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

I ended the last chapter with the words of Kierkegaard, which should never be forgotten when reading his works, if one wishes to penetrate into the essence of his philosophy: "Only despairing terror awakens in man his higher being." That is why the book of Job, the most human, in Kierkegaard's opinion, of all the Bible, attracted him so irresistibly. That is why he made a decision unheard of in its audacity and incongruous for us to oppose Job the thinker to Hegel and the Greek symposion. Job, too, only when the horrors and misfortunes that had befallen him surpassed all imagination did he dare to defy all our indisputable truths. This is how Kierkegaard tells about it in his "Repetition". "The greatness of Job is not manifested when he says: God gave. God took it. He said so at first, but then he did not repeat it." "The greatness of Job lies in the fact that the pathos of his freedom cannot be discharged by flattering promises and promises." "Job proves the breadth of his worldview by the steadfastness that he opposes to the insidious tricks and approaches of ethics." Everything that Kierkegaard says about Job can also be said about him. And here is the conclusion in which Kierkegaard declares: "Job is blessed. Everything he had was returned to him, and even doubly. And this is called repetition... When does it come? When did it come for Job? "When every conceivable certainty and probability for a person speaks of impossibility." And this repetition, according to Kierkegaard's deep conviction, "is destined to play an important role in the new philosophy, the new philosophy will teach that – all life is repetition." A new philosophy, i.e., existential philosophy. This philosophy begins when every possibility and probability conceivable for man speaks of complete hopelessness, i.e., of the end, and when speculative philosophy falls silent. For Hegel, for the participants in the Greek symposion, there is nothing to do here – there is nothing to begin or continue. They do not want and do not dare to resist the instructions and dictates of reason. They are completely dominated by the conviction that reason, and reason alone, is given to determine the boundaries of the possible and the impossible. They do not even dare to ask themselves where this unshakable confidence in the omnipotence of reason came from. This seems to them to be tantamount to a readiness to put absurdity and nonsense in the place of reason. Can I decide to take such a step? Can a person sacrifice his reason? To forget the warning of the divine Plato that the greatest misfortune that can befall a man is if he becomes a misologos, that is, a hater of reason? But is it a matter of sacrifice? It turns out that Plato did not foresee everything. Reason is definitely needed, we really need it. In the ordinary conditions of our existence, it helps us to cope with difficulties and even with very great difficulties encountered on our life path. But it happens that reason brings the greatest misfortunes to a person, that from a benefactor and liberator he turns into a jailer and executioner. To renounce it does not mean to sacrifice anything. There can be only one question: how to throw off this hated power? And even more: a person completely ceases to ask, as if he feels that in the very questions there is a concession to the immeasurable claims of the truths revealed to us by reason. Job does not ask: he cries, weeps, curses (did not Pascal mean Job when he said: je n'approuve que ceux qui cherchent en gémissant?), in a word, he rages, and the edifying speeches of his friends who have come to console him cause fits of rage in him. He sees in them only the expression of human indifference and human cowardice, which cannot bear the sight of the horrors that have befallen him and cover up their betrayal with lofty words of morality and wisdom. Reason "dispassionately" bears witness to the end of all possibilities, ethics, which always follows on the heels of reason, comes with its pathetic exhortations and edifying speeches that man is obliged to obediently and meekly bear his lot, no matter how terrible it may be. Kierkegaard, like Job, has only one answer to this: it is necessary to kill, to destroy the abominable monster that has usurped the right in the name of reason to pass judgment on a living person and in the name of morality to demand from him that he consider the sentences pronounced forever inviolable and holy. "Oh, my unforgettable benefactor," writes Kierkegaard, "long-suffering Job, can I come to you except to betray you or to shed feigned tears over you? I did not have your riches, I did not have seven sons and three daughters... But he who has a little can lose everything, and he can lose everything, who loses his beloved, and he finds himself covered with abscesses and scabs, who has lost his honor and his pride, and with this the strength and meaning of life."

From these involuntary cursory remarks and from the brief excerpts from the Repetition quoted, one can partially guess what a huge and important task the unknown Danish master of theology set himself during his lifetime. From the famous philosopher Hegel, from the famous sages of ancient and modern times, he went to the private thinker Job, from learned treatises to the Holy Scriptures. Scriptures. Pascal's chercher en gémissant is contrasted as a method of searching for truth with the methods used by the best representatives of philosophical thought up to now. "Job's cries" are not, as we have all been taught to think, only cries, i.e., aimless, meaningless, unnecessary for anyone, and annoying cries for everyone. For Kierkegaard, a new dimension of thinking opens up in these cries, he senses in them a real force, from which, like from the trumpets of Jericho, the fortress walls must fall. This is the main motif of existential philosophy. Kierkegaard knows as well as anyone that for speculative philosophy, as well as for common sense, existential philosophy is the greatest absurdity. But this does not stop, it inspires him. A new dimension opens up in thinking, as it were. On Job's scales, human sorrow turns out to be heavier than the sand of the sea, and the groans of the perishing refute the evidence. When every conceivable certainty and probability speaks of impossibility, then a new, no longer rational, but insane struggle begins about the possibility of the impossible. This struggle is what Kierkegaard calls existential philosophy, a philosophy that seeks truth not from Reason with its limited possibilities, but from the boundless Absurd.

From Job, the path of Kierkegaard leads to the one who is called the father of faith in the Scriptures – to Abraham and his terrible sacrifice. The entire book "Fear and Trembling" – the very title of which is taken from the 2nd Psalm – is dedicated to Abraham. Already with Job it was difficult, very difficult: what an effort it cost Kierkegaard his determination to oppose Job's tears and curses to Hegel's calm and sober thinking! But more was required of Abraham, much more than of Job. Job's troubles were sent by an external force, Abraham himself raised a knife over his son. People flee from Job, and even ethics, feeling powerless to help him, imperceptibly distances itself from him. People should not flee from Abraham, but take up arms against him: Abraham is the greatest criminal, but at the same time the most unfortunate of men: he loses his son, the hope and support of old age, and at the same time, like Kierkegaard, his honor and pride.

Who is this mysterious Abraham, and what is this mysterious book, in which the work of Abraham is not branded with a shameful name, as it should have been, but exalted and glorified for the instruction and edification of posterity? Kierkegaard fearlessly declares: "Abraham, by his action, transcends the boundaries of ethics. His telos (the Greek word for purpose) lies higher, beyond the ethical. Looking back at this goal, he puts aside the ethical." How could Abraham have dared, how dare anyone dare to put aside the ethical? "When I think of Abraham," writes Kierkegaard, "I seem to be utterly annihilated. Every moment I see what an unheard-of paradox constitutes the content of Abraham's life, every moment something pushes me away from him, and my thought, with all its tension, cannot penetrate into the paradox." And then he adds: "I can ponder and understand the hero, but my thought cannot penetrate into Abraham. As soon as I try to climb to its height, I now fall, because what is revealed to me is a paradox. But I do not belittle the importance of faith for this reason, on the contrary: for me, faith is the highest thing that is given to man, and I consider it dishonest that philosophy puts something else in the place of faith." And, finally: "I looked into the eyes of the terrible and was not afraid, I did not tremble. But I know that even if I resist courageously the terrible, my courage is not the courage of faith, but is nothing in comparison with the latter. I cannot carry out the movement of faith: I cannot close my eyes and throw myself into the abyss of the Absurd without looking back."

Accordingly, he directs all his forces against our ethics and what we call objective truth. "If the ethical is the highest," he writes, "then Abraham is lost." On the other hand: "superstition ascribes to objectivity the power of the head of Medusa, which turns subjectivity into stone." In the objectivity of speculative philosophy, he sees its main flaw. "Men," he writes, "have become too objective to attain eternal bliss: eternal bliss consists in passionate, infinite, personal interest. And this is abandoned in order to become objective: objectivity robs the soul of both its passion and its infinite self-interest. And such infinite interest is the beginning of faith." "If I renounce everything (as is required by speculative philosophy, which, by revealing the finiteness and transience of everything that life gives us, imagines in this way to liberate the human spirit)," Kierkegaard writes about Abraham's sacrifice, "this is not yet faith, it is only submission. I do this movement on my own. And if I do not do this, it is only out of cowardice or weakness. But in believing, I do not renounce anything. On the contrary, through faith I gain everything: if anyone has faith as a mustard seed, he can move mountains. It takes purely human courage to renounce the finite for the sake of the eternal. But it takes a paradoxical and humble courage of faith to possess everything finite by virtue of the Absurd. This is the courage of faith. Faith did not take away from Abraham his Isaac. Through faith he received it." One could cite as many quotations from Kierkegaard as you like, in which the same idea is expressed. "A knight of faith," he declares, "is a real lucky man, who owns everything finite." Kierkegaard sees perfectly well that these kinds of statements are a challenge to everything that our natural thinking tells us. For this reason he seeks protection not from reason with its universal and necessary judgments, to which speculative philosophy so passionately strives, but from the Absurd, i.e., from faith, which our reason qualifies as Absurdity. He knows from his own experience that "to believe against reason is martyrdom." But only such a faith that does not seek and cannot find justification in reason is, according to Kierkegaard, the faith of the Holy Spirit. Hagiographa. It only gives man hope to overcome that cruel necessity which has entered the world through reason and has come to dominate it. When Hegel transforms the truth of Scripture, the truth of Revelation, into a metaphysical truth, when, instead of saying that God took the form of man, or that man was created in the image and likeness of God, he declares that "the fundamental idea of absolute religion is the unity of human and divine nature," he kills faith. The meaning of these Hegelian words is the same as the meaning of Spinoza's words: "God acts only according to the laws of nature and is not forced by anyone." And the content of human absolute religion is again reduced to Spinoza's proposition: things could not have been created by God in any other way and in no other order than they were created. Speculative philosophy cannot exist without the idea of Necessity: it needs it like air to man, as a fish needs water. That is why the truths of experience, as Kant put it, irritate our mind so much. They talk about a free, divine fiât and do not give real, i.e., tedious, coercive knowledge. But for Kierkegaard, coercive knowledge is the abomination of desolation, it is the source of original sin – through his "ye shall be as gods knowing," the tempter led to the fall of man.

IV

We talked about the faith of Abraham. Abraham decided on a deed that shocked the human imagination: he raised the knife over his only son, over his hope, over the joy of old age. Of course, enormous forces are needed for this: it is not for nothing that Kierkegaard himself said that Abraham set aside the ethical. Abraham believed. What did he believe in? "Even at that moment," writes Kierkegaard, "when the knife flashed in his hands, Abraham believed that God would not demand Isaac from him. Let's move on. Let's say he really killed Isaac, Abraham believed. He did not believe that somewhere in the other world he would find bliss (as ethics based on our reason teaches). No, here in this world," Kierkegaard emphasizes, "he will still be happy. God can give him another Isaac. God can bring a slain son back to life. Abraham believed in the power of the Absurd: human calculation for him had long since ended." And in order to dispel any doubts as to how he understood Abraham's faith and the meaning of his action, he added his own work to the biblical narrative. Of course, he does not do this directly and openly. People don't talk about such things openly, much less Kierkegaard: that's why he invented his indirect statements. On occasion, among other things, he will say: "What Isaac is to a man, everyone decides for himself and for himself," but the meaning and concrete meaning of these words can only be unraveled by listening to the story he invented about a poor young man who fell in love with the king's daughter. It is quite obvious to everyone that the young man will not see the princess as his own ears. Ordinary common sense, as well as the highest human wisdom (after all, there is no fundamental difference between common sense and wisdom), equally advise him to give up the dream of the impossible and achieve the possible: the widow of a rich brewer is the most suitable match for him. But the young man, as if something had stung him, forgets both common sense and the divine Plato, and suddenly, just like Abraham, throws himself into the arms of the Absurd. Reason has refused to give him the king's daughter, whom it intended not for him, but for the king's son, and the young man turns away from reason and tries his luck with the Absurd. He knows perfectly well that in everyday life there reigns the deepest certainty that he will never get the king's daughter. "For," writes Kierkegaard, "reason is right: in our valley of sorrow, where it is lord and master, this was and will remain an impossibility." He also knows that the wisdom bestowed by the gods on men recommends in such cases a calm resignation to the inevitable as the only way out of the situation. And he even goes through this submission, in the sense that he gives himself an account of reality with all the clarity of which the human soul is capable. Others, Kierkegaard explains, will perhaps find it more tempting to kill in himself the desire to possess the king's daughter, to break off, so to speak, the edge of sorrow. And yet, he declares, "it is wonderful to possess a king's daughter, and the knight of obedience, if he denies it, is a liar," and his love was not true love. Kierkegaard contrasts the knight of obedience with the knight of faith. "Through faith," this knight says to himself, "through faith you will receive a king's daughter." And once again he repeats: "Still, how wonderful it is to receive a royal daughter." The knight of faith is the only happy one: he dominates the finite, while the knight of obedience is only a stranger and a stranger here. But then he admits: "And yet I am not capable of this daring (movement). When I try to do it, my head is spinning, and I hasten to take refuge in the sorrow of submission. I can swim, but I'm too heavy for this mystical soaring." And in his diaries we read: "If I had faith, Regina Olsen would have remained mine."