nature, but what is this something more? Whatever it is, it is elusive, ambiguous, very difficult to encapsulate in a philosophical theory. What is clear is that the human being does not exist in the same way that the table exists, or the dog or the tree. All of these things exist, but it means something very different to say that I exist. When I say the table exists, there is very little ambiguity: it is a material object that occupies space, it is empirically observable, it obeys certain laws, it has certain properties, a certain function, etc. We can certainly debate the particulars of this, but how we go about debating this is a straightforward matter. In scientific inquiry we know what methods to use, what the marks of a good scientific hypothesis are, etc. But when I say that I exist, ambiguity abounds. Think about this little proposition: I exist. It looks like a straightforward proposition. Descartes thought it to be about as close to a self-evident proposition as we can get, with the lone exception of “I think.” He went on to ask, what is my nature, what kind of thing am I, but again he formulated this as a metaphysical matter: what is my essence, what kind of substance am I? Existentialists will reply that we need to look deeper than Descartes did, and to be more skeptical—yes, more skeptical than Descartes. Nietzsche believed his thought on this issue to be both more profound and more skeptical than Descartes.

Many of the existentialists can be thought of as skeptics of a kind but in a sense very different from a Descartes or a Hume. Especially they are largely skeptical of metaphysics and of all overarching philosophical systems such as rationalism, empiricism, idealism, positivism, etc. Their basic proposition is this: if we are going to understand the nature of human existence, we will need to describe that existence in terms of our own first-hand experience of being human and the meaning of being human, or in terms of what phenomenology calls our “lived experience.” We’ll need to describe life, the ordinary business of living a human life, very carefully and in detail while making as few assumptions as possible. In other words, we must proceed “phenomenologically.”

What is phenomenology?

The philosophers of existence are commonly also phenomenologists, although not all phenomenologists are existentialists. In fact, a better term for existentialism is existential phenomenology. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) was the founder of phenomenology, which is loosely definable as the philosophical study of phenomena in general, where a phenomenon is anything that comes before our consciousness. It is not the study of “mere appearances” in contrast to objective reality, things in themselves, or something of the kind. When we’re thinking phenomenologically, we are not assuming from the outset that there is any separation between the world of appearances and objective reality, or between the way things seem and the way they are, nor are we assuming a radical separation of subject and object. We are trying to assume nothing whatsoever. “Phenomena” are everything that can be an object of thought, perception, or any mental act, essentially anything you can have an experience of, and it excludes anything that is beyond the reach of human consciousness. Husserl didn’t invent the term phenomenology, a word that goes back prior to Kant and Hegel, but he was the founder of the phenomenological movement in twentieth-century continental philosophy. It’s a movement that largely coincided with existentialism, but what is phenomenology?

A proper answer would require book-length treatment, but the short answer is that it is a method of philosophical investigation, essentially a method of closely describing or interpreting our lived experience of some phenomenon or other and without prior philosophical commitments. It’s a careful, detailed description of how we, or I, actually experience something or how something in my experience shows itself to me/us, more or less “subjectively” or (better) “intersubjectively.” The first-person perspective is central here. We’re not describing the world from the point of view of eternity or as an omniscient God would see it, but how we experience it first-hand. What is primary here is not the object itself, apart from a perceiver, but the way the object is perceived by us, how it shows up in our experience. There is a primacy of perception here. The point of view of the investigator is always that of the experiencer—not a God’s-eye point of view or the (non-) standpoint of a Cartesian meditator. The phenomenological method is neither the deductive method of formal logic nor the empirical method of the natural sciences, although it is closer to the latter. A basic premise of phenomenology is the primacy of lived experience.

Nietzsche had sought to undermine the idea that knowledge of any kind can be completely objective. Knowledge in every case, he had argued, is contingent on—that is, both made possible and limited by—the perspective of the knower. Phenomenology in the twentieth century tries to spell out further the implications of Nietzsche’s “perspectivism,” which we’ll come to when we get to Nietzsche. Husserl wanted to come up with a new conception of knowledge, and a new foundation for knowledge, one that is as certain as what Descartes was after. That foundation, for Husserl, is what he called “the things themselves” (the phenomena) as they are experienced, where the basic idea is this: rather than pronounce an epistemological theory about what knowledge should be—a model based on mathematics or science—let’s describe what it actually is, or what it is experienced as from the point of view of the knower. Phenomenology, then, is a philosophical method, but for Husserl it is at once a scientific and epistemological discipline. For most other existential phenomenologists, it would be regarded as a non-scientific, non-formal, and explicitly interpretive method.

Husserl’s slogan for phenomenology is “To the things themselves!” meaning that we ought to bracket, suspend, or otherwise put out of our minds everything that does not strictly belong to the phenomena themselves as they present themselves to us. Let’s try to bracket our preconceptions and biases of all kinds, including our philosophical theories, everyday beliefs and assumptions, and our habitual modes of thought. This is what he called the “phenomenological reduction.” We bracket even the question of the existence of the world. What we want to know is how the world is experienced by us, not whether the world “really” or objectively is the way it is experienced. Instead of trying to know the world as it supposedly is in itself, let’s describe the world as it is perceived. Nothing more is possible in any case, unless Nietzsche was mistaken and there really is some God’s-eye point of view on the world.

Some kind of bias is an inevitable dimension of all human thought. It’s hardly easy to bracket all of our biases and preconceptions. In fact, it’s impossible, so instead we must become aware of our own biases, in order to put them out of play insofar as this is possible and attend strictly to the things themselves as they present themselves rather than search for something that is not experienced and that allegedly stands behind the phenomena, such as the “thing in itself” (Kant), an imperceptible substratum (empiricism), or some imperceptible thing (platonic form) that allegedly underlies the phenomena. Just describe what you see, and without prior theoretical commitments. Simple experiences are the basic data with which the phenomenologist works. Husserl believed that if we attend carefully to the things themselves then we will get at the world that exists prior to our conceptualizing it, or what he termed the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) or the world of ordinary experience as it is actually experienced, and not as it supposedly is “in itself” or how it “really” is. The lifeworld is the world of our immediate, everyday experience. It is pretheoretical, pre-philosophical, and pre-scientific. A “phenomenological investigation” into something is an attempt to capture the lived experience of that thing through careful description. It describes how it is “for us” or how it appears to our consciousness, how it is given in our everyday, pre-theoretical experience. In short, Husserl’s idea is that we can study experience “rigorously and systematically on the basis of how it appeared to consciousness,” and Husserl himself gained a reputation for being extremely rigorous and detailed in his descriptions. He especially describes the life of the mind in painstaking detail, from the point of view of the experiencer oneself.

More on existentialism

Back to our earlier question: what united the various philosophers, novelists, and others whom we commonly designate as existentialists? What makes them existentialists? In part, it’s the questions they attempt to answer. In part, it’s their methodology: phenomenology. Also very important is the style or spirit in which they write. The philosophers of existence are not technicians, logicians, or scholars in a narrow sense but are thinkers in a much larger sense. They want to get to the root of human life, to examine our existence in the most profound way possible. It is profundity they are after, not formal certainty. Certainty, some of them will say, belongs to the surface of life, not the depths. The deeper we go in our investigations of human life, the more uncertain things become. These are murky waters, but they are the most important questions that philosophy deals with. Socrates called on us to live “the examined life,” and this is exactly what the existentialists are trying to do, and in the most fundamental way possible. There is a necessary incompleteness and ambiguity that we will have to cope with. Our knowledge is limited, and our point of view is limited.

What also characterizes this style of thinking is its object: the human being rather than the universe or the world of nature. Also, they are interested in the human being in the full range of its existence, not just the human being as a rational being, as an intellect, as a biological being, or as a psychological being, but as what Kierkegaard called an “existing individual” or as Heidegger would later term a “being-in-the-world,” meaning a whole person, a threedimensional being who is embedded in a network of social relations, a culture, and a language, a being with an intellect and a body, with emotions and moods. We are worldly beings; we always participate in a social world that largely makes us who we are. We also stand out from that world; none of us is simply stamped out by our culture or is a product of our environment and nothing more. We are individual persons with choices and our choices play a large, even decisive, role in making us the kind of beings that we are. We are free, and radically so. We experience ourselves as free agents who are capable of living by our own self-chosen values and convictions. For many existentialists, this is the very nature of the life that is well lived—a life that is authentic or self-chosen. We are social beings in a profound sense, but this does not deny our personal agency. Nietzsche, for instance, would say that the goal of a human life is to be able to say, “Thus I willed it”: my life and my character are the product of my own choices. For Nietzsche and all the existentialists, one of the most basic problems we have is that our lives for the most part are not self-chosen even while they ideally ought to be. For the most part, we live as others around us live, believe what they believe, care about the same things other people care about, with very small differences between us. We live for the most part what Heidegger would call an inauthentic existence, where this means one that’s organized around values we did not choose, have never thought about, and likely never will. We conform, not only in outward ways (in our appearance, in how we act) but in our inner lives as well, in our imaginations, in our selfunderstanding, in our beliefs, etc. For the existentialists, this is a disaster. It is even more than this: it is a violation of our own nature. Our nature is to be free choosers, to live by our choices, and this is exactly what most of us don’t do.

How the existentialists think about philosophy is nicely summarized by Miguel de Unamuno, an early twentieth-century Spanish existentialist: “Philosophy is a product of the humanity of each philosopher, and each philosopher is a man of flesh and bone who addresses himself to other men of flesh and bone like himself. And, let him do what he will, he philosophizes not with reason only, but with the will, with the feelings, with the flesh and with the bones, with the whole soul and with the whole body. It is the man that philosophizes.” The philosopher is not a technician or quasi-scientist. They do not just solve puzzles, or they shouldn’t—although for the most part they do. They are interpreters of the human condition. What they should be doing is trying to understand what human life is like and what, if anything, it means. The meaning of life is philosophy’s most essential question. It will need to be answered, however, by individuals for themselves. There is no single “Meaning of Life” that applies to all of us, something that can be discovered objectively. Meaning, if it exists at all, will have to be invented, and by each of us for ourselves. Meaning is an invention and a free decision.

Sartre would formulate the point this way: our existence precedes our essence, i.e., our existence precedes our character or who we are. Who I am, or who anyone is, is not a raw given, not a fact that I might discover empirically or through introspection. Who I am, that is, my way or mode of existing, is a choice, and it’s a choice that I alone can make for myself. In Sartre’s words, “We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards. If man, as the existentialist sees him, is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself.” Because of this, we tend to find existentialists writing on a similar set of themes: freedom, choice, responsibility, the self as an agent, also suffering, death, experiences where we run up against our limits. The mood of existentialist literature has a tendency to be dark but also lifeaffirming and exhilarating. There is a great deal of attention to themes of human suffering, anxiety, guilt, tragic conflict, and the absurd. Some existentialists are often thought of as pessimists for this reason, but most (nearly all) of them are not. In any case, the dark side of human life is a frequent theme in this literature. There is an appreciation of the tragic aspect of our lives, the fragility of life, the fact of our mortality, the contingency of everything we care about, and a determination to face up to all of this rather than deny or run from it.

There is often a sense of crisis here as well. Two world wars seemed to emphasize this. There is the sense that modern society is in a state of crisis, and Nietzsche was the first to diagnose it. He termed it an age of nihilism—the belief in nothing—in the sense that in the modern age we no longer know what to believe. “God is dead,” Nietzsche wrote, meaning the ideals and worldviews of old no longer stand up to serious questioning. The old gods have fled and left behind a cold and godless universe. Traditional values and ideals have become empty idols that need to be replaced, and there is a sense of tragedy and urgency here. The death of these old systems of belief not only leaves us intellectually confused, but it leaves a kind of void in our culture and in our souls, leaving us drifting through life, disoriented and lost. If God is dead, and the meaning of our lives is not what the great world religions tell us it is, we will have to fill that void for ourselves. How is this to be done? Different existential thinkers will answer this differently, but they will agree to this much: the individual will have to answer this question for him- or herself. There is no authority to defer to, no experts to consult, and no method to follow. Are existentialists therefore nihilists? No; nihilism is our starting point, the problem we need to solve or work through, but it isn’t where we want to end up. Existentialists have as many beliefs and values as any other philosophers; their point is that these convictions, whatever they are, need to be self-chosen.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript

To this point I have been focusing on some important background material to the text we’ll be focusing on. Now let’s get to it, starting with the book’s unusual title. It’s a “postscript,” Kierkegaard tells us, a “p.s.” A p.s. to what? The book is a lengthy postscript, a sequel of sorts, to one of his earlier books, the Philosophical Crumbs (1844). Since he believed his death was imminent, the book was meant to conclude his career as a writer, a kind of final summing up of his ideas. “Unscientific” means unsystematic, plain, not fancy. Hegel had argued that philosophy is a science (Wissenschaft), a rationally formalizable field of knowledge. Kierkegaard was often writing with Hegel in mind, and much of this book is a response to Hegel, including the critique of “the world-historical” (more on that later). Kierkegaard was not a rationalist but almost the opposite of this. Philosophy, on his view, is centrally about ethics. You can think of Kierkegaard as a moralist first; the primary question of (his) philosophy is how we are living. Along the way he will have something to say on a variety of philosophical topics, but first and foremost he is a moralist, and ethics is not a science. It is best conceived in a religious light, not a scientific or objective one. By the nineteenth century a widespread trend was to try to make ethics scientific, and philosophy in general. A good example is again Hegel but also the British utilitarians, rational egoists, positivists, and also Marx, all of whom wanted either to put religion to the side or to get rid of it entirely. Kierkegaard’s view is that there is no ethics without religion, and specifically Christianity. Hegel’s philosophy was presented as a very large “system,” a set of proven doctrines about ethics, politics, metaphysics, history, and some other things that all hang together logically, a system of ideas that accounts for the totality of what exists. A moral system, on Hegel’s view and most other modern moralists, is supposed to be strictly objective and applicable to all human beings because human beings are constituted in the same way, universally, and the differences between us are not morally important. Your individuality is not morally significant. It is of personal importance to you, but from a moral point of view it is not relevant. Kierkegaard’s reply: this is an absurd overestimation of what philosophy, or reason alone, can accomplish. Ethics needs to be unscientific, that is, it needs to be not a purely rational, impersonal system, but precisely the opposite; it needs to be personal. What ethics is about is the human being, not any impersonal rational system, and the human being is an individual. Ethics must take this fundamental fact into account. It’s about the individual person who is faced with decisions, and decisions that vitally concern us. Making an ethical decision is not like solving a math problem, but any purely rational or scientific approach to ethics makes it seem as if it is.

The moral philosopher, then, needs to be unscientific and in a sense unscholarly, which is why we see Kierkegaard departing from certain norms of philosophical prose, for example, the use of humor. Kierkegaard often writes as a humorist. He tells amusing anecdotes, and often phrases ideas in a deliberately comical way. This isn’t just because he liked to be amusing. He needs to step outside some of the conventions of academic discourse and inject philosophy and ethics with a sense of urgency and passion. We are not solving math problems here. We are—I am— trying to do what is right, and I am pursuing happiness in the sight of God. These things vitally concern me, or they concern me in a profound and very personal way. There is nothing impersonal about any of this, so the philosopher who is thinking and writing about this needs to do so on the appropriate level or register. If the topic is profoundly personal and vital, the manner of writing must reflect this.

By the nineteenth century the norms of philosophical prose were rather impersonal and humorless. The person of the thinker was supposed to disappear in their prose, and indeed there was to be no literary voice at all. Finding a literary voice is for literature, not serious thought, or such was the common view. What the reader of a philosophical work was supposed to encounter is the voice of pure reason. Hegel again is a good example; here is the voice of cold reason itself, without a semblance of humor. There is a lot of humor in Kierkegaard, and later in Nietzsche who also believed that philosophy needs to be written in a more personal, passionate, aesthetic, and free-spirited way. Both thinkers are trying to loosen up philosophy somewhat, to inject it with some life and passion. Philosophy as they both conceive of it is somewhere between math and art, and it’s probably a bit closer to art than math. What it is ultimately about, after all, is the human condition, and we are not going to understand this if philosophy becomes too formalistic and rationalistic. In philosophy we must take a chance, think with some boldness, and not be quite so afraid of committing an intellectual error. Life itself requires of us that we sometimes take risks, yet modern philosophers by and large are not risk-takers but are cautious to a fault, in Kierkegaard’s view. Often, they would rather believe nothing than take a chance on an idea that is probably true but unproven. Sometimes what a philosopher should do is merely venture a question, without answering it (or not definitively). Here’s an example: “The problem posed in that piece [Philosophical Fragments], without pretending to have solved it, since it wanted merely to pose it, went like this: can there be a historical point of departure for an eternal consciousness; how can such a thing be of more than historical interest; can one base an eternal consciousness on historical knowledge?” (16) Sometimes what we need to do in philosophy is pose a question without solving it. Kierkegaard is going to try to answer this question in CUP, but his answer is tentative, experimental, not dogmatic or self-certain. This is a kind of freespirited questioning—and then venturing an answer, but not proving one’s case in a definitive way.

For Kierkegaard, the ultimate questions of philosophy, and of human existence, are ethical and what they bear upon is the individual’s relationship to Christianity. As he writes, “So as not to cause confusion, however, it must be immediately borne in mind that the problem is not about the truth of Christianity but about the individual’s relation to Christianity, that is, not about the indifferent individual’s systematic eagerness to arrange the truths of Christianity in [sections], but about the infinitely interested individual’s concern regarding his own relation to such a teaching. Putting it as plainly as possible (to make use of myself experimentally), ‘I, Johannes Climacus, born in this city and now thirty years old, a quite ordinary human being just like anyone else, assume that for me, as much as for a serving maid and a professor, there awaits a highest good called an eternal happiness. I have heard that Christianity contracts to provide one with that good. And now I ask how do I enter into relation with this doctrine?” (16). Immediately there is something that stands in the way of answering this question, and it is philosophy, or the state of philosophy in Kierkegaard’s time. Let’s remember a few key facts about what was going on in philosophy at this time. Philosophy had taken a turn toward the secular during the Enlightenment, so insofar as religion was a topic of philosophical discussion at all, it was to be what Kant called “religion within the limits of reason alone.” For Kierkegaard, any such religion is no religion at all but a religion of the blackboard, and the same can be said for a purely rational, secular ethics like utilitarianism. The latter is a moral system that is suited to a robot, a rationally self-interested mechanism, not an “existing individual.”

Also important to mention here is the philosophy of history, which had become quite fashionable in the nineteenth century. Some of the most important names here are Hegel, Marx, and Dilthey. The questions they were asking include, are there patterns in history, does history contain a meaning, does history repeat itself, is it cyclical or teleological, what is the driving force of history, and is there progress. Hegel had popularized the idea that history does have a discernible meaning—one big meaning—and it is advancing toward some definite end, a superior state of things or a culmination. We can look back at all of world history as one big story that leads in a discernible direction, Hegel and countless other modern thinkers believed, and the philosopher’s job is to look at all of history and try to discern what this direction is. Marx later took the idea in a different direction: the telos (goal or purpose) of history, the direction that everything is moving in, is a classless society. It was a very ambitious project to try to identify where we are headed as a species, but philosophers like Hegel and Marx thought it could be done, and scientifically, objectively. Marx’s system, he insisted, is a science; this is not mere speculation. The notion of progress was also very fashionable at this time, where the idea was that we are progressing from some more primitive state of things to a more perfect one. History is teleological in structure and we can identify, objectively and scientifically, what that telos is. This kind of speculative philosophy of history largely fell out of fashion in the twentieth century when questions of this kind began to seem unanswerable. For Kierkegaard, they are indeed unanswerable. More than that, they are beside the point. What is the point of philosophical thought? It is, he believes, to understand the human condition or what it means to be human, and what it means to be not an abstraction (the human species, civilization, what the speculative philosophers of history were theorizing about) but a flesh-and-blood individual, something unique in the world. Where is the existing individual in all this talk about the progress of the species? Does it even exist or does it disappear? It’s hard to say when all we see are abstractions: the species, civilization, culture, class, etc. I myself am none of these things. I am a person, and the essential thing about me is my relationship to the God of Christianity, while everything else about me is secondary. This therefore becomes the central issue of philosophy and of my existence: what is my relationship to God, and is it what it should be? I think of myself as a Christian, but am I really? Do we even know what this means? We in the modern west think of our society as a Christian society, but is it?

Kierkegaard’s conviction, which he states and restates in all his books, is that the vast majority of us are not Christians in an authentic sense at all. Ours is not a Christian civilization, although we think of it this way. What leads him to this conviction? He begins with an observation: we have taken our Christianity for granted. It tends to go without saying that of course we are Christians, and of course ours is a Christian society, and the problem is the “of course.” Convictions have a way of being taken for granted; they go without saying, and when they go without saying, they then go without thinking. They are no longer thought about and instead become empty dogmas that we profess allegiance to, but they don’t enter into our lives at all. We can think of some other examples: democracy, freedom, friendship, love. We all profess to believe these are important values, but are they? Do we act on these beliefs? Kierkegaard is not interested in these other beliefs or values. He is completely focused on ethics and Christianity, in this book and in all his other books. This is the one dominant theme throughout his writings, so we need to look at his argument in some detail.

The objective problem

Let’s begin with what he calls in Part One “the objective problem of Christianity’s truth,” and keep in mind that he’s going to make a great deal of the distinction between the objective and the subjective in what follows. Christianity, regarded objectively, raises one central question: do the Christian scriptures tell the truth about the world? This is followed by a series of others: Is there really a God? Was Jesus of Nazareth really his son? Was he the messiah? Did he die for our sins? Should we live by his teachings? How do we know that any set of answers to these questions is any better than any other set? Objectively speaking, this is a question of epistemology: how do we know, and do we really know at all or is this all hopeless speculation? Philosophically, there is no difference between this kind of issue and any other. The question is the same: what grounds do we have for a certain doctrine? Is there a rational warrant that can guarantee its truth? If not, don’t believe it, or so says the stance of objectivity.

Kierkegaard is going to say this is not how we should approach the Christian message. It is precisely a “message,” not a doctrine in the way that empiricism is a doctrine. Messages need to be treated differently from doctrines, hypotheses, or arguments. The Christian scriptures do not contain an “argument” in a formal sense of the word, but instead they bear a message. What’s the difference? What does this mean? Here is an example of a formal argument: if P then Q; P; therefore Q. An argument is impersonal, meaning that it isn’t aimed at you or me in particular but at anyone. A message isn’t like this. It has an author and also an addressee. You know the difference between receiving a letter or email that is addressed to you only versus one that is addressed to some large group of people, maybe people chosen at random. The random stuff you maybe don’t read at all, or if you do then you read it differently than if you have been singled out as an addressee. Even if the issue is whether the content of the message is true or false—a seemingly impersonal matter—still it makes a difference whether you, and you alone, are being spoken to. Also, a message has an author. You know the difference between reading something that has a real author (a person) versus something that is computer-generated or something that is written by a committee or an institution. Authorship matters because communication matters. If I am being addressed, I want to know who is speaking. If I don’t know this—if the writing is anonymous, for instance—the nature of the communication changes decisively. Think of the practice of anonymous writing on the internet. Think of the things that people say, or type, on the internet that they would never say to a person’s face. Authorship matters—and we see Kierkegaard taking his own authorship of his books very seriously. He thinks long and hard about this: who is speaking in my books? Is it Søren Kierkegaard or is it the pseudonym?

His use of pseudonyms is an example of what he is going to call “indirect communication.” His basic idea here is this: direct communication has limits, so sometimes communication needs to be indirect. Direct communication—in the form of information, propositions, and arguments— promotes a purely cerebral, intellectual kind of understanding. This is the kind of communication that you’re reading right now, an attempt to convey information to you the reader directly. It’s not very effective at reflection on existential questions. Some things are best said indirectly, including the kind of issues that he writes about. He is not just reporting, in an objective way, what he believes to be true, rather he is trying to help his readers to become religious and sometimes you need to use a little literary artistry to accomplish this. An example of indirect communication is the parables of Jesus. In the New Testament, when someone asks Jesus a moral question directly (is it right to do this? should I do that?), he would typically relate a narrative that would contain the answer if you thought about it in a certain way. He didn’t simply answer the question directly: you should do this. Why not? Kierkegaard’s answer is because this would have effectively shut down thinking. If you ask me what you should do, and I answer directly: do this, what is left for you to do? I have relieved you of the need to think for yourself. A parable puts the task of thinking back onto you, while it also points your thinking in a certain direction. But, very important to Kierkegaard, the final responsibility is your own. I can’t think for you, nor can anyone else. There are matters that you need to think about for yourself, and all existential questions are like this. Kierkegaard loved these parables and tried to imitate them in his own writings. There is an art of speaking and writing, and sometimes it’s best not to speak directly. Style is important, humor serves a purpose sometimes, but not when we’re writing objectively.

Back to the objective problem: is the message of the Christian gospels true? There are a couple of questions we can ask here: 1. Is it true historically? That is, did the events recounted in the New Testament actually happen, and can this be verified historically? 2. Is it true philosophically? That is, are the doctrines the Bible contains true, or philosophically justified? Whether we are asking the first question or the second, we are not interested in the subjective side of Christianity, that is, what our personal response to the Christian message is—whether it changes our life in some way. We want the objective truth, which might not affect me in any way at all, any more than the latest discovery in molecular chemistry changes my life. When we are speaking of an objective problem, the thinker is not personally involved in the matter, and even if it’s their job to find the answer, it might not vitally concern them at all. It might be a matter of perfect indifference whether the answer to our question is X or Y. I don’t really care, if I’m thinking objectively; all I care about is getting the right answer. “Thus the investigating, speculating, knowing subject does indeed ask about the truth, but not about the subjective truth, the truth of appropriation. Thus the investigating subject is of course interested but not infinitely, personally, passionately interested in his relation to this truth in respect of his eternal happiness. Far be it from the objective subject to be so immodest, so vain” (19). Regarded in this way, the question of Christianity’s truth doesn’t really come into view. It is not an objective matter; it is a subjective one. Now, how so, and what does he mean by this? We’ll see.

Chapter 1: The Historical View

Still on the issue of Christianity as an objective problem, the question now is whether there is sufficient historical evidence that the events the Bible recounts actually happened. The Bible is here treated as a historical document, and this is an issue for the discipline that is today called religious studies. If you are a scholar in this discipline, you are a kind of historian, sometimes a translator of religion texts, ideas, etc. What does not come into question in this discipline is whether what a particular religious text says—its message—is true. Religious studies scholars are not believers, or not when they are speaking in their role as scholars. Maybe in their private life they are also a believer, but this doesn’t really matter from the point of view of their scholarship. The scholar of religion is not, as he puts it, “infinitely interested in the truth of Christianity.” Scholars are supposed to be disinterested, which is not the same as uninterested. To be disinterested (a word that is usually misused) means to put some distance between your personal interests and whatever it is you are thinking about. The scholar of religion is supposed to be objective, and this means they are neutral on the matter of its truth. Kierkegaard certainly didn’t lack respect for such scholars; he does say he is impressed with what some of them have achieved, but they have a way of missing the point which is the Christian message itself. If I really am passionately and infinitely interested in my own eternal happiness then I cannot be objective because objectivity requires that I be disinterested. Can I really stand at a distance from my interest in my own eternal happiness? This is exactly what I can’t do. Maybe a robot could, but I’m not a robot. What Christianity asks of each of us, Kierkegaard is going to argue, is an act of faith, a “leap of faith”—although Kierkegaard never actually used this term, or not quite. The phrase has always been credited to him, but Kierkegaard called it instead a “leap to faith,” meaning a leap toward, on the way to, faith—not from it, for I’m never inside it. This is very important for him: being a Christian is more becoming than being. We never arrive at a state of mind where we can now say definitively, I am a Christian. At most, I am on the way toward becoming one, but that’s all. Being on the way means that I am taking a risk, or I am venturing something. It is also a leap that is made without much empirical or historical evidence. One takes a risk—a leap—toward, or in the direction of, faith and it is not as simple as it sounds. We’ll return to the point later.

Here he says that whatever genuine faith is, it is not a “finding” or a conclusion that is reached by means of objective scholarly inquiry. No amount of learning about “the historical Jesus,” for example, is going to make you a Christian. Often it is Christian believers who undertake this kind of research, but the research itself, or the historical learning, does not produce the Christian. Something else does: “Christianity is spirit; spirit is inwardness; inwardness is subjectivity, subjectivity in its essential passion, at its maximum an infinitely, personally interested passion for one’s eternal happiness. Once subjectivity is taken away, and passion from subjectivity, and infinite interest from passion, there is absolutely no decision at all, on this problem or any other. All decision, all essential decision, lies in subjectivity. At no point does an observer (and that is what objective subjectivity is) have an infinite need of a decision, and at no point sees it” (29). Today, Kierkegaard believes, it is not only Christianity or philosophy that is without passion but more or less everything. Ours is a passionless society. We need to inject both philosophy and life itself with a sense of passionate urgency. This is something that later philosophers of existence will very much take to heart, including Nietzsche. Nietzsche is going to say that something terrible happened in ancient Greek philosophy in the thought of Plato and in the person of Socrates, namely the passions were repressed—by reason. There is an old idea that Greek philosophy represented a transition “from mythos to logos,” and Nietzsche holds that if this is true then it is unfortunate. Kierkegaard will say much the same. Sometimes the truth is an objective matter and sometimes it is not.

How, then, are we to think about those ideas, those “truths,” that are of an existential and spiritual nature? Often what philosophers do with these ideas is transform them, without quite telling us, into objective matters—so the issue of the possible truth of Christianity is changed, in religious studies or history, into a quest for the historical Jesus or, in philosophy, into an epistemological problem: how do we know that what the Bible reports is true? For Kierkegaard, this misses the point. The point is that we are dealing with a spiritual, and therefore a subjective, matter which demands that we approach it differently than if it were an objective problem: “If the truth is spirit, then the truth is a taking to heart, not an immediate and utterly unconcerned relationship of an immediate Geist [mind] to a sum of propositions, even if, to compound the confusion, the name given to the relationship is that of the most decisive expression of subjectivity: faith” (33). This is a crucial phrase: “truth is a taking to heart.” But this is very hard to do in a culture (an intellectual culture) where truth—all truth—is regarded as an objective matter and subjective truth doesn’t exist. Kierkegaard will ask, must truth be an objective matter in every case, and his answer is no. He is not saying that no truths are objective, but that not all of them are. When the issue is your eternal happiness, how can you be objective? Maybe if you were a robot you could be, but we are creatures of passion no less than reason.

Chapter 2: The Speculative View

On what Kierkegaard calls “the speculative view,” the possible truth of Christianity is still treated as an objective problem rather than a subjective one. What is the speculative view? Again, it is one that thinks of Christianity as a historical matter and also an epistemological one. The main question is, what does philosophical speculation demonstrate about the truth of Christianity as a set of doctrines? In our philosophical speculations, we try to proceed without assumptions. We then take Christianity as a worldview or set of doctrines and we inquire into its truth or falsity. It is also assumed that we are all Christians and that ours is a Christian society. When we speculate or theorize philosophically, it is a matter of personal indifference whether a certain hypothesis is true or not. The thinker doesn’t care or have a personal investment in the matter of whether rationalism or empiricism provides a more adequate conception of knowledge. You’re supposed to look at the arguments on both sides, as a mathematician would or an accountant. Kierkegaard will say that speculative philosophy of the kind that was popular in the nineteenth century, and again he is thinking especially of Hegel, is not faith and it’s also not capable of affording a basis for faith. Only passion is. However, in the modern period passion has a very bad name, especially in philosophy but also elsewhere in the world of scholarship. We are supposed to be personally indifferent or at least disinterested; this is a kind of ideal of all scholarly inquiry, including philosophical speculation.

Kierkegaard holds that the objective speculator can’t even pose the problem of the truth of Christianity properly: “All honour to speculative philosophy, praise be to everyone who genuinely devotes himself to it. To deny the value of speculation … would to my mind be to prostitute oneself, and particularly foolish in one most of whose life has in its little way been consecrated to its service, especially foolish in one who admires the Greeks…. But for the speculating philosopher the question of his personal eternal happiness just cannot arise, for the very reason that his task consists in getting more and more away from himself, and becoming objective, thus vanishing from himself and becoming speculation’s contemplative power. All this sort of thing I myself am quite conversant with” (49). The human being, he goes on to say, is a “synthesis of the temporal and the eternal” (49), also a synthesis of the rational and the passionate. Matters of passion cannot be thought or comprehended with reason alone. If you want, for example, to know what love is, you don’t construct a philosophical theory about it. You fall in love; you let it happen to you, and there is a difference between these two things.

Similarly, if you are thinking about your eternal happiness and the truth of Christianity, you need faith, which is a passionate matter. You can also compare it to getting a joke: you don’t exactly get a joke when it is explained to you. When you get it, you get it in an immediate way—you see or experience something without anything having been explained to you. Kierkegaard gives us the analogy of sawing wood, if you have any experience of doing that: “In sawing wood, it is important not to exert too much pressure on the saw; the lighter the hand of the sawyer, the better the saw operates. Were someone to press down on the saw with all his might, he would no longer be able to saw at all. Similarly, it is important for the speculating person to make himself objectively light, but the person with a passionate, infinite interest in his own eternal happiness makes himself subjectively as heavy as possible. For this very reason he makes it impossible for him to speculate. If Christianity now requires this infinite interest in the individual subject, … it is easy to see that he cannot possibly find in speculation what he seeks” (50).

Part 2: The Subjective Problem: The Subject’s Relation to the Truth of Christianity, or What It Is to Become a Christian

I’m going to skip over most of section 1, on Lessing, and mention just a few issues that he discusses here. G. H. Lessing (1729–81) was a German philosopher, dramatist, and art critic. Kierkegaard admired some of his work, and says he is indebted to Lessing for a few ideas, including one of Kierkegaard’s more important views, and it’s about truth: “truth is inwardness” (65), or (better) some truths are truths of the mind or spirit. They are not objective; they are subjective. They are truths that the individual must understand for oneself. They can’t be proven to you by someone else. You have to find your own way to it and on your own terms. Finding one’s way to the truth—this kind of truth—is a kind of striving, not an inquiry exactly but something more personal and subjective. It’s more like a personal aspiration, something I’m trying to become, rather than an object that I’m trying to know the objective truth about. Understanding the meaning of my existence is like this. As he writes, “there can be no [logical] system for life itself” (92). No matter how accurately you arrange your Ps and Qs on the blackboard, you are not going to understand your life this way, by following rules or an objective method. Nor will you understand any other existential question by following rules. For this, you need some passion, and plenty of it. You also need some boldness of thought, and at a time when boldness of thought is deemed by philosophers to be out of order, something that leads to irrationality. We need, as he puts it, to “become subjective.”

Part 2, Section 2: The Subjective Problem, or How Subjectivity Must Be for the Problem to Appear to It

Chapter 1: Becoming Subjective

Becoming subjective, Kierkegaard announces, is (1) an ethical task and (2) the highest such task that human beings can undertake, but what is it? First, this might strike us as an odd thing to say: I need to “become” a subject? Am I not already a subject—a knowing subject, a moral subject/agent, etc.? He will say no, my subjectivity isn’t simply given. I must undertake to become a subject as a kind of project. It’s an ethical project, and also a religious one. It’s also going to be a very difficult undertaking.

We tend to regard subjectivity—the fact that I am a subject, a self—as a kind of given fact about ourselves. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are both going to disagree. Nietzsche is also going to say you must “become what you are.” We might think this is a very strange thing to say, but Kierkegaard thinks that we shouldn’t. What is strange, or what should strike us as strange but probably doesn’t, is the idea that our subjectivity—that is, who I am—is an altogether settled matter. There are some things about me that are settled, but others are not, and the more important matters tend not to be. A fair portion of our existence is more a matter of becoming than stable being. The very act of thinking itself is an act of becoming, in the sense that we’re striving for something. As he puts it, “becoming is the thinker’s very existence” (77). Also, “Existence itself, existing, is a striving...” (78). We often talk about ourselves as if the fundamentals of our existence are basically given, but it isn’t so. It’s far more the nature of a task, but what sort of task is it? Kierkegaard will say this: when what I want to know about is subjectivity, how am I to proceed? Objectively? But “the matter at issue” is me myself, not some object that I stand to at a distance. This question is going to be inseparable from the question of Christianity, that is, the truth of Christianity. I am an ethical being, who strives for happiness, and this immediately raises the issue of religion. Again: Christianity holds out the promise of my eternal happiness, and I cannot be indifferent to this, or think about it in an objective way. I am personally and infinitely concerned about this. As he puts it, “Christianity protests against all objectivity” (108). Why? What does the requirement to “be objective” ask of me? It asks precisely that in my thinking I bracket myself, or my subjectivity, from my reflections. When the matter that is to be thought about is subjectivity itself, am I still supposed to bracket my subjectivity, and transform the self that I am into some sort of object, and one that I stand to at a reflective distance? I’m to bracket myself when I think about myself, and transform myself into an object—and think that if I can do so then I will know the truth about myself?

For Kierkegaard, this isn’t possible. Objectively speaking, there’s not much of anything to be said about my subjectivity. Don’t divest yourself of your subjectivity. On the contrary, his view is that in the modern age the problem is precisely that our subjectivity is underdeveloped. The point is to develop it, not to put it out of play still more when we go to think about the questions that are of the most vital importance to us. We need to bring our passions with us. Faith itself is a passion, and in his view “the highest passion of subjectivity” (110).

The task of becoming ethical has nothing to do with what he calls “the world-historical.” When he uses this phrase he’s thinking especially of Hegel. There’s no grand philosophical theory to be advanced, such as Hegel’s grand theory of history, about how I can become an ethical subject. Instead it is a task of inwardness; I must cultivate my own inwardness. When I examine my own interior—my mind, my imagination, my passions, my character—there may not be much that is there. “Inside” me there may be a void, an existential vacuum. This is exactly what many existential thinkers of the twentieth century are going to assert of the vast majority of human beings in our time: outside us is a cold, indifferent universe and within each of us is a kind of vacuum. What is missing is what Kierkegaard calls inwardness, some inner depths of some kind, and especially real passions. As one Kierkegaard scholar writes, “When Kierkegaard speaks of the inwardness of subjectivity, he is in no way referring to introspective reflection on our own mental and emotional states, for this would merely be the mode of detached contemplation. Instead he is referring to active involvement, manifested by passionate self-commitment to one’s innermost moral or spiritual commitments” (Watts, 83). Silence is a manifestation of inwardness. Think about the person who is incapable of being silent for any length of time. Do they really have that much to say? Probably not; something else is going on. There is something profound about silence. A person who is always making noise is incapable of inwardness. Their words are empty chatter. What they’re lacking is any kind of inner depth. Inwardness refers to a depth dimension within the self, or a process of “deepening” (226). This inward deepening can be cultivated, for example, by thinking about death or suffering, or by being silent. Kierkegaard writes, “suffering is precisely inwardness” (241). Also, ‘“Only someone who knows how to remain essentially silent can really talk—and truly act. Silence is the essence of inwardness, of the inner life’” (Watts quoting Kierkegaard, The Present Age, 84).

In Kierkegaard’s view, you cannot be ethical if within you is a void. This is not seen by ethical systems like Kantian deontology or utilitarianism where being ethical is a matter of rational calculation, applying a certain method to resolve a given problem, as if being ethical amounts to be being skilled in performing mental calculations, drawing inferences, and following rules. Kierkegaard tends to make fun of this way of thinking, and indeed he often pokes fun at his philosophical adversaries. A thoroughly bad person, even a crazy person, can be a good mathematician or logician. They can follow rules as well as anyone can, but doing this won’t make you ethical. Looked at from the point of view of “world history,” or some sort of rational system, the individual subject is a trifling thing. In utilitarianism, what matters is the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and your own happiness all but disappears from the equation. From a moral point of view it doesn’t matter at all, any more than from the point of view of world history your life matters. Maybe if you’re Napoleon it matters, but not if you are you. From the vantage point of any kind of rational system, the individual subject is a trifling matter, while from your vantage point it is infinitely important, and this is the standpoint that matters. “Ethically, the individual subject is infinitely important” (123).

What is inwardness? It’s a very important concept in Kierkegaard’s thought, and we’ll get back to this, but it’s not straightforward what he means by it. It is not one thing and seems more an invention than a discovery. It crucially involves that which one “takes to heart,” that which resonates within me. It’s well worth asking whether Kierkegaard was right about the existential vacuum, as many later existentialists will also think. If he is right, how did this come to pass? Was it always so or is this unique to modern times?

One thing that is clear is that “becoming subjective” is far from easy. It is a very difficult lifetask and it may well take an entire lifetime to learn it. You may also never learn it. For example, how am I to think about death, that is, not death in general but my own death? This is hardly easy. I can regard my death in an objective way, as we often do: I am going to die someday, everyone dies, etc. The difficult thing is to think about my own death, that is, death as a subjective matter—and I must think about this. This is one of the most important matters that the existing individual can take up. How am I to understand my own death, not just the fact that it is going to happen but what it means? Also, what if it were to happen not one day long from now but now? He writes, “Suppose death were so devious as to come tomorrow! Just this uncertainty, when it is to be understood and held fast by an existing individual, and hence enter into every thought, precisely because, as uncertainty, it enters into everything, and therefore also even into my starting on world history, so that I make it clear to myself whether, if death does come tomorrow, I am beginning upon something that is worth starting on—merely this one uncertainty generates incredible difficulties, difficulties of which not even the speaker is always aware” (139). If we are to think about death, we need to see it in relation to my life as a whole and the meaning of that life. This is hardly easy, and reading what philosophers have written about it doesn’t seem to help: “And yet I have thought again and again, sought guidance in books—and found none” (143). Why has he found no guidance? Philosophers have been writing about death at least since Plato. Is none of it of any value to Kierkegaard? The problem as he sees it is that death, when it’s discussed by philosophers, has been spoken of again as an objective matter. Either it’s regarded as a metaphysical question (what is death? a state of some kind) or an ethical question (why is death bad? is suicide bad? should we allow physician-assisted suicide? is there a right to die?). These are all objective questions, but the vital matter to be thought about is my own personal death and my possible immortality. Christianity tells me that I stand to gain an eternal life and eternal happiness, so what does that mean for me and for how I am currently living? It is not an abstract question, or a philosophical “issue” in the usual sense. It is a profoundly personal question at the same time that it is a philosophical one. Philosophers can and often have tried to prove that we are or are not immortal, but this still misses the point. Whether I am immortal can’t be proven objectively because it is not an objective matter: “He asks about his immortality, what it means to become immortal, whether there is something he can do to become it” (146). This is not a metaphysical question, but an ethical one. It amounts to, am I living right, and how might I live better? I’ll come back to the topic of death later.

The chapter ends with an often-quoted passage in which Kierkegaard tells an amusing story about how one day he was sitting and reflecting on his life: “So I sat there and smoked my cigar until I fell into a reverie. Among others I recall these thoughts. You are getting on, I said to myself, and are becoming an old man without being anything, and without really taking on anything. Wherever you look about you on the other hand, in literature or in life, you see the names and figures of the celebrities, the prized and acclaimed making their appearances or being talked about, the many benefactors of the age who know how to do favours to mankind by making life more and more easy, some with railways, others with omnibuses and steamships, others with the telegraph, others through easily grasped surveys and brief reports on everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age, who by virtue of thought make spiritual existence systematically easier and yet more and more important. And what are you doing? Here my soliloquy was interrupted, for my cigar was finished and a new one had to be lit. So I smoked again, and then suddenly this thought flashed through my mind: You must do something, but since with your limited abilities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, take it upon yourself to make something more difficult. This notion pleased me immensely, and at the same time it flattered me to think that I would be loved and esteemed for this effort by the whole community, as well as any. For when all join together in making everything easier in every way, there remains only one possible danger, namely, that the ease becomes so great that it becomes altogether too easy; then there will be only one lack remaining, if not yet felt, when people come to miss the difficulty. Out of love for humankind, and from despair over my embarrassing situation, having accomplished nothing, and being unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and out of a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task everywhere to create difficulties” (156–7). The humor here is intentional, but it’s also an accurate report of Kierkegaard’s purpose in writing his books. Modern life, as he sees it, has turned into a quest for security, ease, and comfort in spite of the fact that insecurity, difficulty, and suffering lie at the heart of the human condition. It is the philosopher’s role to remind us of that fact. Remember Socrates, the gadfly; this man was a nuisance, and he seemed to pride himself on this. This is a philosopher’s proper task, not to provide reassurance that all is well but to tell us how it is. This is what Kierkegaard is trying to do here.

Chapter 2: The Subjective Truth, Inwardness; Truth is Subjectivity

Truth “is” subjectivity? A very unconventional and provocative assertion. The norm in philosophy has always been to say that truth is objective. What does he mean by this and why is he saying it? He is going to give us a long answer in another long chapter—almost 100 pages (don’t bother reading the appendix). Kierkegaard’s view is this: consider the notion of truth as correspondence, which we find especially among the empirically minded. Truth, on the correspondence theory, is an objective matter of the relation between a statement and a fact, and subjectivity does not enter in. The existing individual becomes what he calls a “phantom” in this way of speaking about truth; he calls it “the fantastic I-I,” for example the Cartesian meditator, the “knowing subject” of modern epistemology. This is a “mirage”; it doesn’t exist. As he puts it, “the thinker has never existed qua human being” (255). The existing individual is the only being who knows the truth, but in modern philosophy the individual is an object of indifference. It disappears from the equation of knowledge while truth itself—the objective kind—becomes an object of total indifference to the subject. The question to be asked of objective truth is this: what does it matter, to me? When I myself have been placed in brackets by the requirements of objective inquiry, why should I then care about the conclusion it reaches?

By “subjective truth” Kierkegaard means the truth of “appropriation, inwardness, subjectivity” (161), the truth that we care about—and not just a little. It is the truth that we “exist in” (260). This is the truth of inwardness—so we’re back to this theme. Inwardness is an elusive concept in Kierkegaard’s writings. It is a kind of umbrella term for the private or personal life of the mind, that aspect of ourselves that we don’t usually show to the world, or not indiscriminately, what is going on in the mind when we are alone with ourselves—and there may not be anything going on there at all. Maybe we try, maybe frantically, to avoid this part of life completely and to occupy ourselves exclusively with outward things: getting what we need, pleasing people, doing what we must. Many people live this way 100% of the time. Kierkegaard and later philosophers of existence lament that this is what our lives consist of, for the most part or even exclusively, that we run from our own depths or even that we have no inner depths. What’s going on “in here” may be no different from what is going on “out there,” which may be just a lot of noise, sound and fury signifying nothing.

Objective truth occurs in the region of outwardness: the truth in this sense is out there in the world, and it’s an object of indifference to the existing individual. Subjective truth is the opposite; it occurs in our inwardness, in the inner depths of the person, and it is something that we are never indifferent to. We are interested, and sometimes infinitely interested. Here our interests are not an obstacle to thought but a necessary condition of it. Take, for example, our thinking about God. Objectively, it is a question of whether God exists, whether this can be proven, etc. Subjectively, the question concerns the subject’s personal relatedness to God. Here one is seeking to know God, not to know the objective truth about God. In the ancient world, Kierkegaard says, it is sometimes said that only a few knew the truth, while now many do. The opposite can be said of inwardness (170), that is, the ancients (some of them) experienced a richer quality of inwardness than we do. We moderns, who think so highly of the state of our knowledge, tend to be very self-satisfied on the matter of our knowledge and to think that in other times people didn’t have much knowledge, or they had an inferior quality and amount of it. We know more than the ancients, or so we think. Kierkegaard’s reply: not about the things that matter most. On the contrary, we tend to be at a loss about such things. Remember his remarks about death: we are at a loss here especially. We largely don’t think or talk about it, and when we are compelled to, we don’t know what to say about it. The denial of death—the silence about it—is a commonplace and uniquely modern phenomenon.

Kierkegaard gives us a concise definition of subjective truth: “Here is such a definition of truth: the objective uncertainty maintained through appropriation in the most passionate inwardness is truth, the highest truth there is for someone existing. At the point where the path branches off … objective knowledge is placed in abeyance. All he has objectively is uncertainty, but it is just this that tightens the infinite passion of inwardness, and truth is precisely this venture of choosing an objective uncertainty with the passion of the infinite” (171). There are a few distinct points here.

1. The first is about objective uncertainty. We do not look for the subjective truth about 2 + 2 = 4. This statement is a fact, objectively.

2. By contrast, subjective truth involves “appropriation,” a taking to heart of some idea, making it my own, being transformed by it.

3. This is a matter involving passion. It is not the truth about some impersonal or purely technical matter. On the contrary, it concerns me urgently.

4. There is an element of choice here. I am not compelled by some rational demonstration or proof to believe. I choose to believe something, and to take a risk in doing so. Thinking here is a venturing. I am not on solid ground, and I can’t prove my case or produce a valid argument. But it is not a matter of objective argumentation. Again his example will be faith. There is no argument for this; one ventures to believe or one doesn’t. There is no epistemology of faith, or methodology. It’s more like a venturing of mind and/or heart, and that venturing may be objectively rational or irrational, but—and this is the crucial matter—this is beside the point. Not all thought is capable of being, or needs to be, objective, and nor is all truth.

Kierkegaard knows how most philosophers are going to reply to this: this is not truth at all but guesswork, empty speculation, irrational non-sense; it is “subjectivism,” which is usually taken to be a term of criticism on the premise that philosophy must always be objective. Philosophy, according to most modern philosophers, must limit itself to what is known as an objective certainty or near-certainty. Kierkegaard’s reply: if it does, it will not even begin to understand the human condition and it will not be capable of answering any of the questions that truly matter to us as existing individuals. Sometimes philosophy, or philosophers, even pride themselves on not venturing answers to these questions. Why would philosophers pride themselves on such a thing? The usual answer is because serious thought must be disciplined, cautious, and disinterested. Kierkegaard’s reply: if so, we will have nothing “serious” to say about the most serious questions that human beings face, and it’s intolerable that philosophy should be silent on existential questions. The rest of the world is not silent about them. So philosophers are to leave those questions—and they are philosophical questions—that are the most important to all of us to the rest of the world to answer for us? Why? Because we are afraid of getting the wrong answer, or of getting an answer that falls short of complete certainty? Kierkegaard’s view: I’m not going to do this. Serious thought can also be bold, venturesome, and passionate.

More on becoming a Christian

Kierkegaard never tired of this subject. This is a long chapter, and a long book. The argument continues this way: “if at one time it was difficult to become a Christian, now I think it becomes more and more difficult year by year” (181). Why would he say this? It seems counterintuitive. It’s more intuitive to think that when it is the norm in a given culture to be a Christian or a Buddhist or a Muslim, it is far easier to become a Christian or a Buddhist or a Muslim than in a society where this is not the norm, because there are other people and an institution to support you in your faith. Kierkegaard’s reply: neither a religious institution nor other people can help you in this, not at all. Indeed, they tend to be a kind of obstacle to authentic faith. Faith is a matter of the inwardness of every individual. In my inwardness there is only me, and my infinite passion for eternal happiness. Christianity is a completely subjective matter. There is absolutely nothing objective about religious commitment; there are no objective grounds, no possibility of objective evidence or argumentation. It is 100% subjective, unapologetically subjective. Christianity is not even true, in the sense of that word that we usually mean, or true in part: “Much that is strange, much that is deplorable, much that is outrageous has been said about Christianity; but the most stupid thing ever said about it is that it is true to a certain degree. Much that is strange, much that is deplorable, much that is outrageous has been said about enthusiasm; but the most stupid thing ever said about it is that it is to a certain degree. Much that is strange, much that is deplorable, much that is outrageous has been said about love; but the most stupid thing ever said about it is that it is to a certain degree” (192).

Christianity is “non-sense to the Greeks,” that is, to philosophy. He repeats this phrase from Paul quite often. For Kierkegaard, non-sense is what faith should remain; it should not be transformed into an objective hypothesis. The primary reason why it is becoming more and more difficult to become a Christian in the modern world is because of the supremacy of a certain form of knowledge, i.e., the supremacy of reason and science. Reason, or what he calls “speculation” or objective knowledge, has eclipsed passion, subjectivity, inwardness, and faith. All of the latter have become disreputable, and knowledge has become a kind of compartment of the mind that is clearly demarcated from all these other things. If serious thought aims at knowledge, all these other things are banished from the realm of serious thought, and the consequence of this is rather more serious than we think: “speculation ... is indifferent to existence” (211). Further, “My main thought was that in our time, due to the quantity of knowledge, one has forgotten what it is to exist and what inwardness means, and that the misunderstanding between speculation and Christianity might be explained by this” (209). Notice how he puts these two questions together: “what it is to exist” and “what inwardness means.” Why do this? Are they not separate issues?

Also, he says that “one has forgotten what it is to exist.” To forget normally means that there was a time when this was more fresh in mind. But was there, and if so then when and where? And how can knowledge be the culprit, as he so often says? For example: “it is the misfortune of our age to have acquired too much knowledge and to have forgotten what it is to exist and what inwardness means” (226). This is about as clear a statement on the matter as we get from Kierkegaard, and he repeats it often. He seems to be saying that if what we care about is outwardness alone—outward things, appearances, objective certainties—then everything else becomes less important. What are these other things? In a word, it is inwardness. What it means to exist—that is, for me, the existing individual—is to have a rich inner life and to conduct that life in the sight of God. It means precisely not to be exclusively, or even primarily, concerned with outward things but to value things of the spirit and/or the mind over material things. He means this especially in a religious sense but not only this. It is not only the religious who have inwardness (one might well wonder about this): “That it is possible to exist with inwardness also outside Christianity has been sufficiently vindicated by the Greeks among others, but in our day we appear actually to have come to the point where, although we are all Christians and know all about Christianity, it is already a very rare thing to come upon anyone even with as much inwardness as a pagan philosopher” (233). Some Greek philosophers, then, “among others,” had a sense of this; modern philosophers largely don’t. Obviously, the Greek philosophers were not Christian, so what did their inwardness look like? He makes this point very quickly and moves on, leaving us to wonder about this. What was the inwardness of Socrates? His answer might go along these lines. Socrates renounced outward things: wealth (he had none), power (none), reputation (bad), popular opinion (was against him his whole life). What mattered to him is that he was on a kind of quest for knowledge, and he never departed from this throughout his life, right to the end, and in a way that we can still look to as a kind of example. Here is someone who taught us, by example, how to live and what is important even while he was not the kind of believer that Kierkegaard was. Socrates was not a man of faith in Kierkegaard’s sense, or not exactly. He did say some things about the gods, but was he genuinely religious or was this just a way of speaking? Socrates often spoke of his daimon, a kind of inner sense or conviction, and he trusted his daimon as a kind of article of faith. He trusted it absolutely, although he couldn’t produce a rational argument for why it needed to be listened to and obeyed.

Chapter 3: “Actual, Ethical Subjectivity; The Subjective Thinker”

This chapter is merely 50 pages long, but there is still a great deal of what one might regard as rambling. This book of over 500 pages could have been written in about 200, but anyway—more on the problem of “existence.”

What is to exist? First, it is to exist as an individual, nothing else. What he calls “the language of abstract thought,” including much philosophy, fails to capture this, the inner side of one’s existence. Instead, abstract thought regards the individual from the point of view of eternity, that is, objectively or as an omniscient God might. We need to think about the human being as a concrete particular—a single, unrepeatable, irreplaceable being—and we need to think about them in their actual circumstances—not in some abstract circumstance such as the state of nature. Think of how many modern philosophers theorize about human existence—about ethics and politics—by focusing on the individual in the state of nature. Thomas Hobbes started this in the seventeenth century in Leviathan. Who is this individual? It is precisely no one, but also everyone, stripped down to their moral essentials. For Kierkegaard, my moral essentials include my individuality while the individual in Hobbes’ state of nature is not an existing individual but an abstract “one,” meaning anyone but no one in particular. For Hobbes, we are to think about ethics on the basis of how an abstract individual (not an existing or actual one) would operate in an equally abstract (not real) environment (a presocial one). Hobbes and later social contractarians ask in an abstract way about an abstract being. Kierkegaard’s reply: but I’m not an abstract being but a concrete one. If we want to understand a moral agent, we need to examine them as concrete beings, not convert them into abstractions. I am not an abstraction—a P or Q on a philosopher’s blackboard. I (each of us) am a being who is infinitely interested in my existing and in my eternal existence. This is what demands to be thought above all, and abstract thinking doesn’t help us. The verb, to abstract, means precisely to separate something—the thing we want to know about—from the context in which we find it, not to describe it in context, in its living environment, but to remove it from that environment and from everything else and to hold it aloft, as a thing apart from everything. We abstract, for instance, a word or concept from its concrete circumstances, such as its history or the actual ways the word is used by speakers of a language. Should we do this when we are thinking about the human being? Kierkegaard thinks that while philosophers have always attempted this, they’ve never succeeded. What they have tried to describe is the human being as an essence (reason) or a substance of some kind (material or immaterial). Science too speaks of the human being as an organism, but neither philosophy nor science speaks of the human being as a human being, that is, in its particularity and concreteness. To do so is usually thought to be unphilosophical. “Pure thought” has become a kind of idol in modern intellectual culture even though, if any such thing exists, it has no way of thinking about the existing individual. How would pure thought—pure speculative reason— understand you, that is, you not as an organism, or a citizen, or a member of any other class but you yourself. It can’t. If it tried to, the first thing it would do is convert you into an impersonal category: the individual, the Queen’s student, the Canadian, etc. You yourself, your subjectivity, would be removed from the abstraction and declared irrelevant. This is exactly what makes “pure” thought pure, that it removes all the impurities, such as your accidental properties, which are those properties that you have but that don’t define who or what you are.

Recall this ancient metaphysical distinction: essential versus accidental properties. Now construct a complete list of your own properties; which are accidental and which are essential? Kierkegaard will say this is a pointless question. I don’t understand what I am about by asking this kind of question or through any other form of abstract or pure thought. I understand myself in actual, concrete terms if I understand myself at all. I understand myself, for example, as someone who acts, who does things and who has done particular things. I am an actor, an agent and a chooser. My actions and decisions are not merely what I do, but in an inward sense who I am. This would become a major theme in twentieth-century existentialism, where the idea we often find is that I am in a deep sense what I do. The phrase “what I do” often suggests a kind of separation between the I itself, an entity of some kind, and the actions that I perform, but this is false. My actions, or those that hold any significance, define me, for example, as a moral agent. My moral character just is what I have done and what I am now doing, nothing apart from them. I can’t very well say that I am a morally good person and that in the past I have committed crimes without feeling any remorse or paying any penalty or resolving to change my ways. I’m going to have to say that in light of those actions I am not a good person at all.

He then goes on to say more critical things about abstract thinking. He focuses on the Hegelian, but he could say the same of a great many other philosophers: the rationalist, the empiricist, the Kantian idealist, the positivist, a great many others. He warns his readers about speaking to a Hegelian (he is being humorous): “So caution must be exercised when dealing with a Hegelian, and one must above all make sure with whom one has the honour of speaking. Is he a human being, an existing human being, is he himself sub specie aeterni, even when he sleeps, eats, blows his nose and whatever else a human being does? Is he himself the pure ‘I am I,’ something that has certainly never occurred to any philosopher?” (256). One might say the same of a Hobbesian or any social contract theorist: is Hobbes himself one of his presocial individuals? Is Descartes himself the Cartesian meditator? Kierkegaard’s point is beware all notions of “pure thought” or thinking that is said to be purely abstract. It has a way of losing touch with what is really real, which is the existing individual that each of us is. Our own thinking, most especially about existential questions, must aim not to be merely clever, in an abstract and technical sense, but something richer than this.

He again says something complimentary about the Greek philosophers: “The Greek philosopher was one who exists and did not forget that fact. He therefore resorted to suicide, or to dying from the world in the Pythagorean sense, or to being dead in a Socratic sense to be able to think. He is conscious of being a thinking being, but he was also conscious that existence, as his medium, by putting him in the constant course of becoming, prevented him from thinking all the time. So, to be able truly to think, he took his own life. Modern philosophy smiles loftily at such childishness, as though every modern thinker did not know, as well as he knows that thought and being are one, that to be what he thinks is not worth the effort” (258–9). Another curious statement about truth: “the truth is to be existed in” (260) rather than held in the mind as an impersonal bit of information. We are to live in the truth, to appropriate it, to take it to heart (again). It is not only Christians who can do this. As we have seen, Socrates did this by infinitely emphasizing ethical knowledge (266) and by making the question of the good life—for anyone, but for him as well—the central one: how should I live? This is the principal question of philosophy, for Socrates, and it is an ethical question. Kierkegaard adds, “The ethical deals with particular human beings” (268) and “The ethical lays hold of the individual” (268). In purely abstract, formal thought, there is nothing to take to heart, and there is no passion one way or another. What would it mean to take logic to heart? I know what it means to make my inferences conform to the rules of logic, but it is something else entirely to take logic to heart. Likely there is no such thing, and even being passionate about it would be strange. The point is not to appropriate the truth, it is to follow the rules, to know the system and to operate within it. This is not at all what it means to exist. What does it mean? It means to have some passion: “Existing, unless by this we are to understand an existing of a kind, is impossible without passion. That is why every Greek thinker was also essentially a passionate thinker. I have often reflected how one might bring a person into a state of passion. Thus I have imagined having him put on a horse and making this set off in the wildest gallop. Or better still, properly to bring out the passion, taking a man who wanted to get somewhere as quickly as possible (and was therefore already in some state of passion) and putting him astride a horse that could scarcely walk—and yet that is what existing is like if one is to be conscious of it” (260–1). To exist is not to be in control, although we tend to speak of it this way. Knowing especially is, we often say, a matter of gaining control over our object; knowledge is a kind of mastery, an act of grasping, suspending the chaos, and making everything that is in motion stand still. To know is to call the world to order.

Kierkegaard’s reply: the world doesn’t stand still, and it’s not ever well-ordered. Control is something we need to surrender, as we surrender to passion. To exist is to feel the ground beneath you tremble, to realize that the ground you stand on—what you imagine to be absolute and fixed for all time—is the opposite of this. Your very existence is a contingency. It is a search for something you may never find. It is not tidy or well-ordered in the way that abstract thinking—“the system”—tries to be. Kierkegaard’s own thinking is not tidy or well-ordered, hence the word “unscientific” in the title. We might wish he had cleaned it up a bit: eliminated the repetition, shortened it, defined more clearly some of his terms, broken it up into more and shorter chapters, but he has said he’s not trying to make things easier for us but more difficult. Not surprisingly, this is a difficult book; all his books are. It’s no exercise in pure thought. Indeed, “Pure thought is a phantom” (265). Philosophical thought is not pure, nor is ethical thought, nor is Christianity. Especially, he repeats, it is not a doctrine; the worst thing we can do with Christianity is exactly what philosophers have done with it: intellectualize it, rationalize it, absorb it within a system, or make it into a system of its own. It doesn’t assert anything at all about the world: that God exists, that there is an afterlife, that Jesus was the messiah, etc. It is a “message,” not a series of assertions.

About abstract thought: he is not saying that there is no value at all in abstract or purely formal thinking, but that it has limits that we usually do not recognize. Abstract thinking is not false, but it doesn’t allow us to see the reality that is our existence. Abstract thought conceals half the world—the important half—and while often claiming it has grasped the totality. Hegel’s system claims to encompass the totality of what is: all of human history—everything that human beings everywhere have said and done—is encompassed and explained in this system. Kierkegaard’s rejoinder is that those who love abstract thinking habitually overlook that this manner of thinking has limits, that is does not reveal much about human existence, it does not give us any insight into ethical questions or existential ones although it believes that it does.

Toward the end of this chapter, Kierkegaard reminds us of an old proverb: prayer, trial, and meditation make a theologian. He gives it a new twist: “Likewise, imagination, feeling, and dialectics with passion in the inwardness of existing are what are required for a subjective thinker” (293)—and especially passion. Let’s think about this: to understand a philosopher, does it help to understand what their passions were? Think of the philosopher you know best. What passions motivated or otherwise informed their writings? Very seldom do they tell us. Nietzsche did, and Kierkegaard did, but did Hegel, or Kant, or Descartes? Not so much. We can sometimes imagine what their passions might have been: maybe Descartes was really passionate about not committing intellectual errors as he had done in the past. He does say at the outset of the Meditations that he is struck by the frequency of error and our susceptibility to it. Maybe this rose to the level of a driving passion for him. Does this help us to understand his project? Would we understand it differently than if he had written his philosophy purely as a blackboard exercise?

Chapter 4: The Problem of the Crumbs: How Can an Eternal Happiness Be Built on Historical Knowledge?

This chapter goes to almost 200 pages. Here’s some good news: I won’t ask you to read it. But there is also some important material in here. I’m going to hit some of the highlights, that’s it. A lot of it is repetition of what he has already said. Again the question is what it means to be a Christian, but also can one know what this means without oneself becoming one? The answer is going to be no. If Christianity were a doctrine or a system of belief, it would be possible.

He begins this excruciatingly long chapter by saying again that the modern age values speculation very highly. “Speculation ... has completely understood Christianity” (303), or so it is commonly said. It is also often said that speculation is “the highest development within Christianity,” and for Kierkegaard this couldn’t be further from the truth. Speculation, or objective thought, misses the point that is authentic Christianity.

Let’s ask the question again: what does it mean to be a Christian? Does it mean, as we often say, that one was baptized? This is a usual question to ask: are you Christian? Well, were you baptized? If so then you are a Christian. Let’s think about this. When are most Christians baptized? When they are babies. It is not exactly a choice, then. How do I become a Christian if I already am one? Kierkegaard’s reply: with extreme difficulty. “In short: it is easier to become a Christian if I am not a Christian than to become a Christian when I am one; and this decision is reserved for the person who has been baptized in infancy” (307). Institutional Christianity is a positive obstacle to my becoming a Christian. He asks, “What is baptism without appropriation?” (307) It is nothing at all, an empty ritual and a social norm signifying nothing. At best, it is the possibility that the child will one day become a Christian, but it’s a bare possibility. Babies do not take the Christian message to heart. Being a Christian today is just a matter of course. It’s a non-decision, or a decision made by one’s parents, whose baptism was decided by their parents, etc. Becoming it in a genuine sense is very hard to do when everyone talks about it as if it were a straightforward matter. When it was a new religion, it was clear to everyone that becoming Christian was difficult. Early Christians were living in a polytheistic empire. The religion of the Roman empire was polytheism, the belief in many gods, and it had a fair degree of respect for local religions and gods of various kinds, including Judaism and Christianity. But the common belief is that in the early days of Christianity, becoming Christian was very difficult since you faced persecution, etc. (Historians now dispute this old story of persecution, by the way.) Today, on this view, becoming Christian is much easier. Kierkegaard has said repeatedly that he wants to make it more difficult to become a Christian. He also says that the question of what Christianity is should be answerable in simple terms: “The question of what Christianity is must therefore be raised but not made a learned one, or in a partisan way under the presumption that Christianity is a philosophical doctrine, for then speculation is more than a party, or is both party and judge. So the question must be raised in terms of existence, and it must be possible to answer it and to answer it briefly” (311). If it were a “learned”—philosophical, theoretical, objective— question, the answer would be complex, but it isn’t that kind of question. The difficulty in becoming a Christian is not that it requires any advanced powers of reasoning or understanding but in actually living this way.

Can one know what Christianity is without being one? Yes and no: it is possible to know, intellectually and objectively, “what Christianity is” without being one, but what the nonChristian cannot know is “what it is [subjectively] to be a Christian.” We get a pretty clear idea here of what Kierkegaard is against: who are the people who are calling themselves Christian today (in his day)? There are those who are not intellectuals—whose spirituality tends to be uncomplicated—and there are those who are; it is especially the latter whom Kierkegaard has a problem with. The problem is their constant tendency to regard Christianity as a doctrine, a philosophical hypothesis or system, that is, to think of it in objective terms, given the bad reputation that subjective thinking has. These intellectuals don’t ever question whether they themselves are Christians, even while they dispute what Christianity is. They claim to be uncertain of what Christianity is, but somehow they know that they are Christians.

Part of the difficulty in being a Christian is that it asks so much of us, and at the same time that other things are asked of us. Only so much can be asked of me, and becoming a Christian asks that in my inner life I relate absolutely to the absolute telos (end, goal) of human life, i.e., I must not only care about my eternal happiness, but care infinitely. Religion is a matter of passion— infinite passion. Part of what makes becoming a Christian so difficult is that I must also relate to, or concern myself with, what he calls “relative ends,” ordinary cares, worldly interests and obligations. How am I to do all of this? His answer is “by relating absolutely to his absolute telos and relatively to the relative” (342), that is, I should not relate in a merely relative or moderate way to the absolute. I should not be Christian “to a certain degree” (192). The only way to relate to the absolute is in an absolute or infinite way. I shouldn’t have the same kind of infinite passion for worldly concerns that I have for my eternal happiness. The title to one of his books is Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, but to will it infinitely. The world doesn’t make it easy to will one thing, especially something that is not worldly and practical. He is not saying turn your back on worldly matters, just don’t be overly concerned about them, as we normally are. A certain amount of renunciation of worldly concerns is required: “The religious person has lost the relativity of immediacy, its distraction, its time-wasting—precisely its time-wasting; the absolute consciousness of God consumes him like the scorching of the summer sun when it will not set, like the scorching of the summer sun when it will not leave off” (407). Kierkegaard exhibited this himself in his personal life, such as it was. Remember, he had been engaged to a woman named Regine Olsen. He broke off the engagement and never married in later years, supposedly so he could devote himself completely to his writing and his religious calling. It is necessary, he believed, to sacrifice worldly happiness for a higher purpose. There is also a certain amount of suffering involved, sometimes a great deal, and also guilt: “guilt-consciousness is the decisive expression of the relation to an eternal happiness” (443). The consciousness of guilt is also “the greatest possible deepening in existence” (445). Over against God, we are always in the wrong, or we are always in sin—not just every so often or every time I commit a transgression. The existing individual is a sinner, period, and becoming aware of this “is the greatest possible deepening in existence”: “Just one guilt, as I said, is enough, and with it someone existing who relates to an eternal happiness is trapped for ever; human justice passes a life sentence only for the third offence, but eternity pronounces an everlasting sentence the first time. He is forever trapped, buckled in the trappings of guilt, and he never gets unharnessed—unlike the draught horse, which at times has its hauling harness removed; unlike the day labourer who has his freedom once in a while—not even in the night is he essentially unhitched” (446). In worldly terms, we may be guilty of this or that if we commit an offense, but in religious terms we are guilty in an absolute sense. Religion in general is an affair of the absolute and the infinite, not the relative, and becoming religious includes acquiring a taste for the absolute. He is not saying that we are all evil but that we are all sinners—a traditional Christian idea—and he is trying to invest this old idea with some existential pathos, just as in general he is trying to invest religion with a pathos that it can sometimes lack. So again the ideal for the individual is to “maintain a relation to the absolute telos and to the relative ends at the same time” (342), to live one’s life with relative or moderate concern for worldly things and in primary relation to the God of Christianity.

The three “stages on life’s way”

Stages on Life’s Way is the title to a book Kierkegaard wrote in 1845, and in it he advanced the idea that there are three stages in the process of becoming a Christian. Essentially these are three ways of life or, one might say, modes of existence. They are not developmental stages exactly, but there is a clear sense that three is superior to two and two is superior to one. The three stages are 1. the aesthetic life; 2. the ethical life; 3. the religious life. So what are these?

1. The aesthetic stage is oriented around not just art (hence the name) but everything associated with it, including passion, pleasure, and the erotic. This stage is represented by the sophisticated hedonist, and it’s a person who is not much concerned about ethics or religion. They are fascinated by the pleasures of this world and of the body, and it’s the life that the vast majority of people lead. They are often said by people who live the second way of life to be immoral, or it is a way of life that is said by people at stage two to be self-serving, empty, and shallow.

2. At this stage, one comes to believe that the aesthetic way of life is lacking any conception of selfhood. The self in stage one has no cohesion, no stable identity or inner depths to it. It is vacuous, for they are not really committed to anything except the pleasures of the moment. There’s no real self-reflection here, so one becomes a convert (or one might) to an ethical way of life. This is a way of life that is oriented around some set of commitments. It is in making commitments that I choose who I am going to be. For example, in marriage one commits to live a certain way and to be a certain kind of person. At this stage, one is living according to the norms of one’s time and place and one is socially rewarded for doing so in the form of a good reputation, for instance. In short, the ethical here means (what he calls in Fear and Trembling) “social morality” or living by the norms of one’s society, whatever these happen to be.

3. This second way of life also has its limitations, and these limitations are overcome in the religious stage. The norms of our time and place are not perfect. There is a higher conception of ethics. He gives us the example of the story of Abraham in the book of Genesis. Fear and Trembling was about the Biblical story of Abraham and God’s command that he sacrifice his son as an act of religious devotion. Kierkegaard saw in this story an example of how religion needs to be thought of as beyond the realm of worldly morality and also beyond philosophy. In this story, God commands Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac in order to prove his faith. Abraham anguishes over his decision, but he decides to do as God commands. As he raises the knife, an angel appears and commands him not to harm the boy, so Abraham instead sacrifices a ram that had its horns caught in a thicket. The point of the story, on Kierkegaard’s reading of it, is that there is a higher morality than that of the world of social norms, conventions, and laws, and the world tends to frown on this higher morality. This is obviously a religious morality. This stage does not represent a complete rejection of the aesthetic; it is a partial surpassing of it, and the ethical stage will also be partially surpassed by the religious stage.

Let’s look in a little more detail at Kierkegaard’s analysis of the Abraham story. The title of this text says a great deal. Abraham obviously doesn’t take the decision to kill his son lightly; it is the most agonizing decision of his life. For a long time he and Sarah had longed to have a child, but she could not become pregnant. That Isaac was born at all was a miracle; Sarah was 90 years old at the time, and he is their only child. Now, out of the blue and without explanation, God commands Abraham to do this. It’s a decision that he makes “in fear and trembling,” that is, in passion. This is not a decision based upon reason, nor is it based on worldly morality or what Kierkegaard calls “the ethical.” “The ethical” here means the laws and norms of his time and place; it is socially based. But it also refers to what he terms “the universal,” that is, some general moral principle or socially recognized value. The universal applies to everyone, and maybe in all times. From the point of view of the ethical, he shouldn’t commit this act. It is an act of murder, pure and simple. It’s very significant that Abraham goes off alone with his son to commit this act. He doesn’t tell Sarah what he intends to do, so he’s leaving behind not just his wife but the conception of morality that she represents while he responds to a moral command of a higher kind.

What exactly would we say about Abraham’s act from the point of view of “the ethical”? If you or I were to commit the same act, and go through with it, it would be a clear case of murder, which is about as unethical an act as we can imagine. Is there any act that is worse, ethically speaking, than murder? Likely not, unless it’s mass murder. In religious language, it is a sin. But Abraham is not acting in his usual capacity as a moral agent, as a citizen of his society. Instead, he is acting as a “single individual.” When I act as a single individual before God, my ethical responsibility is to God, and I leave all my social obligations behind me. Abraham is no longer acting in the role of citizen, or member of a society, or even member of a family. He is acting as an existing, single individual in the face of God and he is asserting his individuality or singularity. God is also communicating to Abraham in his singularity; God is commanding Abraham alone to do this; he is not setting it down as a commandment that everyone must do likewise. Abraham, then, is not merely a member of a society. He exists—as a single, unique, irreplaceable individual. There is a part of our existence that is removed, in some way, from the social, and that is higher than it. It doesn’t answer to society but to something higher. What this something higher is, for Kierkegaard, is of course God. Some later existentialists will speak of this “something higher” in non-religious terms. “The single individual is higher than the universal” (Marino, 9), and faith is higher than social morality. “The single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute” (Marino, 10), that is, Abraham stands in an absolute relation to God whereas his ethical or social relations lack this quality of absoluteness or infinity. For example, I am a citizen of a particular state and so owe a certain loyalty to that state, but this is a relative (non-absolute) end. I am not absolutely loyal to the state. I am relatively loyal; my loyalty has limits and conditions. If the state had commanded Abraham to kill his son, he likely would have refused, but the relation between him and God is categorically unlike this. It’s an absolute or unconditional relation between something absolute within him and an absolute God without him, and the proper way of relating to the absolute is not relatively but absolutely. We should relate in a relative way to what is relative and in an absolute way to the absolute. In New Testament terms, we should give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and give unto God what is God’s.

Kierkegaard asks, is Abraham a tragic hero in the ancient Greek sense? We might think so because he is a single individual who is called upon, by something higher than himself, to carry out an act that is noble but socially forbidden. His answer is no, Abraham is something entirely different. He is “either a murderer or a man of faith” (Marino, 11). We can understand and even admire the tragic hero from the standpoint of the ethical, but from that standpoint we can’t understand Abraham. We can only see him as a killer. He’s either that or a man of faith—which is it? Kierkegaard calls Abraham a “knight of faith,” so what is this, and how is it different from the tragic hero? In the case of the tragic (Greek) hero, this person is acting in defiance of convention, but in the name of the universal. For example, Prometheus steals fire from the gods, in defiance of divine command, or Antigone gives her brother a proper burial in defiance of a legal order. What’s the difference between their acts and Abraham’s? In the case of the tragic hero, they are acting in the name of the universal—that is, an ideal that applies to everyone and still belongs to “the ethical.” In the story of Antigone, for instance, it was divine law—which applies to everyone universally—that she was acting in the name of: every human being deserves a proper burial, no matter what human law states. Because her act still falls within what we recognize as “the ethical,” we admire her, as we admire Prometheus. We don’t feel this way about Abraham because he is not acting in the name of any universal but in the name of something utterly singular. Like the tragic hero, he is undergoing an anguishing “spiritual trial,” but what is on trial here is only himself in his singularity. He is not acting for the betterment of mankind, as Prometheus was, or for the good of some other person, as Antigone was (her dead brother). From Fear and Trembling: “Abraham’s situation is different. By this act he transgressed the ethical altogether and had a higher telos [end, purpose] outside it, in relation to which he suspended it. For I certainly would like to know how Abraham’s act can be related to the universal, whether any point of contact between what Abraham did and the universal can be found other than that Abraham transgressed it. It is not to save a nation, not to uphold the idea of the state that Abraham does it; it is not to appease the angry gods. If it were a matter of the deity’s being angry, then he was, after all, angry only with Abraham, and Abraham’s act is totally unrelated to the universal, is a purely private endeavor. Therefore, while the tragic hero is great because of his moral virtue, Abraham is great because of a purely personal virtue. There is no higher expression for the ethical in Abraham’s life than that the father shall love the son” (Marino, 14). Note Kierkegaard’s distinction here between “moral virtue” (the ethical) and a “purely personal virtue” (the religious). Why, Kierkegaard asks, did Abraham do it, or why was he about to do it (God stopped him)? His answer: “For God’s sake [not for the sake of some social ideal] and—the two are wholly identical—for his own sake”; “he does it for his own sake so that he can prove it,” that is, prove his faith to God (Marino, 15).

Do we still admire Abraham? Kierkegaard will say yes and no: “although Abraham arouses my admiration, he also appalls me” (Marino, 15). Why are we appalled at his act? For an obvious reason: it looks, from the point of view of “the ethical,” like a simple case of murder. Why do we admire him? Because it was an act of faith, and one that required him to pay a terrible price. It was not a social price so much as a personal and existential one. Is he justified? Again, yes and no. His act is a paradox: it defies social morality while it answers to a higher, personal morality. “As the singular individual he became higher than the universal” (Marino, 23). Also, it’s a paradox that is resolved through passion, not reason. Abraham didn’t sit down and coldly reason out what his correct course of action was. His act was motivated by passion. Faith is a passion; there is nothing rational about it. This kind of faith is, again, “foolishness to the Greeks.” Abraham’s act is not just foolish from the point of view of the ethical; it’s shameful. The paradox of religion is that “there is an absolute duty to God, for in this relationship of duty the individual relates himself as the single individual absolutely to the absolute” (Marino, 27). I have this duty even while I also have ordinary duties of social morality. These duties occasionally conflict, and when they do, I must act as a singular individual. The single individual is in this sense higher than the social. Whereas the tragic hero sacrifices him- or herself in order to serve the universal, the knight of faith sacrifices or relinquishes the universal “in order to become the single individual” (Marino, 33). This is something that the individual can only do alone. No one can help you in this: “But he also knows that up higher there winds a lonesome trail, steep and narrow; he knows it is dreadful to be born solitary outside of the universal, to walk without meeting one single traveler. He knows very well where he is and how he relates to men. Humanly speaking, he is mad and cannot make himself understandable to anyone. And yet ‘to be mad’ is the mildest expression. If he is not to be viewed in this way, then he is a hypocrite, and the higher he ascends this path, the more appalling a hypocrite he is” (Marino, 34).

Even here, at the third stage, there are different conceptions of the religious which in CUP he calls religiousness A and B. “Religiousness A” is a form of spirituality that is preparatory to the kind of Christianity that Kierkegaard has been talking about. It is spirituality in its conventional forms. He calls it “Christendom”—the institutional Christianity of Rome and the various Protestant and orthodox churches—in contrast to Christianity. Religiousness A is not specific to any given religion. It is exhibited, for example, in ancient Greek and Roman religion (polytheism) and in the person of Socrates. Obviously, he wasn’t a Christian, but he did exhibit an attitude of mind that was in a sense religious in that he seems to have felt a kind of longing for the beyond. “Religiousness B” is Christianity in Kierkegaard’s sense, and it is radically paradoxical. “Christianity is precisely the paradoxical” (89), and its central paradox is this: how could an eternal God appear in the world, in time, at a certain point in history? This is impossible; it is objectively impossible for a God that is eternal in the sense of outside of time to appear in time, but it occurred. It can’t be, objectively speaking, but it is. There is also the matter of how I, a being-within-time, can relate to my eternal (outside of time) happiness. This too can’t be, but this is the heart of religion. The very heart of the religious way of life is a paradox, or a set of paradoxes. It is a matter of passion, especially the passion for the impossible. Remember, Kierkegaard always thought of himself as a religious poet, and poetry is quite accepting of paradox. Philosophy has a hard time with it. For the most part, philosophy regards paradox as contradiction—the very essence of irrational thought. If we think of all paradox in this way, we will never reach this highest “stage on life’s way.”

More on death

Death has been a major theme in western philosophy from the beginning, and Kierkegaard had some important ideas on this topic as well, although it does not emerge as a major theme in CUP. Perhaps his most important text on this topic is “At a Graveside” from 1845. He published this piece in his own name. The basic idea here is that we ought to imagine our own death as something that could come at any time. Too often we think of it as a kind of abstract possibility: it will happen, but one day, a long time from now. This allows us to put it out of mind, and this is what we usually do because it’s an unpleasant thing to think about. But for Kierkegaard it serves an edifying purpose to imagine this. He would often write what he called “edifying discourses.” These are designed to produce an uplifting effect on his readers, to help them along in their development from one stage to the next. “At a Graveside” is one of these edifying discourses. He writes in Three Discourses: “Death is the schoolmaster of earnestness, but in turn its earnest instruction is recognized precisely by its leaving to the single individual the task of searching himself so that it can then teach him earnestness as it can be learned only by the person himself. Death minds its own business in life; it does not run around, as the timorous think, and sharpen its scythe and scare women and children—as if this were earnestness. No, death says, ‘I exist; if anyone wants to learn from me, then let him come to me’” (Three Discourses, 75–6).

Death teaches “earnestness” or what Heidegger would later call authenticity. Imagining death— and not death in the abstract or someone else’s death but my own—reminds me that my life is my own, and that I had better live it in earnest, that is, with some sense of urgency and passion. His point is not, live for today, enjoy the moment, for tomorrow we die. This is what a hedonist will say. His point is, I had better make some decisions about who I am going to be and how I am going to live, because I’m not going to have it forever: “That death can make a finish is indeed certain, but the challenge of earnestness to the living is to think it, to think that all is over, that there comes a time when all is over. This is the difficult thing, because even in the moment of death the dying person thinks that he still might have some time to live, and one is even afraid to tell him that all is over. And now the living, as long as he is living perhaps in health, in youth, in happiness, in power—that is, safeguarded, yes, well safeguarded if he is not willing to shut himself in with the thought of death, which explains to him that this security is false. There is a consolation in life, a false flatterer; there is a safeguard in life, a hypocritical deceiver—it is called postponement. But it is seldom called by its proper name, because even when one wants to say it, it insinuates itself into the word and the name becomes somewhat toned down, and of course the toned-down name is also a postponement” (Three Discourses, 79–80). Postponement is a form of evasion or denial, and it is the most common attitude we have toward death. Everyone and everything around us says to us in one voice: don’t worry about it, don’t think about it, it’s not going to happen any time soon, and there’s nothing to be gained in wallowing in morbid thoughts. Kierkegaard’s reply: there is something to be gained all right, and that is a new appreciation of what I have and a sense that everything in my life matters. It gives my life a kind of “force”: “Death in earnest gives life force as nothing else does; it makes one alert as nothing else does. Death induces the sensual person to say: ‘Let us eat and drink, because tomorrow we shall die—but this is sensuality’s cowardly lust for life, that contemptible order of things where one lives in order to eat and drink instead of eating and drinking in order to live. The idea of death may induce weakness in the more profound person so that he sinks relaxed in mood, but the thought of death gives the earnest person the right momentum in life and the right goal toward which he directs his momentum” (Three Discourses, 83).

Imagining death reminds me that I have a limited time to do with my life what I want to do, and to become what I want to become. It gives me a sense of the fragility of life. It’s not the objective truth of death that matters but its subjective truth. I must appropriate this truth, make it my own, take it to heart, and allow the thought of it to transform me. If this thought doesn’t produce any effect on me, probably nothing will. Several twentieth-century philosophers of existence would take up his ideas here in a major way.

Works Cited

Hannay, Alastair. Kierkegaard: A Biography. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ed. and trans. Alastair Hannay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling in Basic Writings of Existentialism, ed. Gordon Marino.

New York: The Modern Library, 2004.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Watts, Michael. Kierkegaard. Oxford: Oneworld Press, 2014.

Ziolkowski, Eric. The Literary Kierkegaard. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011.

PART TWO

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

Major works:

1872: The Birth of Tragedy

1874: Untimely Meditations

1879: Human, All Too Human

1881: Daybreak

1882: The Gay Science

1883–85: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

1886: Beyond Good and Evil

1887: On the Genealogy of Morals

1888: Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, The Case of Wagner, Ecce Homo

Posthumously: The Will to Power

We will be reading Beyond Good and Evil in its entirety. My remarks below will be arranged thematically rather than by chapter.

Biography

Friedrich Nietzsche lived just short of 56 years. In January of 1889 he suffered a complete mental breakdown, from which he never recovered. He remained a mentally incompetent invalid for the last eleven years of his life, so his life prior to the breakdown was fairly short: 44 years. To this day his name tends to arouse strong reactions, either positively or negatively. For many he is a kind of mythical hero, a prophet of the modern world. For others he is a villain of some kind, especially due to the fact that in the 1930s the Nazis tried to claim Nietzsche as a kind of forerunner of National Socialism—which he clearly was not. But our knowledge of him is often second-hand and predisposes us toward or against him before reading any of his texts, and this can create a kind of distortion. There is a caricature of Nietzsche that we need to be aware of and then put aside. The cartoon version of Nietzsche is that he was a proto-fascist, misogynist, immoralist, rugged individualist, tortured existentialist, and antisocial madman. There is a bit of truth in the caricature, but only a bit. From the start, people have had an unusual fascination with Nietzsche’s personal life, and this is very unusual for a philosopher. Partly this fascination is due to his own habit of drawing attention to himself in his writings. Nietzsche himself would say that he “writes in blood,” that the act of thinking and writing is essentially an act of self-expression and confession in an almost religious sense, and that philosophy itself expresses the sense of life, maybe the soul, of its author. Nietzsche would always have a habit of personalizing his philosophy and often used phrases like “our wisdom,” “our truths,” “our virtues,” where “our” means “my.” What does this mean: our truths? What about the truth is his? Philosophers usually think of truth as an impersonal, objective matter; it doesn’t belong to anyone. Who does 2 + 2 = 4 belong to?

The fascination with him as a person is partly due to the association of his name with Nazism. How did this come about? Obviously, he died many years before the Nazis emerged. This all got started by Nietzsche’s younger sister Elisabeth, who always professed a great loyalty to her brother, both during his sane life and for many years after his death. For a time, the two of them shared a home during his time as a professor at the University of Basel. She often helped him manage his domestic affairs, and she also had a habit of meddling in his personal life in a way that was probably contrary to his interests, most obviously in driving away one of the few women Nietzsche ever took a romantic interest in, Lou Salomé. Elisabeth married a man named Bernhard Förster, who was a political activist and a kind of proto-Nazi, a strident German nationalist and anti-Semite. Förster and some of his associates wanted to create a German emigrant colony in Paraguay which was to be a new, racially and culturally “pure” (Aryan) Germania in the new world. Nietzsche himself thought this was a hair-brained scheme that he wanted nothing to do with, and he refused even to meet Elisabeth’s husband and attend their wedding. Nietzsche never really shared Elisabeth’s affection, and he despised her husband. She, however, very much looked up to him from childhood on; he was far less impressed by her. In one letter of 1884 he referred to her as a “vengeful anti-Semitic goose.” Anyway, this colony was short-lived and Förster died in 1889. Elisabeth then returned to Germany to help her mother look after Nietzsche, who by this time had become insane. She had no source of income by this time and Nietzsche’s writings were starting to become known and to make a bit of money. Elisabeth obtained a court order changing her name from Förster to Förster-Nietzsche and she began claiming to be her brother’s closest collaborator and rightful inheritor of his literary estate. She threatened to sue her mother for administrative control of his estate, which consisted almost entirely of a large number of unpublished manuscripts as well as copyrights and royalties from his published writings. Nietzsche himself never made much money from royalties, but after 1889 he was beginning to be somewhat well known in Germany and elsewhere in continental Europe. She forged and altered letters in her brother’s name, making it appear he had appointed her his successor and chief interpreter. After getting control of his estate, she set up a Nietzsche Archive and presided over the editing and publishing of his unpublished writings, but not all of them. She selected those writings that she basically agreed with and she suppressed anything that she disagreed with, especially critical references to German nationalism of which there would have been many. His published writings contained numerous references to German nationalism and anti-Semitism, all of them extremely critical. She ignored any material in which he had written anything expressing tolerance, and even praise, of racial or ethnic equality and cultural diversity and she went on to ally herself with various groups that supported an ideology of extremist German nationalism, including later the Nazis who elevated her to the status of a kind of early prophet of National Socialism. She brought out a volume of Nietzsche’s unpublished writings under the title The Will to Power, which was heralded as the philosophy of Nazism. It was only after the war that scholars discovered what she had done and that his unpublished material was brought out in undistorted form, but by this time his reputation as a proto-Nazi was firmly entrenched in many people’s minds.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in a small village called Röken in Prussian Saxony in October of 1844. He was born on the king’s birthday (Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia) and his parents named him after the king. Interestingly, he didn’t learn to speak until he was two and a half years old. He was the first born of three children. His brother Joseph died in infancy. His father Karl was a Lutheran clergyman, and he came from a long line of clergymen. Nietzsche’s mother also came from a long line of clergymen and young Friedrich was very much expected, by both parents and their entire family, to follow in the same career.

In 1849 Nietzsche’s father died at the age of 35; “brain softening” was the diagnosis (symptoms included extreme depression, paralysis, and convulsions). Nietzsche had been very close to his father. In 1850 Nietzsche’s younger brother Joseph also died, leaving Nietzsche to grow up with his mother, Franziska, his younger sister Elisabeth, and two unmarried aunts. There was also an elderly maid in the Nietzsche household. In spite of the deaths of his father and brother, Nietzsche later reported to having had a basically happy childhood. He would later say that some of his best childhood memories were of him being in his father’s—then later his grandfather’s— study, surrounded by books. After the death of his father, his mother was forced for financial reasons to leave Röken and move to the nearby town of Naumburg, population 15,000, where the family moved into a small apartment. After nine years she managed to buy a home, occasionally taking in boarders to make a bit of money.

In 1858 Nietzsche received a scholarship to study at a prestigious preparatory school named Pforta, with the intention of entering the clergy. The atmosphere of the school was dominated by classicism (plenty of Greek and Latin) and Prussian militarism. There he especially excelled in religious studies, German literature, and classical studies. He did not do so well in math; in fact upon Nietzsche’s graduation his math teacher wanted to refuse his graduation. Nietzsche largely excelled at this school, although he didn’t particularly enjoy his experience there. He had always been a very serious child, very hard working, and with an aristocratic bearing. He was quite different from other kids; he became very focused on self-mastery and was somewhat reclusive. The kids at school called him “the little minister.” One of his childhood peers later wrote this of him: “His fundamental character trait was a certain melancholy, which was apparent in his whole being. From earliest childhood onwards he liked solitude, and used it to give himself up to his own thoughts…. He had a very pious and profound mind, and, as a child, he was already reflecting on many subjects to which most boys of his age pay no attention…. As a small boy he occupied himself with many kinds of games, which he had invented himself…. So he took the lead in all our games, introducing new methods which made them more entertaining and more varied…. He never did anything without consideration, and whatever he did had a definite and well-grounded purpose…. Among his other principal characteristics were modesty and gratitude…. His modesty often gave rise to a certain shyness, and he felt very ill at ease with strangers” (Hayman, 21).

Very early in life, he developed a love of music and then also of writing. At this time he began to suffer from migraine headaches which would plague him for the rest of his life, along with a series of other maladies, both physical and psychological, probably including irritable bowel. Nietzsche was raised as a Christian, but by the age of eighteen he had begun to experience major doubts. In 1864 he graduated from preparatory school and went to study at the University of Bonn where he majored in theology and classical philology. While a university student, Nietzsche wrote to his mother that he was regarded by the students as “something of a freak” (Hayman, 65): “I am by no means disliked, though I am considered to be something of a scoffer, and ironical…. I can add that I do not consider myself a scoffer, that I am often unhappy and too moody and like being a thorn in the flesh not only to myself but to others” (Hayman, 65). Shortly later, he gave up his plan of entering the clergy, gave up his studies of religion and began studying philosophy at the University of Leipzig. There he developed a special interest in the writings of Kant and Schopenhauer and the music of Richard Wagner who would later become a close friend. He also considered becoming a professional musician at this time. He was very good at piano improvisation. Wagner would become a major influence on Nietzsche’s ideas throughout his career, but especially toward the beginning. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy was dedicated to Wagner and he seems to regarded the older Wagner as a kind of father figure. In his later years Nietzsche would write about Wagner in a more critical way, but early on he regarded Wagner as the embodiment of artistic genius and an individual who might initiate a profound cultural renewal in Europe. Nietzsche at this time was inspired by the idea of creating a small group of cultural elites—including himself and Wagner—who would reinvigorate German culture. Wagner also saw himself in a grand way, a man who thought very highly of himself and his music. Nietzsche became disenchanted with him by the mid-1870s. It seemed to him that Wagner was becoming a cult figure and arrogant, and Wagner was also a strident German nationalist and anti-Semite. He and his wife had surrounded themselves with a circle of friends at first, a group that Nietzsche was a part of, then a crowd of fawning admirers. A cult of personality had grown up around him and Nietzsche wanted no part of it. He certainly didn’t want to be Wagner’s philosophical mouthpiece, which is what he sometimes was in his early writings. He didn’t want to be a disciple of anyone. A philosopher, he came to believe, must never be a disciple but a freethinker. He began to regard his improvisation on the piano as a kind of model for philosophical writing. It would become very important to him to develop a writing style that was distinctive and self-expressive. As he wrote in a couple of letters around this time, “I honestly want never to write again so woodenly and so drily as I did, wearing logical corsets,” and “Above all, some gay spirits in my style must be given back their liberty. I must learn to play on them as on a keyboard, not like pieces I have learned, but impromptus, as free as possible, though always logical and beautiful” (Hayman, 85).

In 1867 Nietzsche was called to serve a required year of military duty in the Prussian army. He never saw any combat, but during his duty with the mounted artillery unit he suffered a severe chest injury due to a riding accident. He was very good on horseback, but his myopia made him a poor judge of distances, even at close range, and one day he threw himself into the saddle so hard that he tore muscles in his chest. He was hospitalized for a month, then released from military service. During the Franco-Prussian war (1870–71), he served for a time as a medical orderly.

In 1869 he was offered a job at the University of Basel, teaching classical philology. This was very unusual, both because he was very young (24) and because he hadn’t completed his Ph.D. He received his doctorate in the same field from the University of Leipzig shortly thereafter, in March 1869, and without an examination or defense. He also gave up his Prussian citizenship at this time and was officially stateless for the rest of his life. In 1872 he published his first book, and it was not well received. In 1876 he took a medical leave from Basel which ended up being permanent in 1879 when he was given a modest pension for six years, subsequently renewed. Thereafter he lived a rather nomadic existence for the rest of his life.

Nietzsche suffered from chronically ill health his entire life: migraine headaches for weeks on end, depression, dizziness, temporary loss of vision, digestive disorders, insomnia—symptoms that “it is now fairly well agreed upon, characterize the tertiary phase of cerebral syphilis” (Allison, 9). As David Allison writes, “The question of Nietzsche’s illness still remains a matter of some speculation. Two postmortem analyses failed to disclose any syphilitic infection, but the course and development of his symptoms seemed to indicate the likelihood of such an illness” (251). Another biographer, Julian Young, disagrees: “It seems, then, that [Doctor] Sax’s brain tumor diagnosis is no more likely to be true than the syphilis story. Because the theoretical possibility of exhuming Nietzsche’s body and performing an autopsy using the latest medical technology will never be realized, we will never know for certain whether his mental condition was caused by an underlying physical pathology. Nonetheless, the most plausible conclusion appears to be that Nietzsche’s madness was, in fact, a purely psychological condition” (Young, 562). Young speculates that Nietzsche had bipolar disorder, with psychotic features toward the end. Some have speculated that he inherited his disease—whatever it was—from his father, but this is not known. We do know that Nietzsche visited a brothel in 1865, but he claimed that all he did there was play the piano. He did love playing piano his whole life. As mentioned, he was especially good at piano improvisation and he also tried his hand at writing music, which he was not great at.

Nietzsche spent a great deal of time after his departure from Basel traveling through Europe looking for a place to get healthy, which he never did find. Somehow, in spite of his health problems, he had a habit throughout his life of taking very long walks, often for several hours at a time. In these years he was living for the most part in boarding houses, and it was here that he did his writing. Sometimes he wrote by hand, but quite often he would rely on various people to take dictation for him. His habit was to think about ideas while he was walking, and either write them down in a notebook or go back to his room and write there or dictate his notes to someone. He didn’t write at a desk, at least in his later years. From a letter to a friend in 1877: “I walk six to eight hours a day and think out the material which I afterwards throw down on paper, quickly and with complete certainty.” Young adds: “This manner of working—long thoughtful walks, accompanied always by a notebook, followed by short periods of intense writing—became the modus operandi for the rest of his life. His eyes, he thought, demanded it: ‘I have eyesight for about one-and-a-half hours a day…. If I read or write longer a bad attack of pain follows the same day.’ The aphoristic style of nearly all his mature works—he once said he approached philosophical problems like cold baths, fast in and fast out—was thus not merely a literary choice: it was demanded by the condition of his eyes. Or, more accurately, demanded by what he believed about his eyes. For he had already been advised by two doctors, … and would shortly be advised by a third, that the more he used his eyes the closer he would come to complete blindness” (Young, 236). That advice was almost certainly wrong, but he accepted it.

He would for the most part spend summers in Switzerland and winters in Italy: “His last years of sanity were to be spent shifting joylessly from place to place in search of propitious climatic conditions, rather in the way that he moved from one doctor to another, always hopeful that he had made the right decision but seldom making one he did not later regret. Mostly he spent his summers in Upper Engadin, believing the altitude to be good for him, and his winters near the Mediterranean, where it was not so cold, if not warm enough to live comfortably in unheated rooms, as he mostly did, feeling too poor to pay for heating” (Hayman, 213). He wasn’t exactly poor, but he was living on a modest pension. He was especially drawn toward mountains, forests, and bodies of water. His ill health was probably made worse by his habit of concocting homemade medicines to alleviate pain.

In 1882 he met and immediately fell in love with a woman named Lou (Louise) Salome. She rejected his three marriage proposals, probably wisely. She was a twenty-one-year-old Russian immigrant (sixteen years younger than Nietzsche) and a student at the University of Zurich. Prior to this, in 1876, he had met and quickly proposed to another woman, who also refused him. While he would often write very derogatively of women and marriage, he also seems very much to have wanted to marry, at least at certain times even though it didn’t fit easily with his view of himself as a wanderer.

Throughout the 1870s and 80s, his books did not sell well and made little impression in the philosophical world. By the end of his sane life he was not well known and he was making very little money on his books, some of which he had to subsidize himself. In the case of Beyond Good and Evil (BGE), his publisher didn’t even want it and he was forced to have it printed at his own expense. It was, in effect, self-published and it started to produce a bit of a reaction, but not much. He wrote in a letter to a friend: “Let us assume that people will be permitted to read it [BGE] in about the year 2000.” This would have been hard to take for someone who regarded himself as a “destiny,” a word he often used when speaking of himself. His “destiny” or “task” was nothing less than to create a kind of revolution in thought. Solving the problem of nihilism, as Allison points out, was his mission: “What motivated Nietzsche to assiduously pursue such an audience was his deep conviction that he, perhaps more than anyone else at the time, was in possession of a newly emergent truth—one he experienced and internalized as a veritable trauma—namely, that the world was on the brink of a completely unfathomable disruption and dislocation. It was his recognition that the very foundations of Western culture were being withdrawn: the God of the West, who for millennia on end had served humanity as the font of traditional faith, as the creative source of all being, truth, and moral value, was no longer credible to the scientifically educated classes of late nineteenth-century Europe. If the ‘death of God’ is perhaps the foremost cultural concern in Nietzsche’s work, it is precisely his response to this ‘greatest event in history’ that governs the detailed analyses of his more general reflection” (Allison, viii).

In 1887 and 88 he was working on a large book to be called The Will to Power but abandoned it and had parts of it published as separate books. In January of 1889 he suffered a complete psychological breakdown upon witnessing a coachman cruelly whipping his horse on the streets of Turin, Italy. “On or about January 3, 1889, matters came to a head. Seeing a coachman thrashing his horse with a whip in one of Turin’s piazzas, Nietzsche threw his arms around the horse’s neck, tears streaming from his eyes, and then collapsed onto the ground. The uncanny thing about this story is that, if it is true, Nietzsche partially scripted the scene half a year earlier…. In the middle of a letter to von Seydlitz, he abruptly breaks off chatting about mundane things to recount a vision of ‘moral tearfulness’ that came to him out of the blue: ‘winter landscape. An old coachman with an expression of the most brutal cynicism, harder than the surrounding winter, urinates on his horse. The horse, the poor, ravaged creature, looks around, thankful, very thankful.’ An even more exact script for the scene … is to be found in Crime and Punishment [which Nietzsche read], where Raskolnikov has a dream in which, overcome by compassion, he throws his arms around a horse that has been beaten to death…. The reliability of the horse story has been questioned on the grounds that the original source is an anonymous newspaper article written eleven years after the supposed event. Yet it does have a ring of truth for, as we have seen, Nietzsche had an unusually powerful disposition to compassion … and had always been easily moved to tears” (Young, 531–2). After this breakdown he had moments of lucidity, during which he was said to be cheerful and could engage in conversation, but these moments became fewer and fewer, until he became completely incapacitated and was taken care of, first, by his mother and then by his sister. In 1900 he died of a stroke several weeks before he would have turned 56. Elisabeth gave him a traditional Lutheran funeral, which would have enraged him. She was also quite wealthy at this point because of his increasing fame.

As far as influences on his ideas go, these are few. In his early days, he was impressed by Kant, Schopenhauer, and Wagner, but it is hard to say which of their ideas actually influenced his thought for long. In later years he admired Spinoza, Montaigne, Dostoevsky, and a few others, but not many. He was well aware of Darwin and influenced somewhat by him, but most of his remarks about Darwin are critical. His writings often give the impression that he wasn’t influenced by anyone. He read a little about eastern thought, and it intrigued him, but very little real knowledge of this was available in the western world at the time. He never read Kierkegaard; likely he never heard of him except for a letter a friend sent to him toward the end of his sane life, but he was a voracious reader throughout life, when his eyes were up to the task.

Nietzsche’s style

It’s not a straightforward question how we should take Nietzsche and the spirit in which we ought to approach Nietzsche’s texts. In the case of BGE, for example, we are expecting a philosophical treatise, and it begins this way: “Supposing truth is a woman—what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? That the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won—and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground— even more, that all dogmatism is dying” (p. 1). What is this? Whatever is going on here, it isn’t a formal treatise. Nietzsche didn’t write treatises, or not after The Birth of Tragedy. That book wasn’t well received, and he probably took this hard. His response was essentially to “become himself” even more and to write in his own style, complete with aphorisms, hyperbole, high rhetorical flights, outrageous opinionatedness, and frequent autobiographical pieces.

The Birth of Tragedy appeared in 1872 and a decade later he published The Gay Science (or Joyful Wisdom), which is a collection of 383 aphorisms of varying length, from a few lines to several pages. There is very little sense of overall organization in the book or any larger argument. It looks like scattered reflections and to some extent so does BGE. The overall effect is not a result of poor organization. Everything about Nietzsche’s writing is carefully thought out and also excessive—purposely. For Nietzsche, writing is essentially an act of personal selfexpression—and this means all writing, not just fiction but philosophical writing no less. Nietzsche thought of BGE, and all his books, as literary works of art. They are not sober treatises written in the usual philosophical way: looking for definitions, analyzing arguments, looking to see whether conclusions follow logically from true premises, etc. Why not? Because Nietzsche had an unusual view of what philosophy itself is and what the philosopher’s role in a culture properly is.

Philosophy is the “personal confession” of its author, and it calls for an equally personal interpretation on the part of the reader. His text doesn’t simply mean whatever you want it to mean, but it isn’t 2 + 2 = 4 either. Reading philosophy is like listening to music, Nietzsche believes. It involves the whole person of the reader, not just the head but the body. This is what the person is: a body with a capacity for thought, but our thought, or our mind, is not disconnected from our body. Nietzsche himself spent his whole life trying to get healthy and his ideas are similarly meant to embody health or a life-affirming view of human existence. Ideas always have this quality of being expressive of life in a healthy condition or in a declining condition, and usually the latter. Philosophy is personal, as he sees it. Of the books he wrote his favorite book was also his most personal one: Thus Spoke Zarathustra which was written immediately before BGE. It tells the story of Zarathustra—not the historical figure (the founder of Zoroastrianism) but a fictional character Nietzsche conceived as an embodiment of his ideas. The book is written in mostly dialogue form, and it tells the story of how Zarathustra leaves the city and goes to live on a mountaintop, alone. There is a town in the valley below and Zarathustra occasionally goes down to this town to teach his wisdom, which the people completely reject, at which point he returns to his mountaintop and talks to animals and a succession of unusual characters. This reflected what was happening in Nietzsche’s own life. He was living an increasingly isolated existence, his social contacts becoming few in number. He kept up a very active correspondence with friends, but writing letters is not the best form of social contact. Zarathustra embodies Nietzsche’s solitude—which he loved but also didn’t love. He was not an antisocial person at all, on the contrary, but after his departure from the University of Basel his sense of isolation grew as he traveled from place to place, never settling down anywhere. The philosopher is a solitary wanderer—in thought, but in Nietzsche’s case not only in thought. In a letter to a friend from 1885, speaking of his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra which he had just finished: ‘“It is a beginning at self-disclosure—nothing more! I know perfectly well that there is no one alive who could write anything like Zarathustra.’ In the same vein, he told Peter Gast that ‘It is incredibly full of detail which, because it is drawn from what I’ve seen and suffered, only I can understand. Some pages seem to be almost bleeding.’ Doubtless, then, Zarathustra was an intensely personal work—and due in part to this, it is often enigmatic and extremely difficult to comprehend: ‘At the moment Zarathustra’s value is entirely personal…. For everyone else, it is obscure, mysterious, and ridiculous. Heinrich von Stein … told me candidly that of said Zarathustra, he understood “twelve sentences and no more.” I found that very comforting’” (Allison, 111).

Ideally the philosopher is also a “cultural physician,” a kind of artist, a secular prophet, and a cultural revolutionary. Here’s an example of Nietzsche playing the role of cultural physician: “Anyone who has looked deeply into the world may guess how much wisdom lies in the superficiality of men. The instinct that preserves them teaches them to be flighty, light, and false. Here and there one encounters an impassioned and exaggerated worship of ‘pure forms,’ among both philosophers and artists: let nobody doubt that whoever stands that much in need of the cult of surfaces must at some time have reached beneath them with disastrous results” (p. 71). Modern culture is a cult of surfaces, shallow and inauthentic. This is symptomatic of a deeper pathology: nihilism. It is the job of the philosopher to see this, to understand what nihilism is from its roots and how it came to pass, and to think about what is to be done about it. This is not a modest role and Nietzsche was not a particularly modest man. Outwardly he was, but he had an extremely ambitious view of his “task.” Nor was he an egalitarian. He was an unapologetic antiegalitarian and also something of a misogynist. He was a very harsh critic of other philosophers, of common trends of his day and of the whole state of modern culture. Modern European culture as he saw it had reached a dead end, which he summarized in one word: nihilism. Nothing holds any meaning for us anymore. We no longer know what we can believe in. “God is dead,” and we have killed him—meaning that all the old worldviews and belief systems no longer stand up to critical scrutiny. We no longer have convictions, or a right to hold any. Our ideals of old have deteriorated into idols and empty slogans. This situation in the realm of ideas amounts to a profound cultural and also personal crisis. Nietzsche was a profoundly skeptical philosopher, somewhat in the tradition of a Descartes or a Hume but in a very different way. He was skeptical of all the great world religions (particularly Christianity), all metaphysics and epistemology (rationalism, empiricism, materialism, idealism, positivism, etc.), moral systems, both old and new (Judeo-Christian, utilitarian, Kantian, etc.), political ideals both old and new (liberalism, socialism, nationalism). In general terms, modern culture and modern ideas in general had reached the end of the road. The state of modern culture was one of meaninglessness, mediocrity, and a drift toward nothingness, and it becomes the task of the thinker and also the artist—it became Nietzsche’s task—to revolutionize the modern age through the power of ideas and also through the power of art, Wagner in music and Nietzsche in philosophy—until their falling out.

More on the writing style

What Nietzsche had to say is not the kind of thing that philosophers usually write, then or now, and it did not lend itself to the formal treatise form. He felt like he had not only to persuade his readers but to wake them up from the condition of ennui and intellectual laziness that, as he saw it, they suffered from—hence the shocking, deliberatively excessive and provocative style. He wants to provoke strong reactions from his readers, and he succeeded. Readers tend either to love Nietzsche or to despise him. You can’t be indifferent, and you certainly can’t be bored. He was also writing for a future audience—for a twentieth-century audience because he had quite given up on his contemporaries, or he claimed to. Nietzsche’s intended audience did not exist yet. He wrote—or so he said, repeatedly—for “philosophers of the future.” He wrote for an audience of like-minded souls, which he didn’t observe anywhere in the Europe of his time. His intended reader is the sort of person he regards as a creative and noble individual, and since these people are rare at present, he is writing for an audience of the future.

Many find Nietzsche’s style to be difficult, and it is intentionally difficult. As he puts it, “I obviously do everything to be ‘hard to understand’ myself!” (39) Why? Again, because Nietzsche was writing not for just anyone but for a specific type of person. He insisted he is an “untimely” philosopher—many years before his time—and, in a way, he was. He was writing for the philosophers of the future and he wanted his readers to read his books as they would listen to a Wagnerian opera, and preferably to memorize every word.

What we also see in Nietzsche’s style of writing is an unusual jumping from topic to topic. In the course of an entire book, there is a large train of thought, or line of argument, but within a chapter he changes the subject very quickly and very often. He often changes his style too. If the topic is morality, for example, he will jump from an aphorism on Kant to a sentence or two on Spinoza, to Aristotle, to Greek tragedy, Christianity, etc. He doesn’t, as we might say, “stay on topic,” which is what we are used to expecting of a philosopher: if you’re going to criticize Kant, then do so, but give us a sustained line of argument over a number of pages. Nietzsche often prefers to take more of a hit and run approach. Why does he do this? In part, because of the cold bath approach but also because this reflects what he believes to be the nature of thinking and knowledge. It is characteristic of our knowledge that we examine or interpret an object now from one point of view and now from another, and another, etc. The more perspectives we bring to bear on our object, the richer our knowledge of it becomes. We’ll return to this when we look at his “perspectivism.” Also, sometimes a very concise criticism can produce an effect on readers that a more sober and sustained line of argument cannot. It provokes us; if it is well executed, it forces us to think in a way we might not otherwise. It gets through our defenses quickly. The problem with the hit and run critique is that it can look careless and sloppy. Nietzsche’s writing was anything but careless. He does mean us to take these criticisms seriously, but he also wants to provoke us, to be a kind of Socratic gadfly or to get under the reader’s skin in a way we don’t usually expect in philosophy.

Finally, because of the deeply personal nature of Nietzsche’s writing, it appears as if Nietzsche is speaking directly to us, to me. David Allison writes, “Perhaps more than any other philosopher who readily comes to mind, Nietzsche writes exclusively for you. Not at you, but for you. For you, the reader” (vii). The boundary between author and reader is very fine; he seems to write for us, rather in the way that a religious text sometimes gives the impression that it was written directly for the individual reader. This is one reason why his writings have been interpreted in wildly different ways.

Nietzsche’s critique of modern philosophy

Nietzsche would apply his critique of philosophy and philosophers to the entire tradition stemming from Socrates. The philosophers of the nineteenth century and prior had, he thought, committed errors so numerous that listing them all is an impossible task. Let’s focus on several of the major critiques from which many of the smaller and more specific criticisms are derived, beginning with the general enervation or exhaustion of philosophy itself that he believed to be something of an epidemic by his time. The roots of this enervation, Nietzsche believed, extend many centuries prior to his own, in the philosophical systems of Plato and Aristotle as well as in the person of Socrates. What the ancient Greek period represents, for Nietzsche, is not a transition “from mythos to logos” but “a decline of the instincts” and the decisive triumph of the Apollonian (rational) over the Dionysian (passionate). Philosophical thinking invariably is an instinctive activity of sorts, a form of self-expression not unlike the artistic. If Greek tragedy represented, in Nietzsche’s view, the supreme achievement of ancient culture, it was because of its power to combine the rational spirit of the Apollonian with the instinctive power of the Dionysian. It was this combination of conflicting psychological attitudes and the creative tension between them that made ancient Greek culture great. For Nietzsche, the Apollonian symbolizes order, measure, form, clarity, restraint, balance, and reason while the Dionysian symbolizes instinct, sexuality, intoxication, frenzy, madness. “In the end, he argued, the magnificence of classical Greece was due in large part to the frank recognition and acceptance of both attitudes and to the acknowledgement that both attitudes were necessary for the highest state of classical Greek art, tragic drama. Classical tragedy thus achieved a balance of the Dionysian and Apollonian attitudes as a response that mirrored the complexities of human existence, never simply sacrificing one attitude for the other” (Allison, 19). This combination or synthesis was not duplicated by any of the Greek philosophers or any who would follow. Philosophy from this point forward was dominated by dichotomies of reason versus passion, theory versus practice, truth versus falsity, reality versus appearance, necessity versus contingency, good versus evil, and so on, all of which Nietzsche would decisively reject.

What caused this enervation of philosophy? His reply: it was a symptom of a decline of the instincts, the triumph of reason over instinct. Instinct is the only ground from which ideas ever emerge. Philosophy is never a purely rational and cerebral undertaking, although we often pretend that it is. With Socrates began the renunciation of the instincts, of the body and the senses, of appearance and experience in favor of the rational and otherworldly, and the loss of the Dionysian instincts in philosophy led directly to its decline or perhaps its stillbirth, since for Nietzsche there was no time either prior to Socrates or later in which philosophy would synthesize the Apollonian and Dionysian in the manner of ancient tragedy. But this is exactly what he wants from philosophy: a combination of reason and instinct, intellectual rigor and creative imagination. By Nietzsche’s time, philosophers had become what he considered arid scholastics and specialists. He complains of this quite often, especially in Part 6 of BGE, “We Scholars.” Here are a couple of examples: “The dangers for a philosopher’s development are indeed so manifold today that one may doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The scope and the tower-building of the sciences has grown to be enormous, and with this also the probability that the philosopher grows weary while still learning or allows himself to be detained somewhere to become a ‘specialist’—so he never attains his proper level, the height for a comprehensive look, for looking around, for looking down”; “Genuine philosophers, however, are commanders and legislators; they say, ‘thus it shall be! They first determine the Whither and For What of man, and in so doing have at their disposal the preliminary labor of all philosophical laborers, all who have overcome the past. With a creative hand they reach for the future, and all that is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a hammer. Their ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is—will to power” (p. 136).

Nietzsche would often separate philosophers from what he variously called scholars, critics, historians, scientists, and philosophical laborers, all of whom far outnumbered the philosopher. The genuine philosopher in all times and places is rare, Nietzsche insists. The philosopher is a fundamentally creative and free spirit, beholden to no values or judgments that are not of one’s own explicit fashioning. The typical academic of Nietzsche’s time follows a trajectory of someone else’s design and values that they neither created nor chose. Countless remarks like these may be found in Nietzsche’s other works and what they clearly signify is a lament for philosophy itself and the disappearance of an ideal among those who were calling themselves philosophers. The note of contempt in such remarks is consistent and unmistakable: “For this is the truth [says Zarathustra]: I have left the house of scholars and slammed the door behind me” (Z, p. 147). This is exactly what Nietzsche himself felt about his departure from the university.

Why this note of contempt, we might ask? Is this just symptomatic of a cantankerous personality or is there a properly philosophical point to this? There is indeed a point, and to see it we need to understand Nietzsche’s very ambitious conception of philosophy and the philosopher and how the thought of his day quite obviously fell short of this ideal. It fell short as well of philosophy’s original self-understanding as the love of wisdom. The philosopher’s role, as Nietzsche saw it, essentially involves inventiveness, value-creation, critical questioning, depth of understanding, breadth of vision, and responsibility for one’s culture. The academic of the nineteenth century lacked not one but all of these qualities, Nietzsche believed. The kind of work they did required a narrowing of vision, a focused and very limited range of knowledge, and a self-restraint that is antithetical to free-spirited questioning. Fundamentally, they are servants of received thought: analysts and systematizers, commentators, followers and managers of other people’s ideas. As he expresses it, “It is for these investigators to make everything that has happened and been esteemed so far easy to look over, easy to think over, intelligible and manageable, to abbreviate everything long, even ‘time,’ and to overcome the entire past” (p. 136). The philosophers of Nietzsche’s time were “mere spectators in everything,” as Zarathustra put it: “Like those who stand in the street and stare at the people passing by, so they too wait and stare at thoughts that others have thought.” Nietzsche would qualify this by suggesting that the philosopher’s education must include a certain amount of scholarly labor as a precondition for original thought, yet a precondition is all that it is. It was necessary to a philosopher’s development that they master the skills of the scholar, critic, historian, and what have you, “to be able to see with many different eyes and consciences, from a height and into every distance” (p. 136). Creative thought requires that we stand on others’ shoulders, but as a means of finding a voice of our own, not in order to become lifelong followers and disciples. This failure of the professors to rise above the condition of laborer results in them adopting the beliefs and values of the past as a kind of dogma or faith, but this is a faith that does not realize it is a faith. It tends to regard itself as at the furthest remove from faith; it represents a call to rational order, to certain truth and justice. It thinks of itself as a rejection of appearances and uncertainty, of unreasoning faith and prejudice of any kind.

Nietzsche’s reply is that the philosophers are one and all believers in a particular kind of faith, but what kind of faith is this? He calls it “the faith in opposite values”—the faith in an endless series of dichotomies whose values are hierarchically ordered and unquestioned. The list is long: reality/appearance, truth/falsehood, objectivity/subjectivity, absolute/relative, rational/irrational, necessary/contingent, theory/practice, body/mind, life/death, nature/culture, good/evil, male/female, public/private, and so on. In failing to question these dichotomies, philosophers fall into a kind of orthodoxy. Ideas, for Nietzsche, are always inventions, symbols, and expressions of a particular human type, but philosophers have by and large come to regard the concepts they analyze as something timeless and outside of history, something objective and fixed in their meaning. When any idea is regarded this way, that idea can be analyzed and systematized, but it tends not to be questioned, or not fundamentally. This gets us to the heart of Nietzsche’s critique: “You ask me about the idiosyncrasies of philosophers?... There is their lack of historical sense, their hatred of even the idea of becoming, their Egyptianism. They think they are doing a thing honour when they dehistoricize it, sub specie aeterni—when they make a mummy of it. All that philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has escaped from their hands alive.” Such philosophers are “conceptual idolaters” (Twilight, 45); “they have trusted in concepts as completely as they have mistrusted the senses: they have not stopped to consider that concepts and words are our inheritance from ages in which thinking was very modest and unclear” (WP, p. 220).

There is a tendency toward historical forgetfulness that causes philosophy to deteriorate into scholasticism and idolatry. This kind of forgetfulness had caused the classical love of wisdom to become transformed into an orthodoxy of received concepts and values. For Nietzsche, it is the thinker’s task to philosophize with a hammer, which always means not to demolish ideas but to question them in a radically undogmatic way, to sound out all received ideas as one applies a tuning fork. This is precisely what his contemporaries had failed to do, leaving philosophy with an altogether false objectivism of reified symbols and unquestioned values. This lack of historical consciousness contributed to philosophy’s reduction in the modern period to the theory of knowledge with its false notions of objectivity, certainty, and epistemic foundations. A philosophy that is free-spirited and questioning has no chance under these conditions. In the name of objectivity and reason, philosophy had succumbed to what Zarathustra would call the “spirit of gravity.” Philosophy had become a solemn business indeed, and it required from the thinker a painstaking sobriety and a seriousness of purpose not unlike that of the priest, to whom Nietzsche often compared modern philosophers. It also required an increasingly minute division of intellectual labor which had the effect of narrowing our vision and hemming thought within ever smaller specialties.

Nietzsche’s critique of his contemporaries included even the personal failings of philosophers. He would often remark upon “the self-glorification and self-exaltation of scholars.” Philosophers had become vain and petty careerists who are basically indifferent to what is happening to the world. They had become uncreative and uninspired, a profession of intellectual conformists and self-seeking professionals. There was no sense of urgency in their writings, nothing free-spirited and inventive about it. Nietzsche would often emphasize the responsibility of the philosopher where this was a wide responsibility for the culture of which one is a part. Nietzsche’s philosopher, as he would say of himself, is a psychologist of sorts and “cultural physician,” one responsible for the detection of maladies such as the nihilism that he himself diagnosed as a widespread condition of the modern west. It is a responsibility that includes pronouncing a verdict on how the general culture is faring, and indeed on the value of human life itself. Philosophy should not shy away from such questions but take them up in the boldest spirit possible, even while we recognize how contestable our answers will inevitably be. Philosophy properly concerns itself with cultural and existential problems, the scope and depth of which transcend all specialized inquiry. Philosophers are charged not only with interpreting culture but with getting out in front of it and supplying it with a new direction.

He would also emphasize the difficulty of philosophical thinking. It is difficult for a few reasons, primarily because of its creative dimension and its broad-ranging responsibility. This is not a responsibility everyone wants. The philosopher’s untimeliness—his being “of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow”—adds to the difficulty of the task. Such a thinker invariably stands opposed to the ideals of their time and their responsibility is to sound out these ideals for signs of their deterioration into idols and also to create new ideals. Thinking itself is an essentially creative, experimental, and free-spirited activity, one that leads us into adopting a variety of perspectives without adopting any of them as final. These “new philosophers” or “philosophers of the future”—whom Nietzsche hoped to be on the way—were “men of experiments,” “attempters,” “very free spirits.” They are to be posers of questions and lovers of masks in addition to being “friends of ‘truth.’” Nietzsche’s philosopher is a solitary and inventive individual, strong in will and fated in every case to swim against the current of the present.

Next, let’s look at some more specific criticisms of modern philosophy. He makes about 1000 of them, so we’ll need to be selective. Let’s begin with the critique of human nature (the individual). A great deal of modern philosophy concerns the subject, the self, or the individual. For example, Descartes’ meditator is an individual, thinking is asocial, and what we know directly are our own ideas. The first proposition known with certainty is that “I think, I am.” Another example is Hobbes’ individual who is the foundation of politics; for Hobbes, the truth of the human condition is the presocial individual in the state of nature, and this is a common premise of modern philosophy: human nature is what it is, it’s timeless, universal, ahistorical, asocial, and metaphysically knowable. Nietzsche’s reply: all of this is false. What is the essence of the human being? What makes a human being human, and so distinguishes us from other species? There is nothing, no property of the human being, that makes us human. There is no essence of human nature; there are no essences period. The notion of an essence is the idea of something that is what it is apart from our culture, our history, our individuality. It’s not perceptible, yet it is supposed to constitute the deepest part of our being. Why did we ever think that there are such essences or that a single property that can be neatly distinguished from a thing’s accidental properties? When I reflect on myself—who or what I take myself to be—I have no experience of trying to separate an essence from the rest of my qualities. When I reflect on myself, it seems closer to the truth that I am making a decision than a discovery. I am deciding who I am going to be. This is more of an aspiration or an invention—like creating a work of art—than objective discovery. A metaphysical account of the self, then, is impossible. The self is more becoming than being, because what we ultimately are is up to us to decide. What is ultimate about me is not a metaphysical given. It’s not fixed, ahistorical, or beyond the reach of my will. The human being is the “as yet undetermined animal” (p. 74), that is, it’s undetermined by a mysterious soul-substance, by biology, by environment, conditioning, culture, language, social relationships, or anything else. In the case of the well-lived human life, one “gives style to one’s character,” and is able to say of one’s own life, “Thus I willed it.” Nehamas summarizes the point this way: “The self, according to Nietzsche, is not a stable, constant entity. On the contrary, it is something one becomes, something, he would even say, one constructs. A person consists of absolutely everything one thinks, wants, and does. But a person worthy of admiration, a person who has (or is) a self, is one whose thoughts, desires, and actions are not haphazard but are instead connected to one another in the intimate way that indicates in all cases the presence of style. A self is just a set of coherently connected episodes, and an admirable self, as Nietzsche insists again and again, consists of a large number of powerful and conflicting tendencies that are controlled and harmonized. Coherence, of course, can also be produced by weakness, mediocrity, and one-dimensionality. But style, which is what Nietzsche requires and admires, involves controlled multiplicity and resolved conflict. It still, however, does not seem to require what we generally consider moral character” (Nehamas, 7). Nietzsche is going to offer more of an existential and moral description of the self than a metaphysical or essentialist one, and this will later give rise to a morality of self-realization. Modern moral philosophy is often individualistic—an individualism that is both metaphysical (Descartes, Hobbes) and moral (Hobbes, Locke, Mill). Nietzsche is also an individualist, but his individualism is an existential and moral idea, not a metaphysical one. There can be, on his view, no metaphysics of the human being. There can be no metaphysics, period—no objective philosophical account of the world.

The critique of modern epistemology and metaphysics

This critique also expresses a very broad-ranging skepticism as we find Nietzsche offering a host of skeptical refutations of rationalism, empiricism, and various other doctrines, including what has come to be called foundationalism—the idea that the sum total of human knowledge has a single, absolute foundation. For Nietzsche, this is an impossible conception of knowledge. The kind of absolute certainty that Descartes wanted is impossible. What is to replace foundationalist epistemology? His answer: perspectivism.

Here are some typical passages from BGE where this skepticism is expressed. Regarding his critique of binary oppositions (a critique that has had a profound influence on a great deal of contemporary continental philosophy): “The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values. It has not even occurred to the most cautious among them that one might have a doubt right here at the threshold where it was surely most necessary—even if they vowed to themselves, [‘All is to be doubted’]” (p. 10). Also, “Even if language, here as elsewhere, will not get over its awkwardness, and will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many subtleties of gradation; even if the inveterate Tartuffery of morals, which now belongs to our unconquerable ‘flesh and blood,’ infects the words even of those of us who know better— here and there we understand it and laugh at the way in which precisely science at its best seeks most to keep us in this simplified, thoroughly artificial, suitably constructed and suitably falsified world—at the way in which, willy-nilly, it loves error, because, being alive, it loves life” (p. 35).

Some other examples (you can find the complete passages in BGE) are as follows. His critique of Descartes’ cogito: p. 23, “When I analyze … certainty for me.”

His critique of logic: p. 24, “With regard to … consequently—.”

His conception of knowledge as “falsification” and self-expression: p. 11, “… most of the conscious … ‘measure of things’”; p. 12-13, “What provokes one … to mock itself”; p. 13, “Gradually it has … plant had grown”; p. 14. “In the philosopher … to each other.”

Here he is questioning the value of truth—interestingly not the nature but the value of truth: p. 9,

“What in us … before the problem?”

His notion of the will to power: p. 16, “It always creates … the causa prima”; p. 21,

“Physiologists should think … frequent results”; p. 48, “Suppose, finally, … and nothing else”; p. 203, “Here we must beware … is will to power.”

His conception of knowledge as an imposition of symbols and will to power: p. 29, “In the ‘in itself’ … and weak wills”; p. 136, “Genuine philosophers … will to power.”

His view of scientific knowledge as interpretation: p. 21, “It is perhaps … world-explanation.”

Perspectivism

To know something is to interpret one’s object in a manner that is contingent at once on history and language, on values and the requirements of a certain kind of life, and on point of view or perspective. Knowing the world is not to be thought of on the model of unconditioned subjectivity (mind) encountering an uninterpreted reality, as an objective beholding of what is there, or a mirroring relation made possible by some method or other. What is—what has being for us—has always already been interpreted, classified, and revealed in ways that reflect our historical heritage. Interpretation belongs to experience in general and from the outset, interpretations that are value- and theory-laden, partial, interested, incomplete, and uncertain. Interpretation occurs from a finite perspective, one that reveals the interpreted object in a particular aspect while also constituting the being of that object. If philosophy is an interpretive art then it ought to be unabashedly so, a “gay science” of free-spirited questioning and provocations, of “dangerous maybes” and Dionysian excess.

Of the many ideas that twentieth-century continental philosophy owes to Nietzsche, none is more important than the concept of perspective itself. The hypothesis that knowing invariably occurs from a finite point of view applies to scientific and philosophical no less than to the various other ways of knowing the world, and it applies also to moral and political thought. It is not a condition from which any technique of reflection could ever deliver us.

Nietzsche placed the concepts of interpretation and perspective in the center of his philosophy and through a series of skeptical arguments he tried to undermine the idea that the philosopher could behold the universe as an omniscient God might, which is from an absolutely unconditioned point of view or indeed from no point of view. Nietzsche’s “death of God” signifies the death of ahistorical, nonperspectival thinking, the death of the absolute in all its forms, and the realization of human finitude. All apparent certainties, for Nietzsche, are products of historical and linguistic mediation. What we call a “self-evident truth” is a proposition that fits easily into an existing historical schematism and on which many other propositions depend. Its self-evident appearance is a consequence of historical forgetfulness and is in every case illusory. Being is not external to consciousness, nor the reverse. What we perceive and know of the world is the particular aspect of it that a finite point of view renders visible, not the totality. The very concept of totality or being “in itself” is unintelligible, since apart from subjectivity it is quite literally unthinkable. Knowing an object, for Nietzsche, means relating it to the interpreter, viewing it under a particular aspect and in relation to an existing framework of language and concepts. It involves in every case viewing the object from a perspective that constitutes the being of the object. Nietzsche’s way of putting this is that “we possess the concept ‘being,’ ‘thing,’ only as a relational concept” (WTP, p. 313). Being in itself is an empty notion. What has being for us is never a simple matter of the way things are. Instead, the way things are is the mode in which they manifest themselves to the occupants of a particular standpoint. As Alexander Nehamas puts it, “Nietzsche’s central problem as an author, therefore, is that he wants his readers to accept his views, his judgments and his values as much as he wants them to know that these are essentially his views, his judgments, and his values. As least some of his preoccupation with the problem of his proper audience springs from his desire to have as readers only those who will always be aware of the nature of his views, and of all views in general. He is constantly resisting the dogmatic self-effacement that is directed at convincing an audience that the views with which they are presented are not their authors’ creations but simply reflections of the way things are” (Nehamas, 35).

Perspective is “the basic condition of all life,” including all knowing (BGE, p. 2). “The perspective therefore decides the character of the ‘appearance’” (WTP, p. 305), and where the opposition of appearance and reality is abolished. A couple of passages: “Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject’; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason,’ ‘absolute spirituality,’ ‘knowledge in itself’; these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this—what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?” (GM, p. 19) Another: “Against positivism, which halts at phenomena—‘There are only facts’—I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact ‘in itself’: perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing.... In so far as the word ‘knowledge’ has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings.— ‘Perspectivism’” (WTP, p. 267).

What passes for facts are low-level interpretations that are not presently contested, interpretations that we rely on for pragmatic purposes, and which many, less elementary, propositions depend on. What Nietzsche rejected are not facts in this sense but facts “in themselves” and indeed anything that is “in itself,” whether it be things, being, truth, or knowledge. The “in itself” would be knowable only by God. Perspectivism anticipates what Heidegger would term the “as-structure” of interpretation: to know, understand, or perceive something is always to perceive it as this or that kind of thing, as belonging to a particular category of being. It is never to behold it sub specie aeternitatis or under the aspect of eternity.

What a thing is for us—not merely how it appears but how it is, the manner in which it is manifest to us—is contingent on perspective in the sense of either a language, worldview, disciplinary vocabulary, set of beliefs, values, affects, or will to power. No perspective on any object gives us a privileged view of it but an aspect only. For example, think of any historical event; how do we understand it? It may be interpreted from the point of view of politics or economics, sociology or religion, psychology or morality, or any number of viewpoints and vocabularies. Each perspective, or set of perspectives, opens up a dimension of meaning while closing off others. Each raises particular questions while dismissing others as irrelevant, yet none gives us a uniquely and supremely authoritative knowledge of that event, or one that could encompass everything that can be known of it. The same can be said of any interpreted object: in being known, it is revealed to us in a particular and limited aspect. As Nehamas writes: “Perspectivism implies that in order to engage in any activity we must necessarily occupy ourselves with a selection of material and exclude much from our consideration. It does not imply that we see or know an appearance of the world instead of that world itself.... What is seen is simply the world itself ... from that perspective” (p. 50).

Nietzsche would also emphasize the “falsification” of consciousness, a theme that Nietzsche regarded as essential to his perspectivism. Interpretation arranges, orders, forms, evaluates, simplifies, and so constitutes its object, and in doing so it “participates in Being” (Jean Granier: 190–2). To cite Granier, “Each appearance is an apparition—that is, a real manifestation—and there is nothing to look for beyond these manifestations. To be is to appear—not in the sense that appearing is the equivalent of Being, but in that every apparition is a revelation of Being.” A good interpretation is faithful to its object while also involving what Granier calls “some creative initiative on the part of the interpreter.” A common tendency of thought is to overlook this initiative or deny it outright, thus regarding our perspectival categories as categories of the object in itself. As the same scholar writes, “knowledge is a relation, and an absolute would cease to be absolute if it sustained a relation to an other being outside itself.” Yet posit the “in itself” and identify it with the aspect that a contingent mode of access makes visible is both commonplace and the essence of falsification. Knowing always involves simplifying our object. It involves an imposition of stability and a call to order, an appropriation that captures the dimension of the thing that serves our interests. It is a fundamentally interested (self-interested and self-serving) and artificial arrangement that comes into view, one that includes a large amount of “forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, investing, falsifying, and whatever else is of the essence of interpreting” (GM, p. 151). When Nietzsche spoke of interpretation he would always accent the element of falsification and distortion. This does not mean that we have failed to “get it right” in the sense of accurately representing being in itself but that we have compressed the manifold into an expedient classification. The order of the world is illusory in the sense that it is a consequence of centuries of arrangement, unification, and simplification according to “a scheme that we cannot throw off” on account of its practical utility (WTP, p. 283). As Nehamas writes, “To engage in any activity, and in particular in any inquiry, we must inevitably be selective. We must bring some things into the foreground and distance others into the background. We must assign a greater relative importance to some things than we do to others, and still others we must completely ignore. We do not, and cannot, begin (or end) with ‘all the data’” (Nehamas, 49).

Language, for instance, imposes a certain order or arrangement on experience, as does logic, science, and common sense. “The naiveté was to take an anthropocentric idiosyncracy as the measure of things, as the rule for determining ‘real’ and ‘unreal’: in short, to make absolute something conditioned” (WTP, p. 315). Concepts “are interpreted into things” (WTP, p. 323); they are impositions and projections that suit those occupying a particular standpoint, and impositions that we do not regard as such. It is the nature of knowledge that it serves life, or a particular form of it. It is a condition of the knower’s existence. Every interpretive framework furthers the interests of its adherents and makes it possible to “‘know’ (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species” (GS, p. 300). Modern epistemology had entirely overlooked not only the perspectival but the self-serving dimension of knowledge. It insisted that if only we bring our thought into conformity with the correct method then all interests and all subjectivity can be overcome. This, in his view, is an illusion.

Disinterest, objectivity, and detachment were regular targets of Nietzsche’s skepticism: “We have projected the conditions of our preservation as predicates of being in general. Because we have to be stable in our beliefs if we are to prosper, we have made the ‘real’ world a world not of change and becoming, but one of being” (WTP, p. 276). Also, “The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment; in this respect our new language may sound strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating” (BGE, p. 11). “The inventive force that invented categories labored in the service of our needs, namely of our need for security, for quick understanding on the basis of signs and sounds, for means of abbreviation:—‘substance,’ ‘subject,’ ‘object,’ ‘being,’ ‘becoming’ have nothing to do with metaphysical truths” (WTP, p. 277). Passages like this are found throughout Nietzsche’s writings, and what they bring to our attention is the error of projecting what are essentially conditions necessary for the promotion of our practical interests onto being itself. Science no less than religion exists “to suit us,” as a means of “taking possession of things” and achieving “intellectual comfort.” This, in a nutshell, is what most— maybe all—of our thinking pursues: not the objective, disinterested truth—just knowing how things are—but a state of psychological comfort. It takes a psychologically minded philosopher to see this, and a suspicious one. Nietzsche would come to be called (by Paul Ricoeur) a “master of suspicion” along with Marx and Freud, and what we need to be suspicious of, above all, are our highest values: knowledge, truth, objectivity, science, reason, justice, the good.

Nietzsche’s perspectivism maintains that we must conceive of knowledge in terms of the will to knowledge, the will to truth, and inseparable from both, the will to power. Interpretations no less than evaluations and all other forms of human expression are manifestations of the will to power. A vocabulary of domination and conquest would always inform his remarks on knowledge. Knowing is a fundamentally instinctive activity—“the personal confession of its author” in the case of philosophy. There is no eliminating either the perspective or the person of the knower from knowing and the known, and the person taken not merely as a “knowing subject” but as a biological organism. It is the body that thinks and interprets. The intellect does not belong to an order transcending the bodily and the instinctive, nor does it transcend the order of the political. Power, or the will to power, is the basis not only of knowledge but of life as a whole: “A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power” (BGE, p. 21). Knowing is one form in which this is accomplished. What the knower in every case wants is to transform what surrounds it, not merely to behold what is there. Every perspective on the world interprets reality “in order to press it into service,” and in this sense is “a tool of power” (WTP, p. 266). The essentially political language of power and command was offered as a corrective of Enlightenment epistemologies that had spoken of the knowing subject in excessively dispassionate and impersonal terms, as if knowing the truth were a fundamentally passive affair of registering uninterpreted sense impressions or analyzing clear and distinct ideas by means of an impossibly cerebral conception of reason. Nothing about the knower is passive, uncreative, unbiological, ahistorical, or coldly impersonal. It legislates what it sees, classifies and schematizes the world according to its own conditions of existence.

The strong accent on the active, legislative nature of interpretation must not be read in too literal or crude a way, as many of Nietzsche’s critics are inclined to do. The accent on power calls attention to his view that the values and interpretations that issue from a perspective strive not only to express one’s own form of life but to expand its sphere of influence and to constitute as well the world in which others live. It is in this sense that Nietzsche spoke of philosophy as “the most spiritual will to power” and of philosophers as “commanders and legislators,” not to mean that they are petty autocrats of the mind but that their theoretical constructions afford an order to an existence that unto itself is without it. Philosophical interpretations are not alone in this respect. Scientific hypotheses, artistic expressions, religious precepts, moral values, and many other things are likewise expressions of the will to power that are partisan in favor of the interpreter. Ultimately it is “one’s own forms” that one imposes onto the world, and normally without thinking that one is doing so (BGE, p. 203). The task of philosophical reflection is to become aware of this fact. As Maudemarie Clark writes, “What Nietzsche objects to in previous philosophers is not that they read their values into the world, but that they pretended to be doing something else, that they were not ‘honest enough in their work’” (240). This is what he meant when he spoke not only of philosophers but of knowers in general as “advocates who resent that name, ... wily spokesmen for their prejudices which they baptize ‘truths’” (BGE, p. 12–13).

The critique of religion

In broad terms, what is Nietzsche’s objection to religion? Clearly, Nietzsche was an atheist, as many philosophers were by this time (Marx, Feuerbach, the utilitarians, and many others). Even when philosophers were not atheists, they were trying to think philosophically in increasingly secular ways, for instance, about ethics; think of the utilitarians, for whom morality was a secular religion, or a successor to religion. Nietzsche as well wanted to replace religion with a secular philosophy. He was a religious skeptic, but this isn’t saying enough: he was disdainful of religion, he held it in contempt. Why such disdain? What is wrong with religion?

In short, he sees religion as inevitably debasing human existence, with the possible exception of ancient polytheism. In religious worldviews, everything that is transcendent, inspired, noble, creative, and great is projected onto an otherworldly realm, one that is beyond the reach of perception, leaving the human being as the author of everything in our existence that is debased and mediocre. In order to praise God, we must debase ourselves, prostrate ourselves in the face of something transcendent.

Human existence, Nietzsche believes, needs a justification, an answer to the question, why are we here, and especially, why am I here? What is the value of life, and the meaning of it? Something must justify our existence—otherwise we have nihilism—and what justifies our existence is precisely that which we attribute to God. It will become Nietzsche’s project, in a sense, to withdraw the investment human beings have always had in their gods, in an otherworldly dimension, and in an afterlife and reinvest that passion, creativity, and meaning in human existence, and in my personal existence.

For an illustration, think of art, architecture for example. Consider the medieval Gothic cathedral: Notre Dame, or our own St. Mary’s on Johnson Street at Clergy, an excellent local example of a mid-nineteenth-century Gothic-revival Catholic cathedral. In the Christian middle ages, our highest natures—our aspirations, creative forces, ideas, passions—went into the service of religion. Christian thought prevailed, and even art and architecture were the servants of religion, as was philosophy itself. Nietzsche would take a look at a Gothic cathedral and ask, what if we were to take all the energies, the creativity, the passion and inspiration that went into this “house of God” and place it in the service of human life, my life? How different might human life become, how much more creative, vital, passionate, authentic, and noble?

Nietzsche singled out Christianity for special criticism, and he insisted on separating the spirituality of Jesus himself from the religion that later took his name. In speaking of Christianity, he was speaking of the Christian movement that was primarily associated with St. Paul. This is a creed, a set of dogmas, institutions, laws, a set of universal values, and a movement that he views as herd-like. The Christian religion “transformed the symbolic into crudities” (WP, 170). It debased all of us by taking what is vital in human existence and projecting it onto an otherworldly divinity, before whom we debase ourselves.

Nietzsche provided a kind of psychology of religion, especially of religious origins, which anticipates Freud, who a few decades later would attempt much the same. What instinct, he asks, gave rise to religion? He gives a couple of answers: 1. Ressentiment, at least in the case of the nihilistic religions, possible exceptions being pagan religions. Religion is a symptom of resentment against the noble. Ressentiment, he believes, is what the masses feel toward the noble individual. The word means resentment, but Nietzsche prefers the French term which connotes a lingering bitterness, malicious envy, and vengefulness, a reaction to some wound (an apparent slight or insult) that doesn’t go away and that motivates a desire to bring someone down. It’s a psychology that wants to level, to bring down, or to bring down to a state of misery and debasement equal to one’s own. This, he believes, is the basic impulse of religion and of conventional morality, and it can be seen from traditional ways of speaking about immorality. We say things like don’t stand out, don’t step out or get out of line, stray or wander. 2. Second is extreme feelings of power which we assume we ourselves cannot be the cause of. The cause must be divine, we feel, and this assumption debases us. What Nietzsche ultimately wants is to present a nobler, exalted vision of the human being to replace this ancient view. We get a clue here as to what Nietzsche is up to in his philosophical project as a whole. All his major concepts serve a purpose, which is to create a conception of the human being as something that is worthy of reverence. It was suffering and weariness that gave rise to the belief in an afterlife and another world where the thought was, if this life is one of suffering, we’ll have to invent another one. So the afterlife comes into being, and what follows is the demotion (ontological) and renunciation (moral) of this world and the body. Nietzsche’s reply: forget the afterlife, what’s important is this life, this earth, and the body. Also, there isn’t anything higher: an afterlife, an immortal soul, an absolute ground of morality. A few passages where he speaks of religion as neurosis, an expression of life in a debased condition, may be found on pages 60 through 64. There are countless similar passages in Nietzsche’s writings.

Is there any religious idea that Nietzsche approves of? He does offer a somewhat positive assessment of “the pagan,” that is, the Dionysian. Also, his own positive philosophy can well be understood as a secular religion (anti-religion maybe) or counter-mythology to replace traditional religion. It is the task of philosophy, he thought, to do this. It is the function of art too, he believed, to engage in a kind of myth-making to replace the myths of old.

The critique of morality

Right after completing BGE Nietzsche wrote a book on ethics called On the Genealogy of Morals. By genealogy he meant history, but specifically it is a search for the historical origin of moral values. It is not objective, value-neutral history. There is no such thing in any case; history is always partisan and rhetorical, he believes. Genealogy is an explicitly partisan account of how particular groups of human beings came to adopt certain values and why. What is decisive about moral values is their origin. Moral values, like all ideas, serve us, or they serve those who subscribe to them, and in ways that we don’t usually see. That is why we actually accept them, because they are in some fundamental way self-serving. They serve, if not me myself, then my group, my culture, or the species as a whole.

Ordinarily we don’t think that our sense of morality or justice is self-serving. We commonly distinguish what is good or right from what is prudent or self-interested, especially if we subscribe to a morality of altruism; what is good, the altruist believes, is what serves others, or maybe all of us equally, not me specifically. But the distinction is an illusion. Nehamas writes, “Like everyone else, Nietzsche’s rivals make the mistake of remaining blind to the slave revolt; they do not realize that, at some particular time, it created the values by which most people regulate their lives today, and that these values are not given us by nature. Considering the most current interpretation of our values as the only one they have had, they fail to see that selflessness or utility is in fact an interpretation in the first place. They therefore believe that there is a natural connection between being good and being selfless, and therefore that this connection is not subject to history and to change, to appropriation and manipulation by particular groups with particular interests at different times. They see our values as given objects rather than as created products, and they make a straightforward, unthinking projection of the categories of the present onto the past” (Nehamas, 109). What the moral philosopher must ask is, of what form of life are certain values expressions, ascending (healthy) life or descending (unhealthy) life? A life or person who has “turned out well” or one who is resentful, envious, and resigned to an unhappy life? The moral philosopher must be a kind of psychologist and also a historian, and not a value-neutral historian but a very suspicious one.

Nietzsche’s hypothesis is as follows: a revolution took place in the ancient world that concerns how we think about morality. The effects of this revolution are still with us and continue to influence how we think about morality in the modern world. This is what he calls “the slave revolt in morality,” a revolt of “slave morality” against a formerly dominant “master morality,” a reversal from an individualistic ethics of aristocracy or nobility to one that serves the masses and the downtrodden. By slave morality he means especially Judeo-Christian morality but also its modern secular equivalents: Kantianism, utilitarianism, egalitarianism, socialism, Marxism, liberalism, etc. These are all moralities of the herd, as he sees them, different forms of the same underlying morality, and it’s ubiquitous in the modern world.

Let’s have a closer look at this hypothesis. There is, Nietzsche believes, a certain falsity about morality. We traditionally regard morality as a kind of transcendent deliverance, something that is given, maybe God-given, well known, uncontroversial, unified, homogeneous, and maybe universal, such that we can appeal to our conscience or our moral intuitions as a kind of starting point in ethics. This, he believes, is an illusion. Moral ideas, like all ideas, are human inventions. They were invented somewhere, sometime, by some set of people, for some reason—so where, when, by whom, and why are the questions the moral philosopher must ask. Our intuitions come from somewhere, historically speaking. They must be regarded as a kind of effect or artifact of our cultural past. Doing moral philosophy therefore requires the work of the historian as much as the philosopher, and the psychologist as well. In Nietzsche’s writings he often claimed to speak as a kind of psychologist and as a moral-philosophical historian (genealogist) in tracing the history of morality.

He finds its origin in the slave revolt, where this is a reversal of a prior ethics of nobility. It represents the triumph of the herd at the expense of any conception of individual greatness— nobility of character and deeds, an ancient Greek and Roman ideal. There is no longer any conception of nobility after the slave revolt, including in the modern age. Allison writes, “To be generous, Nietzsche’s argument about a ‘slave revolt’ in morality is hardly meant to be an accurate historical portrait. Indeed, he tells us in section 16 [of the Genealogy] that this key value inversion is only a ‘symbol’ of the ‘struggle’ between different moral evaluations that occur ‘across all human history.’ Rather, … the Genealogy is the attempt by a ‘psychologist’ to understand the deeper processes of social-historical formation that underlie our seemingly ‘instinctive’ moral behavior, as well as the values that are attested to by such behavior” (Allison, 220).

Here are some representative passages. Regarding master morality: p. 204-5, “There are master … is value-creating”; p. 212, “There is an instinct … instinct of reverence”; p. 215. “At the risk of … is justice itself.’”

Regarding slave morality: p. 207, “It is different … to be contemptible”; p. 110, “Inasmuch as …

‘thou shalt’”; p. 114, “There is a point … fear in it.”

Regarding values as interpretations, self-expressions, and often necessary illusions: p. 85: “There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.”

Have a look at this passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “Now it is with men as with this tree. The more it wants to rise into the heights and the light, the more determinedly do its roots strive earthwards, downwards, into the darkness, into the depths—into evil” (69). What are we to make of this? Is he saying that we ought to become evil? Not exactly. He’s saying that we must go “beyond good and evil.” This is what the Übermensch does: create new values. As we grow to a height, if we do at all, we also become capable of what is commonly regarded as evil.

More on the slave revolt: this revolution of sorts represents the victory of an ethics of slavery over an older ethics of nobility. A little diagram:

Master Morality		Slave Morality
good (1)	î	good (2)
bad (2)	ì	evil (1)
(1) life-affirmation		(2) altruism
pride		humility
creativity		collectivism
individuality		equality
intellectual honesty		life-negation
independence
integration

Master morality’s basic distinction is between the good (or noble) and the bad (base), and where the good has primacy. Slave morality reverses this. The latter’s basic distinction is between good (formerly the base) and evil (formerly the good or noble, which is condemned in the strongest terms). In master morality, or an ethics of nobility, the bad or the base is an object not of hatred or strong condemnation but simple contempt or indifference. This is the indifference you might feel for something that you feel to be beneath you. For example, stealing something inexpensive from a store is something you probably wouldn’t do, not necessarily because it’s “evil” or a major crime but because it’s beneath you; it’s base, or something you just wouldn’t do. In master morality, the bad is something of an afterthought. Its original thought is “the good,” which is essentially an affirmation of life and of oneself.

Nietzsche is not saying there are two kinds of people in the world: masters and slaves, and that every person is naturally one or the other. There is, he thinks, a master and a slave in everyone. These two are not actual groups, but spiritual or psychological characteristics within all of us. There is a kind of individualistic ideal here, but there is no one conception of the good life and no method of fashioning values objectively. Each one of us is a battlefield of strong and conflicting forces, and there’s a nobility and a slavishness within each of us. These are opposite forces or imperatives that battle it out within the heart and mind of each one of us. In some, the noble part is more dominant, in others (a larger number) the slavish part prevails.

The critique of politics

Nietzsche will speak very often of “power,” but unlike modern political theorists, he is not much interested in political or social power. The will to power is not primarily a political idea. It is more psychological, sociological, ontological, existential, and moral than political. In fact, Nietzsche was not very interested in politics at all. He certainly did not have a “political philosophy,” or a “moral philosophy” exactly. Regarding the latter, he is clearly in favor of master morality, but he always stops short of prescribing it for all. It’s only for some—those who are so inclined by necessity. Our values grow out of us with necessity, as an apple tree bears apples, not oranges. So too, a slavish personality will sign on to slave morality not as a result of theoretical reasoning but as a psychological necessity. There isn’t much choice about it. By the same token, the creative individual is going to prefer master morality not because it’s more rational but because it’s an expression and an affirmation of who one is. All ideas are the personal confession of their author, and this includes moral values, political ones too.

His writings on politics mainly take the form of scattered remarks—mostly critical—regarding the dominant political ideas of the nineteenth century, and without ever advancing a positive view of his own. For example, in Part 8, “Peoples and Fatherlands” we find him commenting negatively on German nationalism and some other political ideas current at the time. German nationalism was very popular in his day (in Germany anyway), and Nietzsche was utterly disdainful of it. A popular issue at the time in Germany was the nature of the German national character—what is it that is distinctively German? Nietzsche’s answer: nothing good. Profundity? No, he sees no evidence of this. Good taste? No. Nietzsche refers to himself as a “good European,” i.e., a non-nationalist, pan-European, citizen of the world, wanderer. Nietzsche gave up his German citizenship and was legally stateless.

European democracy also did not impress Nietzsche. On his view, democracy represents the political counterpart of slave morality, so do political egalitarianism, socialism, Marxism, and liberalism, i.e., all the major political movements of his time. Nietzsche didn’t appear to hold out much hope for a better politics on the horizon and he did not have many ideas as to how to improve the political situation of modern Europe. If he had such views, he would have surely expressed them in his usual way.

One political view Nietzsche did express is his love of hierarchy and disdain for equality. Why? Because egalitarianism’s basic instinct, he believes, is ressentiment, the instinct to level down out of envy of everything noble. It is the expression in ethics of the instinct to tear down, to make ordinary or mediocre. Much of Nietzsche’s philosophy is expressed in terms of a set of hierarchies, including a hierarchy of symbolic human types: the Übermensch, the “higher men,” the masses, the “Ultimate” or “Last Man.” He also spoke of a hierarchy of moralities: aristocratic morality, slave morality (Judeo-Christian morality, some eastern moralities—Buddhism— modern egalitarianism, democracy, socialism, liberalism). These are all different forms of the will to power.

Along with his condemnation of nationalism, we also find Nietzsche condemning anti-Semitism in very strong terms. He writes (p. 187) that he has never met a German who is not anti-Semitic and asks why this is so. His answer: because the Jews are a stronger and more resilient people than the rest of German society. Anti-Semitism is another form of ressentiment against the more capable. We then find Nietzsche’s views of the English, especially the English philosophers. He doesn’t think much of them: the English philosophers are shallow, he says, and he often resorts to name-calling when discussing British philosophers (dolts, muddle-heads). He doesn’t think a lot better of the French, although he does believe France to have the most sophisticated culture and the best taste in Europe (p. 192). There is virtually no mention of North America; it doesn’t seem to have been on his cultural radar.

Nietzsche’s re-mythologizing efforts

His positive philosophy can be seen as a kind of art and/or a sublimated religiosity. Is there a way, he is asking, to reintroduce for the modern world some ancient ideas? Remember: Nietzsche was very conscious of the disaster (intellectual, cultural, existential, personal) that the death of God represents. “God is dead” is not a metaphysical hypothesis about the Biblical God. It is an interpretation of what is happening to us today. We have lost something; modern life suffers from a lost spirit, it is drifting. The decline of ancient worldviews has created a hole— both in the culture and within the self—that we don’t know how to fill. Allison writes, “What does Nietzsche recognize as the consequences of God’s death? … Certainly, the first effect of God’s death is to remove the universal foundations of morality…. A second and immediate effect is that we will continue to live under the shadow of the dead God, we will continue to display his raiments and trappings for some time…. A third consequence of God’s death is that we enter an age of ambiguity and transition, characterized precisely by that nostalgia for the earlier age. He calls it an impending age of ‘breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm.’ God’s death, we remember, is called the greatest, the most momentous event in history, yet one whose reverberations are just now beginning to be felt” (Allison, 96-7).

Also, remember that Nietzsche was the son of a clergyman. There’s every indication that what he’s giving us is a kind of alternative mythology or that he’s taking the religious instinct and creatively transforming it into a kind of myth that knows it is a myth, not a doctrine or a system. But it answers to a need that is deeply felt—for a meaning to our existence that is at once secular (not a creed or anything that can be taken literally) and profound. It even incorporates some vaguely religious ideas, for example about gratitude: p. 64: “What is amazing about the religiosity of the ancient Greeks is the enormous abundance of gratitude it exudes: it is a very noble type of man that confronts nature and life in this way. Later, when the rabble gained the upper hand in Greece, fear became rampant in religion, too—and the ground was prepared for Christianity.”

This new mythology of a kind includes the following major concepts.

The Übermensch

The idea of the “overman” (über means over, super, above) arises out of Nietzsche’s contempt for mediocrity and complacency, which he regarded as the norm in his time. Nietzsche tells us that the human being is something that must be overcome or transcended, and he would repeat this point constantly throughout his writings. It is time, he writes in a rather prophetic voice, for us to overcome what is “human, all too human” (the title to one of his earlier books) and prepare the way for the overman—meaning what? This is a symbol; it’s absolutely not to be taken literally. It’s a symbol of the human being as an object of reverence, a quasi-religious-mythical symbol of what we are capable of becoming.

Like any symbol—always beware of taking Nietzsche literally—it requires some interpretation on the part of the reader, but let’s think of it as a metaphor for several things, beginning with personal integration (or integrity), what he calls “giving style to one’s character,” and of the self as a willed configuration. He writes in The Gay Science, “One thing is needful.—To ‘give style’ to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is practiced 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. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed—both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views; it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evidence how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!” (GS, p. 232) Above all, what the overman represents is the human being who re-evaluates the values of old and goes “beyond good and evil.” This does not mean that the overman is “evil” in any straightforward sense. It does mean that the overman thinks creatively about values—is not a slave to convention in his/her moral thinking and actual way of life but is a non-conformist with respect to values. These people—the creators of new values—are the saviors of the world, and our culture revolves around them.

It’s important to emphasize that the overman is not an actual person or a human type. Nietzsche wasn’t delusional; he didn’t think he himself was a superhuman being (although he did have a rather robust self-esteem, and he lets us know it). It is a symbol of the transformation and liberation of the human spirit, a transcendence of what human beings merely are and have been. You can think of it as a symbol of humanity’s highest possibilities, a symbol of human nobility and “self-overcoming,” that is, the capacity to overcome obstacles in one’s own nature, internal obstacles that we all have (what he occasionally calls “stupidities”) and to will my own personal transformation from what I presently am to my highest possibility. It’s also a symbol of intellectual honesty—the refusal to lie to oneself or engage in wishful thinking.

This is a difficult ideal to realize. It’s a rigorous and demanding life-task, and one that requires great sacrifice and heroism. There is more than a bit of missionary zeal here. Remember, Nietzsche was the son of a minister and a bit of that is coming through here. Humanity, he firmly believes, will only realize its highest possibilities when it is freed from its own resentment and guilt, and when it is freed from metaphysical illusion and what he calls “the spirit of gravity” or the kind of ponderous, overly serious, joyless attitude toward life that he associates with religion and also philosophy. The overman is a symbol of the free spirit—one who is not grave but exuberant, self-loving, self-affirming, and life-affirming. You can think of the overman as a symbol of life-affirmation, of self-affirmation, and self-overcoming.

What does the overman value? How do they act or live? We don’t get a systematic answer but scattered remarks, many of them. This is a kind of individualistic ideal, with a strong aesthetic dimension. It’s not a type but something unrepeatable and unique. The only common elements seem to be self-overcoming, a developed or strong will, integrity or style, and life-affirmation. Here’s Allison’s interpretation: “…the notion of the overman signifies humanity’s capacity for achieving a self-transformation of itself and a fully truthful understanding of the human condition. This can come about, Nietzsche argues, only when humanity is freed from the bitterness, resentment, guilt, and shame brought on by traditional moral doctrine (‘the spirit of gravity’), and when it is liberated from the clouds of metaphysical deceit and illusion that obscure the symbol of truth itself” (Allison, 119).

Nietzsche illustrates the overman theme in Thus Spoke Zarathustra with a metaphor in a passage titled “Of the Three Metamorphoses” or three transformations of the human spirit: from the camel to the lion to the child. The camel symbolizes the weight-bearing spirit. It is strong, heroic, and takes upon itself great tasks—but it’s still a herd animal, submitting to a master which is the “thou shalt” of conventional morality. It is transformed into the lion: a powerful animal and what he calls a “lord in its own desert.” It is not a creature of the herd (cats are not herd animals), but nor is it especially creative or joyous. Its creative act is to say no to all “thou shalts.” It refuses to submit to a deity or a herd mentality. It replaces the “thou shalt” with the “I will.” Remember, meaning is something I must will into being as a creative act. But it should also be joyful and life-affirming. The third and final transformation is of the lion into a child, and specifically a child at play. He’s not saying “become as little children” or glorifying all aspects of childhood. He is saying that there’s something about the child at play that represents a kind of ideal. What is a child at play doing? Nietzsche’s answer is that they are affirming life, loving life, existing in the present. The child is not preoccupied by the past (they don’t have much of a past, and they’re not weighed down by guilt) or the future (try getting a kid to think about the future). The child is totally immersed in the moment—and in a way that adults tend to find difficult. For the most part we are busy living either in the past or in the future. For Nietzsche himself, it was in music that he could really be in the moment. This is part of why he strove to make his writing as musical, as lyrical, as possible. For Nietzsche himself, it was through his writing that he could exist in the moment and create meaning in his life, which is probably why he did it so obsessively.

Amor fati

This is the love of fate, specifically one’s own fate. The noble human being is one who loves their fate, who experiences a profound gratitude for the life they have and is able to live in the present. He wrote in 1882: “I want to learn progressively to regard the necessary as beautiful, so shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from now on … sooner or later I want to be someone who says nothing but yes” (Hayman, 240). It is an ideal for Nietzsche to be able to say yes to life—and this means all of life and not a selective yes to happiness or the good times and a no to the bad. We must strive to live in a way that we can be deeply grateful for the life that we have, and this is easier said than done. Nietzsche himself struggled with this throughout his life. This was a man who suffered a great deal, from childhood on. His question not just for us but for himself is, can we be grateful even for our suffering? To love life means to love all of it. It’s a package deal: we love the totality of our life or we don’t, and not many do, he thinks. How many are able to look back on the life we’ve lived so far and everything that’s happened and say encore?

The will to power

This is a central notion in Nietzsche’s philosophy. It’s also the title of the book he was working on and then abandoned shortly before he went mad. A version of it was published posthumously. What does this idea mean? It’s another very interpretable concept, as are all of Nietzsche’s main ideas. Is this a kind of Darwinian instinct to survive, a will to live or to exert political power? No, it’s a basic drive in any living thing not just to survive or reproduce but to expend energy or in a very general sense to assert oneself, to impose form on the formless, to impose one’s own form on the world and on oneself (self-mastery). It is a will, or an imperative, to accomplish some purpose, to achieve something, to expand one’s sphere of influence.

More than this, it is a will to impose form on something or someone, to give form or meaning to something that lacks it, and specifically one’s own form in the way, for instance, that an artist or craftsman gives form to matter. The artist imposes on matter a form that is foreign to it, and that is the form of the artist him- or herself, or the artist’s spirit. For Nietzsche, all art is an expression of the will to power, so is all morality. Slave morality, for example, directly expresses the will to power of the masses—and then it denies this and claims that it serves us all. So, Nietzsche believes, is everything else in the realm of human activity an expression of this one underlying drive: our words, our actions, every act of human expression, life itself is an expression or manifestation of the will to power. What underlies life is not the will to survive but to gain and express power in some form.

Is this simple power-seeking, the kind of power that politicians want? No—or it’s much more than that. It is that too, and it can also take very crude forms, including violence, but the will to power is much more than this. It includes the whole domain of what minds do: interpretation (which all thinking is) is also an expression of the will to power. Because in interpreting a text, or the world, I am imposing a form on it, not just passively beholding what is there. I must actively interpret, or impose a meaning on, the text and on life as well. Life unto itself has no meaning; what meaning it has is the meaning I have invented and imposed on it. Some of these meanings are surely nobler or more life-affirming than others. Our sense of the meaning of our lives is expressive or symptomatic of either ascending life or descending life, higher or lower. This is what the eternal return is meant to be a test of: do I myself belong to a higher or a lower order of humanity? The higher will greet the news of eternal recurrence as a liberation. The lower will be horrified; their hope is for an afterlife—not more of this one.

One of the more important passages where he discusses the will to power: “Suppose, finally, we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will—namely, of the will to power, as my proposition has it; suppose all organic functions could be traced back to this will to power and one could also find in it the solution of the problem of procreation and nourishment—it is one problem—then one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as—will to power. The world viewed from inside, the world defined and determined according to its ‘intelligible character’—it would be ‘will to power’ and nothing else” (p. 48). For Nietzsche, all manifestations of the will to power and everything in the realm of what human beings do and what we create can be assigned an order of rank: ideas, values, philosophies, values, works of art, cultures, religions, etc.

Eternal recurrence

This is an idea that was very close to Nietzsche’s heart. It is the centerpiece of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which was his favorite book of those he wrote (and probably those he didn’t). It is introduced in that book with great fanfare. Zarathustra refers to this idea as his “most abysmal thought”—abysmal because “the little man” also recurs eternally. This too is a very interpretable idea. Is it a scientific-metaphysical doctrine or a moral-existential one? Here’s where the idea is first introduced: “The greatest weight.—What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?” (GS p. 273, sec. 341).

This is the first and most important articulation of the concept in Nietzsche’s writings. Notice how Nietzsche first introduces this idea, not in the form of a doctrine, a proposition, or an argument but in the form of a question—a “perhaps” or a “what if?” The “what if” in this passage is crucial. This is typical of Nietzsche’s style of thought: pose a question, pose it again, in numerous forms, examine it from numerous points of view, linger over the question and don’t be in a hurry to answer it. What has primacy in all thinking is the question. Some of his questions are meant primarily to provoke. As Allison writes, “While the ‘strong’ [literal] view of the eternal return is dramatically stated in The Gay Science, it is not really advanced as a straightforward, literal proposition (i.e., one that is capable of being verified or falsified). Rather, the viewpoint is figuratively expressed: it is advanced as a question and is stated—by a hypothetical demon, no less—in the conditional: ‘What if?’ Its psychological force is strengthened by the circumstance of its utterance, namely, that one is enjoined to reflect upon such a personal destiny at the very weakest moment of personal depression or resignation, when one would desperately wish to relive one’s own past moments of joy and happiness” (Allison, 123.)

The eternal recurrence or eternal return—the idea that this life will recur an infinite number of times in the future—ought to be read not as a doctrine or hypothesis but as a test of character and of how we are living; it’s an existential, not metaphysical, issue. The issue is how do I hear this news? Is it good news or bad? What would my response be? If it would be received as bad news then I must change my life. If I hear it as good news, it is an affirmation of life and how I’m living it. The idea is not to be taken literally. Nietzsche himself insisted on the close relation between the eternal return and the overman—so if the former were a metaphysical doctrine, something he meant us to take literally, what connection could it have to the Übermensch? Most important, Nietzsche was not a metaphysician, so it would be remarkable if his favorite idea were a metaphysical one—although he did provide very loose and somewhat experimental arguments for this idea in some of his unpublished writings. Many readers of Nietzsche for a long time interpreted the idea as a metaphysical one, but it’s clearly a metaphor and one that harks back to Christian immortality, only it’s an immortality that is faithful to this earth and this life. You can think of the eternal return as a kind of counter-mythology. Why mythology at all? Because for this son of a minister, human life is meaningless without it. Without it, we have the triumph of the Apollonian over the Dionysian, arid rationalism and cultural nihilism. What Nietzsche wants is to restore (if it ever existed) the dynamic tension between opposites. This is where creativity and meaning are found. The eternal return, then, is a test of our character and of the deepest dimension of our character.

Works Cited

Allison, David. Reading the New Nietzsche. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.

Hayman, Ronald. Nietzsche: A Critical Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.

Young, Julian. Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

PART THREE

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911)

Major works published in Dilthey’s lifetime:

1870: The Life of Schleiermacher

1883: Introduction to the Human Sciences

1905: Poetry and Experience

Works in English translation, published posthumously:

Vol. 1: Introduction to the Human Sciences

Vol. 2: Understanding and the Human World

Vol. 3: The Formation of the Human World in the Human Sciences

Vol. 4: Hermeneutics and the Study of History

Vol. 5: Poetry and Experience

His collected works in German amount to 26 large volumes. Introduction to the Human Sciences is volume 1. This is a man who likes to write. What he did not like to do is publish.

I will cover in what follows (and ask you to read) the Preface and all of Book I from Introduction to the Human Sciences, or pages 47-169.

Biography

Dilthey was a “philosopher of life.” The concept of life plays a major role in his thought, as we’ll see, and yet very little has been published about Dilthey’s own life. In fact, he seems to have gone to some lengths to keep his life out of public view. A biographer of his, H. P. Rickman, begins his chapter (there is no book-length biography of Dilthey that I know of) by saying how difficult it was even to find out how many children Dilthey had. He was a very private individual. He was also one of the most important philosophers of his time. His various writings are highly original, but today his name is less well known than Kierkegaard or Nietzsche. His influence on twentieth-century philosophy, especially hermeneutics (Heidegger and Gadamer), has been great. Gadamer discussed his thought at some length in his magnum opus, Truth and Method (1960), which brought Dilthey a fair degree of attention, so his thought has had a significant influence.

His life was not particularly unusual; he essentially lived the life of a conventional German university professor, although he was considerably harder working than most. He was born in November 1833 in the town of Biebrich, on the Rhine river, which was later (1926) incorporated into the city of Wiesbaden and today has a population of 36,000 (Biebrich, that is). His father, Maximilian (1804–67), was a Protestant clergyman and theologian, and in a long line of clergymen. His mother, Maria Laura Heuschkel (1806–87) was the daughter of a conductor, and she was very musical herself. Dilthey came by his own love of music through her. During his student years he studied composition and enjoyed playing the piano. He would later write a fair amount of music, and he especially loved the music of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and Handel. He would later say of Beethoven, “I feel as if only there is my soul in its homeland.”

He attended elementary schools in Biebrich, then went down the road to Wiesbaden for high school where he especially excelled in art, history, and philosophy. Studying philosophy at that time meant studying Kant and Hegel in particular, and Kant had an especially deep influence on Dilthey throughout his life. In 1852 he graduated from high school at the top of his class and in the same year he went to the University of Heidelberg to study theology and follow in the family tradition. After about a year he moved to Berlin, mainly because he was attracted by the cultural life of the city, especially the music. He was studying theology mostly because his parents wanted him to become a clergyman, but he was becoming more interested in philosophy and history. Even in his student years he had an incredible capacity for work and would work twelve to fourteen hours a day. He was reading widely in philosophy, especially Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, and also studying Greek, Hebrew, and English.

By this time he had lost his religious faith, so becoming a minister didn’t seem like such a good idea, although he would never react against religion in the extreme way that Nietzsche did. Dilthey was not by temperament given to extremes. He told his mother at the time that he just didn’t have a religious nature. At the heart of his nature was a longing for knowledge and he ceased to believe that religion could satisfy that longing, but maybe philosophy could. He then continued his studies with an eye to becoming a university professor. This meant he had to be a student for a long time and had to be supported through these years by his parents. He tried to support himself for a while as a school teacher, and hated it. He was also tempted to become a journalist and earned some money at this time writing short journalistic pieces for a few German magazines and newspapers. He was developing a very wide set of interests and read across various disciplines, something that would become a lifelong habit.

Still in his twenties he developed a strong interest in the philosophy of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). His first book was a biography of Schleiermacher, and this figure would have a dramatic influence on his own philosophical writings. While a student, one of Dilthey’s professors had been editing Schleiermacher’s letters for publication. When this professor died, Dilthey was asked to take over the editorship. While working on this, he wrote his first philosophical work, which was an essay on Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics. This essay won two prizes, and it encouraged him to pursue philosophy some more. He would later say that writing this essay led him to develop his own basic philosophical position which he would express for the first time at length in his Introduction to the Human Sciences of 1883.

In 1864 he submitted his thesis and received a doctorate. The topic of the thesis was Schleiermacher’s ethics, and after this he spent a short time teaching in Berlin before he was offered a better position at the University of Basel, where Nietzsche had been. At last he was free of financial worries, and he was also free to attend lectures and labs on physiology, which he was also becoming interested in.

We get a picture of his personality from a letter written by William James, who met Dilthey at a dinner party in 1867: “A soft, fat man with black hair … of uncertain age between twenty-five and forty, with very small green eyes, he wore the elegant frockcoat with an exceedingly grimy shirt and collar and rusty old rag of a cravat. The professor overflowed with information about everything knowable and unknowable. He is the first man I have ever met of a class of men to whom learning has become as natural as breathing. He talked and laughed incessantly at the table and gave Mrs. Grimm the whole history of Buddhism, and I don’t know what other bits of the history of religion. After dinner Grimm and the professor got involved in a heated controversy about the primitive form of natural religion. I noticed that the professor’s answers became somewhat tired and then his massive head suddenly fell forward. Grimm called out that he’d better have a proper sleep in his chair. He eagerly consented. Grimm gave him a clean handkerchief which he threw over his face and appeared to go to sleep instantly. After ten minutes Grimm woke him with a cup of coffee. He rose, like a giant refreshed, and continued to argue with Grimm about the identity of Homer” (Rickman, 26).

In the same year, his father died. He had been quite close to his family throughout his life. In 1868 he left Basel for a professorship at the small University of Kiel, in the north of Germany. He felt that Germany was where he really belonged, and he much preferred the cultural life of Germany to Switzerland. While in Kiel, Dilthey had a somewhat painful experience involving a woman named Marianne von Witzleben. He met her in 1870 and they quickly became engaged, although the engagement was broken off a few days later. Marianne was very upset by this and became physically ill; evidently it was Dilthey who broke it off. The whole affair affected him deeply, and he kept her letters for many years.

While in Kiel his first book was published. This was the biography of Schleiermacher and it appeared in 1870. He’s now 37 years old. Like so many of his later books, this one was unfinished. What he published was to be the first volume. He never wrote a second volume and agonized about writing one for the rest of his life. Why did he write a biography at all? Dilthey was a philosopher, and philosophers don’t usually write biographies. He had begun to believe that no real separation can be made between philosophy and history. He would always approach philosophical questions historically, in terms of how a certain philosophical question had come about in history. He would always approach a philosophical question by first reviewing past ideas on the subject. Philosophical problems are best approached this way, he believed. He also believed that individuals are the ultimate, meaningful units of society and that their actions shape history. No matter what larger trends historians and social scientists look for, the individual should always be their main interest. Schleiermacher was, for Dilthey, one of the most important thinkers of his time. The life of such a person, he thought, was a microcosm of what was happening in the culture around him; he is a sign of the times, so if we want to understand any historical time, we should look closely at key individuals who lived at that time.

In 1871 Dilthey received a job offer at the University of Breslau, which he accepted. In 1873 he became engaged for a second time, to Katherine Puttmann, whom he had met three months prior to their engagement, and they were married the following year. They would later have three children together: a daughter, Clara, was born in 1877; a son, Max, was born in 1884; and Helena in 1888. Their marriage was not without troubles, one reason being that he spent an inordinate amount of time working.

During his years in Breslau he was starting to write on the issues that are the focus of the Introduction to the Human Sciences, which appeared in 1883. His question had become, what are the methodological foundations of the human studies, i.e., the social sciences and (especially) the humanities? His time in Breslau came to an end in 1882 when he was offered a better job at the University of Berlin and he would remain in Berlin for the rest of his life. He and his family would live a comfortable, somewhat pampered upper-middle-class life there. There were always several servants in the house, so Dilthey wasn’t exactly doing housework or a lot of active parenting. He probably never set foot in the kitchen, and he hired a vehicle to drive him to the university when he had to teach. He was not a particularly social person and was always rather quiet. Mostly he just wanted to be left alone to write. People were usually impressed by him but found him hard to get to know. “Thus he wrote to York in the summer of 1884: ‘I am leading my summer life. I meet people only professionally; otherwise I live with my books on my balcony or in my garden which is full of roses…. I wish I could turn my back on the world entirely…. For my old age, if I should reach it, I have no other thought except complete withdrawal from the world.’ Sometimes, though, he complains about the philosopher’s fate: ‘I could envy a woodcutter for being able to see every day, every week, what he has accomplished. The demands on the man who philosophizes cannot be fulfilled. A physicist is a pleasant reality, useful to himself and others: the philosopher exists, like the saint, only as an ideal’” (Rickman, 38). Throughout his life he worked very long hours and would often complain of overwork, although this was completely voluntary. During these years he would get up at 4:00 a.m. and work for twelve hours.

By 1905 he retired from teaching; he’s now 72. His writing actually increased during the final years of his life. He hoped to live till the age of 110, thinking maybe he could actually complete all his books by then. He lived to be 78. He was on holiday in the fall of 1911 when he caught an infection and died. There was an infection raging at the hotel he was staying at. The old professor, absorbed in his studies, apparently didn’t notice. He caught it and died quite quickly.

As far as his influence goes, this has been considerable. He is far less famous today than Nietzsche, but José Ortega y Gasset called him “the most important thinker of the second half of the nineteenth century,” quite a remarkable claim considering this was also the time of Nietzsche, Marx, Mill, Freud, Weber, and James. He would have a large influence on some of the biggest names in twentieth-century continental philosophy, including Husserl, Heidegger, (especially) Gadamer, and Ricoeur. His output of writings is tremendously impressive, both for their range and originality. He made a major contribution to the philosophy of the human studies, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, psychology, and education. During his lifetime he was known primarily for his writings on history and poetry; his philosophy was largely unknown because it was largely unpublished. His students called him “the man of first volumes” since he rarely finished work on anything and was always beginning something new. He left behind a massive quantity of unpublished writings which are housed in an archive in Berlin. Two world wars did much to delay the publication of his work, as did the Nazis, who weren’t fond of him at all. In 1936 the Nazi rector at the University of Goettingen said, “A man who talks about Dilthey does not belong in a German university.” High praise indeed. After the war, interest in his work gradually revived some, especially after the publication of Gadamer’s Truth and Method in 1960, in which he acknowledged Dilthey as the most important philosopher of hermeneutics prior to Heidegger.

Why didn’t he publish more? Rickman writes, “His own personality was partly to blame. There was an element of secretiveness in Dilthey’s nature which made him reluctant to publish his writings and prompted his students to call him ‘the mysterious old man.’ But he was also weighed down by the vastness of his schemes and felt unable to complete them properly. Never satisfied, he kept on revising his drafts and storing them up for future, even more comprehensive, programs. A complex and subtle thinker, he struggled with ambiguities he could not fully resolve and continuously revised his ideas to achieve a deeper and more comprehensive vision. Believing that the truth had many facets he recoiled from black and white certainties; his gift of entering sympathetically into different ways of thinking, which made him such a sensitive historian of ideas, made him so open-minded that he continued to explore finely balanced possibilities. The more his work becomes available the more obvious this becomes. In fact, the story of Dilthey’s laborious, lifelong struggles to systematize his ideas, and his editors’ no less laborious struggles to put his writings neatly together, reflects his style of thinking” (Rickman 20-21).

Hermeneutics

Dilthey was a hermeneutical philosopher, so interpretation is going to emerge as a major theme in his writings, as it was for Nietzsche. Dilthey was aware of Nietzsche’s work and was at first enthusiastic about it, but by the time he wrote this book he was less impressed. In the end he was not much influenced by Nietzsche, and this is a bit surprising. Both philosophers take as their point of departure the concept of life—both can be described as philosophers of life—both are trying to gain a comprehensive understanding of human life and they both believe that human life crucially bears on the idea of interpretation. They were also both convinced of the historicity—the deep embeddedness in history—of life and of interpretation. They both shared a fundamental critique of the metaphysical tradition, a strong interest in psychology, and a deep appreciation of the aesthetic dimension of human existence. But the similarities end here. When Dilthey refers to himself as a philosopher of life he means the collective life of mankind rather than what Nietzsche meant by life, the psychological dimension of the individual. Dilthey would criticize Nietzsche for putting too much importance on the subjectivity of the individual, or the personal. To understand the person, we need to view the person in relation to a culture and a historical tradition.

Dilthey wants to advance the hypothesis that interpretation is the foundation of the humanities and social sciences. The German word for these disciplines is the Geisteswissenschaften, which is a German translation of J. S. Mill’s “moral sciences,” i.e., all the disciplines of the humanities—philosophy, history, literary studies, classics, religion—and social sciences— psychology, sociology, anthropology, geography, economics, political science, etc. They all work with the same underlying methodology, and it is a method that is far less formalistic than scholars in these fields often believe it is. Dilthey was writing this book in the early days of the social sciences. A very influential view at that time was positivism, whose basic hypothesis was that the new social sciences can and should follow the same methods used in the natural sciences. Why should they do that? In short, because only scientific knowledge, according to the positivists, is bona fide knowledge and all else is empty speculation, and this includes interpretation. Interpretation, in their view, is too subjective to be useful in serious scientific investigation. A few of the main theorists of the social sciences at the time were people like Karl Marx, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, J. S. Mill, and Auguste Comte. Of these theorists, only Comte was a positivist strictly speaking, although Mill was pretty close to being one. Comte’s view was that sociology in particular aims to discover scientifically provable laws; society, he thinks, operates according to laws, as nature does. The job of the scientist is to discover these laws and to observe their workings in social phenomena. Dilthey’s reply: there are no laws, in a strict, causal sense, of human life, of the psyche or of society. If there are no laws there to be found, the business of the social/human scientist must be something else. It is not to explain why the whole domain of social life is the way it is but to understand what the various aspects of social life mean.

Essentially, the human scientist is an interpreter of the human condition or of some particular aspects of it. Interpretation is the methodological foundation of the human sciences—this is his principal hypothesis in this book. While the natural sciences seek to explain why the natural world is the way it is, the human sciences seek to understand the meaning of human expressions. He proposes an important distinction here between explanation and understanding. Explanation answers the question, why does this happen? Understanding answers the question, what does this mean?

Because of his influence, the idea of understanding became a key concept in what came to be called “understanding sociology” (Verstehens-soziologie) and “understanding psychology” (Verstehens-psychologie). Along the way, he’s going to advance some important claims about human understanding. First, understanding or interpretation is a very common practice of everyday life; indeed it is pervasive and fundamental to our experience in general. Also, it’s a source of the most important knowledge we have of human life and social reality. Understanding can’t be replaced by any other mode of cognition, and it is the one essential aspect of the human sciences that separates them from the natural sciences. This is his principal hypothesis in this book. Now the details.

What are objects of knowledge in the various disciplines of the human sciences? They are not naturally occurring objects like atoms or planets. They are expressions of the inner life of human beings. This is what primarily interests Dilthey: the inner life of the person, and the thousands of ways that it expresses itself. This is how we should understand history, for example, as so many expressions of the inner lives of human beings. This is also what the psychologist studies, and the sociologist, and the literary theorist, etc. In all the human sciences, we are trying to understand human beings by interpreting expressions of their inner life.

A central question then becomes, how can we develop methods of gaining “objectively valid” interpretations of “expressions of inner life”? We want our interpretations of human expressions to be valid, and objectively so. It is science after all, so our thinking needs to be rigorous and valid. Is there a science of interpretation? We know Nietzsche’s answer: no. In the twentieth century Heidegger and Gadamer would agree with Nietzsche that interpretation is never exactly objective although it can and should strive to be rigorous and faithful to its object. Dilthey is going to propose that there can be a science of interpretation, but this doesn’t mean that we can carry over the form and method of knowledge that is used in the natural sciences to the human sciences. That we can’t do. The method that we use in the human sciences is neither deduction nor induction. It’s interpretation. He rejects positivism completely. The starting point for all the human sciences is life: lived experience. This is an idea that Husserl would take up in his conception of phenomenology. Dilthey was a major influence on Husserl and he is often described as a forerunner of phenomenology, as is Nietzsche. He preferred to call his approach empirical—although he insisted he was not an empiricist, in the mold of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Mill. In fact, Mill is one of the main philosophers he is arguing against in this book, that is, Mill’s more or less positivist philosophy of science. Philosophy and all the human sciences must describe life, or lived experience, and in doing so it must not try to go behind life, to what supposedly underlies life or what lies behind it. “For knowledge may not posit a reality that is independent of lived experience” (202). This would become a standard idea in phenomenology: just describe lived experience as we actually experience it rather than explain the way our experience appears to us in light of what allegedly underlies it. We have no experience of anything that underlies or stands behind life/experience, and any claims about what underlies our experience will be empty metaphysical speculation. Dilthey has some very harsh criticisms of metaphysics throughout this book. He essentially wants to replace metaphysics with an analysis of “worldviews.” More on this later.

Philosophy begins with life. The human sciences in general aim to understand life in all its various expressions and to achieve a comprehensive understanding of what human life is and has been. Dilthey was very much a philosopher of life, and he wasn’t the only one. “Life philosophy” was a bit of a trend in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. All the existentialists are life philosophers, but not only them. So were the American pragmatists—especially William James and John Dewey—and there were others: Karl Marx, Henri Bergson, and then Husserl and the phenomenological movement. In all these philosophers, the idea was that we need to return to the fullness of lived experience rather than adopt a formalist, causal, or mechanistic view of the human being.

Dilthey’s view is that in beginning with lived experience we are not asking, what lies behind our various experiences of the world. Nothing lies behind it, as far as we know. We are limiting ourselves to life and life’s expressions, without trying to explain human expressions as effects of some unseen causes. We are also not regarding the human world as one large mechanism or searching for mechanistic explanations for how human beings act. Human beings are not mechanisms. They are agents, they are free, and their actions are expressions of who they are. We experience life in complex, individual moments of meaning and all of these meanings come to be what they are in a context of the past and future. We need to understand the human being as a being within history. Everything about us, about the mind itself and its various workings, is historical, that is, how the mind works must be understood not in causal or mechanistic terms but as having come about as a result of centuries of history and culture: “Not through introspection but only through history do we come to know ourselves,” he says (GS 5, Understanding the Human World, 279). The problem with scientific ideas is that they tend to overlook this fact about us, our historicity. Historicity would become a major theme in twentieth-century continental philosophy. More on this later.

The dynamics of the individual’s inner life are a complex matter of thinking, feeling, and willing, and these matters resist both explanation and quantification. The aim of the human sciences should not be to understand life in terms of concepts that are extrinsic to it and that are imposed on it from outside, from the natural sciences. Life must be understood from the experience of life itself. The human being is not some philosophical abstraction. As he puts it, “In the veins of the ‘knowing subject’ constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, runs no real blood” (GS 5, 4). He would say the same about Descartes’ thinking thing and Hobbes’ system of matter in motion: they are not you and me. How do you and I actually understand our own actions and thoughts? In terms of their meanings, and in terms of the past, present, and future.

The human sciences versus the natural sciences

Dilthey’s basic hypothesis is that the human sciences must create a new model for the interpretation of human phenomena, one that does not simply carry over the terminology and methods of the natural sciences. Our theoretical model must be derived from the character of human experience itself. The two principal concepts he is going to use are meaning and history, neither of which does much work in natural science. In fact, the very success of natural science is due in part to its exclusion of everything that is not measurable, and you can’t measure meanings.

Consider an example. How does natural science speak of a very ordinary experience: the perception of the color blue, let’s say? Scientists were explaining this experience by speaking of the vibrations of light waves. This is a mechanical explanation, but it doesn’t tell us anything about what blue is like—the actual quality or flavor of this experience. The felt or experienced sensation of blue can’t be derived from any purely physical explanation. As he writes, “For example, I am no more able to find a point of transition from a purely mathematical determination or a quantity of motion to a color or tone than I am to a process of consciousness. Blue light is not more readily explained by the corresponding frequency of its oscillation than a negative judgment by a process in the brain. Physics leaves the task of explaining the sensory quality of blueness to physiology. Since this discipline does not find in the motion of physical parts the means for conjuring up blueness either, psychology is finally duped into trying to establish it” (63). Blue is experienced as having a certain meaning or set of meanings. For instance, in Canadian politics blue has long been a symbol of conservatism in contrast to liberal red, NDP orange, etc. One sees blue, in a political context anyway, as a bearer of a particular meaning. The person wearing a blue suit or tie is often expressing solidarity with conservatism. Think also of blue (Democrat) states and red (Republican) states in the US. This is the kind of thing that the human sciences deal with. They don’t deal with raw facts and phenomena that are silent about the individual. They deal with the individual’s inner experience and the multiple ways that experience is expressed.

This, in short, is what we are trying to do in all the human sciences: to understand the inner experiences of other people, including what things mean to them and what their purposes are. There is a felt purposiveness in our experience, for example, in our actions. Part of the meaning of my action is that I have a particular purpose in view: “we are not blind forces but rather volitional creatures that reflectively establish their purposes” (69). The idea of purpose has been eliminated from modern natural science along with meaning. Nature doesn’t have a purpose, unless we resort to some very non-empirical speculation. But in the human sciences, these notions—meaning, purpose, experience, history—are exactly what we are trying to understand. In the study of psychology, we want to understand what a patient is experiencing—how they feel, for example. Psychology shouldn’t aim only to explain human experiences as effects of causes but to understand their human significance. Similarly, in the study of history, we want to understand what life was like for a particular people at a particular time and place—what was the flavor of their experience. In the study of sociology, we want to understand what a particular phenomenon means, and not in an absolute sense but what it means for the people of that society. We are trying to bring about a kind of mental transfer here; we are trying to transfer their experiences into our heads, to re-experience what they experienced. This is the aim of interpretation, to experience someone else’s mental intentions or states of mind, to see the world through their eyes, feel what they feel, etc. This is an idea that Dilthey borrowed from Schleiermacher: the aim in all interpretation is to reconstruct and re-experience another person’s experience.

How is that done? Many philosophers (Kant, Heidegger, Gadamer) are going to say this is elusive and maybe also impossible or irrelevant, and today this is the most common view. Dilthey’s reply: we can do this by reading a person’s expressions. The key word for all the human sciences is “understanding.” Explaining is for the natural sciences; the natural sciences “explain” nature whereas the human sciences “understand” expressions of life. Understanding focuses on the individual, and this is especially clear in the case of the arts. For instance, in literary studies, the individual text is the thing—not the text as a mere representative of some general rule or law but the individual text as a unique human expression. This is reversed in the natural sciences, which are interested in the individual object primarily as a means of arriving at a more general knowledge of the world. The natural scientist sees the human being as an instance of a type, not as an existing individual.

Dilthey believed that there was a kind of creeping scientism that was taking over the study of human phenomena. It was a worry that Nietzsche also had, and that continental philosophers ever since have had and still have today. We’ll come back to the division between the natural and human sciences a bit later.

Dilthey’s hermeneutical formula

Dilthey has a problem and it’s a big one. It doesn’t seem possible for anyone to climb into your mind and experience what you are experiencing. A common saying has it that you don’t know how I feel and maybe you can’t, maybe no one can unless you can somehow find a way to climb into someone else’s head. How can a scholar in any discipline of the human sciences understand someone else’s experience without resorting to guessing? We commonly think, I can have a pretty good idea of how you’re feeling or what you’re thinking. What is our basis for saying this? How could I know this? Dilthey’s answer: by interpreting your expressions. We know how to do this, and we do it all the time. For instance, I can know what you’re thinking because I can ask you and you can tell me. You can express in language the content of your thought—no mystery there. You can express your inner mental states in any number of ways: through your spoken words, your actions, your facial expressions, your tone of voice, your body language, what you write, and 1000 other ways. Human beings are constantly expressing themselves, and what they are expressing is what particular things mean to them—what they believe, how they feel, etc. and we are not unable to read their expressions. When I look in another person’s direction, this is mostly what I’m doing. I’m trying to understand them, which means I’m trying to understand what they’re experiencing. When I look out at a class of students, I’m trying to understand: are you with me? Do you understand what I’m saying? Do I need to clarify something? Do you have something to say? And we all know how to do this. I can try to read your facial expressions, for example. If you’re confused by what I just said, I’ll probably see it in your face. This isn’t empty guesswork.

Dilthey wants to make this basic method of interpretation that we all use more explicit. Again the question is, how can I understand someone else’s experience? Dilthey gives us a formula: (1) experience, (2) expression, (3) understanding. “A science belongs to the human studies only if its object becomes accessible to us through a procedure based on the systematic relation between life [experience], expression, and understanding” (GS 7). Let’s look at each of these separately.

1. First is experience. This is one of the most ambiguous words in philosophy. There are two words in German for experience: Erfahrung and Erlebnis. Dilthey uses Erlebnis which is a technical term which means “lived experience.” Erfahrung is an older word that refers to experience in general and it’s not a technical term, as when I say: in my experience, ... or: I have experience in ... I have seen something, been through something. Erlebnis is focused on individual experiences. It means life itself as we meet it immediately, and at particular moments. This kind of experience bears a meaning. For instance, I can have an experience of a piece of music; the music has a meaning to it. I can hear the song over and over again, but there’s a unity to this experience; it is an experience of the same kind every time. It is one experience, even though I have it many times. An experience in this sense is a unit of meaning, and this is the basic unit that the human scientist works with. It is an experience that brings us into direct contact with life prior to all efforts to grasp the experience theoretically or reflectively. Our immediate experience of the world is pre-theoretical and pre-reflective: “the experience does not stand like an object over against its experiencer, but rather its very existence for me is undifferentiated from the whatness which is present for me in it” (GS 7). Our immediate experience of the world is prior to the subject/object division, that is, the world itself and my experience of it are given together. I don’t experience the world as a set of objects over there, or out there, nor do I experience it outside of time. Meaning can’t even be imagined except in terms of what I expect the future to be and what I remember about the past. Temporality belongs to the basic structure of my experience. It is not something that my consciousness imposes on experience, as Kant had argued. Temporality is implicit to experience itself as it is given to us, immediately. If experience is intrinsically temporal, understanding it must also be temporal, i.e., we must understand the whole domain of human expression within a temporal-historical frame, and as something that is rich in meaning.

2. Next is expression. By this word he doesn’t mean only the expression of feeling but something more encompassing: the expression of what something means for us. An expression is an embodiment of either a feeling or an idea, a law, a language, an event, or any meaningful experience. An expression is a kind of outward objectification of some inner state. For example, a work of art is an expression, and what it expresses is some inner state of the artist—a feeling, a thought, etc. All human expressions are capable of being understood through interpretation.

3. Finally we have understanding. Since the basic unit of the human sciences is experience— meaningful experience—interpretation or understanding (synonymous terms) is going to be pervasive in all the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. Therefore hermeneutics— the philosophical study of understanding—is the method of the human sciences. What is understanding? It is the operation in which the mind grasps the mind of the other person, or some particular experience of the person. Understanding is not a form of technical knowledge. We don’t understand (in this sense) a math problem. Understanding is not a purely intellectual exercise or an exercise in pure reason. “We explain by means of purely intellectual processes, but we understand by means of the combined activity of all the mental powers in apprehending” (GS 5). Also: “We explain nature; man we must understand” (GS 5). Understanding is the mental process in which we comprehend lived human experience, in all its richness and complexity. This kind of understanding is valuable in itself. It is not a means to something outside itself: “The secret of the ‘person’ attracts us for its own sake to ever newer and deeper efforts to understand. And in such understanding arises the realm of the individual, which encompasses man and his creations. Herein lies the understanding function most proper to the human studies” (GS 5). In these disciplines we are interested in understanding the experience of others for its own sake, unlike scientific explanations of X—a particular phenomenon. X is scientifically interesting primarily for what it indicates about a general hypothesis or law.

Historicity

Dilthey repeatedly asserts in his work that “man is an historical being.” This basic idea would have a very large influence on twentieth-century continental philosophy. What exactly does this mean? It means something more than the simple fact that we live in the course of time. Dilthey doesn’t think of history as something that is purely past or something that’s over and done with. History doesn’t stand to us as an object over against our ahistorical subjectivity. History belongs to our subjectivity itself; it constitutes us as subjects, or it forms us. This means two things.

First, the human being understands itself not directly or through some kind of introspection but through expressions or objectifications of life. “What man is only history can tell him” (GS 8). Also: “What man is and what he wills, he experiences only in the development of his nature through the millennia and never completely to the last syllable, never in objective concepts but always only in the living experience which springs up out of the depths of his own being” (GS 6). Every individual operates with a certain self-understanding, but where does this selfunderstanding come from? What is its source? Dilthey’s answer: my historical past, my tradition. My self-understanding is never a direct grasp of an essence. It is always an indirect understanding that is mediated by expressions from the past. For example, I can come to understand what I’m about by reading literature—let’s say a novel that may have been written 20 or 100 years ago. This is a large part of the importance of literature and all art: it gives me a sense of myself, or a sense of who I might be. Maybe a novel presents me with a character that I can aspire to become like, maybe a heroic figure. For a young person especially, a hero is important because it presents me with an explicit idea, or a concrete embodiment, of what I might want to become. The child thinks: I want to be like X. The child doesn’t ever become X. You become yourself, but not directly but by taking a detour through X. This is the first meaning of historicity: what we are, only history can tell us.

Second, the individual has no fixed nature or essence. It is, as Nietzsche said, the “as yet undetermined animal.” Dilthey fully agrees. It’s not just that I haven’t yet discovered who I am going to be. I haven’t yet decided this, or I’m always in process of deciding. What I am awaits my future decisions. This is what Ortega y Gasset would later call the human being’s “ontological privilege”: we have the privilege of inventing ourselves. Again, I invent myself by taking possession of particular expressions from my cultural past, so being in touch with the past actually liberates me. It doesn’t weigh me down, as we often think of the past—as a burden, all those names and dates. We have the power to alter our own essence and this is how we do it, not through any direct act of introspection or self-discovery. There’s nothing there to discover. What we are, we are in and through an engagement with history. This is what he means when he says, “The totality of man’s nature is only history” (GS 8).

The hermeneutical circle

Friedrich Schleiermacher had proposed that understanding is the same—or occurs by the same means, operates by the same principles—whether we are interpreting religious texts, laws, literary works, or anything else. While the objects of interpretation may differ, the process by which they are understood does not. This is in direct contrast to his predecessor, Friedrich August Wolf, for whom we require a different procedure of interpretation for different kinds of objects.

The question of hermeneutics is, by what means does anything become understood? The paradigm situation we are to imagine is the dialogical act of making oneself understood to another speaker and understanding what they are saying. By what means does the meaning or intention of one speaker enter the consciousness of another? For Schleiermacher, and then for Dilthey, the hermeneutic process is one of figuring out another person’s mental intentions. Hermeneutics is therefore a reconstructive enterprise: we are reconstructing in our own mind the meaning that our interlocutor has constructed in their mental states. To understand is to reexperience the meaning or intention that resides in another’s consciousness. Similarly, textual interpretation will aim at re-experiencing the intentions (intended meaning) of the author. Both the spoken utterance and the written text represent an embodiment of a part of the psychic life of the speaker or author.

How is this done? By means of the hermeneutic circle. In other words, understanding has a circular or spiral structure. In the case of a text, we understand the meaning of the text as a whole in terms of the individual parts, and we understand a part in terms of the whole or by relating the part to a larger context. Similarly, we understand a general concept with constant reference to the particular(s), and the particular with respect to the universal. For example, how do we understand a sentence? A sentence may be conceived as a kind of unity—one unified expression, and what unifies it is a meaning. We understand the sentence as a whole by understanding each of the words that make it up, and we understand the individual words by relating them to the larger context of the sentence as a whole. What matters here is context: the sentence is itself a particular part of a larger structure: a paragraph, say, or a chapter. This larger structure affords the context with respect to which we may interpret the sentence.

To illustrate this: imagine you are reading a book on political philosophy and you come across a sentence like: “Preheat oven to 350 degrees.” What are we to make of this? The particular sentence appears to belong to the genre of cooking. It therefore causes a disruption in our understanding of the text—a disruption of meaning. What’s it doing here? If the sentence contains any meaning at all, it must hang together with what comes before and after it. If it is free-standing—that is, if it relates at no point to what comes before or after it—it defies understanding. When reading a book, if I can’t understand a sentence, what do I do? Look at the sentences before and after it. What is the larger context? What’s going on, what led up to this, where is this going? All of this sheds light on the sentence I’m trying to understand. When I read an entire chapter at once I tend to understand what’s going on, but if I read a sentence from the middle of a chapter, without knowing what led up to it, its meaning is going to be far less clear. Maybe I won’t understand it at all.

This circular structure describes the only way that understanding works. It is inescapable. There is a kind of leap that occurs in all understanding. We bring with us our expectations, anticipations, prior beliefs, language, a belief about the context of what is to be understood. For example, in starting to read Dilthey’s book, we are anticipating that we are reading a modern philosophical text, that it contains an argument, a point of view, that it is attempting to persuade the reader of something, that it is not wildly incoherent, that it makes sense, that it hangs together, that it continues a conversation that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were also participating in. On that basis we anticipate that the book’s title conveys something about the meaning of the whole, and we read the opening sentences in light of the book’s title, the name of the author, the table of contents, or maybe what we have heard about the book. Our sense of the book as a whole—what it is about—conveys some intelligibility on the opening sentences, which in turn create a further context for the paragraphs that follow. The context therefore evolves in the course of the reading and does not remain fixed. The meaning of any statement therefore depends on the context in which it is said. The same sentence means something different in different contexts. The meaning of any human expression is not fixed. Meaning is contextual and historically contingent. In a cookbook, “Preheat oven to 350 degrees” is a straightforward instruction and is easily understood. In a book of political philosophy, it looks like a misprint.

The same process applies to how I understand myself: I am the person who is living a particular life. How do I understand my life as a whole? In terms of the parts that make it up. How do I understand any given part? In terms of the whole: that experience was a culmination, a prelude, it foreshadowed later experiences, or it was a dead end, a learning experience, etc. The meaning of any particular experience is nothing in itself. Rather, it lies in its contribution to a larger story. I understand everything in my experience this way. This means that there is no real starting point for understanding. We don’t understand things in a linear way: begin here, follow this method, and end up there, having gained some definite knowledge. Understanding comes about in a nonlinear, circular way, but it can also be objective. We can see Dilthey trying to get beyond what we might call objectivism—positivism, scientism—but he does not do so completely. The sort of critique of objective knowledge that we see in Nietzsche didn’t convince Dilthey. We can and should negotiate our way through the hermeneutic circle in an objective way and objective interpretation is the basis of the human sciences.

The human sciences

This is obviously the focus of a book called Introduction to the Human Sciences, which is the most important book he actually published, and it’s not exactly an introduction. It’s not meant to be a textbook for students. It’s a very ambitious book, and he summarized the essential aim of the book this way: the book has the task “of asserting the importance and independence of the human sciences over against the predominance claimed for the point of view of the natural sciences in philosophical thought” (“Survey of My System,” GS 8). This book was to be volume one of a projected two- or three-volume work. He wrote drafts of a second volume—which are included in our edition—but never finished them. Most of his subsequent writings can be viewed as continuations of this volume. (By the way, the Introduction to this volume, by Makkreel and Rodi, is well worth reading. It gives a nice, clear overview of Dilthey’s project.)

His basic hypothesis is this: human reality is infinitely rich in meaning, complex, and interconnected. The epigraph to Book One, by Hermann von Helmholtz, reads: “Reality has, up to now, revealed itself to science, which faithfully investigates its laws, as being more sublime and rich than even the most extreme efforts of mythical fantasy and metaphysical speculation could portray it” (53). There is more under the sun, of human life, than we know. All of human experience must be understood in its essential connectedness. In the human world, everything is connected to everything else. We don’t understand any human phenomenon in isolation but through its connections with things outside it, and the more connections the better. If you’re a psychologist, don’t expect to know the truth about the human psyche apart from its culture, its history, etc. There is no such thing as the psyche, if we mean by this an object of knowledge that is unchanging and that simply is what it is. As he writes, “Man as a fact prior to history and society is a fiction of genetic explanation; the human being which a sound analytic science takes as its object is the individual as a component of society. The difficult problem which psychology must solve is how to attain analytic knowledge of the universal characteristics of man” (83). The “knowing subject” of epistemology doesn’t exist: “No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant” (50). Don’t expect to know the self apart from history, or apart from “socio-historical reality.” The self is what it is only in relation to its time and place: “Nature is alien to us. It is a mere exterior for us without any inner life. Society is our world. We sympathetically experience the interplay of social conditions with the power of our total being. From within we are aware of the states and forces in all their restlessness that constitute the social system. We are constantly required to respond to what we know about the state of society with dynamic judgments of value, and to transform this state—at least in consciousness—with our restless volitional impulse” (88).

Also, don’t expect to understand a given text as something separate from the particular time and place in which it was written. Everything in human reality is interrelated. Anything you want to understand, you understand by relating it first to this, then to that, just as in reading a book you are trying to see how the various parts of it hang together and also how it relates to other books, whether by the same author or others. We understand everything relationally, by showing connections between the thing we want to know and various other things in a process that never ends. You can think of human reality as a whole as consisting of interrelated parts. Philosophy itself, as he puts it, “is the effort to make us conscious of the unity and connectedness of all the expressions of being” (The Types of Worldviews). He would always define philosophy as a search for connections between disciplines and between the various domains of human experience: “Philosophy is the developing consciousness of what man does in his thinking, creating, and acting.... Progress in philosophy lies in the growing consciousness the human mind, seen as a whole, has of its doings, goals, and presuppositions” (GS 8). If this is true then we need to see all the various disciplines of the humanities and social sciences as contributing to one comprehensive view of the human condition rather than see them as separate disciplines, in which the individual scholar is a specialist who doesn’t and needn’t see outside their specialty. To properly understand our specialty, whatever it is, we need precisely to view it in relation to what is outside it. Dilthey therefore tries in this book to provide an overall view of how these various disciplines could work together and supplement each other rather than become completely inward-looking, as scholars tend to do.

Question: how are we to understand these new disciplines—or if not exactly new, there was a renewed focus on their methodological underpinnings: psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, jurisprudence, history, etc. They take themselves—or some of them do—to be sciences. Are they? Dilthey’s reply: let’s make a basic distinction between two branches of the sciences. The German word is Vissenschaft which has a broader meaning than “science.” It’s closer to “studies,” scholarly discipline, or field of inquiry. He distinguishes between the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology; the hard sciences) and the human sciences (Geistesvissenschaften) where Geist means mind or spirit. In making this large distinction, he was repeating Mill’s distinction between what he had called the physical and the “moral sciences.” Dilthey is less interested in the natural sciences. He’s interested in the human, and especially their methodological foundations. Let’s look at this in more detail.

Dilthey spends a fair amount of time in this book describing the history of modern science, how it achieved a kind of “emancipation” from religion at the end of the middle ages. All of the sciences, throughout medieval times, had been more or less beholden to Catholic theology until the modern scientific revolution declared its independence from all religion and all authority— the authority of tradition, the Bible, the Church, Plato and Aristotle, etc. That is, the natural sciences achieved this emancipation; the human sciences did not and have still yet to achieve it. But what they are subordinate to today is not religion but the natural sciences: “the increasing power of the knowledge of nature subjugated them [the human sciences] in a new manner, and no less oppressively [than religion had]” (47).

What Dilthey is trying to achieve in this book is a new kind of scientific revolution, one for the human sciences. These disciplines need a kind of Francis Bacon figure. What Bacon achieved in The New Organon (1620) was a comprehensive view of natural science, its foundation and its methods. What the human sciences also now need is to understand what they are about, methodologically. They need to gain some theoretical self-understanding and also a justification. Many of these disciplines have justified their existence in merely utilitarian ways: society needs historians, politicians, judges and lawyers, economists, etc., so education in these fields has been essentially vocational. It is designed to train people to enter these professions but without really understanding what these fields are about. There is a kind of cloud that hangs over these disciplines—of ambiguity and uncertainty about what they can really achieve. This often gives rise to an antagonism between the natural sciences—which have had a few centuries to get clear on what they are about—and the human sciences—which are only starting to do this. Dilthey’s view: we need to get rid of this antagonism. The natural sciences and the human ones sometimes overlap, but there is a basic division that we need to understand. The two are not at odds.

Common to all the disciplines of the human sciences is the problem of their status, foundation, and methodology. Many people in these fields, when they looked at the progress of the physical sciences over the last few centuries, felt that the theoretical clarity and precision of their own field left a lot to be desired. They asked themselves, can the human sciences be made as certain, precise, and reliable—in short, as “scientific”—as the older, physical sciences? Many theorists in these disciplines, in Dilthey’s opinion, were overly anxious to argue that their discipline closely resembles the natural sciences, methodologically. It was because of this anxiety about the scientific credentials of these disciplines that many theorists turned toward positivism, or the idea that there is a fundamental unity in all the sciences. All knowledge is scientific knowledge and all disciplines work with the same method, the method of science. This is the positivist view: all the sciences have a common foundation: math. Not just the natural sciences but the human sciences too. Comte tried to establish sociology as an all-encompassing and ahistorical field for the human sciences. The scientific study of society, he thought, can and should ignore history, which is a separate field, just as the scientific study of the human psyche can and should ignore history. These sciences are to be modeled on natural science, with a mathematical foundation. The eventual aim of Comte’s sociology was prescriptive: not just to describe society, or explain it, but to redesign it in light of rational scientific methods: “For the driving force of the modern scientific spirit is an insatiable longing for reality; having transformed the natural sciences, it now wants to take possession of the socio-historical world so as to encompass, if possible, the whole world and to attain the means of directing the workings of human society” (173). Today, this kind of positivism is usually regarded by social scientists as passé and rather crude, but its legacy is alive and well albeit in subtler forms. Vestiges of it are also very apparent in a great deal of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, not so much in continental philosophy which to this day never tires of arguing against positivism and sometimes probably overreacting against it.

We’ll see later what Dilthey has to say about sociology, but his first claim is that we cannot study society, or anything human, apart from history: “The nature of knowledge in the human sciences must be explicated by observing the full course of human development. Such a method stands in contrast to that recently applied all too often by the so-called positivists, who derive the meaning of the concept of science from a definition of knowledge which arises from a predominant concern with the natural sciences. On the basis of that concept, they determine which intellectual occupations merit the name and status of science. Thus on the basis of an arbitrary concept of knowledge, some have shortsightedly and presumptuously denied the status of science to the writing of history as it has been practiced by great masters, and others believed it necessary to transform those disciplines which are founded on imperatives, rather than on judgments about reality, into cognitive sciences of reality” (57). Society and the human psyche are not objects frozen in time. They are, in short, what they come to be in the course of history, and they must be studied explicitly in terms of how certain social meanings came about in time. Dilthey starts to make this point in the first sentence of the book: “This work, the first half of which is now being published, will combine a historical approach with a systematic one in order to attain as much certainty as possible about the philosophical foundations of the human sciences” (47). In other words, we can’t study society systematically—that is, as a system—apart from its history. He goes on to say in the same paragraph: “the historical approach seeks to determine the innermost impulse of contemporary society.” If we want to understand the innermost impulse of a society, we need to study particular aspects of that society empirically and historically.

Again, the human sciences need a methodological foundation, but the foundation is not math or the scientific method. Whatever it is, it’s not the same as what it is in physics and chemistry. It can’t be the same because of the objects that are studied in the natural sciences and the objects that are studied in the human studies: the first studies naturally occurring phenomena, the second studies human phenomena (expressions). This division isn’t meant to be absolute. A human being is also a being within nature; we are organisms after all, but we are also more than that. We can know a great deal about biology and still not have a very rich understanding of our humanity or what it means to be human. No amount of study of the natural sciences is going to tell us what it is to be a human being because a human being is not a rock or a planet. It is a different kind of thing. It’s a natural object, but it’s also more than that, and the something more is the interesting part. How do we study that? Dilthey: in a variety of ways, but in short by means of interpretation. What we do in the human sciences is more like literary interpretation than physics or chemistry and this is because of the kind of being that we are. We are beings with minds. We have purposes, make evaluations, understand meanings, have convictions, laws, histories, etc. We are heirs to traditions and these traditions define how we do things, what institutions we have, etc. We don’t just stand within traditions; we are formed by them. Essentially, what the human sciences try to do is understand the human world and it’s essentially an empirical set of disciplines, that is, they describe the various aspects of the social world but they are not limited to empirical description.

There are three classes of assertions that human scientists make: (1) particular descriptions or interpretations of what is given in perception; here the focus is on individual phenomena for their own sake; (2) abstractions from these descriptions, or theoretical generalizations; here the emphasis is on the limited uniformities we see in human experience; (3) prescriptions; here the focus is on formulating “goals and rules for its [society’s] further development.” There’s an enormous amount of interpretation, analysis, abstraction, and theorizing in these disciplines in addition to straightforward empirical description of particular things. The subject matter here is vast. It includes the whole field of human history, including the history of ideas, as well as the arts, sociology, psychology, anthropology, essentially the entire domain of human experience. This is what Dilthey is trying to get his head around, and to do so he had to become something of a polymath. The sheer quantity of knowledge that he possessed is vast. Essentially, he was up on all the human sciences of his day, including philosophy.

History

We’ve seen what Dilthey has to say about historicity: we are historical beings through and through, and the ultimate aim of the human sciences is to understand human history in all its complexity. What does he have to say about history as a discipline and also the philosophy of history? How can a historian, who belongs to one age, understand human beings who belong to another age? Also, how are we to understand history itself? In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was an enormous amount of discussion about history, not only among historians and philosophers. A few key ideas of the age were enlightenment, progress, and humanity, and these three ideas were closely bound up together. There was an emerging historical consciousness, that is, a growing interest not only in history itself but where we are in history, how history is unfolding, whether there are larger meanings of history. Does it teach any lessons, for example? Is there any large structure to it? Does it have a plan? Much of this discussion was very speculative. Many were taking the view that there is a hidden plan, pattern, or blueprint for history of one kind or another. There is some system of principles that will allow us to unlock the secret of history and maybe predict the future. Dilthey is skeptical of this. For Dilthey, there is no hand of God playing itself out in history; we are not, as far as we can know anyway, moving toward salvation. Against Hegel and Marx, we are not advancing; history has no goal or telos. He is very skeptical of all large-scale theorizing about the goal of history. What we see in history are limited uniformities and rough patterns only, and we shouldn’t inflate these limited uniformities into grand laws and causal principles.

He’s especially skeptical of historical teleology, but he doesn’t take the opposite view either: that history is just a meaningless set of events, just one thing after another, signifying nothing. There is meaning to be discerned in history, but human beings give history a meaning(s), and we do this through our plans and goals. We don’t discover meaning in history, especially not One Big Meaning. We invent it, and we invent it through our own current projects and aspirations. For instance, what is the meaning of Canadian confederation? It is a part of our present undertaking to build a democracy of a certain kind. Apart from this project of ours today, confederation doesn’t mean much of anything. It’s the connection to the present that gives it meaning.

Dilthey’s critique of philosophy of history and sociology

As we’ve seen, the positivist view of sociology was that it aims to discover scientifically provable laws. For positivists, society operates according to laws, as nature does. The job of the scientist is to discover these laws and to observe their workings in a variety of social phenomena. Dilthey’s reply: there are no laws (in a strict, causal sense) of human life, or of “socio-historical reality.” What there are, are rough patterns, limited uniformities, and the sociologist should have an eye for these uniformities, but they shouldn’t be blinded by them, that is, they shouldn’t see only theoretical entities such as (his list) “art, science, state, society, and religion.” The sociologist should focus on individual phenomena. The trouble is that they have a tendency, like many philosophers do, to become prisoners of their own abstractions: “These [abstractions] are like fog banks that obstruct our view of reality, yet cannot themselves be grasped” (93). An example is religion. This is something that a sociologist or anthropologist is often interested in studying, but what is it? In the hands of the sociologist or anthropologist, it is typically an empty abstraction, one that conceals more than it reveals about the particular religious group they are trying to understand. The sociologist studies what he calls “the external organization of society.” How should they do it? Empirically, yes; they are trying to describe the experience of members of a society and to do so objectively. One thing they need to focus on is the specific operations of the will: “Viewed objectively, we find individuals in society related to one another not merely through a correspondence of their activities, and not merely as individuals that are self-contained or even devoted to each other by the free ethical ground of their being. Rather, this society comprises a complex of communal relationships and bonds into which the wills of individuals are integrated, or interwoven, as it were. A glance at society shows us, to begin with, an enormous quantity of minute, transient connections in which wills appear as united and bound together. Then lasting relationships of this kind are formed in economic life and the other cultural systems. But above all, wills are joined together in the family, the state, and the church, in corporate bodies and in institutions, to form associations that result in a partial unity of such wills” (115). The sociologist studies human groupings, in which the wills of individuals come together to realize some shared purposes. Some of these groupings last a long time; others last a short time, but much of the life of a society bears on how individuals come into this kind of association and their interactions, the institutions they form, laws, norms, etc. It is typical of human beings that we form a kind of “communal consciousness” and that we form relationships of power and interdependence. Much of the business of sociology is to study their workings in detail, and without making concepts like power, dependence, family, community, religion, etc. into grand theoretical abstractions. Grand abstractions tend to be meaningless.

Dilthey didn’t want to get rid of sociology, although he sometimes appears to be saying this. His criticisms are pretty harsh: just look at the titles of chapters 14–16. Sociology is not really a science; it’s a pseudo-science, he seems to be saying. But we should have a clear idea of what he is criticizing here. It is sociology in the grand style, which is what Comte was doing. “The apprehension of this new state of affairs led to a new theory, a science of society. In France, ‘sociology’ came to signify the realization of the grand illusion of attaining knowledge of the true nature of society by synthesizing the results of all the sciences, and of projecting, on the basis of this knowledge, a new external organization of society corresponding to the prevailing realities of science and industry, as well as of guiding the new society by means of such knowledge” (133). Sociology in this early and very ambitious form was going to gather knowledge from the various human and natural sciences, systematize it, and apply the whole of it in remaking society. It aimed at nothing less than a complete transformation of society in light of the current state of scientific knowledge. Dilthey’s reply: this is an absurd overestimation of what any science can achieve. We will never have a totalized grasp of society, and indeed there can be no science of society. There are particular sciences that study particular aspects of human life, but the pieces don’t add up to any grand picture. The best we can do is develop a more and more comprehensive understanding of the human being in society, but there are limits here. There are two disciplines that attempt to know the whole of socio-historical reality: sociology (in England and France) and the philosophy of history (mainly in Germany), and they both aim far higher than they should. They both make the mistake of seeing some particular human expression as “merely the raw material for their abstractions” (141).

Regarding the philosophy of history, he will take a similar view. “Philosophy of history” he defines as “a theory which attempts to know the interconnectedness of historical reality through a correspondence with the unity of interconnected propositions” (142). It’s a search for “conceptual unity,” the underlying concepts that allow us to gain a big-picture comprehension of history. A common way of speaking about this conceptual unity is in terms of a plan, one master plan that directs how history unfolds. This kind of philosophy of history is grand in scale, but it is less grand than sociology since sociology aims at the transformation of socio-historical reality while philosophy of history tries only to understand it. The majority of his remarks on this subject are skeptical, but he’s not rejecting the entire field. He’s rejecting the kind of grand theoretical flights that we see in Augustine, Hegel, and Marx, but we still need to think philosophically about history.

He contrasts two then-current approaches to the study of history: what he calls Hegel’s “ethereal heights” and the “pragmatic historian.” The latter doesn’t theorize at all but instead tries to keep their nose very close to the ground of particular historical occurrences. Dilthey will say this: the historian and philosopher of history both need to combine a theoretical and a pragmatic orientation. “But in reality the necessary purposive nexus of human history is realized precisely by means of this interaction of particular individuals, their passions, their vanities, their interests. The pragmatic historian and Hegel fail to understand each other because they start their discourse from two opposed perspectives: the solid earth and the ethereal heights. Yet each of them possesses a portion of the truth. Everything brought about by men in this socio-historical reality happens by means of the mainspring of the will. Here purpose acts as motive” (103). To understand a historical occurrence at all, we need to understand what motivated people to do what they did, and to do this we need to engage in some abstract reflection and theoretical analysis, not just recount the chronicle of what happened and who did what. We need not only to know the facts but to interpret what they mean. We need to understand why they did it and what it meant to them. What were their purposes?

To see this, the historian needs to think within the hermeneutical circle: to understand the individual event, we need to relate it to a universal, or some general concept, and vice versa. This is the basic structure of historical, and all, interpretation. Philosophy of history provides the universals that we need in order to understand the meaning of particular events. The bare particular cannot be understood on its own. This is the error of the pragmatic historian: thinking that we can understand the particular historical event without the universal, just by knowing the detailed facts. Dilthey will say we need not only to “know the facts” but to understand what they mean or meant to them, and we understand any particular in light of a universal or an idea. These universals shouldn’t be castles in the air either. There is no One Big Meaning of history: “History no more has such an ultimate and simple message which would express its true sense than does nature” (141). There is no large-scale explanation of history. The only way we have to explain historical events is (1) empirically, (2) on a relatively small scale, and (3) within the particular human sciences—and by synthesizing the specific findings of historians, anthropologists, economists, etc. “If there is a kernel of truth behind the hopes for a philosophy of history, it lies in [the ideal of] historical research based on the widest possible mastery of the particular human sciences. Just as physics and chemistry are resources for the study of organic life, anthropology, legal theory, and political science are the resources for the study of history….

[T]he highly complex reality of history can be known only by means of sciences which investigate the uniformities that apply to the more simple facts into which we can analyze that reality” (143-4).

This kind of approach is never going to reduce history to a formula or a principle. One of the main principles on offer at the time was the idea of progress, and Dilthey was very skeptical of this: “Even the power of the concept of progress lies less in the idea of an end than in our own experience of a striving will, of a life-project, and of the joyous consciousness of the energy that this life-project generates. This experience of the self would project itself into an image of universal progress even if such progress did not clearly manifest itself in the real course of history…. The philosophy of history more than any other area of metaphysics is clearly rooted in religious experience, and withers and decays when this connection is severed. The notion of a unified design of human history, or of God’s educational plan for human history, was a product of theology, which found fixed points for such a construction in the beginning and the end of all history” (146). In the eighteenth century the idea that one big plan drives history tried to divorce itself from religion, but it was unsuccessful. It is a religious idea—which has been secularized, but the essence remains. It essentially goes back to Augustine. If historians are no longer looking for a Hand of God beneath the surface of events, they are now looking for a Law of Progress.

Finally, he argues that “the methods of the philosophy of history and of sociology are wrong.” This is the title of chapter 16. What is the method in German philosophy of history? The key figures were Hegel, Winckelmann, Herder, the Schlegels, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, and they used a procedure that Dilthey calls “creative intuition,” i.e., speculative reason: “There was no special method for this procedure, only a process of cross-fertilization in which the particular human sciences contribute to each other [to manifest] a developing world. This creative intuition was reduced to a principle by the metaphysical school. To be sure, this way of concentrating its meaning-content made the intuition unusually effective for a short time. But this concentration comes about only when notiones universales cast their grey pall over the historical world” (153). The effect of this method is to dazzle us with generalities and abstract notions that soar over the head of particular historical actors and events, just as sociology dazzles us with large theoretical concepts that shed very little light on the actual realities of social life. As an example, think of Hegel’s idea of freedom. History, Hegel tell us, is advancing toward the progressive realization of universal freedom. According to Hegel, in the ancient eastern world, one was free (the ruler); in ancient Greece and Rome, some were free (the aristocracy); in the modern west, and into the future, all are free by nature and all will be free in fact. Dilthey’s response: did Hegel actually demonstrate this in a rigorous way? No, it was a grand flight of abstraction and speculation. It’s not even capable of being grounded using the usual methods of historical inquiry. For Hegel, the historian is just supposed to intuit this. You’re supposed to see it, this progressive march toward freedom, at work in particular events. Just as, for Augustine, the (sacred) historian is supposed to see the Hand of God at work in history. Dilthey asks, how do we know that we’re actually intuiting what’s there, rather than imagining it all? We don’t. He says the same about a “universal sense of human evolution.” Comte claimed to intuit this beneath the surface of sociohistorical life. On the surface of society and history we see certain events taking place, and beneath the surface we see a kind of quasi-biological evolution at work, says Comte. Dilthey asks, how does Comte know that’s what he’s seeing? What’s his method? The method is creative intuition alone, which is not really a method at all. It looks a lot like empty speculation: “On the other hand, the ‘universal sense of human evolution,’ as he [Comte] intuits it from the course of world history, is again nothing but a notio universalis, a confused and indeterminate general representation abstracted from a mere survey of the nexus of history. It is an unscientific abstraction under whose broad cloak man’s increasing control over nature converges with the growing influence of his higher capacities over his lower, of his intelligence over his passions, and of his social inclinations over his egoistic ones” (156).

The same can be said about progress. This very popular idea is the very core of the philosophy of history and has been from the beginning—and there’s little evidence for it. How, then, are we to proceed in the study of history and society if not on this grand scale? His answer: on a much smaller scale. We should keep our theoretical flights low to the ground. How is this done? Well, how do they do this in the natural sciences? They engage in abstract theorizing there too, but there the study of the natural world is divided into several specialized sciences—physics, chemistry, biology, etc. and the focus of each of these disciplines is specific. A scientist will study some particular question in a particular context and they should be careful not to make any grand pronouncements that they can’t prove empirically. The same should happen in the study of the human world. The sociologist, anthropologist, or whoever should try to get clear on some particular context. They should be trying to understand what some particular human expression means in the context in which we find it. We have no knowledge of society or history as a whole other than what we get by analyzing its particular aspects and seeing whether these aspects add up to any larger picture, which they may or may not. But don’t expect to know the totality with any real clarity.

History moves like the sea, in waves. It is not linear, but there are “enduring phenomena,” for instance, religion, the state, family, and the arts. There is something relatively solid there that we can study, but alongside these more lasting creations are many others that are here for a short time, trends that come and go and muddy the waters of human reality. For example, there are revolutions like the French and American, which produce effects that endure for centuries. But there are other revolutions that either fail or they change things for a while, and then eventually come to nothing, or another revolution replaces it. This complicates things and makes it pretty difficult to come up with a big-picture understanding of revolutions in general. It’s on this note that he concludes this book (or Book 1).

There is one last hypothesis of Dilthey’s that we should have a look at, and which is related to what we’ve been discussing. It’s his notion of worldviews.

Worldviews

Like Nietzsche, Dilthey was generally skeptical of metaphysics. What he wants to replace it with is a philosophy of worldviews. The basic idea is this: our way of understanding anything is always informed by a larger worldview of one kind or another, and we see the rise and fall of these worldviews in the general course of human history. To understand a certain historical era, we need to understand how they thought and what they did, which means we need to understand their worldview. For example, if we want to understand our own era, we need to understand something about the rise of modern science and technology, because science and technology define our time. But worldviews, as Nietzsche said, also reflect the personalities of those who create and adopt them. There is a psychology of worldviews. We can classify the different worldviews according to the different types of human personality. Every personality includes thought, will, and feeling, but in each of us, one of the three tends to predominate. Plato may well be in the background here. Remember his tripartite theory of the soul, in which the human being or mind is said to be made up of three parts or aspects: reason, spirit, and desire. All three are present in everyone, but in every individual one of the three predominates. Dilthey gives this idea a different spin. It’s partly because of this little theory that Dilthey became quite well known in his lifetime. He divides the worldviews into three kinds, as follows.

1. The first one is centered on rational thought. For example, modern science, rationalism, empiricism, metaphysical materialism, realism, positivism. This worldview—cluster of worldviews maybe—is an expression of a highly intellectual personality. They tend to be rather tough-minded and this-worldly. He mentions as examples Hume, Mill, and Marx, but we could include a great many modern thinkers and philosophies.

2. The second is centered on moral ideas, especially freedom. This strongly moral view of the world is an expression of a more aspirational personality. They tend to be more soft-minded and sometimes otherworldly. His examples: in religion, Judaism and Christianity; in philosophy, Kant.

3. Finally, there is what he calls objective idealism, and its central principle is feeling. It embodies an aesthetic and contemplative view of the world. His examples: Buddhism, Spinoza, Hegel. It’s not very tough-minded, more dreamy and romantic.

These three are rough approximations only. Any given way of thinking is likely to be some combination of the three, but one of the three tends to predominate. We don’t exactly choose our worldview because our worldview is an expression of our personality, also our age. We find ourselves already thinking within a worldview. He doesn’t think this leads us to complete relativism—the idea that truth itself is relative to our worldview, or our personality, or our time. He takes us perhaps a step or two in this direction, but real knowledge is still possible for Dilthey. Every worldview contains knowledge, but this knowledge is never capable of being complete. Our knowledge is genuine, regardless of what our own worldview is, but it doesn’t lead us to ultimate reality. Knowledge is always partly the product of the mind’s activity in shaping, organizing, and structuring (Nietzsche would say falsifying) what it sees. The philosopher Dilthey thought himself close to in this respect was not Nietzsche but Kant, who had argued that we can know reality only as the content of our consciousness. Reality is the world as it appears to us, given our worldview.

Works Cited

Dilthey, Wilhelm. Introduction to the Human Sciences. Eds. Rudolf Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi.

Trans. Michael Neville. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

GS followed by a volume number refers to Dilthey’s Gesammelte Schriften or collected works in German.

Rickman, H. P. Wilhelm Dilthey: Pioneer of the Human Studies. London: Paul Elek, 1979.