Repetition Kierkegaard Quotes

A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.

Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me standing here? Who am I? How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it, why was I not informed of the rules and regulations and just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought from a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in the big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn’t it a matter of choice? If I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager-I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?

My opinion is, of course, completely my own. I would not impose it on anyone else and decline any pressure to change it.

Of what good is an armchair of velvet when the rest of the environment does not match? It is like a man going around naked and wearing a three-cornered hat.

There is nothing so seductive to a girl as to be loved by a poetic-depressive type. And if she is vain enough to deceive herself into thinking that she loves him faithfully by clinging to him instead of giving him up, then her task will be easy. She will enjoy both the distinction and the good conscience of being faithful, and at the same time the most finely distilled romantic love. God save everyone from such faithfulness!

In spiritlessness there is no anxiety. It is too happy for that, too content, and too spiritless. But this is a very pitiable reason, and paganism differs from spiritlessness in the former being definable as directed toward spirit and the latter as directed from spirit. Paganism is, if you will, the absence of spirit and thus differs far from spiritlessness. Paganism is in this respect much to be preferred. Spiritlessness is spirit’s stagnation and ideality’s caricature. Spiritlessness is accordingly not literally dumb when it comes to repetition by rote, but it is dumb [has lost its sense] in the way in which it is said of salt that it has lost its flavor† and when one asks then how it can be salted.

I admire you, and yet at times it seems to me as if you were deranged. Or is it not a sort of mental derangement that you subject to such a degree every passion, every emotion of the heart, every mood, to the cold discipline of reflection? Is it not mental derangement to be so normal, to be a mere idea, not a human being like the rest of us, pliant and yielding, capable of being lost and of losing ourselves? Is it not mental derangement to be always awake, always sure, never obscure and dreaming?

... how often we see people who either from spiritual laziness live on the crumbs that fall from other people’s tables, or for more egotistical reasons try to identify themselves with others until they resemble the liar who, through frequent repetition of his stories, ends up believing them himself.

... he will seek vainly to the right and to the left and in the newspapers for a guarantee that he has actually been amused. For a sophisticated person, on the other hand, who is still unembarrassed enough to dare to be amused all by himself, who has enough self-confidence to know, without seeking advice from anyone else, whether he has been amused, farce will perhaps have a very special meaning, in that now with the spaciousness of abstraction and now with the presentation of a tangible actuality, it will affect his mood differently. He will, of course refrain from bringing a fixed and definite mood with him so that everything affects him in relation to that mood. He will have perfected his mood, in that he will be able to keep himself in a condition where no particular mood is present, but where all moods are possible.

آه ايّوب! آه! ای ايّوب! آيا براستی تو چيزی به غير از اين كلمات زيبا بر زبان نياوردی: خداوند داد و خداوند گرفت: و نام خداوند متبرك باد؟ آيا اين‌ها تنها كلماتی بود كه بر زبان آوردی؟ با تمام درد و عذابی كه كشيدی فقط همين‌ها را تكرار كردی؟ چرا هفت روز و هفت شب خاموش ماندی، در روحت آخر چه می‌گذشت؟ هنگامی كه تمام هستی بر سرت خراب شد و همچو تكه‌های سفالی شكسته در اطراف پاهايت پخش‌و‌پلا شد، آيا بلافاصله به اين شكل فوق بشری بر خود مسلط گشتی، آيا بلافاصله به اين تعبير از عشق دست يافتی، به اين پُردلی برخاسته از ايمان و اعتماد؟...

As Kierkegaard wrote: 'Repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never tires'. This sentence is misunderstood by almost everyone. On the basis of this misunderstanding, it is either confirmed (by those who are happily married) or criticised (by those who are happily divorced). When you read the expression, it is easy to interpret it as follows: 'The beloved wife/husband is a repetition of whom one never tires/ However, for Freud and Kierkegaard, the repetition is central, the repetition on the basis of which a partner is ascribed a particular place, and not vice versa. At the same time, repetition then had a different meaning. Nowadays, repetition has become almost synonymous with boredom. One only has to think of a children's game that is endlessly repeated and yet gives pleasure every time, in contrast with the blase adult who always wants something new, something different, something that might still rouse him from the lethargy of excess.

But it is just as useless for a man to want first of all to decide the externals and after that the fundamentals as it is for a cosmic body, thinking to form itself, first of all to decide the nature of its surface, to what bodies it should turn its light, to which its dark side, without first letting the harmony of centrifugal and centripetal forces realize [*realisere*] its existence [*Existents*] and letting the rest come of itself. One must learn first to know himself before knowing anything else (γνῶθι σε αυτόν). Not until a man has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning; only then is he free of the irksome, sinister traveling companion―that irony of life which manifests itself in the sphere of knowledge and invites true knowing to begin with a not-knowing (Socrates), just as God created the world from nothing. But in the waters of morality it is especially at home to those who still have not entered the tradewinds of virtue. Here it tumbles a person about in a horrible way, for a time lets him feel happy and content in his resolve to go ahead along the right path, then hurls him into the abyss of despair. Often it lulls a man to sleep with the thought, "After all, things cannot be otherwise," only to awaken him suddenly to a rigorous interrogation. Frequently it seems to let a veil of forgetfulness fall over the past, only to make every single trifle appear in a strong light again. When he struggles along the right path, rejoicing in having overcome temptation's power, there may come at almost the same time, right on the heels of perfect victory, an apparently insignificant external circumstance which pushes him down, like Sisyphus, from the height of the crag. Often when a person has concentrated on something, a minor external circumstance arises which destroys everything. (As in the case of a man who, weary of life, is about to throw himself into the Thames and at the crucial moment is halted by the sting of a mosquito). Frequently a person feels his very best when the illness is the worst, as in tuberculosis. In vain he tries to resist it but he has not sufficient strength, and it is no help to him that he has gone through the same thing many times; the kind of practice acquired in this way does not apply here. Just as no one who has been taught a great deal about swimming is able to keep afloat in a storm, but only the man who is intensely convinced and has experiences that he is actually lighter than water, so a person who lacks this inward point of poise is unable to keep afloat in life's storms.―Only when a man has understood himself in this way is he able to maintain an independent existence and thus avoid surrendering his own I. How often we see (in a period when we extol that Greek historian because he knows how to appropriate an unfamiliar style so delusively like the original author's, instead of censuring him, since the first prize always goes to an author for having his own style―that is, a mode of expression and presentation qualified by his own individuality)―how often we see people who either out of mental-spiritual laziness live on the crumbs that fall from another's table or for more egotistical reasons seek to identify themselves with others, until eventually they believe it all, just like the liar through frequent repetition of his stories.

آه دایه‌ی عزیزم که نقشت هرگز از لوح دل و جانم نمی‌رود، تو ای پری‌روی گریزپای ساکن در جویباری که از کنار مزرعه‌ی پدرم می‌گذشت، تو که همواره در ایام صغر پا به پای من بازی می‌کردی گیرم فقط محض برآمدن کام دل خویش! تو ای راحتی‌بخش باوفای من، تو که در گذر سال‌ها پاکی و بی‌آلایشی خویش را از کف ندادی، تو که هرگز پیر نشدی، حتی زمانی که من پیر می‌شدم، تو ای پری‌روی نهرنشین خاموش که بارها در آغوشت پناه جستم، خسته و ملول از دست آدم‌ها، خسته و ملول از دست خویشتن، هر گاه که نیاز داشتم به قرار جستن در سایه‌ی ابدیت، چندان غمین که زمانی به پهنای ابدیت برای از یاد بردنش لازم بود، باری، تو هیچ‌گاه از من دریغ نکردی آنچه را آدمیان می‌خواستند از من دریغ کنند و بدین منظرو ابدیت را درست به اندازه‌ی زمان شلوغ می‌کردند و حتی آن را از زمان هم مخوف‌تر می‌ساختند. باری، کنار تو دراز می‌کشیدم و خود را در پهن‌دشت آسمان بالای سرم و در پچ پچ آرام تو گم می‌کردم! تو ای خودِ شاداب‌تر من!، تو ای حیات گریزپای مقیم در نهری که در کنار مزرعه‌ی پدرم جاری‌ست، آن‌جا که چنان دراز به دراز می‌خوابم که انگار عصایی هستم که رهگذری روی زمین گذاشته و رفته‌ست، اما من در این پچ‌پچ اندوه‌زا و ماخولیایی نجات می‌یابم و از بندها می‌رهم! این چنین در لژ خویش پا دراز می‌کردم، گوشه‌ای می‌افتادم مثل جامه‌های کسی که برای آب‌تنی رفته‌ست، دراز به دراز کنار جویبار فریادها و خنده‌ها و بی‌خیالی‌های تماشاچیان که شتابان از کنارم می‌گذشت.

Which brings me back to Ecclesiastes, his search for happiness, and mine. I spoke in chapter 4 about my first meeting, as a student, with Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the Lubavitcher Rebbe. As I was waiting to go in, one of his disciples told me the following story. A man had recently written to the Rebbe on something of these lines: ‘I need the Rebbe’s help. I am deeply depressed. I pray and find no comfort. I perform the commands but feel nothing. I find it hard to carry on.’ The Rebbe, so I was told, sent a compelling reply without writing a single word. He simply ringed the first word in every sentence of the letter: the word ‘I’. It was, he was hinting, the man’s self-preoccupation that was at the root of his depression. It was as if the Rebbe were saying, as Viktor Frankl used to say in the name of Kierkegaard, ‘The door to happiness opens outward.’23 It was this insight that helped me solve the riddle of Ecclesiastes. The word ‘I’ does not appear very often in the Hebrew Bible, but it dominates Ecclesiastes’ opening chapters. I enlarged my works: I built houses for myself, I planted vineyards for myself; I made gardens and parks for myself and I planted in them all kinds of fruit trees; I made ponds of water for myself from which to irrigate a forest of growing trees. I bought male and female slaves and I had homeborn slaves. Also I possessed flocks and herds larger than all who preceded me in Jerusalem. Also, I collected for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. (Ecclesiastes 2:4–8) Nowhere else in the Bible is the first-person singular used so relentlessly and repetitively. In the original Hebrew the effect is doubled because of the chiming of the verbal suffix and the pronoun: Baniti li, asiti li, kaniti li, ‘I built for myself, I made for myself, I bought for myself.’ The source of Ecclesiastes’ unhappiness is obvious and was spelled out many centuries later by the great sage Hillel: ‘If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am only for myself, what am I?’24 Happiness in the Bible is not something we find in self-gratification. Hence the significance of the word simchah. I translated it earlier as ‘joy’, but really it has no precise translation into English, since all our emotion words refer to states of mind we can experience alone. Simchah is something we cannot experience alone. Simchah is joy shared.

People, for the most part, live in the objective-immediate mode (discussed earlier). This means that they are totally absorbed in and identified with positive worldly interests and projects, of which there is an unending variety. That is to say, although they differ from one another in their individual natures, the contents of their respective positivities, they are all alike in being positive. Thus, although the fundamental relation between positives is conflict (on account of their individual differences), they apprehend one another as all being in the same boat of positivity, and they think of men generally in terms of human solidarity, and say 'we'. But the person who lives in the subjective-reflexive mode is absorbed in and identified with, not the positive world, but himself. The world, of course, remains 'there' but he regards it as accidental (Husserl says that he 'puts it in parentheses, between brackets'), and this means that he dismisses whatever positive identification he may have as irrelevant. He is no longer 'a politician' or 'a fisherman', but 'a self'. But what we call a 'self', unless it receives positive identification from outside, remains a void, in other words a negative. A 'self', however, is positive in this respect—it seeks identification. So a person who identifies himself with himself finds that his positivity consists in negativity—not the confident 'I am this' or 'I am that' of the positive, but a puzzled, perplexed, or even anguished, 'What am I?'. (This is where we meet the full force of Kierkegaard's 'concern and unrest'.) Eternal repetition of this eternally unanswerable question is the beginning of wisdom (it is the beginning of philosophy); but the temptation to provide oneself with a definite answer is usually too strong, and one falls into a wrong view of one kind or another. (It takes a Buddha to show the way out of this impossible situation. For the sotāpanna, who has understood the Buddha's essential Teaching, the question still arises, but he sees that it is unanswerable and is not worried; for the arahat the question no longer arises at all, and this is final peace.) This person, then, who has his centre of gravity in himself instead of in the world (a situation that, though usually found as a congenital feature, can be acquired by practice), far from seeing himself with the clear solid objective definition with which other people can be seen, hardly sees himself as anything definite at all: for himself he is, at best, a 'What, if anything?'. It is precisely this lack of assured self-identity that is the secret strength of his position—for him the question-mark is the essential and his positive identity in the world is accidental, and whatever happens to him in a positive sense the question-mark still remains, which is all he really cares about. He is distressed, certainly, when his familiar world begins to break up, as it inevitably does, but unlike the positive he is able to fall back on himself and avoid total despair. It is also this feature that worries the positives; for they naturally assume that everybody else is a positive and they are accustomed to grasp others by their positive content, and when they happen to meet a negative they find nothing to take hold of.

Every Joke has a bottom, a familiar pain, anger, trauma. "Get it? Do ya get it?" Whatever the joke is, it's usually only funny once, sometimes not at all. David Bohm would report being distressed and disturbed by Krishnamurti's "jokes", and even Carl Jung thought Kierkegaard, with his emphasis on comedy was borderline pathological. Kierkegaard's comedy emphasized the "winning side". No one could make people laugh like Jung could, however, he wasn't necessarily trying to be funny. Some make people laugh due to the warmth of their rapport with the other, not necessarily because of the sophistication or memorization of a worn out joke. Compulsive joking about some familiar or unfamiliar pain will only take you so far. People get turned off by the repetitive need to find entertainment in something distressing and all too familiar.

our world gains meaning and sense through consistency and predictability. Language would not have been the same had we not repeatedly used the same words to refer to the same objects; science would not have been what it is had experiments and their results not been repeatable. Things gain sense through repetition (or the possibility of repetition). Law has a similar structure: if it is not repeatedly followed, it loses its grounds.

Some of us, understandably, do not wish to hear even this message of hope and personal growth. We wish to have our old world, our former assumptions and stratagems, reinstituted as quickly as possible. We are desperate to hear: “Yes, your marriage can be restored to its pristine assumptions; yes, your depression can be magically removed without understanding why it has come; yes, your old values and preferences still work.” This understandable desire for what is called “the regressive restoration of the persona” merely papers over the growing crevice within, and off we go in search of another palliative treatment, or another less demanding view of our difficulties. It is quite natural to cling to the known world and fear the unknown. We all do—even as that crevice between the false self and the natural self grows ever greater within, and the old attitudes more and more ineffectual. Most of us live our lives backing into our future, making the choices of each new moment from the data and agenda of the old—and then we wonder why repetitive patterns turn up in our lives. Our dilemma was best described in the nineteenth century by the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard when he noted in his journal the paradox that life must be remembered backward but lived forward. Is it not self-deluding, then, to keep doing the same thing but expecting different results? For those willing to stand in the heat of this transformational fire, the second half of life provides a shot at getting themselves back again. They might still fondly gaze at the old world, but they risk engaging a larger world, one more complex, less safe, more challenging, the one that is already irresistibly hurtling toward them.

Job is infinite contestation and Abraham infinite resignation, but these are one and the same thing. Job challenges the law in an ironic manner, refusing all second-hand explanations and dismissing the general in order to reach the most singular as principle or as universal. Abraham submits humorously to the law, but finds in that submission precisely the singularity of his only son whom the law commanded him to sacrifice. As Kierkegaard understands it, repetition is the transcendent correlate shared by the psychical intentions of contestation and resignation.