For Kierkegaard, being true to oneself requires passing into the religious sphere and ‘becoming a Christian,’ but this has nothing to do with being a member of a church and blindly accepting ‘Articles of Faith.’ Such a view creates the kind of self-satisfied conformism that existentialists reject. On Kierkegaard's view, becoming a Christian requires a passionate inward commitment precisely because of the absurdity and irrationality of its doctrines. It is not difficult to accept a set of plausible moral principles, but it is terrifying to be a Christian because of its implausibility. Indeed, it is the absurdity that makes the religious life possible. It requires the highest form of individuation, a ‘leap’ into a paradox that cannot be rationally justified and a willingness to suspend one's obligations to the ethical sphere.
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard uses the biblical figure of Abraham to illustrate the experience of individuation that occurs as one moves from the ethical to the religious sphere. The ethical reveals to Abraham a universal commandment, that under any and all circumstances a father must protect and love his child. But he is told by God to break this moral code and kill his son. He is caught in a horrifying conflict where he must either disobey the word of God or violate a universal moral imperative. In his willingness to sacrifice his son, Abraham becomes a ‘knight of faith.’ He breaks his commitment to ethical principles and chooses a higher truth: the truth embodied in the solitary individual who stands in anguished freedom before himself and an absurd and incomprehensible God. With a religious conscience, Abraham makes the ‘leap of faith,’ accepting the maddening paradox that his own individual needs are of infinite importance and, therefore, higher than the universal and ethical. “Faith is just this paradox,” writes Kierkegaard, “that the single individual is higher than the universal, though in such a way, be it noted, that the movement is repeated, that is, that, having been in the universal, the single individual now sets himself apart as the particular above the universal” (1985, 84). As a paradox, Abraham's choice is incomprehensible to others. In making the leap he has “discover[ed] something that thought cannot think” (1936, 29). There are no reasons to explain his actions. By all appearances, “he is insane and cannot make himself understood to anyone” (1985, 103). This is because one's own subjective truth cannot be expressed objectively; it can only be felt with the intensity and passion of the individual who makes the choice.
The philosopher Bernard Williams offers a secularized version of Kierkegaard's ‘suspension of the ethical’ with an account based loosely on the life of the French painter Paul Gauguin. On Williams's reading, Gauguin, in pursuing the life-defining commitment to be an artist, abandons his wife and children to a desperate financial situation and moves to Tahiti, where he believes the tropical setting will allow him to develop more fully as a painter. Although he feels a strong sense of moral duty to his family, he is drawn by deeper values that conflict with universal principles and rational justifications. Williams describes the tension between the values of morality and the values of the individual, writing that “while we are sometimes guided by the notion that it would be the best of worlds in which morality were universally respected and all men were of a disposition to affirm it, we have, in fact, deep and persistent reasons that that is not the world we have” (1981, 23). Like Kierkegaard, Williams sees traditional conceptions of morality as generally following the Kantian formula that moral values are rational and universal. Yet in Gauguin's case we see that there are values — grounded in the idiosyncratic passions of the individual — that fall outside the purview of reason and morality, and this means that morality cannot be the sole source of value. Williams's underlying point is not to claim that moral considerations are unimportant, but that “each person has a life to lead” (1985, 186), and this means that, in being true to myself, I may have to make the painful choice of breaking these binding commitments because they do not adequately reflect the values that matter to me as an individual.
Similarly, when Kierkegaard claims that the ‘individual is higher than the universal,’ he is not suggesting that religious faith requires getting rid of the ethical. This is impossible. The point is that, in some cases, faith may supersede any moral obligation. But the ethical is still present in the anguished struggle that the individual endures in breaking this obligation. If the content of the ethical sphere were completely absent, then Abraham would not be overcome with ‘fear and trembling.’ The paradox that Kierkegaard is expressing is that the passionate, life-defining commitment required in being true to oneself cannot be expressed or made intelligible in ethical terms of right and wrong; it is a commitment that is beyond rational comprehension. Becoming a self, then, “remains in all eternity a paradox, inaccessible to thought” (1985, 85). This idea, that in order to be authentic we must be willing to go beyond universal moral principles, is developed further by Nietzsche, who claims that these principles breed conformism and weakness, preventing individuals from wholly accepting themselves and diminishing their ability to create their own lives.
Living with style
There is no way to access Nietzsche's conception of authenticity without placing it within the context of nihilism. For Nietzsche, nihilism means that the very idea of “truth is an error” (1968, 454, 540), and there is no objective or universal justification for our choices and actions. This, however, is not a cause for despair, but for celebration. It frees us from the bourgeois values of the Western tradition so we can create new values and meanings that reflect our own temperaments and styles of living. In this sense, Nietzsche's account of being true to oneself is unique in the canon of existentialism because it is not so preoccupied with gloomy themes of death and anxiety. For Nietzsche, the confrontation with nihilism is a cause for rejoicing, cheerfulness, and laughter because it opens up new and exciting possibilities for self-creation. In The Gay Science, he writes:
After all, these immediate consequences, its consequences for us, are, contrary to what one might expect, not at all sad and gloomy, but rather like a new kind of light that is hard to describe, a new kind of happiness, alleviation, cheering, encouragement, and dawn. When we hear the news that the ‘old God is dead,’ we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel as if we were struck by the rays of a new dawn; at this news, our heart overflows with thankfulness, wonder, presentiment, expectation. (1995, 343)
Initially, it may seem strange to talk about the possibility of being true to oneself in Nietzsche's philosophy because he rejects the notion of an independent and unified self. The self, as we saw in chapter 5, is nothing more than the dynamic “totality of drives that constitute our being” (1997, 119). This is why Nietzsche claims that “to become what one is, presupposes that one not have the faintest notion what one is” (1967, 9). But if there is no self, no way one ‘really is,’ then how can we ever be authentic? To answer this question, we have to first get clear about the underlying principle of Nietzsche's philosophy, the ‘will to power’ (Wille zur Macht).