Kierkegaard

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Kierkegaard Nietzsche

• Fathers (Grandfathers, Crazy Uncles?) of
  Existentialism

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Ecce Holbo Ill be your guest lecturer for the
day. Send me email phihjc_at_nus.edu.sg And this
note set is downloadable http//homepage.mac.com/
jholbo/existentialism.ppt
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The term was explicitly adopted as a
self-description by Jean-Paul Sartre, and through
the wide dissemination of the postwar literary
and philosophical output of Sartre and his
associates existentialism became identified
with a cultural movement that flourished in
Europe in the 1940s and 1950s
Existentialism
http//plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/
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The nineteenth century philosophers, Soren
Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, came to be
seen as precursors of the movement.
Existentialism was as much a literary phenomenon
as a philosophical one Dostoyevsky, Kafka,
etc.
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artists such as Alberto Giacometti and even
Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock,
Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning were
understood in existential terms. By the mid 1970s
the cultural image of existentialism had become a
cliché, parodized in countless books and films by
Woody Allen. I took a test in
Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and
got 100. Woody Allen
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http//www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_wo
rks_36_0.html
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Its bad enough, from a traditional point of
view, for philosophy to leave behind
propositionality with it, presumably, classical
notions of proof and argument. But how can
philosophy leave behind representation? How can a
philosophy be embodied by something that isnt
even about anything. (So now you get the Woody
Allen joke?)
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The philosopher at work and play?
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WOODY ALLEN That's quite a lovely Jackson
Pollock, isn't it? GIRL Yes it is.
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ALLEN What does it say to you? GIRL It
restates the negativeness of the universe, the
hideous lonely emptiness of existence,
nothingness, the predicament of man forced to
live in a barren, godless eternity, like a tiny
flame flickering in an immense void, with nothing
but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a
useless bleak straightjacket in a black absurd
cosmos. WOODY ALLEN What are you doing
Saturday night? GIRL Committing
suicide. WOODY ALLEN What about Friday night?
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So maybe, instead of not being about anything
these works are all about Nothing if you see
the distinction?
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At least this guy Giacometti - represents the
human form, even if it looks a bit stretched out
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"Life size figures irritate me because a person
passing on the street has no weight in any case
hes much lighter than the person when hes dead
or fainted. He keeps his balance with his legs.
You dont feel your weight. I wanted without
having thought about it to reproduce this
lightness making the body so thin. Giacometti
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Without denying the validity of scientific
categories (governed by the norm of truth) or
moral categories (governed by norms of the good
and the right), "existentialism" may be defined
as the philosophical theory which holds that a
further set of categories, governed by the norm
of authenticity, is necessary to grasp human
existence .
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To approach existentialism in this categorial
way may seem to conceal what is often taken to be
its "heart" (Kaufmann 196812), namely, its
character as a gesture of protest against
academic philosophy, its anti-system sensibility,
its flight from the "iron cage" of reason. Not
scientific Not ethical/moral (in a conventional
sense) Anti-systematic Then how?
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Heidegger's 1927 Being and Time, an inquiry into
the "being that we ourselves are" (which he
termed "Dasein," a German word for existence),
introduced most of the motifs that would
characterize later existentialist thinking the
tension between the individual and the "public"
an emphasis on the worldly or "situated"
character of human thought and reason a
fascination with liminal experiences of anxiety,
death, the "nothing" and nihilism.
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Though neither Nietzsche's nor Kierkegaard's
thought can be reduced to a single strand, both
took an interest in what Kierkegaard termed "the
single individual." Both were convinced that this
singularity, what is most my own, "me," could be
meaningfully reflected upon while yet, precisely
because of its singularity, remaining invisible
to traditional philosophy, with its emphasis
either on what follows unerring objective laws of
nature or else conforms to the universal
standards of moral reason.
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Kierkegaard, in one Woody Allen joke
Two Jews are eating at a restaurant in the
Catskills. The one says to the other. The food
here is so terrible. The other replies Yes,
and the portions are so small.
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Kierkegaard Danish philosopher of religion.
Born in 1813, died in 1855. He was the Socrates
of Copenhagen. Dont be a Søren!
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When Søren Kierkegaard was about four or five
years old, his sister asked him at dinner, Soren,
what would you most like to be. Søren answered
a fork.
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Soren Kierkegaard's numerous works are like tall
trees in literature. High up in the treetops,
his monkeys sit and eat from the trees. If you
attack them, they throw large Kierkegaardian
pieces down at you -- rather like monkeys who sit
up in coconut palms and throw down nuts if you
attack them with stones.
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If only the Kierkegaardian nuts were not so
large and tough that you have a difficult time
opening them to get to the relatively small
kernel. - Hendrik Hertz
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The thing is to find a truth which is true for
me to find the idea for which I can live and
die. What would be the use of discovering
so-called objective truth, of working through all
the systems of philosophy and being able to
review them all and show up the inconsistencies
within each system? What good would it do me to
be able to develop a theory of the state and
combine all the details into a single whole, and
so construct a world in which I did not live. . .
What good would it do me to be able to explain
the meaning of Christianity if it had no deeper
significance for me and for my life? I certainly
do not deny an imperative of understanding but it
must be taken up into my life. What I really
lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do,
not what I am to know.
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What is the problem that Kierkegaard plans to
address in this book? It is, he explains
  The question of the individual's relationship
to Christianity. . . To put it as simply as
possible I, Johannes Climacus, born in this
city and now thirty years old, a common ordinary
human being like most people, assume that there
awaits me a highest good, an eternal happiness,
in the same sense that such a good awaits a
servant girl or a professor. I have heard that
Christianity proposes itself as a condition for
the acquirement of this good, and now I ask how I
may establish a proper relationship to this
doctrine.
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But, Climacus anticipates an angry response to
his question   What extraordinary
presumption, I seem to hear a thinker say, what
egotistical vanity to dare lay so much stress
upon one's own petty self in this theocentric
age, in the speculatively significant 19th
century, which is entirely immersed in the great
problems of universal history universal history,
we will presently learn, is another word for
Hegel's system.
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Kierkegaard frequently remarks that nothing is so
hard as becoming a Christian in a Christian
country. Why? Because everyone thinks they
already are, and they dont see the problem. A
thousand years ago our Danish ancestors were
pagans. They worshipped Odin, and trees, things
like that. Then, we Danes wisely became
Christians. But we only became Catholics, which
is better than paganism, but not as good as
Protestantism, which came next. Then we worked
out which sort of Protestantism is best - Danish
protestantism, as it happens. Now that many of
us have read Hegel, we understand spiritual
matters better and better.
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Kierkegaard responds that you can't inherit a big
pile of spirituality from your ancestors, like a
trust fund, and either make it grow or live off
the interest, as you like it. In the realm of
the spirit, only he who works, gets bread. But
this means that religionSpiritcant be like
science.
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The problem, in a nutshell, is that philosophy
works by always trying to become more objective
and impersonal. It abstracts away from all the
incidental particularities that characterize
ordinary mortals, such as myself, and all of you
in this room. This works very well in a lot of
areas. But religious faith, Kierkegaard thinks,
is always a matter of becoming more subjective
and personal.
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What does Hegel say it is Spirit, that
is. It is mind discovering itself as the ground
of possible experience. That is to say it is
consciousness discovering itself as reason. To
put it another way what Hegel calls the
absolute idea, or absolute spirit, is reason
becoming certain that, in its particular
individuality, it has being absolutely in itself,
or is all reality. In short, Absolute Spirit is
just Spirit Come To Know Itself, as itself.
(Clear?)
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Concluding Unscientific Postscript
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But all this becoming more and more objective
about the subject leaves unanswered what does it
have to do with me? Ex Libris Absolute
Spirit And I__________________ am Absolute
Spirit, come to know itself as it itself.
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Portrait of The World-Spirit As A Young Man
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World-Spirit in its dressing gown and fur hat.
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Immediacy/Aesthetic Childhood, impulse, primitive
man, the whirring buzzing world of the senses.
Kierkegaard says things like you are dwelling
in the aesthetic. It is something like a world
that you are inside. "nothing but the shapeless
abstract of immediate knowledge, the heart's
revelation, the truths implanted by nature, and
also, in particular, healthy reason and common
sense. - Hegel
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Ethical/Universal He who has chosen and found
himself ethically has determined himself in all
his concreteness. . . Here then he has himself as
a task, which virtually amounts to arranging,
shaping, moderating, arousing, suppressing, in
short bringing about a proportionality in the
soul, a harmony which is the fruit of the
personal virtues. The end of his activity here
is himself, but it is not an arbitrarily fixed
end, for he has himself as a task which is set
for him, even though it has become his by his
choosing it.
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"Faith already has the true content. What is
still lacking in it is the form of thought.
Hegel Dialectic is really a benevolent
ministering power, which discovers and helps to
find where the absolute object of worship is. . .
It does not see the absolute, but it leads the
individual as it were up to it. - Kierkegaard

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"Faith already has the true content. What is
still lacking in it is the form of thought.
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healthy reason and common sense.
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Either Abraham is the father of faith or there is
no faith. Either faith is higher immediacy, a
teleological suspension of the ethical, or there
is no such thing as faith.
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If there were no eternal consciousness in a man,
if at the bottom of everything there were only a
wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark
passions produced everything great or
consequential if an unfathomable, insatiable
emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would
life be but despair? Life is so terrible. And
the portions are so short.
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A traveler, who had visited many lands and
peoples and seen several of the earths
continents, was asked what quality in men he had
found everywhere. He said they tend to be lazy.
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Artists alone hate this lazy procession in
borrowed manners and left-over opinions and they
reveal everyones secret bad conscience, the law
that every man is a unique miracle they dare to
show us man as he is, unique even unto each move
of his muscles even more, that by strictly in
consequence of this uniqueness, he is beautiful
and worth regarding, new and incredible, as every
work of nature, and never boring
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When the great thinker despises human beings,
he despises their laziness for it is on account
of their laziness that men seem like factory
goods, indifferent, unworthy to be associated
with or instructed. Human beings who do not want
to belong to the mass need only to stop being
comfortable follow their conscience, which cries
out Be yourself! All that you are now doing,
thinking, and desiring, that isnt you at all.
Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator
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We are unknown to ourselves, we men of
knowledgeand with good reason. We have never
sought ourselveshow could it happen that we
should ever find ourselves? It has rightly been
said "Where your treasure is, there will your
heart be also" Matthew 621
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our treasure is where the beehives of our
knowledge are Whatever else there is in life,
so-called "experiences"which of us has
sufficient earnestness for them? Or sufficient
time? Present experience has, I am afraid, always
found us "absent-minded
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So we are necessarily strangers to ourselves,
we do not comprehend ourselves, we have to
misunderstand ourselves, for us the law "Each is
furthest from himself" applies to all eternitywe
are not "men of knowledge" with respect to
ourselves. Preface, GM, 1
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The starry heavens above and the moral law
within.
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We have no right to isolated acts of any kind
we may not make isolated errors or hit upon
isolated truths. Rather do our ideas, our values,
our yeas and nays, our ifs and buts, grow out of
us with the necessity with which a tree bears
fruitrelated and each with an affinity to each,
and evidence of one will, one health, one soil,
one sun.Whether you like them, these fruits of
ours?But what is that to the trees! What is that
to us, to us philosophers!
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Whats the one thing that all of you know that
Nietzsche said?
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Beyond Good and Evil What could that be about?
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On the Genealogy of Morals Three Essays 1.
Good and Evil, Good and Bad 2. Guilt, Bad
Conscience, and the Like 3. What is the Meaning
of Ascetic Ideals?
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The English psychologists who have one more
advantage than their books They are
interesting! They explain the origins of moral
notions good and bad as utility functions.
Good Useful (Forgetting x Habit)error
Self-interest (Or something like that)
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Are these English philosophers nihilists?
Motivated by a secret, malicious, vulgar,
perhaps self-deceiving instinct for belittling
man?
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Anyway, they are wrong, these English
psychologists. Good vs. Bad is a
self-applied badge of superior rank/status an
instinctive pathos of distance, as Nietzsche
calls it. Far from thinking about the good of
others (only to promptly forget this is what they
were thinking about) the good only ever think
about themselves. Not like babies, like blond
beasts.
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But, Dad, dont we eat the antelope?
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They might establish a courtly, conventional sort
of existence, in virtue of their self-assertive
strength But, once a week or so they go
back to the innocent conscience of the beast of
prey, as triumphant monsters who perhaps emerge
from a disgusting procession of murder, arson,
rape, and torture, exhilarated and undisturbed of
soul, as if it were no more than a students'
prank, convinced they have provided the poets
with a lot more material for song and praise.
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Good and Badfellas Good and Evilfellas
You know, we always called each other
goodfellas. Like you said to, uh, somebody,
You're gonna like this guy. He's all right. He's
a good fella. He's one of us. You understand? We
were good fellas.
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One will have divined already how easily the
priestly mode of valuation can branch off from
the knightly-aristocratic and then develop into
its opposite this is particularly likely when
the priestly caste and the warrior caste are in
jealous opposition to one another and are
unwilling to come to terms
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The knightly-aristocratic value judgments
presupposed a powerful physicality, a
flourishing, abundant, even overflowing health,
together with that which serves to preserve it
war, adventure, hunting, dancing, war games, and
in general all that involves vigorous, free,
joyful activity. The priestly-noble mode of
valuation presupposes, as we have seen, other
things it is disadvantageous for it when it
comes to war! As is well known, the priests are
the most evil enemies - but why?
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Because they are the most impotent. It is because
of their impotence that in them hatred grows to
monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most
spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly
great haters in world history have always been
priests likewise the most ingenious haters
other kinds of spirit hardly come into
consideration when compared with the spirit of
priestly vengefulness. Human history would be
altogether too stupid a thing without the spirit
that the impotent have introduced into it.
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The slave revolt in morality begins when
ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives
birth to values. Good/Bad Good/Evil That first
good is the good in Goodfellas. The second is
the Christian good of turn the other cheek,
self-denial. It is the utilitarian good of
altruism and self-sacrifice. So Good1 Evil.
Good1 comes before Bad. But Evil comes before
Good2.
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The Blond Beasts may be beautiful unconscious
works of art themselves but they really dont
get art. If being an individual means
appreciating yourself as a work of art, then
Goodfellas arent individuals.
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Morality For Beautiful People
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Essay 2 Guilt, Bad Conscience, and the Like
To breed an animal with the right to make
promises is not this the paradoxical task that
nature has set itself in the case of man? Is it
not the real problem regarding man?
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Essay 3 What is the meaning of Ascetic Ideals?
How could the denial of life ever serve life?