Kierkegaard's Writings, VI, Volume 6

Fear and Trembling/Repetition

Søren Kierkegaard, Edna H. Hong, Howard V. Hong

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781400846955
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia delle religioni

Presented here in a new translation, with a historical introduction by the translators, Fear and Trembling and Repetition are the most poetic and personal of Søren Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writings. Published in 1843 and written under the names Johannes de Silentio and Constantine Constantius, respectively, the books demonstrate Kierkegaard's transmutation of the personal into the lyrically religious. Each work uses as a point of departure Kierkegaard's breaking of his engagement to Regine Olsen--his sacrifice of "that single individual." From this beginning Fear and Trembling becomes an exploration of the faith that transcends the ethical, as in Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac at God's command. This faith, which persists in the face of the absurd, is rewarded finally by the return of all that the faithful one is willing to sacrifice. Repetition discusses the most profound implications of unity of personhood and of identity within change, beginning with the ironic story of a young poet who cannot fulfill the ethical claims of his engagement because of the possible consequences of his marriage. The poet finally despairs of repetition (renewal) in the ethical sphere, as does his advisor and friend Constantius in the aesthetic sphere. The book ends with Constantius' intimation of a third kind of repetition--in the religious sphere.

[PART ONE]

[REPORT BY CONSTANTIN CONSTANTIUS]

¹When the Eleatics denied motion, Diogenes, as everyone [III 173] knows, came forward as an opponent.² He literally did come forward, because he did not say a word but merely paced back and forth a few times, thereby assuming that he had sufficiently refuted them. When I was occupied for some time, at least on occasion, with the question of repetition³—whether or not it is possible, what importance it has, whether something gains or loses in being repeated—I suddenly had the thought: You can, after all, take a trip to Berlin; you have been there once before, and now you can prove to yourself whether a repetition is possible and what importance it has. At home I had been practically immobilized by this question. Say what you will, this question will play a very important role in modern philosophy, for repetition is a crucial expression for what “recollection” was to the Greeks.⁴ Just as they taught that all knowing is a recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition. The only modern philosopher who has had an intimation of this is Leibniz.⁵ Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward. Repetition, therefore, if it is possible, makes a person happy, whereas recollection makes him unhappy—assuming, of course, that he gives himself time to live and does not promptly at birth find an excuse to sneak [III 174] out of life again, for example, that he has forgotten something.

Recollection’s love [Kjærlighed], an author has said,⁶ is the only happy love. He is perfectly right in that, of course, provided one recollects that initially it makes a person unhappy. Repetition’s love is in truth the only happy love. Like recollection’s love, it does not have the restlessness of hope, the uneasy adventurousness of discovery, but neither does it have the sadness of recollection—it has the blissful security of the moment. Hope is a new garment, stiff and starched and lustrous, but it has never been tried on, and therefore one does not know how becoming it will be or how it will fit. Recollection is a discarded garment that does not fit, however beautiful it is, for one has outgrown it. Repetition is an indestructible garment that fits closely and tenderly, neither binds nor sags. 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, for one becomes weary only of what is new. One never grows weary of the old, and when one has that, one is happy. He alone is truly happy who is not deluded into thinking that the repetition should be something new, for then one grows weary of it. It takes youthfulness to hope, youthfulness to recollect, but it takes courage to will repetition. He who will merely hope is cowardly; he who will merely recollect is voluptuous; he who wills repetition is a man, and the more emphatically he is able to realize it, the more profound a human being he is. But he who does not grasp that life is a repetition and that this is the beauty of life has pronounced his own verdict and deserves nothing better than what will happen to him anyway—he will perish. For hope is a beckoning fruit that does not satisfy; recollection is petty travel money that does not satisfy; but repetition is the daily bread that satisfies with blessing. When existence has been circumnavigated, it will be manifest whether one has the courage to understand that life is a repetition and has the desire to rejoice in it. The person who has not circumnavigated life before beginning to live will never live; the person who circumnavigated it but became satiated had a poor constitution; the person who chose repetition—he lives. He does not run [III 175] about like a boy chasing butterflies or stand on tiptoe to look for the glories of the world, for he knows them. Neither does he sit like an old woman turning the spinning wheel of recollection but calmly goes his way, happy in repetition. Indeed, what would life be if there were no repetition? Who could want to be a tablet on which time writes something new every instant or to be a memorial volume of the past? Who could want to be susceptible to every fleeting thing, the novel, which always enervatingly diverts the soul anew? If God himself had not willed repetition, the world would not have come into existence. Either he would have followed the superficial plans of hope or he would have retracted everything and preserved it in recollection. This he did not do. Therefore, the world continues, and it continues because it is a repetition. Repetition—that is actuality and the earnestness of existence.⁷ The person who wills repetition is mature in earnestness. This is my private opinion, and this also means that it is not the earnestness of life to sit on the sofa and grind one’s teeth—and to be somebody, for example, a councilor—or to walk the streets sedately—and to be somebody, for example, His Reverence—any more than it is the earnestness of life to be a riding master. In my opinion, all such things are but jests, and sometimes rather poor ones at that.

Recollection’s love is the only happy love, says an author⁸ who, as far as I know him, is at times somewhat deceitful, not in the sense that he says one thing and means another but in the sense that he pushes the thought to extremes, so that if it is not grasped with the same energy, it reveals itself the next instant as something else. He advances that thesis in such a way that one is easily tempted to agree with him and then forgets that the thesis itself expresses the most profound melancholy, so that a deep depression concentrated in one single line could scarcely express it better.

About a year ago, I became very much aware of a young man (with whom I had already often been in contact), because his handsome appearance, the soulful expression of his eyes, had an almost alluring effect upon me. A certain toss of his head and flippant air convinced me that he had a deeper and more complex nature, while a certain hesitation in inflection suggested that he was at the captivating age in which spiritual maturity, just like physical maturity at a far earlier age, announces itself by a frequent breaking of the voice. Through casual coffee-shop associations, I had already attracted him to me and taught him to regard me as a confidant whose conversation in many ways lured forth his melancholy [III 176] in refracted form, since I, like a Farinelli,⁹ enticed the deranged king out of his dark hiding place, something that could be done without using tongs, inasmuch as my friend was still young and pliant. Such was our relationship when, about a year ago, as I said, he came to me, quite beside himself. He appeared more vigorous and handsome than usual; his large glowing eyes were dilated—in short, he seemed to be transfigured. When he told me that he had fallen in love, I involuntarily thought that the girl who was loved in this way was indeed fortunate. He had been in love for some time now, concealing it even from me, but now the object of his desire was within reach; he had confessed his love and found love in return. Although as a rule I tend to relate to men as an observer, it was impossible to do that with him. Say what you will, a young man deeply in love is something so beautiful that one forgets observation out of joy at the sight. Usually all deeply human emotions disarm the observer in a person. One is inclined to observe only when they are lacking and there is an emptiness or when they are coquettishly concealed. Who could be so inhuman as to play the observer if he saw a person praying with his whole soul? Who would not rather be permeated by an emanation from the devotion of the person praying? But if one hears a clergyman declaim a learned sermon in which, unsolicited on the part of the congregation, he testifies several times in an artificial, grandiloquent, and affected passage that what he is saying is the simple faith that knows nothing of neatly turned phrases but through prayer provides what he, by his own account and probably for good reasons, sought in vain in poetry, art, and scholarship—then one calmly puts one’s eye to the microscope, then one does not swallow everything one hears but closes the jalousie, the critic’s screen that tests every sound and every word. The young man of whom I speak was deeply and fervently and beautifully and humbly in love. For a long time nothing had made me so happy as to look at him, for it is often distressing to be an observer—it has the same melancholy effect as being a police officer. And when an observer fulfills his duties well, he is to be regarded as a secret agent¹⁰ in a higher service, for the observer’s art is to expose what is hidden. The young man talked about the girl with whom he was in love. He did not [III 177] use many words, and, unlike most lovers’ eulogies, what he said was not a vapid analysis. He was not self-important, as if he were a cunning fellow to have caught such a girl; he was not self-confident—his love was wholesome, pure, sound. With a charming openness¹¹ he confided that the reason for his visit to me was that he needed a confidant in whose presence he could talk aloud to himself, as well as the most immediate reason that he was afraid to sit all day with the girl and thus be a nuisance to her. He had already gone to her house several times but had forced himself to turn back. He then asked me to go for a ride with him to divert him and to help pass the time. And I was agreeable, for from the moment he had taken me into his confidence, he could be assured that I would be wholeheartedly at his service. I used the half hour before the carriage arrived to write a few business letters, asked him to fill his pipe meanwhile or page through an album that had been laid out. But he did not need such occupation; he was sufficiently occupied with himself, was too restless to sit down but paced swiftly back and forth. His gait, his movement, his gestures—all were eloquent, and he himself glowed with love. Just as a grape at the peak of its perfection becomes transparent and clear, the juice trickling from its delicate veins, just as the peel of a fruit breaks when the fruit is fully ripe, just so love broke forth almost visibly in his form. I could not resist stealing an almost enamored glance at him now and then, for a young man like that is just as enchanting to the eye as a young girl.

Just as lovers frequently resort to the poet’s words to let the sweet distress of love break forth in blissful joy, so also did he. As he paced back and forth, he repeated again and again a verse from Poul Møller:

Then, to my easy chair,
Comes a dream from my youth.
To my easy chair.
A heartfelt longing comes over me for you,
Thou sun of women.¹²

His eyes filled with tears, he threw himself down on a chair, he repeated the verse again and again. I was shaken by the scene. Good God, I thought, never in my practice had I seen [III 178] such melancholy as this. That he was melancholy, I knew very well—but that falling in love could affect him in this way! And yet, how consistent even an abnormal mental state is if it is normally present. People are always shouting that a melancholiac should fall in love, and then his melancholy would all vanish. If he actually is melancholy, how would it be possible for his soul not to become melancholically absorbed in what has come to be most important of all to him?

He was deeply and fervently in love, that was clear, and yet a few days later he was able to recollect his love. He was essentially through with the entire relationship. In beginning it, he took such a tremendous step that he leaped over life. If the girl dies tomorrow, it will make no essential difference; he will throw himself down again, his eyes will fill with tears again, he will repeat the poet’s words again. What a curious dialectic! He longs for the girl, he has to do violence to himself to keep from hanging around her all day long, and yet in the very first moment he became an old man in regard to the entire relationship. Underneath it all, there must be a misunderstanding. For a long time nothing has affected me so powerfully as this scene. It was obvious enough that he was going to be unhappy; that the girl would also become unhappy was no less obvious, although it was not immediately possible to predict how it would happen. But so much is certain: if anyone can join in conversation about recollection’s love, he can. Recollection has the great advantage that it begins with the loss; the reason it is safe and secure is that it has nothing to lose.

The carriage had arrived. We drove out along Strandveien¹³ in order to return through the heavily forested areas later. Since against my will I had taken an observational approach to him, I could not refrain from all kinds of attempts to log, as the sailor says, the momentum of his melancholy. I set the tone for possible erotic moods—none. I explored the influence of change in the environment—in vain. Neither the broad bold assurance of the sea nor the hushed silence of the forest nor the beckoning solitude of the evening could bring him out of the melancholy longing in which he not so much drew near to the beloved as withdrew from her. His mistake was incurable, and his mistake was that he stood at the end instead of at the beginning, but such a mistake is and remains a person’s downfall.¹⁴

And yet I maintain that his mood was a genuine erotic [III 179] mood; anyone who has not experienced this mood at the very beginning in his own love has never loved. But he must have a second mood alongside it. This intensified recollecting¹⁵ is erotic love’s [Elskovens] eternal expression at the beginning, is the sign of genuine erotic love. But on the other hand it takes an ironic resiliency to be able to use it. This he lacked; his soul was too compliant for that. It may be true that a person’s life is over and done with in the first moment, but there must also be the vital force to slay this death and transform it to life. In the first dawning of erotic love, the present and the future contend with each other to find an eternal expression, and this recollecting is indeed eternity’s flowing back into the present—that is, when this recollecting is sound.

We turned homeward; I took leave of him. But my sympathy had been aroused almost too powerfully, and I could not rid myself of the thought that very soon it would all have to eventuate in a dreadful explosion.

During the next two weeks, I saw him occasionally at my place. He began to grasp the misunderstanding himself; the adored young girl was already almost a vexation to him. And yet she was the beloved, the only one he had loved, the only one he would ever love. Nevertheless, he did not still love her, because he only longed for her. During all this, a remarkable change took place in him. A poetic creativity awakened in him on a scale I had never believed possible. Now I easily grasped the whole situation. The young girl was not his beloved: she was the occasion that awakened the poetic in him and made him a poet.¹⁶ That was why he could love only her, never forget her, never want to love another, and yet continually only long for her. She was drawn into his whole being; the memory of her was forever alive. She had meant much to him; she had made him a poet—and precisely thereby had signed her own death sentence.

As time went on, his state became more and more anguished. His depression became more and more dominant, and his physical strength was devoured in mental struggles. He was aware that he had made her unhappy, and yet he was conscious of no guilt; but precisely this, in all innocence to become guilty of her unhappiness, was an offense to him and vehemently stirred his passion. He believed that to confess to her how things stood would hurt her deeply. It would indeed amount to telling her that she had become an imperfect [III 180] being, that he had grown away from her, that he no longer needed that ladder rung by which he had climbed. And what would the result be? Since she knew that he would not love any other, she would become his grieving widow who lived only in the memory of him and their relationship. He could not make a confession; he was too proud on her behalf for that. His depression entrapped him more and more, and he decided to proceed with a fabrication. Now he used all his poetic originality in order to delight and amuse her; what he could have provided for many he now devoted entirely to her; she was and remained the beloved, the one and only adored, even though he was close to losing his mind in his anxiety over the monstrous falsehood, which only enthralled her all the more. In a sense, her existence or nonexistence was virtually meaningless to him, except that his melancholy found delight in making her life enchanting. It goes without saying that she was happy, for she suspected nothing, and the fare was only too appetizing. He did not want to be creative in a stricter sense, for then he would have to leave her; therefore, as he said, he kept his creativity under the pruning shears and cut everything as a bouquet for her. She suspected nothing. This I do believe. Indeed, it would be shocking if a young girl could be so self-loving as to treat a man’s depression with disregard. But that can happen, and once I was very close to discovering such a situation. There is nothing so captivating for a young girl as being loved by a poetic-melancholic nature. And if she only has enough self-love to delude herself that she loves him faithfully by clinging to him instead of by giving him up, then she has a very easy task in life, enjoying the honor and the good conscience of being faithful and at the same time also the very finest distilled eroti...