Tillich and the Courage to Be - Part Five

Tillich’s next section is titled “Courage and Life: Nietzsche.” It is the last section of Chapter 1 “Being and Courage” of the book, The Courage to Be, and it contains some important statements that get illuminated throughout the rest of the book (and in some of Tillich’s other works). In the very beginning of the section he addresses a very obvious concern – namely, what the heck does “self-affirmation” mean when applied to something that has no self – “the inorganic realm or in the infinite substance, in being itself?” This, it seems to me, is a Big Deal in Tillich’s scheme because in other works he seems to make clear that he conceives of God as “being itself” and “infinite substance.” So what he is really talking about here (though he doesn’t come out and say it in this way in this section) is what does “self-affirmation” mean when applied to God? The way he answers it says much about Tillich’s conception of God and why it appeals to me so much. He asks what this means about the ontological concept of courage – essentially doesn’t this undermine it? He says that critics say that he is introducing subjective concepts (such as “world soul” and “will to power”) into the realm of objective reality. His reply is:

…[T]hese accusations are mistaken. They miss the meaning of ontological concepts. It is not the function of these concepts to describe the ontological nature of reality in terms of the subjective or objective side of our ordinary experience. It is the function of an ontological concept to use some realm of experience to point to characteristics of being-itself which lie above the split between subjectivity and objectivity and which therefore cannot be expressed literally in terms taken from the subjective or the objective side. Ontology speaks analogously. … They must be understood not literally but analogously. This does not mean that they have been produced arbitrarily and can easily be replaced by other concepts. Their choice is a matter of experience and thought and subject to criteria which determine the adequacy or inadequacy of each of them. (Courage p. 19)

As I read this, he is basically saying that God cannot be understood literally as some kind of objective truth – God is beyond the literal or subjective and must be understood analogously. But at the same time God can be taken seriously. And the theology is empirically based - experience-guided experiments. The literalness of the understanding of God is what gets in the way of religion for many of us science and reason loving moderns.

When Tillich addresses Nietzsche’s philosophy he says that Nietzsche makes an important advance on Spinoza. While for Spinoza self-affirmation implies affirmation as against or over “something” he does not specify over “what.” In fact Tillich implies that it seems impossible to account for a negative “something” over which one must affirm the self in Spinoza’s system. For Nietzsche, Tillich argues, the “something” is essentially the negation of life, or death. Nietzsche’s “will to power” says Tillich is “the self-affirmation of the will as ultimate reality.” (Courage p. 17) Courage, then is “the power of life to affirm itself in spite of [the ambiguity of life], while the negation of life because of its negativity is an expression of cowardice.” (Courage p. 17) And finally “[s]elf –affirmation is the affirmation of life and of the death which belongs to life.”

One of the neatest quotes Tillich takes from Nietzsche (to me) is “And this secret spake Life itself unto me. ‘Behold,’ said she, ‘I am that which must ever surpass itself.’ …. There doth Life sacrifice itself-for power!” (Courage p. 19, quoting The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. II, translated by Thomas Common. Italics in the original.) For Nietzsche, according to Tillich, self-affirmation implies self-negation as well, but not for the sake of negation but rather for “the greatest possible affirmation, for what he calls ‘power.’” The “will to power” is the path to “more life.” (Courage p. 19) Life must be willing to surpass itself.

The courageous, says Nietzsche, know fear but can defeat it. They can look into the abyss “with eagle’s eyes” and grasp the abyss. That person has courage. With that thought, Nietzsche’s existentialist side, Tillich concludes his review of the history of the ontological side of courage, and Chapter 1 of The Courage to Be.