 Oh! Hi there. Welcome back to 19th and 20th century philosophy. I'm Matt Brown. Today we're going to talk about Soren Kierkegaard and Frederick Nietzsche, the proto-existentialist philosophers. Now Soren Kierkegaard was Danish. He lived in the first half of the 19th century, published most of his major works between the 1940s and the 1950s. Frederick Nietzsche was German, lived primarily in the latter half of the 19th century, and most of his published works, major works were published in the 1870s and 1880s. There are lots of similarities between these proto-existentialist thinkers. Among other things, they both wrote in a very literary style. They both used complicated forms of philosophical writing besides the sort of systematic treatise. Both were reacting negatively against the ideas of Hegel. They saw Hegel as a kind of arch-rationalist philosopher who was problematic on many grounds, and they sought, in place of Hegel's systematic rationalist philosophy, to try to find a philosophical point of view that could speak to questions of how to live an authentic human life. Both were doing philosophy that had a very psychological side to it, a very personal, almost psychoanalytic side to it, and that was focused on the questions of life and human existence. Both took Socrates as a main sort of influence, were quite interested in ancient Greek philosophy generally, but Socrates in particular. One major difference concerning Kierkegaard and Nietzsche is there's differing attitudes towards religious belief. So Soren Kierkegaard was a deeply religious thinker, Christian, a major part of his complaint about Hegel was the heretical nature of Hegel's philosophy of the absolute. Nietzsche was a anti-religious thinker, deeply antipathetic towards Christianity in particular, and this informed a lot of their writing, both of their writing significantly. Kierkegaard, as I said, was really very much a psychological thinker in addition to a philosophical thinker. In particular, he pioneered a lot of thinking very advanced for his time about the nature of certain kinds of psychological phenomena like anxiety and dread. He worried about the feeling of alienation. I think it's important to note that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, like Marx and Mill in different ways, are dealing with aspects of the human condition that arise in the 19th century as the world becomes more urban, more industrialized and the lives that people lead become, you know, go through some radical transformations. You know, the late 18th century, of course, saw a number of political revolutions that affected this, early 19th century as well, and so they're reacting in part to some of the issues of their time. And so a sense of alienation, a sense of the world and a sense of anxiety, concerns about the relationship between the society and the individual are very keen in the minds of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. One of the key ideas of soaring Kierkegaard's philosophy is the three stages of life, that is the aesthetic stage, the ethical stage, and the religious stage. These are the stages that Kierkegaard thought a sort of prototypical person would go through in their search for a satisfactory or authentic way of living. The aesthetic stage is one in which we seek to satisfy our desires. We seek pleasure. According to Kierkegaard, you know, the difficulty with the aesthetic phase is boredom. Eventually, various pleasures will lose their novelty and their interests for us and will come to find ourselves dissatisfied with the aesthetic life. The second stage, the ethical stage is one where we seek to live according to a system of rules of ethical or moral behavior. And this is one that Kierkegaard thinks the failures of the aesthetic life naturally lead us to, but the ethical life also for Kierkegaard ultimately fails because we have to deal with competing or conflicting moral requirements. The various ethical rules that we follow lead us to impossible choices, where there's no way to do the right thing. And this, according to Kierkegaard, leads us to a recognition of sin and the sort of inevitably sinful nature of humanity. And so also is dissatisfactory. The final stage, the religious phase stage requires a leap of faith. And the leap of faith is a matter of a personal relationship to God, right? So it's a kind of religious life led not by reason, not by a desire for the good or for pleasure, but by a personal relationship with God. So finally, the notion of the leap of faith leads us to the reading for today, which talks about the concept of truth as subjectivity. Now, by this, Kierkegaard does not mean, you know, just believe whatever you want. It's all a matter of opinion, and like truth is just whatever you want to believe. Nothing like that. What Kierkegaard means here is that truth, the kind of ultimate, significant truth of our existence is a matter of a deep personal commitment to something. Obviously here, the key notion being religious commitment. So for Kierkegaard, although he has no problem with the notion of objective science per se, the sort of ultimate, meaningful notion of truth that he's working with is one where truth is about a subjective personal commitment. The contrast for truth as subjectivity is not objective science so much. The contrast is really the opinion of the crowd, right? Going with what the crowd says to get along with the crowd as opposed to believing something because it speaks to you in a deep personal way. Now with Nietzsche, it's a somewhat different story. Nietzsche too is concerned, of course, how to live an authentic life. He is also inspired by the Greeks. He is also deeply engaged with ideas from Christianity. But for Nietzsche, you might say it all went wrong when the Christians ascended to social power. What I mean by this is, according to Nietzsche, what Christianity represented was a point of view that was designed for, you know, slaves for oppressed people who, in the context of the Roman Empire, were, you know, not able to have their own sort of political or personal power. And so Christianity was a way of reconciling themselves to their fate, dealing with their resentment about the way that they lived by dreaming of a world beyond this one where they would be happy. This all went wrong, according to Nietzsche, when Christianity became sort of socially powerful because now you have a society that is teaching people what he called a slave morality. And he thought our ideas about good and evil were sort of deeply infected with this problematic history. Nietzsche also sort of conceived of an alternative perspective in which courageous, creative individuals, which he called the Gloobermensch or the Superman or the Overman, would, what are you doing? What are you doing? You are causing so much trouble today and I've got to shoot a video. Come on. Which he called the Ubermensch or Superman or Overman would come to sort of create their own values through an act of a personal choice, right, of almost artistic creation. And it was this conception that drove a lot of what he was thinking about. You may know Nietzsche from his concept of the death of God, which is a kind of commentary on the sort of vacant nature of religious belief and contemporary that is mid 19th late 19th century society. And in the Twilight of the Idols we explore some of these concepts as well as his own nature, his own exploration of the nature of truth and objectivity. Like Kierkegaard, he's very much anti-rationalist and he has a view which some have called perspectival in nature. He sees the nature of truth itself as somehow tied to human perspectives and denies the existence of a kind of God's eye view on the universe. Okay, so that's a quick introduction to some of the main ideas of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. What brings them together as a pair? We'll obviously talk more about the segments from Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols and the segment on truth is subjectivity from Kierkegaard later today in class or on Discord. Also, if you have any comments about what I said in the video or questions, please feel free to send me a note or leave a comment here on the video. Otherwise, I'll see you next week and I look forward to talking to you again about 19th and 20th century philosophy.