A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PATHOLOGIZING IN NIETZSCHE AND KIERKEGAARD

Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are alike in their reliance on emotional disturbances to heighten their perception of reality. A name for this process is "pathologizing." Pathologizing is the creative purging of unconscious sources of illness for the sake of new discovery. The method of madness in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard is thus one that fully accepts suffering as the fate of the genius and turns it into an occasion of self actualization. Each consciously intensifies the tendency in himself (and all human beings) toward sickness and morbidity. In strikingly personal ways they anticipate the demise of nineteenth century optimism and the mood of malaise that will replace it. The effect of such malaise on the emotional life of the individual is their concern. This concern leads them to the underlying contradictions of Cartesian consciousness that breed insanity.;The movement of Nietzsche's thought, for instance, becomes irrational. He focusses on the maddening consequences of the murder of God at the hands of rational men. He seeks an inner stamina that can sustain him in the midst of what has become man's intolerably rational condition. He is driven to the awareness of a loss of personal meaning that is both nihilistic and suicidal. He finally resists the pull of Thanatos by moving toward a synthesis of science and art that is emotionally based.;Nietzsche gives himself up to an unconscious method of discovery. He becomes irrational in thought in order to express what he feels to be his irrational situation. He embraces a process of sickness whose health lies in a deeper meaning not yet evolved in the mind of man. As his fixation on suicide finds expression in the proclamation of the madman that God is dead, so his pain-racked isolation resurrects madness in order to bring man to his "senses." He seeks a Dionysian spirit that is strong enough in its resistance to mass conformity to embrace the likes of passion, suffering, and the primitive.;The struggle for Kierkegaard is similar. He anticipates the anomie and emotional disintegration that the age of Kafka will usher in. How man can act and be meaningly alive in the face of the absurd conditions of his existence is Kierkegaard's question. As Nietzsche intuits the character of the irrational via an irrational method, the method of Kierkegaard's madness is that of absurdity. Kierkegaard decides finally to overcome the absurd in kind, and paradoxically, with an absurd leap of faith. The equilibrium he discovers is the felt meaning of a personal God.;To view Kierkegaard as a misguided zealot is to deny the emotional intent of his pathologizing. He is rather a man of religious conviction with an uncanny sense of depth psychology. He remains a gadfly of personal integrity whose dialectical grasp of the complexities of human existence cuts across conventional boundaries of acceptance. The interpenetration of psychology and religion is but one instance of this. He speaks in behalf of a repressed dimension of insight that has been relegated by the either/or constructs of rational skepticism to the realm of insanity.;The contradictory impulses of western thought reach full force in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and are transformed by them. Unacclaimed in life, they continue to shape modern perspectives in seminal ways. Psychoanalytic theory via Freud, for example, is reducible to Nietzschean assumptions. Existential slants in psychology a la Rollo May, Abraham Maslow, and Ernest Becker are similarly informed by Kierkegaard and have not yet come to terms with the depths of his insight. The emotional struggle of both is that of the primitive thinker contra the maddening intolerance of a scientific Geist.