Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher born in Copenhagen, is usually regarded as the founder of existential philosophy (see Sartre's chapter). He is the youngest of seven children in his family. When he was twenty-one, his mother and five other children died successively. And he himself lived only 42 years old. In his early work "On the concept of irony", he made a brilliant criticism of Hegel's philosophy, and in his subsequent works, he continued to criticize the national church because he found it irreconcilable with his Christian beliefs.
as a refutation of the concept of category or whole in the works of Spinoza, Hegel and Marx, Kierkegaard's works once again endow the Cartesian individual with ontological importance, because for these philosophers, the individual is almost an irrelevant concept. In order to refute this concept, Kierkegaard said: "Every era has its typical way of depravity. In our time, it may not be pleasure, indulgence or lewdness, but it is a kind of undivided pantheism contempt for human individuals. " However, Kierkegaard was not a Cartesian in other ways. His works can probably be well summarized by his famous aphorisms, such as "the conclusion made by passion is the only reliable conclusion" and "what our times lack is not meditation but passion".
For Kierkegaard, the whole history of ideological evolution has been occupied by some wrong concepts. Since the Greek era, philosophy has focused on building a metaphysical system and worshiping reason or experience in order to understand the world. But none of these systems take the fundamental "human condition" into account. At every turning point, we are faced with the need to make a decision. Choice is the starting point of our existence, eternal companionship and the heaviest burden. In his diary, Kierkegaard wrote: "What I really lack is a clear awareness of what I am doing, not what I know ... What I should do is to find a truth that is true for me and an idea that I can live for and die for." This theme has reappeared in the thoughts of all existentialists, and this indisputably makes Kierkegaard the "first existentialist", although he himself did not admit this title.
the answer is religious belief. Kierkegaard thinks that belief is related to passion, but not to reason. Reason will only destroy faith, not prove it. Because even if one is immersed in the rational proof of the existence of God (as Anselmus or Aquinas did), these behaviors have nothing to do with believing in God. One must choose to believe in God in a passionate and personal way, not just a rational and logical exercise. A sincere belief requires its inner motivation, just like the concept of "leap of faith", that is, there is no spiritual comfort in the process by telling us what is "right" or "true" by reason. Kierkegaard believes that if the existence of God is only the result of common sense or rational meditation, then this comfort will eventually make us lose the need for faith.