German Pessimism
Pessimism,
which comes from the Latin ‘pessimus’, the worst, was a term used by
Jesuits to attack Voltaire (1694 - 1778 CE), who had himself pointed to
the great suffering found in the world to attack Leibniz’s idea that
because God is rational this is the best of all possible worlds. This
is called “the problem of evil”, an issue for the ancient Greek and
Roman Epicureans. If the world is rational, then why is there such
suffering? Romantics such as Voltaire’s friend Rousseau (1712 - 1778
CE) pointed to the same examples of suffering to argue that society was
corruptive and we should get back to nature and live simply like our
ancestor, the uncorrupted “noble savage”. So far, our thinkers have
been champions of reason and civilization, yet there was a growing
awareness that advancements in Europe had not merely produced
philosophical speculation and scientific discovery.
Even
earlier than Voltaire and Rousseau, European authors such as Desiderius
Erasmus (1466 - 1536 CE) and Baltasar Gracián y Morales (1601 - 1658
CE), both Catholic priests, had written satirical novels satirizing the
hypocrisy of society and European civilization. Gracián, a Spanish
Baroque Conceptionist and a favorite author of both Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche, used contradictory perspectives between oppositional
characters to explore society’s deceptions and disappointments. Much
like the novel Locke read by Ibn Tufail and Robinson Crusoe, Gracián’s
three-part novel Criticón (Critical, like Kant) features a civilized
man, Critilo, and a natural man, Andrenio, who has left civilization and
returned to the wild, journey together through Spain, France and Italy,
finding hypocrites and fools everywhere.
In
the early 1800s, the time of Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, Germany and
German thought went through a period of great pessimism. Just like in
ancient Egypt, Greece and China, human thought often flourishes in
periods of tragedy and war as people are forced to turn critically to
old conceptions and institutions and ask hard questions about what works
and does not work for the individual and the community. In the late
1700s, the American and French revolutions, along with developments in
England, had brought new rights to the common people. When the German
people rose up to fight for rights similar to their neighbors, several
German princes came together to crush the popular people’s movement.
Germany was at this time a loose confederacy of regional
principalities, ruled locally. Hegel’s students Marx and Engels wrote
the Communist Manifesto for this discouraged audience, arguing that the
people would one day rise up and overcome oppression with a revolution
that would remove the capitalists from society just as the French
Revolution had removed the nobility and much of the clergy.
Recall
that Descartes, Kant and other Rationalists argued that the human mind
is capable of deducing certain and objective truth, such as that found
in algebraic mathematics. When the political tide turned against the
German people, who sought a more reasonable society like the Americans
and French, the people began to wonder about reason and human progress.
Is the world, society or mind run by reason? If so, does reason always
work objectively for the good of everyone? This created a tide of
pessimism, found in popular folk songs and elite intellectual texts
alike. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates (as Plato’s mouthpiece) argued
that the world is created from ideal forms that can be known by the just
and wise, but Thrasymachus argued that justice is merely the will of
the stronger who can impose their ‘order’ on others. German thought
likewise turned from the reason of Leibniz and Kant towards the will of
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as the ordering force in the Darwinian world.
The world is tough, not necessarily reasonable, and ideas must be
fought for, even if they are imperfect. Life, at its best, is romantic
and dramatic, not rational or mathematical. Kant and Hegel were
confident that reason can complete itself as a system. Pessimism turned
away from reason, completion and objectivity, towards passion,
incompleteness and subjectivity.
German
pessimism, centrally Schopenhauer and his follower Nietzsche but also
very applicable to the Dutch thinker Kierkegaard, fed into the later
Existentialism of Sartre and Absurdism of Camus. Sartre, who coined the
term ‘Existentialism’, claimed Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as its
founders, even though neither used the term. All these thinkers
flourished in popularity during two more recent periods of pessimism:
WWI for Europe (producing the Dada modern art movement) and post-WWII
for America (producing the counter-culture of the beatniks during the
Korean war, and then hippies during the Vietnam War, both particularly
thriving in the Bay Area).
Arthur Schopenhauer
(1788 - 1860), who looks in his famous portrait like a cross between a
cranky old grandfather and Wolverine of the X Men, was a follower of
Kant, but unlike his own follower Nietzsche who despised Kant and argued
against him frequently, Schopenhauer took Kant’s philosophy and
radically inverted it. Like Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s father died
tragically when he was young, leaving him free to pursue philosophy
rather than the family profession. For Schopenhauer, it was business.
For Nietzsche, it was the ministry.
Remember
that Kant conceded to Hume that the world is unknown and all we can
have about it are assumptions, but reason is capable of rendering
objective truth about the mind and its categories. Schopenhauer, more
pessimistic about the use of reason than Kant, saw the gulf and gap
between the world and our ideas as a stormy abyss that forever
frustrates our idealizations. He agreed with Kant that the mind works
categorically and mathematically, but the gap between our conceptions
and the ‘thing-in-itself’ turned Schopenhauer from Kant’s Rationalism
and mathematical science to Buddhism and the ecstasy of art. Like
Hegel, Schopenhauer was influenced by while critical of Kant and his
critical philosophy, both taking in ideas of resistance and social
communion from Fichte. Much as Marx took Hegel and “stood him on his
head”, turning his dialectical Idealism into dialectical materialism,
Schopenhauer stood Kant on his head, in some ways following his own
Kantian teacher Fichte, turning from the objectivity of reason to the
centrality of will.
Kant
sought objectivity in reason, the most abstract part of the mind, the
most removed from immediate sensation. Schopenhauer argued that
sensation and the experience of the will is basic. Kant’s
self-certainty is replaced by Schopenhauer’s will of the body. Like
Merleau-Ponty, Schopenhauer argued that our fundamental experience of
ourselves is not in the abstractions of reason, but in the embodied
will. We are, at base, a striving. Like Nietzsche, his follower,
Schopenhauer was critical of other philosophers for focusing on
abstractions of reason and ignoring love, friendship, sexuality, and
artistic passion, which are central to our existence. For Kant freedom
comes from reason. For Schopenhauer, freedom is only in terms of the
will, much like for Fichte, his teacher, in terms of assertion and
resistance. For Kant, freedom is a moral decision. For Schopenhauer,
freedom is found primarily in the motions of the body. Schopenhauer,
like Freud, considered the freedom of reason to be an illusion, as the
mind is compulsive relative to the body. Thoughts appear free, but the
purest part of our freedom is not in the channeling of abstractions, but
in the self-recognition of volition.
Schopenhauer
compared abstract concepts to Plato’s shadows on the cave wall, what he
considered to be the ultimate insight of Plato. However, for
Schopenhauer, the Sun outside the cave is the will of all, not the sum
of conceptions. Schopenhauer argued that there is no objective thought
apart from emotion, though he did not do a systematic job of
systematizing this interaction. Nietzsche would pick up this theme
later, just as Freud would attempt to systematize it as Psychoanalysis.
While many previous thinkers such as Plato try to separate emotion from
thought to make it objective, for Schopenhauer thinking is delusional
abstraction that separates us from our true self. It is individuation
of abstraction, the abstract idea of separate selves, separate from the
world and each other, that causes the will to be at odds with itself,
which causes the selfishness often associated with will. The world is a
battleground because of abstractions and ideas, which have misled the
will into conflicts with itself. Science is not raising humanity up,
but dividing it among itself. Science conjures up distinctions, while
only art reunites us with the will as an undivided whole.
For
Schopenhauer, the supreme insight is seeing beneath conceptions to the
true essence. This is true genius, not science, but art. Remember the
predilection of the Analytic tradition for precision and science, and
that of the Continental tradition for emotion and art. While Hegel
still put reason and science on a pedestal, it is with Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche that Continental thought takes a turn towards the dramatic.
For Kant, reason dealt with the should, the projections of
possibilities. For Schopenhauer, the will is the ultimate basis of
projection, the engine of what should be, of what is desired, and reason
and its concepts only abstract empty dreams. For Kant, it is reason
that gives us projected purposes, while for Schopenhauer, it is based in
the will, the furthest part of ourselves from reason. For Kant, it is
reason that unites humanity in the universal. For Schopenhauer, it is
will that unites us with not just others, but the world as a whole.
Criticizing Kant for seeking in conceptions what is at hand in desire,
Schopenhauer said that Kant was like a man at a masked ball who spends
the entire evening wooing a woman in hopes of a conquest, only to find
out when the masks are taken off that she is in fact his wife.
Remember
that Hegel disliked Kant’s gap between our ideas and the
‘thing-in-itself’ and believed that it could be overcome by reason
through dialectic. Schopenhauer disagreed with Hegel and argued that
reason could not overcome the gap. In fact, Schopenhauer and Hegel both
taught at the University of Berlin as brief philosophical rivals. As
Hegel was becoming increasingly popular, Schopenhauer scheduled his
lectures at the same time as Hegel’s to try to combat his philosophy,
like the later Schelling, but when this backfired and more students
attended Hegel’s lectures and Schopenhauer only had five students, he
resigned after a single semester in disgust. Schopenhauer openly called
Hegel a charlatan who tricks people into believing reason completely
fleshes the world out, and wrote that when he read Hegel’s Phenomenology
of Spirit he felt as if he were in a madhouse.
Schopenhauer
also ridiculed Hegel’s conception of history, which presented the
Germans as near the summit of human civilization and world history.
Schopenhauer did not see civilization as changing, but rather the same
old mess. Society is a painful struggle of will. Beneath
representation, the divisions of abstractions, there is only one will,
divided and at war with itself. The world’s wars and social conflicts,
such as the uprisings that contributed to German pessimism, which
eventually brought Schopenhauer his fame, convinced him that there was
little progress and humanity remained much the same as it always had,
without the possibility of Hegel’s great ascension. Schopenhauer
believed that time doesn’t progress, and wrote that the history of a
village and the history of an empire teach us the same thing. This is a
very cyclical and cynical view of humanity, one that I admit I am
partial to while allowing for technological evolution and its effect.
While
Hume did not speak his views about theism or atheism publicly,
Schopenhauer, like Hegel’s student Marx, was openly atheist, the first
of the central modern European philosophers. Schopenhauer did believe
that the world was alive, but not that it was rational. Schopenhauer’s
solution to the problem of evil was to reject the idea that a living
world is a rational world. While he believed that the world shared a
single will, he believed that rationality had turned the world against
itself, each part striving against the other parts, just as
Schopenhauer’s teacher Fichte had interpreted Kant.
Even
as an atheist, Schopenhauer was deeply influenced by Indian thought,
specifically the Upanishads, Vedanta and Buddhism. As a youth, he had
received a Latin translation of the Upanishads, the distillation of the
philosophical meanings of the Hindu Vedas, and he was so impressed with
them that he continued to read them every night before bed, and left the
book open on his desk. Of the Upanishads, he wrote that they were the
most sublime philosophy of world history, the product of “the highest
human wisdom”, and that, “it has been the consolation of my life and
will be the consolation of my death”. He predicted that the philosophy
of the Upanishads, orthodox Hindu texts, may replace Christianity as the
religion of Europe.
Schopenhauer
only learned about Buddhism after he had already composed his
philosophy, but he saw deep parallels between the Four Noble Truths of
the Buddha and his own conception of existence as will and suffering,
and would sometimes refer to himself as a Buddhist. The first three of
the Four Noble Truths are existence is suffering, the cause of suffering
is desire, and there is a way out of suffering. He wrote that, if his
own philosophy was correct, it would be expected that it agree with the
most popular system of thought in human history. He received
instruction in meditation from a friend, though it is unknown whether he
practiced with any regularity. Like much of Indian thought and Hume,
who himself may very well have been influenced by Indian sources,
Schopenhauer argued that thought is caused by will and desire, the
fundamental essence of all things.
Schopenhauer’s
central great work, The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als
Wille und Vorstellung, 1818 CE), famously opens with the words, “The
world is my representation”, about as succinct an expression of Idealism
possible, particularly standing next to the long-winded works of Kant
and Hegel. Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche rejected Kant and Hegel’s
approach of writing exhaustive systems, preferring to have several clear
and deep ideas expressed in aphorisms, regardless of how systematic.
This has made both more popular and enjoyable to read than Kant and
Hegel for non-professionals, such as artists and authors.
For
Schopenhauer, the mind represents and idealizes the world, which is
essentially will. All things, including the concrete self and abstract
conceptions, are manifestations of will. The world is full of perpetual
striving for ideals that never come to perfection. The classic
metaphor he uses is the ship bobbing on a stormy sea, a ship built of
ideals as straight boards on a sea of chaotic desires. I mentioned with
Kant that this is far less anchored than Kant’s island. One must
recognize one’s condition, and have the courage and will to hold one’s
course in spite of the endless hardship. Developing sea legs and a
tough stomach, to recognize oneself and one’s world as striving without
hope for a Hegelian resolution by reason, is virtue and true strength.
The subject that recognizes itself as willing still sees itself as a
self, what Schopenhauer calls the “knot of the world”, the mystery par
excellence’, the only event purely for and in itself. Other than this
authentic recognition, human existence is self-denial, a pendulum
between boredom and pain.
There
is for Schopenhauer one escape from will and the self, just as for
Buddhism the fourth of the Noble Truths is that the way out is Buddhism
itself. For Schopenhauer it is not Buddhism but art, through which we
can temporarily escape ourselves and our desires through ecstasy and
identification with others and the whole. Nietzsche similarly argued
that creativity was the highest form of life, but he argued that it was
not the loss of self and escape from will but rather the highest
activity of the individual, self-assertion expressing power and
accomplishment. For Schopenhauer, it is not standing out as an
individual but identification with the world beyond representation,
feeling unity with the other that transcends conceptualization.
Schopenhauer
considered music the highest form of art, the form that embodies pure
will itself, because unlike visual arts it represents and copies no
particular things or ideas. In this way it is similar to American
Abstract Minimalist painting and sculpture that became popular in the
wake of WWII and with the beatniks, art which goes beyond Cubism,
Futurism and Surrealism in representing no particular things but
striving to give shape to pure emotion and sensation.
Oceanic
feeling of Freud’s criticism of religion in Civilization and its
Discontent. The composer Wagner befriended Nietzsche and promoted
Nietzsche’s work using Wagner’s own fame due to their mutual love of the
philosophy of Schopenhauer, revolutionary work for pessimistically
minded German intellectuals of their time. Schopenhauer compared the
‘should’ of the will, its purpose and drive, to the melody of music, and
compared music to the numbers of the Pythagoreans and the Chinese Yi
Jing, a favorite of Leibniz’s, the deep underlying essential form and
representation of fundamental existence. The greatest art after music
is tragedy, as it shows us the unified will divided painfully against
itself. Consider the works of Shakespeare, and the suffering undergone
due to ignorance and passion.
Like
much of Indian thought, but very unlike Descartes, Schopenhauer saw
animals as intimately related to human beings, both being similar
manifestations of will, striving and suffering. Schopenhauer even
believed that crystals display will, much like the ancient Greek
philosopher Thales believed that magnets have souls, and that crystals
are halfway between earth and vegetation. In one passage near the end
of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer speaks of sea
lions and the way that they form a circle around their young. Whenever a
pup tries to escape the circle, it gets a bite from the elders to teach
it to stay where it is safe. Clearly he is drawing a comparison
between the way sea lions and humans learn through suffering and
restricting the will in themselves and others.
Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche were both influences on Freud, who saw civilization and
human behaviors as repression of desire and will, as the super-ego
putting the ego’s endless search for pleasure in check. In his
Civilization and its Discontent, Freud argued that religion is a
hopeless attempt to regain the “oceanic feeling” that we had in union
with our world before we left the womb. Schopenhauer would agree, but
disagree with Freud that regaining this feeling is a hopeless illusion.
Nature is blind to its own striving. If it is aware, it does not
represent itself as a self-concept, nor does it plan its activities
through reason. Recall Fichte argued that the “I” is a striving that
conceives of itself in terms of opposition to others. Schopenhauer
follows Fichte, arguing that animals such as dogs and people can
conceive of themselves, representing themselves to themselves as selves
conceptually. Schopenhauer argued that animals share this with humans,
being able to recognize their own names, unlike minerals and plants.
Recall Berkeley arguing that we recognize other minds by their ability
to have ideas like our own.
Schopenhauer
argued against the use of the pronoun ‘it’ when referring to animals,
as it lead to them being treated as mere objects. This is in complete
disagreement with Descartes, who thought that animals were automata
without sensation. While Descartes said that there is no greater a
misleading mistake as to think that animals have souls, Schopenhauer
wrote, “He who is cruel to living creatures cannot be a good man”. For
Schopenhauer, animals live in a simpler, continuous present moment, much
as Buddhism teaches. Animals are also incapable of the abstractions
needed to harm others through elaborate technologies. Like Nietzsche,
there is a romanticism for a simpler, more authentic past shared with
Rousseau, the Transcendentalists, as well as ancient Chinese Daoists.
Schopenhauer
believed in compassion for all beings, unless they are human, lower
class, and rioting. Schopenhauer, of the state, said he preferred to be
ruled by a lion than a fellow rat, clearly a conservative and
authoritarian in spite of his radically unique philosophy, openly
atheist and indebted to Indian thought. In the riots of 1848, part of
the disappointment that turned to pessimism, he lent his opera glasses
to an army officer shooting from a distance at violent rioters. Yet,
Schopenhauer was opposed to the slave trade and the mistreatment of any
people based on ethnicity. He was decently convinced of white
supremacism, as were the majority of European scientists at the time,
but unlike many of his day he believed that the ancient Egyptians and
Indians were equal to Europeans. He wrote abolitionist works supporting
the movement in the United States, writing, with an unfortunate choice
of words, that “our black brothers” were receiving treatment, “belonging
to the blackest pages of mankind’s criminal record”.
Ethically,
Schopenhauer argued that in harming other things, we harm ourselves.
Unfortunately this seems to have extended more to animals and slaves
than to the German rioters. While the world is a Darwinian struggle,
there is for Schopenhauer a temporary Buddhistic release in art and
recognizing the other as ourselves, such as we do in tragic fiction.
Schopenhauer lived alone except for a series of pets, mostly poodles,
who apparently often responded to Schopenhauer when he called their
names. He wrote that he could see the immortal will of the cosmos in
the eyes of his dog, so what really dies or passes away? Schopenhauer
himself died sitting on his couch, next to his pet cat. Hopefully the
cat, if not the Upanishads, was a final solace for Schopenhauer.
Schopenhauer
had a great influence on many, including Nietzsche, Wagner and
Wittgenstein, but his work caught on first with artists rather than
philosophers. Freud read Schopenhauer and found it remarkable how much
his own ideas were prefigured in Schopenhauer’s work, as did his student
Carl Jung, as did the Jungian Psychologist Joseph Campbell. The
scientists Einstein and Schrodinger both approved of Schopenhauer.
Camus, who befriended but later broke with Sartre the Existentialist,
was influenced in his Absurdism by Schopenhauer, as was Tolstoy.
Borges, the great Argentinian surrealist author of the short Ficciones,
wrote that he never bothered to systematically present his own
philosophy because it had already been written by Schopenhauer.
Soren Kierkegaard
(1813-1855 CE), who was posthumously crowned the first Existentialist
philosopher by Sartre, was very pessimistic about the painful struggle
of existence, like Schopenhauer. However, unlike Schopenhauer but like
Schopenhauer’s follower Nietzsche, Kierkegaard turned not to the
communal will, but to the solitary existence of the individual. For
later Existentialists, the individual is left alone to give meaning to
the world, for Kierkegaard, left wonderfully and horribly free. Like
Schopenhauer, he saw Hegelian abstractions of reason as inauthentic, but
it is the self with which one is left, not the will of the world.
Born
in the Dutch city of Copenhagen, Kierkegaard used to enjoy walking
through the city, greeting everyone he met as his fellow equal
regardless of their station in life. Nietzsche, whose thinking has
often been compared to that of Kierkegaard, prefered solitary hikes in
the mountains. Like Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard was raised in a wealthy
family that was very depressing. His father is said to have been
convinced that, because of his sins, all his children would die before
him, having cursed God as a youth and having impregnated Kierkegaards
mother out of wedlock while she was a family maid. Kierkegaard was
drilled by his father in lessons at a very young age such that he would
be the top student in any class, but to avoid the young Kierkegaard from
developing any pride in accomplishment, his father demanded that he get
the third best grades in the class, purposefully making mistakes to
place himself between what would have been the third and fourth student
if Kierkegaard had not held back. As mentioned, Kierkegaard was a
student of Hegel and Schelling, but he found both to be boring and
unnecessarily abstract.
Kierkegaard’s
love life is infamously depressing. Kierkegaard was engaged to Regina
Olson, the love of his life, but he came to the conclusion that he had a
divine purpose to be a philosopher and critic of society. Many of the
philosophers we have studied never married, during earlier times when
marriage and children were expected and proper. Kierkegaard’s teacher
Hegel was one of the few great European philosophers who was married,
however happily. Kierkegaard broke off the engagement, and hung out
around bars and bordellos in the hopes that Regina would fall out of
love with him. Regina married and moved to the Virgin Islands, Dutch
colonies, where her husband had been appointed governor. Kierkegaard
wrote in his journals on many occasions that he still loved Regina, and
after Kierkegaard and Regina’s husband were both safely dead, Regina
revealed that she had never stopped loving Kierkegaard either.
Kierkegaard
means ‘churchyard’ in Dutch, which also has the double meaning of
graveyard, as Christians have traditionally been buried within the gated
yard of a church. Though Kierkegaard was an emphatic Christian, unlike
the proto-Existential Schopenhauer and later atheist Existentialists
such as Nietzsche and Sartre, he had a very unorthodox take on
Christianity. Kierkegaard's works are dominated by theological
concerns, wondering on most pages about the individual’s relationship to
God and to Jesus as Christ. However, it is the individual’s choice, in
the face of nothing, neither Rationalist deduction nor Empiricist
induction, that made commitment and truth meaningful. Kierkegaard
wanted to have his tombstone, in the graveyard, read only, “The
Individual”, though his relatives decided otherwise.
For
Kierkegaard, the meaning of Christianity was not the achievement of
objectivity, as it was for Descartes, Kant and Hegel, but the acceptance
of subjectivity, of individually lacking the all pervasive view.
Kierkegaard was brutally critical of the Dutch Church for presenting
itself as the communal objective community, and argued that it is only
as an individual, with no community to trust or follow, that one can be a
genuine Christian. Like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard argued that
Christianity began as a rebellion against the status quo but became the
new entrenched regime. Jesus rebuked the Pharisees, the political and
religious establishment of his time, and said that because they think
they see they are in fact blind. Nietzsche said that one should follow
the example of Jesus, not the example of Paul, who unlike Jesus started a
religion and insisted on dogmatic obedience.
In
his later years, Kierkegaard attacked the Danish Lutheran Church
without mercy, in the name of what he considered genuine Christianity.
At Kierkegaard’s funeral, a fight broke out when young theology
students, who were progressive and inspired by the works of Kierkegaard,
protested that the church was attempting to hijack his name and fame by
calling him one of their own after he had so bitterly attacked their
hypocrisy for decades. Often, theology students and theologians tend to
be progressive, while priests and bishops tend to be conservative.
Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger all started out as theology students,
who later turned to philosophy.
While
religion is often associated with dogmatism and conservativism and
science with skepticism and progressivism, it is important to remember
that religion can inspire progressivism and science can become stuck in
dogmatism. There is much in the bible that Kierkegaard drew on to
support the view that the individual, let alone the social community,
never comprehends the objective view of God, such as the ending of the
book of Job, in which Job accepts joyfully that he does not nor need not
understand how or why suffering occurs, as well as the pronouncement in
Isaiah that, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, and My ways are not
your ways”. For Kierkegaard, as genuine human truth is subjectivity,
not pretending to have achieved objectivity, it is only the individual
who accepts total subjectivity who comes to realize the greater truth,
not objective truth but subjective truth insofar as it is achievable by
human individuals. For Kierkegaard, truth is not an object achieved,
but a test withstood, not a hurdle overcome, but an experience endured.
Like
Nietzsche and Heidegger, who Sartre also labeled forerunning
Existentialists, Kierkegaard argued that no social system can
authentically give the individual meaning and truth. Individuals must
make choices, and if they choose to go along with the masses, they have
sacrificed their own ability to give truth meaning. Kierkegaard wrote
that he could have, like most scholars of his day, become a voice
pronouncing the greatness and objectivity of his race, his country, his
historical period, his fellow scholars, but rather than commit treason
to truth he chose to become a spy, a solitary individual who chronicled
the hypocrisy of all claims to objectivity.
Kierkegaard
wrote two sorts of books. His earlier works were written under
pseudonyms, false characters who did not display Kierkegaard’s own
beliefs but rather foolish views of their own that Kierkegaard wished to
mock and expose to criticism. Later, he wrote his Upbuilding
Discourses under his own name for the few individuals he believed would
understand his philosophy by reading both his earlier and later work.
Kierkegaard
saw himself as a true follower of Socrates, much as Diogenes of ancient
Athens did while he attacked the Idealism of Plato. Socrates argued,
before the court which would condemn him to death, that he knew that he
did not know, which is why the Oracle at Delphi had said that no man was
wiser than Socrates. Kierkegaard wrote his college thesis on Socrates,
irony, and indirect communication, much as Kierkegaard indirectly
communicated through his pseudonyms. While in his later dialogues Plato
used Socrates as a mouthpiece for Plato’s own Parmenidean and
Pythagorean philosophy, Socrates himself never made great claims to
truth, and would instead use analogy, myth, and paradox to show that
human judgements and beliefs are problematic and contradictory even as
they assert themselves with certainty, which Kierkegaard argued was also
the method of Jesus. Kierkegaard wrote that Socrates “approached each
man individually, deprived him of everything, and sent him away
empty-handed”. Socrates showed others that they did not truly know what
they believed themselves to know, and he was killed by the Athenian
assembly for doing it just as Jesus was killed for questioning the
Pharisees. Kierkegaard considered himself, like Socrates and Jesus, to
be a master of irony.
Hegel,
who believed that he had created the final system of philosophy, wrote
that whoever would follow him and add to his work would merely gather up
the “philosophical fragments” in a “concluding unscientific
postscript”. In his most open attack on Hegel, Kierkegaard wrote two
works, Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript to
the Philosophical Fragments in 1846, just as the protest movement in
Germany was getting underway. He attacked Hegel’s system for presenting
itself as the objective view, even as it claimed to be the summation of
all possible subjective views. He also attacked Hegel’s determinism,
arguing, similar to Descartes and Kant, that the individual is free and
only turns to order and authority out of fear of freedom and
uncertainty. Neither Hegel’s philosophy nor the Danish Lutheran Church
could possibly contain or pacify the radical freedom of subjectivity,
which is equally wonderful and terrifying.
Even
to those who would argue that modern developments in neurology and
computer technology are revealing the determinate patterns of the brain,
and thus decision making, Kierkegaard would argue that no system can
determine meaning for the individual, and it is the interpretation of
individuals that gives rise to meaning. This would become bedrock for
Sartre and Existentialism, and Sartre was right to identify this with
Nietzsche as well. Consider that if we perfectly and flawlessly map out
the human brain, we still do not know what to do with this knowledge.
Should we use it to cure poverty? Should we use it to wage war? No
amount of progress in the sciences can determine what science and its
progress mean to the individual.
Recall
that Kant and Hegel argued that reason is the free part of the mind
with which we can speculate about what should happen, while the
understanding is the part of the mind that operates by necessity to
categorize what is the case. Earlier Hume had argued that one cannot
derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Kierkegaard, like Schopenhauer, argued
that the openness of freedom and the terror of insecurity come not from
abstractions of reason but from the depths of one’s being, from what one
truly is beneath the faculties of understanding and reason. Like
Hegel, Kierkegaard sought the concrete, but like Schopenhauer he
rejected Hegel’s union of the concrete and abstract, arguing that
abstraction stands in the way of the concrete.
To
be an individual is to experience “a vertigo of possibilities” the
monstrosity of spontaneity. Sartre later wrote, inspired by
Kierkegaard, that when we are high up on the edge of a cliff, the very
place one would experience physical vertigo, we are not only afraid of
falling but of the part of ourselves which wants to leap into the void
and attempt to fly. Kierkegaard wrote, “We are condemned to be free”.
It is our freedom, the experience of the infinite, which unites us most
intimately with our world. Recall Merleau-Ponty argued that our
physical experience has no set boundaries. For Kierkegaard, existence
is uncertainty, and this must be faced rather than avoided for the
individual who realizes they are unsatisfied in a way that cannot be
overcome through passing pleasures. Much as Nietzsche, Heidegger and
Sartre would later say, Kierkegaard argued that one can overcome the
angst, the vertigo of possibilities, by making a leap of faith, by
facing the horror of the void and choosing to believe in something and
act with some purpose in spite of the fact that beliefs and purposes can
never be fully justified. Only this is authentic individuality, haven
chosen oneself, chosen what one is to be, with the full honest
recognition of the freedom involved in the choice.
To
end our examination of pessimism on a humourous note, recently someone
created a Twitter account with tweets from a fictitious character named
Kim Kierkegaardashian, a fake personality created by merging mournful
existentialist insights with superficial consumerism. While this is a
brilliant pairing of a depressed intellectual man and a chipper
superficial woman, I in no way want to give the impression that I think
that men are intellectual (or pessimistic, for that matter) compared to
women, which would be quite inaccurate and sexist. Tune in to any
episode of Jersey Shore to learn that superficial is an equal
opportunity employer, or if you want to induce a state of pessimism in
yourself. That said, you can make a game of these tweets. Try to
figure out which part is Kierkegaard, and which part is Kardashian!
(https://twitter.com/KimKierkegaard)
My
white Manolo pumps glitter so brightly as to hurt the eyes & yet
they are a delight to look upon! All existence begins with
contradiction.
We
have severed ourselves from the power that established us. We are our
own masters. We are Glam Gods. Glam Gods! Exactly this is despair.
Transformed
into a Tahitian princess by Bruce Weber! Made fantastic in this way,
one fails to notice that in a deeper sense one lacks a self.
Awww
Kanye won 3 Grammys!! That makes a total of 21!!! Sooo proud!! But it
avails nothing, being only a higher and more glittering illusion.
How does the single individual reassure himself that he is legitimate? A little BiGGie in the morning gets the vibe going.
Red
lips, side parts and stunning dresses! Your struggle to appear happy
& confident betrays that your dark passions are achieving dominance
Go-karting with Kanye in $6000 shoes. When the strong food of actuality ceases to feed us, we turn to farce.
You
can never go wrong with a white blouse. It says: My pain & my
suffering are nameless; there is no one who understands me.
Marry and you will regret it. Do not marry and you will also regret it. Sex and The City kind of day.
I have only one confidant: the silence of the night. BFFs for life!!!
Can't
sleep. It’s almost 6am here in Paris. Been up for hours playing fruit
ninja. Woe to the person who wants to be excused from suffering!
To
win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, &
some knowledge of human passions. LIKE me on Facebook to learn more!
Every
revelation you make is an illusion; so far, no one has succeeded in
knowing you. Your white pumps literally go with any outfit.
Want a red carpet look for New Year’s? Clothe yourself in pain.
