Chapter 8 2.There is a river in front of everyone

The great leader Chairman Mao taught us that people should always have a little spirit. After taking out a small book to study the spirit of the chairman's important speech, I found that for all sentient beings, from the first step into this world, there is a river in front of them. This is a "river of existentialism". To explain, "Existentialism" is a philosophical school that had a huge influence in the West from the end of the 19th century to the 1950s, and became popular again in China in the 1980s.The person who laid the foundation and erected the house was called Kierkegaard, and outstanding architects and decoration designers such as Heidegger, Tillich, and Sartre worked together to make this house very grand.

Mental patients live in mental hospitals, of course. What kind of people live in the house of "existentialism"?A group of people who are extremely painful in spirit! "Existentialism" is a refuge for a group of people who have "hit the road" but have not yet made it to the other side of the river. I also spent some time in this house many years ago, so I was extremely impressed. Kierkegaard is a "rich second generation" in Denmark, who has money and leisure, and is fascinated by philosophy.Philosophers have always had a fine tradition of being single, and he also resolutely inherited this tradition: Although he fell in love with a beautiful noble lady, he rejected love and marriage for the sake of philosophy.Such a loyal warrior who does not eat the fireworks of the world and bears the suffering of mankind will of course be ridiculed and humiliated by everyone, even children dare to bully him.On the streets of Copenhagen, there are often a group of little kids behind him throwing small stones at him. That - not this", is equivalent to "Left - Right - Left".

Compared with the eldest brother Kierkegaard, Heidegger, who is the second younger brother, is much worse, a typical poor N generation.Nowadays, when real estate developers sell real estate, they often advertise "dwelling poetically" and "×××× is the home of existence", which is shamelessly plagiarized from Heidegger (Heidegger's famous saying is " Language is the home of being" - author's note).They don’t know that when Heidegger was young, let alone not being able to afford even one square meter of these buildings, even if he had a chicken leg to eat, he felt that he lived a happy life like heaven.

He was born in the German countryside, his father was just a handyman, in dire straits, and lived a life worse than a horse.When Heidegger was in elementary school, he was always malnourished. When he was in middle school, he couldn't afford the tuition fees.The reason why he was able to read it, and eventually made his way to the top, relied on the "Hope Project" and the funding of his friends.In middle school, in order to study, he had to sign a "deed of prostitution", promising to become a pastor in the future, in exchange for the church to pay his tuition.When he was in college, due to his health, he wanted to tear up the contract of prostitution, and the church refused to give him money in a rage, and he almost dropped out of school.Later, it was only with the help of friends that he was able to read it and mixed into the upper class.

Heidegger is a typical "Phoenix Man".Born in poverty, he knew best how to get to the top, so he first flattered Husserl (he is a Jew), the philosophical boss in German academia, and became Husserl's assistant, getting a good position.After the Nazis came to power, he flattered the Nazis, and finally pushed Husserl aside and became the rector of the University of Freiburg himself.If meanness can be a prize among philosophers, Heidegger must be doing it. Tillich seemed inscrutable.In Heidegger's eyes, religion doesn't mean much, and there is really no attraction in entrusting one's life to God.But Tillich is really a man who surrenders himself to God.

During World War I, he was a chaplain.After Hitler came to power, he ran to the United States and devoted himself to "cooking" existentialism and Christian theology in one pot.Finally, he blushed.In addition to strength, there is another important reason. The United States is a Protestant country, and Tillich caters to the American people's deep understanding of Protestantism.His success proves that if you want to preach a very powerful truth to the people, you also need to flatter them.The reason is simple, you are not God. Sartre likes to play deep, and he often appears in cafes on the banks of the Seine in Paris.By the way, many petty bourgeoisie and white-collar workers now drink coffee in cafes to show that they are romantic, which is actually very pretentious.The same is drinking coffee, some people are just wasting time, while some people can generate extremely profound thoughts, this is the difference in grades!

Sartre was also one of the warriors who kept the philosopher's single tradition alive.However, Simon de Beauvoir, who advocated feminism and wrote this shocking book, was his lover all his life.Their romantic deeds tell us: when a man or woman says he (she) is "single", that does not mean that he does not have women or men.Please remember this point, "leftover men" and "leftover women"! What kind of life and the truth of the world did the four mentioned above see when they built the house of "existentialism"?In order to facilitate understanding, I briefly summarize their views and logic as follows.

(1) Man is a kind of "existence" in the world (is it a lump of meat tens to hundreds of kilograms), and this "existence" is different from "existence" such as a tree or a pig, because the two The head on each shoulder is conscious and aware of its own "existence", while the tree and the pig do not. (2) When you know your own "existence", you also know that you are just you, the talkative Zhang Damin, Xiao Lizi, etc. You are not Obama, not Osama bin Laden.In short, you know that you are who you are, that you are different from others. (3) You know that you are different from others, which means that this world is very dangerous for you, and it is estimated that you will be safe on Mars.Because the world is neither a part of you nor you a part of it, then, like volcanoes in nature, earthquakes, like men and women in society, can threaten you and you will feel it.

(4) The more deadly threat comes from your "existence" itself.A thing that "exists", if you know it exists, what is the most fearful thing?It is "non-existence", it is nothingness!For humans, survival means existence, while death means non-existence, so people are most afraid of death.However, a person is doomed. From the first day of his birth, he is actually marching towards death step by step until he closes his eyes and completes the death process.Therefore, every day you exist is a day threatened by non-existence, your existence is always denied.How painful is this?

When the famous Mr. Saddam was tried, he disregarded everything in court, ignored the judge's orders, and insisted that he was still the current president of Iraq.However, Milosevic of the former Yugoslavia, who is also a suffering brother, turned the court into a place for "trial" of NATO.This strong contrast is related to "existence".Do you think Saddam is so stupid that he doesn't know how to learn from Comrade Milosevic?The truth of the matter is that he has regarded the "President of Iraq" as his existence psychologically. If he does not, it will be a denial of his existence and his nihilization, which is disastrous!So he must convince himself that he is still the current president of Iraq.

If you enter a party where no one pays attention to you or even looks at you, do you feel anxious, uncomfortable, or even annoyed?The reason is simple, you realize that in the eyes of others, you do not exist at all! (5) Therefore, people are lonely and full of anxiety of "non-existence".And the fact that people will definitely die in the end makes life seem very absurd.What could be more absurd than all the hard work, and finally everything turned into a pile of loess? (6) However, man has free will and can create his own world.The world itself has no meaning, but people can give it meaning.Of course a tree and a pig have no troubles, but their "essence" has been fixed, but people can develop their "existence" and create their own essence by themselves.God is fair, it is impossible to give everything to pigs, and it is impossible to give everything to people. (7) It is true that our "existence" is always under threat, but it is a virtue not to succumb to fate.We should have the "courage to be" and assert ourselves against all threats! Do you see it?It was a relentless revelation of the pain of life.When a person thinks about the meaning of life, such a river of "existentialism" appears in front of him.It oozes angst, pain, and absurdity.However, on the other side of it is the paradise of fairness and justice, the paradise of ultimate care, the true freedom and liberation of the soul, and the poetic habitat of the enlightened. In front of this river, different people have made different choices. The vast majority chose to stay on this side of the river.They deliberately ignored the presence on the other side and refused to go down the river.Isn't thinking painful?Well, I don't think, I just "regress" and change myself from a "person" to a pig.The pig eats and sleeps, sleeps and eats without pain, and I can do the same. In addition, people really need to give life a little meaning in order to avoid absurd attacks and survive.However, my eyes can just focus on many things in the world, such as money, power, beauty, food, entertainment and all the strange things.I can think that getting these things is meaning.Hehe, I am not afraid that my existence will be nihilized. With an LV bag on my shoulder, and an "unlimited gold card" in a high-end store, who dares to ignore my existence?Only I ignore them!What?Man must have a God?Power, money, country, nation, myself, my idol is my God! Crossing the river is difficult.But there are still people who go down the river, but there are three situations for going down the river: one is to go down the river and walk to the other side; in the river. From the perspective of philosophy, those who stay on this bank and never go down the river are pure laymen, and realists are the "cave people" despised by Socrates and Plato (not cavemen, whose minds are not so developed yet. ), they see only phantoms all their lives, but take phantoms as real. People who have gone down the river and retreated are apostates and pragmatists who realize where their ideals are, have pursued them, but eventually betrayed them. Those who struggle painfully in the river, who can neither retreat nor reach the other side at once, are idealists. Reaching the other side are religious saints, Buddhist masters, classical philosophers, true hermits. Psychologically, what are the characteristics of these different people? People who stay on this bank and never go down the river are lethargic on many serious issues, and their brains and psychology are often handed over to others to control.They are the "mass" of the revolution, the "consumers" of the consumer society, the "fans" of celebrities, and the patriotic youth who gather on the Internet.Lu Xun's novels are full of them, spectators who are carried like ducks, and Mrs. Xianglin and Ah Q all belong to this category. Although this kind of person is sometimes miserable, he still retains a certain normal emotion of human nature-if he is not driven to perversion. Those who went down the river but returned were psychologically abnormal, and they were "smart people" in a pejorative sense.They are "businessmen" in life, as long as they have a little sweetness, they can sell themselves.Because they have already sold themselves once, for the sake of profit, there is nothing that cannot be sold afterwards.It's just that they are destined to suffer their own revenge for their betrayal.I will talk about this later. The above two kinds of people are heroes who laugh at idealists and even pull their fists at them.Because only by trampling ideals to death and devaluing ideals to nothing, those who have ideals will not cause them anxiety in the comparison.If a group of people have no soul, then I will feel at ease that I have no soul. The Frenchman La Rochefoucauld in the 17th century exposed viciously: "Modity is a kind of emotion that people who are intoxicated with happiness are afraid of incurring envy and contempt." The attitude that seems to be a virtue is a kind of psychological protection device for people. Not to mention laughing at a person? Struggling in the river, people who can neither retreat nor reach the other side at once suffer the pain of being torn apart from ideals and reality, but mentally, they are healthier than those who don't know who they are, or who have betrayed themselves. However, if one day, he cannot despise everything in the world psychologically, this kind of person is likely to collapse psychologically. Those who reach the other side are those who have overcome the division of the self, illuminated the darkness of the unconscious, or touched the truth of humanity and the world.They are almost invincible psychologically.