Like almost everything I have read and heard by Peter Kreeft so far, this lecture is illuminating in its precision, surety of judgement and balanced sympathy for the subjects dealt with: nourishment for soul and mind. Thank you for producing this series, and for making it available. This is priceless! If I may make a suggestion or request: It would be excellent if there were a version of this without the musical soundtrack. I for one would greatly appreciate that since, to me, the sounds are a bit distracting.
As an avid reader of Nietzsche, it is fascinating to find out about Heidegger's ideas over the calulated and the meditative side of man and how IDENTICAL they are of Nietzsche's, Greece influenced, dissection of the psyche into the Apollonian and Dionysian. One side responsible for retrospection and forethought and the other for just being. Thank you Dr. Kreeft!
Oh my WORD ! What a great lecture ! I fell in love with the quest for Being when I was at Mt St Mary's University. Is it any wonder I left and studied secular psychology instead? It is a clever and all too true observation Dr Kreeft has made about Heidegger, one can simply substitute God in place of the word "being" so Being and Time becomes God and Time, and that would make sense since Heidegger was born a Catholic and then became a protestant and then an Agnostic- not an Atheist and then when he finally died, he had a deliberate Catholic Funeral. There is no escape from the truth of Being and that is the Truth of God!
Thank you for these amazing lectures. For some reason, it's harder to find a few of these lectures on youtube than others. I didn't even know that the lectures on Hegel vs Kierkegaard and this one existed.
Another amazing speech. How are we not teaching kids and our youth about the danger and the beauty of ideas? Here we see the danger of some of the ideas that are really common today (will to power, God is not necessary, you can be anything, etc.). Please show this to your kids before it is too late!
Unless you are safely grounded in philosophy, you will get lost in their ideas. Just like what Nietzsche said, if you will look down at the abyss, you will find that the abyss is staring back at you. Get to develop your methodical thought by systematically studying their respective philosophies. That's how we do that when we took our bachelor's degree and masteral degree in Philosophy. It will help you to be critical and not be overly fundamentalist
I have been studying Husserl and practicing his Phenomenological Reduction which he called a self meditation. Heidegger is difficult for me to come to terms with in relation to Husserl, but in the lecture the connection through meditative thinking finally comes clear. Husserl called it originary thinking, Heidegger inceptual thinking. (And Jung Primordial thinking which I suspect is quite closely related.) But calling it meditative thinking, as opposed to ordinary scientific and technological thinking reminds us of way of being that we have largely lost.
«Up to now it has been admitted that all our knowledge had to be based on objects; but all attempts to establish something about them a priori, by means of concepts, with which our knowledge could have been extended, assuming such a presupposition, came to naught. Therefore, finally, let us try to see if we will be more fortunate in the problems of metaphysics, making the hypothesis that objects must be governed by our knowledge». The falsehood of Kant's statement is astonishing, he claims, with unspeakable presumption, to invalidate all the metaphysical knowledge accumulated by European civilization in 20 centuries of history starting from Aristotle. On the other hand, Kant has nothing better than to oppose this gross rejection of gnoseological realism by opposing the very old idealism of Parmenides and the subjectivism of Protagoras as constituting the perspective of who knows what innovation and rigorization of philosophical thinking. This proposition of boasters as heralds of an absolutely new, truly critical knowledge, finally a beacon of truth, liberator of humanity from the darkness of error, is typical of the Gnostic and of modern idealism from Descartes to Fichte to Hegel to Husserl. Husserl proposes setting aside the realistic attitude of the subordination of consciousness to reality to replace it with the vision of one's self-awareness as consciousness purified by reference to external reality and understood itself as an operation by which being becomes being of consciousness, therefore not plus the consciousness relative to being, but the relative or "correlated" being of consciousness. It is the "phenomenological reduction", that is, being reduced to being-thought, so that the thinker does not think of a being distinct from himself, but thinks of himself. Which is precisely the gnosis. Husserl says: «We observe that the being sought by us is nothing other than what for essential reasons can be indicated as pure "Erlebnisse", pure consciousness with its pure correlates and on the other hand its pure ego, and therefore we begin to consider the ego, the conscience, the "Erlebnis" as they are given to us in the natural attitude and which are to be drawn in their purity». As if the object of knowledge needed to be "purified" by self-awareness and were not rather this which is pure, true, and sincere to the extent that it adapts to external reality. It is clear that here, as in Protagoras, it is consciousness that wants to be the measure of reality, and it is not reality that is the measure of consciousness! Husserl then states: "It is now understood how indeed, in the face of the natural experimental and theoretical attitude, whose correlate is the world, a new attitude must actually be possible, which, despite the exclusion of the entire sphere of psychophysical nature, retains for us something remaining - the entire field of absolute consciousness. So instead of naively living in experience and theoretically investigating the experienced, the transcendent nature, we carry out the phenomenological reduction. In other words: instead of naively carrying out the constitutive acts of nature with their transcendent theses (acts that are real or, according to a prefigured potentiality, possible to carry out) and to pass, through the motivations immanent in them, to ever new transcendent theses, let us put all these theses, the actual ones and, first, the potential ones out of action, let us not indulge them and rather direct our grasping and theoretically investigative gaze on pure consciousness in its absolute being. The Gnostic wants to persuade us that it is naive to look at things considered outside of us, as if they were really outside of us, while in reality everything is found in our absolute consciousness and has its foundation and existence on it. It is then a matter of shifting attention away from external reality and turning it towards our ego, which is nothing other than absolute being and absolute consciousness. True wisdom is absolute self-awareness. And this is exactly Gnosis. Modern man, according to Husserl, has discovered that that external, objective and transcendent God, who until then was placed beyond and above things as the creator of things, considered as external to the ego, in reality is not other than the transcendental and original, experiential, athematic and preconceptual dimension of the empirical and categorical self. Therefore the science of God, theology, is resolved in the Self-Consciousness, which posits the being of things as being thought of things. And this again is precisely the gnosis. And this is where modernism comes from. The admirable new and immortal science, never conceived before, science not of external things that lead to God, but self-awareness of one's own ego as the absolute thinker of the things thought, is the intellectual narcissism proper to Gnosticism, cultivated in India for 36 centuries already.
Beautifully presented and well praised, even the contradictory belief, is still fascinating. The voice of experience is the beauty of all, on my part for the refinement of it's well deserved joys.
I think the characterization of Heidegger as an atheist is interesting- he did most of his formative work in Catholic philosophy and broke from religion while seeming to maintain faith. Similarly, he takes the notion of God very seriously (though maybe something of a Pagan god) in his work on art and especially in the Contributions. he also, in a way made famous by folks like Marion, considered writing a theology- though in it, he says, he’d never talk of “Being.” Does anyone know the reasons or source of characterizing Heidegger as an atheist?
I'll quote extensively an Italian Dominican Theologian, Fr. G.Cavalcoli OP (today's the feast of St Catherine of Siena, let's tribute an homage to her! Ed.) "Heidegger's ethics is based on the concept of acting as being and for this reason, Heidegger ethics is both anthropology and metaphysics. And since action says relationship, we also find relational personalism in Heidegger, with notes typical of his philosophy. So for him acting is a self-transcendence like being for death (sein zum Tode), so as to be free for death (Freiheit zum Tode), in which the "possibility of being a whole" is realized [1]; «authentic being for death is the most proper possibility»[2] for man, because in death man is before being, at the definitive peak of his own free decision, a being that appears to him as nothing, but which is that Dasein which he himself is. Even in Heidegger there is no room for the relationship as an accident of the person: the very being of the individual is a being for life or for death. For Heidegger, I am essentially «guilty»[3] and anguished, but precisely in this acknowledging myself as guilty and making it my own, precisely deciding to be what I am, make my «original being-for the being-ability of my Being there more precisely»[4]. This decision involves my «anguished and tacit self-projecting of my own more guilty being»[5]. Now, Heidegger continues, «being guilty is proper to the being of Dasein and means being the null foundation of a nullity»[6]. But it is precisely in this decision to be for death, to let death "make itself master of the existence of Dasein"[7], that I "understand the effective possibilities of my Dasein"[8]. The understanding of this possibility of this gives me, according to Heidegger, «an imperturbable joy»[9]. Here the resonances of the Lutheran "simul justus et peccator" embedded in the Hegelian dialectic of the negative (death, nothingness) as a producer of the positive (life, being) are evident. But it should also be noted that the negation of being by nothingness in the dynamics of action introduces a factor of conflict into human existence, which takes on a social aspect in the footsteps of the Hegelian dialectic, with the difference that in Hegel dialectical polarity has a logical character, in Heidegger we have an existential dialectic, for which we do not have a conflict of concepts as in Hegel, but the opposition of life and death. In this circularity, it does not seem that life has the victory, because for Heidegger nothingness enters the very destiny of man, even if this nothingness seems to belong not to the ambit of the entity of reason, but to the horizon of the sacred. Heidegger, as is well known, claims to find the authentic original philosophizing in the Parmenidean doctrine of being, in Heraclitus's doctrine of becoming, and in Anaximander's Infinity, without forgetting Cartesian "geological" voluntarism. In Heidegger's social ethics, we therefore find a mixture of elements coming from Luther with others, completely opposite, coming from Nietzsche, all within the horizon of a conception of being, which unites, as in Hegel, Parmenides with Heraclitus, being and time. The result of these juxtapositions is his characteristic conception of man as the "there" of being, i.e. as the place and time of the appearance and presence of being to this man here, who am I in an emotional situation and I question myself about being; be understood as transcending the entity. I find myself thrown into the world of dejection, guilt, anguish, and precariousness: my being is being-for-death. Heidegger's gnoseological background is not realist but idealist. The truth of knowledge for him does not lie in the adequacy of judgment to the external thing but in the experience of the truth of being, which reveals itself to me as the presence of the present. Therefore, I am not in contact through the senses with a reality outside of me, but only with my self-consciousness, for which being is being thought. I don't have a real relationship with things outside of me, but I have, indeed I am, in a subsisting and existential relationship of me as thereof being ("house of being") and being as being there ("shepherd of being) The relationship in Heidegger corresponds to the categories of the "there" of Dasein. This is me, as an entity that over time asks about being. In this way I am not only the questioner, but also the questioned, so that for him being a man coincides with being, not however with simple being, but with being there because I who am here and now, in the time and in space, within the horizon of that being and therefore of that Dasein about which I wonder. As in Husserl, also for Heidegger, in Descartes' line, I am relative to myself insofar as I am conscious of myself. This "am", therefore, is the being of which I am aware and which I am myself. The relationship, therefore, also in Heidegger, as for all idealists, is the relationship of consciousness of the ego with itself, of the empirical ego with the absolute ego, and vice versa. Thus, according to Heidegger there is the ascending relationship of the empirical ego, the existential ego, to the absolute ego, being; and there is the descending relationship of being with there, that is, with my empirical self, being towards death, rejected and thrown away, guilty and anguished. But the descent corresponds to the ascent, i.e. pre-understanding (Vorverständnis), remembering thinking (an-denken), authentic existence, care, being-in-the-world, things-in-hand (Dingen zu Handen), being-with (mitsein), going-forward, transcendence, planning oneself, ecstasy, language, freedom. The descending relation instead includes the sacred, the void, the event (Ereignis), the revelation, the clearing (Lichtung), the opening (Offenheit), the presence of the present, and destiny. Heidegger's social ethics are inspired by the Hegelian one, centered on obedience to the state and on belonging to the state. For which the single individual is completely dependent on the State and relative to the State, which, in its head, the prince - for Heidegger the Führer of the National Socialist regime - is the absolute Substance of the multiplicity of individuals. Heidegger clarifies the will to power of the state by making use of Nietzsche's concept of will to power, which for Nietzsche, as Heidegger explains[10], is none other than being as a will that wills itself, according to the definition of the will already given by Hegel. Therefore, absolute relation is an absolute voluntarism which is identified, as already in Schelling and in Fichte, in being as action (Fichte) and freedom (Schelling), for which the Absolute exists because it wanted to exist. The being of which Heidegger speaks is the Nietzschean's will to power. This can be seen from the praises he gives to this conception, which therefore for him has nothing to do with the "esse ut actus essendi" of St. Thomas. The comparison, therefore, that some have made, between the difference between being and being in Thomas from that of Heidegger, absolutely does not hold, because while for Thomas transcendent being is the best perfection and the best goodness, for Heidegger it is nothing compared to all beings and represents only the finiteness and temporality of beings, which for Heidegger is the man who asks himself the question about being. For this reason, in Heidegger's ethics, the theme of love and goodness is completely absent, and the whole moral question lies in the freedom and authenticity of the existential self in the dimension of temporality and finiteness, in relation to the pre-categorical and emotional experience of the 'to be like to be there. It is true that in Heidegger's philosophy, as Umberto Regina has pointed out[11], and even in the Letter on Humanism of 1947, the "divine God" appears, but the polemic against the Christian conception of God, contemptuously called by him «onto-theology», as if it were a crude fantasy, makes us understand that its «sacred» and its «divine» are none other than that of Hölderlin, as he himself explains to us in the book dedicated to him[12], the sacred of Germanic mythology which was at the center of the National Socialist conception, supported by him[13], of the German state and people. [11] Being and time, Longanesi & C., Milan 1976, pp. 289, 369. [12] Ibid., p. 373. [13] Ibid., p.369. [14] Ibid., p.370. [15] Ibid., p.369. [16] Ibid. [17] Ibid., p.374. [18] Ibid. [19] Ibid. [20] Nietzsche, Adelphi Editions, Milan 2013. [21] Heidegger. Existence and the Sacred, Morcelliana, Brescia 1974. [22] Hölderlin, Adelphi Editions, Milan 1988. [23] Cf. Andrea Colombo, The cursed. From the wrong side of history, Edizioni Lindau, Turin, 2017, pp.61-73.
"formative work in Catholic philosophy and broke from religion" --- That is characteristic of modernism generally; an attempt to reinterpret everything without God. It simply does not work.
There is a false citation in the video. From 24:08 to the end are not the words of Heidegger. Heidegger never supported book firings but said to be prevented one. In any case, I'd like to be provided the source.
In addition, the claim just before, at 23:00, that Hitler fired Husserl and then Heidegger took his former professor's job is incorrect. Husserl retired in 1928 at the age of 69, almost five years before Hitler took power. Heidegger was awarded Husserl's vacated chair at Freiberg on the heels of his publication of Being and Time. On account of German anti-Semitism, Husserl was eventually banned from the university library, but that was in 1933, and weeks before Heidegger took over as Rector. Some accounts claim that the actions against Husserl immediately incited protest and so his ban was lifted in a week's time. That Heidegger and Husserl had a falling out--and that Heidegger failed to show appropriate care for his Jewish, former teacher--is true, but the details as Kreeft reports them are false and highly sensationalized.
One of the best videos I’ve ever watched. This brings together information I’ve been reading and learning about for a decade. I’m so grateful to Word on Fire and Dr Peter Kreeft!!
Not only did Nietszche lose his sanity while pitying a flogged horse. It happened in Turin which falls on the line of st michael the archangel which stretches from mt skellig ireland to mount carmel in Israel. This line is also known as the sword of truth! Ive always found this fascinating.
Thank you very much for this insightful comparison! Jaspers versus Heidegger could be interesting as well and my question is: Who are the philosophers who followed Heidegger and Jaspers in their spirit?
What a very gifted man, working for the Lord! Lord save us from Antichrist, from ourselves who sometimes know no better, ourselves who daily fall into the traps, our own traps our own idolatry of selves, our own pride.. Lord Jesus, save us from ourselves, Lord Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything 🙏🏻❤️ Immaculate Heart of Mary pray for us, Sacred Heart of Jesus save us.
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: 00:23 🤝 Nietzsche and Heidegger are seen as existentialism founders, focusing on lived human existence. 01:22 🌟 Both Nietzsche and Heidegger recognize Socrates and Jesus as central figures in Western civilization. 02:49 🤯 Nietzsche and Heidegger have stark differences regarding ethics, values, and religion. 03:58 🔀 Nietzsche's rejection of traditional moral values and his focus on power and transvaluation. 05:22 🔥 Nietzsche's intense criticism of Christianity as a corrupting force, paralleling his anti-Semitism. 07:27 😶 Heidegger's philosophical exploration of "being" and his critique of technological thinking. 09:52 💥 Heidegger prophesies the danger of technology capturing human thinking and erasing true nature. 12:56 🌌 Heidegger distinguishes between "beings" (entities) and "being" (existence) as a central concept. 14:58 🙌 Heidegger emphasizes meditative thinking over calculative thinking to engage with existence. 18:52 👾 The danger of humans being captivated by their own technology and losing their essential nature. 22:43 ⚠️ Heidegger's surprising alignment with the Nazi party and disturbing support for Hitler. 24:47 🧐 The complex lesson from Heidegger's philosophical depth and political passion, exposing human vulnerability. 26:09 🌍 Nietzsche and Hitler's glorification of power and militarism, reflecting a rejection of Christian morality. Made with HARPA AI
Nietzsche didn't like the slave morality of he Jews, but he was in awe of their ability to create it. He passionately hated anti-semites and said in beyond Good and Evil that the Greeks and Indians never created a work of literature as great as the Hebrew Bible.
Nietzsche is painted here as a moral relativist. Nietzsche’s perspectivism is substantially different from epistemological nihilism. Nietzsche wasn’t trying to transcend truth or god . His new approach to truth is not just premise vs premise or idea vs idea like it has always been,. Instead it is about analysing the truth of the idea as well as analysing the psychological need for the idea to be true. Thus gaining the fullest perspective a better way at understanding truth itself. Once we understand the idea then the need for the idea psychologically, then we can start to talk about moral truths by seeing what is common amongst all perspectives.
National Socialism was not a simple doctrine of the state, it was not a simple doctrine of Deutschland über alles of nineteenth-century Pan-Germanism, it was not only the vision of the German land as the land of the Sacred, according to Hölderlin's vision, it was not only the reawakening of the ancestral cruelty and anarchy of the ancient Germans and of their warlike religious mythology, which so worried Tacitus and for which Rome never succeeded in subduing the Germans, but was also the project of a new and superior divine humanity according to the Nietzsche's super humanist model. He wanted to be a new humanity in the terms set by Nietzsche, whom Hitler declared his master. Indeed, as Heidegger observes, Nietzsche calls the highest form of man "prey animal" and sees the supreme man as "magnificent blond beast that wanders eager for prey and victory". This superhumanity, founded by National Socialism, benefits, according to Nietzsche, from the "gay science", which "dances in hell", the science of truth - according to Schelling's vision - not of the truth that leads to freedom, but of the truth founded on freedom , author of the "death of God", "devaluator of all values", shaper of herself in the manner of Fichte, operator "beyond good and evil", and even, as Heidegger illustrated, was the true metaphysics , which, basing itself on Descartes' cogito, through German idealism, finally understood in Nietzsche that being is the eternal return of the same, the "ring of return", as Severino says, symbolized by the swastika, symbol of the eternal death-life cycle; being, which is the will to power as an affirmation of its own power, which philosophy "with hammer blows" and mercilessly crushes lower humanity.
If you’re an anti Christian moralist , the reasons for being so makes you an anti moralist in relation to any religion, the implication of this is moral relativism. Implying Nietzsche’s morality is in common with satanic cults also implies this…..
He keeps on mentioning kirkegaard when I thought he was supposed to be opposing Frederick Nietzsche to Heidegger, at least according to the title of this video.
This is a valuable presentation. The presentation addresses what, I think, is the most significant philosophical concern facing human beings today: what happens to the species when the epistemological/metaphysical/theological beliefs underpinning the core values we once subscribed to/continue to subscribe to are relentlessly attacked? What happens to the species when those core values themselves are attacked? Everything which has happened to the species, over the last century or more, seems to be an outcome of this enormous and terrible concern. It continues to happen even today. The names mentioned in the presentation: Socrates, Jesus Christ, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Heidegger - such great and significant names, such a great and significant debate spanning so many years. Heidegger seems to offer a way out, but, unfortunately, his association with the National Socialists has undermined his credibility. Why did one of the most intelligent and perceptive of people choose to support such a dark thing? I can think of two reasons off the top of my head: 1. He was frightened of saying no to Hitler and being seen as an enemy. Maybe he was concerned about the consequences for his family if he didn’t “play along.” 2. He was feeling completely at odds with the sort of “broken modernity” Germany was exposed to after the First World War and the Great Depression. Maybe it was his deep conservatism. Maybe he thought Hitler offered some return to a pristine past, when a shining Being would be finally unveiled once more.
Absolutely mistaken as someone that didn’t understand nietzche work and took words as literal. I got shocked at 7minutes of listening to it and stopped the video after hearing this shallow and bad understanding of nietzche philosophy. And I am not even fond of nietzche but this discourse is just wrong on so many levels and any philosopher with familiar with nietzche works attest it easily.
@@savelives3763 i mean he's directly quoting nietzche a lot of the time. what do you mean? nietzche did believe that christianity was a negative influence for humanity and that men had to go beyond good and evil to assert themselves in a godless world. you can say he's painting an unflattering picture of nietzche's ideas, but not through misrepresentation.
Dr. Kreeft is spot on in his reading of Nietzche. Nietzche is intoxicating, a profit of modernity and one must ultimately reject him. Most people get him wrong because he's so intoxicating. I've been going back to nietzche every few years for almost a decade now, each time is a bit different.
The clearest and most well-reasoned presentation of meditative thinking, free apprehensions is in Schopenhauer, rather than the mealy-mouthed monstrosity that is Heidegger. German language could reasonably sue him for damages, no court would deny it.
It's worth noting that Nietzsche believed that Christianity saved man from falling into practical and theoretical nihilism. He also didn't think going back to paganism was possible, or even desirable. Also, Heidegger eventually returned to Catholicism. Otherwise great lecture.
@@kylecroarkin1371 ........ Alright you caught me. I read it on Wikipedia. Though he never really let go of his Catholic influences (namely Augustine and Scotis).
@@KiwiFromChowder "A few months before his death, he met with Bernhard Welte, a Catholic priest, Freiburg University professor and earlier correspondent. The exact nature of their conversation is not known, but what is known is that it included talk of Heidegger's relationship to the Catholic Church and subsequent Christian burial at which the priest officiated" Fascinating, I didn't know this happened. Thank you.
Perhaps he never knew love or was never loved, for if he had felt the joy of love from even one other human being, he would have began his journey to knowing God who is Love, we should pray for his soul, that in his final moments he saw his failing and his unholy condition and sought real forgiveness from our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ 🙏🏻
Not conscience making cowards of us all, but rather *humility* makes us into cowards; as does anything that tells us to "mind our place", same with reverence towards God, same with obedience, same with any capacity for authority at all; all of those make us fit only for Hell, same with obedience, for by obedience does sin enter our lives.
@@andrewferg8737 That is none of your business; all that *is* your business is to know that humbling oneself is what teaches one to hate all so-called superiors and anyone with any kind of superiority over the lowest common denominator.
@@chissstardestroyer "teaches one to hate" "at one time we too were foolish, disobedient, misled, and enslaved to all sorts of desires and pleasures-living in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not by the righteous deeds we had done, but according to His mercy, through the washing of new birth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. This is the Spirit He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior" (Titus 3) Peace be with you.
@@andrewferg8737 Yet the citations you gave do not mesh with reality, so thus the fake citations you gave are worthless *in and of themselves*, seeing as humbling oneself teaches one to hate those who are even remotely above oneself.
If God gives you your existence then doing anything except humbling yourself is absurd, like sawing off the branch you’re sitting on, ultimately hating yourself.
A common but fatal misunderstanding occurs when when what Heidegger understands by Dasein is aligned (confused?) with consciousness. For Heidegger, 'consciousness' is a modern metaphysical construction that names the subject that 'represents' Being on the basis of beings whereby Being becomes fixed in image as object. Conversely, Dasein indicates the ecstatic clearing or site (being-there) for the singular Event (Ereignis) of Being itself. It is incorrect to say Dasein is equivalent to being conscious. Rather, Dasein is to be understood as belonging to Being and as the (more original ) ground of what is named by consciousness.
This is told perfectly from a Catholic point of view, but not from a Lutheran point of view. Most National-Socialists were evangelical in the Lutheran sense and they had a more sacral view of their earthly “Reich” giving it a spiritual dimension as well.
Love conquers everything, God is Love and His son has conquered this world, all the Nietzches, Heidegger, Hitler, Mussolinis and everything in between, all sin against man against God. We have everything to be hopeful for, trusting in the Creator and Lord of all creation 🙏🏻
In the wake of Böhme, Fichte, Schopenhauer and Hegel, for Schelling the absolute Spirit, which he calls "Subject" or simply "Absolute", is not "the ipsum Esse", a pure act of being, an absolute being that cannot but -being, but it is the active power of being, but it is subsistent will, because otherwise, according to Schelling, God could not be free. God exists not because he cannot fail to exist, since his essence is his own existence, but because he wanted to exist, even being able not to exist. Between being and not being he has chosen to be, and he maintains it not out of necessity, but out of will. Schelling does not realize that acting is an act of being and assumes being. There is no doubt that God possesses free will. But God could not choose if he did not exist first. For this reason, it is absurd to think that his being is the effect of free choice. Free choice of whom, if it is true that God cannot exist as a cause before existing as an effect? That in God the will coincides with the being, fine. But this being cannot not be, because it must explain the existence of the contingent. If God is not necessary, it will therefore be contingent. But how can a contingent God be God? Doesn't it become a simple entity among entities? How does he support them all? God is certainly free, but he is free in relation to the other than himself, in relation to the creature: a creature that is convertible into non-being or wickedness. But God cannot exercise his freedom in relation to his being, which is what conditions the existence of his free will. It makes no sense to talk about wanting what does not exist. It is necessary to exist to want. And one cannot will if one does not exist. For this reason, one's (describable) existence cannot be the effect of one's (normative) will. Yet for Schelling God is not being, but "power to be", "wanting to be", a will which, as Hegel would later say, "wants itself". It resembles the Fichtian ego, which places the non-ego in the ego. But here a horrendous thought arises, before which Schelling unfortunately does not back down, but goes on casually: if God is the power of choice between being and non-being, between good and evil, then God is at the origin not only good, but also bad. He is, as Nietzsche will say, above good and evil. Schelling takes this voluntaristic approach to extremes, going so far as to say that God exists because he willed to exist. But he goes even further and hooks up with Jakob Böhme, for whom God has the ability to do good as well as evil. The risk of such a conception, into which Hegel will fall, is that of conceiving a God who enters into contradiction with himself, in an eternal conflict between his being and his non-being, the good God and the bad God. . If being for him is being-non-being, the consequence follows that good is good-evil, everywhere and therefore also in God. But evil is not a simple negation of good, but privation, that is, it is not simple to limit, but to take away what is due. Blessed Duns Scotus and still more Ockham did not even dream of positing the existence of God as an effect of his will, having sufficient common sense to understand that an agent cannot act before existing.
Not a fair comparison between these two titans: Kreeft is a devoted christian and Catholic .. no wonder he favors Kirkegaard etc .. he’s smitten with the unseen world and Socratic “reason” .. what a waste of time
@@JS-ln4ns are you saying all views are subjective. What a revelation. 🤦 you mean like Nietzsche’s perspectivism? There are no truths. Only bias perspectives that assist our own will to power .. What I meant is that Kreeft is as far from unbiased as one could get. Not that no opinion has value.
I also love his assertion that living according to will to power never works and hai evidence are characters from Dostoyevsky. Yes your right it never works in these polemics written against it give me a break man 😂
I feel such disdain hearing these kinds of Germans that have been responsible for such reprehensible thoughts and actions. But I must also remember amidst these awful humans, the Blessed Doctor Joseph Ratzinger lived and spoke, wrote and lived Truth, which is the Eternal Word that will never be conquered. The awful ends of those men with the humble and meek end of Pope Benedict speaks louder than those joyless philosophers.
Nietzsche didn’t hate jews. This guy needs to read Kaufmann’s translation of Geneology of Morales, in which he had plenty of space in the footnotes to point out any hints of antisemitism. The opposite is true. Nietzsche repeatedly praises the Jews and holds them in higher regard than his German countrymen. Kreeft Jesus-washes this entire lecture, a pity given there is so much richer treasure to dig for in these thinkers ‘ writings. One more reason not to get philosophy from youtube.
Nietzsche was not an atheist. You can’t claim the murder of something you believe doesnt exist. Nietzsche was claiming the leftovers of a world where god was dead.
Dr. Kreeft is quite wrong in his interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy. Watch Robert Solomon's lectures on Nietzsche for a better understanding. It seems like he does what many do when they read Nietzsche which is take everything literally without understanding his writing style.
Unfortunately, this gentleman has turned the monumental writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which he presents (preaches?) in a sort of stolid, fatherly tone of "authority", into vehicles for the propagation his own straitlaced, evangelistic and rather pedestrian ideas. He completely misunderstands Heidegger's concept of releasement (it is NOT detachment in the way he states it), and gives us a very parochial and unnuanced version of what Nietzsche means by "power" and the death of God. The whole lecture, or rather sermon, is weighed down by an ulterior motive. I'm not buying it.
In Nietzsche, in some way, the postulate of modern rationalism is lost; in the sense that all those premises that are at the origin of the idealistic position - and which had already been massacred in the path of the Hegelian left - in Nietzsche reach the culminating critical expression of him, and this massacre concerns on the ontological proof. That is Nietzsche, after Marx and after the Hegelian left, not he accepted more the idea that man is characterized starting from an idea of reason, from an idea constitutive of reason which would be the idea of God, the "idea Dei." InFeuerbach this idea is still there, so much so that Feuerbach still retains the idea ofthe religious nature of man - and it will be the accusation Marx makes against him after Stirner, i.e. after 1845. Andrè Gide said: “Not believing in God is much more difficult than one thinks. However, to continue doing this, one must absolutely forbid oneself to look at nature and to reflect on what one sees”. In Nietzsche no longer secularization, that is, in him atheism takes the place of secularization; for Nietzsche, there is no longer the immanent God, now there is the rejection of God, the Prometheism gets it right all the way: Prometheus becomes the Antichrist. This atheism, which however can no longer be based on secularization, takes on the aspect of the atheist option, that is, put in a synthetic formula, "God does not exist because I decide that he must not exist". There is no proof of the non-existence of God. In other words, in Nietzsche, atheism reveals itself in its postulate and no longer scientific nature. Warning: this passage is important, because throughout the 18th century in France, and also in the nineteenth century of positivism, atheism found its strength - even the Marxist one, after all - in assuming the process of secularization; and what the process of secularization affirm? You can't go further back; that religion belongs to the pre-modern, archaic, parochial conscience, and that after modernity we can no longer call ourselves Christians. This is the strength of the idea of secularization: but how? Are you still a believer after the electric bulb? But when the idea of secularization goes into crisis with Nietzsche, atheism loses its implicit rational basis and therefore only the atheistic option remains. The atheist option is the decision: superman must prove existentially atheism in order to become Superman. Again with one singular aporia, because superman to become such must somehow already presuppose - and therefore we do not know who is before and who is after, with respect to nihilism. That's why Nietzsche is so popular among elites, who feel like a god. In a nutshell, the postmodern mind prefers being first in the second order, namely the post-human, the Brave New World Without God, than second or less in the first one, the divine order. As the devil compared to St Joseph.
disappointing that you would link Nietzsche with Hitler, Hitler wasn't even born when Nietzsche published his books! and Nietzsche openly despised the anti-Semitic movement.
How horribly this man misunderstood Nietzsche! At 9:21 in the video he quotes one of the most beautiful passages of Nietzsche, the death of god. Why wiping off the horizon? Such an image tells that Nietzsche was the most misunderstood philosopher. I stopped watching it at this time since Heidegger’s section will become even more strepitous .
??? Husserl absolutely was Jewish. He was born into a non-orthodox Jewish home. His wife was also Jewish. Husserl became Christian around the age of 27 and he married a year later--his wife being baptized right before their wedding.
Here's where this, and all condemnations of pursuit of power are blatantly from Hell itself: they drive men away from pursuit of God's ideas; as He designed it- but the rejection of pursuit of power indeed teaches us men to hate anyone given power, or anyone who possesses it; yes, even hatred of God comes not out of pride, as the bible very falsely claims, but rather out of *humility* and especially the obedience to Him that forbids us from seeking to perfect ourselves. Indeed, if you follow the papal teachings about the need to *not* pursue obtaining power, then being a student is forbidden, as well as seeking self-mastery and even discipleship is the doorway, all of those, not to Heaven but rather to Hell- as is the fruit of obedience to God; for His vicars have condemned the sole doorway for us to seek to follow Him, and have kicked out those who seek to obtain virtue- for the only power there ever could be is moral standing and virtue.
National Socialism was not a simple doctrine of the state, it was neither a simple doctrine of Deutschland über alles of nineteenth-century Pan-Germanism, and it was not only the vision of the German land as the land of the Sacred, according to Hölderlin's vision, neither it was only the reawakening of the ancestral cruelty and anarchy of the ancient Germans and of their warlike religious mythology, which so worried Tacitus and for which Rome never succeeded in subduing the Germans, but was also the project of a new and superior divine humanity according to the Nietzsche's super homistic model. He wanted to be a new humanity in the terms set by Nietzsche, whom Hitler declared his master. Indeed, as Heidegger observes, «Nietzsche assigns to the highest form of man the name of "prey animal" and sees the supreme man as a "magnificent blond beast that wanders eager for prey and victory"». This superhumanity, founded by National Socialism, benefits, according to Nietzsche, from the "gay science", which "dances in hell", the science of truth - according to Schelling's vision - not of the truth that leads to freedom, but of the truth founded on freedom , author of the "death of God", "devaluator of all values", shaper of herself in the manner of Fichte, operator "beyond good and evil", and even, as Heidegger illustrated, was the true metaphysics , which, basing itself on Descartes' cogito, through German idealism, finally understood in Nietzsche that being is the eternal return of the same, the "ring of return", as Severino says, symbolized by the swastika, symbol of the eternal death-life cycle; being, which is the will to power as an affirmation of its own power, which philosophy "with hammer blows" and mercilessly crushes lower humanity. Nazism does not recognize the unity of mankind, human equality or brotherhood, and therefore does not recognize a universal, objective, fixed and determinate human nature, and therefore does not recognize a natural law and a natural law binding on positive law state, but since the state is divine and itself the source of morality ("ethical state"), it is the Führer himself, single and empirical determination of the will of the state, as subsisting will, will to power, who decides what is legitimate and illegitimate in the conduct of the citizen. Nazism places humanity on two levels or on two planes or layers, in a similar way to the Gnostics, who distinguished the "spirituals" from the "psychics" and the "hylics". Now it's not that every ranking or opposition is prohibited. St. Paul distinguishes a "carnal man" from a "spiritual man"; we distinguish the learned from the unlearned, the healthy from the sick, the righteous from the wicked, the young from the elderly, without this impeding the passage from one state to another and the common belonging of all to the same human species. The defect of the Nazi meaning lies in placing insurmountable, ontological barriers between human races, such as between animals and humans, for which the German is by nature destined to dominate the weak or inferior or to eliminate them. Hitler himself thus presents the new concept of humanity in a speech before the Reichstag on January 30, 1937 : From the point of view of principles, instead of the concept of the individual or the concept of humanity, we place the idea of the people, of the people born of the blood that flows in our veins and of the soil that saw us born. For the first time, perhaps, in the history of mankind, it has been proclaimed in this country that of all the duties incumbent on man, the noblest and most elevated consists in maintaining the race that comes from God, … From the point from a juridical point of view, the conclusion follows that the conception according to which the law has the aim of ensuring and maintaining the protection of the individual in his person and in his goods is false. The National Socialist revolution gave law and legal science a clear and unequivocal starting point: the true task of justice consists in preserving and defending the people against any element which shirks these obligations towards the community or which causes prejudice to the interests of the latter". By "people" we naturally mean the German people, whose interest therefore prevails over that of the "individual", that is, of the person and of humanity itself. Notice how the following words of Hegel about the dominant people, which of course are Germans, fit what Hitler says here: «The people to whom the moment of its geographical and anthropological existence belongs as a natural principle, is entrusted with the execution of the same in the process of the developing self-awareness of the Spirit of the world. This people is the ruling people in the history of the world, the ruling people for this age. And these words of Hegel's are equally well suited to what Hitler says about law: «The ground of law is generally the spiritual element and its next place and starting point is the will, which is free, so that freedom constitutes its substance and its determination and the system of law is the realm of freedom realised, the world of the spirit produced by moving from the spirit itself, like a second nature. …" Further, and I conclude, even if there were different currents and tendencies within it, National Socialism was the final result, from an ideological point of view, of the convergence of idealism, pantheism, biological racism (positivist and not only), neo-paganism and Lutheranism. An explosive mix! It must be said that this movement, above all initially, presented some good aspects: for example, a strong and radical anti-communism, resolute opposition to liberalism, the will to defend the love of country against any cosmopolitan internationalism, the reparation for the wrongs suffered by Germany following the diktat of Versailles, the fight against atheism and Freemasonry, a collaboration between the social classes and the synthesis between love for the nation and the aspiration for complete social justice. Unfortunately, these positive aspects were included in a globally wrong synthesis and strongly invalidated by those non-Christian or even anti-Christian philosophical currents which, over time, dragged National Socialism towards an ever more dangerous and pernicious slope. This explains why, rightly, Pius XII in the allocution of June 2, 1945 spoke of "the satanic specter exhibited by National Socialism". Fascism avoided these extremes probably because Mussolini was much less fanatical and ideological than Hitler and because the negative aspects of fascism were more accidental than essential - or at least more contained both by the shrewdness of the exponents of fascism and by the very characteristics of the Italian people.
Nietzsche was no mere atheist. He was against the organized Christianity which he found despicable and life denying. He was highly critical of monotheism, but as a philologist writes in veneration of the Greek polytheism
Pk. I always offer up my communion to my 2 sons and mother never to be separated from God and my 89 yr okd mom's long healthy of mind and body life with many more such years. I will add you to this offering because the world needs more years of you.
atheism was not a ‘religion’ to Nietzsche - that claim reeks of christian dogmatism. i’ve not encountered your work, nor your lectures, but as soon as i heard you say that, i examined your wikipedia page, and my suspicions were confirmed. it’s not that you’re a philosopher who happens to be a catholic - you’re fundamentally a christian apologist.
I just looked at the channel on which this was posted, and i suppose the name should’ve been enough to let me know we’re not engaging in honest philosophical inquiry and exploration.
@@ben_alfred "a christian apologist" --- All Western philosophy pivots upon Christianity. All philosophy more generally pivots upon theism. Your hypothetical philosopher in a vacuum, or "a philosopher who happens to be" is simply a fiction. Philosophical inquiry and exploration is always an inquiry about God. Religion is how one puts those conclusions into practice.
@@andrewferg8737 1) You have also played fast and loose with terms bitterly in need of defining. 2)You have no grounds to suggest one of the premises in my criticism is that Nietzsche exists in a vacuum 3)Christianity pivots on the preceding ideas, religions, and cultures from which it emerged. 4)Much of reason and honest, clear-thinking inquiry was inherited from the Ancient Greeks, and so in some sense, Western philosophy pivots most strongly upon their post-socratic paradigm rather than on christianity. 5)The curiosity which enabled humans, once our intellects surpassed a threshold, to think of the questions subsumed under philosophy is the same that found deeply disquieting an absence of explanation for complex questions; the same that birthed narratives of fictitious spiritual entities, and also expertly crafted tales to make things not understood make more sense to them. They fit their world into their collective linguistic structure, and thus narratives and beliefs in supernatural explanations, intended to sate or sooth, are towards what humans incline. These proclivities have engrained themselves genetically. Naturally, since curiosity does not retire even after that initial void has been supplanted, more investigation occurs, and with civilisation, writing, more complex language, and the population size to manifest genius, it matures into philosophy and science. Thank god, or multiple less impressive explanatory god-like figures, that our propensities can yield to reason and evidence on occasion. Our capacity to adapt, to update if you will, has been a boon on par with our capacity to inquire. So then, in some sense, philosophical inquiry and religion and religious beliefs are intimately intertwined. They have both employed the same instrument - the human intellect - whilst motivated by the same force: curiosity. They are, however, still distinct.
@@ben_alfred Medieval, modern, and postmodern philosophy (ie, Western) is a conversation about Christianity. Ancient philosophy (pre-Christian) west or east is a conversation about reality. Reality, or existence in and of itself, is the referent for the term God based on the Mosaic Hebrew theonym יהוה from the root verb hayah meaning "to be." This theology predates Socrates by at least a millennium and served as the foil for or against which other systems of thought developed or faded.
Every man, with a simple reasoning, knows that God exists; but this may be repugnant to him, because he feels it as a brake on the affirmation of himself and his own freedom. Atheism does not arise from any need for truth, as Nietzsche would have us believe, nor from the need to overcome superstition, as Lucretius would have it, nor from noble scientific reasoning, as Comte would have us believe, or from sincere aspirations for human greatness, as Feuerbach would have us believe or by the need to fight for the liberation of the oppressed, as Marx would have us believe, but from these petty, sordid and wretched interests. we must recognize that in the modern age the question of the existence of God has become extremely complicated due to the thousand obstacles that charlatans and sophist philosophers have wanted to put in the way of reason towards God and due to the birth of gnoseologies which deny the first evidences of the senses and reason, evidence that forms the basis for the demonstration of the existence of God. If you don't believe in the truth, how can you discover the supreme truth that is God? What interest can such a perspective have? If one does not believe in the truth-giving power of reason, it is logical that one ends up in atheism, because it is reason that leads to God. And an irrational "faith" which claims to replace reason is useless, because faith presupposes otherwise reason is not faith but fanaticism and cryptoatheism, as demonstrated by the path that goes from Luther to Hegel and from Hegel to Marx and from Marx to Nietzsche. I partially repeat concepts already written in some previous comment, but I add some issues historically very important. Marx calls Prometheus “the first saint and martyr of the philosophical calendar" - and we find him then in the first edition of the "Birth of tragedy" by Nietzsche on the cover of which a chained Prometheus is depicted who is devoured by the eagle of Zeus. The whole spirit of nineteenth-century literature and aesthetics is moved by this idea of a Prometheus who is a bit like Nietzsche's Antichrist. The process of atheism typical of nineteenth-century philosophy would be unthinkable without the critical destruction of the Gospel text. This passage, which is not highlighted at all in philosophy textbooks - as if philosophy moved on its own ground, as if this process of atheism were a self-referential problem and internal to pure philosophy, while instead, in my opinion, it depends on the fact that behind it there was a work of critical theology of an Enlightenment type. The work of systematic demolition of the historicity of the Gospels continues in the nineteenth century, starting with Reimarus and arriving, always in the Hegelian school, up to David Friedrich Strauss who in 1835 publishes his Life of Jesus - Strauss continues and radicalises the work of Reimarus and had dozens of reprints placing itself as the foundation of the atheism of the Hegelian left. The young Nietzsche himself reads Strauss' Life of Jesus and because of this, we could say, loses faith and is not alone! In Nietzsche the postulate of modern rationalism fails; in the sense that all those premises that are at the origin of idealistic position. In Nietzsche they reach their culminating critical expression, and this massacre concerns the ontological proof. That is, Nietzsche, after Marx and after the Hegelian left, no longer accepts the idea that man is characterized starting from an idea of reason, from a constitutive idea of reason which would be the idea of God, the idea Of the. As I said in a previous comment, in Feuerbach this idea is still there, so much so that Feuerbach still retains the idea of religious nature of man - and it will be the accusation Marx makes against him after Stirner, i.e. after 1845. ”. In Nietzsche no longer secularization, that is, in him atheism takes the place of secularization; for Nietzsche there is no longer the immanent God, now there is the rejection of God, the Prometheism gets its right all the way: Prometheus becomes the Antichrist. This atheism, which however can no longer be based on secularization, takes on the aspect of the atheist option, that is, put in a synthetic formula, "God does not exist because I decide that he must not exist". There is no proof of the non-existence of God. In other words, in Nietzsche atheism reveals itself in its postulatory and no longer scientific nature.
@@PaoloGasparini-ux2kp Existence of God is not relevant question in our times and I wouldn't call Nietzsche an atheist in modern scientific sense because Nietzsche start from critique, from destroying old ways of thinking and go to the point of mental breakdown, never build anything. He recognized the fact that we killed God in that sense that we do not behave seriously enough to bear the thought of always-present-witness of all our actions, no matter what we claim we believe, so there is no point to argue. We are not authentic anymore and our lies and immoral acts works for us as fine as so called truth and morality so there is no point to value one over another. We can say theoretically that good is better than evil but in the world of facts, in the world of history and evolution we cannot prove it, we need another supernatural world to sustain this claim but Nietzsche reject believing in other worlds. So the question is not about existence of God but existence of life after dead and believe in Kingdom of Heaven. But after we killed God, it is irrelevant either. His superman should overcome and escape from that good-evil relativity to the point where he's free to create his on values and this stays close to christianity message, the only difference is that he never preach about how to choose values or which one to choose. If you are not beyond good and evil you can't be authentic and real free person so no matter what you do everything is relative. Only from the point of real freedom you can choose values and decide that you put your trust in God or in Abyss. For Nietzsche Kingdom of Heaven is on Earth, in the place of full freedom, home for the superman. If it's not happen here it will never happen out there. Nietzsche himself never stood at that point of absolute freedom due to his mental breakdown, so he's philosophy is rather from Abyss, he rejected Augustine's notion of predestination of grace. He tried by his own efforts and failed.
@@eldoradose 1/2 Dear friend, thank you for replying! I start from the central affirmation of your answer: "Existence of God is not a relevant question in our times". Sure, if God didn't exist, life would be all a vain agitation. Yes, one can indulge in pleasures, but all in all, these are ephemeral experiences. What can an atheist say if not what we find written in the Book of Wisdom: “Our life is short and sad; there is no remedy when a man dies. We were born by chance and afterward we will be as if we had not been" (Wis 2:1-2). And again: "The passage of a shadow is in fact our existence... Come therefore and let us enjoy the present goods, let us taste the creatures as in the time of youth! Let us satiate ourselves with fine wine and perfumes, let no spring flower escape us, let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither (Wis 9.5-8). But the feeling of nothingness and the desire to please easily lead some to arrogance: “We lord it over the righteous, who is poor, we do not spare widows, nor do we have respect for the gray hair of an elderly old man. Let our strength be the law of justice, for weakness is useless" (Wis 9:10-11). What can the reflections of an atheist lead to if not to this? This means that in order to rediscover the sense of himself, a man must never stop questioning himself and "make his call firmer" (2 Pt 1:10). A great convert, Blaise Pascal, whom Dr. Kreeft recently treated in one of these philosophical series, wrote: "The order of thought lies in starting from one's self, from one's author, from one's end." (Thoughts,146). The order of thought! How beautiful is this expression! A well-ordered thought that wants to reach the conclusion of the fundamental truth of one's life must "begin with one's own self, with one's author, with one's end". Nietzsche said that God has ceased to be man's point of reference and that pleasures must be re-appropriated. However, he had to admit that death is "his gloomy traveling companion" (The Gay Science 4,278). Blaise Pascal said that man is the only animal that thinks about death and knows he is dying. Faced with this reality of death, a question of meaning constantly emerges in man. Now only God, for what he has told us and for what he has prepared for us (and how many incontrovertible demonstrations he has given us in Christ!), Can give complete meaning to our existence, to our death, and to our post-mortem. For this reason, another philosopher, Saint Augustine said: "You God made us for you in our heart is restless until he rests in you" (Confessions, I, 1,1). For an atheist, everything ends in death. One could ask him what evidence he brings to say that with death everything ends. He has none! Yet, even before being a believer, one can affirm that man has a life that transcends matter and that this is precisely what marks the difference from the exclusively material life of animals. Transcendent life is demonstrated by the fact that you talk to each other and that you communicate spiritual concepts, perhaps wrong, but you can speak of life, of death, of meaning and nonsense, of the existence of God or of his non-existence. Well, isn't all this spiritual life? Isn't it life that transcends matter? And if there is something in us that transcends matter, can it not mean that when the body, which is material, dissolves, there is something else that can exist? The mere fact that, regardless of their existence, you can think of angels, demons, the inhabitants of heaven, the damned; Does not the mere thought that you yourselves may be there in their company manifest a spiritual activity and life which transcends matter, and which can subsist beyond the death of the body? As you can see, these are not yet discourses of faith, because we are talking about what is the object of evident experience on the part of everyone. Beyond the reasoning that I have brought you, there are facts such as those of diabolical possessions and apparitions which are indications of an afterlife. I am thinking, for example, of the apparitions of Lourdes or of Fatima (these days in Venice, in San Salvador's Church, we have the "peregrinatio Mariae, a copy of the statue of Fatima, until the 8th of May) which have been examined in a very strict manner by the authorities civil rather than ecclesiastical. I am not speaking of Lourdes or Fatima to demonstrate the supernatural, but only to simply say that even from a rational point of view we have signs and attestations of the afterlife. While the atheist (or rather, the one who has not yet discovered the love of God) has none in favor of him. Indeed, even if he brought someone, it could not be that it is a testimony coming from the afterlife, blatantly disavowing his own assertion.
2/2 We say frankly that atheism is quite always a pretext for doing one's will instead of God's. As a will to reject God's will in order to do one's own, atheism is a mortal sin. If the atheist is, therefore, a lover of moral values, of the common good, or of universal brotherhood, it is certainly not so as an atheist, but by his choice of convenience, always reserving the freedom to transgress these values, when it suits him. Respect for universal values is the basis of faith in God, which is its universal principle. On the other hand, atheism in itself leads the subject to subjectivism and individualism, that is, to give a damn about the common good or interests, and to pay attention only to one's own personal gain. We must consider that the human will, even after original sin, is constitutively inclined towards Him by God, but since he is free, he has the possibility of constituting or considering the good of him, not God but itself. He is made for an absolute good which is God, but by its free choice, he can absolutize the relative. He is made for the infinite good, but by its own free choice, he can regard the finite as if he were infinite. He is made for eternity, but he can choose the storm. He is made for the ipsum Esse, but may prefer becoming; he is made for life, but he can choose death. Every man, therefore, with simple reasoning, knows that God exists; but this may be repugnant to him because he feels it as a brake on the affirmation of himself and his own freedom. Atheism does not arise from any need for truth, as Nietzsche would like us to believe. We must free ourselves from the horrendous precipice into which the famous Italian poet Leopardi fell (my wife did her thesis on him), who believed that being is an illusion and nothing, comes from nothing and goes towards nothing. The famous five ways of St. Thomas to prove the existence of God, so what purpose do they have? Prove that God exists to someone who doesn't know it, just as I could prove in a trial, for example, that it was the husband who killed his wife?. Not at all! St. Thomas does not intend to bring the reader to the knowledge of something he does not know but to strengthen the conviction already possessed, at least implicitly, by the reader. It must be recognized that in the modern age, the question of the existence of God has become extremely complicated due to the thousand obstacles that charlatans and sophist philosophers have wanted to put in the way of reason in relation to God and due to the birth of gnoseologies which deny the first evidence of the senses and of reason, evidence which forms the basis for demonstrating the existence of God. If you don't believe in the truth, how can you find out the supreme truth which is God? What interest can such a perspective have? If one does not believe in the truthful power of reason, it is logical that one ends up in atheism, because it is reason that leads to God. An irrational "faith" that claims to replace reason is useless because faith presupposes reason, otherwise, it is not faith but fanaticism and crypto atheism, as demonstrated by the path that goes from Luther to Hegel and from Hegel to Marx and from Marx to Nietzsche, as I already mentioned above. In the meantime, the Church has deemed it appropriate to make the best of a bad situation by understanding the opportunity that in terms of civil coexistence there are no problems in recognizing the status of citizens even atheists. And so it happens that our modern societies born from the French and American revolutions, no longer founded like the previous ones on the obligation of the subject to respect the Christian religion of the sovereign, but on the common commitment of citizens to respect the universal rights of man, the profession of atheist no longer appears as a crime against the State, but the Constitutions, with the consent of the Church, recognize equal rights to believing citizens and atheists in the name of the right to freedom of thought, which is not only religious freedom but believe or not believe in God. The problem today is that there are many erroneous or incomplete or contradictory or insufficient concepts of God: Mohammedans, Occamists, Cusanians, Lutherans, fideists, Cartesians, Spinozists, Masonicists, Enlightenmentists, rationalists, Kantians, Fichtians, Hegelians, Schellingians, pseudomystics, ontologists , pantheist, modernist, Heideggerian and rahnerian of God. And many Catholics drink these poisoned drinks perhaps without realizing it. I limit my self to treat only this aspect of atheism, that is far more the most important issue of our time, far more than any particular Author. In a nutshell, we have to choose, evil or good, devil or Christ, the Brave New World without God or Christ. Bread and wellness, and welfare, and fitness, or the Christ crucifixed and Resort. Finally, I truly thank you, and so do all the numerous interlocutors I have met so far on the WOF philosophical RUclips channel because you have stimulated me to investigate the reasons for my hope and to be further certain of it. Which I wouldn't have done if I hadn't been constantly prodded by objections.
@@PaoloGasparini-ux2kp Seduction is stronger than reasoning. People use their intellect to find new ways for power, fame, and wealth to be even more seductive. So for many God lives in power, fame and wealth. For others God lives in virtues so they looking for wisdom and justice and the good but all of these are one, unity and not divided so you cannot be good or wise or virtuous in otological sense, you can only try to become, try to act in that manner. Power, fame, wealth, all sensuall pleasures you can gain, but not the good and not the virtue, not the wisdom or love. These are deeds not something to gain. You cannot believe in existence of God, it's irrelevant because God is so obvious but people put "Him" in different places. To believe means to trust that you are God in that sense that your deed is truly good, and virtuous and not a dream only. So the problem now is...how do you know that you're not cheating, or delusion about yourself and in fact behave in immoral tricky fashion, or dream? For Nietzsche the whole western culture from Socrates is nothing more than cheating and pretending.You can believe in truth but how do you know what the truth really is? If you know what truth is, this means that you are perfect and omniscient. Obviously we are not, so we only try to become and participate in the truth but if we not are but only try to become, we do not know what we are doing actually because we reaching for something unknowable for us, like a blind man or a dreamer. So being and becoming must be one and the same and to do so you need love as third part. Without love you don't really know what you are doing so the only thing left for you is hope and faith that you are not making things worst. Reason is a lighthouse but seductions also shine. So what is relevant is hope, love and faith, not only faith in existence which comes out of reasoning. Atheism is delusion wheel because you put your hope, love and faith in something that comes out from hope, love and faith, in yourself only.Instead of believing that your act is godly, you believe that the act is only humanistic, that everything is only your creation, and by You you mean homos sapiens or whathever, but not God. So comes "Eternal return" and Nietzsche struggle to come out of it. He knew that becoming is the ladder to escape from that wheel, that dreamy state of being, to wake up but third essential part of trinity is love, not will to power. Now many people might believe that they are something more than monkey, that they are gods, but when they act not out of love but out of will to power, they are heading toward the same place where Nietzsche ended, toward a fall and breakdown.
"It is significant that Hitler - who was certainly no philosopher - admired Nietzsche, as did Mussolini, who actually wrote some philosophy defending Nazism as The Logical upshot of moral relativism." "Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition. . . . If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be the bearers of an objective, immortal truth . . . then there is nothing more relativistic than fascistic attitudes and activity. . . . From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable." That's from Mussolini's Diuturna, pages 374-77 (Peter Kreeft, A Refutation of Moral Relativism, p.18)
This prof is too biased in the glorification of Christianity.he supports Christianity against paganism. Heidegger was no Pagan but a surreptitious Christian
@@hrabmv that is your idea but Christianity is an arrogant religion that shamed other civilizations s truth conveniently forgotten it thinks thst God exists only in the euro world Paganism is open minded Christianity genocides others it has the nature of exclusivity it is based on doxa. All these qualities are not lost in Kant Kant asu ed the superiority of the west even through lies like “ only white men can do mathematics” these ideas are justifications based on bias This dogmatism is why western religions are predatory and the prof ignored history as he criticizes Nietzsche
I'm not disagreeing with the overarching appraisal of the lecture as expressing "biases," but the judgment that Heidegger was more pagan than Christian is not a stretch. I'm not interested in figuring out who's a "real Christian," but Heidegger openly admitted that his philosophy was indelibly shaped by his Catholic upbringing--but also by his break from Christianity ("Mein bisheriger Weg" (1937/38)). His wife, Elfride, claims that her husband had lost his faith by the early years of their marriage. Yes, Heidegger was raised Catholic, and he requested a Catholic burial, but he was also very hostile to traditional Christianity through most of his scholarly life (even while importing all sorts of Christian notions of guilt, fallenness, etc.). His obsession with the Greeks, his sense that Western man has been suffering from the "forgetfulness of Being" since the time of the Presocratics, and his articulation of Christianity's contribution to the decline, are too well-documented in his most prominent works to require citation. This isn't to say that he's definitely "more pagan than Christian"--since everyone will interpet these words differently, and b/c Heidegger relies on notions introduced in Christianity (Paul, Augustine, Luther)--but I'm not sure Kreeft's claim here is simply the result of bias. (Though other claims of his probably are.)
![Rick Roderick on Nietzsche and the Will to Power [full length]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZI9asjQnTIM/mqdefault.jpg)
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
Like almost everything I have read and heard by Peter Kreeft so far, this lecture is illuminating in its precision, surety of judgement and balanced sympathy for the subjects dealt with: nourishment for soul and mind. Thank you for producing this series, and for making it available. This is priceless!
If I may make a suggestion or request: It would be excellent if there were a version of this without the musical soundtrack. I for one would greatly appreciate that since, to me, the sounds are a bit distracting.
Agree... Totally priceless. 🙏🏻
This series has been incredible. Thank you Dr. Kreeft
"Conscience did not die. It took its revenge." That's a line that will stay with me.
As an avid reader of Nietzsche, it is fascinating to find out about Heidegger's ideas over the calulated and the meditative side of man and how IDENTICAL they are of Nietzsche's, Greece influenced, dissection of the psyche into the Apollonian and Dionysian. One side responsible for retrospection and forethought and the other for just being. Thank you Dr. Kreeft!
Informative and enlightening, thank you Dr. Kreeft
I love that Dr. Kreeft ended the last video with the Letter to the Laodiceans and begins this video with the same.
Oh my WORD ! What a great lecture ! I fell in love with the quest for Being when I was at Mt St Mary's University. Is it any wonder I left and studied secular psychology instead? It is a clever and all too true observation Dr Kreeft has made about Heidegger, one can simply substitute God in place of the word "being" so Being and Time becomes God and Time, and that would make sense since Heidegger was born a Catholic and then became a protestant and then an Agnostic- not an Atheist and then when he finally died, he had a deliberate Catholic Funeral. There is no escape from the truth of Being and that is the Truth of God!
Thank you for these amazing lectures. For some reason, it's harder to find a few of these lectures on youtube than others. I didn't even know that the lectures on Hegel vs Kierkegaard and this one existed.
Dr. Kreeft is a wonderful teacher, but this one especially will need a rewatch. “Notoriously difficult” made me feel better.
Another amazing speech. How are we not teaching kids and our youth about the danger and the beauty of ideas? Here we see the danger of some of the ideas that are really common today (will to power, God is not necessary, you can be anything, etc.). Please show this to your kids before it is too late!
I guess they are very complicated ideas. Hard for children or even many adults to properly comprehend or explain.
Unless you are safely grounded in philosophy, you will get lost in their ideas. Just like what Nietzsche said, if you will look down at the abyss, you will find that the abyss is staring back at you. Get to develop your methodical thought by systematically studying their respective philosophies. That's how we do that when we took our bachelor's degree and masteral degree in Philosophy. It will help you to be critical and not be overly fundamentalist
Why exactly are these ideas dangerous ?
@@Anhedonxia that humans should let go of morality like Sartre proposed.
@@Anhedonxia "Why exactly are these ideas dangerous ?" ---- Are you honestly asking that question???
87 y old! professor....simply amaaazing :))🎉🎉
Very rich in thought and philosophy. I enjoyed this lecture as each word in the speech was very powerful and philosophical. Thank you!
I have been studying Husserl and practicing his Phenomenological Reduction which he called a self meditation. Heidegger is difficult for me to come to terms with in relation to Husserl, but in the lecture the connection through meditative thinking finally comes clear. Husserl called it originary thinking, Heidegger inceptual thinking. (And Jung Primordial thinking which I suspect is quite closely related.) But calling it meditative thinking, as opposed to ordinary scientific and technological thinking reminds us of way of being that we have largely lost.
«Up to now it has been admitted that all our knowledge had to be based on objects; but all attempts to establish something about them a priori, by means of concepts, with which our knowledge could have been extended, assuming such a presupposition, came to naught. Therefore, finally, let us try to see if we will be more fortunate in the problems of metaphysics, making the hypothesis that objects must be governed by our knowledge».
The falsehood of Kant's statement is astonishing, he claims, with unspeakable presumption, to invalidate all the metaphysical knowledge accumulated by European civilization in 20 centuries of history starting from Aristotle. On the other hand, Kant has nothing better than to oppose this gross rejection of gnoseological realism by opposing the very old idealism of Parmenides and the subjectivism of Protagoras as constituting the perspective of who knows what innovation and rigorization of philosophical thinking.
This proposition of boasters as heralds of an absolutely new, truly critical knowledge, finally a beacon of truth, liberator of humanity from the darkness of error, is typical of the Gnostic and of modern idealism from Descartes to Fichte to Hegel to Husserl. Husserl proposes setting aside the realistic attitude of the subordination of consciousness to reality to replace it with the vision of one's self-awareness as consciousness purified by reference to external reality and understood itself as an operation by which being becomes being of consciousness, therefore not plus the consciousness relative to being, but the relative or "correlated" being of consciousness. It is the "phenomenological reduction", that is, being reduced to being-thought, so that the thinker does not think of a being distinct from himself, but thinks of himself. Which is precisely the gnosis.
Husserl says: «We observe that the being sought by us is nothing other than what for essential reasons can be indicated as pure "Erlebnisse", pure consciousness with its pure correlates and on the other hand its pure ego, and therefore we begin to consider the ego, the conscience, the "Erlebnis" as they are given to us in the natural attitude and which are to be drawn in their purity».
As if the object of knowledge needed to be "purified" by self-awareness and were not rather this which is pure, true, and sincere to the extent that it adapts to external reality. It is clear that here, as in Protagoras, it is consciousness that wants to be the measure of reality, and it is not reality that is the measure of consciousness!
Husserl then states:
"It is now understood how indeed, in the face of the natural experimental and theoretical attitude, whose correlate is the world, a new attitude must actually be possible, which, despite the exclusion of the entire sphere of psychophysical nature, retains for us something remaining - the entire field of absolute consciousness. So instead of naively living in experience and theoretically investigating the experienced, the transcendent nature, we carry out the phenomenological reduction. In other words: instead of naively carrying out the constitutive acts of nature with their transcendent theses (acts that are real or, according to a prefigured potentiality, possible to carry out) and to pass, through the motivations immanent in them, to ever new transcendent theses, let us put all these theses, the actual ones and, first, the potential ones out of action, let us not indulge them and rather direct our grasping and theoretically investigative gaze on pure consciousness in its absolute being.
The Gnostic wants to persuade us that it is naive to look at things considered outside of us, as if they were really outside of us, while in reality everything is found in our absolute consciousness and has its foundation and existence on it. It is then a matter of shifting attention away from external reality and turning it towards our ego, which is nothing other than absolute being and absolute consciousness. True wisdom is absolute self-awareness. And this is exactly Gnosis.
Modern man, according to Husserl, has discovered that that external, objective and transcendent God, who until then was placed beyond and above things as the creator of things, considered as external to the ego, in reality is not other than the transcendental and original, experiential, athematic and preconceptual dimension of the empirical and categorical self. Therefore the science of God, theology, is resolved in the Self-Consciousness, which posits the being of things as being thought of things. And this again is precisely the gnosis. And this is where modernism comes from.
The admirable new and immortal science, never conceived before, science not of external things that lead to God, but self-awareness of one's own ego as the absolute thinker of the things thought, is the intellectual narcissism proper to Gnosticism, cultivated in India for 36 centuries already.
I can’t over-express how profoundly excellent this entire series is. Thank you. Incredible work.
Fabulous. Thank you and God bless
Such a great lecture.
Beautifully presented and well praised, even the contradictory belief, is still fascinating. The voice of experience is the beauty of all, on my part for the refinement of it's well deserved joys.
I think the characterization of Heidegger as an atheist is interesting- he did most of his formative work in Catholic philosophy and broke from religion while seeming to maintain faith. Similarly, he takes the notion of God very seriously (though maybe something of a Pagan god) in his work on art and especially in the Contributions. he also, in a way made famous by folks like Marion, considered writing a theology- though in it, he says, he’d never talk of “Being.” Does anyone know the reasons or source of characterizing Heidegger as an atheist?
I'll quote extensively an Italian Dominican Theologian, Fr. G.Cavalcoli OP (today's the feast of St Catherine of Siena, let's tribute an homage to her! Ed.)
"Heidegger's ethics is based on the concept of acting as being and for this reason, Heidegger ethics is both anthropology and metaphysics. And since action says relationship, we also find relational personalism in Heidegger, with notes typical of his philosophy. So for him acting is a self-transcendence like being for death (sein zum Tode), so as to be free for death (Freiheit zum Tode), in which the "possibility of being a whole" is realized [1]; «authentic being for death is the most proper possibility»[2] for man, because in death man is before being, at the definitive peak of his own free decision, a being that appears to him as nothing, but which is that Dasein which he himself is. Even in Heidegger there is no room for the relationship as an accident of the person: the very being of the individual is a being for life or for death.
For Heidegger, I am essentially «guilty»[3] and anguished, but precisely in this acknowledging myself as guilty and making it my own, precisely deciding to be what I am, make my «original being-for the being-ability of my Being there more precisely»[4]. This decision involves my «anguished and tacit self-projecting of my own more guilty being»[5]. Now, Heidegger continues, «being guilty is proper to the being of Dasein and means being the null foundation of a nullity»[6].
But it is precisely in this decision to be for death, to let death "make itself master of the existence of Dasein"[7], that I "understand the effective possibilities of my Dasein"[8]. The understanding of this possibility of this gives me, according to Heidegger, «an imperturbable joy»[9]. Here the resonances of the Lutheran "simul justus et peccator" embedded in the Hegelian dialectic of the negative (death, nothingness) as a producer of the positive (life, being) are evident.
But it should also be noted that the negation of being by nothingness in the dynamics of action introduces a factor of conflict into human existence, which takes on a social aspect in the footsteps of the Hegelian dialectic, with the difference that in Hegel dialectical polarity has a logical character, in Heidegger we have an existential dialectic, for which we do not have a conflict of concepts as in Hegel, but the opposition of life and death. In this circularity, it does not seem that life has the victory, because for Heidegger nothingness enters the very destiny of man, even if this nothingness seems to belong not to the ambit of the entity of reason, but to the horizon of the sacred.
Heidegger, as is well known, claims to find the authentic original philosophizing in the Parmenidean doctrine of being, in Heraclitus's doctrine of becoming, and in Anaximander's Infinity, without forgetting Cartesian "geological" voluntarism.
In Heidegger's social ethics, we therefore find a mixture of elements coming from Luther with others, completely opposite, coming from Nietzsche, all within the horizon of a conception of being, which unites, as in Hegel, Parmenides with Heraclitus, being and time. The result of these juxtapositions is his characteristic conception of man as the "there" of being, i.e. as the place and time of the appearance and presence of being to this man here, who am I in an emotional situation and I question myself about being; be understood as transcending the entity. I find myself thrown into the world of dejection, guilt, anguish, and precariousness: my being is being-for-death.
Heidegger's gnoseological background is not realist but idealist. The truth of knowledge for him does not lie in the adequacy of judgment to the external thing but in the experience of the truth of being, which reveals itself to me as the presence of the present. Therefore, I am not in contact through the senses with a reality outside of me, but only with my self-consciousness, for which being is being thought. I don't have a real relationship with things outside of me, but I have, indeed I am, in a subsisting and existential relationship of me as thereof being ("house of being") and being as being there ("shepherd of being)
The relationship in Heidegger corresponds to the categories of the "there" of Dasein. This is me, as an entity that over time asks about being. In this way I am not only the questioner, but also the questioned, so that for him being a man coincides with being, not however with simple being, but with being there because I who am here and now, in the time and in space, within the horizon of that being and therefore of that Dasein about which I wonder.
As in Husserl, also for Heidegger, in Descartes' line, I am relative to myself insofar as I am conscious of myself. This "am", therefore, is the being of which I am aware and which I am myself.
The relationship, therefore, also in Heidegger, as for all idealists, is the relationship of consciousness of the ego with itself, of the empirical ego with the absolute ego, and vice versa.
Thus, according to Heidegger there is the ascending relationship of the empirical ego, the existential ego, to the absolute ego, being; and there is the descending relationship of being with there, that is, with my empirical self, being towards death, rejected and thrown away, guilty and anguished. But the descent corresponds to the ascent, i.e. pre-understanding (Vorverständnis), remembering thinking (an-denken), authentic existence, care, being-in-the-world, things-in-hand (Dingen zu Handen), being-with (mitsein), going-forward, transcendence, planning oneself, ecstasy, language, freedom. The descending relation instead includes the sacred, the void, the event (Ereignis), the revelation, the clearing (Lichtung), the opening (Offenheit), the presence of the present, and destiny.
Heidegger's social ethics are inspired by the Hegelian one, centered on obedience to the state and on belonging to the state. For which the single individual is completely dependent on the State and relative to the State, which, in its head, the prince - for Heidegger the Führer of the National Socialist regime - is the absolute Substance of the multiplicity of individuals.
Heidegger clarifies the will to power of the state by making use of Nietzsche's concept of will to power, which for Nietzsche, as Heidegger explains[10], is none other than being as a will that wills itself, according to the definition of the will already given by Hegel. Therefore, absolute relation is an absolute voluntarism which is identified, as already in Schelling and in Fichte, in being as action (Fichte) and freedom (Schelling), for which the Absolute exists because it wanted to exist.
The being of which Heidegger speaks is the Nietzschean's will to power. This can be seen from the praises he gives to this conception, which therefore for him has nothing to do with the "esse ut actus essendi" of St. Thomas. The comparison, therefore, that some have made, between the difference between being and being in Thomas from that of Heidegger, absolutely does not hold, because while for Thomas transcendent being is the best perfection and the best goodness, for Heidegger it is nothing compared to all beings and represents only the finiteness and temporality of beings, which for Heidegger is the man who asks himself the question about being.
For this reason, in Heidegger's ethics, the theme of love and goodness is completely absent, and the whole moral question lies in the freedom and authenticity of the existential self in the dimension of temporality and finiteness, in relation to the pre-categorical and emotional experience of the 'to be like to be there.
It is true that in Heidegger's philosophy, as Umberto Regina has pointed out[11], and even in the Letter on Humanism of 1947, the "divine God" appears, but the polemic against the Christian conception of God, contemptuously called by him «onto-theology», as if it were a crude fantasy, makes us understand that its «sacred» and its «divine» are none other than that of Hölderlin, as he himself explains to us in the book dedicated to him[12], the sacred of Germanic mythology which was at the center of the National Socialist conception, supported by him[13], of the German state and people.
[11] Being and time, Longanesi & C., Milan 1976, pp. 289, 369.
[12] Ibid., p. 373.
[13] Ibid., p.369.
[14] Ibid., p.370.
[15] Ibid., p.369.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid., p.374.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Nietzsche, Adelphi Editions, Milan 2013.
[21] Heidegger. Existence and the Sacred, Morcelliana, Brescia 1974.
[22] Hölderlin, Adelphi Editions, Milan 1988.
[23] Cf. Andrea Colombo, The cursed. From the wrong side of history, Edizioni Lindau, Turin, 2017, pp.61-73.
@@PaoloGasparini-ux2kp thank you so much for the thorough and thoughtful response!
"formative work in Catholic philosophy and broke from religion" --- That is characteristic of modernism generally; an attempt to reinterpret everything without God. It simply does not work.
There is a false citation in the video. From 24:08 to the end are not the words of Heidegger. Heidegger never supported book firings but said to be prevented one. In any case, I'd like to be provided the source.
I agree, I think serious lectures on RUclips should cite their sources in the little “…more” space below the video or be left pinned in the comments.
In addition, the claim just before, at 23:00, that Hitler fired Husserl and then Heidegger took his former professor's job is incorrect. Husserl retired in 1928 at the age of 69, almost five years before Hitler took power. Heidegger was awarded Husserl's vacated chair at Freiberg on the heels of his publication of Being and Time. On account of German anti-Semitism, Husserl was eventually banned from the university library, but that was in 1933, and weeks before Heidegger took over as Rector. Some accounts claim that the actions against Husserl immediately incited protest and so his ban was lifted in a week's time. That Heidegger and Husserl had a falling out--and that Heidegger failed to show appropriate care for his Jewish, former teacher--is true, but the details as Kreeft reports them are false and highly sensationalized.
Thanks much for this video.
Very enlightening!
One of the best videos I’ve ever watched. This brings together information I’ve been reading and learning about for a decade. I’m so grateful to Word on Fire and Dr Peter Kreeft!!
Not only did Nietszche lose his sanity while pitying a flogged horse. It happened in Turin which falls on the line of st michael the archangel which stretches from mt skellig ireland to mount carmel in Israel. This line is also known as the sword of truth! Ive always found this fascinating.
this story is almost certainly apocryphal
Your on another level of imagination man
Thank you very much for this insightful comparison! Jaspers versus Heidegger could be interesting as well and my question is: Who are the philosophers who followed Heidegger and Jaspers in their spirit?
What a very gifted man, working for the Lord! Lord save us from Antichrist, from ourselves who sometimes know no better, ourselves who daily fall into the traps, our own traps our own idolatry of selves, our own pride.. Lord Jesus, save us from ourselves, Lord Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything 🙏🏻❤️ Immaculate Heart of Mary pray for us, Sacred Heart of Jesus save us.
He never existed your Jesus you cattle
As always great - but i don’t understand that realy unnecessary and unnerving background sound- please dont do that
I was expecting an accurate comparison of two philosophers' ideas, what I got was a subtle misrepresentation and an irresistibile urge to pee
men, i need his books children of socrates.
Also, socratic logic and handbook of Christian apologetics.
Both amazing.
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation:
00:23 🤝 Nietzsche and Heidegger are seen as existentialism founders, focusing on lived human existence.
01:22 🌟 Both Nietzsche and Heidegger recognize Socrates and Jesus as central figures in Western civilization.
02:49 🤯 Nietzsche and Heidegger have stark differences regarding ethics, values, and religion.
03:58 🔀 Nietzsche's rejection of traditional moral values and his focus on power and transvaluation.
05:22 🔥 Nietzsche's intense criticism of Christianity as a corrupting force, paralleling his anti-Semitism.
07:27 😶 Heidegger's philosophical exploration of "being" and his critique of technological thinking.
09:52 💥 Heidegger prophesies the danger of technology capturing human thinking and erasing true nature.
12:56 🌌 Heidegger distinguishes between "beings" (entities) and "being" (existence) as a central concept.
14:58 🙌 Heidegger emphasizes meditative thinking over calculative thinking to engage with existence.
18:52 👾 The danger of humans being captivated by their own technology and losing their essential nature.
22:43 ⚠️ Heidegger's surprising alignment with the Nazi party and disturbing support for Hitler.
24:47 🧐 The complex lesson from Heidegger's philosophical depth and political passion, exposing human vulnerability.
26:09 🌍 Nietzsche and Hitler's glorification of power and militarism, reflecting a rejection of Christian morality.
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Thank you
Fantastic presentation
Thanks to beloved God for these lectures❤
Clicked on notification but I was never notified. Anyone else?
So am I
Nietzsche didn't like the slave morality of he Jews, but he was in awe of their ability to create it. He passionately hated anti-semites and said in beyond Good and Evil that the Greeks and Indians never created a work of literature as great as the Hebrew Bible.
5:45 "ITS A JEWISH PLOT!"
Reminds me of Red Dead Redemption lol
Nietzsche is painted here as a moral relativist. Nietzsche’s perspectivism is substantially different from epistemological nihilism. Nietzsche wasn’t trying to transcend truth or god . His new approach to truth is not just premise vs premise or idea vs idea like it has always been,. Instead it is about analysing the truth of the idea as well as analysing the psychological need for the idea to be true. Thus gaining the fullest perspective a better way at understanding truth itself. Once we understand the idea then the need for the idea psychologically, then we can start to talk about moral truths by seeing what is common amongst all perspectives.
National Socialism was not a simple doctrine of the state, it was not a simple doctrine of Deutschland über alles of nineteenth-century Pan-Germanism, it was not only the vision of the German land as the land of the Sacred, according to Hölderlin's vision, it was not only the reawakening of the ancestral cruelty and anarchy of the ancient Germans and of their warlike religious mythology, which so worried Tacitus and for which Rome never succeeded in subduing the Germans, but was also the project of a new and superior divine humanity according to the Nietzsche's super humanist model.
He wanted to be a new humanity in the terms set by Nietzsche, whom Hitler declared his master. Indeed, as Heidegger observes,
Nietzsche calls the highest form of man "prey animal" and sees the supreme man as "magnificent blond beast that wanders eager for prey and victory".
This superhumanity, founded by National Socialism, benefits, according to Nietzsche, from the "gay science", which "dances in hell", the science of truth - according to Schelling's vision - not of the truth that leads to freedom, but of the truth founded on freedom , author of the "death of God", "devaluator of all values", shaper of herself in the manner of Fichte, operator "beyond good and evil", and even, as Heidegger illustrated, was the true metaphysics , which, basing itself on Descartes' cogito, through German idealism, finally understood in Nietzsche that being is the eternal return of the same, the "ring of return", as Severino says, symbolized by the swastika, symbol of the eternal death-life cycle; being, which is the will to power as an affirmation of its own power, which philosophy "with hammer blows" and mercilessly crushes lower humanity.
"Nietzsche is painted here as a moral relativist" ---
The professor does not paint Nietzsche as a moral relativist, but as an anti-Christian moralist.
If you’re an anti Christian moralist , the reasons for being so makes you an anti moralist in relation to any religion, the implication of this is moral relativism. Implying Nietzsche’s morality is in common with satanic cults also implies this…..
@@PaoloGasparini-ux2kp Das ist richtig!
Ah yes another meaningless subject of opinion
Good lecture.
Above all sinful- both engaged in vices. The difference is one wanted to and was punished and one did not want to do and was forgiven.
He keeps on mentioning kirkegaard when I thought he was supposed to be opposing Frederick Nietzsche to Heidegger, at least according to the title of this video.
That's what I was wondering too, until Heidegger comes in around 3/4 way through.
@@clairemcintosh8071 yes, but why do that between Nietzsche and kirkegaard to begin with, and then have it dominate most of the video?
@@grosbeak6130 I get where you're coming from, I might re-listen to try work that out.
This is a valuable presentation. The presentation addresses what, I think, is the most significant philosophical concern facing human beings today: what happens to the species when the epistemological/metaphysical/theological beliefs underpinning the core values we once subscribed to/continue to subscribe to are relentlessly attacked? What happens to the species when those core values themselves are attacked? Everything which has happened to the species, over the last century or more, seems to be an outcome of this enormous and terrible concern. It continues to happen even today.
The names mentioned in the presentation: Socrates, Jesus Christ, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Heidegger - such great and significant names, such a great and significant debate spanning so many years.
Heidegger seems to offer a way out, but, unfortunately, his association with the National Socialists has undermined his credibility. Why did one of the most intelligent and perceptive of people choose to support such a dark thing? I can think of two reasons off the top of my head:
1. He was frightened of saying no to Hitler and being seen as an enemy. Maybe he was concerned about the consequences for his family if he didn’t “play along.”
2. He was feeling completely at odds with the sort of “broken modernity” Germany was exposed to after the First World War and the Great Depression. Maybe it was his deep conservatism. Maybe he thought Hitler offered some return to a pristine past, when a shining Being would be finally unveiled once more.
Peter Kreeft is so trustworthy and clear. I wonder what he thinks of the thought of Alexandr Dugin?
Will read Heidegger's 'Discourse on Thinking', seems necessary - the world of will is growing unbearable.
Thanks for this video. A good way to continue searching for the truth is reading "Work of Human Hands" by Fr. Anthony Cekada.
Another great video. It's always interesting to hear a Christian's interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy
He is mistaken about Nietzsche on many fundamental subjects.
Could you elaborate on your assertion?
Absolutely mistaken as someone that didn’t understand nietzche work and took words as literal.
I got shocked at 7minutes of listening to it and stopped the video after hearing this shallow and bad understanding of nietzche philosophy.
And I am not even fond of nietzche but this discourse is just wrong on so many levels and any philosopher with familiar with nietzche works attest it easily.
@@savelives3763 i mean he's directly quoting nietzche a lot of the time. what do you mean? nietzche did believe that christianity was a negative influence for humanity and that men had to go beyond good and evil to assert themselves in a godless world.
you can say he's painting an unflattering picture of nietzche's ideas, but not through misrepresentation.
Dr. Kreeft is spot on in his reading of Nietzche. Nietzche is intoxicating, a profit of modernity and one must ultimately reject him. Most people get him wrong because he's so intoxicating. I've been going back to nietzche every few years for almost a decade now, each time is a bit different.
The clearest and most well-reasoned presentation of meditative thinking, free apprehensions is in Schopenhauer, rather than the mealy-mouthed monstrosity that is Heidegger. German language could reasonably sue him for damages, no court would deny it.
It's worth noting that Nietzsche believed that Christianity saved man from falling into practical and theoretical nihilism. He also didn't think going back to paganism was possible, or even desirable. Also, Heidegger eventually returned to Catholicism. Otherwise great lecture.
Hello, where'd you get Heidegger returning back to Catholicism from?
@@kylecroarkin1371 ........ Alright you caught me. I read it on Wikipedia. Though he never really let go of his Catholic influences (namely Augustine and Scotis).
@@KiwiFromChowder "A few months before his death, he met with Bernhard Welte, a Catholic priest, Freiburg University professor and earlier correspondent. The exact nature of their conversation is not known, but what is known is that it included talk of Heidegger's relationship to the Catholic Church and subsequent Christian burial at which the priest officiated"
Fascinating, I didn't know this happened. Thank you.
I was under the impression Nietzsche thought Christianity was indeed Nihilistic 🤔 not that it saved man from it.
The last 46 seconds destroyed literally the whole 26 minutes 🤦🏻♂️! Entirely misunderstood Nietzsche!
Nietzsche must hv been terribly tormented soul......it is somehow painful to hear how astray a human can go.....
Perhaps he never knew love or was never loved, for if he had felt the joy of love from even one other human being, he would have began his journey to knowing God who is Love, we should pray for his soul, that in his final moments he saw his failing and his unholy condition and sought real forgiveness from our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ 🙏🏻
I think I need to read all of Peter Kreeft's books, now. That was way too much packed into a 30 min video.
“Calculative Vs Contemplative” could be a better title I guess!
🙏👏
Not conscience making cowards of us all, but rather *humility* makes us into cowards; as does anything that tells us to "mind our place", same with reverence towards God, same with obedience, same with any capacity for authority at all; all of those make us fit only for Hell, same with obedience, for by obedience does sin enter our lives.
"all of those make us fit only for Hell" ---
Do you honestly teach that to your own children?
@@andrewferg8737 That is none of your business; all that *is* your business is to know that humbling oneself is what teaches one to hate all so-called superiors and anyone with any kind of superiority over the lowest common denominator.
@@chissstardestroyer "teaches one to hate"
"at one time we too were foolish, disobedient, misled, and enslaved to all sorts of desires and pleasures-living in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not by the righteous deeds we had done, but according to His mercy, through the washing of new birth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. This is the Spirit He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior"
(Titus 3)
Peace be with you.
@@andrewferg8737 Yet the citations you gave do not mesh with reality, so thus the fake citations you gave are worthless *in and of themselves*, seeing as humbling oneself teaches one to hate those who are even remotely above oneself.
If God gives you your existence then doing anything except humbling yourself is absurd, like sawing off the branch you’re sitting on, ultimately hating yourself.
A common but fatal misunderstanding occurs when when what Heidegger understands by Dasein is aligned (confused?) with consciousness. For Heidegger, 'consciousness' is a modern metaphysical construction that names the subject that 'represents' Being on the basis of beings whereby Being becomes fixed in image as object. Conversely, Dasein indicates the ecstatic clearing or site (being-there) for the singular Event (Ereignis) of Being itself. It is incorrect to say Dasein is equivalent to being conscious. Rather, Dasein is to be understood as belonging to Being and as the (more original ) ground of what is named by consciousness.
This is told perfectly from a Catholic point of view, but not from a Lutheran point of view. Most National-Socialists were evangelical in the Lutheran sense and they had a more sacral view of their earthly “Reich” giving it a spiritual dimension as well.
Nice
Love conquers everything, God is Love and His son has conquered this world, all the Nietzches, Heidegger, Hitler, Mussolinis and everything in between, all sin against man against God. We have everything to be hopeful for, trusting in the Creator and Lord of all creation 🙏🏻
Will of power , of course
The will for power is descriptive, not normative.
In the wake of Böhme, Fichte, Schopenhauer and Hegel, for Schelling the absolute Spirit, which he calls "Subject" or simply "Absolute", is not "the ipsum Esse", a pure act of being, an absolute being that cannot but -being, but it is the active power of being, but it is subsistent will, because otherwise, according to Schelling, God could not be free. God exists not because he cannot fail to exist, since his essence is his own existence, but because he wanted to exist, even being able not to exist. Between being and not being he has chosen to be, and he maintains it not out of necessity, but out of will.
Schelling does not realize that acting is an act of being and assumes being. There is no doubt that God possesses free will. But God could not choose if he did not exist first. For this reason, it is absurd to think that his being is the effect of free choice. Free choice of whom, if it is true that God cannot exist as a cause before existing as an effect? That in God the will coincides with the being, fine. But this being cannot not be, because it must explain the existence of the contingent. If God is not necessary, it will therefore be contingent. But how can a contingent God be God? Doesn't it become a simple entity among entities? How does he support them all?
God is certainly free, but he is free in relation to the other than himself, in relation to the creature: a creature that is convertible into non-being or wickedness. But God cannot exercise his freedom in relation to his being, which is what conditions the existence of his free will. It makes no sense to talk about wanting what does not exist. It is necessary to exist to want. And one cannot will if one does not exist. For this reason, one's (describable) existence cannot be the effect of one's (normative) will.
Yet for Schelling God is not being, but "power to be", "wanting to be", a will which, as Hegel would later say, "wants itself". It resembles the Fichtian ego, which places the non-ego in the ego. But here a horrendous thought arises, before which Schelling unfortunately does not back down, but goes on casually: if God is the power of choice between being and non-being, between good and evil, then God is at the origin not only good, but also bad. He is, as Nietzsche will say, above good and evil.
Schelling takes this voluntaristic approach to extremes, going so far as to say that God exists because he willed to exist. But he goes even further and hooks up with Jakob Böhme, for whom God has the ability to do good as well as evil.
The risk of such a conception, into which Hegel will fall, is that of conceiving a God who enters into contradiction with himself, in an eternal conflict between his being and his non-being, the good God and the bad God. .
If being for him is being-non-being, the consequence follows that good is good-evil, everywhere and therefore also in God. But evil is not a simple negation of good, but privation, that is, it is not simple to limit, but to take away what is due.
Blessed Duns Scotus and still more Ockham did not even dream of positing the existence of God as an effect of his will, having sufficient common sense to understand that an agent cannot act before existing.
Not a fair comparison between these two titans: Kreeft is a devoted christian and Catholic .. no wonder he favors Kirkegaard etc .. he’s smitten with the unseen world and Socratic “reason” .. what a waste of time
@@JS-ln4ns are you saying all views are subjective. What a revelation. 🤦 you mean like Nietzsche’s perspectivism? There are no truths. Only bias perspectives that assist our own will to power ..
What I meant is that Kreeft is as far from unbiased as one could get. Not that no opinion has value.
I also love his assertion that living according to will to power never works and hai evidence are characters from Dostoyevsky. Yes your right it never works in these polemics written against it give me a break man 😂
I feel such disdain hearing these kinds of Germans that have been responsible for such reprehensible thoughts and actions. But I must also remember amidst these awful humans, the Blessed Doctor Joseph Ratzinger lived and spoke, wrote and lived Truth, which is the Eternal Word that will never be conquered. The awful ends of those men with the humble and meek end of Pope Benedict speaks louder than those joyless philosophers.
people treat you quite awful and less they are getting paid not too
That’s one interpretation of Nietzsche
Respect your views, but we all have our own interpretations of Nietzsche, and disagree with yours.
"Thoughts are Stupid, Action is Genius" ~Andres Diaz
Nietzsche's would approve this message
Nietzsche didn’t hate jews. This guy needs to read Kaufmann’s translation of Geneology of Morales, in which he had plenty of space in the footnotes to point out any hints of antisemitism. The opposite is true. Nietzsche repeatedly praises the Jews and holds them in higher regard than his German countrymen. Kreeft Jesus-washes this entire lecture, a pity given there is so much richer treasure to dig for in these thinkers ‘ writings. One more reason not to get philosophy from youtube.
Heidegger allegedly coverted to catholicism on his deathbed.
Nietzsche was not an atheist. You can’t claim the murder of something you believe doesnt exist. Nietzsche was claiming the leftovers of a world where god was dead.
Dr. Kreeft is quite wrong in his interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy. Watch Robert Solomon's lectures on Nietzsche for a better understanding. It seems like he does what many do when they read Nietzsche which is take everything literally without understanding his writing style.
did Heidegger have a mortal fear of the nazis?
Unfortunately, this gentleman has turned the monumental writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which he presents (preaches?) in a sort of stolid, fatherly tone of "authority", into vehicles for the propagation his own straitlaced, evangelistic and rather pedestrian ideas. He completely misunderstands Heidegger's concept of releasement (it is NOT detachment in the way he states it), and gives us a very parochial and unnuanced version of what Nietzsche means by "power" and the death of God. The whole lecture, or rather sermon, is weighed down by an ulterior motive. I'm not buying it.
In Nietzsche, in some way, the postulate of modern rationalism is lost; in the sense that all those premises that are at the origin of the idealistic position - and which had already been massacred in the path of the Hegelian left - in Nietzsche reach the culminating critical expression of him, and this massacre concerns
on the ontological proof. That is Nietzsche, after Marx and after the Hegelian left, not
he accepted more the idea that man is characterized starting from an idea of reason, from an idea constitutive of reason which would be the idea of God, the "idea Dei." InFeuerbach this idea is still there, so much so that Feuerbach still retains the idea ofthe religious nature of man - and it will be the accusation Marx makes against him after Stirner, i.e. after 1845.
Andrè Gide said: “Not believing in God is much more difficult than one thinks. However, to continue doing this, one must absolutely forbid oneself to look at nature and to reflect on what one sees”. In Nietzsche no longer secularization, that is, in him atheism takes the place of secularization; for Nietzsche, there is no longer the immanent God, now there is the rejection of God, the Prometheism gets it right all the way: Prometheus becomes the Antichrist.
This atheism, which however can no longer be based on secularization, takes on the aspect of the atheist option, that is, put in a synthetic formula, "God does not exist because I decide that he must not exist". There is no proof of the non-existence of God. In other words, in Nietzsche, atheism reveals itself in its postulate and no longer scientific nature. Warning: this passage is important, because throughout the 18th century in France, and also in the nineteenth century of positivism, atheism found its strength - even the Marxist one, after all - in assuming the process of secularization; and what the process of secularization affirm? You can't go further back; that religion belongs to the pre-modern, archaic, parochial conscience, and that after modernity we can no longer call ourselves Christians. This is the strength of the idea of secularization: but how? Are you still a believer after the electric bulb? But when the idea of secularization goes into crisis with Nietzsche, atheism loses its implicit rational basis and therefore only the atheistic option remains. The atheist option is the decision: superman must prove existentially atheism in order to become Superman. Again with one singular aporia, because superman to become such must somehow already presuppose - and therefore we do not know who is before and who is after, with respect to nihilism. That's why Nietzsche is so popular among elites, who feel like a god. In a nutshell, the postmodern mind prefers being first in the second order, namely the post-human, the Brave New World Without God, than second or less in the first one, the divine order. As the devil compared to St Joseph.
Honest questuion. Do you think it's bad to speak with authority and try to propagate your ideas?
Nietzsche said "God is dead", how can that be construed as atheism?
The Nietzsche horse story has been debunked.
Really? What’s your proof?
@@davidc.2878 New Biography, I Am Dynamite. Hearsay rumor started by the son of the owner where N lived.
@@richardrumana5025 thanks!
disappointing that you would link Nietzsche with Hitler, Hitler wasn't even born when Nietzsche published his books! and Nietzsche openly despised the anti-Semitic movement.
How horribly this man misunderstood Nietzsche! At 9:21 in the video he quotes one of the most beautiful passages of Nietzsche, the death of god. Why wiping off the horizon? Such an image tells that Nietzsche was the most misunderstood philosopher. I stopped watching it at this time since Heidegger’s section will become even more strepitous .
Horrible video. The most egregious interpretation of Nietzschean philosophy on youtube!
I've heard this is a bit of a strawman of Nieztche. All this hardcore anti empathy stuff.
Husserl wasn't Jewish. His wife was.
??? Husserl absolutely was Jewish. He was born into a non-orthodox Jewish home. His wife was also Jewish. Husserl became Christian around the age of 27 and he married a year later--his wife being baptized right before their wedding.
Here's where this, and all condemnations of pursuit of power are blatantly from Hell itself: they drive men away from pursuit of God's ideas; as He designed it- but the rejection of pursuit of power indeed teaches us men to hate anyone given power, or anyone who possesses it; yes, even hatred of God comes not out of pride, as the bible very falsely claims, but rather out of *humility* and especially the obedience to Him that forbids us from seeking to perfect ourselves.
Indeed, if you follow the papal teachings about the need to *not* pursue obtaining power, then being a student is forbidden, as well as seeking self-mastery and even discipleship is the doorway, all of those, not to Heaven but rather to Hell- as is the fruit of obedience to God; for His vicars have condemned the sole doorway for us to seek to follow Him, and have kicked out those who seek to obtain virtue- for the only power there ever could be is moral standing and virtue.
Too simplistic . Leni Refienstahl tried to get Hitler into Nietzche but he thought he was too mercurial . Hitler preferred Shopenhaur .
National Socialism was not a simple doctrine of the state, it was neither a simple doctrine of Deutschland über alles of nineteenth-century Pan-Germanism, and it was not only the vision of the German land as the land of the Sacred, according to Hölderlin's vision, neither it was only the reawakening of the ancestral cruelty and anarchy of the ancient Germans and of their warlike religious mythology, which so worried Tacitus and for which Rome never succeeded in subduing the Germans, but was also the project of a new and superior divine humanity according to the Nietzsche's super homistic model.
He wanted to be a new humanity in the terms set by Nietzsche, whom Hitler declared his master. Indeed, as Heidegger observes,
«Nietzsche assigns to the highest form of man the name of "prey animal" and sees the supreme man as a "magnificent blond beast that wanders eager for prey and victory"».
This superhumanity, founded by National Socialism, benefits, according to Nietzsche, from the "gay science", which "dances in hell", the science of truth - according to Schelling's vision - not of the truth that leads to freedom, but of the truth founded on freedom , author of the "death of God", "devaluator of all values", shaper of herself in the manner of Fichte, operator "beyond good and evil", and even, as Heidegger illustrated, was the true metaphysics , which, basing itself on Descartes' cogito, through German idealism, finally understood in Nietzsche that being is the eternal return of the same, the "ring of return", as Severino says, symbolized by the swastika, symbol of the eternal death-life cycle; being, which is the will to power as an affirmation of its own power, which philosophy "with hammer blows" and mercilessly crushes lower humanity.
Nazism does not recognize the unity of mankind, human equality or brotherhood, and therefore does not recognize a universal, objective, fixed and determinate human nature, and therefore does not recognize a natural law and a natural law binding on positive law state, but since the state is divine and itself the source of morality ("ethical state"), it is the Führer himself, single and empirical determination of the will of the state, as subsisting will, will to power, who decides what is legitimate and illegitimate in the conduct of the citizen.
Nazism places humanity on two levels or on two planes or layers, in a similar way to the Gnostics, who distinguished the "spirituals" from the "psychics" and the "hylics". Now it's not that every ranking or opposition is prohibited. St. Paul distinguishes a "carnal man" from a "spiritual man"; we distinguish the learned from the unlearned, the healthy from the sick, the righteous from the wicked, the young from the elderly, without this impeding the passage from one state to another and the common belonging of all to the same human species. The defect of the Nazi meaning lies in placing insurmountable, ontological barriers between human races, such as between animals and humans, for which the German is by nature destined to dominate the weak or inferior or to eliminate them.
Hitler himself thus presents the new concept of humanity in a speech before the Reichstag on January 30, 1937 :
From the point of view of principles, instead of the concept of the individual or the concept of humanity, we place the idea of the people, of the people born of the blood that flows in our veins and of the soil that saw us born. For the first time, perhaps, in the history of mankind, it has been proclaimed in this country that of all the duties incumbent on man, the noblest and most elevated consists in maintaining the race that comes from God, … From the point from a juridical point of view, the conclusion follows that the conception according to which the law has the aim of ensuring and maintaining the protection of the individual in his person and in his goods is false.
The National Socialist revolution gave law and legal science a clear and unequivocal starting point: the true task of justice consists in preserving and defending the people against any element which shirks these obligations towards the community or which causes prejudice to the interests of the latter". By "people" we naturally mean the German people, whose interest therefore prevails over that of the "individual", that is, of the person and of humanity itself.
Notice how the following words of Hegel about the dominant people, which of course are Germans, fit what Hitler says here:
«The people to whom the moment of its geographical and anthropological existence belongs as a natural principle, is entrusted with the execution of the same in the process of the developing self-awareness of the Spirit of the world. This people is the ruling people in the history of the world, the ruling people for this age.
And these words of Hegel's are equally well suited to what Hitler says about law:
«The ground of law is generally the spiritual element and its next place and starting point is the will, which is free, so that freedom constitutes its substance and its determination and the system of law is the realm of freedom realised, the world of the spirit produced by moving from the spirit itself, like a second nature. …"
Further, and I conclude, even if there were different currents and tendencies within it, National Socialism was the final result, from an ideological point of view, of the convergence of idealism, pantheism, biological racism (positivist and not only), neo-paganism and Lutheranism. An explosive mix! It must be said that this movement, above all initially, presented some good aspects: for example, a strong and radical anti-communism, resolute opposition to liberalism, the will to defend the love of country against any cosmopolitan internationalism, the reparation for the wrongs suffered by Germany following the diktat of Versailles, the fight against atheism and Freemasonry, a collaboration between the social classes and the synthesis between love for the nation and the aspiration for complete social justice. Unfortunately, these positive aspects were included in a globally wrong synthesis and strongly invalidated by those non-Christian or even anti-Christian philosophical currents which, over time, dragged National Socialism towards an ever more dangerous and pernicious slope. This explains why, rightly, Pius XII in the allocution of June 2, 1945 spoke of "the satanic specter exhibited by National Socialism". Fascism avoided these extremes probably because Mussolini was much less fanatical and ideological than Hitler and because the negative aspects of fascism were more accidental than essential - or at least more contained both by the shrewdness of the exponents of fascism and by the very characteristics of the Italian people.
This person doesn't understand Nietzsche. Can't even get the basics right. Don't listen to him.
Nietzsche was no mere atheist. He was against the organized Christianity which he found despicable and life denying. He was highly critical of monotheism, but as a philologist writes in veneration of the Greek polytheism
Grammar Logic Rhetoric. This content falls of deaf ears of children aren’t formed in/with the trivium.
It is not the existence of God, the root of the problem, but the limited life span of humans, and living things!
Pk. I always offer up my communion to my 2 sons and mother never to be separated from God and my 89 yr okd mom's long healthy of mind and body life with many more such years. I will add you to this offering because the world needs more years of you.
Sick
Jordan Peterson needs to come to class. He praises Nietzsche in the sense that the he embraced God forgetting Nietzsche embraced his own God--self.
atheism was not a ‘religion’ to Nietzsche - that claim reeks of christian dogmatism. i’ve not encountered your work, nor your lectures, but as soon as i heard you say that, i examined your wikipedia page, and my suspicions were confirmed. it’s not that you’re a philosopher who happens to be a catholic - you’re fundamentally a christian apologist.
I just looked at the channel on which this was posted, and i suppose the name should’ve been enough to let me know we’re not engaging in honest philosophical inquiry and exploration.
@@ben_alfred "a christian apologist" ---
All Western philosophy pivots upon Christianity. All philosophy more generally pivots upon theism. Your hypothetical philosopher in a vacuum, or "a philosopher who happens to be" is simply a fiction. Philosophical inquiry and exploration is always an inquiry about God. Religion is how one puts those conclusions into practice.
@@andrewferg8737 1) You have also played fast and loose with terms bitterly in need of defining.
2)You have no grounds to suggest one of the premises in my criticism is that Nietzsche exists in a vacuum
3)Christianity pivots on the preceding ideas, religions, and cultures from which it emerged.
4)Much of reason and honest, clear-thinking inquiry was inherited from the Ancient Greeks, and so in some sense, Western philosophy pivots most strongly upon their post-socratic paradigm rather than on christianity.
5)The curiosity which enabled humans, once our intellects surpassed a threshold, to think of the questions subsumed under philosophy is the same that found deeply disquieting an absence of explanation for complex questions; the same that birthed narratives of fictitious spiritual entities, and also expertly crafted tales to make things not understood make more sense to them. They fit their world into their collective linguistic structure, and thus narratives and beliefs in supernatural explanations, intended to sate or sooth, are towards what humans incline. These proclivities have engrained themselves genetically. Naturally, since curiosity does not retire even after that initial void has been supplanted, more investigation occurs, and with civilisation, writing, more complex language, and the population size to manifest genius, it matures into philosophy and science. Thank god, or multiple less impressive explanatory god-like figures, that our propensities can yield to reason and evidence on occasion. Our capacity to adapt, to update if you will, has been a boon on par with our capacity to inquire. So then, in some sense, philosophical inquiry and religion and religious beliefs are intimately intertwined. They have both employed the same instrument - the human intellect - whilst motivated by the same force: curiosity. They are, however, still distinct.
@@ben_alfred Medieval, modern, and postmodern philosophy (ie, Western) is a conversation about Christianity.
Ancient philosophy (pre-Christian) west or east is a conversation about reality.
Reality, or existence in and of itself, is the referent for the term God based on the Mosaic Hebrew theonym יהוה from the root verb hayah meaning "to be." This theology predates Socrates by at least a millennium and served as the foil for or against which other systems of thought developed or faded.
@@andrewferg8737 you’ve not addressed most of what i’ve said
I recommend to read Nietzsche (and all philosophy) by yourself and do not listen to this simplifications and quotes out of context.
Every man, with a simple reasoning, knows that God exists; but this may be repugnant to him, because he feels it as a brake on the affirmation of himself and his own freedom. Atheism does not arise from any need for truth, as Nietzsche would have us believe, nor from the need to overcome superstition, as Lucretius would have it, nor from noble scientific reasoning, as Comte would have us believe, or from sincere aspirations for human greatness, as Feuerbach would have us believe or by the need to fight for the liberation of the oppressed, as Marx would have us believe, but from these petty, sordid and wretched interests.
we must recognize that in the modern age the question of the existence of God has become extremely complicated due to the thousand obstacles that charlatans and sophist philosophers have wanted to put in the way of reason towards God and due to the birth of gnoseologies which deny the first evidences of the senses and reason, evidence that forms the basis for the demonstration of the existence of God.
If you don't believe in the truth, how can you discover the supreme truth that is God? What interest can such a perspective have? If one does not believe in the truth-giving power of reason, it is logical that one ends up in atheism, because it is reason that leads to God. And an irrational "faith" which claims to replace reason is useless, because faith presupposes otherwise reason is not faith but fanaticism and cryptoatheism, as demonstrated by the path that goes from Luther to Hegel and from Hegel to Marx and from Marx to Nietzsche.
I partially repeat concepts already written in some previous comment, but I add some issues historically very important.
Marx calls Prometheus “the first saint and martyr of the philosophical calendar" - and we find him then in the first edition of the "Birth of tragedy" by Nietzsche on the cover of which a chained Prometheus is depicted who is devoured by the eagle of Zeus.
The whole spirit of nineteenth-century literature and aesthetics is moved by this idea of a Prometheus who is a bit like Nietzsche's Antichrist.
The process of atheism typical of nineteenth-century philosophy would be unthinkable without the critical destruction of the Gospel text. This passage, which is not highlighted at all in philosophy textbooks - as if philosophy moved on its own ground, as if this process of atheism were a self-referential problem and internal to pure philosophy, while instead, in my opinion, it depends on the fact that behind it there was a work of critical theology of an Enlightenment type.
The work of systematic demolition of the historicity of the Gospels continues in the nineteenth century, starting with Reimarus and arriving, always in the Hegelian school, up to David Friedrich Strauss who in 1835 publishes his Life of Jesus - Strauss continues and radicalises the work of Reimarus and had dozens of reprints placing itself as the foundation of the atheism of the Hegelian left. The young Nietzsche himself reads Strauss' Life of Jesus and because of this, we could say, loses
faith and is not alone!
In Nietzsche the postulate of modern rationalism fails; in the sense that all those premises that are at the origin of
idealistic position.
In Nietzsche they reach their culminating critical expression, and this massacre concerns the ontological proof. That is, Nietzsche, after Marx and after the Hegelian left, no longer accepts the idea that man is characterized starting from an idea of reason, from a constitutive idea of reason which would be the idea of God, the idea Of the. As I said in a previous comment, in Feuerbach this idea is still there, so much so that Feuerbach still retains the idea of religious nature of man - and it will be the accusation Marx makes against him after Stirner, i.e. after
1845. ”. In Nietzsche no longer secularization, that is, in him atheism takes the place of
secularization; for Nietzsche there is no longer the immanent God, now there is the rejection of God, the Prometheism gets its right all the way: Prometheus becomes the Antichrist.
This atheism, which however can no longer be based on secularization, takes on the aspect of the atheist option, that is, put in a synthetic formula, "God does not exist because I decide that he must not exist". There is no proof of the non-existence of God. In other words, in Nietzsche atheism reveals itself in its postulatory and no longer scientific nature.
@@PaoloGasparini-ux2kp Existence of God is not relevant question in our times and I wouldn't call Nietzsche an atheist in modern scientific sense because Nietzsche start from critique, from destroying old ways of thinking and go to the point of mental breakdown, never build anything. He recognized the fact that we killed God in that sense that we do not behave seriously enough to bear the thought of always-present-witness of all our actions, no matter what we claim we believe, so there is no point to argue.
We are not authentic anymore and our lies and immoral acts works for us as fine as so called truth and morality so there is no point to value one over another.
We can say theoretically that good is better than evil but in the world of facts, in the world of history and evolution we cannot prove it, we need another supernatural world to sustain this claim but Nietzsche reject believing in other worlds. So the question is not about existence of God but existence of life after dead and believe in Kingdom of Heaven. But after we killed God, it is irrelevant either.
His superman should overcome and escape from that good-evil relativity to the point where he's free to create his on values and this stays close to christianity message, the only difference is that he never preach about how to choose values or which one to choose. If you are not beyond good and evil you can't be authentic and real free person so no matter what you do everything is relative. Only from the point of real freedom you can choose values and decide that you put your trust in God or in Abyss. For Nietzsche Kingdom of Heaven is on Earth, in the place of full freedom, home for the superman. If it's not happen here it will never happen out there.
Nietzsche himself never stood at that point of absolute freedom due to his mental breakdown, so he's philosophy is rather from Abyss, he rejected Augustine's notion of predestination of grace. He tried by his own efforts and failed.
@@eldoradose 1/2 Dear friend, thank you for replying!
I start from the central affirmation of your answer: "Existence of God is not a relevant question in our times".
Sure, if God didn't exist, life would be all a vain agitation.
Yes, one can indulge in pleasures, but all in all, these are ephemeral experiences.
What can an atheist say if not what we find written in the Book of Wisdom: “Our life is short and sad; there is no remedy when a man dies.
We were born by chance and afterward we will be as if we had not been" (Wis 2:1-2).
And again: "The passage of a shadow is in fact our existence... Come therefore and let us enjoy the present goods, let us taste the creatures as in the time of youth! Let us satiate ourselves with fine wine and perfumes, let no spring flower escape us, let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither (Wis 9.5-8).
But the feeling of nothingness and the desire to please easily lead some to arrogance: “We lord it over the righteous, who is poor, we do not spare widows, nor do we have respect for the gray hair of an elderly old man. Let our strength be the law of justice, for weakness is useless" (Wis 9:10-11).
What can the reflections of an atheist lead to if not to this?
This means that in order to rediscover the sense of himself, a man must never stop questioning himself and "make his call firmer" (2 Pt 1:10).
A great convert, Blaise Pascal, whom Dr. Kreeft recently treated in one of these philosophical series, wrote: "The order of thought lies in starting from one's self, from one's author, from one's end." (Thoughts,146).
The order of thought! How beautiful is this expression!
A well-ordered thought that wants to reach the conclusion of the fundamental truth of one's life must "begin with one's own self, with one's author, with one's end".
Nietzsche said that God has ceased to be man's point of reference and that pleasures must be re-appropriated.
However, he had to admit that death is "his gloomy traveling companion" (The Gay Science 4,278).
Blaise Pascal said that man is the only animal that thinks about death and knows he is dying.
Faced with this reality of death, a question of meaning constantly emerges in man.
Now only God, for what he has told us and for what he has prepared for us (and how many incontrovertible demonstrations he has given us in Christ!), Can give complete meaning to our existence, to our death, and to our post-mortem.
For this reason, another philosopher, Saint Augustine said: "You God made us for you in our heart is restless until he rests in you" (Confessions, I, 1,1).
For an atheist, everything ends in death.
One could ask him what evidence he brings to say that with death everything ends.
He has none!
Yet, even before being a believer, one can affirm that man has a life that transcends matter and that this is precisely what marks the difference from the exclusively material life of animals.
Transcendent life is demonstrated by the fact that you talk to each other and that you communicate spiritual concepts, perhaps wrong, but you can speak of life, of death, of meaning and nonsense, of the existence of God or of his non-existence.
Well, isn't all this spiritual life? Isn't it life that transcends matter?
And if there is something in us that transcends matter, can it not mean that when the body, which is material, dissolves, there is something else that can exist?
The mere fact that, regardless of their existence, you can think of angels, demons, the inhabitants of heaven, the damned; Does not the mere thought that you yourselves may be there in their company manifest a spiritual activity and life which transcends matter, and which can subsist beyond the death of the body?
As you can see, these are not yet discourses of faith, because we are talking about what is the object of evident experience on the part of everyone.
Beyond the reasoning that I have brought you, there are facts such as those of diabolical possessions and apparitions which are indications of an afterlife.
I am thinking, for example, of the apparitions of Lourdes or of Fatima (these days in Venice, in San Salvador's Church, we have the "peregrinatio Mariae, a copy of the statue of Fatima, until the 8th of May) which have been examined in a very strict manner by the authorities civil rather than ecclesiastical.
I am not speaking of Lourdes or Fatima to demonstrate the supernatural, but only to simply say that even from a rational point of view we have signs and attestations of the afterlife.
While the atheist (or rather, the one who has not yet discovered the love of God) has none in favor of him.
Indeed, even if he brought someone, it could not be that it is a testimony coming from the afterlife, blatantly disavowing his own assertion.
2/2
We say frankly that atheism is quite always a pretext for doing one's will instead of God's. As a will to reject God's will in order to do one's own, atheism is a mortal sin. If the atheist is, therefore, a lover of moral values, of the common good, or of universal brotherhood, it is certainly not so as an atheist, but by his choice of convenience, always reserving the freedom to transgress these values, when it suits him. Respect for universal values is the basis of faith in God, which is its universal principle. On the other hand, atheism in itself leads the subject to subjectivism and individualism, that is, to give a damn about the common good or interests, and to pay attention only to one's own personal gain.
We must consider that the human will, even after original sin, is constitutively inclined towards Him by God, but since he is free, he has the possibility of constituting or considering the good of him, not God but itself. He is made for an absolute good which is God, but by its free choice, he can absolutize the relative. He is made for the infinite good, but by its own free choice, he can regard the finite as if he were infinite. He is made for eternity, but he can choose the storm. He is made for the ipsum Esse, but may prefer becoming; he is made for life, but he can choose death.
Every man, therefore, with simple reasoning, knows that God exists; but this may be repugnant to him because he feels it as a brake on the affirmation of himself and his own freedom. Atheism does not arise from any need for truth, as Nietzsche would like us to believe.
We must free ourselves from the horrendous precipice into which the famous Italian poet Leopardi fell (my wife did her thesis on him), who believed that being is an illusion and nothing, comes from nothing and goes towards nothing.
The famous five ways of St. Thomas to prove the existence of God, so what purpose do they have? Prove that God exists to someone who doesn't know it, just as I could prove in a trial, for example, that it was the husband who killed his wife?. Not at all! St. Thomas does not intend to bring the reader to the knowledge of something he does not know but to strengthen the conviction already possessed, at least implicitly, by the reader.
It must be recognized that in the modern age, the question of the existence of God has become extremely complicated due to the thousand obstacles that charlatans and sophist philosophers have wanted to put in the way of reason in relation to God and due to the birth of gnoseologies which deny the first evidence of the senses and of reason, evidence which forms the basis for demonstrating the existence of God.
If you don't believe in the truth, how can you find out the supreme truth which is God? What interest can such a perspective have? If one does not believe in the truthful power of reason, it is logical that one ends up in atheism, because it is reason that leads to God. An irrational "faith" that claims to replace reason is useless because faith presupposes reason, otherwise, it is not faith but fanaticism and crypto atheism, as demonstrated by the path that goes from Luther to Hegel and from Hegel to Marx and from Marx to Nietzsche, as I already mentioned above.
In the meantime, the Church has deemed it appropriate to make the best of a bad situation by understanding the opportunity that in terms of civil coexistence there are no problems in recognizing the status of citizens even atheists. And so it happens that our modern societies born from the French and American revolutions, no longer founded like the previous ones on the obligation of the subject to respect the Christian religion of the sovereign, but on the common commitment of citizens to respect the universal rights of man, the profession of atheist no longer appears as a crime against the State, but the Constitutions, with the consent of the Church, recognize equal rights to believing citizens and atheists in the name of the right to freedom of thought, which is not only religious freedom but believe or not believe in God.
The problem today is that there are many erroneous or incomplete or contradictory or insufficient concepts of God: Mohammedans, Occamists, Cusanians, Lutherans, fideists, Cartesians, Spinozists, Masonicists, Enlightenmentists, rationalists, Kantians, Fichtians, Hegelians, Schellingians, pseudomystics, ontologists , pantheist, modernist, Heideggerian and rahnerian of God. And many Catholics drink these poisoned drinks perhaps without realizing it.
I limit my self to treat only this aspect of atheism, that is far more the most important issue of our time, far more than any particular Author.
In a nutshell, we have to choose, evil or good, devil or Christ, the Brave New World without God or Christ. Bread and wellness, and welfare, and fitness, or the Christ crucifixed and Resort.
Finally, I truly thank you, and so do all the numerous interlocutors I have met so far on the WOF philosophical RUclips channel because you have stimulated me to investigate the reasons for my hope and to be further certain of it.
Which I wouldn't have done if I hadn't been constantly prodded by objections.
@@PaoloGasparini-ux2kp Seduction is stronger than reasoning. People use their intellect to find new ways for power, fame, and wealth to be even more seductive. So for many God lives in power, fame and wealth. For others God lives in virtues so they looking for wisdom and justice and the good but all of these are one, unity and not divided so you cannot be good or wise or virtuous in otological sense, you can only try to become, try to act in that manner. Power, fame, wealth, all sensuall pleasures you can gain, but not the good and not the virtue, not the wisdom or love. These are deeds not something to gain.
You cannot believe in existence of God, it's irrelevant because God is so obvious but people put "Him" in different places.
To believe means to trust that you are God in that sense that your deed is truly good, and virtuous and not a dream only. So the problem now is...how do you know that you're not cheating, or delusion about yourself and in fact behave in immoral tricky fashion, or dream? For Nietzsche the whole western culture from Socrates is nothing more than cheating and pretending.You can believe in truth but how do you know what the truth really is? If you know what truth is, this means that you are perfect and omniscient. Obviously we are not, so we only try to become and participate in the truth but if we not are but only try to become, we do not know what we are doing actually because we reaching for something unknowable for us, like a blind man or a dreamer. So being and becoming must be one and the same and to do so you need love as third part. Without love you don't really know what you are doing so the only thing left for you is hope and faith that you are not making things worst. Reason is a lighthouse but seductions also shine. So what is relevant is hope, love and faith, not only faith in existence which comes out of reasoning.
Atheism is delusion wheel because you put your hope, love and faith in something that comes out from hope, love and faith, in yourself only.Instead of believing that your act is godly, you believe that the act is only humanistic, that everything is only your creation, and by You you mean homos sapiens or whathever, but not God. So comes "Eternal return" and Nietzsche struggle to come out of it. He knew that becoming is the ladder to escape from that wheel, that dreamy state of being, to wake up but third essential part of trinity is love, not will to power.
Now many people might believe that they are something more than monkey, that they are gods, but when they act not out of love but out of will to power, they are heading toward the same place where Nietzsche ended, toward a fall and breakdown.
Uh oh you've got a major problem with how your framing Nietzsche. Thumbs down on this one.
LMAO
"It is significant that Hitler - who was certainly no philosopher - admired Nietzsche, as did Mussolini, who actually wrote some philosophy defending Nazism as The Logical upshot of moral relativism."
"Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition. . . . If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be the bearers of an objective, immortal truth . . . then there is nothing more relativistic than
fascistic attitudes and activity. . . . From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt
to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable." That's from Mussolini's Diuturna, pages 374-77 (Peter Kreeft, A Refutation of Moral Relativism, p.18)
Your reduction of Hitler into the cartoon cut out bad guy cripples you
Pity is not a sin for Nietzsche pity is part of the will to power and a necessary capacity of the Ubermensch
Marx won and this old man proves it.
Capitalism still standing strong how did he won
This prof is too biased in the glorification of Christianity.he supports Christianity against paganism. Heidegger was no Pagan but a surreptitious Christian
lol :) no you can not be that cause Christ said whoever is ashamed of me...i will be ashamed of him too.
@@hrabmv that is your idea but Christianity is an arrogant religion that shamed other civilizations s truth conveniently forgotten it thinks thst God exists only in the euro world Paganism is open minded Christianity genocides others it has the nature of exclusivity it is based on doxa. All these qualities are not lost in Kant Kant asu
ed the superiority of the west even through lies like “ only white men can do mathematics” these ideas are justifications based on bias This dogmatism is why western religions are predatory and the prof ignored history as he criticizes Nietzsche
See above
I'm not disagreeing with the overarching appraisal of the lecture as expressing "biases," but the judgment that Heidegger was more pagan than Christian is not a stretch. I'm not interested in figuring out who's a "real Christian," but Heidegger openly admitted that his philosophy was indelibly shaped by his Catholic upbringing--but also by his break from Christianity ("Mein bisheriger Weg" (1937/38)). His wife, Elfride, claims that her husband had lost his faith by the early years of their marriage. Yes, Heidegger was raised Catholic, and he requested a Catholic burial, but he was also very hostile to traditional Christianity through most of his scholarly life (even while importing all sorts of Christian notions of guilt, fallenness, etc.). His obsession with the Greeks, his sense that Western man has been suffering from the "forgetfulness of Being" since the time of the Presocratics, and his articulation of Christianity's contribution to the decline, are too well-documented in his most prominent works to require citation. This isn't to say that he's definitely "more pagan than Christian"--since everyone will interpet these words differently, and b/c Heidegger relies on notions introduced in Christianity (Paul, Augustine, Luther)--but I'm not sure Kreeft's claim here is simply the result of bias. (Though other claims of his probably are.)
Thank you