Kierkegaard (27 page)

Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology

October 16, 1843

Constantine Constantius

“Hope is a lovely maiden who slips away between one's fingers; recollection is a beautiful old woman with whom one is never satisfied at the moment; repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never wearies” (132).

If God exists, then God is the source of all existence. What is more, if God exists then God is Eternal, not temporary. Thus, if human selves are to realise their authentic existence, they must relate rightly to God, which is to say, to the Eternal. It is the self's identity becoming authentic through a right relationship to Eternity that occupies this book. The idea of “repetition” is crucial for personhood. Without repeated events, there can be no persistent reality, no continuity of a self. Without repetition, life would be one fleeting and unconnected experience after another. Repetition happens when a self commits, and recommits, its new self with the ideals and choices of the past self. By repeatedly choosing oneself, a person unites their past and future selves in the present. Without repetition there can be no meaning—“all life dissolves into an empty, meaningless noise” (149). The continuity of existence through time is what makes “repetition” more a matter of eternity than of temporality. Like the Eternal, repetition is ever-present and ever-future. The self that chooses itself again in the moment is an ever-renewing self: every choice that entails the choices of the past also opens up new avenues in the future. Like Eternity, repetition is pregnant with possibility. However, without a right relationship to the Eternal, repetition becomes bare endurance, much like the pointless task of Sisyphus doomed to roll the same rock up the same hill. Only choices made “before God” give repetition its value and meaning.

Working with the theme that repetition is necessary for meaningful identity,
Repetition
contrasts different ways people attempt to seek this out. Pagans such as Socrates and pre-Christians like the writer of Ecclesiastes adopt the attitude “what is new becomes old.” The meaning of existence has to be found by looking (or remembering) the past, for “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). The aesthete of Christendom is such a person. The first half of
Repetition
tells the whimsical tale of a young man who, realising he enjoys his memories of his beloved more than he enjoys her, takes a return trip to Berlin to relive his most formative experiences and to rediscover himself. The
experiment is a disaster and the young man learns that by attempting to relive the past he has robbed his experiences of the novelty and meaning they held for him. If there is to be true repetition, it cannot be had by replicating external experiences. This leads to the shorter, second section of the book, which explores the ethical approach to repetition. The ethicist realises that meaningful repetition has to do with responsible self-choice. Yet this too is doomed to disaster for the simple reason that no amount of discipline and constancy of character can restore a broken, sinful self to wholeness. Here, the religious possibility of repetition arises. For the one who says, “I am making everything new” (Revelation 21:5), what is old becomes new. The repetition of Eternity does not just repeat a life. It redeems it.

Readers should be forgiven if they read strong autobiographical connections into this book. The subject of a young man aesthetically, ethically, and religiously rethinking his purpose in life after a failed romance hits rather close to (Søren's) home. A few months previous to its publication, Søren had also fled to Berlin when he realised Regine did not hate him. The book is full of allusions to the possibility of restoration of lost love. Yet before the book was sent to the printers, Søren learned the news that Regine had become engaged to Fritz Schlegel. The manuscript editions show evidence of revision and addition in light of this news, expanding the “religious” aspect of spiritual restoration in the face of despair and adding a number of ambiguous comments about the constancy of womanly love. Yet readers would be mistaken to read
Repetition
as straightforward autobiography. As Søren liked to constantly remind his readers, he was a poet who takes the stuff of life (including his own) and spins it into new things. Constantine Constantius is not writing nonfiction, he is writing an experimental essay on what it is to be a self and how one goes about becoming one.

Fear and Trembling

October 16, 1843

Johannes de Silentio

“The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he meant to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he meant to sacrifice Isaac—but precisely in this contradiction is the anxiety that can make a person sleepless, and yet without this anxiety Abraham is not who he is” (30).

Kierkegaard arranged to have this book published on the same day as
Repetition
. It is attributed to the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, who repeatedly tells his readers he is not a man who has faith. Nonetheless, Johannes de Silentio sets out to explore what he thinks faith might be. He does this primarily through a series of extended reflections on the person of Abraham and the attempted sacrifice of Isaac.
Fear and Trembling
treats the Genesis story seriously, but this is not a work of biblical exposition. Instead, Johannes attempts to get inside the head of this “father of faith,” retelling the story from multiple perspectives and comparing Abraham's predicament to other tragic stories drawn from classical myth. It is significant Johannes often admits defeat, thus living up to his name John “the Silent One.” “Every time [he considered the story] he sank down wearily, folded his hands and said, ‘No one was as great as Abraham. Who is able to understand him?' ”(14).

In service of understanding the faith of Abraham, the book introduces some key ideas. One is the idea that “the ethical” can be a temptation away from “the religious.” Abraham's religious stance results in his willingness to commit an offence against that which is universally considered to be ethical. It is always true that fathers should not kill their sons. Yet Abraham's right position towards God entails willingness to do just this; hence, faith is something higher than ethics. Here de Silentio introduces the idea of the “teleological suspension of the ethical.”
Teleological
means “purposeful,” and
suspension
implies a temporary pause. Thus faith entails an openness to the possibility that the demands of common morality may be temporally suspended for a higher purpose. De Silentio is quick to point out that faith does not always imply killing—it occurs whenever someone resigns that which is right and good while at the same time believing this will be restored to them. Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac while at the very same time believing that God's promise to bless Abraham through Isaac would still be fulfilled. De Silentio likens this double posture of “resigning” and “receiving” to a dancer's leap. (Although the phrase never appears in the original Danish, this is the source of the English idiom “Leap of Faith.”) De Silentio calls people who move through life resigning “the ethical” while retaining hope it will be restored “Knights of Faith.” The Knights do not call attention to themselves. Indeed, like Abraham, they must remain silent. To justify “faith” by making reference to what is common-sensically and universally considered “ethical” is to succumb to a temptation.

The book contains some of the most striking ideas of Kierkegaard's authorship; however, it is significant how few of them appear in any of his later works. The Knight of Faith and his silent, anonymous faith does not show up again, and de Silentio's vision is subject to criticism by Kierkegaard's later pseudonyms. Although he talks about “faith,” it is not actually Christianity with which de Silentio is concerned—he resolutely focuses on characters from pagan antiquity and pre-Hebrew history, and the figure of Jesus Christ is mentioned only once in passing and never named. At the same time, the theme of resigning and receiving is clearly related to the events of Kierkegaard's own life and his tortured relationship with Regine—a connection that did not go unnoticed by her or anyone who knew of their situation.

The thinly veiled personal nature of the book and the lyrical genius Kierkegaard employs to develop his ideas has made
Fear andTrembling
one of the most compelling and influential books, not only of Kierkegaard's career, but in the history of Western thought. Kierkegaard himself was
aware of this book's potential to overshadow the rest (“O, once I am dead,
Fear and Trembling
alone will be enough for an imperishable name as an author. Then it will be read, translated into foreign languages as well. The reader will almost shrink from the frightful pathos in the book” (JP 6491), yet the reasons above, and the pseudonymous nature of the piece, should make readers pause before treating Johannes de Silentio's vision of faith as Søren Kierkegaard's last and best word on the subject.

Philosophical Fragments, or a Fragment of Philosophy

June 13, 1844

Johannes Climacus

“. . . can an eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge?” (title page).

Philosophical Fragments
is attributed to Johannes Climacus, one of Kierkegaard's favourite pseudonyms, and one to whom is entrusted some of the ideas nearest and dearest to Kierkegaard's heart. Søren's journals reveal his prevarication over whether to use a pseudonym at all for this book, and it was only at the last minute he scratched his name from the manuscript and submitted the text to the publishers as “Johannes Climacus” instead. Climacus had been used as a stand-in for Søren in an earlier book with a high autobiographical content (also called
Johannes Climacus
), which Søren had left unfinished. The name will appear a few years later as the author of the magnum opus
Concluding Unscientific Postscript
, which at the time Søren thought would conclude his authorship.
Philosophical Fragments
is a short book, written from the point of view of someone who claims to have faith but who is still uneasy calling himself a Christian. The subject matter revolves around the limits of human reason, methods of learning truth, and the
relationship
between
faith, historical events, and paradox. The title is a satirical dig at Hegel and his followers who approached matters of faith, reason, and historical truth from a distinctly systematic angle, offering grand, holistic schemes that allowed for no loose fragments of thought.

One of the major Kierkegaardian themes
Fragments
develops is the difference between “pagan” and “Christian” categories of conveying truth. Socrates, the greatest pagan of all time, embodies the “mauetic,” or “midwife,” method. His goal was to bring the truth out from within his learners, getting them to effectively recall what was already lodged within. Socrates was not the object of the learning—indeed, he must become less so that the learner can attain self-knowledge.
Fragments
contrasts this with an approach to truth in which the Teacher
is
the message. Here, no amount of midwifery will bring forth truth from within the learner, for the learner exists in a state of sin. Truth must be revealed, not recalled: the condition for receiving Truth is not to gain more knowledge, but to repent and be saved. With the introduction of a Teacher who is himself the Truth, and not merely a vehicle for relaying useful self-knowledge,
Fragments
is led to examine another grand Kierkegaardian theme: offence at—or belief in—the paradox of the incarnation. It is worth noting here that
Fragments
is not an explicitly “Christian” book. As a way of preventing the Christianised reader from making too easy assumptions, the book studiously avoids talking about “God” and instead refers throughout to “the god.” The name of Jesus Christ is not mentioned, and the incarnation is discussed wholly in terms of a paradox of mutually conflicting concepts, rather than a specific person with a narrative life. “I shall merely trace [the idea] in a few lines without reference to whether it was historical or not” (45). The Paradox is the presence of the Finite with the Infinite, of the Eternal with the Temporal. It is a thought that reason cannot think, and it is with this paradox that Climacus thinks the learner must reside without being offended if he is to be said to have faith. The time and place of the incarnation is less important to Climacus than is the claim that the
incarnation had a time and a place at all. How can faith in any one point in history be the source of salvation?
Fragments
considers whether the first witnesses of the incarnation (the “first-hand disciples”) had any advantages over any second-hand disciples who came later. It suggests being a second-hand disciple is impossible only if faith is a matter of accumulating knowledge. Yet faith is not a matter of knowledge. It is a matter of not being offended when confronted with the Paradox. The Paradox of the Infinite residing with the Finite is not a problem that can be solved with more information; thus, the first-hand disciples faced the same challenge as did the second-hand disciples. The incarnation was as offensive to reason one second after it happened as it is thousands of years later.

Concept of Anxiety

June 17, 1844

Vigilius Haufniensis

Søren arranged to have this book published five days after
Fragments
and on the same day as
Prefaces
. Unlike these books, and true to its name,
Anxiety
is a serious, convoluted read. Søren's own anxious inner life clearly informs the work; however, this is no simple autobiography. The book itself is laid out like a sort of textbook, prompting some interpreters to speculate it was intended to be a satire on the Hegelian method that had so gripped Kierkegaard's contemporaries who treated personal subjects with a detached, objective air. The book takes as its subject matter such related topics as freedom, original sin, inherited guilt, and the overriding sense of angst, which Haufniensis thinks affects all humans everywhere.