Liu Qing | Homelessness is the biggest spiritual crisis of modern people

Liu Qing, born in 1963. In 1978, he studied at the Department of Chemical Engineering of Shanghai Donghua University, and in 1985, he received a master's degree in engineering and stayed at the school to teach. In 1991, he went to the United States to study political science, and obtained a master's degree (Mackay University) and a doctorate degree (University of Minnesota). From 2000 to 2003, he was an associate researcher at the Institute of Chinese Culture, Chinese University of Hong Kong. In July 2003, he returned to Shanghai to work as an associate professor of the History Department of East China Normal University, a researcher and assistant to the director of the Institute of Modern Chinese Thought and Culture of East China Normal University. His research field is the history of Western thought. In 2005, he was selected into Shanghai "Pujiang Talent Program". 2007-2008 Fulbright visiting scholar in the United States. Since July 2013, he has been a professor and doctoral supervisor of the Department of Political Science of East China Normal University; director of the Center for World Politics Research of East China Normal University.

Transferred from the official account "No. 22 Mansion"

The dilemma of modernity manifests itself in two distinct domains: the spiritual life of the individual and the public affairs of society. These two issues are related to each other, but can still be discussed separately at the analytical level.

Some phenomena we can all feel, such as mental confusion, emotional sleepiness, mourning culture, and emptiness. There is a fundamental problem behind these phenomena, which is the "spiritual crisis" or "belief crisis" of modern people.

You may be familiar with the term "crisis of faith", but what does it really mean? The road signs in this chapter give you two background hints. First, I often hear people say that belief in life is very important, but why do people need belief to live? Second, why is it more difficult to establish beliefs in modern societies than in traditional societies, and what are the consequences of doing so? After understanding these two background prompts, you will have a basic understanding of the three thinkers who will appear in this chapter, Nietzsche, Freud, and Sartre.

Why do people need faith to live? On August 1, 1835, a 22-year-old college student wrote in his diary: What I'm really missing is to figure out in my heart: What the hell am I going to do? The problem is to find a truth that is true for me, a belief that I can live and die for it.

The college student who wrote this passage was the Dane Kierkegaard, who later became a famous philosopher and the source of Western existentialism.

Does this passage of his resonate with you or give you a sense of deja vu? Perhaps, at some point in your life, you will also think about similar questions, concerned with the fundamental meaning of life, and this concern is the philosopher Said "Ultimate Care".

The ultimate concern is not just a philosopher's concern, but an inner experience that everyone may experience. For example, after a hard day's work, exhausted, looking at the busy traffic and feasting outside the window, thinking to myself, "Why am I working so hard?" Living conditions, having a house and a car, allowing myself and my family to live a decent life, and allowing my children to enjoy a better education in the future..."

Setting a specific goal is not difficult. At every moment of life, everyone has a specific goal of the moment, but if you further ask the meaning of this specific goal, you need a larger goal to answer. If you keep asking, you will eventually encounter the question of ultimate concern: what is life for? What is the meaning of life?

Ultimate concern is "ultimate" because it seeks the fundamental answer behind all answers. The basis for responding to the ultimate concern is the so-called "life belief" or "life ideal". So, we need faith to support the fundamental meaning of life.

But I guess someone will say, why should I keep asking about the meaning of the goal? I know I have to work hard for a better life, and that's enough. I will stop here, and I will not bother to continue to ask questions, to pay attention to the question of ultimate concern. So, I don't need to live by faith either.

This question sounds reasonable. Many people do not have any clear ideals in life, but they can still eat and live normally and live a good daily life. In this way, it seems that you can avoid the question of the ultimate question of life, and you can get rid of the trouble of belief.

However, many philosophers believe that this is just pretending to solve the problem of belief, when in fact you can't really get rid of it. You can avoid this question, but the question of faith is like a ghost that will come upon you at some point. This is because people always face two fundamental life problems at the spiritual level, one is death and the other is greed.

Let's talk about death first. Is death really a problem? We often hear people say, "It is better to die than to live." Confucius also said in "The Analects of Confucius", "If you don't know life, how can you know death". You may think that Westerners may be too serious about death, because of the cultural differences, the Chinese are more comfortable with it. In fact, the West also has relatively calm ideas. For example, the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus once had a saying of dispelling death: as long as you can still think about death, it means you are still alive, then you don’t have to worry about death. And once you're dead, it doesn't feel like death is a problem. What he actually means is that death will not be the actual experience of man anyway. This seems to eliminate the problem of death.

But is this claim reliable? I don't find it very reliable. Although death is not our actual life experience when we are alive, human beings are conscious beings, and we have a consciousness about death. We know that death is a possibility—unexpected natural or man-made disaster, accident, or disease—that can happen at any time. And the possibility of death is very serious, it is the possibility of ending all other possibilities of life. We know that everyone is mortal, but the concept of "eternity" exists in human consciousness. This can lead to a profound sadness about death, a sense of irreparable lack. So we mourn the dead and worry or fear our eventual death.

Another problem in life is "greed". We know that man is a biological being in a physical sense with animal-like desires. But at the same time, man is a spiritual being with so-called conscience and moral sense. We have the concept of "sublime" in our moral consciousness, but we are sometimes swayed by animalistic desires and cannot extricate ourselves. From the perspective of morality, people feel ashamed of their own desires, despise themselves, and feel the humility of their own lives.

Death and greed are the troubles that every life will face, and they are also the two major problems of ultimate concern. How to deal with these two problems? Relying on belief, the most typical is religious belief. For example, what Christianity calls soul salvation means that your body will die, but if you believe in God, your soul can be saved and gain eternal life. Although you are a humble and sinful person, by believing in religion and cultivating your own conduct, you can go to the lofty realm of morality. Therefore, the meaning of faith is to achieve the transcendence of life, to let you transcend death to eternal life, to overcome the fear of death; to let you transcend the humble to the sublime, so as to overcome the shame of desire.

In fact, not only religion, but the ultimate ideal of life has a similar transcendence. For example, we learned from Lei Feng's deeds when we were young. He famously said, "I want to devote my limited life to serving the people infinitely." This ideal can also play a role of transcendence as a belief in life: you have contributed your short life to an infinite noble cause, and your life will gain an eternal height, surpassing death. The same belief also encourages you to pursue lofty morals, and to be a noble person will transcend your humble self-interest.

Whether it is religious beliefs or other ultimate life beliefs, there are solutions for dealing with death and greed. If we can establish a firm belief in life, we can clearly answer the troubles of ultimate concern, and the soul will have a foundation to settle down. Therefore, some philosophers say that faith is the hometown of the soul, and it gives sustenance to the meaning of life.

So the question is, since the plan is ready-made here, it is clear why there is a crisis of belief? Because there is such a conundrum: Does belief need a reason? Are beliefs believed because they are true, or are they believed to be true because they believe? There is a rift between "truth" and "belief".

Take religious beliefs, for example. In many traditional societies, professing religion is a default choice because religion is widely accepted in both conception and social practice, and religion represents holiness and righteousness. Most people are religious and become the mainstream of society. It is easy for people to follow religions because they believe in the holiness of religions, or because they follow the mainstream.

But after the change of ancient and modern, religious belief has been challenged by rationalism. Before accepting a belief, modern people often require confirmation that the belief is true, reliable and credible. But how can we be sure? Modern people tend to seek evidence and need reasons to prove and confirm.

The greater the significance of belief to life, the stronger the requirement to demonstrate that belief is truth. Only true faith can make people sincerely and firmly believe. So modern people associate "faith and truth" more and more closely, which brings an unbearable burden of argument, because there is a logical gap between faith and truth.

Faith is essentially a value, and accepting belief requires making value judgments, while truth and falsehood are a matter of fact, and distinguishing true and false is a factual judgment. As we said in the chapter on Weber, the former has no objective rational basis, while the latter can in principle be based on scientifically rational evidence and logic. That is to say, on the issue of belief, if a value judgment is reviewed by the standard of reviewing factual judgment, it is equivalent to using the speed standard of a sprint race to evaluate whether a painting is beautiful or not, and it will not work. In academic language, there is a logical rupture between belief and truth.

Kierkegaard struggled with this question all his life, and finally he found that you cannot rely solely on logic and reasoning to prove that a belief is true and to confirm its reliability. Therefore, you have to bravely "jump" to be able to cross this gap. It's all an adventure. Because we can't know whether the result of this leap is reaching the other side of salvation or falling into the abyss of emptiness. We can't even calculate the probability of this risk. Faith requires great courage.

To sum up, we will constantly ask the meaning of life, and this questioning will encounter the two major problems of death and greed. To meet this challenge, we need to establish a reliable belief in life. In traditional western societies, people mainly rely on religion to cope. But after the baptism of Enlightenment rationalism, accepting religious belief is no longer the default option for granted. Modern people tend to rely on reason to verify and confirm the reliability of beliefs, so accepting beliefs is not blind obedience. However, there is a gap between belief and reason, which cannot be bridged by rational argument itself, making it very difficult to establish belief in the modern world.

If faith is the hometown of the soul, then for many modern people who do not have faith, they have fallen into the predicament of spiritual homelessness. This predicament is "the spiritual crisis of modern man", and it is also the theme of this chapter.

If you are also plagued by this problem, then you are not alone. Some of the greatest minds in human history have pondered this question. Subsequent sections describe some of the most insightful thinkers on the subject, including Nietzsche, Freud, and Sartre. Their insights are instructive, but I must tell the truth: no one can give us a sure and reliable way out of this predicament. Nietzsche said: "How much truth a man can bear is the test of his mental strength."

It's also a high-energy warning: this journey of our minds is about to enter a precipitous road, an adventure, and you need to be prepared for a spiritual test.

How much truth can a man bear,

It is a test of his mental strength - Nietzsche