This week, I feel like we have finally moved into the modern era with Freud and Nietzsche. Nietzsche's ideas don't have the same raw, pulled out of whole cloth sense that the previous philosophers, such as Kant, had (using people as a means to an end and not acting out of non-universalisable maxims are equivalent? What?). Similarly, Freud's ideas seem to be not rejecting the church and established morality but merely ignoring them, as they are no longer such powerful forces in everyone's minds and thoughts.
Nietzsche was a lot like Machiavelli, in that he spoke of rejecting morality, but he spoke in much more vague and metaphysical terms, which is a luxury he had in the modern era. Machiavelli's work was highly practical, and simply assumed that one would abandon morality when he needed to, which presumably successful leaders were already doing, or they wouldn't be successful leaders. Nietzsche, on the other hand, formally said that this form of leadership was good, which would've been impossible to argue in early Renaissance philosophy.
I really like Freud's ideas. Humans are not in control of our own minds, and it really refreshed me to see someone in history finally admit that.
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