Kirgegaard – Religious Philosopher[180] 

Until recently, Søren Kierkegaard was completely unknown in France: even in literary and philosophical circles, nothing was known about him. Now interest in him has grown greatly in France: many of his books have already been translated into French, many articles about him have appeared in philosophical and general literary journals, and his ideas are increasingly attracting the attention of French educated people. Still, there are still many people in France who have scarcely heard his name. Meanwhile, in other countries, Kierkegaard's influence on philosophical and theological thought is enormous. Especially in Germany, where Kierkegaard was "discovered" at the end of the last century. The famous theologian Karl Barth came from Kierkegaard. To a large extent, the same can be said of the more outstanding modern philosophers of Germany, Jaspers and Heidegger: mediocre or direct, their thought is kept in the orbit of Kierkegaard's ideas. Literature about Kierkegaard in Germany has grown immensely: he is studied as the classics are studied. But I will say now: Kierkegaard is one of the most complex and difficult thinkers. It is difficult mainly because of the unusual and completely unusual manner in which philosophical questions are posed by our thinking.

He called his philosophy existential, which means that he thought in order to live, and did not live in order to think. And this is what distinguishes him from professional philosophers, for whom their philosophy is simply a "specialty," the same as any other profession – philology, astronomy, mathematics – a specialty that has nothing to do with and no connection with their lives. This, however, does not mean that the life of Kierkegaard is rich in external, visible and interesting events for everyone. On the contrary, he had nothing to do with the events that marked the era in which he lived. In his books, as well as in his numerous diaries, you will not find even a mention of the revolution of 1948, although he was already 35 years old at that time and it coincided with the height of his literary activity. Kierkegaard lived outside of history, or, if you like, and this is of great importance for Kierkegaard's understanding, he had his own history, indifferent to everyone, but which gave him absolutely extraordinary material for thinking.

I

Søren Kierkegaard was born on 5 May 1813 in Copenhagen, from his father's second marriage, Michael Kierkegaard, to his former servant Anna Lund. Now I note that this marriage was somewhat hasty: Michael Kierkegaard had to cover his sin, as they say. This circumstance played a great role in the history of the spiritual development of the son, who learned in his early youth that his strict and pious father succumbed to temptation soon after the death of his first wife. But even more important for Kierkegaard was another fact from his father's life. When Kierkegaard was only eleven years old, he was given by his parents, very poor peasants, to work for shepherds, also very poor people, who themselves lived in very difficult conditions and exploited the child at their complete disposal in every possible way. And so, one stormy, cold, rainy autumn day, when he had to graze sheep in one of the harsh and unsheltered valleys of Jutland from early morning, half-dressed, exhausted by back-breaking work, the unfortunate boy fell into despair and, running up the hill, cursed God. Old Kierkegaard could not forget this until his death (he died at the age of 82): he saw in it a crime against St. John. He was endlessly tormented by this, considering himself condemned to eternal perdition. And not only himself - all his offspring. He was unable or unwilling to hide this from his children, and young Seren already knew that he was burdened with a grave hereditary sin. Thus, two events that occurred long before the birth of Søren Kierkegaard turned out to be decisive in his life. It must be thought that here lies the key to the exceptional in its determination and concentration tension with which existential philosophy treats the biblical theme of original sin and the fall of man, which has been abandoned by all.

Kierkegaard's upbringing was, of course, entirely in the hands of his father at first, and was strictly religious in nature. Nevertheless, he was sent to school, which he graduated in 1830, and then entered the university to study theology. While his father lived, Seren's studies at the university, to the great chagrin of the old man, went badly: his son was distracted from theology by other interests - he spent a lot of time in society, visited the theater, etc. - led, as they say, an absent-minded life, and it seemed to all those close to him that he would never achieve a university diploma. When his father died in 1838 at the age of 82, no one doubted that Søren would not pass the exams. But, contrary to popular belief, he passed the exam with honors as early as 1840 and, in addition, shortly before the exams, received a diploma of magister artium. But although he had all the necessary academic degrees—and, by the way, a Ph.D. in theology (equivalent to a German doctor of theology)—he never held the office of pastor, nor any of the other positions to which his diploma entitled—he remained a "private" person, or, as he himself put it, a "private thinker," until his death. In the year of graduation, he became engaged to a young girl, Regina Olsen, who was only 17 years old and whom he had known since childhood. But a year later, on October 10, 1841, he, without any reason, broke up with his fiancée – to the great indignation of both his relatives and those close to his fiancée and all of Copenhagen. Copenhagen a hundred years ago was a big village: all the inhabitants knew the affairs of all the inhabitants, and Kierkegaard's unfounded break with his bride made it the talk of the town. Regina Olsen was shocked beyond hear; she did not understand, and could not understand, what had caused Kierkegaard's unexpected action. But Kierkegaard was even more shocked and crushed by his act. His break with his fiancée – for all of us a secondary, insignificant fact – acquired for him the dimensions of a great historical event. And it would not be an exaggeration to say that the character of his philosophy was determined precisely by the fact that by the will of fate he had to experience such an insignificant fact as a historical event—as an "earthquake," to use his own words. What made him break up with Regina Olsen? Both in his diaries and in his books, he constantly speaks in his own name and in the name of fictitious persons about a man who had to break off from his beloved, but he constantly strictly forbids his future readers to inquire into the real reason that forced him to do what was most difficult and painful for him (as well as for his bride). Moreover, he says more than once that in his writings he did everything to confuse the curious. And yet, it must be said that at the same time he did everything so that his secret did not go with him to the grave. In his books and diaries, he repeats, "If I had faith, I would never have left Regina Olsen." The words are mysterious: what can faith, as we are all accustomed to understand this word, have to do with whether to marry or not to marry? Meanwhile, the great truth and the great insight of Kierkegaard are telling. We will speak of this in more detail when his religious philosophy is expounded. For now, I will say that Kierkegaard's literary activity began – except for his Ph.D. thesis (it is called "What is Irony?") – from his separation from his fiancée, i.e. from 1841, when he was 27 years old. Books, large and small, articles, edifying speeches, diaries follow one another with amazing speed – in the 15 years that he had left to live (he died on November 11, 1855), what he wrote amounted to 28 volumes – 14 works, 14 diaries. His first book is called All or Nothing, and the title alone testifies to the direction that Kierkegaard's thought took. Equally characteristic is the title of his second book: "Fear and Trembling" and the attached semi-fictional, half-philosophic work - "Repetition". The first deals with the sacrifice of Abraham, the second with the book of Job. 9 years after the appearance of "Fear and Trembling", he himself wrote in his diary: "Horror must seize a person before the gloomy pathos that penetrates this book." What he says about Fear and Trembling can be said about all his writings, about everything he wrote. And in the book "What is Fear", and in "Illness to Death", and in "Exercises in Christianity", and in his speeches "A Tread in the Flesh", "What is the Difference Between an Apostle and a Prophet", "Is It Right for the Sake of Truth to Give Himself to Pieces", as well as in those books that do not give out their content by their title, such as "Stages of the Path of Life", "Philosophical crumbs", etc. – in everything he wrote, one can feel that unheard-of gloomy and heavy pathos that Kierkegaard himself noted in "Fear and Trembling". The same must be said of his diaries. And the older he becomes, the more formidable and terrible his pathos becomes. Accordingly, in his writings, the challenge of modernity grows more and more. He fought on two fronts at once: on the one hand, with speculative philosophy, with its representative, Hegel, who in his time was the ruler of thought in Europe, on the other hand, with the church and the clergy, with the entire "Christian world," which, as he wrote, "killed Christ." Especially harsh and unrestrained were his last speeches in a small magazine filled by himself and called "Moment". He openly declared that the clergy and all those who belong to the church betray Christ, and that whoever wants to be a Christian must leave the church. His article about Bishop Münster, who headed the Danish Church for many years in a row, dates back to the same time. Münster was Father Kierkegaard's confessor, and he alone knew how to bring some peace into the soul of the old man, tormented by the inexhaustible memories of his grave sins. Münster was, in fact, the tutor of Søren himself, whom he had known since early childhood and who never missed a single of his Sunday sermons. All Denmark considered him their spiritual leader and revered him. As long as Münster lived, Kierkegaard did not hurt him. But when Münster died on January 30, 1854, and his son-in-law, Professor Martensen, a well-known scientist and philosopher (Hegelian), called him "a witness to the truth" in his funeral oration, Kierkegaard burst out and wrote and published an article entitled "Was Bishop Münster a Witness to the Truth?", in which he insisted with sharpness, even for himself, that Martensen had no right to say what that he said that Münster was not a witness to the truth. This article, as well as his articles on the church, aroused, of course, general indignation and indignation.

But Kierkegaard himself did not have long to live. – On October 2, 1855, he collapsed – from exhaustion – in the street, he was transferred to the hospital, where he died two months later. During his lifetime, Kierkegaard was famous in Denmark, but he was not known at all abroad. However, even in Denmark he had to print his works at his own expense, and although the costs of printing were paid off by the sale of books, his books did not give him income. He could exist only thanks to the small fortune left to him by his father. But since he did not want to keep his money in interest-bearing securities, believing that, according to the Bible, it is a sin to charge interest, by the time of his death almost all his funds had been exhausted: only a small amount remained, which was barely enough for a modest funeral.

II

Before proceeding to the exposition of Kirkergard's philosophy, it is important to note that he was a very well-read and comprehensively educated man. In his library, which contained about 2,200 volumes, along with the works of the Greek philosophers (in the original), medieval mystics, the Church Fathers, the latest German philosophers (he had the complete works of Hegel and almost everything that the ancients wrote about Socrates), we find numerous works of Catholic theologians, theosophical works of Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg and Baader, and at the same time a huge number of books on literature - Shakespeare, I mention this chiefly to warn that the ordinary considerations accumulated in the course of centuries by common sense and human wisdom were as well known to Kierkegaard as they were to those who do not want to follow him, but prefer to follow the broad, well-trodden road of thought.

If he did take a different path, it was not because he was not knowledgeable enough or because he did not understand what makes people think as everyone else thinks. He knew everything and understood everything – he knew better and understood more deeply than others. And yet, or rather, precisely because of this, he took his own path, so unusual and so alien to everyone. Plato (through the mouth of his incomparable teacher Socrates) proclaimed to the world: "There is no greater misfortune for man than to become a misologos, i.e., a hater of reason." Plato, and after him Aristotle, also taught: the beginning of philosophy is wonder. If it were necessary to formulate in a few words Kierkegaard's most cherished thoughts, we would have to say: the greatest misfortune of man is his unconditional trust in reason and rational thinking, and the beginning of philosophy is not surprise, as the ancients believed, but despair. In all his works, he repeats in a thousand ways: the task of philosophy is to break free from the power of rational thinking and find the courage in oneself (only despair gives a person such courage) to seek the truth in what everyone is accustomed to consider paradox and absurdity. Where, according to the testimony of our experience and understanding, all possibilities end, where, according to our understanding, we run up against a wall of the absolutely impossible, where it becomes clear that there is no way out, that everything is over forever, that man has nothing to do and nothing to think about, and there is nothing left to do and nothing left to look and freeze, where people cease and must cease all attempts to search and struggle, it is only there, in Kierkegaard's opinion, that a true and genuine struggle begins, and in this struggle is the task of philosophy.

Aimes-tu les damnés, comnais-tu l'irrémissible?—from all the pages of Kierkegaard this terrible question of Baudelaire looks at us. Kierkegaard admired Socrates. "Outside of Christianity," he wrote in his diary in the last years of his life, "Socrates is one of a kind." But what can the wisest of men say to us, what can the wisest of men say to himself in the face of the insurmountable, in the face of people given over to eternal damnation? Socrates taught Plato and all of us to think that reason can help a person out of any trouble and that hatred of reason is the greatest misfortune. But in the face of the insurmountable, reason is powerless, and, not wanting to admit its impotence, it calls for obedience, on which it builds its ethics, which has arrogated to itself the right and power to betray people to eternal destruction. That is why Pascal already spoke so defiantly about our impotent reason and miserable morality. This prompted him to make such a stunning and stunning decision – to renounce reason and everything that reason, which imagines itself to be the highest life principle, gives to man. Hence his je n'approuve que ceux qui cherchent en gémissant, in contrast to the universally recognized methods of searching for truth, which seem to us to be eternally fused with the very nature of thought. We value only objective, dispassionate searching. Truth, according to our ineradicable conviction, is given only to him who, having forgotten himself and his neighbors, and the whole world, forward expresses his readiness to accept everything that it will bring with it. This is the meaning of Spinoza's precept: non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere: not to laugh, not to cry, not to curse, but to understand. Are we given a choice between Spinoza and Pascal? Can we admit that Pascal's passionate chercher en gémissant will provide us with the truth to a greater extent? Or even that dispassionate "understanding" binds a person hand and foot, paralyzes his thought, and forever cuts him off from the ultimate truth, from what the Scriptures call "the one thing needful"? History has long answered this question. Pascal's s'abêtir, as well as his chercher en gémissant, were handed over by us to the Kunstkamera, where rare and curious in their own way, but useless things are kept. We are possessed by objective truth, which even believers do not dare to argue with and before which they bow. But can the verdict of history be considered the last and final?

I mentioned Pascal in the hope that it would be easier to get to Kierkegaard through Pascal. In a small philosophical novel "Repetition", which is appended to his book "Fear and Trembling", which is remarkable for its sincerity, depth and power of expression, Kierkegaard writes: "Instead of turning (in difficult moments) for help to the world-famous philosopher, Professor pubilicus Ordinarius (i.e., Hegel), my friend (Kierkegaard almost always, when he needs to express his heartfelt thoughts, speaks in the third person) seeks refuge with a private thinker, who first knew everything that was best in life and who then had to leave life – to the biblical Job... Job, sitting on the ashes and scraping the scabs on his body with shards, throws cursory remarks, almost hints. And here my friend thinks to find what he needs. Here the truth will be expressed more convincingly than in the Greek symposion" (i.e., in Socrates, Plato, and all the great philosophers who, before and after Plato and Aristotle, created and shaped Hellenic thought). The opposition of Job to Hegel and Plato, i.e., to all ancient and modern philosophy, is the greatest challenge to our entire culture, but this is Kierkegaard's cherished thought, which runs through all his works. Hence what he calls existential philosophy, which, according to Kierkegaard's teaching, should replace speculative or speculative philosophy. "The difficulties of speculation," he explains in his diary, "grow as we have to existentially carry out what is speculated about. But on the whole, in philosophy (and in Hegel and others) it is the same as in all people in life: in their everyday existence they use quite different categories from those which they put forward in their speculative constructions, and they console themselves not at all with what they so solemnly proclaim."

Speculative philosophy and speculative philosophers, whom Kierkegaard always derisively calls speculators, have torn human thought away from the roots of being. Hegel confidently, as if truth itself were speaking through his lips, declares in his logic: "When I think, I renounce all my subjective particularities, I delve into the thing itself, and I think badly if I add anything of myself." Not only Hegel, it seems to all of us, but all of us are convinced that the condition for the comprehension of truth is man's readiness to renounce his most important, most vital interests and to accept everything that is revealed to him by his intelligent sight, by his reason, no matter how terrible and disgusting it may be. "In philosophy," we read in the same Hegel, "religion receives its justification. Thinking is the absolute judge before whom the content of religion must justify and explain itself." And here again Hegel does not speak in his own name, he only gives expression to what all people thought ("allness", as Dostoevsky said). If religious truth cannot justify itself before reason, which itself has no need to justify itself to anyone, it thereby exposes its inadequacy and dooms itself to death. Kierkegaard himself went through Hegel: in his youth he, like almost all his contemporaries, was completely in his power. For a long time he interpreted his inner opposition to Hegel's philosophy as "an inability to understand a great man," and with horror in his heart he spoke of this "shame and misfortune of his." At the same time, he was clearly aware that behind Hegel there was a Greek symposion, and, in the final analysis, he would have to begin a struggle not only against Hegel, but against Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates himself. In other words, to raise the question of the infallibility of the human mind. Were the Greeks right, are modern philosophers right, seeing in reason the only source of truth? Was Hegel right when he proclaimed that everything that is real is rational and everything that is rational is real, and that against the real – however terrible it may be – there is nowhere and no one, and, consequently, there is no need to seek protection, that it can and must be accepted as it is? Hegel, replies Kierkegaard, "deified reality" and saw in this his merit and his strength, but in fact it was his weakness, the sluggishness of his spiritual being. Hegel did not even have any doubts about the correctness of his methods of searching for truth, just as they do not arise in the overwhelming majority of people. "People," writes Kierkegaard, "as a matter of course, do not understand the truly terrible," close their eyes to it and "take life as it is, as everyone understands and accepts it." But can such an attitude to life be called philosophy? Is this thinking? Isn't it the other way around? Does it not mean that a person who has turned away from the horrors of life – be it the famous professer pubicus Ordinarius or the average man in the street – that such a person has abandoned both philosophy and thought? "Human cowardice," Kierkegaard declares, "cannot endure what madness and death have to tell us." That is why he leaves the universally recognized Hegel and goes "to the particular," as he puts it, "thinker," to the Biblical Job. He does not go to admire the magnificent outbursts of anger of the long-suffering elder as an outside observer, or to enjoy the incomparable images of one of the "most," as he said, "human books of the Holy Scriptures." Scriptures." Hegel was also capable of this – and who has already admired the book of Job! Kierkegaard, who, in contrast to "allness," found or was forced to find the courage to listen to what madness and death tell us, goes to Job as to a thinker, goes after the truth from which Hegel has fenced himself off, taking refuge in the oasis of his philosophical system. Hegel does not want to, cannot hear either Kierkegaard or Job: through their lips they speak madness and death, which cannot be justified before reason. People thrown out of life have no place in Hegel's "system", speculative philosophy turns away from them, forgets about their existence. Kierkegaard cries: "What is the power that has robbed me of my honor and my pride, and so senselessly? Am I really outside the protection of the laws?" But can Hegel doubt for a moment that the individual is outside the protection of the laws? For speculative philosophy, it is quite self-evident that the individual man, i.e., a being who has come into existence in time, must have an end in time, and that laws are not at all established in order to preserve such a transitory existence. And the force of which Kierkegaard speaks is by no means a senseless force, but a meaningful, rational force, for, as we have just heard, everything that is real is reasonable. It is the task and the duty, even the destiny of man—and Kierkegaard has no right to claim any privilege for himself—to grasp this great truth, forever unchangeable, to accept it with wise calmness, and to submit to his fate. This was also known to Job's friends, who did everything possible to help him rise to the proper moral height by their speeches. But the more and more ardently his friends spoke, the more inflamed Job became. The same effect was produced on Kierkegaard by reading the works of Hegel. For a long time he did not dare to rebel against the illustrious teacher and ruler of the thoughts of his own youth. "Only despairing terror," Kierkegaard writes in his diary, "awakens in man his higher being." Job, too, only when the horror of human existence revealed to him surpassed all imagination, dared to enter into the great and final struggle with self-evidence.

III