Psychotherapy as a Human Science

Angst, Authenticity, and Ressentiment: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

60 Angst,Authenticity,and Ressentiment Kierkegaard and Nietzsche THE COMMON GROUND Much as they differed on important points, Hegel and Marx were both historicists who believed that history has an ascertainable goal and that movement toward this goal should be reckoned as “progress.” For Hegel that goal was the self-recovery of Absolute Spirit, while for Marx it was the creation of a classless society, free of exploitation and oppression. Disparate as these goals seem, both Hegel and Marx construed history as a cumulative, linear process that culminates in a kind of collective epiphany, in which my deepening self-knowledge radiates outward, encompassing a deepening awareness of my interdependence with others and our collective coinherence in a process of self-authorship and self-discovery that spans several millennia. At issue, then, is a shared notion of history as a process of the self-discovery and selfcreation of the human species over time. These assumptions about history were questioned by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who dismissed any notion of historical progress and were wary of collective self-authorship. This tendency is evident in Kierkegaard’s habit of lumping all forms of society and social action together under the derisive category of “the crowd.” No other mode of sociability is even mentioned in Kierkegaard’s opus. While Marx looked beyond the grim realities of class society to a time when the average person embraced and embodied an idealized “life of the species,” for Kierkegaard the genus or the species is nothing but a mere abstraction : “A crowd in its very concept is the untruth, by reason of the fact that it renders the individual completely impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his sense of responsibility by reducing it to a fraction . . . . For ‘crowd’ is an abstraction and has no hands: but each individual ordinarily has two hands.” A different but equally scathing appraisal of groups is found in Nietzsche. In contrast to Marx, who addresses himself to the masses, Nietzsche declares: “The masses . . . deserve notice in three respects only: first as faded copies of great men produced on paper with worn out instruments, then as a force of resistance to great men, finally as instruments in the hands of great men; for the rest, let the Devil and statistics take them!” (Nietzsche 1983, 113). Kierkegaard and Nietzsche shared a fervent antipathy to groups — a kind of radical individualism. And in the wake of Kant and Hegel and the tremendous pressure to systematize knowledge that gripped the nineteenth century, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were both profoundly antisystematic thinkers. This does not mean that they were unsystematic in the sense that they lacked a system. On the contrary, they rejected the idea that the world, in all its complexity, could be encompassed in a system. Unlike Hegel, they did not aim to create a comprehensive , internally consistent and intellectually satisfying account of world history. And unlike Marx they were not invested in charting the way to collective emancipation. Their goal was to provoke and disconcert their readers, to get under their skin and compel them to confront their own existence in a stark and honest way, without pretense or subterfuge. This Socratic agenda registers indirectly in their respective styles, their quasi-confessional, quasi-confrontational modes of address, their preference for aphorisms, essays, and fragments rather than the lengthy and densely argued tomes of professional philosophers. Finally, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche attacked Descartes, Hegel, and the whole rationalist tradition for making inflated claims to omniscience and being grotesquely divorced from the ground of existence. For Kierkegaard, the ground of existence is God; for Nietzsche, it is life, or the instincts, represented by the figure of the Greek god Dionysus. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche 61 62 Angst, Authenticity, and Ressentiment And at this point, the parallels between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche simply cease, giving way to deep divergences in perspective. In pursuit of genuine self-knowledge, Kierkegaard stressed the profound solitude and interiority of the true Christian, in contrast to the tepid, complacent piety of “Christendom” (Kierkegaard 1968), while Nietzsche rejected Christianity altogether as a belated derivative of “the Jewish slave revolt in morals” (Nietzsche 1956). Moreover, Kierkegaard felt that genuine self-knowledge could only develop in the context of ethical resolve that deepens, in due course, into a deep (if iconoclastic) mode of piety. Nietzsche, by contrast, asserted that genuine selfknowledge could only be acquired by the total overthrow of religion and by deliberate acts of...