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(a) First, let’s think about Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the human being …

Walter Kaufmann, who almost singlehandedly introduced Nietzsche and his philosophy to the English-speaking world in the 20th Century, cites Stefan Zweig on Nietzsche’s circumstances and his chronic health problems in The Portable Nietzsche:

"Carefully the myopic man sits down to a table; carefully, the man with the sensitive stomach considers every item on the menu … for every mistake in his diet upsets his sensitive digestion and every transgression in his nourishment wreaks havoc with his quivering nerves for days … nothing that stimulates, refreshes, or rests him: only the short meager meal and a little urbane, unprofound conversation in a soft voice with an occasional neighbor (as a man speaks who for years has been unused to talking and is afraid of being asked too much). […]

[And back up in his tiny unheated apartment] a heavy and graceless trunk, his only possession, with the two shirts and the other worn suit. Otherwise, only books and manuscripts, and on a tray innumerable bottles and jars and potions: against the migraines, against the stomach cramps, against spasmodic vomiting, against the slothful intestines, and above all the dreadful sedatives against his insomnia, chloral hydrate and Veronal. … his fingers freezing, his double glasses pressed close to the paper, his hurried hand writes for hours – words the dim eyes can hardly decipher. For hours he sits like this until his eyes burn."

In this same volume Kaufmann observes in connection with 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' (a writing saturated with biblical allusions that seems to me to be a sustained and blasphemous invitation or dare for God to intervene) that “what Nietzsche needed most was [an editor with] a blue pencil”. I teach my undergraduates that what Nietzsche needed most was a devoted friend, a faithful, articulate Lutheran friend who would stick with him over the long and provide a long-term profound conversation about God in Christ and life in the life He gives us to the full. This, I tell my students, is why they must read Nietzsche: to be prepared and to be on the lookout for 21st-century Nietzsche’s who need their friendship. And, I also explain that they need to read Nietzsche during their university days to begin building an immunity toward his philosophy.

(b) Second, let’s think about Friedrich Nietzsche, the author …
​
For a rather brief intro to his view of philosophy, see the video at
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Friedrich+Nietzsche+Ubermensch&&view=detail&mid=93855D73D4DF9FD1B1D993855D73D4DF9FD1B1D9&FORM=VRDGAR

If you’re amenable to reading one complete writing of Nietzsche, I recommend spending some time perusing Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. BTW, odd things happen when you google this title, so it’s worth mentioning that the original German title is Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. As Kaufmann explains, Wissenschaft is not what we think of as the natural sciences, but is a way of referring to a disciplined study. The colorful word fröhliche sets the tone for the mode Nietzsche is working in, so to speak. It’s not exactly philosophy as done in the university classroom. As Kaufmann says,

"Thus the title of the book has polemical overtones; it is meant to be anti-German, anti-professorial, anti-academic and goes well with the idea of “the good European” that is encountered in these pages. It is also meant to suggest “light feet,” “dancing,” “laughter” – and ridicule of “the spirit of gravity.”

(It is, then, a bit fröhlicheit to have a university professor by the name of “Schulz” and sometimes known for his gravitas to be providing you this introduction to section 125 of Nietzsche’s book, nicht war?!)

The Gay Science is written as a series of poems and aphorisms. Nietzsche scholars will usually point out that this playful format hides a coherent system underneath it all. I am not so sure that there is a coherent argument here. It’s philosophical pyrotechnics, so you ought to watch out that you don’t get scorched. At any rate, I am now going to take the Master Metaphor of The Madman (Book 3, Section 125 of The Gay Science) as a stand-alone piece for our consideration in keeping with Nietzsche’s aphoristic style.

So, please read Nietzsche’s The Madman in its entirety once or twice. I’ve attached my annotated version of the metaphor below. The Cambridge edition of the complete book is available as a downloadable PDF at www.holybooks.com/.../The-Gay-Science-by-Friedrich-Nietzsche.pdf. Kaufmann’s translation with commentary is what I use. Used copies of that old standby are readily available in hard copy.

For a single volume introduction to Nietzsche and his work, see Walter Kaufman’s The Portable Nietzsche.

(c) Third, let’s think about Friedrich Nietzsche, the patron saint of postmodernism as we experience it …

Dramatic 21st-century videos on Nietzsche: https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=God+Is+Dead+Friedrich+Nietzsche&&view=detail&mid=7C3D44613F6E1248F3C97C3D44613F6E1248F3C9&FORM=VRDGAR
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=God+Is+Dead+Friedrich+Nietzsche&&view=detail&mid=212F35AF932AB4103F7C212F35AF932AB4103F7C&rvsmid=7C3D44613F6E1248F3C97C3D44613F6E1248F3C9&FORM=VDQVAP&fsscr=0

Let me offer this excursus regarding Western culture – the culture for which Nietzsche says that God is dead – from my own philosophical critique of Jacque Derrida’s “deconstruction” of marriage. 

1. Here is Derrida’s recommendation for a secularized kind of marriage:

2. Here is my definition of Western culture, the culture which Derrida takes as being dead to God

3. Derrida was committed to postmodernism. His “patron saint” was Nietzsche. You’ll notice that he provides a demonstrably poor, anemic and pitiful notion of marriage as a replacement for what Bonhoeffer identified as “the divine mandate of marriage”. In other words, Derrida dismisses the traditional concept of marriage for no reason other than its biblical origin and offers in return … nothing but his own dogmatic and adolescent replacement. 

Towards the Übermensch (“the Overman, the Super-man, the Transhuman”)
 
     "I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? […] What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment...
     Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! […]
     Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth...
     What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue.
     The hour when you say, 'What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.'
     The hour when you say, 'What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the lion his food? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'
     The hour when you say, 'What matters my virtue? As yet it has not made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'  [***]
     'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink ...
     One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health.
     'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink.”
 
-- Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Walter Kaufmann, translator

Download the conversation here:

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Kant’s Ultimate Principle for Relationships
(a) Think of Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) as the poster Professor of the Enlightenment.
 
To hear from Kant in his own words what the Enlightenment Project is please see his 1784 essay What is Enlightenment (at least the first two paragraphs) at www.allmendeberlin.de/What-is-Enlightenment.pdf
 
I recommend considering that this Enlightenment Project amounts to “Let’s assume that the God of the Bible does not exist and see how politics, ethics and life are better without Him”.
 
This, then, is what Kant is endeavoring to do with his moral philosophy:
 
“Sapere aude! ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’- that is the motto of enlightenment.”
-Or, in other words- Act veluti si Deus daretur. “Act as if God is not a given” – that is the Enlightenment Project.
 
(b) How does Kant work this out? He introduces the categorical imperative.
 
To read Kant’s thinking on this way of construing ethics (a branch of philosophy seeking to answer the  question, “How then ought we to live together as human beings?”) see his 1785 book Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.
 
The complete Groundwork is available in its entirety with footnotes and critical essays at http://www.inp.uw.edu.pl/mdsie/Political_Thought/Kant%20-%20groundwork%20for%20the%20metaphysics%20of%20morals%20with%20essays.pdf
 
I’ve included the central sections from the Groundwork (around section 420) regarding the three forms of the categorical imperative for you below, with my highlighting.
 
BTW, for the very hearty philosophical appetite, there is a nice and blessedly brief introduction to Kant’s moral or ethical reasoning within the context of his wider philosophical development at http://www.iep.utm.edu/kantmeta/. Section (8) treats his ethics.
 
(c) Above you will find my PHIL 101 handout with my paraphrases of the categorical imperative.
(d)  About the voice behind the categorical imperative …
 
Q.  As you read the groundwork or my paraphrases, do you hear a familiar voice behind the categorical imperative?
A1. It may sound like your mother’s voice, but oddly reversed: “If you are getting set to jump off the bridge, do you want everyone else to jump off too?”
A2. It may sound like Jesus’ voice in His Sermon on the Mount: “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12).
 
(e)  In university ethics courses, we normally refer to Kant’s moral philosophy as deontology or a duty-driven ethic.
 
However, this Enlightenment deontology is derived from a biblical, 3rd petition understanding of ethics. Call it biblical deontology (see Ecclesiastes, esp 12:11-14)
 
11 The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd. 12 My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh. 13 The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. 14 For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.
 
About Deontology or a “Duty-driven” Ethos
 
“[Taking to heart Genesis 22 and Abraham’s test.] A Temptation; but what does that mean? That which ordinarily tempts a human, to be sure, is whatever would keep him from doing his duty, but here the temptation is the ethical itself, which would keep him from doing God’s will. But Here the necessity of a new category for understanding Abraham becomes apparent.
-- Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
 
Such a Christian ethics, although it is reasonable, is not a gnostic undertaking; on the contrary, it is an anxious, existential resurrecting to a new life kata Christon, in Christ Himself. Think of Bonhoeffer’s Christ-ethic.
 
Doing God’s Will versus Ethical Self-Knowledge
 
“The knowledge of good and evil seems to be the aim of all ethical reflection. The first task of Christian ethics is to invalidate this knowledge” (21).
 
1. All knowledge now is based upon self-knowledge (29).
1.1 The experience of shame indicates an original loss (24-27).
1.2 Our original comprehension of God and other human beings has become empty.
1.3 Our original union has been displaced by disunion: disunion from God, from human beings, from
self (see the datum of conscience).
1.4 “Know yourself” (gnothi seauton, Greek) is unachievable.
 
2. Freedom in Christ, not knowledge, is the center of Christian ethics (30ff).
2.1 We cannot know or approach God except through the Word (nisi per Verbum).
2.2 Jesus’ freedom is the freedom of the absolute simplicity of His action. There is never a plurality of possibilities, conflicts or alternatives; there is only doing the will of His Father.
 
3. Doing God’s will, not merely contemplating the good, is the summum bonum of Christian ethics.
3.1 Genuine knowledge depends on God’s revelation in the Person of Christ (37).
3.2 The knowledge of the Pharisees was barren, disruptive, negating.
3.3 The knowledge of Jesus and His disciples is fruitful, redemptive, active.
 
4. Paradoxically, then, if we gain merely an epistemology from Christ – if hearing the Word does
not make us doers – knowing becomes a forgetting (48).
4.1 Hearing and doing are interdependent.
4.2 “To know” in the biblical languages means “to love;” we love because He first loved us (1 John
4:19).
4.3 Loving God is simply the other aspect of being loved by God.
 
-- adapted from Bonhoeffer’s Ethics (Part One, I)

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Berkeley’s Table
a) Read Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge. There is an enjoyable version of Berkeley at http://sqapo.com/berkeley.htm. Let’s agree not to tell anyone that we are using Glyn Hughes’ Squashed Philosophers or Berkeley’s Principles squashed down to 35 minutes of reading!
 
A full edition of Principles is downloadable at www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwilkins/Berkeley/HumanKnowledge/1734/HumKno.pdf.
 
There is a nice, free self-quiz at http://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780195342604/student/chapt3/quiz/berkeley/.
 
b) George Berkeley (1685 – 1753) is the only major philosopher in the modern period for whom the God of the Bible is taken seriously as a lynchpin in his philosophy. A key Bible passage for Berkeley is Acts 17:28. Be sure to reread Acts 17:16-34 and then to invest at least a few minutes looking up verse 28 in a study Bible or in your favorite Greek NT commentary.
 
c) Berkeley is taking on the empiricist philosopher John Locke (1632–1704). To get a quick understanding of empiricism, please see especially Part 2. Regarding John Locke at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SPE), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/.
 
I’ve attached my own annotated version of part of the SPE article on Berkeley’s philosophy below.
 
d) Berkeley challenges Locke’s materialistic empiricism (that extramental entities automatically deliver their ideas into our minds via our senses). In answer to the problems that Locke’s materialism poses, Berkeley differentiates between inanimate entities and mindful beings. The essence of inanimate beings, Berkeley argues, is to be perceived (esse est percipi), whereas the essence of mindful beings is to perceive (esse est percipere). Epistemologically speaking, then, it makes no sense to talk about epistemology or knowledge without a mindful being, a perceiving being such as a human being – or at least the God of the Bible – doing the perceiving and knowing. No knower, no epistemology. So, something much more robust that a materialist empiricism is called for – something such as God Himself, “in whom we live and move and have our being”!
 
BTW, Metaphysics = Ontology + Epistemology

e) Berkeley’s challenge to Locke’s materialism has been put into poetry:
 
Berkeley Limericks by Ronald Knox:
 
There was a young man who said, "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."
 
God's Reply:
Dear Sir, Your astonishment's odd:
I am always about in the quad
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by
Yours faithfully, God.

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Descartes’ Evil Demon
a) Read Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy with particular attention to Meditation 1 and Meditation 3. Then reread these two Meditations!
 
The Classical Library posting at http://www.classicallibrary.org/descartes/meditations/  is somewhat searchable. There is a basic outline of Descartes’ arguments at http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/dbanach/medol.htm, but D. Weiss’s annotated version at http://www.faculty.ycp.edu/~dweiss/phl321_epistemology/descartes  gets five stars for its annotations and thought-provoking questions embedded in Descartes’ text.
 
(The Descartes’ Introduction, Meditation 1 and Meditation 3 from the Weiss version is posted above for your reference.)

b) We’re moving now into the modern period of Western Thought (1600 – the present), a period characterized by the messy divorce of faith by reason. Think of Descartes (1596 – 1650) as the keynote speaker of modernity. Descartes ushers in a sea change for Western thought. It’s the tectonic shift from looking to God for salvation to looking to science for salvation.

So, we will begin our understanding of what’s going on in modernity with a consideration of Descartes’ scientistic philosophy and move from there into his treatment of God as a philosophical idea.

c) As a warm-up to a fundamental, Cartesian problem and for a glimpse at the consequences of this sea change in modernity, please view the first 25-30 minutes of the Princeton lecture, Toward a More Perfect Human by Leon Kass at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N_BOyGFekA


This will introduce you to Kass’s critique of scientism or the modern penchant for replacing Christ crucified with salvation-by-science. It’s a longer introduction to Descartes than you may expect – it’s a bioethics lecture, in fact – but do stick with it. There’s a method to my madness; I’m setting the stage for the madness of Descartes’ method for doing philosophy!


d) After the video lecture read Kass’s diagnosis of the root of scientism in Descartes’ way of doing philosophy at http://log24.com/log07/saved/071024-KassApp.html  I’ve included this below for you, with my highlighting added.

e) Now we are in a position to see what an innovator Descartes is in his philosophy – an innovator of the sort that C.S. Lewis refers to in The Abolition of Man.
It’s the Cartesian Two-Step:
1. First, reduce philosophy, the befriending of wisdom, to a scientific project that methodologically reduces our human quest for understanding creation to a sort of science for manipulation of nature.
2. Second, treat God as a mental idea.




My analysis
Descartes’ treatment of God as a mental idea is innovative, but unwarranted. Prior to Descartes and modernity ideas were not assumed to originate within one’s mind, but were, already and always, in the public domain. Recall Plato’s Cave, where the Idea of The Good is “beyond being” or Aristotle’s intellectual confidence that ideas and the truth of reality were located in language or logos. Think of how language has us – how language shapes our neuro-architecture, rather than the other way around.


It is a newfangled idea (!) that God (or God as an Evil Demon!) could be approached as a mental idea in the first place. Note the scientism and the mathematical manhandling of creation and the human creature involved in this methodological innovation. See Leon Kass on Descartes’ Innovative method below.


Consider the methodological diminution of Descartes’ Methodism, so to speak.


Observe how it reroutes the philosophical inquiry away from the theology of the cross and toward science for salvation. (For the Lutheran theologia crucis as an epistemological recognition regarding God, see Article 4 of the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, an article on Justification: “But God cannot be treated with, God cannot be apprehended nisi per Verbum, except through the Word.”)


Observe further how Descartes’ Methodism reduces our working understanding of the human being as the sort of living creature that is characterized by logos.


Consider the Cartesian hangover in relation to our understanding and practice of the Gospel ministry, given that the office of the ministry is not assessable scientifically. See my LOGIA article, On the Terminating of the Church’s Professors (Vol 19, No 4, Reformation 2010).