Who is Kierkegaard? He is often said in most presentations— "Danish psychologist and poet of religious philosophy, founder of modern existential philosophy, pioneer of postmodernism, and pioneer of modern humanistic psychology." ”
But these descriptions are also difficult to summarize Kierkegaard's legacy. In the history of Western philosophy, Kierkegaard can be said to be a special figure. Although he left a large number of works, his popularity was limited to Danish cultural circles, and most of them were understood as literary and theological works. But in the 19th century, people "rediscovered" him, especially after the First World War, with the rise and development of existential philosophy, his influence on the intellectual circles of Western countries was increasing.
The philosopher Jaspers once said: "The present state of philosophy is characterized by the fact that the philosophers Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were neglected during their lifetime, and have been despised in the history of philosophy for a long time to come, and whose importance is growing ever more and more." All the other philosophers after Hegel are losing power more and more, and today these two men are indisputably standing out as the truly great thinkers of their time. He even said that it was Kierkegaard and Nietzsche who "opened our eyes."
Interestingly, the two philosophers that Jaspers is talking about, one is a devout Christian, and the other is preaching that God is dead, but they are on the same path, and together they open a precedent for a kind of "anti-philosophy" in modern philosophy, and the object of this "anti" is Hegel.
Hegel was arguably the last master to seek a unified philosophical system, constructing a whole doctrine of spiritual universality, in which human existence served the development of what he called the "absolute spirit." But Kierkegaard took a different path, trying to jump out of the universality, and from the perspective of personal uniqueness to explore and reflect on the meaning of existence, the human personality and the value of existence from the background of history to the foreground.
Kierkegaard is not only "anti-philosophical" in content, but also in the form of his writings. His work is very different from the systematic philosophical discourses of Kant and Hegel, which are anti-systemic and also anti-universal, and he rarely uses philosophical concepts to discuss, but integrates his philosophies into poetic literary works.
This makes Kierkegaard's works have multipleities, some works are easy to read, others are unknown, and it is even more difficult to try to sort out a system of so-called philosophical views in his works, and at the same time integrate a large number of theological and ancient Greek literature, which can be said to be very unfriendly to readers in modern, especially non-Western cultures. To understand him in depth, you either have to find something that others have summarized, or you have to calm down and study his work repeatedly.
But Kierkegaard's many re-emergences are not only manifested in his works, his philosophy is extremely individual, his personal life experiences, personality, emotions, psychology, ideals and pursuits are deeply embedded in his philosophical thought and reflected in his writings. That is to say, if you want to understand his thoughts, you also need to go deeper into his life experience.
Hegel once said in the introduction to lectures on the history of philosophy, "Facts and activities in the history of philosophy are characterized by the fact that personality and individual character do not very much penetrate into its content and substance. This view can be applied to philosophers like Kant, whose writings can be read almost entirely without knowing his personal life experience, for the mechanical, orderly life of the study does not seem to add any personality to his thoughts.
As Heine said, "Kant's life is difficult to describe. For he has neither life nor history." For Kierkegaard, however, Hegel's view was completely unsuitable. Kierkegaard's entire thought is intimately connected to his personal life and experience, and many of his writings are in fact of a spiritual autobiographical character to varying degrees, from which we can hear his inner monologues and the call of life in various life situations.
He himself confessed frankly that "the subject of everything I write is only and entirely my own". Therefore, to understand his philosophy, it is first necessary to understand what kind of person he really is, what kind of things have happened in his short life, and what kind of influence it has had on the formation and development of his thoughts and character.
Kierkegaard of the Golden Age of Denmark
Born in Copenhagen on 5 May 1813, Soren Kierkegaard lived at the height of Danish cultural life. Often referred to as the Danish Golden Age – it is generally thought to cover roughly the first half of the 19th century. He lived in an era of talented people such as the fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersen, the physicist Aosta, and the sculptor Tovalson. Kierkegaard spent his entire life in Copenhagen, except for the occasional trip to the northern coast or Berlin.
Copenhagen was a small town with only 115,000 inhabitants compared to today. This means that the vast majority of important writers, poets, scientists, and artists know each other and can gain from each other. For example, Kierkegaard's first book, The Essay from a Surviving Man, published in 1838, was a review of a novel by Hans Christian Andersen.
Kierkegaard's father, born into a destitute family, came to Copenhagen from Jutland at the age of 12 to apprentice an uncle in the wool business. About ten years later, he became self-reliant, had his own business, and soon made his fortune and became a well-known local businessman.
Kierkegaard's mother was his father's second wife, who had been a maid in his father's house and was officially married after the death of his father's first wife. Over the course of fifteen years, she had seven children, the youngest of whom Kierkegaard was. Unfortunately, most of these siblings died at a fairly young age, except for his eldest brother.
In 1834, when Kierkegaard had just turned 21, only he, his brother and father were still alive in the family, and all five siblings and his mother had died. Premature contact with death not only cast a lingering shadow over kierkegaard's family, but also had a great impact on kierkegaard's own heart.
Father, Religion, Melancholy and Legacy
Although Kierkegaard was born into a wealthy family and grew up pampered, he never felt the joy of childhood, partly because he was born with a physical defect (skinny, somewhat hunched back, and accompanied by a disability of his legs), and because he himself was deeply distressed by his inability to participate in various activities like others, and in his own words, the cause of the pain was "the imbalance between my soul and my body".
On the other hand, it is more important because of his family education from his father. Kierkegaard the Elder was a deep believer in religion, and he taught his children from an early age to fear God and instill in them the christian idea that they are born guilty, and that Jesus' mercy lies in the Christian idea of bearing sin for people and being crucified as atonement. Kierkegaard's eldest brother studied theology and later became a leading priest and bishop of the Danish state church.
This left an indelible imprint on Kierkegaard's young mind, both making him a devout Christian throughout his life and sowing the seeds of rebellion deep within him. Kierkegaard later criticized his father's religious education as "crazy" and "cruel", often saying that he had no real childhood, and that he was an old man when he was born.
He recalled: "From the time I was a child, I was under the power of a great melancholy... No one can know how unfortunate I feel. "As a child, I was educated strictly in the spirit of Christ: to man, it is madly educated ... It's horrible for a kid to frantically play a melancholy old man! ”
The problem was not strict religious indoctrination, but the fact that his precocious child, with his peculiar sensitivity, concealed some unseemly secret beneath his father's apparent religious piety, a guilty guilt that tormented his father and left him in a constant state of inexplicable melancholy. His father, he said, was the "most melancholy man" he had ever seen in the world.
He once wrote in his diary that once his father stood before him, looked at him, felt that he was in great distress, and said, "Poor child, you are living in wordless despair." Kierkegaard never said exactly what his father's privacy was, but once he learned the truth of the matter from his father's drunken slaughter, and he was deeply confused and bitter about the contradiction between his father's moral behavior and religious belief, and this suspicion and distrust of his father caused him a heavy mental burden and cast a shadow over his life. He himself said, "My birth was the product of sin, and I appeared in the world against god's will." ”
As for why the elder Kierkegaard was so depressed, it may have stemmed from two experiences. When the old and young were herding sheep on the wasteland, they once looked at the rugged stones and desolate wasteland, lamenting that the harsh natural environment made him often hungry and cold, sick and disaster-prone, and his survival was severely tested. From this sorrow, he stood on a hill and loudly accused and cursed God, complained about God's injustice, and lamented the bad fortune of his fate. The ignorant and impulsive blasphemy of his youth left an eternal sense of guilt in his heart, which made him feel constant fear.
Later, a year after the death of his first wife, Kierkegaard the Elder had a relationship with the maid of the family and conceived a child. Premarital adultery is already immoral in Christianity, and unmarried pregnancy is not tolerated by doctrine. In desperation, the elder Kierkegaard had to marry him (that is, Kierkegaard's mother), but due to the disparity in status and communication barriers, the relationship between the husband and wife has not been very good. These two secret things that are seriously contrary to Christian doctrine, coupled with the deep sense of "original sin" of Christians, are the source of Kierkegaard's always depressed mood.
The tension between Kierkegaard's father and son led to their separation, but the father made great efforts to improve the relationship, made a frank confession to the son, and the son was deeply moved, reconciled with the father, and became more convinced that God really existed. Shortly after the reconciliation, the father died.
Kierkegaard wrote in his diary: "My father died at 2 a.m. on Wednesday. How I wish he could live a few more years, I see his death as his last sacrifice to love me; For he died not from me, but for me, so that I could be an important person if possible. ”
Kierkegaard the Elder left behind an inheritance of nearly £200,000 that supported Kierkegaard's life without work and a large number of self-funded publications until Kierkegaard died at the age of 42.
Marriage, a lifetime of bondage
In addition to his father, the great influence on Kierkegaard's birth was that of a young girl named Regina Olsen, and their brief and unfortunate love affair caused a wound on the philosopher's fragile mind that could never be healed.
Kierkegaard first met Regina in 1837, when he was in the midst of a mental anguish of self-guilt, and getting to know the girl, who was 9 years younger, gave him hope of regaining happiness. According to himself, he felt at the outset that "I am infinitely different from her", but in the six months after getting to know her, "I was filled with more poetry in my heart than in all the novels in the world combined".
After his father's death, he made up his mind to propose to her and get his consent, and he felt so happy that he later wrote: "There is no better time in life than in the early days of love, when every meeting, every look, bringing something new home and feeling happy." ”
But that sense of well-being soon faded, he said, and the day after the engagement, "I felt in my heart that I had made a mistake," with remorse, "during that period, my pain was indescribable." ”
Why Kierkegaard repented after just getting engaged, he himself did not say very clearly, most likely for psychological reasons. After a brief period of happiness, he fell into an insurmountable melancholy. Regina also disagreed with him, often saying to him: "You have never been happy, whether I am with you or not, you are always like this".
But she did fall in love with him, and even almost "adored" him, which deeply touched him. He thought that if he had not been a confessor, if he had not been so melancholy, then union with her would have been the greatest happiness he had dreamed of. But then many things must be hidden from her, and the marriage must be based on hypocrisy, which cannot make his beloved happy.
So he tried to break the marriage, but Regina was reluctant to break up with him, and repeatedly begged him not to leave her. But he restrained his inner pain, unmoved, resolutely returned the engagement ring, and wrote to her to ask her to "forgive such a man, who may be able to do something, but cannot make a girl happy."
Later he himself said, "It was a terrible and painful time: having to behave so cruelly and at the same time love like I did". According to his diary account, he cried all night after the breakup, but the next day he pretended to be indifferent as usual.
He missed Regina all the time and prayed for her every day. Later, Regina married someone else, and Kierkegaard remained celibate and never forgot her. He said: "I love her, I have never loved anyone else, and I will never love anyone else again", "To me, there are only two people who have such an important meaning, and that is my late father and our dear little Regina, in a sense, she said to me that she is also dead".
Until five years after they dissolved, he wrote in his diary: "There is not a day when I do not miss her from morning to night. Three years later he said: "Yes, you are my love, my only love, and when I had to leave you, I loved you more than anything". During this time, he also tried to restore his relationship with Regina, but without success, and finally he realized that he had lost her forever.
He said, "What have I lost?" I lost my only love. So he devoted himself to his writing activities, and he made it clear in his diary that the purpose of his writing was for Regina: "My existence will absolutely add accents to her life, and my work as a writer can also be seen as a monument to respect and praise her." I brought her and me into history. ”
Abandoning Regina, he said, he chose not only "death" but also a literary career, "it was she who made me a poet," and his last wish was to dedicate his work to Regina and his late father after his death. He wrote desperately with such a mood, and some of his works were actually to confide in Regina, to give her "secret code communication", if they did not understand the background, it was difficult for others to fully understand.
He said: "If someone asks me how I was educated to be a writer, not to mention my relationship with God, I should reply that it is thanks to an old man I am most grateful for and a young girl who owes the most... The former educated me with his noble wisdom, and the latter with her ununderstood love. ”
He also stressed that he had become a writer precisely because he had lost Regina, and that if he married her, he would never have been himself. He was doomed not to enjoy family happiness, and he was, as he himself called "the most unfortunate man."
Author: The Puzzle of Real Names and Kana
Kierkegaard wrote a lot of works in his lifetime, but he basically relied on his father's inheritance to publish at his own expense, and under the customs of the literary circles at that time, most of them were published under pseudonyms. This also makes Kierkegaard's work a puzzle in its entirety, with kana being highly popular and real names more concentrated in the field of theology. But the two are intertwined, and they need to learn from each other to better understand his ideas.
There are also two important points in the writing career, which divide Kierkegaard's work into three main stages. The first milestone was the dissolution of the marriage with Regina in 1841, which had been largely kierkegaard's youth, and he wrote his first book, The Treatise from a Surviving Man (1838), and received a doctorate in philosophy (1841) with a dissertation entitled "On the Concept of Irony".
The second important node is also a little absurd, because the elder Kierkegaard believed in Christ, and most of the children in the family died prematurely, so he thought that this was God's punishment and predicted that all the children would not live to be 33 years old. Why 33? For Jesus was crucified after 33 years of living on earth.
Kierkegaard inherited this view from his father, writing what he thought was the last book in 1846, at the age of 33, declaring that his literary mission was over and determined to become a priest (he had a master's degree in theology and had been trained in seminaries).
Between 1841 and 1846, Kierkegaard's major works were Either/Or, Repetition, Fear and Trembling, Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Fear, Stages of the Path of Life<哲学片段>, and The Last, Non-scholarly Epilogue to what Was Done (this book, as can be seen from the name, was Kierkegaard's last book before his death).
To Kierkegaard's surprise, God did not take him in at the age of 33, and in the days that followed, Kierkegaard provoked a fight with a popular Danish weekly magazine, Pirate Ship. The weekly magazine also honored him mercilessly, portraying him as an eccentric-looking hunchbacked freak with uneven pants legs. He also began to criticize the Christian organizations in Denmark as not pure enough.
Until his death in 1855, Kierkegaard left behind a large number of works, including The Works of Love, Revelatory Instructions in Different Contexts, Lethal Diseases, and a series of religious works.
In Chinese environment, Kierkegaard has a set of 10 volumes of essays, "Kierkegaard's Collected Works", which can be used as the best reference to understand him, but if you start at the beginning, you can start with one of his trilogies - "Diary of the Seducer", "Repetition", "The Aesthetic Effect of Marriage", the content is simple and popular, and will not be dissuaded. There are also two books to refer to, Kierkegaard – Socrates in the Golden Age of Denmark and How to Read Kierkegaard, which can help make it easier to understand Kierkegaard's thought.
In general, it is very difficult to read and understand Kierkegaard in a Chinese context, first, there is no system for his philosophical thought; Second, his works contain a lot of religious and ancient Greek philosophical content; Third, a very personal style of writing. All of the above will pose a great obstacle to understanding from the perspective of Chinese, if it is not necessary, it can be understood only from some introductory and biographical works.
Finally, let's end with Kierkegaard's epitaph in honor of this master:
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard.
Born May 5, 1813. Died November 11, 1855
Just a short while, then I have won.
Then the whole struggle entirely disappears.
Then I can rest in halls of roses and talk
with my Jesus without ceasing.
Sauron, Abbe, Kierkegaard.
Born May 5, 1813, died November 11, 1855.
When I fight again, I win.
At that time, the battle was completely gone.
Then I would be able to rest in the hall full of roses.
Talk to my Jesus without stopping.