Rick Roderick on Kierkegaard and the Contemporary Spirit [full length]

This video is 7th in the 8-part lecture series Philosophy and Human Values (1990).

Thanks to rickroderick.org for making this available. I'm merely interested in redistributing to anyone who might enjoy and benefit.

I. A recap of Nietzsche:

A. Power is inter I wined with things which are not dependent on power, such as truth and goodness.

B. The Greeks were straight-forward with their idea of virtue. It was based on excellence and the fulfillment of human powers.

C. Christian morality grew out of a slave context. Its doctrines of love and compassion were tooted in resentment of a power that could not express itself.

II. God is "dead."

III. Kierkegaard

A. In a place where all are Christians, ipso facto, none are Christians.
B. Kierkegaard did not believe that each one of us are individual subjects some how separated from each other like monads.

IV. The Sickness Onto Death:

A. Kierkegaard argues that psychology is, in principle, impossible.

B. The self is not a substantial thing but a deep relation, and it's not even that relation but the relating of relations.

1. We are a synthesis between our desire for freedom and our recognition of brutal necessity.

2. Because we are a relation, we are incomplete.

3. This despair constitutes the self.

C. Kierkegaard describes a morally ill person who is struggling with death yet does not die. (sick unto death)

D. The hope is to find a way to die.

1. Suicide is not acceptable.

2. Despair is the reaction to the struggle to be human in inhuman conditions.

V. The relation to human values and social systems:

A. The 19th century story was the replacement of manual labor with machine labor, while the 20th century story will be the replacement of intellectual labor with machine labor.

B. Humans driven to this extent of socialization would greatly prefer death but are unable to do it,

C. In the postmodern culture, images are more real than the real thing, and patriotism is cynical.

D. Things no longer look like human values but rather human commodities.