Tests of moral mettle usually pounce on us without warning. A few days ago, a friend emailed saying that in the morning when he pulled up to drop his daughter off at her grammar school, he turned to see a man in the car next to him slapping his little boy around. Should my friend have intervened? There is no practice run. There you are and you have to decide on a moment’s notice what to do, knowing in your bones that this isn’t any ordinary choice, but a choice of what kind of person you will be, a choice of who you are.
I once went for what I suspected was going to be a sad but ordinary sickbed visit with a relative who had been a mentor to me for many years. Maybe I had been out of touch, but I soon grasped that for him, it was late in the fifth act. There were no longer any sources of pleasure in his life. He had severe heart problems and collapsed discs, which caused him relentless, agonizing back spasms. With nothing to placate the pain, his glaucous eyes were suffused with tears. A platoon of yellow pill bottles sat on a nearby shelf. One was filled with powerful opioids. It was twilight and his soft groans filled the room as he thought ahead to the long, lonely, excruciating night stretching before him. He sighed deeply and fell silent for a moment and then asked, “Gordon, pass me that bottle. I can’t take it anymore.”
What to do? I loved the man and knew there was only more misery ahead. Worse yet, when it comes to interminable suffering, I can’t help but imagine that unyielding pain cauterizes good memories, chases them out of the house along with our most tender feelings. Without any hope of a respite, prolonged agony can numb a person, making him indifferent to what is closest to his heart. To me, it seems a death within a death. So what about the pills? His nurse would not be returning for another four hours. There would be plenty of time to help him through the door and out of the cage of his suffering. What to do?
Kierkegaard, using the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, wrote that unlike most scribblers, he took up his quill not to make life easier for his readers but to make it more difficult. Maybe that is how it is with morality. The more developed you become, the more moral issues you discern, the more taxing life becomes.
The existentialists are so riveted to the idea of unifying thought and action that it would be reasonable to expect that they would have developed some kind of ethical guide to help us distinguish between right and wrong. Not exactly. None of the authors with whom we are in conversation ever composed anything approximating a full-fledged moral theory. At the end of his Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre promised a sequel in the form of an existential ethics. Though he lived nearly forty years after the publication of this tome, he failed to deliver his ethics book. Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s lifetime lover, tried to make good on Sartre’s promise with her Ethics of Ambiguity. While original in its own right, de Beauvoir’s ethics was less than satisfying, even by her own reckoning. A friend of both Sartre’s and de Beauvoir’s, Camus confided that his instruction on matters moral did not come in the form of treatises but from his vocation as a football goal keeper. In an interview, Camus said, “After many years during which I saw many things, what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport . . .” Later he would add that his lessons in justice not only came from the soccer pitch but the theater as well.
Still, the paucity of ethical treatises or existential moral vade mecums does not imply that the existentialists are void of moral insights. I repeat, the love that philosophy refers to is not a love of knowledge but a love of wisdom, an understanding of how to live a moral and good life. Even Aristotle underscored that his Nicomachean Ethics was not about learning what virtue is but about becoming virtuous, becoming good. On that score, though the existentialists comprising the dramatis personae of this book may not have worked out systematic ethical theories, their writings bristle with moral epiphanies, a few of which I hope to share from Sartre, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Camus.
I repeat, the love that philosophy refers to is not a love of knowledge but a love of wisdom, an understanding of how to live a moral and good life.
Midway in his “Existentialism Is a Humanism” essay, Sartre recalls the story of a young man who came to him for advice. The “boy,” as Sartre refers to him, confides that his brother has been killed by the Nazis, and to avenge his death he wants to join the resistance. There is, however, a problem. Because the young man is the sole survivor in his family and his mother needs him, he has to choose between the resistance and his responsibilities at home. Aristotle taught that life is too rich and varied in circumstances to try to live according to a moral rule book. Sartre agrees:
Who could help him choose? Christian doctrine? No. Christian doctrine says, “Be charitable, love your neighbor, take the more rugged path, etc. . . . Whom should he love as a brother? The fighting man or his mother? Which does the greatest good, the vague act of fighting in a group, or the concrete one of helping a particular human being go on living? Who can decide a priori? Nobody. No book of ethics can tell him. The Kantian ethics says, “Never treat any person as a means, but as an end.” Very well, if I stay with my mother, I’ll treat her as an end and not as a means; but by virtue of this very fact, I am running the risk of treating the people around me who are fighting, as means.1
People frequently react to being in the vice of bad options, huffing, “I’ll just go with my gut feelings.” Sartre blocks this ploy, pointing out that we can talk deep into the night about our feelings and how much we hate hatred or love justice, but ultimately our conversations and the emotions infusing them are empty without action. Or, as Sartre puts it, “The only way to determine the value of this affection is, precisely, to perform an act which confirms and defines it.” Forgive the platitude, but for Sartre, if you don’t walk your talk, then it is just talk. Another common strategy is to seek out counsel when poised between right and wrong. Sartre dispatches that tactic as well, observing that when we look about for advice, we inevitably turn to someone we think will tell us what we want to hear.
Forgive the platitude, but for Sartre, if you don’t walk your talk, then it is just talk.
Without any objective set of rules to guide our actions, we still must choose. Neither a nihilist nor a moral relativist, Sartre emphatically states that we are responsible for our actions. For him, being a human being in the deepest sense demands the ability to abide with anxiety and despair—anxiety because you are free, responsible, and devoid of moral guideposts; and despair because there are no guarantees about the outcomes of your struggles. Open your history books; over time, millions have fought for justice, and both their causes and their bodies have been covered over in mass graves. Sartre is not convinced of that long arc of justice that Dr. King put his faith in and spoke about with such power and fervor.
Both Kierkegaard and Sartre connected freedom, anxiety, and responsibility. With freedom comes the anxiety needed to make morally responsible choices. Both thinkers recognize a natural impulse to want to escape this burdensome freedom. One of Sartre’s most influential concepts, which has worked itself into common parlance, is his notion of “bad faith.” To be in bad faith is to deny our freedom by acting as though we were objects. There are many patterns of bad faith, but at base Sartre insists that bad faith is a futile attempt to lie to oneself. In Being and Nothingness, he explains, “the one who practices bad faith is hiding a displeasing truth or presenting as truth a pleasing untruth.” What makes bad faith different from an ordinary lie is “the fact that in bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth.” A few lines later, Sartre brings down the gavel: “Bad faith does not come from the outside to human reality. One does not undergo his bad faith, one is not infected with it, it is not a state. But consciousness infects itself with it.”2 Sartre, who was well-versed in Freud, took aim at psychoanalysis, charging that the psychoanalytic mind-set is an open invitation to bad faith in that it tempts us to imagine that we are not acting freely but at the behest of unconscious forces. I might, for instance, tell myself that I did not choose to respond to my brother with withering sarcasm; my vitriol was the expression of unconscious rage at my father. Or perhaps I tell myself that the reason I acted coolly with a friend struggling through a divorce was because my serotonin levels were out of whack. Sartre insists that we know we are lying to ourselves when we deny our ability to choose freely.
Recently, I watched a documentary about the tragic 1966 massacre at the University of Texas at Austin. On a searing August day, former Marine sharpshooter Charles Whitman climbed to the observation deck of the University of Texas tower and, over a period of ninety-six minutes, shot forty-eight passersby, mortally wounding seventeen. Early in his murderous spree, Whitman wounded a pregnant woman and killed her husband. There, before scores of people, the pregnant woman lay in 100-degree heat on the grill-like concrete. Watching her writhing in agony and distress, many bystanders were torn between their fear and the feeling that they had to pull the woman to safety. Half a century later, one woman recalled, “I wanted to help, but I knew then that I was a coward.”
Sartre insists that we know we are lying to ourselves when we deny our ability to choose freely.
I knew that I was a coward? Not for Sartre. He writes, “But when the existentialist writes about a coward, he says that this coward is responsible for his cowardice. He is not like that because he has a cowardly heart or lung or brain; . . . he is like that because he has made himself a coward by his acts.”3 To convince yourself that you are a coward, according to Sartre, is to practice the bad faith of pretending that being a coward is akin to being born with blue eyes or blond hair. It is to convince yourself that you couldn’t have acted other than in a cravenly fashion.
No one is born a coward or, for that matter, a hero. We only selectively want to believe it, but we can change. Moral U-turns are possible. It may not be the kind of narrative to have touched Sartre, but my favorite story in the New Testament is when Peter denies Jesus three times. After his final “I don’t know him,” you would have thought that Peter might have taken the Judas option. Instead, he recouped his courage, was crucified for his Lord, and became the rock of the church.
No one is born a coward or, for that matter, a hero. We only selectively want to believe it, but we can change. Moral U-turns are possible.
Though he regularly identified himself an immoralist, to say nothing of the Antichrist, Nietzsche was a passionate moralizer. He is most well-known and/or reviled for his announcement of the death of God, which is in effect a declaration of the impossibility of faith in the present age. However, for Nietzsche it isn’t just God who died; our present morals are ghosts of values past. In his most lucid and accessible work, On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche, like Marx and Freud but with different analysis and terminology, proclaims that the conscience, which we have been taught to believe is sacred, derives neither from God nor reason. Because conscience does not come from on high, Nietzsche maintained that it is imperative that we take a historical perspective on our moral principles. At the same time, he warns about the difficulties of adopting the historical “long view,” in part because we are a product and part of the very process we aim to examine.
Cultivating a historical perspective on ethics requires undertaking a “genealogy of morals.” We need to decipher how our moral concepts have evolved, or perhaps devolved, over the millennia. A philologist, that is, someone who studies the origins of words, Nietzsche tracks the vicissitudes of meaning of normative concepts such as good and evil, while simultaneously underscoring the fact that over time, new meanings, often antithetical to the original, emerge. Still, the old connotations live on as feint resonances. For example, students today blithely use sucks as a pejorative. They are incredulous when I inform them of the sexual connotations of this now commonly used word in the not-too-remote 1970s.
More pertinent to Nietzsche’s point, we currently associate goodness with peace, kindness, and justice. This was not always so. Not by a long shot. Nietzsche submits:
I believe I may venture to interpret the Latin bonus [good] as “the warrior” provided I am right in tracing bonus back to an earlier duonus. . . . Therefore bonus as the man of strife, of dissention (duo), as the man of war: one sees what constituted the “goodness” of a man in ancient Rome. Our German gut [good] even: does it not signify “the godlike,” the man of “godlike race”? And is it not identical with the popular (originally noble) name of the Goths?”4
The radical shift into the present pacific nexus of meanings was the result of what Nietzsche terms the “slave revolt.” As this tale goes, back in the days of who knows exactly when, there was a noble knightly class and a slave class. Akin to the Vikings, the nobles were men of action, poised for aggression, conquest, and adventure. For an Achilles or an Agamemnon, good was equivalent to what the noble class cherished—pride, bravery, openness. This warrior aristocracy defined what was good as what they liked. That’s all there was to it.
Yet, among the upper-crust tough guys there existed a priest class, who lacked the taste and temperament for steel and blood, but were hardly deficient in their desire to express what Nietzsche anointed their “will to power.” Without moral connotations, the elites considered the laboring class as subhuman, as “the unlucky ones.” And as the unfortunates who perhaps had to cart huge boulders to build the Coliseum, they resented their suffering. Brimming with thirst for power, the priestly class tapped into this ressentiment, eventually turning suffering and self-denial—what Nietzsche tabbed the “ascetic ideal”—into the touchstone for all virtues. Though it was in part a result of the spell cast by priestly purification rites, Nietzsche’s account is murky as to the precise method by which this inversion of values took place; nevertheless, after the slave revolt, seeking glory or your own interests was a cause for consternation. If you wanted something for yourself, you needed to dress up that objective, both for yourself and others, as though it were only for the good of the community; for example, I want to go to medical school, not because I like the respect and salaries that doctors enjoy but because I want so badly to help people. Over time, and with a subtle form of psychological jujitsu, the priest class was able to hypnotize their warrior brethren into seeing themselves through a new set of categories, through the eyes of the enslaved and the ascetic ideal.
Harken to the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” After the slave revolt, qualities formerly regarded as vices, like meekness, were magically transmogrified into signs of blessedness. If pride were not a sin, the timorous individual too cowardly to seek revenge could now be proud of turning the other cheek. Expressions of strength, ambition, and the craving for glory became suspect and were denounced as sinful.
As Nietzsche’s genealogy has it, Judeo-Christianity was both the tool and the epitome of ressentiment. Nietzsche claimed the faith of Abraham and the crucifixion were an underhanded power grab: the weak mantled themselves with the authority to judge and laud it over others, to burn people at the stake, and consign them to the eternal punishment of hell. The end product of four generations of pastors, Nietzsche, whom his schoolmates once nicknamed “the Little Pastor,” had a masterful command of the Bible and the writings of the church fathers. As if to reveal the ugly underbelly of the so-called religion of love, Nietzsche asks, “For what is it that constitutes the bliss of this Paradise, this paradise that Christians are climbing all over each other to reach?” Nietzsche answers, “We might even guess, but it is better to have it expressly described for us by an authority . . . Thomas Aquinas, the great teacher and saint. Beati in regno coelesti, he says, meek as a lamb, videbunt poenas damnatorum, ut beatitude illis magis complaceat.” In translation, “In order that the bliss of the saints may be more delightful for them and they may render more copious thanks to God for it, it is given to them to see perfectly the punishment of the damned.”5 Nietzsche adds a longer and more graphic expression from Tertullian, which strikes the same malicious chord that heaven would not be heaven unless the elect were able to tune in to the suffering of the damned at will. Christians who want to take a purifying lesson from Nietzsche might think in terms of trying to be honest enough with themselves about their less-than-holy impulses, on the aggressive and power motives that, like mites, can burrow their way into our postures of faith.
The desideratum of Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals is a “trans-valuation of values.” Members of the philosophy guild celebrate their ability to ask foundational questions, but those queries are often nothing but prinked-up intellectual rebuses. Nietzsche, the philosopher with the hammer, banged out his own unhinging question: What is the value of our values? Or again, are our values adding value to our lives, or are they making us sickly? The ancient skeptics taught that when we have a question of truth or falsity, we first need a criterion to resolve the issue. Then arises the question that spurs skepticism. Whence comes the criterion? And what criterion did we use to arrive at it? To the point at hand, what is the criterion that Nietzsche uses to make his momentous assessment of the value of values?
Nietzsche declares that the grand moral theories of most philosophers are essentially self-portraits. The pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes taught that if horses had gods, their gods would look like horses, and Nietzsche continued Xenophanes’s tradition of characterizing philosophers as masters of projection. Aristotle was the epitome of contemplation, and so when it came to illuminating the best life, it was of course one of contemplation. Kierkegaard was passion incarnate, and, not surprisingly, for him passion was the sine qua non of a life worth living. A sickly individual, Nietzsche had an ideal self that was an extrapolation from the desire for health and vigor that always escaped him. A shooting star of an academic, at a mere twenty-four Nietzsche was hired as a professor at the University of Basel, without having even defended his dissertation, but because of chronic migraines and other maladies he was forced to retire only a few years later. Having departed from the lecture hall, Nietzsche became an itinerant, moving from place to place, tirelessly seeking a sunny locale that would energize him, a place, usually in his beloved Italy, where he could breathe freely and create. Thus, health was the god term for Nietzsche and the scale for his reevaluation of values.
Nietzsche’s notion of health was not limited to healthy digestion, strong lungs, and sinews. Health amounts to much more than its individual parts. To be healthy is to be brave, bold, and creative. It is to be a “free spirit,” to be one who stands apart from the crowd and creates his or her own values. Napoleon and Goethe were exemplars, as was Jesus in his own way. Behold Nietzsche’s portrait: “Such men,” Nietzsche writes, “live in their own solar system—one has to look for them there.” Such a self-defining man “is a star without an atmosphere. His eye, directed blazingly inward, looks outward, for appearance’s sake only, extinct and icy. All around him, immediately upon the citadel of his pride beat the waves of folly and perversity; with loathing he turns away from them.”6
Like most intellectual immortals, Nietzsche had a capacity to tolerate cognitive dissonance. An atheist of the fundamentalist stripe, he nevertheless recognized the genius of select true believers. He was also quick to admit that for all of its flaws and follies, the slave revolt produced an inner world. Those disinclined to adventures and conquest now sought and produced adventures within themselves. As Nietzsche phrased it, “for the first time man became an interesting creature,” and some of these interesting, inwardly turned creatures created divine works of art, like Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov or Notes from Underground, the satirical novel that Nietzsche relished and helped shape his On the Genealogy of Morals.
Still, on balance, Nietzsche judged the slave revolt and slave morality, which he associated with democratic values, as putting us on a path to nihilism, to a herd state of mind that knew only two poles and two concerns, business and pleasure, work and play. At the end of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche described humanity as slipping toward a weariness that, à la “the last man,” aches for nothing more than “pitiable comfortableness”—a pair of slippers, a flat-screen television, and some action movies. As culture became more civilized and bureaucratized, you could even hear the same grievances from none other than the hyperrational protofeminist J. S. Mill:
There has crept over the refined classes, over the whole class of gentleman in England . . . an inaptitude for every kind of struggle. This torpidity . . . is new in the world: but . . . it is a natural consequence of the progress of civilization.7
Whereas we used to fantasize about everlasting fame, Nietzsche regarded today’s everyman and everywoman as slouching toward becoming the bourgeois Babbitt whom, in contrast to his Superman or Übermensch, he baptized “The Last Man.” The slave revolt leveled the prospects for greatness, looked askance at the heroic, and on Nietzsche’s reckoning hampered the emergence of individuals powerful and creative enough to become a lodestar for humanity and our self-understanding. Nietzsche is open to criticism for valuing individual greatness and competition over what he surely would have judged to be the tepid ideal of cooperation. Even so, perhaps there is something to be learned from our Zarathustra.
What moral insight might we glean from the bespectacled, well-dressed, well-mannered scholar who would turn our moral sensibilities inside out? Lyrical philosopher that he was, Nietzsche felt free to take poetic license, sometimes to the point of verging on self-contradiction. However, aspects of moral counsel are easily extracted from the writer: Be courageous and creative.
Today, it is rare to hear someone make such an invocation. More than likely, those in earshot of such an appeal will interpret it as an accusation of weakness. For a trifling example, in this anxious and credential-crazed society, I have had students shuffle into my office holding back tears because they received a B-plus on a quiz instead of an A. At exam time, it seems like half my students are shaking in their boots, while another smaller portion of the class tries to deal with their anxiety by striking pirate poses of indifference. Last spring, our finals period fell close to the anniversary of the Normandy invasion. In the session before our exam, I was getting peppered with irritating probes about what was going to be on the test. Finally, like the Patton of the philosophy department, I all but shouted, “Get a grip!” Then I went on to remind my class of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds that, in June 1944, on the eve of D-day, General Eisenhower emerged from headquarters to have a somber talk with his troops. He spoke of the momentous importance of what they were about to undertake, but also warned that many of them would not be coming back. “There,” I hectored, “was something to quake about.” My halftime-like speech inspired a few of my charges to gather their strength, but others sneered and shook their heads at me disapprovingly, as though I were a remnant of the old order, an order that failed to recognize that test anxiety is a medical problem.
Lyrical philosopher that he was, Nietzsche felt free to take poetic license, sometimes to the point of verging on self-contradiction. However, aspects of moral counsel are easily extracted from the writer: Be courageous and creative.
In myriad ways, Nietzsche emphasizes the urgent importance of being able to get into the ring with your fears. After all, if you can’t take a hit, much less absorb the fear of taking a hit, then there is no way around it: you are going to be morally challenged. Rather than shying away from our personal bogeymen, Nietzsche bids us to embrace the trials that tempt us to call in sick, because they are the pathway to becoming who we are.
I am reluctant to use another example from the world of the ring, but one of the reasons I have been training fighters for thirty years and counting is on account of lessons drawn from Aristotle and Nietzsche. Both taught that character is sculpted by how we cope with our fears. It would be a mistake to equate physical and moral courage; just the same, in a tight situation, if I had to choose, I would partner up with the person who had experience putting him- or herself at risk.
Everyone, or almost everyone, craves their red badge of courage. The most famous philosopher of nineteenth-century Europe, G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) helps to explain why. In his famous allegory of the Lord and Bondsman, Hegel speculates that it is in mortal combat and ultimately in our willingness to give up our lives that we rise to a higher level of freedom and consciousness. If Hegel is correct, the lofty image that the warrior occupies in our society has something to do with the fact that in her willingness to sacrifice her own life, she has escaped the otherwise universal choke hold of death anxiety. The boxing ring is not the battlefield by any stretch of the imagination, but the fight game can be legitimately understood as a stylized version of Hegel’s proverbial trial by battle; as such, it affords new possibilities of freedom and selfhood.
In myriad ways, Nietzsche emphasizes the urgent importance of being able to get into the ring with your fears. Rather than shying away from our personal bogeymen, Nietzsche bids us to embrace the trials that tempt us to call in sick, because they are the pathway to becoming who we are.
Today, the young and the privileged get very little practice in sparring with their angst. Maybe they should take up the sweet science. In a well-supervised boxing gym, athletes get regular workshops in handling their fears. I have one Nietzschean exercise that I call “the courage drill.” One of the most difficult skills for an individual with pugilistic ambitions to master is staying in the pocket; that is, remaining within striking distance of his or her opponent. When your dance partner in violence launches his or her power punch, there is a natural instinct to retreat straight back, which both puts you on the nasty end of your rival’s blow and leaves you out of position to counterpunch. With this exercise, I have one boxer shoot a combination, and I stand behind the person on defense so that he or she cannot step out of the pocket. When they fall back I don’t hesitate to scold, “Come on, be brave!” And if my boxer happens to be one of my philosophy students, I might even add a snarky Nietzschean invocation, “Come on—live dangerously!”
Most philosophers bid us to go to war against our instincts. Socrates, for one, acts as though he can’t wait to die in order to be unshackled from his body and the desires the flesh gives rise to. For Kant, moral worth has everything to do with overriding our inclinations. Again, Schopenhauer believed that the aim of life should be to slough off the will to live. In contrast, Nietzsche tries to reunite us with our instincts, no matter how base or unshaven they prove to be. One of Nietzsche’s gripes about Christianity, the old moralists, and the ascetic idea was that they inculcated a distrust of anything that smacked of the ecstatic or, as he termed it, the “Dionysian.” It is an ice cube down the back, but Nietzsche insists that there was a healthier time when we took unadulterated joy in watching the suffering of others. Hard to fathom? It shouldn’t be.
Over the course of a lifetime, many of us glue ourselves to screens and gobble up thousands of graphic throat-slitting movies. Hollywood gift wraps our bloodlettings in morality tales, like a heroic serial killer who, working outside the law, kills evil serial killers! The cruelty we savor has to be on an HD screen and with a patina of justification. If you are going to blast people away, it has to be for the good of humankind. And yet, having enjoyed all the Hollywood gore, we rub our palms together and tell ourselves that there is nothing more abhorrent than violence and senseless suffering.
In the opening pages of On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche expresses the hope that the breed of investigators he is trying to engender will “know how to keep their hearts as well as their sufferings in bounds and have trained themselves to sacrifice all desirability to truth.” And then he finishes with “every truth, even plain, harsh, ugly, repellant, unchristian, immoral truth.—For such truths do exist.”8 There are many, but one of the ugly historical truths that Nietzsche claims to have cornered is this: “it is not long since princely weddings and public festivals of the more magnificent kind were unthinkable without executions, torturings, or perhaps an auto-da-fé.”9 Nietzsche contends that civilization, the process by which human beings were, so to speak, “tamed” and rendered predictable, was based on an ocean of blood. Consider Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, a testimony to an era when bad debts and broken promises were balanced out by the offended party being allowed to delight in the physical suffering imposed on the guilty culprit. Nietzsche wanted us to own a side of ourselves that we lock in the basement. He all but preaches that we need to be candid with ourselves about what we actually find appealing as opposed to what we would like to think we like.
Nietzsche had a discerning eye for the toxic feelings of suspicion, envy, and disguised ire. Again, I know where Nietzsche is calling from. Once upon a time, I was asked to do a taped interview on a radio show that regularly attracts over a million listeners. Weeks and months passed by and my interview was never aired. I made inquiries. Finally, the producer emailed me to say the interview did not hang together and that she could not broadcast the discussion on her show. I complained, at which point she had an underling inform me that putting my interview on the airwaves might damage my reputation. Naturally, I feigned indifference, but inwardly I was fuming and could not forgive the slight. This was three years ago, and sometimes, even now, when I can’t sleep, I fantasize about how I might exact revenge: human, all too human. Father Nietzsche would understand my desire to repay this insult.
These days there is a robust industry of forgiveness experts, much of it orbiting around the idea that we need to be able to forgive ourselves, as though I had the authority to forgive myself for someone whom I have victimized! I might as well pretend that as a third party I could forgive the fiend who mugged and robbed my friend. Nietzsche does not prescribe self-forgiveness but something even more radical. Healthy consciousness requires forgetfulness. As Nietzsche describes it, you don’t need to be able to forgive; you need to be able to forget both the transgressions of others and your own missteps. The coda to section 10 of the First Essay, Book 1, of On the Genealogy of Morals reads:
To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds for very long—that is the sign of strong full natures in whom there is an excess of power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget (a good example of this in modern times is Mirabeau, who had no memory for insults and vile actions done him and was unable to forgive simply because he—forgot). Such a man shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others; here alone genuine “love of one’s enemies” is possible—supposing it to be possible at all on earth.”10
While most philosophers praise memory and disparage forgetfulness, Nietzsche sees it the other way around. Forgetfulness is a form of spiritual digestion essential to spiritual well-being. We need to resist becoming moral stamp collectors. We need to be strong enough to let things go.
There is much that divides and unites Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. On a purely personal and psychological level, both had the ability to hold the wire of continuous hyperintense levels of intellectual stimulation that would have been more than enough to drive others to madness. For the most blatant of contrasts, Kierkegaard’s life and works were faceted to the issue of faith. Stressing the striving aspect, Kierkegaard always described himself as becoming a Christian. He would have concurred with Nietzsche that faith in God is not exactly blessed by reason and that the faithful are only able to trust in God by power of the absurd. Like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard was a free spirit who found the cleverness and relentless, narrow-minded pragmatism of bourgeoisie society repugnant.
As Nietzsche describes it, you don’t need to be able to forgive; you need to be able to forget both the transgressions of others and your own missteps.
A couple of years before Nietzsche drifted into his decade of insanity, the Danish literary critic Georg Brandes introduced Nietzsche to Kierkegaard’s writings. Though it is not clear how much of Kierkegaard he absorbed, philosopher Thomas Miles makes a strong case that Nietzsche read and was impacted by Kierkegaard’s virulent Attack upon “Christendom.” At bottom, both men were apostles of self-honesty, courage, and boundless passion.
Affinities aside, Nietzsche surely would have diagnosed Kierkegaard as having imbibed the poison of the slave revolt. Of “the man of ressentiment,” the individual who is the end product of the slave revolt, Nietzsche says his “soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world.” An author who invites us to explore all the nooks and crannies of our inner lives, Kierkegaard would certainly have been counted a soul squinter. For a familiar example, remember Kierkegaard claims that happiness is despair’s greatest hiding place. Nietzsche would have had a belly laugh or perhaps wretched at the idea that we ought to have third thoughts about those rare moments when we feel joyful and at home in ourselves.
Kierkegaard was also a priest of the Nietzsche-detested “ascetic ideal,” an ideal demanding that the “purity of heart is to will one thing”—namely, what God wills. This ideal prescribes that wherever there is the natural desire to accrue some benefit for our actions or perhaps for a degree of reciprocity, then the heart is divided and ignoble. More than a dozen times, Kierkegaard reminds us that to become who you are, namely, a child of God, you must “die to this world,” an age-old notion that would have given Nietzsche another of his debilitating migraines.
Kierkegaard’s views on ethics were usually entwined with his endless reflections on faith. The question of whether or not something was ethical was seldom isolated from the issue of it’s being an act of faith. No matter, Kierkegaard still manages to frame glimmering thoughts about the moral life. After all, he generated a veritable library of up-building literature, much of which could well be interpreted as moral self-help.
We have touched on this before but Kierkegaard believed the knowledge of right and wrong were universally distributed. Moral improvement is not a matter of acquiring more knowledge or skills of analysis. If it were, the economically/educationally disadvantaged would also be morally disadvantaged—and that would belie an unjust and immoral universe. Because Kierkegaard did not believe that the task of offering ethico-religious instruction was one of transmitting knowledge, he reconsidered what it meant and how to go about communicating the truths that matter, the truths that are a way of life. With ethics, there is no longer an object of knowledge to be passed along; instead, ethico-religious communication is primarily a matter of enlivening a person’s relationship to their ideas. When we are faced with examples of moral greatness, for instance, we should not imagine that a Mandela or a Bonhoeffer is cut from a different cloth. Here, Kierkegaard would link arms with Sartre. Our moral capacities are not like athletic abilities. There is no such thing as a moral genius. Rather than passively admiring moral heroes, I ought to strive to follow their lead.
Again, Kierkegaard wrote thousands of pages of uplifting literature, spiritual and moral self-help. For Kierkegaard, part of what it means to build someone up is to nudge him or her out of an objective posture and cultivate in that individual a concern about what kind of person he or she is becoming. Students always come to me understandably absorbed in the question of vocation and what to do after college, but they seldom spend their time and energy thinking about what kind of human being they want to become.
Our moral capacities are not like athletic abilities. There is no such thing as a moral genius. Rather than passively admiring moral heroes, I ought to strive to follow their lead.
Early in his career, Kierkegaard drafted a series of lectures on indirect communication. Perhaps because he detected a contradiction in directly communicating about indirect communication, Kierkegaard never delivered or published these lectures. He left them in his notebooks, which he, in turn, left to posterity. In these notes, Kierkegaard asserted that moral education had more to do with drawing the truth out of a person than injecting them with it:
It may be that science can be pounded into a person, but as far as esthetic capability is concerned (simply because there is no object) and even more so with the ethical (simply because here in the strictest sense of the word there is no object), one has to pound it out of him. The corporal sees the soldier . . . in the farm boy and therefore says: I will have to pound the soldier out of him.11
On my reading, part of the “beating out” that Kierkegaard was prescribing consists of helping one another to avoid self-deception. In The Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard defines despair as an imbalance in the self. In the next section, he defines it in terms of different levels of consciousness of being a self. Finally, he begins part two with the simple decree, “Despair is sin.” He then presses, What is sin?
For Kierkegaard, part of what it means to build someone up is to nudge him or her out of an objective posture and cultivate in that individual a concern about what kind of person he or she is becoming.
Kierkegaard’s beloved Socrates held that sin is ignorance. But we can’t be culpable if we are justifiably ignorant. For example, if you hand me a drink at a party unaware that it has been spiked with arsenic, you cannot be blamed, because you had no way of knowing. On the other hand, suppose we suffer and make others suffer from an ignorance that we have brought upon ourselves. Kierkegaard frequently presses us to understand that there are two ways of understanding: theoretical and practical. You can see him chuckling as he writes:
It is exceedingly comic that a speaker with sincere voice and gestures, deeply stirred and deeply stirring, can movingly depict the truth, can face all the powers of evil and of hell boldly, with cool self-assurance in his bearing . . . it is exceedingly comic that almost simultaneously . . . he can timidly and cravenly cut and run away from the slightest inconvenience.12
A few pages later, in a brilliant paragraph that needs to be cited in full, Kierkegaard offers this vivid image of what happens when moral push comes to shove:
In the life of the spirit there is no standing still . . . therefore if a person does not do what is right at the very second he knows it—then knowing simmers down. Next comes the question of how willing appraises what is known. Willing is dialectical and has under it the entire lower nature of man. If willing does not agree with what is known, then it does not necessarily follow that willing goes ahead and does the opposite of what knowing understood (presumably such strong opposites are rare); rather, willing allows some time to elapse, an interim called: “We shall look at it tomorrow.” During all this, knowing becomes more and more obscure, and the lower nature gains the upper hand more and more; alas, for the good must be done immediately, as soon as it is known, . . . but the lower nature’s power lies in stretching things out. Gradually, willing’s objections to this development lessen; it almost appears to be in collusion. And when knowing has become duly obscured, knowing and willing can better understand each other; eventually they agree completely, for now knowing has come over to the side of willing and admits that what it wants is absolutely right.13
The author draws a breath and concludes:
And this is how perhaps the great majority of men live: they work gradually at eclipsing their ethical and ethical-religious comprehension, which would lead them out into decisions and conclusions that their lower nature does not much care for, but they expand their esthetic and metaphysical comprehension, which ethically is a diversion.14
This passage had been critiqued for seeming to suggest that when it comes to moral decisions, we should go with whatever our gut tells us. But twice Kierkegaard indicates that it is not a matter of acting on impulse. Instead, we should act as soon as we know what the right thing to do is; this knowing may or may not require intellectual consideration.
Imagine a moral decision that promises to deliver a large package of pain. Perhaps you are a police officer who has witnessed your friend and partner abusing a suspect. If you report your popular and well-respected colleague, you can be sure of quickly becoming a pariah in the department. As your commanding officer walks by and greets you, you momentarily consider saying something, but then the thought occurs that you have a family to support, and, besides, chances are no important change will come of you speaking up. Then you recall the case in 2017 of the Baltimore police officer who was poised to testify against his department. The day before his court date, he was mysteriously gunned down. Just a coincidence? The men and women in blue stick together. You decide this is too momentous a choice to make on the spot, so you say to yourself, “I will sleep on the decision.” Kierkegaard’s passage warns of the moral and spiritual perils of procrastination. The more time you put between yourself and an action, the more likely you are to convince yourself that the right thing to do is the easy thing to do.
I don’t need to engage imagination to bring Kierkegaard’s analysis to life. Memory will suffice. Years ago, I was taking a coaching certification clinic. Everyone was looking at each other’s papers, conferring, and chuckling about the process, including the proctor, who was also a coach. I suppose we were all telling ourselves that we were sussed and seasoned coaches and that the information we were being examined on was useless. For the most part, that was true; nevertheless, we were always lecturing our athletes about being upstanding men and women of integrity. For a moment, I considered making a protest about the cheating. As it often happens with moral dilemmas, it was a situation that seemed to bubble up out of nowhere. Because of my need for affiliation, it felt like high stakes for me. Though it wasn’t a life or death matter, I had recently been accepted into this fraternity and the last thing I wanted to do was stand up and start giving these veterans of the ring a moral lecture. Instead, I reassured myself that my colleagues and I were all knowledgeable and dedicated trainers generously volunteering our time to enrich the lives of young people, many of whom were at risk. I shouldn’t have, but I kept my mouth shut, traded answers, joked around, and tried to forget what I didn’t do.
Morally speaking, the temptation is not just to take the path of least resistance but to convince ourselves that the path of least resistance is the righteous path. As we continue to undermine our own sense of agency, our moral comprehension diminishes bit by bit. Because of this dynamic—or, as Kierkegaard might say, “dialectic”—we older folks sometimes look condescendingly at young people, thinking and perhaps muttering, “You’re full of idealism, but in time you will learn.” Learn what? How to shut down? That when you learn what life is all about you will darken your moral understanding by slowly talking yourselves out of truths that might earn you a cold shoulder or nix a promotion? Careerism, the comfort and sense of belonging that success yields, provides one of the most powerful impetuses for convincing ourselves to look the other way when a sacrifice is demanded.
Morally speaking, the temptation is not just to take the path of least resistance but to convince ourselves that the path of least resistance is the righteous path.
I should know.
In the 1980s, I needed to go to Denmark to learn Danish and finish my dissertation on Kierkegaard. I applied for a Fulbright and was excited to earn a spot on the list of finalists. At the time, there was a civil war going on in Nicaragua between the US-supported Contras and the Sandinistas. A close friend of mine, who was working in Nicaragua as a nurse, confided that the Contras were murdering doctors and medical personnel because they did not want the Sandinistas to gain popularity with the peasants. It deeply disturbed me that my government and taxes were supporting these killers, so I resolved, or rather “almost” resolved, to stop paying my taxes as a form of protest. One afternoon, a knowledgeable friend casually informed me that since the Fulbright came through the State Department and the US government reacted negatively to tax resisting, I ought to reconsider protesting that way. Think again I did. À la Sartre’s example, I even discussed the issue with a psychoanalyst who conveniently reassured me that it was grandiose of me to imagine that I, one person, a graduate student, could make a difference. Having let the issue percolate for a few days, I told myself the tired tale that I would have more of an impact after I took my doctorate. I wrote the check and sent my taxes in, and off I went to Denmark. I should and could have done otherwise. But maybe with its lack of consequences, that moment of regret is all too easy.
For the umpteenth time, “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself.” Once more, there are different aspects of ourselves that we have to relate to one another, for example, our temporal and eternal dimensions. We are also burdened with having to relate ourselves to our past and future. Sweet days gone by are seldom an issue, but how to interpret major missteps that might prompt a person to lose faith in himself is a challenge that molds who we are.
Some thinkers have portrayed regret as a humanizing emotion. The twentieth-century moral philosopher Bernard Williams indicated that in instances where a person hurts another through no fault of her own (a truck driver who runs over a child, to use his example), we still expect her to feel remorseful, to feel the weight of the event more intensely than any spectator. “Other people,” Williams writes, will try to comfort her, “but it is important that this is seen as something that should need to be done. Indeed, some doubt would be felt about a driver who too blandly or is too readily moved to that position of comfort.”
Some hold the commonsense view that regret over a past event you can do nothing about is a waste of time when you can actually do something instead.
Spinoza reasoned that remorse and repentance are pernicious intoxicants that interfere with our understanding: It is out of rashness that we transgress, and it is out of rashness that we pound our heads about our transgressions. Our main aim, he believed, should be to avoid acting on impulse and emotion and to be guided by reason. Nietzsche agreed, saying remorse is a case of “adding to the first act of stupidity a second.”
Regrets come in different forms. There are the faux pas and botched career moves. Just before he tumbled over the falls and out of existence, I asked an uncle if he had any regrets. His brow furrowed. He drew a deep breath as though what he was about to say was hard going. Then he confessed that the one thing he deeply regretted was selling a certain piece of property at a price that was much too low. That was it?
Last year, I was sitting deckside in Florida with a retiree who was beaming with friendliness as he bounced up and down in the pool. We started chatting, first about his hometown of Pittsburgh and the many great athletes who hailed from the City of Bridges. Somehow the conversation veered to Vietnam and his experiences there as a draftee. Embarrassed because I was spared from that jungle crucible, I just listened. First it was a few madcap stories about his arrival in ’Nam, but then his thoughts swam along a darker current. Moving his arms underwater, he recalled: “One time I had just gotten paid and I was gambling, playing poker with this fourteen-year-old Vietnamese kid. A great kid. He was studying English—wanted to make something of himself! Well, he won fair and square. He cleaned me out of my whole paycheck. I was drinking heavily back then. I picked up my M16, pointed it at him, and demanded my money back. He gave me my money.” All I could do was gently smile and tell him (though it wasn’t entirely true) that every ugly deed that I committed had also been fueled by alcohol. As though I’d missed the point, he responded, “I haven’t had a drink in decades. But you know I’d give anything to be able to see that kid now grown.” His voice cracked with emotion. “I would get on my knees and ask his forgiveness. I would say that I hope he has had a great life and that I am sorry.” The otherwise jolly veteran-turned-accountant went on to hint that he had done worse things “over there.” I hung my head and was thinking that maybe I should apologize to him for having been able and willing to get a deferment, ducking the harrowing machine that diced his sense of innocence.
Not long after, I found myself wide awake one night, unable to sleep, when the incubus of a memory of another weak and selfish moment crawled out from under my bed. Sitting on my chest, it seemed to say, “O, teacher of ethics, how can you have any moral confidence in yourself after that?”
Moral regrets15 are usually packed up in deep self-storage, and we often make a point of remembering to forget them, even while we are awash in pseudo-regrets. I often regale my male friends with the tale of the time during college football preseason when I started a fight with a coach on the practice field. This incident helped bring an end to my less-than-glorious gridiron career. In that sense, I regret it. But when I tell the story, it is always with a chuckle, as if to boast, “Wasn’t I an outlaw in my day?”
As Freud and Kierkegaard taught, we always have to consider the affect, the mood with which an idea is expressed, in order to comprehend the meaning the idea has for us. The memory that the Vietnam vet bounced out of the pool was not of that backward boastful sort; it was a beach ball of sorrow. I suspect that he was a better person for having mulled over and hung his head for his behavior than he would have been had he resolved that what’s done is done and never thought about it again.
In the chapter on faith I noted that for Kierkegaard, prayer does not change God—it changes, it develops, the person praying. Perhaps it is the same with regret. I can’t rewind and expunge my past actions, but perhaps I change who I am in my act of remorse. “Make the most of your regrets,” Henry David Thoreau advised, “never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.”
To live afresh is to be morally born again.
For Kierkegaard, prayer does not change God—it changes, it develops, the person praying. Perhaps it is the same with regret. I can’t rewind and expunge my past actions, but perhaps I change who I am in my act of remorse.
Clearly, considered in terms of moral development, this trio of existentialists offer a strange and diverse bit of moral instruction. Sartre urges us to recognize that our radical freedom breeds anxiety and that we have a proclivity to try to escape the angst in bad faith by denying our freedom. Nietzsche summons us to recognize that our moral values are not sacred and did not come from on high. If he were to offer a homily, it would include the suggestion that rather than torture ourselves and others, we ought to learn to let transgressions go and be attentive to emotions and power interests that stealthily infuse our moral sensibilities. Finally, Kierkegaard instructs that the main obstacle to leading a righteous life is our predisposition to hoodwinking ourselves by talking ourselves out of doing the right thing when it requires sacrifices that diminish our happiness and satisfaction.