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9 Chapter One  Metaphysics of Motion T he task of becoming a Christian” is the problem and the purpose of Kierkegaard’s whole authorship, and the “becoming ” in question here is not incidental or external to its “task” of Christianity, but rather essential to it. A Christian is after all an existing individual, and to exist means to be inescapably in a process of becoming. Kierkegaard’s concern is about how this human becoming is to be channeled toward Christianity: what does it mean to become a Christian, and how is this possible? Questions about the significance and possibility of becoming have a history as old as philosophy itself. The concept of becoming that has been discussed and developed throughout this history has its roots in the Greek kinesis, which translates into English as both movement and change. The experience of becoming, of the emergence and passing away of things, was to ancient minds a source of the wonder that led them to seek insight into the powers at work in the world. The philosophical tradition has since remained preoccupied with comprehending and articulating the unfolding, kinetic nature of existence. Kierkegaard’s enquiry into becoming from the perspective of the task of Christianity is, of course, positioned rather differently from the Greeks’ attempts to make sense of the cosmos—but the revival of these earliest debates about the possibility of motion is integral to his project of creating an ‘existentialist’ philosophy. In particular, Aristotle ’s theories and categories, which were developed above all in order to account for kinesis, provided Kierkegaard with a conceptual framework that could be adapted to his own analysis of religious becoming. If we want to understand the significance of movement both for philosophy in general and for Kierkegaard in particular, the ancient Greek metaphysics of motion is the best place to begin. Heraclitus taught that everything is constantly in motion, at once coming into being and passing away, flowing like “an ever-living fire.” This philosophy of flux means that the appearance of solid, individual things is an illusion and leads to the conclusion that knowledge is impossible . This tension between movement and knowledge proved to be the greatest problem (aporia: literally, difficulty of passage) in Greek thought: although we see things moving around and changing, how are we to conceive of this logically? If something is now one way and then another , is there a moment when it is neither? Or when it is both? And how can something come into being when it is preceded by nothing? If something changes, in what sense is it still the same thing? One solution to the aporia of becoming, favored by the Eleatic school of philosophers, was to claim that change is impossible and thus unreal. Parmenides’s poem Way of Truth argues that “what is” is one and indivisible, subject neither to coming to be nor to destruction. Here the pursuit of knowledge and its requirement of intelligibility override the evidence of sense perception. Indeed, both Heraclitus and Parmenides approach the question of motion by suggesting that things are not as they appear to be: one denies the reality of enduring individual things, and the other denies the reality of their movement. The mystery of becoming provides an impulse to metaphysics by making appearances questionable. Plato’s more sophisticated ontology in a way combines the views of Heraclitus and the Eleatics. Plato agrees with the former that the physical world is a flowing stream of becoming that cannot yield knowledge of the truth, but he avoids Heraclitus’s skeptical conclusions by positing, like Parmenides , a superior reality that is eternal, unchanging, and intelligible. For Plato, the realm of Forms or Ideas is “really real,” whereas apparent, particular things, “tossed about” between being and not-being, are like mere shadows of what properly exists. This view of becoming as a lesser kind of being means that a philosopher’s priority is to contemplate the Forms rather than to investigate kinesis. Plato does provide some discussion of movement: notably , in the Laws he distinguishes ten kinds of motion, ending with “life” that moves both itself and other things. This concept of life as the source of motion is used to argue that the soul, as the giver of life, is immortal; and in the Timaeus God is portrayed as the “best soul,” the self-moved mover of the best motions. However, throughout Plato’s works the movements of souls are subordinated to the Form of the Good...

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