To regard Dante and Sartre as philosophical twins would be zany. Whereas Dante’s Inferno literally accepts Hell, Sartre’s depiction in No Exit is only a metaphor for inauthentic earthly living. Whereas Dante unequivocally accepts the Divine, Sartre unequivocally accepts only earthly life. Whereas Dante gratefully embraces an inherently meaningful cosmos, Sartre relishes the opportunities afforded by an inherently meaningless world. The list of differences could be extended considerably.
However, when judged only in terms of how human beings ought to live their lives on earth, numerous points of agreement between Dante and existentialism sparkle. I’ll call these Dante’s ten existential lessons for leading a good human life.
1 We define ourselves through our choices and decisions
For Dante, unlike for existentialist philosophers, human beings embody a natural telos: the goal of spiritual purification and reunification with the divine. But, like the existentialists, Dante does not claim that human beings embody an antecedently fixed essence. We must define ourselves through our choices and decisions, which reflect our exercises of freedom. Our goal must be won through the process of living artfully. We are responsible for the people we are becoming. Facile excuses, ego-saving rationalizations, and denials of responsibility are all too common, but unhelpful. Assuming a transcendent world of perfect substantive justice, Dante is confident that we will all receive precisely what we deserve. Lacking belief in a transcendent world, existentialism makes no such guarantees; although in a sense we will get what we deserve on earth, as our choices and actions rebound to mold our characters. Neither Dante nor the existentialists exonerate individuals from responsibility on the basis of their starting position in society, their early socialization, or the vicissitudes of outrageous fortune. For better or for worse, both Dante and the existentialists highlight human freedom (transcendence) over genetic endowments and social circumstances (facticity). At the end of our lives, Dante and the existentialists jointly insist that we are responsible for the lives we have led and for the people we have become. Sartre’s overly simplified but still profound slogan “No excuses” could just as easily have been uttered by the Florentine poet.
Dante is utterly convinced that we can connect to enduring value, that the transcendental world is rational and just, and that our lives attain an ultimate culmination; whereas secular existentialism contends that human beings have no fixed final end and that our lives are thoroughly finite. But both sides agree that, for human beings, the process of earthly living is self-definition through the exercise of freedom. We are completely responsible for those matters that fall under our control. Both Dante and the existentialists are convinced that the most important matters – those pertaining to the construction of the self – are under our control. No excuses!
2 Soul-crafting is our most important project
Moreover, the ongoing process of soul-crafting is the paramount human project for both Dante and the existentialists. That the two parties differ radically on the final end of this process must not obscure their agreement on the essential point that we must never lose sight of the value of soul-crafting.
For Dante, soul-crafting involves spiritual purification in confrontation with temptation, suffering, and human fallibility. No light matter is at stake: our flourishing on earth and our fate in the afterlife depend on the outcome of this struggle. For (secular) existentialists, soul-crafting involves forging a worthy character in confrontation with human weakness, the inclination to make excuses, and the comfort of inauthentic living. Again, no light matter is at stake: our flourishing on earth depends on our success at living a life that is authentic for the most part and avoids major self-deceptions. We become what we choose and what we do.
For example, Nietzsche sketches the process of soul-crafting in terms of higher human types. They represent the full process of Nietzschean becoming – recurrent construction, deconstruction, reimagination, and re-creation. To prepare as much as to approximate a higher human type, we must pass through the “three metamorphoses” of discipline, defiance, and creation. The spirit, like a camel, flees into the solitude of the desert to bear enormous burdens (the process of socialization and the construction of the self); the spirit, like a lion, must transform itself into a master, a conqueror who releases its own freedom by destroying traditional prohibitions (the process of deconstruction of the self and liberation from the past); but the lion cannot create new values, so the spirit must transform itself into a child, whose playful innocence, ability to forget, and capability for creative games signals the spirit’s willing its own will (the process of re-imagination and re-creation of the self).10
The texture and shadings of Nietzschean transcendence, eternity, and world creation are much different from religious versions of these features. The focus is on this world, the premises are cosmic meaninglessness and a tragic view of life, eternity is recurrent flux, and transcendence is the process of socialization, destruction, reimagination, and re-creation. In sum, Nietzschean redemption is nothing but a response to the lack of religious salvation, a message of affirmation to nudge away the chaos arising from the awareness that “God is dead.” Cosmic congratulations will not spring forth, but higher human types, who embody the proper attitudes, do not need any.
Nietzsche’s grand individualism, however, is dangerous. Physicians understand that insecurity, a relentless striving for achievement, chronic impatience, intense competitiveness, and deep hostility increase bodily stress and their presence is the best predictor of several diseases. These characteristics are much more likely to be embodied by people alienated from others than by people intimately connected to others. The path to health, wisdom, and joy is reached by broadening one’s boundaries and widening one’s subjectivity. Moral of the story: our inner deconstructions, reimaginations, and re-creations must ultimately invigorate the quality of our participation in the external world. Otherwise internal explorations are tepid exercises in abstraction and narcissism. Are Nietzschean relationships robust enough to ensure mental and physical health?
In any event, the parallel between Dante and an existentialist such as Nietzsche is created by their joint concern for the human art of soul-crafting in a context where everything is at stake and nothing is guaranteed. Embedded in the vortex of everyday tasks and activities, human beings, too often unconsciously, relinquish the paramount project of their lives. Typically, we expend too little of our conscious effort and we reflect too infrequently on crafting our souls. Dante anticipates existentialism when he demands that we explicitly and vigorously attend to this matter.
3 Authenticity is required for human flourishing
Dante does not use anything like the term “authenticity.” But his emphasis on human freedom; avoiding self-deception; taking responsibility for one’s choices and deeds; reflecting upon one’s mortality; self-consciously crafting one’s soul; rejecting facile excuses for inappropriate conduct; and parlaying suffering and adversity into practical advantage – all prefigure existential themes. Dante sketches how to live authentically in what he takes to be an inherently meaningful cosmos. His position diverges from that of modern secular existentialism in the matter of whether the cosmos is inherently meaningful.
But both Dante and the existentialists agree on the broader framework of what authentic living requires; they differ stronger on the details because of their divergent views on the fundamental nature of the cosmos.
For example, Albert Camus provides an alternative sketch of living authentically in what he takes to be an inherently meaningless cosmos.11 Camus argues that human beings desperately crave for inherent value, meaning, and rationality, but discover only a neutral, meaningless, indifferent cosmos. The enormous gap between human needs and an unresponsive universe is the summit of absurdity. Once we recognize the absence of a master plan and the absurdity of our existence, we underscore our own insignificance, our alienation, our lack of ultimate hope. Our acts are ultimately futile. The absurd is not a philosophical concept but a lived experience. Camus concludes that we cannot transcend or destroy the absurd, but we can forge and manifest our characters through our response to it.
Camus’s account oscillates between two descriptions of how human beings might create meaning and live authentically. The first way is by meeting our fate with scorn and rebellion. Camus’s preferred authentic response requires an awareness of the absurd: living life in the face of our fate, affirming life through rebellion, maximizing life’s intensity, and dying unreconciled. Relentlessly confronting his or her fate; refusing to yield, rejecting psychological crutches; embracing no doomed hopes for release; and creating a fragile meaning through endless rebellion – the existential hero soldiers forward.
Fueled by resentment and bravado, the existential hero refuses to bend or to beg for relief. We should not live within a perspective from which our lives are insignificant; we should revel in our hardness and endurance. We can create virtues out of contempt, pride, and strength. Like a stubborn army recruit sentenced to dig continually and fill the same hole all over again, the existential hero finds victory in his or her refusal to seek the consolations of ordinary human beings. The hero will neither admit defeat nor yield. The hero lays a patina of defiance on extraordinary mental toughness. The hero’s attitude is a monument to the human spirit: authenticity leavened by indefatigability.
The image invokes mixed blessings. Some of us will admire such defiance as it distances the existential hero from typical human reactions. The hero has seemingly proved himself or herself superior to peers, most of whom will be unable to fight the good fight while consciously accepting the human condition. However, other people will not embrace the existential hero’s self-styled martyrdom and victimization. Fueled by resentment, utterly detached from commitment beyond rebellion, intolerant of lesser responses, and keenly aware of his punishment, the hero embodies a destructive romanticism.
Camus offers a second description of how human beings might create meaning and live authentically: they may bask in the immediacy of their life, engage in the process of living to the fullest extent, and immerse themselves in the textures of experience. We should avert our gaze from questions of what we are accomplishing by hurling ourselves into our tasks with gusto. We must pay close attention to the textures of our journey. By luxuriating in the process of life and by living in the present, to the extent possible, we internalize and transform our fate. For those who are thoroughly engaged in their tasks, the meaning of their lives is single-minded engagement. From this perspective, we are too busy and too fascinated with the wonders surrounding our journey to focus on destructive emotions such as contempt and defiance.
The best experiences of flow, though, are episodic and unique. We cannot live our entire lives “in the moment” even if we wanted to. The temporary loss of a sense of self, total immersion in the project at hand, and suspension of our awareness of time energize our spirits. At their best, flow experiences add complexity and nuance to our selves. The risk, however, is dehumanization through inadequate reflection. By operating solely from a personal perspective, without a robust sense of past and future, and oblivious to other possibilities, a perpetually engaged flowmeister could become less human. Perhaps such a person would be relatively happy, innocently contented, or simply too engaged to assess his or her condition. Nevertheless, flowmeisters risk dehumanization as their givenness destroys their transcendence. Such people work busily in their chains, but do not recognize how they remake their context.
An important message lies at the heart of the image. Human beings too often project into the future while immersed in the everydayness and routines of life. We ignore the textures of the immediacy of life as we busily fulfill our daily schedules and fantasize about a better future. In the meantime much that is valuable in life seeps through our fingers. Even if total immersion in the flowmeister image is dehumanizing, a dose of it is healthy, given the structure of our lives.
4 Vice is its own punishment
That bad things sometimes happen to good people and good things happen to bad people seems uncontestable. In response, Eastern spiritualists invoke the notion of karma: bad things happen only to those who deserve them; although it appears at times that bad things happen to good people, in fact those seemingly good people are working off their karmic debt from past lives. The doctrine of karma, in concert with a belief in reincarnation, allows the conclusion that earthly life is, after all, rational and just.
Neither Dante nor the existentialists accept the doctrine of karma. Whereas Dante was convinced that perfect rationality and justice would be realized only in the afterlife, secular existentialism is equally convinced that the cosmos is benignly indifferent to human needs and that no afterlife awaits us. Yet Dante and the existentialists insist that vice is its own punishment.
For Dante, the seven capital vices deeply affect a person’s character regardless of how fortune and other people respond. We become our sins in that our souls reflect the nature of our deeds. Regardless of how other people perceive us and of how luck favors us, who and what we are is an objective matter, determined by the way we exercise our freedom – what we choose and what we do. For Dante, although a fuller dispensation of justice occurs in the afterlife, we do reap what we sow on earth. Thus arrogance distorts and amplifies the self; alienates us from salutary human communities; and renders us empty and self-absorbed. Envy simmers in its own resentment; diminishes the self; and deepens our sense of inadequacy. Wrath wallows in spite; severs us from righteous elements in the community; and hardens our hearts. Sloth begins in joyless apathy and blossoms into hopelessness and muted self-absorption. Avarice fastens us onto a pendulum of frustration and relegates us to a quicksand of rapacious desire; we ignore the interests of others when we should not, and we become captive to our own insatiability. Gluttony, understood as excessive self-indulgence, diverts us from noble pursuits; weakens the resolve of our wills; and promotes unnecessary suffering. Lust replaces the human need for intimacy and bonding with the yearning to satisfy immediate cravings. As such, lust distances us from loving the proper things in the appropriate measure.
Accordingly, Dante is firmly convinced that vice carries its own punishment; our characters are formed and reflected by the way we exercise our freedom; and the condition of our characters is an objective matter. Indeed, the punishments Dante conjures in Hell and Purgatory are metaphors for what sinners have already made of themselves while living. The afterlife reflects infallibly what sinners have become through their choices and acts. For Dante, the law of contrapasso operates on earth, not merely in the afterlife.
In that sense, Dante prefigured an existential theme. For example, in Sartre’s No Exit, the Hell depicted is not literal. Instead Sartre describes how many people, through their choices and deeds, create their own Hell on earth. As a secular existentialist, Sartre put no stock in an afterlife. By living inauthentically, wallowing in bad faith, immersing ourselves in received opinions, fleeing from responsibility, and the like, we forge our characters in feckless fashion. For Dante, Christian vices bring their own punishments; for Sartre, existentialist vices do the same. Similarly, for Nietzsche, to live as a “last man” – whose central interests revolve around trivial pursuits, a life of comfort, and social conformity – is to craft one’s soul pathetically; for Heidegger, to take solace in das Man – seeing myself as a member of a generic type and submerging myself into the crowd – is to manufacture one’s own craven existence; for Camus, to grasp for psychological crutches and to remain in denial about the human condition is to supplicate oneself before illusion. In all cases, existentialists regard these behaviors as the worst human vices, which engender their own punishments. For Dante and for the existentialists, to flunk the test of soul-crafting is to fail life. Regardless of how fortune responds to us and how others perceive us, we are in the process of becoming certain people, with particular characters that are forged from the way we exercise our freedom.
5 Self-deception nurtures vice
Dante’s Hell includes a host of sinners whose self-deception constituted or promoted their vices. Of course, the most infamous of this group is Francesca. She deceives herself that lust is love; that her (mis)reading of a romance novel underwrote her actions; that reason is defenseless when confronted by strong desire; and that she is not responsible for her misdeeds. Francesca is one of several cases where self-deception abets wrongdoing. In general, for Dante, self-deception is a major cause of why we too often love the wrong objects, or love the right objects in inappropriate measure.Once again, Dante anticipated an existential theme.
For example, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) gave to existentialism the terminology of authenticity. He described inauthentic human living as distinguished by wrongly denying freedom and succumbing to false ideas of inevitability. He suggested at least five, partially overlapping, ways in which I might be living inauthentically, denying my individuality.12 For Heidegger, living inauthentically is the greatest human vice and various forms of self-deception are its most common cause.
I am sunk in everyday-ness if I live in the “they” and consider myself as das Man – which applies roughly to generic humankind; thinking and acting in accord with “what one does” or “what people do”; subjugating myself to the mass of others; regarding myself as a member of a kind or type. If I accept the seductions of conformity, then a banal life of habit and routine, punctuated by diversions, follows. A particular example of this is distancing myself from any reflection on my mortality. If I recognize in the abstract that all human beings are mortal, but I insist that my death has nothing to do with me now, then I prevent myself from consciously and continually creating who I will be. Heidegger calls this a mark of falling.
I am denying my freedom and transcendence if I think of myself as necessarily being who and what I am. The act of regarding the roles I play and the categories to which I belong as a necessary part of who I am denies my capability of transforming who I am.
I am kneeling before false necessity if I take my decisions, choices, and actions as being the appropriate, natural, inevitable result of the kind of person I am. Doing so relegates my future to my unalterable nature. I am clinging to fixity if I accept that I have a fixed, unalterable essence. Doing so denies my transcendence – my freedom and capability of transforming who I am – and overly empowers my facticity – my givenness, aspects of me that cannot be changed, such as my birthdate, biological inheritance, birth parents, and the like.
I am settling for chatter if the overwhelming bulk of my conversation with others centers on small talk, babble, gossip, and shop. I am merely squandering time in non-threatening ways. I avoid profound issues such as politics, religion, philosophy, and race because discussing such topics jeopardizes my acceptance by das Man. In sum, das Man, necessity, fixity, fallenness, and chatter are the standard bearers for inauthentic living.
For Heidegger, authentic human living focuses on transcendent self-creation in the context of one’s facticity. I must recognize my uniqueness and not identify as a member of a kind or type. I must embrace consciousness of my particular death by heightening my awareness of my mortality instead of regarding mortality in the abstract, as universally pertinent. I must embrace my freedom by concentrating on the decisions, choices, and actions that constitute my life and help form my self. I must shape my future in context, by denying that I am a fixed essence, by accepting the limits of my facticity, and by understanding my transcendent possibilities. I must appreciate the contingency of kinds and types by viewing them as accidental memberships subject to reimagining and revision. Although none of us is entirely authentic or inauthentic, we differ in degree, and those differences distinguish the quality of our being.
For Heidegger, as for Dante, the forms of self-deception are numerous and its results are dire.
6 Commitment and conviction are required for crafting the soul
Dante invents the vestibule of Hell for those without passion, decisiveness, or conviction. They refused to take a stand between virtue and vice during their earthly lives, so they are now compelled to race forever without purpose. They are rejected equally by both Hell and Heaven. Being in the vestibule, they have no hope of transcending their meaningless activity. Shunning vigorous commitment and lacking deep passion while on earth, the neutrals are now stung repeatedly by insects. Having refused, in existentialist terms, to create a robust self on earth, they brought about their disgraceful eternity. As with all punishments in Hell, the sentences of those condemned reflect their earthly lives, or, in this case, their refusal to commit to crafting a substantive life.
The vast horde of indecisive neutrals remains nameless: this is a just response to their nondescript lives. The neutrals sought personal safety over commitment to principle. Stark in their despair, the indecisive neutrals run futilely after a banner that may symbolize a leader or a firm conviction or a connection to enduring value. Dante the author invented the vestibule of Hell for cowardly “nowhere people,” who merited neither praise nor blame. Cravenly fleeing from an authentic existence and remaining agnostic about value, they deserve the disgraceful vacuity of their eternity. It is striking that Dante depicted a vestibule of Hell for the cowardly, because Christian doctrine does not include such a reference. Again, Dante heralds the existential theme that intense commitment and robust conviction are required for authentic living.
Nietzsche provides a striking image of soul-crafting. His desiderata for higher human types include the ability to marginalize, but not eliminate, negative and destructive impulses within oneself and to transfigure them into joyous affirmation of all aspects of life. The best among us will understand and celebrate the radical contingency, finitude, and fragility of ourselves, our institutions and the cosmos itself. They will regard life itself as fully and merely natural, as embodying no transcendent meaning or value. They will harbor little or no resentment toward others or toward the human condition; confront the world in immediacy; and with a sense of vital connection. Higher human types will refuse to avert their gaze from a tragic worldview and, instead, will find value not in happiness conceived as pure pleasure uncontaminated by pain and suffering, but in the inherent activities and processes themselves. They will refuse to supplicate themselves before great people of the past but, instead, they will accept the challenge to go beyond these exemplars. They will give style to their character by transforming their conflicting internal passions into a disciplined and dynamic unity. Higher human types facilitate high culture by sustaining a favorable environment for the rise of other great individuals. They strive for excellence through a self-overcoming that honors the recurrent flux of the cosmos as they refuse to accept a “finished” self as dispositive of personal identity. Most important, they celebrate the ongoing process of human existence – release from the tasks described here is found only in death. Given the human condition, high energy is more important than a final, fixed goal. The mantra of “challenge, struggle, overcoming, and growth,” animating and transfiguring perpetual internal conflict, replaces prayers for redemption to supernatural powers.13
Regardless of how we might evaluate Nietzsche’s image, we cannot deny that his vision, like that of Dante, celebrates the importance of intense commitment and conviction for progressive soul-crafting.
7 Suffering can be redemptive
For Dante the author, writing the Commedia was, among other things, to participate in a redemptive process, a coming to grips with his own shortcomings and a struggle for possible remedies. For Dante the pilgrim, participating in the sins of penitents in Purgatory was a necessary part of purifying his soul, in preparation for Paradise. Following established Christian doctrine, Dante deeply appreciated the redemptive power of suffering. He understood keenly that a pristine world of pleasure would bring no glad tidings for the development of human character. Dante could easily have embraced the slogan “No pain, no gain,” especially when applied to mental and spiritual transformation.
With its emphasis on how the experiences of dread, angst, anxiety, and the absurd nurture insight, existentialism underscores the power of suffering. For example, Nietzsche argues that the will to power is not fulfilled unless it confronts struggle, resistance, and opposition. Pursuing power, in the sense of increasing one’s influence and strength, requires intentionally and actually finding obstacles to overcome. Indeed the will to power is a will to the precise activity of struggling with and overcoming obstacles. Because suffering and pain attend the experience of such struggle, a robust will to power must desire suffering. The resulting paradox is that the fulfillment of the will to power – the overcoming of resistance – results in dissatisfaction when the struggle has (temporarily) concluded. The will to power actually requires obstacles to the satisfaction of its specific desires because, beyond specific desires, the will to power has a more fundamental desire: to struggle with, and to overcome, obstacles. In sum, the will to power deeply desires resistance to the satisfac-tion of its own specific desires. Accordingly, it cannot embrace final serenity or permanent fulfillment. The satisfaction of one specific desire brings both fulfillment – a feeling of increased strength and influence – and dissatisfaction – as resistance has been overcome and is no longer present. Only endless striving and continual conquests fuel a robust will to power.14
Nietzsche, then, embraces the criterion of power: exertion, struggle, and suffering are at the core of overcoming obstacles, and human beings experience and truly feel their power only through overcoming obstacles. Higher human types joyfully embrace the values of power, while “last men,” Nietzsche’s male-gendered notion of embodied banality, and utilitarian philosophers extol the values of hedonism.
The highest ambitions of last men are comfort and security. Last men are an extreme case of herd mentality: habit, custom, indolence, egalitarianism, self-preservation, and muted will to power prevail. As seekers only of comfort, security, survival, and conformity, last men lack deep convictions, inspiring projects, or significant purpose. Accordingly, they embody none of the inner tensions and conflicts that spur transformative action. They take no risks, lack convictions, avoid experimentation, and seek only bland existence.
Nietzsche’s tragic view of life understands fully the inevitability of human suffering, the flux that is the world, and the routinized character of daily life. Yet it is in our response to tragedy that we manifest either a heroic or a herd mentality. We cannot rationalize or justify the inherent meaninglessness of our suffering. We cannot transcend our vulnerability and journey to fixed security. We are contingent, mortal beings, and we will remain so.
A happiness worth pursuing is based on experiencing and expressing human creative power. Instead of taking refuge in an easy, secure, comfortable life, the best among us will achieve creative greatness through confrontation with and overcoming of formidable suffering. On this view, suffering is not evil as such, but it provides opportunities for the only life worth pursuing. Imagination and effort give pain and suffering an important role in a good life. While a life of overwhelming misery precludes happiness and prevents the robust creativity that Nietzsche prizes, a worthwhile happiness resides in passionate response to an appropriate amount and range of suffering.
We are tempted to fantasize a painless life, devoid of suffering and loss. Such a life is more easily invoked than fully imagined. A life without pain, suffering, and tragedy is not human. Completeness, self-sufficiency, and the absence of suffering are unreliable criteria for human happiness. No single accomplishment or event is capable of saturating our spirits once and forever. And that is good news. For Nietzsche, human life requires continuous activity, self-transformation, and exertion, not a perfection that ends the journey. A worthy happiness must be earned through choices, actions, and direct confrontation with suffering. The sense of having earned our satisfactions elevates our spirits and partially defines the only happiness worth pursuing.
Most importantly, we are free to create ourselves: we bear no antecedent duties to external authority; we are not under the yoke of preestablished goals. We need not recoil squeamishly from the horrors of existence; instead, we can rejoice in a passionate life of perpetual self-overcoming. Art can validate our creativity; laughter can ease our pain and soften our pretensions.
Of course, Dante does not subscribe to the radical contingency of human life; instead, he joyfully embraces antecedent duties and pre-established goals. For him, struggle and conquest concern the ongoing personal quest for spiritual purity. Dante’s process, unlike Nietzsche’s, embraces a fixed context and aims at a given human telos. As always, Dante and existentialism part company on those foundational themes. However, both Dante and existentialism profoundly appreciate that struggle with and conquest of challenges, obstacles, and suffering are critical for the paramount human project of soul-crafting.
8 Faith is a must or your life is a bust
At the beginning of the Inferno, the pilgrim remembers how he found himself in a deep, dark, dense wilderness whose savagery mirrored his own forlornness and hopelessness when he was about 35 years old.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, chè la diritta via era smarrita. Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte che nel pensier rinova la paura! Tant’ è amara che poco è più morte [“Midway along the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path. How hard it is to speak of what it was like, that savage forest, dense and difficult, which even in recall renews my fear; a bitter place! Death is hardly bitterer”]. (II, 1–7)
The pilgrim must visit Hell in order to begin his own redemption. Having lost hope, he is severed from the theological virtues that define salvation. By observing and interacting with those who never developed or regained faith, hope, and love, the pilgrim can deepen his understanding of the inexorable connection between despair and the corruption of the soul. Without faith, hope must perish, and the soul automatically shrivels. Theologically, this is spiritual death. The denizens of Hell abandoned all faith and hope on earth; they now reap in the afterlife what their lives embodied.
At first glance, the fact that Dante celebrated faith is a yawner. His religious convictions and the narratives, myths, and rituals that sustained those convictions supplied meaning, a sense of order, and answers to the fundamental questions of life: Who am I? What is my destiny? Why am I here? How should I live? What does it all mean? Dante’s faith nourished him and soothed his doubts in times good and bad.
Kierkegaard celebrated the knight of faith, the person who sometimes renounced universal, ethical norms in service of a higher calling. He understood the danger of doing so and the lack of guarantees that the leap of faith required in order to cast aside the general demands of reason and of the moral law. Kierkegaard, though, was convinced that such risks promised great rewards for those human beings willing to take them in service to the religious life.
Not all faith, though, is religious. Believing in ourselves, accepting ourselves unconditionally, and being deeply committed to projects that transcend our own concerns all require faith. Faith can be defined more generally as commitment, conviction, and action in the face of radical uncertainty. Nietzsche’s highest value, amor fati, a maximally affirmative attitude toward life, required faith. Neither he nor anyone else can prove, deductively, that such an attitude is of the greatest objective value. On Nietzsche’s own standards, this is impossible. His highest value requires instead an act of faith.
Nietzsche’s highest value, amor fati, exemplified and was reinforced by great creative projects; sharp understanding of the tragic dimensions of life; acceptance of the world as it is; enthusiastic engagement in the recurring process of self-evaluation, self-deconstruction, reimagination, and re-creation; the ongoing transformation of values; and willingness to live our lives innumerable times over, in the same sequence and without editing out disturbing events. The greatest good is the maximally affirmative attitude toward life, the values it exudes, the creative projects it undertakes, and the obstacles it vanquishes. A worthwhile happiness is often, but not invariably, an accompanying benefit.
We should be drawn to life so powerfully as to celebrate it in all its dimensions, sufferings, and joys alike. We should not seek to edit out tragedy or revise the past. For Nietzsche, suffering does not have an antecedent negative value. The value of suffering or joy or any state in between is mostly up to us. Influenced by aesthetic values, he advises us to evaluate our lives in their entireties. To edit out the pain from our life is to want to be a different person, which betrays a lack of love for our life and for life generally. To desire to live our life as it has been, time and time again, is the psychological test. If we had full knowledge of our lives, only the robust would pass this test. The inner power that either attracts us to life or repels us from it is a person’s measure. The greater the attractive power, the greater the person who embodies it. As his highest value, Nietzsche’s amor fati is not derived from more basic reasons or rational argument. Those who are most strongly attracted to our world, the only world for Nietzsche, will find it most valuable.
Nietzsche’s attitude of amor fati is not achieved through rational argument. Instead, it focuses on the rapture of being alive. Amor fati is an experience animated by faith, not by cognitive discovery. Amor fati demands high energy and robust engagement. First, human beings have the freedom to order their interior life, their responses, to the thought of leading a life worthy of being repeated, in every detail, over and over again. Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence embodies this theme. While lower types adopt passive nihilism, higher types will embrace the entirety of life and will view the lack of inherent cosmic meaning and infinite redemption as liberation from external authority. Even the Stoics admitted that there are things that nature cannot control: our attitudes toward events in the world. Second, unlike the Stoics, Nietzsche glorifies the passions as robust manifestations of the will to power. To become who you are, to overcome yourself, and to destroy, reimagine, and re-create require an active nihilism that elevates the present into a fated eternity. Third, higher types will recognize that passive nihilism or fatalism rests upon the life-denying illusion that the “individual” is separate from the world. On the contrary, the thought of eternal recurrence underscores the individual’s complete immersion in the world of becoming: cosmic fate is not external to us, it is us. Eternal recurrence is the test determining whether one truly loves life. Would you live the life you now lead, in all its details, over and over again? The test can make a difference to your life, as you may ask now and in the future: “Does this action merit infinite repetition? Am I becoming the kind of person whose life deserves to be lived repeatedly?” The thrust of the test is to affirm life in all its dimensions, to love that we are alive, to aspire to excellence. Instead of imputing a crude determinism to the acceptance of eternal recurrence, we can view acceptance as a free act: affirming the immediate moment, the present, willing its return and the return of every other “moment.” By visualizing the present moment in terms of eternity, Nietzsche challenges us to embrace the ceaseless world of becoming, in which eternity does not freeze our choices but, instead, fulfills the present with endless possibility. The solution to the problem of living the good life, then, is grounded in attitude, not in cognition.
Living a robust life requires faith of some sort. Even the most pious worshipers at the shrine of reason must admit that reason cannot prove its own standards noncircularily; reason cannot prove itself. Even the idolators of reason require faith. Part of the human condition is the lack of certain answers to our most pressing questions about life. Religious believers accept a series of answers, but faith is at the core of their acceptance. Nonbelievers in the religious answers must develop other values, principles, and narratives, which can sustain their connection to the life force. A maximally affirmative attitude toward life also has faith at its core.
Camus once claimed, (over-)dramatically, that suicide was the only genuine philosophical question. For Dante the author, those who commit suicide, with only a few exceptions, are consigned to the second ring of the seventh circle of Hell. From a purely practical vantage point, Dante gives Camus an answer: you should not commit suicide unless you yearn for eternal damnation.
More profoundly, both Dante and secular existentialism could agree that the lack of faith and hope creates a hell on earth. For Dante, the law of contrapasso declares that Hell is merely the eternal continuation of the kind of life of the soul that reprobates molded during their earthly existences: Hell makes transparent what was hitherto obscure. For existentialists, human beings without faith and hope in life – fueled, for example, by Nietzsche’s amor fati, or Camus’s attitude of rebellion or commitment to reveling in immediate experience – become unwitting collaborators in their own spiritual impoverishment. Neither Dante nor the secular existentialists require appeals to punishment in an afterlife to locate the horror of despair. After considering the question of suicide, Camus concludes that it is typically a cowardly, inauthentic response to the human condition.
While Camus insists that we should discard the false hope of being rescued from the human condition, his prescriptions for resolute action in the face of what he takes to be the absurdity of our plight require faith and hope. Without faith and hope of a different sort, relentless rebellion and immersion in immediate experience lack all motivation.
Nietzsche disparages as lower types of human beings those who deny, or shroud themselves from, the tragic nature of life. Despite numerous philosophical differences and theological commitments, Dante, Camus, and Nietzsche join hands in declaring that faith and hope are absolute requirements for human fulfillment. (Of course, they differ as to the definition, recipe, and scope of human fulfillment.)
The fact that faith is required for living the good life is not earth-shattering news either for Dante or for the existentialists. For, without faith in something, we lose the ballast for living. Where there is no faith, there is no hope; where there is no hope, there can be no human fulfillment.
9 We have the power to change
Dante hammers the theme that human beings have the power to change their wrong habits, to learn to love the proper objects in the appropriate measure, and to repent over their past wrongdoing. Sincere repentance, even at the moment of death, will lift a soul out of Hell. Although Dante did not invent a twelve-step program, his embrace of human freedom and responsibility, as well as his intense commitment to faith, coalesce comfortably with his firm conviction that salutary change is possible. We are not fixed objects whose characters are set once and forever.
For their part, the existentialists glorify human transcendence, our capability of reimagining and re-creating our characters. For example, Nietzsche insists that the good life is not found in reason, but in the passions: in aspects of life that are of ultimate concern, our creations, devotion to worthwhile causes, and commitment to projects. Our instincts and drives create our meanings. Conscious thought can obscure our creativity. Not only does Nietzsche recognize the power to change, he extols that power as crucial to worthy soul-crafting.
For Nietzsche, the meaning of life focuses on stylistic movement – graceful dancing, joyful creation, negotiating the processes of a world of flux with panache and vigor – instead of goal achievement. We cannot reach an ultimate goal. But we can develop through recurrent personal and institutional deconstruction, reimagination, and re-creation. Our exertion of our wills to power in the face of obstacles, in the knowledge of inherent cosmic meaninglessness, and with profound immersion in the immediacy of life, reflects and sustains our psychological health.
Personal and institutional overcomings will permit us to become who we are: radically conditional beings deeply implicated in a world of flux. By aspiring to live a life worthy of being infinitely repeated in all its details, we joyously embrace life for what it is and we regard it, and ourselves, as part of a grand aesthetic epic.
Whether self-mastery and self-perfection are the sole focus of the will to power, they are the prime concerns of Nietzsche’s work. Neither state idola-try nor discredited supernatural images can offer human beings enduring consolations for their unresolvable existential crises. Instead, a new image of human beings is necessary.
Nietzsche promotes the individualism of the highest human types while understanding that values are initially established by people. Human beings create the value they embody by living experimentally and by nurturing an environment that propagates great people and high culture. Existence and the world are justified as aesthetic phenomena in that the highest artistic creations are great human beings themselves.
Nietzsche’s new image of human beings is not projected for all, or achiev-able by all. His vision is an explicitly aristocratic ideal, which is pitched only to the few capable of approximating it. Greatness and genius are fragile and vul-nerable: they bring about their own destruction, but arise stronger than ever.
The thrust of Nietzsche’s thought is that we can formulate entirely new modes of evaluation that correspond to new, higher forms of life. The value of humanity is established by its highest exemplars and their creations. The higher human forms are extremely fragile and rare: self-control, mastery of inclinations, resisting obstacles, experimentation, and forging a unified character require recurrent destruction and re-creation of self.
We can never transcend our conditionality and the lack of inherent meaning in the world of becoming, but at least a few of us can loosen the limits of contingency, experience fully the multiplicity of our spirits, forge a coherent unity from our internal conflicts, and learn to overcome ourselves and our institutions: theoretical insight can be turned to practical advantage. The episodic rhythms of the camel (self-construction and socialization), the lion (deconstruction), and the child (reimagination and re-creation of the self) beat on.
10 We must confront our mortality
That human beings inevitably die is not newsworthy. But Dante anticipates the stress on a proper attitude toward death, which distinguishes much existentialist writing. For Dante, death is the ultimate, radical fact – a fact that we cannot overcome. Although he is convinced, unlike secular existentialists, that an afterlife awaits us, Dante suggests that the proper approach to death has implications for how we live. That is, our explicit awareness of death bears value by ratcheting up the intensity of our earthly choices and deeds; by highlighting the urgency of our soul-crafting; by underwriting our experience of freedom; by celebrating our individuality; by distancing us from the minor concerns that consume everyday life; and by riveting our attention to the major projects, especially soul-crafting, that make our lives meaningful, significant, and valuable. In short, for Dante, a more acute awareness of our inevitable death can energize us into appreciating our freedom and responsibility more deeply, and can make us attend more carefully to molding our destinies in the afterlife.
While secular existentialists discard the appeal to an afterlife, they, too, emphasize that a keener awareness of our mortality can energize our lives. For example, Heidegger argues that human beings are beings-toward-death. This stilted expression means that human existence is saturated by the understanding that it is finite and headed toward extinction. We suffer inevitable and recurrent anxiety because of our impending deaths. This anxiety is not merely psychological; it is not a problem we may or may not endure. The problem is ontological; it is inseparable from human existence. Awareness of death is an immanent structure of human consciousness. Death is an ever-present potentiality, a constant foreshadowing of the future.
Human beings often deal with ontological anxiety inauthentically. We take refuge in routine, habit, and diversion as a way to forget our destiny. Or we imagine, irrationally, that death is something that happens only to others and applies abstractly to us. Or we regard death as the great disaster that we need not confront until a later, undefined moment. Such approaches are inauthentic because they falsely try to bracket, instead of confronting, ontological anxiety.
To confront ontological anxiety authentically requires continuous awareness of our destiny. Death is part of human experience and should not be denied, either explicitly or implicitly, through the strategies of bracketing. We should affirm ontological anxiety as a step toward liberation. Although we begin from the distractions of everyday-ness, we nevertheless must confront nothingness self-consciously. Heidegger takes the dread of our own nonexistence as the road to authenticity. My death is the one event of my life that no one can duplicate: it is my own and no one can understudy my role.
Heidegger’s call to rise from everyday structures, thought, and action is inspiring. But is confronting death the answer? Other strong moods and emotions – such as love, vengeance, compassion, hate, and conviction – can awake us from dogmatic complacency. Confronting death, then, is not necessary for individuality and concreteness. Confronting death is not always enough to elevate us above social conformity. Even direct experiences with death do not necessarily lead to authentic living. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s main insights can be refashioned: sharpening our awareness of death can be one path toward more robust and authentic living; confronting death is connected to learning how to live; and tranquilized immersion in the everyday-ness of habit and diversion dulls our spirits and dishonors the narrative of our life. But we must temper Heidegger: we are more than beings-toward-death. Death is not the center of our existence.
Heidegger assumes that only the monumental can elevate the everyday-ness of human life to authenticity. Death, then, is for him a source of meaning. But how much awareness of death is liberating? Existentialists such as Heidegger are invariably dramatic. They stress dread, nausea, angst, and high anxiety as primary moods. Sometimes the drama works, sometimes it does not. In the case of awareness of death, too much concern becomes the kind of obsession and neurosis parodied in Woody Allen’s films. Preoccupation with death paralyzes rather than liberates. Much human activity aims at nurturing and extending life, and at struggling against death. A healthy attitude toward death includes fully recognizing its inevitability, refusing to live less energetically, constructing our projects in ways compatible with viewing ourselves as part of a long generational chain, pursuing ideals that affirm life’s possibilities, maintaining a zest for the adventures, triumphs, and failures that constitute life, and appreciating the chance to be part of human history.
I am not necessarily criticizing Heidegger. I do not think his view amounts to a neurotic obsession with death. But he tends to downplay our survival instincts and to venerate ontological anxiety in ways that invite correction. While it is true that denial of death and distraction by the routines of everyday-ness are self-defeating, and that recognizing mortality can provide opportunities for meaning, Heidegger leaves the misleading impression that only immersion in our finitude produces liberation. In any event, both Dante and Heidegger insist that a proper attitude toward death, confronting our own mortality, can facilitate valuable soul-crafting. To ignore our mortality – to refuse to reflect upon it and to bracket it from consciousness – is to live inauthentically.
from the book Dantes Deadly Sins Moral Philosophy in Hell
by Raymond Angelo Belliotti
