Kiergegaard and Nietzsche: anticipators and forerunners

Abstract

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were not much recognised during their short lives. Kierkegaard was often ridiculed when he roamed the Copenhagen centre daily and Nietzsche was far from the best-seller he happen to be today. But they were forerunners to the existentialism of Sartre and Heidegger, though without sharing the Marxism of the former and the mysticism of the latter. Kierkegaard anticipated modernism (individual choice behaviour) and Nietzsche anticipated the subjectivism and perspectivism of post-modernism. Kierkegaard had another side -a kind of religious pietism-like Nietzsche, whose admiration for force and violence contradicts his admiration for Greek culture.3) The distinction between Objectivity and Subjectivity.Kierkegaard spent a lot of time in newspaper debates, attacking and counter-attacking his critics. He had a very poisonous pen for the established state church and its hypocrisies.