Agape and Personhood. David L. Goicoechea
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the way.
Mediation has to do with the medium or middle premise by which
a conclusion comes out of previous premises such that we can say
that if an acorn is properly nourished and cultivated it will become
an oak tree, but this acorn has been duly nourished and
cultivated, therefore, it has reached its goal and is now this oak tree.
Plato explains things by relating them through recollection to their
archeological formal causes and Hegel explains them by relating
them through mediation to their teleological or final cause.
The moment of truth for Hegel is that moment of mediation
when the thesis is negated by the mediating anti-thesis so that
the new synthesis or new whole comes forth into a new future.
Just as Plato does not have a true freedom or a true future because
his recollection reduces things to the past so Hegel does not have
a true and living past because his mediation negates the past
in not keeping the actual acorn as it only becomes the oak.
Plato’s formal recollection and Hegel’s Aristotelian final or
teleological mediation are both mechanical or natural and
quantitative whereas Kierkegaard’s qualitative leap of repetition
provides a metaphysics that preserves the freedom of a new future
and the freedom of a renewing past so that in the present
there is a reconciliation that keeps the past and allows the future.
II.3.4 Repetition as the Ethical Task of Freedom
The book, Repetition, has its small, powerful, metaphysical section
at the beginning and then it is the story of the young man who falls
in love and his mentor, Constantine Constantius, who helps him
to think about his love affair and to explore repetitions’ meanings.
What the young man discovers is that the repetition can reconcile
four different attitudes that make up the four stages on life’s way.
The young man learns that a lover can be a poet, a husband,
a mystic and a person of faith who can repeat all four at once.
Ordinarily and for the most part good husbands love their wives
ethically and with reflective decisions that promote their welfare.
Job was a good ethical man and husband and father and according
to the Deuteronomic morality and religious vision he should have
been blessed, but instead he was cursed for he lost his flocks,
and his land and his children which proved that ethics can fail.
And this often does happen to good people for ethical love need
not be rewarded since the good can suffer more than the wicked.
The relation between the Kierkegaard-Regina story and the Job
and his children story and the Abraham Isaac story is that they
each want to get back again what they have had taken away.
That would be repetition and a happy beginning reconciliation.
If Job lived happily with his family and they were taken away
life would be renewed in repetition if they were united again.
In the epilogue Job does get his children back but that
seems like a fairy tale for no one has experienced such a thing.
However, eternity is the true repetition and when it begins
in faith in the incarnation, the death and the resurrection
the followers of Jesus believe that each individual lives in eternity.
Kierkegaard writes this book under the pseudonym of the Constant
Constant one and by remaining in love’s debt to Regina he
knows that he will always love her come what may and
he believes that in some ways she will always love him too.
II.3.5 Metaphysic’s Interest on Which Metaphysics Founders
Both Plato and Hegel base their ethics on their metaphysics but
Kierkegaard makes clear that neither of them can account for
the genuine new and thus neither can account for freedom and
without the qualitative leap of freedom decisions are impossible.
Metaphysics seeks to account for becoming but if becoming is
a process of necessity which can be logically accounted for
then it lacks the really new and the contingency and possibility
that are the opposite of necessity and which make freedom possible.
The interest of metaphysics is to give a logical account of freedom
but since metaphysics must be truly logical and based on
necessity it falls into self-contradiction in accounting for freedom.
If there is to be a truly free decision then one must make a
qualitative leap into that decision that is not based upon
a merely quantitative build up of necessary antecedents.
If freedom is a lifting up of oneself by one’s boot straps then
the potency for such a leap must be a real potency in oneself
like the potency in the acorn out of which the oak comes forth
but again that potency only works with a quantitative
build up and this model cannot be one of freedom’s qualitative leap.
So what Kierkegaard shows by contrasting repetition’s
qualitative leap of freedom with the quantitative build ups
of Plato and Hegel is that if we really value freedom then
we have to affirm faith in the God-man whose leap from
being God to becoming man alone is a model for freedom.
Kierkegaard is arguing that if we value freedom and all
that it implies in our Western culture then we cannot deny
faith in agape and personhood without which our secular society
has no real metaphysical basis but only hidden assumptions.
Kierkegaard and Job with their faith could have for themselves
the ethical task of always loving their beloved no matter what
and of remaining in debt to those who are present in their absence.
II.3.6 The Single Individual and the Posthorn
Constantius tells the story of a stagecoach driver who arrives
in a town with the mail and blows a posthorn to let the people
know that he and the mail are there and this horn is unpredictable.
It never sounds the same twice and thus symbolizes no repetition.
However, the dialectic