'KIERKEGAARD AND NIETZSCHE' An Essay by Karl Jaspers (excerpt)

In every generation there are two or three who are sacrificed for the others, who discover in frightful suffering what others shall profit by... When, in a generation, a thunderstorm begins to threaten, individuals like me appear.

~ Soren Kierkegaard


If my lectures do not come even close to satisfying these demands, it is still essential that the ideal of one's concerns be recognized. One can take courage to try to do that which passes beyond his strength from the fact that it is a human problem, and man is that creature which poses problems beyond his powers. And also from this, that whoever even once thought he heard softly the authentic philosophic note, can never tire of trying to communicate it...

Nietzsche wanted to 'awaken the highest suspicion against himself', explaining that 'to the humanity of a teacher belongs the duty of warning his students against himself'.

Nietzsche knew himself to be an exception, spoke 'in favor of the exception, so long as it never wants to become the rule'. He required of the philosopher 'that he take care of the rule, since he is the exception.'

This exceptionality, which was as excruciating to them as it was the unique requirement of their problem, they characterized -- and here again they agree -- as pure mentality, as though they were deprived of any authentic life. Kierkegaard said that he was 'in almost every physical respect deprived of the conditions for being a whole man.' He had never lived except as mind. He had never been a man: at very most, child and youth. He lacked 'the animal side of humanity'. His melancholy carried him almost to the 'edge of imbecility' and was 'something that he could conceal as long as he was independent, but made him useless for any service where he could not himself determine everything'.

Nietzsche experienced his own pure mentality as 'through excess of light, through his radiance, condemned to be, not to love,'. He expressed it convulsively in the 'Nightsong' of Zarathustra: 'Light I am; ah! would that I were NIGHT!... I live in my own light...'

Nietzsche compared himself to a fir tree on the heights overlooking an abyss: 'Lonely! Who dares to be a guest here? Perhaps a bird of prey, gloating in the hair of the branches....'. And Kierkegaard: 'Like a lonely fir tree, egotistically isolated, looking toward something higher, I stand alone, throwing no shadow, only the wood dove building its nest in my branches.'

Nietzsche compared himself to the 'scratchings which an unknown power makes on paper, in order to test a new pen'.

The positive value of his illness is his standing problem.

Kierkegaard thought he indeed 'would be erased by God's mighty hand, extinguished as an unsuccessful experiment.'... He felt like an 'interjection in speaking, without influence upon the sentence.'

In great contrast to the abandonment, failure, and contingency of their existence, was the growing consciousness in the course of their lives of the meaning, sense, and necessity of all that happened to them.

Kierkegaard called it Providence. He recognized the divine in it: 'That everything that happens, is said, goes on, and so forth, is portentious: the factual continually changes itself to mean something far higher.' The factual, for him, is not something to abstract oneself from, but rather something to be penetrated until God himself gives the meaning. Even what he himself did became clear to him only later. It was 'the extra which I do not owe to myself but to Providence. It shows itself continually in such a fashion that even what I do out of the greatest possible conviction, afterwards I understand far better,'.

Nietzsche called it Chance. And he was concerned to use chance. For him 'sublime chance' ruled existence. 'The man of highest spirituality and power feels himself grown for every chance, but also inside a snowfall of contingencies,'. But this contingency increasingly took on, for Nietzsche, a remarkable meaning: 'What you call chance -- you yourself are that which befalls and astonishes you,'. Throughout his life, he found intimations of how chance events which were of the greatest importance to him carried a secret meaning, and in the end he wrote: 'There is no more chance,'.


~ Karl Jaspers ('Kierkegaard And Nietzsche')


The Holy Longing
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Tell a wise person or else keep silent
For the everyman will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive
And what longs to be burned to death.
In the calm waters of the love nights
Where you were begotten,
Where you have begotten,
A strange feeling comes over you
When you see the silent candle burning.
Now you are no longer caught in this obsession with darkness
And a desire for higher lovemaking sweeps you upward.
Distance does not make you falter.
And now, arriving in magic, flying
and finally, insane for the light
You are the butterfly.
And you are gone.
And so long as you haven't experienced this,
To die and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest on a dark earth.