This is an odd story in which Kierkegaard’s persona, Constantin Constantius, is tasked to give advice to a young romantic poet tragically in love. Kierkegaard begins, “repetition is a crucial expression for what “recollection” was to the Greeks. Just as they taught that all knowing is a recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is repetition…. Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward…. It takes courage to will repetition…. [On the other hand,] recollection has the great advantage that it begins with the loss; the reason it is safe and secure is that it has nothing to lose.”
For the young lover enveloped in a tragic affair, “His mistake was incurable, and his mistake was that he stood at the end instead of at the beginning, but such a mistake is and remains a person’s downfall…. He began to grasp the misunderstanding himself; the adored young girl was already almost a vexation to him. And yet she was the beloved, the only one he had loved, the only one he would ever love. Nevertheless, he did not still love her, because he only longed for her…. She was merely the visible form, while his thoughts, his soul, sought something else that he attributed to her…. What traps him is not the girl’s lovableness at all but his regret over having wronged her by disorganizing her life…. Humanly speaking, his love cannot be realized. He has now come to the border of the marvelous; consequently, if it is to take place at all, it must take place by virtue of the absurd.”
Kierkegaard concludes by relating the tension between the universal and the exception. The ordinary observer will have difficulty discerning “the dialectical battle in which the exception arises in the midst of the universal, the protracted and very complicated procedure in which the exception battles his way through and affirms himself justified…. in a word, it is just as difficult as to kill a man and let him live. On the one side stands the exception, on the other the universal, and the struggle itself is a strange conflict between the rage and impatience of the universal over the disturbance the exception causes and its infatuated partiality for the exception…. Just as heaven rejoices more over a sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous, so does the universal rejoice over an exception…. The whole thing is a wrestling match in which the universal breaks with the exception, wrestles with him in conflict, and strengthens him through this wrestling. If the exception cannot endure the distress, the universal does not help him any more than heaven helps a sinner who cannot endure the pain of repentance.”
Kierkegaard continues on the theme of the poetic soul, “Such an exception is a poet, who constitutes the transition to the truly aristocratic exceptions, to the religious exceptions. A poet is ordinarily an exception…. A poet’s life begins in conflict with all life. The point is to find reassurance or legitimation, for he must always lose the first conflict, and if he wants to win immediately, then he is unjustified. My poet now finds legitimation precisely in being absolved by life the moment he in a sense wants to destroy himself…. He keeps a religious mood as a secret he cannot explain, while at the same time this secret helps him poetically to explain actuality…. For him the repetition is the raising of his consciousness to the second power…. If he had a deeper religious background, he would not have become a poet. Then everything would have gained a religious meaning…. At first sight, I perceived he was a poet—if for no other reason I saw it in the fact that a situation that would have been taken easily in stride by a lesser mortal expanded into a world event for him.”
No comments:
Post a Comment