Agape and Personhood. David L. Goicoechea
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and Trembling is Kierkegaard’s way of fulfilling his task.
He wants to make the task young and beautiful as was Regina.
She awakened him from his unmotivated lethargy and sleep walking.
By showing us Abraham and his task we can come to love Jesus
and the task He has given us of spending our lives for others.
The actual is higher than the possible and the highest of all
is to live out the highest possible actual which is the gift
and the task which Paul and Kierkegaard were given and which
we can all be given if we notice it and become earnest about it.
Fear and Trembling is a motivational book that wants to move
us to do nothing less than the best we can dream of for others.
The promise and the task of faith in that promise so motivated
Abraham that he lived out his belief that by giving up Isaac
he would get him back a billion fold as a blessing for all peoples.
Jesus as the grain of wheat died that all Abraham’s might live.
II.3 Reconciling the God-Man and Job
II.3.1 Repetition’s Reconciliation Is the Only Happy Love
In Repetition, the companion volume to Fear and Trembling, Søren
also discusses his love for Regina and the engagement breaking.
When he fell in love with her he became a poet who was religious
but he believed that if he had faith he would be able to marry her.
But the engagement breaking was complex and he wrote in his journal:
If I had not honored her higher than myself as my future wife,
if I had not been prouder of her honor than my own,
then I would have remained silent and fulfilled her wish and mine—
I would have married her—
there are so many marriages that conceal little stories.
Such as being gay. Perhaps he worried that if he married her
the whole network of his melancholy would return and she
would have to live day in and day out with a depressed husband.
But he believed that if he really had faith he would be able to remain
in the enthusiasm of his Divine Madness and be married at
the same time in the reconciliation of what he calls “repetition.”
When we think of repetition in English we think of a mechanical
repetition in which the same thing happens over and over again in
exactly the same way so that it is boring and completely non-eventful.
The concept of Kierkegaard has to do with experiencing through
life a reconciled mix of the old and the new at the same time.
The young man falls in love poetically and mystically in a
Platonic recollective love that is captivating for the young girl.
She loves being adored by the melancholic poet as his muse.
But this poetic love is an unhappy love for it expects the new and
the interesting and would be bored with the repetition of the same.
If a love relation is only aesthetically interesting it becomes unhappy.
If it is an ethical mechanical repetition of the same it is unhappy.
But “the dialectic of repetition is easy, for that which is repeated
has been, otherwise it could not be repeated, but the very fact
that it has been makes the repetition into something new.”2
II.3.2 Beyond Platonic Recollection to a New Future
Kierkegaard argues that “repetition is the interest of metaphysics
and also the interest upon which metaphysics comes to grief.”3
He demonstrates that by contrasting faith’s repetition with
Plato’s metaphysics of recollection and Hegel’s mediation.
Kierkegaard clarifies his concept of repetition with several kinds
of definition, nominal or etymological, essential, causal, and
descriptive and for each of these he uses the method of free
imaginative variation or the experimentation of comparisons.
Kierkegaard is proud that Danish has such a good metaphysical
word as Gjentagelse which contains all the religious, ethical
and faith based metaphysical meanings that he will bring out.
Repetition means to bring out or to fetch for Gjen means “again,”
and tag means “day” and else means “getting” so the word means
re-getting it again in a new way each day so that even the
English word re-petition is suggestive for petition as the first
form of prayer is renewed with repentance, thanksgiving and praise.
Petition means to earnestly ask for something from the other.
Repetition for Kierkegaard is the renewal of Platonic Recollection.
“Recollection” is also etymologically a very rich word for the
root “lect” is connected with legein which means “to gather”
and so to collect is to gather together into a logos or one.
So Plato reconciled the being of Parmenides and the Becoming
of Heraclitus with the concept of recollection which shows
the identity of the logos with the ontos which connect the many.
But repetition is much more humble and other-oriented for
according to its basic attitude it constantly re-petitions
the other because one is aware of one’s lack and the need.
For Plato one recollects by climbing up out of the cave and
recovering the past truth that the soul knew before it fell.
For Kierkegaard repletion is a forward recollection that renews
all things because of the surprises of the unknown future.
II.3.3 Beyond Hegelian Mediation to a New Past
So recollection is a process that collects the many into the past
in order to re-fetch their meaning and significance so that Plato
would see the fallen soul rising through the remembrance of
things past until he collected them in their originating form.
Thus there is no genuine future or freedom in the realm of
Platonic recollection because the moment of truth only recovers
what has been and has been previously lost and lost sight of.
Hegel’s metaphysics of mediation goes in the opposite direction
to a future and a telos or goal or purpose that makes the past
only a quantitative, instrumental,