Two Ships Passing in the Night? A Historical Analysis of Nietzsche’s Inauspicious ‘Non-Engagement’ with the Writings of Kierkegaard with Respect to Truth

1 Kierkegaard on Truth

Throughout Kierkegaard’s ^[5] immense corpus of writings, but notably in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, ^[6] Kierkegaard developed a theory of truth summarized as ‘subjectivity is truth’. Rather than an assertation that subjectivity is the ultimate ground or source of truth, however, this thesis may be taken to denote that that which one understands to be the case is to be appropriated by oneself in one’s own existence. ^[7] Moreover, this thesis may be concisely taken as a rebuttal of G. W. F. Hegel’s (1770–1831) systematizing philosophy wherein, for Kierkegaard, subjects are prompted to observe and implement, moment-by-moment, a logic of mediation which collapses important conceptual distinctions (e. g., time and eternity, being and becoming) to achieve an absolute view from nowhere or viewpoint of the world and history in toto. ^[8] Writing as Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard notes Hegelianism’s tendency to degrade participation in the world in favour of observation and correspondingly Hegelianism’s promise to reveal the objective truth of the world and humankind’s place in it or the necessary interconnectedness of all things. The key issue for Climacus is: How does one transcend their own particularistic point of view to attain the objective perspective promised by Hegelianism? For Climacus, such truth is unattainable for human subjects and therefore the founding premise of Hegelian idealism is illusory. Climacus instead offers that, “subjectivity, inwardness, is truth”. ^[9] Deriding this thesis as trading objectivism for an untenable subjectivism, myriad critics ^[10] have accused Climacus of espousing a solipsism in that the locus of truth is presented as a subject’s inwardness. Climacus does, it is noted, aver that, “inwardness in an existing subject is passion”, ^[11] “passion cannot be understood by a third party”, ^[12] and truth is found, “by seeking in silence the [alethic] criterion that is in one’s innermost being”. ^[13] Hence, said critics contend that here ‘truth’ is regarded as that which is passionately endorsed in one’s inward subjectivity, regardless of content, which is, on classical logic, invalid. For if passion, inwardness, or subjectivity begets truth, then two contradictory propositions endorsed in mente with equal passion would both be true.

Obviating this criticism, however, two rejoinders are offered. First, Climacus limits his thesis to “the truth that is related to existence”, ^[14] thereby avoiding its universality. Indeed, for Climacus, passion cannot establish the truth of, for example, 2 + 2 = 5: “In a mathematical proposition the objectivity is given”. ^[15] What circumscribes ‘subjectivity is truth’, then, is that human subjects hold a privileged epistemological position vis-à-vis their own existential commitments (e. g., whether there is good and if one’s action counts as such), which they do not hold beyond probabilistically as observers of other individual subjects. Conversely, the Hegelian attempt at existential objectivity through a disengaged model of the subject is, for Climacus, mistaken insofar as it abstracts and depreciates precisely that which constitutes or is related to existence (i. e., the dispositions upon which subjective identity is founded). Second, Climacus does not obliviously omit the content of truth as he, and Kierkegaard more generally, posits truth as transcendentally embodied in the paradoxical and offensive ^[16] life of Jesus, whose unique charge it was to instantiate good in the world and concomitantly show love of God as the veritable aim and content of truth that is related to existence.

2 Nietzsche on Truth

It is a tenuous undertaking to relate Nietzsche’s conception of truth as a ‘theory’. That is, at least as ‘theory’ is understood in the commonplace sense of a definitive set of propositions which cohere as the explanans for given explananda or a given explanandum. Even if his recurrent denials of truth ^[17] are seen as merely rhetorical, Nietzsche was broadly indifferent to a substantive notion of truth. Or, at least, he had no formal definition of truth. ^[18] Nietzsche was, instead, pragmatically interested in those perspectives which promote certain ways of life or modes of existence. If his views do cohere into a specifiable thesis, then, as Angier contends, ^[19] Nietzsche’s theory may be cast as a four-stage progression culminating in a thorough-going perspectivism. That is, first, Nietzsche depicts the Western philosophical tradition’s conception of human’s place in the world as namely understood through the interpretive systems of Platonism, Christianity, and Kantianism, each of which share the basal assumption that humans occupy an ‘apparent world’ apart from a ‘real world’ (e. g., ‘being’ contra ‘becoming,’ this ‘Vale of Tears’ contra the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, and ‘phenomenal’ contra ‘noumenal’ realms for Platonism, Christianity, and Kantianism, respectively). ^[20] Nietzsche rebuts these metaphysical accounts as defunct insofar as he avers that each entails untenable epistemological paradoxes including the fact that one’s life is situated within the ‘apparent world’ yet is enjoined to uncover his essence in the ‘real world’ and that this dichotomy of the apparent versus the real engenders an ‘anti-natural’ antithesis. He writes, for example, “does man not eternally create a fictitious world for himself because he wants a better world than reality? Above all: how do we arrive at the idea that our world is not the true world? – it could be that the other world is the ‘apparent’ one”. ^[21] Second, attempting to eclipse this ostensible epistemological paradox, Nietzsche proffers Dionysian art (namely as presented in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music) as the foremost means by which man can grasp the reality of appearances untethered to the unknowable realms of becoming, Heaven, or noumena. In this way, Nietzsche presents Dionysian art and aesthetic mysticism as the salve and replacement metaphysics to the vagaries that he sees as afflicting Platonism, Christianity, and Kantianism: “Rescued by art, [one] is rescued, for its own purposes, by – life.” ^[22] However, third, diagnosing that this aesthetic mysticism inherently contains its own epistemic opacities inasmuch as it wants to preserve a notion of metaphysical truth ^[23] yet cannot establish a ground for this truth that is any less obscure than that which he estimates as afflicting Platonism, Christianity, and Kantianism, Nietzsche adopts a scientism such that the truth about the world and humankind’s place in it must become the exclusive bailiwick of science or, rather, Wissenschaften. ^[24] Nonetheless, fourth, Nietzsche further rejects scientism as, at best, incapable of generating values and, at worst, anathemic re-emergence of asceticism whereby faith in science has the potential to buttress such pious zeal to even inspire truth-motivated self-sacrifice. ^[25] Indeed, as Nietzsche notes in On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic, ^[26] faith in science “[...] is not the opposite of the ascetic ideal but rather the [...] most recent and noble manifestation [of it]”. ^[27] Unable to resolve the dissonance between scientism and his fluid axiology with appetites for certain undergirding values (e. g., the self’s capacity for value creation and, namely, accentuations of power, Dionysian joie de vivre, affirmation of ‘this-worldliness’, art and artistry, individuality, autonomy, and pluralism), Nietzsche, then, abrogates the notion of an overarching universal truth about the world and humankind’s place in it and ultimately opts for full-scale perspectivism: “There are many kinds of eyes [...] and consequently there are many kinds of ‘truths’, and consequently there is no truth.” ^[28] Rather than crude relativism, however, Nietzsche’s thesis is namely concerned with locating the unique perspectives from which individuals as ‘free spirits’, including the Übermensch and ‘higher men’, may flourish in their self-development.

3 The Historical Evidence of Nietzsche’s Exposure to and Reception of Kierkegaard

Having selectively surveyed salient aspects of their respective theories of truth, the question remains to what extent Nietzsche was in any way conversant with Kierkegaard’s thought in general and his theory of truth in particular. Several prior investigations have indicated that Nietzsche was indeed familiar with Kierkegaard through multiple sources, ^[29] which are clustered and enumerated here.

1. First, in a 26 August 1888 letter to Carl Fuchs (1865–1951), ^[30] Nietzsche offers a glowing appraisal of Brandes’ Main Currents in 19th Century Literature ^[31] and Brobjer clarifies that correspondences from Peter Gast (i. e., Johann Heinrich Köselitz, 1854–1918) indicate that Gast read parts of Strodtmann’s German translation of this work to Nietzsche likely between 1876 and early 1878. ^[32] Of significance, the second volume of Brandes’ work, ^[33] which Brobjer contends Nietzsche likely re-read in 1887 or 1888, contains 23 pages on which Kierkegaard is discussed or quoted from, including Concluding Unscientific Postscript wherein the ‘subjectivity is truth’ thesis is presented. Notably, in discussing Friedrich Schlegel’s (1772–1829) Lucinde, Brandes posits “It is not merely in name that this irony bears a fundamental resemblance to Kierkegaard’s, which also aristocratically ‘chooses to be misunderstood.’ The Ego of genius is the truth, if not in the sense in which Kierkegaard would have us understand his proposition, ‘Subjectivity is the truth,’ still in the sense that the Ego has every externally valid commandment and prohibition in its power; and, to the astonishment and scandal of the world, invariably expresses itself in paradoxes.” ^[34] Still, despite these references to Kierkegaard, it is impossible to know definitively how much of Brandes’ Main Currents in 19th Century Literature Nietzsche may have retained inasmuch as it is unclear which whole or part of the specific volumes Gast read to Nietzsche sometime between 1876 and 1878 (and the same goes for Nietzsche’s later re-encounter with the work(s) in 1887/1888). It is on this basis that I concur with Brobjer such that this evidence alone is not enough to assert that Nietzsche ‘knew’ Kierkegaard other than to say that he potentially encountered Kierkegaard’s name and thought in broad strokes within German-language literature as early as the second half of the 1870s.

2. Second, in a 27 March 1880 letter ^[35] to his mother, Franziska Nietzsche (1826–1897), Nietzsche requested that she send him a copy of the Danish theologian and eventual Bishop of the Diocese of Zealand, and Primate of the Church of Denmark, Hans Lassen Martensen’s (1808–1884) Christian Ethics. ^[36] Nietzsche’s journal entries from this period indicate that he read at least the first volume of this work during the spring and summer of 1880, ^[37] in which Kierkegaard is solely examined across 27 successive pages. Indeed, as it was at this time that Nietzsche was beginning his vitriolic attack on traditional conceptions of morality and Christianity (e. g., Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality ^[38]), Brobjer ^[39] contends that it was his reading of Martensen that, at least in part, provided impetus and ammunition to Nietzsche’s invective. Importantly, in Christian Ethics, Martensen specifically references Kierkegaard’s theory of truth such that he offers, “[Kierkegaard] considers it as the misfortune of the age to know too much, and with all of this knowledge to have forgotten what it is to exist [...] that the age, by becoming too objective, has forgotten that it is the business of every human to remain subjective [...] [Kierkegaard] has arrived at the perception that ‘subjectivity is the truth’.” ^[40] Martensen’s somewhat sympathetic but also critical treatment of Kierkegaard comprises the longest and most detailed accounting of Kierkegaard’s thought. Taken with the fact that Nietzsche owned at least this first volume of Martensen’s work in his personal library, evidence within both Nietzsche’s published work (e. g., Nietzsche quotes Martensen within § 210 of Daybreak ^[41]) and originally unpublished notes ^[42] that Christian Ethics indeed informed and fuelled Nietzsche’s critique of morality and Christianity, Nietzsche’s exposure to Kierkegaard by way of Martensen appreciably supports the position that Nietzsche held at least some acquaintance with Kierkegaard in and around 1880.

3. Third, in late 1887, Nietzsche read Harald Høffding’s (1843–1931) Outlines of Psychology on the Foundation of Experience. ^[43] Crucially, the copy drawn from Nietzsche’s personal library ^[44] contains underscoring of Høffding’s account of Kierkegaard’s concept of ‘repetition’ (i. e., “Consequently for Kierkegaard the possibility of repetition is the fundamental ethical problem.” ^[45]) and Nietzsche scored “NB” (nota bene) as well as a vertical line as marginalia to call out an accompanying footnote. ^[46] This footnote explicitly references three of Kierkegaard’s texts: Repetition: A Venture in Experimenting Psychology, ^[47] Practice in Christianity, ^[48] and The Moment. ^[49] Accordingly, as Miles observes, in highlighting Høffding’s description of Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘repetition’ and the accompanying footnote in which Kierkegaard’s polemic against established Christendom is noted, Nietzsche’s attention would undoubtedly have been drawn to three of Kierkegaard’s texts and concentrated on a palpable twofold convergence between both his own ethical considerations (viz., Nietzschean ‘eternal recurrence’ and Kierkegaardian ‘repetition’) and his distinct polemics against Christianity. ^[50]

4. Finally, fourth, in a letter to Brandes dated 8 January 1888, ^[51] Nietzsche commends Brandes on his psychological acumen in an essay entitled “Goethe and Denmark”, published in the Goethe Yearbook. ^[52] Of note, this essay contains a discussion of Kierkegaard with respect to his view of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). As well, in a 11 January 1888 letter, Brandes appended a copy of his work, Moderne Geister, and specifically recommended Nietzsche to read the inhering essay on Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), ^[53] in which Kierkegaard is specifically mentioned on 11 pages. More importantly, later in this same letter, Brandes plainly recommends that Nietzsche read the work of Kierkegaard: “There is a Northern writer whose works would interest you, if they were but translated, Sören Kierkegaard. He lived 1813 to 1855, and is in my opinion one of the profoundest psychologists to be met with anywhere. A little book which I have written about him [i. e., the aforementioned Søren Kierkegaard] (the [German] translation published at Leipzig in 1879) gives no exhaustive idea of his genius, for the book is a kind of polemical tract written with the purpose of checking his influence.” ^[54] Responding to Brandes’ suggestion in a letter dated 19 February 1888, Nietzsche notes that “I intend on my next journey into Germany to tackle Kierkegaard’s psychological problems, and to renew my acquaintance with your older literature. That will be of use to me in the best sense of the word, and will serve to cajole my own critical harshness and arrogance into a good temper.” ^[55] Despite Nietzsche’s statement, however, and unfortunately, there is no evidence to indicate that his intention to engage with the work of Kierkegaard was ever fulfilled.

4 Taking Stock of the Historical Evidence

Taken together, without indisputable indication that Nietzsche read any of Kierkegaard’s writings first-hand ^[56] and as each encounter was by way of no more than secondary source, until further evidence is brought to light, there is no absolute necessitation that Nietzsche definitively knew of and was influenced by any aspect of Kierkegaard’s voluminous writings. Indeed, pace efforts ^[57] which speculate that Nietzsche knew Kierkegaard’s work and alluded to it in certain of his writings, there is nothing to apodictically identify the degree of Nietzsche’s knowledge of Kierkegaard’s thought or validate these speculations. That said, however, to dismiss this evidence and relate to these encounters as merely incidental, transient, and thereby posit Nietzsche’s full or principal ignorance is, I think, wantonly conservative. Taken together, Nietzsche’s encounters (including, at some junctures, repeated ones) with the abovementioned commentaries of Kierkegaard’s thought suggest that he would have been acquainted at some level with a panoply of Kierkegaardian ideas. For example, he would have been acquainted with Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms and ‘indirect communication’; ^[58] his description of the aesthetic sphere of existence; ^[59] his exposition of individualism ^[60] and derision for a modern lack of passion; ^[61] Kierkegaard’s concept of ‘leveling’; ^[62] his positing the ideals of faith and grasping such by virtue of the absurd; ^[63] Kierkegaard’s endorsement of the this-worldly importance of Christianity and imitatio Christi; ^[64] Kierkegaard’s attack upon Danish Christendom and institutionalised Christianity; ^[65] as well as, crucially, the ‘subjectivity is truth’ thesis. ^[66] Accordingly, even if one remains agnostic as to the value of these secondary readings for Nietzsche, I concur with both Miles ^[67] and Brobjer ^[68] that it is virtually beyond doubt that Nietzsche had some knowledge of Kierkegaard when he resolved to “tackle Kierkegaard’s psychological problems”. ^[69] At a minimum, for a time, Nietzsche knew Kierkegaard’s name and a focal idea of his ethics and the fact that Kierkegaard had implemented an attack on established Christianity – e. g., highlighting as much in his copy of Høffding’s text roughly contemporaneous with when he wrote The Antichrist ^[70] and Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are ^[71] as well as planned his intended magnum opus, The Will to Power ^[72]. Indeed, Brobjer even estimates that, in his final years of literary productivity, Nietzsche knew of Kierkegaard’s work on the order of approximately 50 pages of commentary and five pages of direct quotations. That is, he knew of Kierkegaard on a scale equivalent to the reception of a short monograph. ^[73] Moreover, as Nietzsche’s knowledge of, for example, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), both of whom he recurrently critiqued and discussed and thereby influenced his thinking in significant ways, came largely by way of secondary literature, ^[74] the importance of this similar mode of exposure to the work of Kierkegaard should not be undervalued.

Nevertheless, as a matter of historical, documentational fact, Nietzsche did not, in writing, unequivocally, and non-elliptically cite Kierkegaard, address his (i. e., Climacus’s) ‘subjectivity is truth’ thesis, nor tackle any of Kierkegaard’s psychological problems, as he had stated his intention to do so in his 19 February 1888 letter to Brandes. That is, he did not do any of these things in the 319 days before suffering the collapse on 3 January 1889 from which he would sadly not recover, but not before first impressively producing in a flurry of literary creativity no less than six works in 1888: Twilight of the Idols, ^[75] The Anti-Christ, The Case of Wagner, ^[76] Ecce Homo, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, ^[77] and the collection of poems, Dionysian Dithyrambs ^[78]. This is striking because, unlike Kierkegaard’s habitually (and at times frustrating and obfuscating) cryptic style – e. g., referring, as Johannes Climacus does, to Jesus as “the god” in Philosophical Fragments ^[79] and to Socrates as “the simple wise man of old” in Works of Love ^[80] – Nietzsche, despite an otherwise basic proclivity for obscurantism, was not decidedly obscurantist in citing those of whom he was critiquing. This is not to say that Nietzsche did not allude to thinkers indirectly. After all, as noted, Nietzsche did just so with regard to Martensen. ^[81] Still, unlike Martensen, who was still alive and a contemporary of Nietzsche when the latter penned his sidelong identification of the former as ‘one theologian’ in Daybreak in 1880–1881, it is unclear why Nietzsche would class Kierkegaard with Martensen as warranting indirect reference only, especially when one considers that Brandes had singled Kierkegaard (but not Martensen) out and esteemed him as “one of the profoundest psychologists to be met with anywhere” in his 11 January 1888 letter to Nietzsche. Indeed, at least in the works authored after this 11 January 1888 letter, I do not think that it is unreasonable to expect that such acclaim from Brandes, the opinions of whom Nietzsche respected, would have prompted Nietzsche to avoid equivocation if he was in fact positively referring to Kierkegaard. Commentators may be inclined to interpret Nietzsche’s affirmation to read Kierkegaard in his 19 February 1888 response as merely a nod of politeness to Brandes without being underpin by any serious intention to follow through on his statement. However, if that is the case and Nietzsche was being more polite than earnest in responding to Brandes, then this would seem to undercut the credibility of any veiled allusion to Kierkegaard as much as it speaks to the matter of the lack of explicit reference to Kierkegaard in Nietzsche’s writings. To continue to illustrate this point, then, across his writings, Nietzsche often unambiguously named names in treating the ideas of religious thinkers such as Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), St. Paul (c. 5–64 or 67), St. Augustine (354–430), Martin Luther (1483–1546), and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881). What is more, in the brief Ecce Homo, nearly 100 persons are individually cited by name. In this context, then, and assuming his at least cursory knowledge of Kierkegaard, it is curious and inauspicious that Nietzsche would specially demur citing Kierkegaard or any of his pseudonyms by name or, at most, opt for referencing Kierkegaard or his theory of truth obliquely. Of the instances of purportedly veiled allusions to Kierkegaard which have been offered, ^[82] I focus on one most salient to the topic of truth. Miles suggests that Nietzsche may have had Climacus’s ‘subjectivity is truth’ thesis in mind when he derisively excoriated the view of passionately believing in Christ as proof of the truth of Christianity as an embarrassing illogicality within § 50 of The Anti-Christ. ^[83] But if this is so, if Miles’ suggestion is accurate and Nietzsche veritably did have Kierkegaard (or his pseudonym) in mind in writing this remark, then beyond Nietzsche potentially begging the question of Kierkegaard’s (e. g., Climacus’s) depiction of the conative nature of religious truth, ^[84] what reason(s) would he have had for specially masking or concealing this allusion? As a useful analogy, in a 20 November 1888 letter to Brandes, Nietzsche remarked on both Dostoevsky and Pascal that “I am grateful to him [i. e., Dostoevsky] in a quite remarkable fashion, however much he may stand in contradiction to my deepest-lying instincts. As for my attitude to Pascal, I almost love him, because he has taught me an infinite amount. He is the one logical Christian.” ^[85] As noted, Nietzsche often did not appear to routinely refrain from naming names when discussing others’ ideas, especially concerning ones with which he disagreed, and he did not do so in discussing Dostoevsky and Pascal (e. g., whether with regards to his more univocally positive appraisal of the former ^[86] or his more debateable ad hominem of the latter ^[87]). It would seem that whatever complex intermingling of concomitant appetitive and repelling sentiments, whatever ambivalent gaze Nietzsche happened to cast upon the personage targeted by his critique, he did not habitually demonstrate a clear preference for circumlocution when it came to identifying the referent individual under discussion. Philosophical and theological similarities between Pascal/Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard aside, ^[88] then, the question conspicuously remains as to why Nietzsche would, as it were, pull his denominating punches when it came to his discussion of the thought of Kierkegaard in particular? It is to this challenge that I now turn.

5 The Salient Challenge of Nietzsche’s Non-Engagement with the Writings of Kierkegaard

There is plainly more to Kierkegaard’s writings than Climacus’s ‘subjectivity is truth’ dictum, and the same goes for the scope of the Nietzschean corpus in full. However, the ontology of truth is paramount insofar as truth holds superordinate status in relation to other propositions (e. g., “Is it true that X?”). On one hand, that Nietzsche did not unequivocally engage Kierkegaard’s work in general nor Climacus’s alethic thesis in particular is unsurprising in that, as aforementioned, Nietzsche was largely uninterested in truth as such. On the other hand, this nonengagement is surprising in that Kierkegaard’s authorial method of dialoguing pseudonyms and discourses engendered multiple perspectives reminiscent of perspectivism and, thus, one might reasonably expect Nietzsche to have been at least piqued by ideas enveloped in this strategy. ^[89] Further, perhaps underlying Miles’s nomination of § 50 of The Anti-Christ as a veiled reference to Kierkegaard, this non-engagement is especially surprising given Nietzsche’s consummate interest in promulgating what he considered his avant-garde message by way of vitiating and capsizing the very content of Kierkegaardian truth. ^[90]

Where, consistent with the Christian worldview personified in the divinity of Jesus, Kierkegaard’s truth was the subjective appropriation of the transcendent God, Nietzsche, in diagnosing God’s death, ^[91] concurrently negated the Godhead and truth: “Indeed, only if we assume a God who is morally our like can ‘truth’ and the search for truth be at all something meaningful and promising of success. This God left aside, the question is permitted whether being deceived is not one of the conditions of life.” ^[92] As Stone ^[93] notes, Nietzsche herewith identified as a legacy of the Christian worldview that truth has absolute value and that this assumption pervaded 19^th century thinking insofar as it is fundamental to efforts to seek truth including, of note, science and scientific scholarship. As Nietzsche further contends, “We see that science, too, rests on a faith; there is simply no ‘presuppositionless’ science. The question whether truth is necessary must get an answer in advance, the answer ‘yes’, and moreover this answer must be so firm that it takes the form of the statement, the belief, the conviction: ‘Nothing is more necessary than truth; and in relation to it, everything else has only secondary value.’” ^[94] More specifically, building on the Platonic view that ideal forms and, ultimately, the form of the Good, reside in the spiritual world standing behind the mundane physical world which undergirds and is therefore more real than this changeable physical world, for Nietzsche, Christianity (as a merely temporal and not eternal phenomenon) epistemically and morally impelled seeking the truth about this ultimate spiritual reality. ^[95] According to Nietzsche, science largely stripped the moral impetus of the Christian worldview but retained the epistemic idea that things appear one way to our senses but that there is also an underlying real structure to the world about which scientists should know the truth. ^[96] Indeed, in Nietzsche’s move from scientism to perspectivism in his developmental conception of truth detailed above, he noted that, because of the absolute value science places on truth, scientists aim and will even ascetically sacrifice themselves to discover the truth of the real structure of the world beyond the physical and perceptible for its own sake, even if illusions may well serve human beings better than truth. ^[97] As noted, unable to square scientism’s absolute valuation of truth with both his preferred fluid axiology and his scepticism regarding notions of universal truth, Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God was tantamount to the pluralization of ‘truths’ in his perspectivism.

Nietzsche’s identification of the importance of absolute truth coupled with his putatively perspectival dismissal of the same can be intelligibly taken as indication that Nietzsche did not engage the countervailing theory of truth by Kierkegaard qua Climacus, preserving as the latter does both objective (e. g., as with mathematical propositions) and subjective, inward existential truth. Here the desire to see Nietzsche in conversation with Kierkegaard is at its most acute and, though it is understandable that studies have accordingly been undertaken to (historically or otherwise) place Nietzsche in the position of commentator on Kierkegaard, again, the documentational record indicates that Nietzsche did not, in writing, overtly critique or otherwise engage with Kierkegaard. From an investigative standpoint, this nullity is inauspiciously uninformative as, even setting aside the tautology of attempting to ascertain the historical truth of the matter and settling for a historiographical simulacrum, the absence of a primary literature in which Nietzsche autonomously and unambiguously addressed the ‘subjectivity is truth’ thesis offers historiographers only grist for conjecture as to why Nietzsche had, at least for a time, and as the historical evidences presented herein attest, at least some knowledge of Kierkegaard’s thought, even specific knowledge of Climacus’s alethic thesis, but ostensibly ‘chose’ silence. But is ‘chose’ the right word? Visibly, a key challenge to the historiographer intent on studying the interrelated history and nature of these thinkers’ inputs to the philosophies and theologies of truth and any matters stemming therefrom is that this nullity precludes elucidation of whether Nietzsche’s silence was unintended and therefore not ‘chosen’ insofar as his career was abruptly, and sadly, truncated before he could formulate an explicit response to Kierkegaard. Alternately, it is possible that, the historical evidence presented herein (as well as prospective other which comes to light in future investigations) are sound however Nietzsche simply did not meaningfully retain Kierkegaard’s contributions enough to expressly remark on them. Or, differently, Nietzsche did retain in mente Kierkegaard’s contributions however did not deign them worthy of response. Further still, this nullity leaves as insoluble an argumentum ex silentio whereby Nietzsche indeed retained and venerated Kierkegaard’s work, including the ‘subjectivity is truth’ thesis, however, like Euthyphro before him, Nietzsche was wrought, by means of Kierkegaard’s irony and maieutic method in a manner befitting Socrates after whom Kierkegaard modelled his writings, ^[98] into aporia out of which he could not, and thus did not, respond. Of course, when not a logical fallacy, an argumentum ex silentio is in itself tenuous. However, insofar as, for example, Brobjer suggests that Nietzsche considered Kierkegaard to be “following in the footsteps of Socrates”, ^[99] one would expect Kierkegaard to induce Socratic effects on his interpreters, Nietzsche or else. Kierkegaard’s capacity to emulate Socrates, too, is not altogether remote considering that, for example, Brandes remarkably likened Kierkegaard to the great pupil and expositor of Socrates, Plato, in the same book-length study of Kierkegaard to which he had drawn Nietzsche’s attention in his 11 January 1888 letter: “[...] if one places ‘In Vino Veritas’ alongside Plato’s Symposium, to which it was ostensibly a companion piece, one must acknowledge with amazement that it sustains the comparison as well as any modern composition could. Greater praise can hardly be given.” ^[100]

In any case, reflecting the overall opacity of Nietzsche’s ‘non-engagement’ with Kierkegaard (that is, at least, an engagement that is not more than covert in its particulars), whatever the cause, it is notable that one of Nietzsche’s valedictory statements on truth is consistent with each of the above alternatives: “I don’t want to be a saint, I would rather be a buffoon [...] Perhaps I am a buffoon [...]. And yet in spite of this or rather not in spite of this – because nothing to date has been more hypocritical than saints – the truth speaks from out of me.” ^[101] Still, in attempting to provide a more definitive answer as to which of these alternatives is the truth, historians and historiographer swayed by Nietzschean perspectivism may dismiss the question of the truth of the matter as inherently nonsensical as such investigators are disposed to assert that the truth is, perforce, relative to a perspective. Indeed, such investigators may hermeneutically cycle back, ouroboros-like, on each and every invocation of ‘truth’ in the present study and assert that the whole endeavour to established a fixed referent for these tokens is misplaced insofar as there are as many (or more) interpretations of such tokens as there are hermeneuts. Conversely, historians and historiographers under the suasion of Kierkegaard are disposed to assert that the truth of the matter is largely irrelevant to individual human subjects (e. g., is only for God’s cognizance) and that the subjective truth, the highest truth there is for an existing subject situated in time, is that to which the subject as a single individual ^[102] relates in passionate inwardness, whether the content of that truth to which one relates is discordant (e. g., what Climacus denominates as ‘truthfully relating to untruth’) ^[103] or consonant with Jesus ^[104].