The Single Individual And The Value Of Existence

As one of the greatest thinkers in the 19th century, Soren Kierkegaard's thought inevitably marked by the imprint of his day. His genius mind made him not only belongs to his time, but also discussed the far-reaching question:the existence of the single individual, which extremely affected the modernity. Kierkegaard's philosophy and religious thought is based on the problem of being and existence which many western philosophers paid close attention to in the history of Western philosophy. Besides, being a devout Christian, Kierkegaard inherited and developed Schleiermacher's thought of "existence approach" which is a personal feeling or intuition of the universe. By using this method, Kierkegaard began to criticize Hegel's speculative philosophy seriously. In his idea, the speculative philosophy suspends the existence of the individual and makes him (or her) disappear in "the crowd". At the same time, his family, love stories and the personal experience which under the influence of his time also strongly affected his thought. All of these backgrounds provide Kierkegaard an individual and existential approach of his philosophy and religious thought.Kierkegaard created a great number of books, newspapers and magazine articles and journals in his short life, he used "direct communication" and "indirect communication" which include pseudonymity, irony, humor, fable and other variety of ways, most of them are by his own creation. These not only impact on the later literature and aesthetics, but also helped him to express his thought better. Kierkegaard stressed the importance of "the single individual" in most of his works. He argued that "subjectivity is truth" and "truth is subjectivity", and the only way to be a single individual is to be in the process of becoming a single individual. To become a single individual, in other words, a Christian, is the only way for a human being to exist and finding the value of existence. Kierkegaard describes the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious as stages on life's way (or existence spheres). To become a single individual, an individual will need to exceed the aesthetic stage and go from the ethical stage to the religious stage through the "leap of faith". In Kierkegaard's "individualism", the isolation from the crowd is not an end but a means to the self's proper relationships, only the relation to God is the essentially relational. Finally, in Religion B, an individual establishes a personal relationship with God-Man relying on faith, and eventually becomes a single individual.As the "Father of Existentialism", Kierkegaard is an influential figure in contemporary thought. The ascendant existentialist movement pointed to him as a precursor. Both Existentialism and Christian existentialism are based on his ideas. Many 20th-century philosophers, both theistic and atheistic, and theologians drew many concepts from Kierkegaard, including the notions of angst, despair, and the importance of the individual. But it is worth noting that Kierkegaard's thought and the existentialism trend has a certain difference.In the present essay, the author tries to combine "the single individual" and "existence" which comes from the religious intention in his authorship with the history of western philosophy and the history of Christian thought. Kierkegaard's "individualism" is to be understood as both remedy and resistance to the false collectivism of modernity. Following the clue of Kierkegaard's thought and the studies of it, this dissertation attempts to approach the meaning of finding out the impact of modern society from the relationship between Christian and philosophy thoughts and Kierkegaard's thought about existence.