Why Nietzsche Matters

Nietzsche matters because, at the close of the 19th century, he saw with unflinching clarity the intellectual and, lacking a better term, spiritual exhaustion of Europe.

He matters because, in his own way, he wagered his intellectual life on offering Western civilization (so-called) a new way forward. Understanding, of course, that, ex nihilo nihil fit, Nietzsche ransacked European intellectual and religious history for sources of inspiration. He found it in Montaigne and Schopenhauer--in many ways as unlikely a pair of bedfellows as one could hope to meet; but that was yet another example of Nietzsche's genius.

Montaigne's uncommon common sense and clear-eyed acceptance of humankind with all of its faults and foibles reflects to an uncomfortable degree the 16th century gentleman's retirement to his country estate; on the cusp of the 20th century, his meditations seemed to Nietzsche to lack something--a je ne sais quoi. The missing ingredient was supplied by the acerbic punch of Schopenhauer's blindly self-assertive Wille.

One can certainly quarrel with the proportions Nietzsche chose for his recipe--Schopenhauer is a stiff drink and a little bit of him goes a long way. But the powerful mixture certainly caught the attention of the most important thinkers to follow in Nietzsche's wake--Heidegger, Sartre, and Marcel among them. Indeed, one might say that this Nietzschean cocktail determined the direction of European philosophy throughout the 20th century and remains, to this day, the narrow gate through which one must pass to productive thinking.

Marcel and Montaigne

Had Montaigne not been Montaigne, Marcel would not have been Marcel. Nor Nietzsche, Nietzsche; Emerson, Emerson. And although it is a matter of dispute among Shakespeare scholars, without Montaigne, Shakespeare might have been less than the Shakespeare we know.

In his essay on "Montaigne and Francis Bacon," Harold Bloom writes: "What Montaigne gives you goes beyond wisdom, if so secular a transcendence is acceptable to you" (Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, 120).

Montaigne re-invented humanism for the Modern Age.

Why Marcel Matters

In Alexandria, it has been said that the only persons incapable of a sin are those who have already committed it and repented; to be free of an error, let us add, it is well to have professed it.--Jorge Luis Borges, Averroes' Search

Marcel matters, first, because of his unflinching intellectual honesty; the sort of intellectual honesty and transparency that characterizes the very best humanistic scholarship.

Marcel referred to this intellectual honesty as "philosophy," and therefore characterized his philosophy as "neo-Socratic."

Intrinsic to intellectual candor is the "refusal, at any price, to have the free movement of our thinking blocked" (Mystery of Being, p. 15). This means that thinking must be permitted to find its own way through the dark wood of avoidable prejudice. I qualify "prejudice" in this way because, since Kant, we know that there are unavoidable prejudices: a priori forms of thinking that, for better or worse, make thinking possible. These are prejudices of the first order; we are stuck with them. If there is any consolation to be had, it is that these prejudices are universal: they do not reflect racial, ethnic, gender, or socio-economic class distinctions (although some will dispute this claim). If they reflect history at all, it is the evolutionary history of our species: again, a history universally shared by human beings.

It is second order prejudices with which we have to deal: those enumerated above and, as Marcel insisted, others--even prejudices that many presume endemic to philosophy itself:

I would not hesitate to say, for instance, that philosophical idealism, as that doctrine has long been expounded, first in Germany, then in England and France, rests very largely on prejudices of this sort...(MOB, 15-16).

Marcel then adds a personal note that I find very revealing:

I remember very well the periods of anguish through which I passed, more than thirty years ago now [he was writing around 1950], when I was waging, in utter obscurity, this sort of war against myself, in the name of something which I felt sticking in me as sharply as a needle, but upon which I could not yet see any recognizable face (Ibid).

Marcel's determination to "do" philosophy in a way that eludes the grip of the dead hand of the philosophical past is why he matters; it is also probably one reason why he is, today, so neglected.

Today, the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of the language of philosophical idealism is not the monumental struggle it was for someone like Marcel in the middle of the 20th century. Today, we have new sets of demons to try to dispatch. Many of them, however, produce the same (or similar) effect upon the discursive intellect that philosophical idealism did. Marcel called this effect the "spirit of abstraction."

It is with his analysis of the spirit of abstraction that I always begin to read Marcel; and from there, I inevitably become distracted. In the past, it had always seemed to me that he fell victim to this spirit and, therefore, I found him to be of little help as a guide through it. But he was really very much like Wittgenstein in this regard: his understanding of the effects of the snake's venom was not second-hand. He himself had been bitten. What I failed to recognize when I tried reading him (in the 1970's, then the 1980's, then again in the first decade of the present century) was how he had managed to recover.

Here is where one has to pay very close attention to the moves he makes: he counters the "spirit of abstraction" with a kind of radical immanence: focusing his attention upon subjective responses to phenomena taken, always, in the individual case. At the same time, however--and this is where one must hold on tight or risk losing the Marcellian difference--he insists upon a notion of transcendence. With the impatience of youth, I repeatedly reached this point in Marcel's discourse and said, "Look! We have reached my stop ... Farewell!" I would then put the book down and turn to other things. For it is in Marcel's insistence upon transcendence that I saw his thought turn back upon itself and undermine his stated project. I did not stick around to see how he managed to extricate his thought from self-contradiction. This is why philosophy worthy of the name is not for the young.

Radical immanence need not be set in opposition to transcendence like matter and anti-matter. Marcel had achieved (as I had not) the Heraclitean way of thinking that was capable of perceiving a harmony of opposed tensions, as in the bow and the lyre.

For Marcel, the "true" opposite of transcendence, i.e., the opposite that interrupts harmonies, that makes them untenable, is not radical immanence, but reductive immanence. It is the latter which is best represented in Western philosophy by scientific materialism and the like; ironically, scientific materialism is a mode of the "spirit of abstraction" for it objectifies phenomena to the point where all subjectivity is banished from consideration. But "purely" objective phenomena do not exist for human beings; they are, in fact, abstractions.

Radical immanence, on the other hand, contains within itself a transcendental dimension: the sort one finds in the sober Romanticism of a William Wordsworth and, especially, Wordsworth's American heir, Wallace Stevens.

Gabriel Marcel

Gabriel Marcel demonstrated that one can be an honest heir to the post-Kantian tradition of critical philosophy and still be a convinced theist.

I tried to read him without success in high school, then in college, then in graduate school. One would have thought him a natural resource for someone who cut his intellectual teeth on Kierkegaard and other so-called "Existentialists." I will confess that his conversion to Catholicism around age 40 made me uneasy; perhaps some residual Protestant distrust of Catholic intellectuals has deprived me of his stimulating companionship through the decades. This is just a guess; an attempt at humility and candor.

Nowadays I find reading him as bracing as reading Pascal and more satisfying since, in his major works at least, he appears to have avoided the apologia that often muddles the Pensees.

Marcel was a Christian humanist in the grand Erasmian manner. I am thankful to have finally found my way to his simple, cheerful, and gracious table.

Heidegger

One moves easily from Herder to Heidegger (here pictured as he liked to see himself, a simple German peasant), although one may also reach Heidegger through the Neo-Kantians with which he early associated himself as well.

Part genius, part snake-oil salesman, Heidegger was, in many respects, a major figure in the Romantic project by which "inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking" were secularized (see M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 12).

Heidegger's body of work is as vast as it is confused and confusing; I have known gifted intellects to wander into the Black Forest of MH never to return. My impression is that Heidegger's greatest charm is for those who, like him, are obsessed with justifying the failures of their lives rather than accept such failures for what they are--milestones along the way--and move on.

Sartre is Heidegger's greatest disciple and the only reason to return to Heidegger is to better understand what Sartre did with him. Like Jacob wrestling the angel at Jabbock's ford, Sartre grasped Heidegger's genius early, felt his grip slipping as Heidegger oozed his trademark snake-oil, and yet managed to hang on long enough to be transformed from a minor French novelist and playwright to a major 20th century intellectual.

Had there been no Heidegger, there would be no Sartre--not as we have come to know him. When we recognize Romanticism in Sartre, it is often a residue of Heidegger's impact upon him.

From Kant To Herder

Gottfried Herder was one of Kant's most perceptive students. He learned much from Kant though it is fashionable to regard Herder as a kind of anti-Kant (in the same way that Aristotle is no longer remembered as the Platonist that late ancient and medieval philosophers understood him to be). Kant's relative obtuseness to history helped to spur Herder on to his great intellectual achievements--in history and historicism.

Romanticism follows the line from Kant to Herder just a surely as it follows the line from Kant to Fichte and on to Hegel.

The Enlightenment gave birth not to a single or monolithic Romanticism but to an unruly brood of Romanticisms. Had Kant not been Kant, Herder would not have been Herder. Let us give credit where (and how) it is due.