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In Fear and Trembling I write this essay. Perhaps that is part of the point, that I not write this essay in comfort, in simple regurgitation of class discussion, or by simply rewording the notes I might have taken. From reading the two passages from Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, I found a profound similarity, which, at first I could not put into words. Simply struggling with what they could both mean. Is perhaps Nietzsche's poorest fisherman rowing with golden oars (pg 269) similar to Kierkegaard's knight of faith? Are they both trying to tell the reader that we are all blindly living our lives?
What is this historical sense Nietzsche speaks of? From here maybe I can begin to put to words the implications which these ideas hold for our very existence and where these assumptions come from in the first place. These are but a few questions, and perhaps by working through these questions I may be able to end this discomfort, and then again, perhaps not. Let us begin with Nietzsche. The humaneness of the future, what does this mean?
Here Nietzsche is beginning to explain his vision of the future, of our existence, of the way we will live in the future. He begins by looking at how we in the present seem to live using this distinctive historical sense, which is really just this way of living using already acquired knowledge, almost in a habitual fashion. By this I mean, right now I may be in university, but the only reason I am even here is because I have been trained by the past generations that higher education is a needed thing, it goes all the way back to the Greeks. I am not here at university because it popped into my head out of nowhere. I did not say Hey I should go pay lots of money so I can be a conversation piece at cafs. No, I did it because the previous generation brought me up with the need to go, and their generation did the same, all leading back to the Greeks and the first schools of thought to Socrates himself!
It is almost as if I had no choice in the matter, that I am living my life because, historically, it is the correct thing to do. It is on this point that my existence comes into question. Am I simply a product of my ancestors? Am I but a legacy of some distant father? This is where the knowing stops. Are any of the ideas I hold so strong even my own?
If I only lived by the past I believe this would be true; however, once we step into the present and truly live in the now we leave behind all training, and we become something different. However here is where things can get lost, because if I truly only lived in the present, I would be no different than an animal. Yet we cannot simply negate the present, for we could become as a melancholy invalid who wants to forget his present condition and therefore writes the history of his youth. Perhaps if we simply embrace the future, we could live in happiness, yet here too a problem lays, because one cannot live simply in the future. If that were true, the future would never come. To achieve something in the future we must accomplish actions in the present.
Yet we must not negate the future or, we will inevitably have to experience the consequences of this negation in the future. So one must, for Nietzsche, embrace both the present, future, and past to fully live! This is so because whenever you negate something about yourself, you in essence become something else. We are the sum of our past, present and future actions. Through living with an awareness of the past, and using this awareness to act in the present critically, we then can forge into the future with a new and glorious existence, rather than the dark, elusive, historical one we embrace so strongly now. For Soren Kierkegaard we too are living our lives not as fully as possible.
There are three spheres of existence, the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious, or faith sphere. In the first, we have our sensuous pleasures, we are bound by the senses, in the second we are bound by duty, and the first we are bound by god (paradoxically, in the bondage of god we find freedom). However one does not simply exist in one sphere we are constantly in flux with these 3 forms of existence. Most of us, though, are simply in flux between the ethical and the aesthetic, and some never find faith, but live in constant fear and struggle.
For Kierkegaard it is only in faith that we leave behind the matters of man and we enter into the infinite. Yet we also become aware of the universal. But the infinite he speaks of is perhaps beyond what we can conceptualize. It is simply that which is not complete, anything is possible. In the universal, which the ethical must have a duty towards, things become finite, because if something is universally true, then the result is that the opposite is false, and hence not exist. With this faith, we do not simply move to faith.
To truly be faithful we must infinitely resign ourselves. This means that we must renounce every judgement and opinion. However immense the implications of this are, how can anyone possibly do this? Infinite resignation would mean that we would stand for nothing, no injustice would matter!
For the ethical person this is inconceivable, but for the truly religious person this is all too familiar. I can remember a time when I started to question certain things my parents had been telling me about the world, and what I had been learning in school, and slowly, I found them all to be false. This caused me to start to become unsure about anything, until I was even unsure about my most passionate of beliefs. Here is when I figured that if I couldnt be sure of anything, then I how can I judge? How can I ever know what is right from wrong?
So I just didnt decide and this became a very frightening experience indeed. I had lost all passions for everything. What next you may ask? The leap to faith. It is in this critical moment when one must take action and uncover the faith inside.
It is for this reason Kierkegaard believed that many people were not truly faithful, because many dont actually take the leap to faith, they simply lose themselves in resignation and slip to the aesthetic stage, or worse. Another point can be seen through his Knight of Faith, who is a defender of faith, in a constant struggle with the ethical and the aesthetic. The Knight of Faith establishes a relationship with the ethical (absolute) and becomes aware of it, just as one would become aware of the need for the past and future. Where, you may ask, is the link between the two thinkers? Well firstly, both men seem to embrace something very strongly, that is truth or god. I see Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith as similar to Nietzsche's madman, both ostracized by the world.
When the madman cries out that God is dead and we have killed him here the madman is seen as crazy. But it is only him that sees the danger of what the atheist has done. He sees where others are blind, and this is what makes him estranged. For the Knight of Faith, or more precisely, Abraham, he is thought mad with his attempt at murder. But in his eyes the love of God is paramount. He sees sacrifice and love, where others see murder and hate.
More generally both men see the existence of men in two ways, that there is in a way a part of us which lives within the herd, and another which lives separate, as an individual. For Nietzsche when you negate the herd you negate a part of yourself and vise-versa. So too with Kierkegaard, though he believes that if you were to simply negate the ethical and society, this would surely be unsuccessful (find quote). Life becomes a struggle. For both men.
For the Madman, this struggle embodies itself with the constant threat of falling into the abyss. For the Knight of Faith. The abyss is the ethical realm. Both are separate from society, yet within it. Here lays the paradox of their visions. Both men seem to be urging us to simply not take things as they are.
We must question and struggle with ideals before truly understanding. Nietzsche would say that we should always question, and that we can not be sure of anything. To be comfortable or certain is to miss the point. One who is comfortable does not question, and cannot really know what is held so strongly. This is true because if I never questioned my ideals they would simply be ungrounded beliefs. For example I was comfortable with the notion that we were placed on this earth to use animals.
I then became aware through questioning that animals too felt pain. All my life I had exploited animals based on the unquestioned habit of eating meat. Kierkegaard too says the same thing, for it is only when we leave all our certainties behind, can you then become certain. Abraham can only see Isaac for the first time after he loses his certainty he finds out of action, how strong his love truly is. That is the key of both mens statements. We must not simply live life as we are told; we must experience it for ourselves and make our minds up through experimentation and actions.
Only here can progress be made, for when we simply live from the past, or from what we have held all our lives, progress does not occur. We stop becoming and create a finite existence through our own willed ignorance. In conclusion, we must not simply live with what is historically correct, nor should we live with total unawareness. We must become as children, yet maintain the wisdom of an old mind. Herein lays the happiness I believe both men search for.
This new awareness which comes out of having faith, or madness, is not an end. Yet a constant becoming, a way to live life and a way in which to perceive life. One man when looking through a window sees everything, and sees it as beauty, another man looks out a window and sees nothing but a tree that needs to be cut down. Let us all become the perceiver of all. Let us become enlightened.
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