Abstract
This essay argues for a formative, and not simply abstract, aspect to the philosophy of religion by attending to the practices of writing employed in Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous work Repetition. By locating this text within an ethical tradition that focuses upon the practices that form subjects, rather than simply the formulation of a theory, its seemingly literary performances can be viewed as exercises. In particular, this text deploys and transforms the Stoic practices of self writing, in the form of keeping notebooks and letter writing, so as to cultivate capabilities. This indirect ethical instruction does not, however, lead to the formation of autonomous ethical subjects, but to the cultivation of capabilities that are only possible in the relational space of vulnerability, service and dependence.
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Notes
Pierre Hadot (1995) and Michel Foucault (2005) have both given voice to the manner in which ancient philosophical traditions understood philosophy as a way of life or as practices directed to the care of the self. Furthermore, both have highlighted the manner in which post-Hegelian (Foucault 2005, 28) and post-Nietzschean (Hadot 1995, 108) strands of philosophy have revived this understanding of the task of thinking. For a wide ranging review of recent studies that are oriented toward the interconnections between philosophy and everyday life, see Van Hooft (2002).
Kevin Hart has highlighted the varied and active senses of theōria and its contemporary English translation, contemplation in his episodic account of the development, alienation, and return of ‘contemplation’ in European philosophical and theological thought (2009).
In this and all subsequent citations of Kierkegaard’s works I will follow the standard abbreviations adopted in the International Kierkegaard Commentary and provide the page numbers from the Hong and Hong translation. The initial citation of each text will provide the year of publication.
On reading as an ethical task, see Cox and Feldman (2005).
Mark Dooley’s (2001) treatment of repetition in relation to responsibility is a notable exception. Jon Stewart (2003, 288–92) and George J. Stack (1977, 133–37) have also briefly considered repetition in relation to ethics. These examinations have, however, followed the aforementioned conceptual itinerary, paying little attention to medium and performance. Edward Mooney’s interpretation of Repetition stays closer to the text, but remains focused upon repetition as a concept—viewing it as a term that illuminates the limits of ethics (1998, 296–299). Daniel Greenspan, emphasizing the psychological and theatrical aspects of the pseudonymous works, suggestively locates Repetition within the ancient ‘moral-psychological tradition’ of educating the passions (2008, 242).
Roberts takes two steps in this direction, while taking one step back. He both questions an overly rationalistic approach to ethics and reframes Kierkegaard’s work in terms of wisdom, while maintaining an essential divide between thought and action. Though he notes that Kierkegaard’s texts demand virtue, virtue is fostered largely on the basis of applying the correct propositions or concepts to one’s life (1998, 192, 195; 2008, 78, 92). As Greenspan observes, a number of the connections that have been drawn by recent interpreters between Kierkegaard and ancient thought (particularly Aristotelian virtue ethics) have been at the expense of the dynamic and critical character of his relationship to both conceptual thinking and antiquity (2008, 6).
The connection between Kierkegaard and Foucault has rarely been explored. The primary exceptions, of which I am aware, are two essays by Paul Bové and William McDonald. The former primarily considers different texts and periods from those that are currently under examination (focusing upon Kierkegaard’s Two Ages and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish). Bové’s work is helpful, in that he notes that Kierkegaard’s work is not simply directed toward a criticism of the present order, but that ‘the maieutic functions of [Kierkegaard’s indirect communication] help to form a style…to form a “counter-ideology” or “counter-practice”’ (1992, 29). McDonald’s essay serves to situate Kierkegaard’s work within a larger trajectory of traditions that Foucault terms ‘Technologies of the Self,’ particularly as they are concerned with ‘self writing.’ Though McDonald deploys these connections to read Either/Or (1843), his essay is largely preoccupied with formulating Kierkegaard’s theory of writing and comparing it to others (McDonald 1996).
Foucault scarcely mentioned Kierkegaard in his writings. To my knowledge he only does so twice; once contrasting his work to Hegel’s ‘with the problem of repetition and truth’ (1972, 237), and the other considering Kierkegaard’s relationship to his pseudonyms, among whom he lists ‘Constantine Constantius’ (1984, 107). The editors of the 1981–1982 Lecture course, The Hermeneutics of the Self, claim that ‘Foucault was a great reader of Kierkegaard, although he hardly ever mentions this author, who nonetheless had for him an importance as secret as it was decisive’ (2005, 32 no. 46).
Arnold Davidson characterizes subjectivation as the manner in which ‘we constitute ourselves as moral subjects of our own actions’ (1994, 118).
The importance of this distinction does not lie in its exhaustive description of the impossibly diverse fields of ‘contemporary ethical theory’ but in providing a heuristic opening for the ethical importance of Kierkegaard’s work.
Gouwens notes that Kierkegaard’s critiques of modern social structures and philosophy are not so much theoretical disputes, as critiques of ‘reflection,’ which he defines in terms similar to Foucault’s characterization of subjectivation. Reflection indicates ‘the character or tone of one’s imaginative and affective life. It includes the ways in which people dream and project images of themselves, how they think—with or without hope—about their prospects and possibilities….It includes too how a person exercises his or her intellective capacities’ (1996, 27). See also Kierkegaard’s Two Ages (1978b, TA, 78–84).
It is not until 17 pages into the book that one receives much that resembles a theoretical or conceptual account of ‘repetition.’ Even here ‘repetition’ is not so much explained as it is positioned in relation to other thinkers. Expanding the philosophical stage beyond the ancient debate between the Eleatics and Heraclitus over motion, Constantius contrasts repetition with Hegelian ‘mediation’ (R, 148, 149). This slightly conceptual aside does not last for long however, as he describes repetition with anecdotes of speakers repeating themselves (R, 150). The remainder of the ‘Report’ stages repetition in relation to Constantius’s farcical attempt to prove it through a return trip to Berlin. In the section of part two entitled ‘Repetition,’ Constantius does not write about repetition, but of his return home and turns his attention back to the story of the young man. The only mention of ‘repetition’ as such is in the concluding paragraphs of this section in which he disavows his former ‘theory’ noting that ‘repetition is too transcendent for me’ and that it should not be sought in professorial philosophical manners (R, 186). Repetition does not return until near the end, when the young man claims to have achieved it by regaining himself from the love of the girl that had kept him captive (R, 220, 221). Yet even this affirmative declaration of repetition is challenged as Constantius declares in his concluding letter to the reader, that the young man’s ‘repetition’ transformed him back into a poet, and thereby allowed him to sneak out the back door and out of life (R, 229).
His account of repetition here, however, does not seem to be offered without a touch of irony as he eschews the speculative reading that would reduce his book to 1, 2, 3 (like an accounting scheme, or three moments of a dialect), but the three part explanation he offers in that very paragraph is accompanied with the letters A, B, C (R 302–03).
Drawing attention back to Kierkegaard certainly does not undermine the importance of the love affair. As so many interpreters have pointed out, this text was written within the context of Kierkegaard’s own struggles with his failed engagement with Regine Olsen. Without understating the importance of Kierkegaard’s biography for this text, I would hope to avoid its reductive deployment. The emphasis upon theory (repetition) or biography (his failed engagement) has sometimes led interpreters to reinstate the ancient division between philosophy and literature and thought and life. By focusing upon the text as an exercise I hope to bring these domains closer together.
By shifting attention from the young man, to Constantius, Kierkegaard and writing, the emphasis of the text is also shifted from a critique of Romanticism to ‘Stoicism.’
McDonald notes a number of parallels between Stoic writing practices and elements of the first volume of Either/Or (1996, 60).
This is how Arrian, the compiler of Epictetus’s Discourses, described the texts he was putting together in a prefatory letter to Lucius Gellius and the term that Plutarch used to describe his On the Tranquility of the Soul. Pierre Hadot observes that Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations should be read as hupomnemata as well (1995, 199, 178; 1998, 30–34).
In a later text, The Sickness Unto Death (1849), he makes a similar reference to ‘stoicism, but understood as not referring only to the sect,’ in which it represents the subject formation of despair in defiance (1980, SUD, 86).
Rick Anthony Furtak argues for the simultaneous resonance and dissonance between Kierkegaard and the Stoics, as both have an integrated understanding of thought and the emotions. He notes, however, that Kierkegaard departs from the Stoics in that he does not give a dispassionate disposition pride of place (2005, 49).
Gouwens notes that virtue is ‘dethroned’ but ‘not eliminated’ for Kierkegaard, (1996, 106) as it exceeds the traditional focus upon habit and places a greater emphasis upon active resolution and receptive dependence in faith (1996, 101, 138). Furthermore, he notes that Kierkegaard’s use of virtue is not simply limited to those that are substantive, but also on a relational understanding of virtue (1996, 117). I want to take Gouwens’s reading a step further and argue that the capabilities that Repetition cultivates are fundamentally relational and dynamic. In this manner it is not so much that readers come to possess abilities, but it is only in fragile space of response and relationship—in service and dependence—that these capabilities are even possible.
The difference being highlighted here between Kierkegaard’s exercises and the Stoics is not unlike that drawn by Matthew Jacoby (1999) between a post-liberal emphasis upon Christian doctrine as being directed toward right moral action and communal formation, and Kierkegaard’s emphasis upon relationship, passion and vulnerability.
The moral or ethical judgment that emerges from the ordeal does not, as John D. Caputo notes, follow the traditional model in which judgment is dictated by the application of principles (1993, 97, 106). Far from ensuring autonomy or certainty, such an ethical exercise opens out in heteronomy and difficulty.
George Pattison notes the interpersonal orientation of Repetition, observing that its ‘sustaining heartbeat’ is a ‘genuine openness to the future that is at one and the same time a genuine openness to the other’ (1993, 359).
Kangas notes that Repetition ‘opens a possibility; it does not explain.’ Therefore, he characterizes repetition as ‘an enablement, a power, not identical to the spontaneity of the will,’ but one which demands patience and which is less of a return than a departure (2007, 122, 124).
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Acknowledgements
I thank John D. Caputo, Marcia Robinson and J. Aaron Simmons for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
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Dickinson, T.W. Repeating, Not Simply Recollecting, Repetition: On Kierkegaard’s Ethical Exercises. SOPHIA 50, 657–675 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0259-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0259-z