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5. Repetition: The Possibility of Motion
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67 Chapter Five Repetition: The Possibility of Motion K ierkegaard wrote Repetition under the pseudonym “Constantin Constantius,” and published it, together with Johannes de silentio’s Fear and Trembling, on October 16, 1843. It makes sense to approach these two texts as companion pieces, for they are both concerned to reveal a disjunction between philosophy and existence, between social ethics and inwardness—and in each case “the truth as knowledge” is undermined by some kind of movement. Although Repetition begins where Fear and Trembling leaves off—by recalling the pre-Socratic debates about the possibility of motion—it presents a new interpretation of truth that helps to illuminate Johannes de silentio’s analysis of Abraham, and for this reason we will explore it first. The opening sentences of Repetition suggest an opposition between intellectual reflection, or “ideality,” and movement. In response to the Eleatic philosophers’ thesis that motion is unintelligible and therefore impossible, Diogenes enacts a movement: When the Eleatic School denied the possibility of motion, Diogenes, as everybody knows, stepped forth as an opponent. He stepped forth literally , for he said not a word, but merely walked several times back and forth, thinking that he had thereby refuted the philosophers.1 As Kierkegaard tells it, movement seems to triumph here, for Diogenes’s “step forth” encourages us to look at the question of “the possibility of motion” in a new way. The opposition between ideality and movement is also, more broadly, an opposition between philosophy and existence—and there is certainly something existential about Diogenes’s mode of demonstration . The struggle between philosophy and existence (often a struggle internal to the individual, especially to the intellectual, perhaps academic individual who is likely to be reading this text) is, we have seen, essential to Kierkegaard’s dramatization of his conflict with Hegel. Here in Repetition this conflict revolves explicitly around the issue of movement. Beginning the book in this way, with the dispute between Diogenes and the Eleatics, also accomplishes the repetition and renewal of the Greeks’ questions about how movement and change are possible. These questions led to Aristotle’s definition of kinesis as the transition from potentiality to actuality, which as we shall see is integral to Constantin Contantius ’s category of repetition. Like the Greeks, Constantin wants to know whether or not a certain sort of movement is possible: he proposes to take a trip to Berlin, where he has been once before, to see if he can achieve a repetition. In 1843 the Greeks’ question of motion is not only repeated but renewed, for Kierkegaard asks about the movements of subjects , not objects—about internal, temporal beings. (The interiority and spirituality of the self is reflected by the transition, made explicit by Heidegger but long since in motion, from substance to time as philosophy’s primary ontological category.) Diogenes is perhaps here to remind us that the question of motion finds its truth in some kind of stepping forth. With this in mind, Constantin travels to Berlin—but might we not expect a Kierkegaardian movement to involve a rather more inward journey? The beginning of Repetition quoted above provides an interpretative key for the text as a whole. The renewal of the Greeks’ question of motion, which implicitly invokes Aristotle’s concept of kinesis, and the undermining of ideality by means of an existential movement, are essential to both the philosophical content and the narrative structure of this enigmatic little book. Constantin Constantius presents us with the “new category” of repetition that should, he claims, replace the concept of recollection that has dominated philosophy from Plato through to Hegel. This comparison between recollection and repetition echoes the opposition between idea and movement suggested by the anecdote about Diogenes: recollection is a mode of knowledge that retrieves the truth in the form of an idea, whereas repetition is a movement of becoming. As well as presenting us with these two opposing concepts, however, Constantin himself participates in the conflict between idea and movement that is dramatized through his troubled friendship with a younger man—and here Constantin , who represents an intellectual, philosophical point of view, is on the side of ideality. Repetition’s two protagonists are both concerned with ques68 Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Becoming [3.235.22.225] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:01 GMT) tions of existential movement, but in different ways: Constantin treats repetition as an hypothesis and enquires in a pseudoscientific manner about its possibility; whereas the nameless young man comes to...