Repetition (Kierkegaard book)

Constantin investigates whether repetition is possible, and the book includes his experiments and his relation to a nameless patient only known as the Young Man.

His observations lead him to conclude that the young man really isn't in love, but that the girl[note 3] is "the occasion[16][17] that awakened the poetic in him and made him a poet.

This love is strong, stronger than the whole world, but the moment it doubts, it is annihilated; it is like a sleepwalker who is able to walk in the most dangerous places with the complete security but plunges down when someone calls his name.

To explain this confusing error to her, that she was merely the visible form, while his thoughts, his soul, sought something else that he attributed to her-this would hurt her so deeply that his pride rose up in mutiny against it.

[note 5] Kierkegaard wrote humorously about the idea of repetition in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, he said, There is a story about a sailor who fell from the top of the mast without injuring himself, got up on his feet, and said: Now copy me – but most likely he himself also refrained from doing it again.

To make oneself out a scoundrel, a deceiver, simply and solely to prove how highly she is esteemed, because a person does not sacrifice his honor for a triviality!

Is your door then shut to the grief-stricken person, can he hope for no other relief from you than what miserable worldly wisdom poorly affords, lecturing on the perfection of life?

No, you who in your prime were the sword of the oppressed, the stave of the old, and the staff of the brokenhearted, you did not disappoint men when everything went to pieces-then you became the voice of the suffering, the cry of the grief-stricken, the shriek of the terrified, and a relief to all who bore their torment in silence, a faithful witness to all the affliction and laceration there can be in a heart, an unfailing spokesman who dared to lament “in bitterness of soul” and to strive with God.

Kierkegaard wrote in Fear and Trembling: "It would be altogether desirable if esthetics would sometime attempt to begin where for so many years it has ended-in the illusion of magnanimity.

"[42] Kierkegaard says, "I perceived that he was a poet-if for no other reason I saw it in the fact that a situation that would have been taken easily in stride by a lesser mortal expanded into a world event for him.

"[43] On December 6, 1843, Kierkegaard published his Four Upbuilding Discourses, he explains this Young Man's relation to Job in the following way, In tempestuous times, when the foundation of existence is tottering, when the moment shivers in anxious expectancy of what may come, when every explanation falls silent at the spectacle of the wild tumult, when a person’s innermost being groans in despair and in “bitterness of soul” cries to heaven, then Job still walks along, at the generation’s side and guarantees that there is a victory, guarantees that even if the single individual loses in the struggle, there is still a God who, just as he proportions every temptation humanly, even though the person did not withstand the temptation, will still make a way out such as he can bear it – yes, even more gloriously than any human expectancy.

Only a soft person could wish that Job did not exist, that he could instead leave off thinking, the sooner the better, could give up all movement in the most disgusting powerlessness, could blot himself out in the most wretched and miserable forgetfulness.

He's the most cunning of all the two-headed, for he could laugh at himself, raise himself above his own contradictions, change his skin and his soul, and yet be quite explicable to himself in every transformation--convinced, self-authorised.

From the beginning he was aware of this parthenogenesis of the soul, whose capacity to multiply by taking cuttings was equivalent to bringing forth young in this life without conception.

Those who have accustomed themselves merely to the repetition of certain sets of phrases in varied order, and who mistake this operation of memory for that of the understanding, will probably find it unintelligible.

The two or four characters are linked by a paranoid system of translation that stands -- as Kierkegaard would want us to believe -- for the nature of every human exchange and constitutes the precondition for poetic repetition.

… In Repetition Kierkegaard set out an exemplary subject for one of the main concerns of poetry, bringing hidden things to light.

Three of his books, The Concept of Anxiety, Repetition, and The Sickness Unto Death, are designated as psychological by their subtitles, and he frequently called himself a psychologist in his journal.

John.” Dr. John tells Kirk that psychology models itself after the natural sciences and attempts to gain a scientific understanding of human behavior and mental processes.

But, he hastens to add, his personal religious beliefs do not enter into psychology as a scientific discipline because science restricts itself to the natural realm, which can be studied by empirical methods.

Throughout Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship the ‘abstract thinker’, the ‘pitiful professorial figure is criticized from the perspective of the existing individual.

When it discovers a man whose power is attracting everyone’s attention, it demands that he explain for what purpose he uses it, and if he is unable to do so, he is suspected of not being a good citizen but perhaps a thug.

So I am by nature: with the first shutter of presentiment, my soul has simultaneously run through all the consequences, which frequently take a long time to appear in actuality.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript p. 264-265 de omnibus dubitandum was the name of Kierkegaard's unpublished book by the pseudonym Johannes Climacus"How it does humble my pride not to be able to go back to her.

Far be it from me arrogantly to think myself an Adonis with whom every girl falls in love, for what it means I do not understand, the gods save me; but since I do not know what the lovable is, I simply cannot know how I am to conduct myself in order to avoid this danger.

Stages on Life’s Way, Søren Kierkegaard, April 30, 1845 The Banquet http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Selections_from_the_writings_of_Kierkegaard/The_Banquet, Edited and Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong 1988, Princeton University Press p.37-78 See also Either/Or Part II p. 122, Repetition p. 214, and Concluding Postscript p. 264"Over the centuries have no knights and adventurers experienced incredible toil and trouble in order finally to find quiet peace in a happy marriage; over the centuries have not writers and readers of novels labored through one volume after the other in order to end with a happy marriage, and has not one generation after the other again and again faithfully endured four acts of troubles and entanglements if only there was any probability of a happy marriage in the fifth act?

Having overcome the numerous adversities, the lovers finally fall into each other’s arms, the curtain falls, the book ends; but the reader is no wiser, for it really is no great art, provided that love in its first flash is present, to have the courage and ingenuity to battle with all one’s might for the possession of that good that one regards as the one and only, but on the other hand it certainly takes self-control, wisdom, and patience to overcome the exhaustion that often is wont to follow a fulfilled desire."

Either/Or Part II p. 17-18 and p. 45-57Kierkegaard's "father’s death, in 1838, had made him and Peter Christian, the only surviving children, heirs to a large estate, of a hundred and twenty-five thousand rix-dollars.

It was only two months later, in a face-to-face confrontation, that she accepted his defection: in Kierkegaard’s version of the encounter, she removed from her bosom a “little note on which were some words from me” and slowly tore it to pieces, afterward stating quietly, “You have played a terrible game with me.” Garff underlines the symbolism: “This little gesture was a decisive act: Regine freed herself from the writing; she had given up being a Regine of words on paper and had returned to reality.” Two years later, returned to reality, she became engaged to Johan Frederik Schlegel, her girlhood tutor, whose courtship had been interrupted by Kierkegaard’s intervention in her life.

"The saying declares that love conquers everything, and this is why the wedding ceremony, which has no festive offering of congratulations but a godly invitation, does not greet the lovers as conquerors but invites them to conflict, fences them in the God-pleasing battleground of the state of marriage, encourages them to fight the good fight, strengthens the contenders by means of the covenant, promises them victory as it accepts their promise, gives them the blessing for the long journey-but then also informs them that the conflict exists: a conflict that must be fought to the finish, toil that must be endured, danger that must be encountered, a curse if it is not jointly borne as a blessing.