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From the Lawh-i-Hikmat, or Tablet of Wisdom. This provides much insight into how important it is for Bahá’í’s to understand Ancient philosophy if they want to understand philosophy in general, as Bahá’u'lláh describes it as an emanation from the Prophets, saying that most philosophers simply derive their knowledge from the insights of the Ancients. Alfred North Whitehead’s justly famous quotation comes to mind:
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
-Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 39 [Free Press, 1979]
“Although it is recognized that the contemporary men of learning are highly qualified in philosophy, arts and crafts, yet were anyone to observe with a discriminating eye he would readily comprehend that most of this knowledge hath been acquired from the sages of the past, for it is they who have laid the foundation of philosophy, reared its structure and reinforced its pillars. Thus doth thy Lord, the Ancient of Days, inform thee. The sages aforetime acquired their knowledge from the Prophets, inasmuch as the latter were the Exponents of divine philosophy and the Revealers of heavenly mysteries. Men quaffed the crystal, living waters of Their utterance, while others satisfied themselves with the dregs. Everyone receiveth a portion according to his measure. Verily He is the Equitable, the Wise.
“Empedocles, who distinguished himself in philosophy, was a contemporary of David, while Pythagoras lived in the days of Solomon, son of David, and acquired Wisdom from the treasury of prophethood. It is he who claimed to have heard the whispering sound of the heavens and to have attained the station of the angels. In truth thy Lord will clearly set forth all things, if He pleaseth. Verily, He is the Wise, the All-Pervading.
“The essence and the fundamentals of philosophy have emanated from the Prophets. That the people differ concerning the inner meanings and mysteries thereof is to be attributed to the divergence of their views and minds. We would fain recount to thee the following: One of the Prophets once was communicating to his people that with which the Omnipotent Lord had inspired Him. Truly, thy Lord is the Inspirer, the Gracious, the Exalted. When the fountain of wisdom and eloquence gushed forth from the wellspring of His utterance and the wine of divine knowledge inebriated those who had sought His threshold, He exclaimed: ‘Lo! All are filled with the Spirit.’ From among the people there was he who held fast unto this statement and, actuated by his own fancies, conceived the idea that the spirit literally penetrateth or entereth into the body, and through lengthy expositions he advanced proofs to vindicate this concept; and groups of people followed in his footsteps. To mention their names at this point, or to give thee a detailed account thereof, would lead to prolixity, and would depart from the main theme. Verily, thy Lord is the All-Wise, the All-Knowing. There was also he who partook of the choice wine whose seal had been removed by the Key of the Tongue of Him Who is the Revealer of the Verses of thy Lord, the Gracious, the Most Generous.
“Verily, the philosophers have not denied the Ancient of Days. Most of them passed away deploring their failure to fathom His mystery, even as some of them have testified. Verily, thy Lord is the Adviser, the All-Informed.
“Consider Hippocrates, the physician. He was one of the eminent philosophers who believed in God and acknowledged His sovereignty. After him came Socrates who was indeed wise, accomplished and righteous. He practised self-denial, repressed his appetites for selfish desires and turned away from material pleasures. He withdrew to the mountains where he dwelt in a cave. He dissuaded men from worshipping idols and taught them the way of God, the Lord of Mercy, until the ignorant rose up against him. They arrested him and put him to death in prison. Thus relateth to thee this swift-moving Pen. What a penetrating vision into philosophy this eminent man had! He is the most distinguished of all philosophers and was highly versed in wisdom. We testify that he is one of the heroes in this field and an outstanding champion dedicated unto it. He had a profound knowledge of such sciences as were current amongst men as well as of those which were veiled from their minds. Methinks he drank one draught when the Most Great Ocean overflowed with gleaming and life-giving waters. He it is who perceived a unique, a tempered, and a pervasive nature in things, bearing the closest likeness to the human spirit, and he discovered this nature to be distinct from the substance of things in their refined form. He hath a special pronouncement on this weighty theme. Wert thou to ask from the worldly wise of this generation about this exposition, thou wouldst witness their incapacity to grasp it. Verily, thy Lord speaketh the truth but most people comprehend not.
“After Socrates came the divine Plato who was a pupil of the former and occupied the chair of philosophy as his successor. He acknowledged his belief in God and in His signs which pervade all that hath been and shall be. Then came Aristotle, the well-known man of knowledge. He it is who discovered the power of gaseous matter. These men who stand out as leaders of the people and are pre-eminent among them, one and all acknowledged their belief in the immortal Being Who holdeth in His grasp the reins of all sciences.”
Here is a moving and brilliant TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert on the creative process. She discusses the burden placed on many artists today by believing they, themselves, are the source of their genius. She says,
“You know, I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It’s like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.”
She suggests, in looking back to Ancient Greece and Rome, where they believed in divine inspiration, that our inspiration may come from an outside source. We are vessels then, for something greater and beautiful that moves and works with us and through us.
She gives a remarkable example of a poet from Virginia: ”I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who’s now in her 90s, but she’s been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, ‘run like hell.’ And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she’d be running and running and running, and she wouldn’t get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it ‘for another poet.’”
I am reminded of the letter ‘Abdu’l-Bahá once wrote to a believer: “O thou lamp who art enkindled with the fire of the Love of God! Verily, I read thy recent letter which showed thy strong love, thy being ablaze with the fire of the love of thy Lord, the Mighty, the Praised, and the penetration of the Spirit of Truth in thy limbs, nerves, veins, arteries, bones, blood and flesh, until it hath taken the reins of power from thy hands and moveth thee as it willeth, causeth thee to speak in what it willeth and attracteth thee as it willeth.“ The creative process that Elizabeth Gilbert describes extends beyond the sphere of artists, as divine inspiration is something we can draw upon in every facet of our lives. It is especially relevant in our service to the Faith.
As Bahá’í’s we know there are forces beyond ourselves working in the world, through us and others. Our task, then, is to become channels for those powerful positive forces of integration, and this is our hope and desire as we strive to serve in this Plan. And as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá reminds and relieves us:
“Remember not your own limitations; the help of God will come to you. Forget yourself. God’s help will surely come! When you call on the Mercy of God waiting to reinforce you, your strength will be tenfold. Look at me: I am so feeble, yet I have had the strength given me to come amongst you: a poor servant of God, who has been enabled to give you this message! I shall not be with you long! One must never consider one’s own feebleness, it is the strength of the Holy Spirit of Love, which gives the power to teach. The thought of our own weakness could only bring despair. We must look higher than all earthly thoughts; detach ourselves from every material idea, crave for the things of the spirit; fix our eyes on the everlasting bountiful Mercy of the Almighty, who will fill our souls with the gladness of joyful service to His command `Love One Another’.“ (Paris Talks, 38-39)
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I was recently looking at an article on Mashable concerning statistics on the penetration of social networking around the world, and wondered if there was anything in the Bahá’í writings to provide insight into this phenomena. I then came across the following passage in Century of Light, published in 2001:
“The system, so prophetically foreseen sixty years ago by Shoghi Effendi, builds a sense of shared community among its users that is impatient of either geographic or cultural distances.” (Century of Light, p. 133) Though they talk here about Shoghi Effendi’s prediction of the internet, their description of the sense of shared community created by the internet was clearly a prescient insight into the evolution of internet use worldwide. It is interesting to note that Friendster began in 2001, Linkedin and Myspace in 2003, and Facebook in 2004, so their analysis preceded the social networking revolution.
Here is the very informative picture from the Mashable article. Note the high percentage of participants in South Eastern Asia. It is a big graphic, so you will need to click on it to see the whole thing.
Also, be sure to check out my earlier post, Facebook and the Contemporary World
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Here is a re-post from Harvard University Press’ blog concerning books on secularism and atheism. The information and references provided here I have found to be very informative and helpful.
“So You Want To Study Secularism?
“According to a report in yesterday’s New York Times that is making its way around the internet this morning, this fall Pitzer College will become the first institution to create a department of secular studies and offer a major in secularism. Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist of religion, proposed the department as a way of concentrating study on modern society’s shift away from religion as its primary organizational structure. The Times quotes Zuckerman as saying that “There are hundreds of millions of people who are nonreligious. I want to know who they are, what they believe, why they are nonreligious. You have some countries where huge percentages of people—Czechs, Scandinavians—now call themselves atheists. Canada is experiencing a huge wave of secularization. This is happening very rapidly.”
“At HUP over the last handful of years we’ve developed an essential little list of books on this very topic. Consider this our pitch for course adoption.
A Secular Age by Charles Taylot
“Our list on secular studies is anchored by Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, published in 2007. The book begins with a simply phrased question that captures the spirit of inquiry behind Pitzer’s new endeavor: “What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?” More simply asked than answered, of course.
“Taylor notes three senses in which modern Western society could be said to have become secular. One applies to public spaces or social spheres, where behavior and interactions were once guided by religious principles but have now been ostensibly emptied of God. As Taylor notes, this sense of secularization is not incompatible with a continued individual belief in God and embrace of religion. So, a second sense he then identifies is that of a falling off of religious practice and belief.
“A Secular Age mostly concerns itself with a third sense, which for Taylor consists of “a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.” To Taylor this entails a fundamental shift in what it means to believe, which occurs when belief itself becomes merely an option. From the Introduction:
“So what I want to do is examine our society as secular in this third sense, which I could perhaps encapsulate in this way: the change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others. I may find it inconceivable that I would abandon my faith, but there are others, including possibly some very close to me, whose way of living I cannot in all honesty just dismiss as depraved, or blind, or unworthy, who have no faith (at least not in God, or the transcendent). Belief in God is no longer axiomatic. There are alternatives. And this will also likely mean that at least in certain milieux, it may be hard to sustain one’s faith. There will be people who feel bound to give it up, even though they mourn its loss. This has been a recognizable experience in our societies, at least since the mid-nineteenth century. There will be many others to whom faith never even seems an eligible possibility. There are certainly millions today of whom this is true.
“The book can fairly be said to have galvanized scholarly inquiry into secularism, and any new work on the subject must reckon with Taylor. One we published ourselves is a collection called Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, which we’d informally considered something of a user’s manual for A Secular Age. Edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan Vanantwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, and with contributions from Robert Bellah, Wendy Brown, Taylor himself, and nearly a dozen others, it’s another volume that should make it into the hands of Pitzer’s majors.
“We also recently published Steven D. Smith’s The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse. Smith argues that public discourse has been drained of force and authenticity because religion was formally forced out but is then usually “smuggled” right back in. If we’re to remain a society that engages in profitable open discussion, Smith says, we’ll have to figure out a way to free discourse from the constraints imposed by secularism.
“Forthcoming this fall we have two new books that will surely find a place within any serious curriculum on secularism. One is Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. The book was meant to be a new history of the Reformation, but instead became a much larger examination of its unintended consequences. All of the pluralism that we see in society today, much of which is evoked by the word “secular,” traces back five hundred years to the late Middle Ages, says Gregory. More on this one in the coming months.
Religion in Human Evolution by Robert N. Bellah
“Also this fall we’ll publish Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution. Like Gregory’s, this book might seem more suited to a traditional religion department than one devoted to studying secularism, but surely that line will prove itself to be one not easily drawn. As Zuckerman told the Times, part of the impetus for creating Pitzer’s new department was the now-huge number of people who consider themselves atheists. Though atheism and secularism aren’t exactly the same thing, clearly the growing embrace of the one leads us to a society more characterized by the other.
“The surge in Atheism owes much to the writing of the so-called “New Atheists,” among them Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. Where the New Atheists cast religion as a war-mongering belief system that should be disproven and then discarded, Bellah synthesizes biological, historical, and sociological research to offer an understanding of what religion actually is and how it developed and changed over time. What’s unique about the book is its focus on human evolution and the development of capacities like storytelling, dance, and mythmaking, which evolved nearly simultaneously around the world into systems we’d now recognize as religion. So, at this world historical moment when so much of Western society seems in a rush to leave religion behind, Bellah, one of our greatest sociologists of religion, has taken the time to reexamine where it came from. So much of what he finds will challenge the very foundations of today’s Atheism that, likeA Secular Age, Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution will be critical for understanding the West’s relationship with religion today.
“So, secularism studies… surely there’s a syllabus to be made in here somewhere, no?”
Thinking Man Statue
It is impossible to separate any aspect of our lives from our habits of thought. For, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains, “all these highly varied phenomena, these concepts, this knowledge, these technical procedures and philosophical systems, these sciences, arts, industries and inventions,” the very elements of human civilization, “all are emanations of the human mind.” The great social transformations marking history’s path are thus the expressions of shifts within the depth of our habits of thought. For example, the Founding Fathers of the United States were all deeply immersed in the new republican social philosophy of their times, which itself arose out of the novel conceptions of self and nature advanced by Descartes. “From age to age,” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá describes accordingly, “the temple of existence has continually been…distinguished with an ever-varying splendor, deriving from wisdom and the power of thought” (Secret of Divine Civilization, p. 1). As the fundamental purpose of the Bahá’í Faith is to build a unified global civilization, one of its most pressing tasks is to cultivate habits of thought adequate to this aim.
It would be foolish, though, to imagine that the Bahá’í community could somehow develop such habits of thought in isolation from society, and wrong to think that it should. Bahá’ís are called upon to enter deeply into the life of society, to draw upon and advance its educational systems, commerce and trade, scientific and technical knowledge, to share in its struggles and rejoice in its triumphs. Yet, Bahá’u’lláh did come to build civilization anew, and Bahá’ís must therefore remain ever conscious of the inescapable limitations of every contemporary mode of thought. Out task, then, is to develop remarkable powers of critical reflection, becoming conscious of the habits of thought prevalent within society, evaluating their limitations and merits, and cultivating thereby habits ever more expressive of Bahá’u’lláh’s message.
The Tree of Life
Our efforts in this direction will inevitably follow an organic rhythm of crisis and victory. Limiting habits of thought will make their way into the Bahá’í community, and sooner or later bring about undesirable consequences. These habits will eventually be recognized by the Bahá’í community, and patiently surpassed towards more adequate ways of thinking. At any given moment of its evolution, then, the Bahá’í community will face a number of such intellectual challenges. When seen in a different light, though, these challenges are actually opportunities for growth and development. Today, as the Universal House of Justice explained in its December 28 2010 letter, many within the Bahá’í community are limited by fragmentary and dichotomous habits of thought, and not surprisingly so, as these habits are widely prevalent within contemporary society. In order to move to the next stage of development, they tell us, we must cultivate the ability to think in terms of wholes and processes.
Over the next weeks I will examine these four habits of thought – the 1) fragmentary, 2) dichotomous, 3) holistic, and 4) processual – describing how they function, considering their role in both society and the Bahá’í community, and providing insight into their philosophical and historical development where useful.
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In the sense that we conceive of the Plan as community building with a spiritual foundation, we are engaged in a development process. As I understand it, conceptions of human nature lie at the very root of this process. Flawed and fixed conceptions of human nature so often turn people off to religion; they give science reason to contradict religion; they have irrationally raised science to the highest arbiter in society today; and dangerously, these conceptions shape development policy. Conceptions of human nature are not simply descriptive, but prescriptive as well, and therein lies the importance of understanding this essential point. What I am interested in exploring in this post is how conceptions of human nature have influenced development initiatives in the past, and explore the understanding of human nature that underlies the Bahá’í community’s efforts.
In The Lab, the Temple, and the Market, Dr. Arbab, who started a Bahá’í inspired development organization working with the rural people of Colombia, highlights the effect of contradictory conceptions of human nature on the development process:
The prevailing — presumably realistic — views of human nature are confusing and self-contradictory. On the one hand, we dream of, and labour for, a world of peace and prosperity; on the other, what passes for scientific theory depicts us as slaves to our self-interest, incapable of rising to the heights of nobility we must achieve to meet our challenges. We work, then, for objectives lying forever beyond our selfish means. It is such contradictions that have led the paralysis of will that today pervades all strata of society.
In this same document, he traces the line of thought that characterized Western growth policies for developing nations. I find his description very interesting and worthy of summarizing:
"Alerte Arela" by Peter Daniel
Post-WWII, when development economists first began to think on a more global scale, development was thought of in terms of economic growth, i.e. industrialization, and the rural poor were seen as ignorant, unmotivated, lazy, and superstitious. After some time, the rural poor came to be seen as the “hidden capital” of developing nations; they were the untapped potential that could bring about the modernization, and thus prosperity, of their countries. As industrialization gained momentum, urban migration followed suit, and development economists held high hopes. Unfortunately, urban migration on this massive scale brought with it a whole host of other problems. As Dr. Arbab points out, “the first stages of migration from rural to urban areas, now so sorely lamented, were not accidents of history: they were inspired and driven by the flawed perception development thinkers held of their fellow human beings.”
Since this time, development thinkers have moved away from thinking of the poor simply in terms of their usefulness to the economic growth of their nation. A more humanitarian approach has come to characterize development projects since the 1970′s: instead of seeing the poor as commodities in themselves, the needs of the poor as human beings were being recognized. Nevertheless, a conception of the poor that was again too simplistic prevented development efforts from having any real effect. The poor were and are still today seen as suffering victims, a “bundle of problems and needs.” While it is undeniably true that the poor suffer due to gross injustices, development agencies have generally failed to uplift the poor when they approach them with such simplistic conceptions. Dr. Arbab puts it well when he says:
The problem runs very deep. Efforts to free development thinking from such paternalistic views tend all too often to fall into ideological traps, at the heart of which is a misconception of human nature. In the cherished notions of these ideologies, the liberated agents of change are either competitive, tireless labourers and entrepreneurs busily accumulating wealth or politicized social actors focused single-mindedly on matters of individual and group power. Neither the excessive individualism of the former nor the consecration to conflict of the latter, of course, supposedly serves only the self. Through some alchemy never quite explained, these labours and struggles result in social forces that will modernize underdeveloped nations and usher humanity into an age of prosperity. At the altars of such tragic misconceptions of human nature the lives of the masses of humanity have been sacrificed for decades.
Bahá’ís are not solely focused on developing materially impoverished countries. We are engaged in a world-wide community building process that is needed in every area of the world. Where material needs are unmet, one oftentimes finds a profound level of “spiritual development.” At the same time, in Belgium, for example, where I currently live, although a materially prosperous country, it is most definitely spiritually impoverished, and thus is also in need of development according to a Bahá’í understanding. True development requires not only material civilization, but spiritual civilization building as well. Material civilization can be compared to the body, and spiritual civilization is the spirit that animates it.
Two important points related to human nature drastically influence how Bahá’ís approach others in this process of community building. In the first place, Bahá’u'lláh repeatedly affirms the inherent nobility of man:
O Son of Spirit! Noble have I created thee, yet thou hast abased thyself. Rise then unto that for which thou wast created.
Secondly, He affirms the capacity of each one of us to give ourselves in service to others, to place altruism above selfish pursuits. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá states, in fact, that our greatest distinction and happiness lies in service to others:
“…the honor and distinction of the individual consist in this, that he among all the world’s multitudes should become a source of social good. Is any larger bounty conceivable than this, that an individual, looking within himself, should find that by the confirming grace of God he has become the cause of peace and well-being, of happiness and advantage to his fellow men? No, by the one true God, there is no greater bliss, no more complete delight.”
The great power which flows from the Bahá’í community’s global efforts is bound intimately with this view of human nature. To see not only our ability to transcend our lower natures and manifest spiritual qualities, but to recognize every individual’s capacity to engage in this transformative process is the most powerful agent of growth and change that we can give to individuals and communities around the world.
In my last post, What is Bahá’í philosophy?, I offered a provisional description of four kinds of philosophical reflection – the practical, the scientific, the critical, and the metaphysical – suggesting ways in which each is already at work in the Bahá’í community’s efforts to advance the Plan.
Nietzsche and his nihilistic mustache
Now I want to point your attention to a group of philosophers known widely as “existentialists,” whose philosophical explorations centered in between the critical and metaphysical, as they sought to debunk much of traditional thought by analyzing the patterns and structures of human subjectivity. Their views can be seen as contributing in a large part to the rise of post-modern society.
Whether we want to be or not, Bahá’ís throughout the world are deeply influenced by post-modern strands of thought. There are several widely influential habits of post-modern thought that Bahá’ís should strive to overcome, among which are a) the tendency to interpret everything in terms of a struggle for power, b) dogmatic relativism, c) a mistrust of seeking unified understanding of humanity, history, truth, etc., and d) a fetish for debunking.
This passage from Century of Light provides us with much insight into aspects of the condition explored by existentialist and post-modern philosophers:
“The sense of disillusionment which, as Shoghi Effendi warned, the spread of political corruption would create in the minds of the mass of humankind is now widespread. Outbreaks of lawlessness have become pandemic in both urban and rural life in many lands. The failure of social controls, the effort to justify the most extreme forms of aberrant behaviour as primarily civil rights issues, and an almost universal celebration in the arts and media of degeneracy and violence - these and similar manifestations of a condition approaching moral anarchy suggest a future that paralyzes the imagination. Against the background of this desolate landscape the intellectual vogue of the age, seeking to make a virtue out of grim necessity, has adopted for itself the appellation and mission of ‘deconstructionism’.” - (Century of Light, p. 132)
Kierkegaard
Interestingly, post-modernism’s ceaseless attacks on the prejudices of modern Western society have helped to create a kind of radical intellectual humility, and this humility seems to have opened the inner ears of a growing segment of the philosophical community to hear again the divine call. God and religion have thus reemerged as topics of constructive philosophical engagement again.
As One Common Faith explains this suprising reversal, “As the twentieth century approached its close, therefore, nothing seemed less likely than a sudden resurgence of religion as a subject of consuming global importance. Yet that is precisely what has now occurred in the form of a groundswell of anxiety and discontent, much of it still only dimly conscious of the sense of spiritual emptiness that is producing it.”
For those of you interested in learning a bit more about existential philosophers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Sartre, the late philosopher Walter Kaufmann (1921-1980) is a brilliant and helpful guide. Here is an article from The Do It Yourself Scholar, entitled Why Study Philosophy?, that provides links to a series of three lectures by Kaufmann on the three above mentioned philosophers. This twofold tendency, towards either nihilism or a radical religious humility, was there from the beginning of existentialism respectively in the thought of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.
Here is the re-post:
“The late, great Princeton philosophy professor Walter Kaufmann (1921-1980) enjoyed being a skeptic and a gadfly. He liked to ask: what’s the point in studying the works of philosophers with “dreadful views?” After all, Plato champions totalitarianism and Kierkegaard disdains reason and sings the virtues of blind obedience to God.
“The answer, Kaufmann believed, was that reading the great philosophers can teach us how to think. A great philosopher is someone who disdains received wisdom, and tests assumptions with evidence and reason. Furthermore, while great philosophers might not be very good at providing solutions, they are very good at diagnosing problems.
“You can get a taste of Kaufmann’s thought and his mordant wit in a series of three lectures on existentialism which he delivered in 1960. In the first lecture, Kierkegaard and the Crisis in Religion, Kaufmann talks about existentialism as a philosophic movement, and how science created a crisis in religious faith that Kierkegaard diagnosed. He also gives a short character sketch of Søren Kierkegaard, showing what a strange and thoroughly disagreeable person he was.
“In the second lecture, Nietzsche and the Crisis in Philosophy, Kaufmann gives an introduction to the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. He acknowledges that Nietzsche had some “pretty nasty ideas,” but he suggests that this was Nietzsche’s way of being provocative, and encouraging other people to think deeply.
“In the third lecture, Sartre and the Crisis in Morality, Kaufmann talks about how modern urban culture undermines traditional morality because of the loosening of social bonds and greater anonymity of the individual. Jean-Paul Sartre analyzed this problem, and came up with the idea that there is no absolute morality, and that ‘man is condemned to be free.’”
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