1001Philosophers

Friedrich Nietzsche vs Soren Kierkegaard on Mind

Kierkegaard treats the mind primarily through the lens of inwardness, anxiety, and the existing individual's relation to itself before God. Nietzsche treats the mind as a battleground of drives whose surface unity conceals competing wills and ranks of power. Where Kierkegaard's psychology serves a recovery of authentic religious existence, Nietzsche's serves a genealogical critique of the Christian-moral inheritance.

About this topic

Philosophy of mind asks what mental states are, how they relate to bodies and brains, and how thought, perception, and feeling are possible at all. Classical sources from Plato through Descartes treated the mind as a distinct substance, while later philosophers proposed varieties of materialism, functionalism, and emergentism in its place. Phenomenologists in the twentieth century turned attention to consciousness as it is lived from the inside. Contemporary philosophy of mind works in close dialogue with cognitive science.

For a side-by-side overview of the two philosophers more broadly, see the full Friedrich Nietzsche vs Soren Kierkegaard comparison. To browse philosophy more widely on this theme, see the the Mind quotes hub.

Representative quotes on mind

Friedrich Nietzsche on mind

  • Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:

    “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

  • Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:

    “There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”

  • Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:

    “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”

  • Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:

    “The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”

Soren Kierkegaard on mind

  • “Purity of heart is to will one thing.”

    The two guides call out to a man early and late. And yet, no, for when remorse calls to a man it is always late. The call to find the way again by seeking out God in the confession of sins is always at the eleventh hour. Whether you are young or old, whether you have sinned much or little, whether you have offended much or neglected much, the guilt makes this call come at the eleventh hour. The in

  • “The reason I cannot really say that I positively enjoy nature is that I do not quite realize what it is that I enjoy. A work of art, on the other hand, I can grasp. I can — if I may put it this way — find that Archimedian point, and as soon as I have found it, everything is readily clear for me. Then I am able to pursue this one main idea and see how all the details serve to illuminate it.”

    Journals of Søren Kierkegaard 1A 8, 1834

  • “Journal entry, Gilleleie (1 August 1835) Journals 1A; this is considered to be one of the earliest statements of existentialist thought.”

    What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.

  • Attributed to Soren Kierkegaard:

    “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

  • Attributed to Soren Kierkegaard:

    “The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”

All 7 Soren Kierkegaard quotes on mind →

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