Were Nietzsche and Kierkegaard think buddies ?

       While watching the lectures concerning Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Birth of Tragedy, I couldn’t help going back to Kierkegaard’s philosophy and the way it intertwines with Nietzsche’s. Indeed, it feels like Kierkegaard’s research for the Self through the aesthetic, ethic and religious personalities, and Nietzsche’s frenzy to unearth Truth are strangely alike. They both see existence as a notion that cannot be fully grasped; it is a subjective and therefore unseizable truth for Kierkegaard and a well-designed ensemble of illusions that covers up the real Truth with a « veil of forgetfulness » for Nietzsche. 

Yet, they both seek this True existence, through the authentic life with Kierkegaard, the aim of which is to avoid the temptation of the absurd, and through the destruction of illusions, that is to say of metaphysics with Nietzsche. Therefore the idea of the absurd and of metaphysics resemble each other; they’re dreamlike and pleasant illusions that humans run to so that they can go on living pleasantly without pondering and trembling over the ultimate and only Truth that is they are going to die. For both philosophers, the discovery of « real » existence involves a violent and cruel tearing apart of one’s self, an exhausting internal turmoil. It can only be achieved through rigorous self-introspection for Kierkegaard and through the utter destruction of all values for Nietzsche.

And yet, Nietzsche is such an optimistic guy compared to Kierkegaard ! Indeed, whereas Kierkegaard can never find the Self (it could never be defined in the first place anyway so it was kind of a lost cause from the beginning) and is left with trembling and utmost despair, Nietzsche thinks that man finally done with « the dragon » is left with the endless possibility of childhood. In the latter’s opinion, the nothingness of nihilism does not mean the annihilation of the hope to discover the « True » world. On the contrary, it symbolizes the literal rebirth of mankind that rediscovers sensuous existence and can create and ingenuously play with its rules, not having yet forgotten the way metaphors work. 

Nietzsche is firm with the certainty that destruction of morality means renewal. He is not left, like Kierkegaard, with the despairing view that only doubt remains when the absurd goes. Whereas he follows his idea that tragic poetry is perfect, and therefore that staring into the abyss of death, that is to say to glimpse at Truth, is an inevitable step towards the liberation of mankind, Kierkegaard cannot help but fall into the abyss when looking into it, and his numerous attempts to find the Self become a way into the absurd, escaping the terrifying Truth that has been revealed, and these attempts fail, of course, as he realizes he’s fallen into the most abstract absurdity. Kierkegaard is then left with the only comfort of despair, as it is the last abstraction left before death. 

And through the acceptation of our own death, that is the only Truth ever achievable, Nietzsche defeats Kierkegaard. Man is freed form the absurd, it has accepted and embraced its Truth and has freed himself from the carcans of religion, morals and even of reason. Amor Fati is the only path to cheerfulness, to this new era that characterizes the Übermensch, to existence.

Hum, but isn’t it a little more complicated than that ? 

I cannot help but be skeptical about Nietzsche’s Übermensch. If we destroy metaphysics and get into a stage where new meaning is to be invented, doesn’t it involve that eventually, we will be back to metaphysics, with different values and different over and devaluation of these values, but with metaphysics nevertheless ? Isn’t building new meaning creating a new illusion, another small truth that will eventually be transformed into a metaphor, into a veil of forgetfulness  that will get us back at stage one ?

What Nietzsche truly condemns is the devaluation of life though metaphysics. Yet the act of rediscovering Truth, of reasserting life through the acceptance of death in a Dionysian perspective, is in itself the construction of a new metaphysical world in which two values, life and death, oppose each other isn’t it ? 

As with Kierkegaard’s philosophy, we’re then left with the idea that the search for the Self or for a new order liberated from metaphysics is a mere illusion, and maybe the greatest of them all ! Therefore don’t we find ourselves back to Kierkegaard’s absolute uncertainty except in death, the latter which actually stands for ultimate doubt and for the greatest unknown ?

And yet, and I’d like to finish on that, isn’t ultimate doubt what Nietzsche relishes most ? He fully acknowledges the fact that he doesn’t have a clue how the world will look after metaphysics has been destroyed. Even if it is only a step of an eternal cycle, what does it matter if it means the new metaphysical world is completely different from the precedent one and can be destroyed at anytime so that rebirth can happen again ? The Eternal Return of the Same here takes on all its meaning; it is no burden as humans do not perceive it as such, and  as it is never quite the same as they are never fully conscious of it. Here, the Übermensch has been achieved ! Humans endlessly play with this eternal rebirth of metaphysics, invent new rules and destroy them as time goes by, living through endlessly different combinations of overvalued and devalued moral systems. 

Whereas uncertainty is despair for Kierkegaard, it is pure cheerfulness for Nietzsche ! The two philosophers are then the two faces of the same coin ! They are fear and joy over doubt.