Kierkegaard’s renunciation and Nietzsche’s affirmation of becoming

The book presents Søren Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as offering sharply different responses to the loss of any transcendent measure for a human life. Kierkegaard’s infinite resignation relinquishes finite meanings without simply declaring meaning irrelevant; Nietzsche’s affirmation of becoming instead embraces life as an open process that creates new meanings and values. The contrast turns on whether this affirmation has adequately confronted the emptiness left behind when all finite measures are abandoned.

Two Responses to the Loss of Measure

Kierkegaard’s position begins with the impossibility of taking a final point of view on one’s own life. No positive object, value, or idea can guarantee meaning for the life as a whole. Infinite resignation does not therefore amount simply to nihilism: significance can emerge in the surrender of the demand for humanly determined significance. What remains is not a new finite purpose but a relation to meaning after its finite contents have been relinquished.

Nietzsche offers a more affirmative response. Rather than continue to seek a measure that confers meaning on life in its totality, one can renounce that search itself and affirm becoming in its openness and uncertainty. Life then needs no transcendent standard to certify its meaning; it is a creative process in which meanings and values are continually made anew. The contrast is not simply despair against optimism: it concerns whether relinquishing the demand for a final measure is enough to establish an affirmative account of life.

The Difficulty of Pure Meaning

The book tests Nietzsche’s answer by asking whether an unqualified surrender of the desire for meaning passes too quickly from the failure of imposed, determinate meaning to a supposedly groundless process that generates meanings. Kierkegaard’s resignation exposes an intermediate difficulty. Once finite meanings are renounced, Meaning itself persists as an empty form: unconditional meaning can appear only as nonsense, with the void or absence of meaning as its negative content.

This remainder makes resignation more than a transition to creative freedom. Pure Meaning is marked by the minimal difference between meaning’s presence and its absence; its content cannot be supplied by a positive measure without ceasing to be pure. The argument therefore leaves Nietzsche’s affirmation facing a question that it cannot dismiss merely by celebrating the creation of new values: what is the status of meaning after the demand for meaning as a whole has been surrendered?

Relation to the Book’s Dialectical Argument

The comparison belongs to the book’s broader account of how a limit can be constitutive rather than a temporary obstacle awaiting resolution. In its discussion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the book argues that a gap need not be overcome through a higher reconciliation; recognizing the division as such can itself change how the relation is understood. Applied to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, this approach keeps the tension between resignation and affirmation in view rather than treating Nietzsche’s becoming as a simple escape from Kierkegaardian despair.

The book’s account of concrete universality likewise emphasizes persistence in tension and noncoincidence, rather than a universal principle smoothly expressed in all its particular forms. That framework clarifies the stakes of the comparison: affirmation does not settle the problem merely by generating new particular meanings, while resignation does not turn the absence of finite meaning into an uncomplicated final answer. Their philosophical relation is organized around the unresolved question of whether becoming can be affirmed without passing over the void disclosed by the renunciation of ultimate meaning.