Human experience is a series of starts and stops. To be human is to navigate the reality of time and space, to deal with ourselves in motion. There are psychological states which help or harm our ability to be in motion, and these states are often dependent on the interplay between our own personal resolve […]
Category: Repetition
As I was writing today, it hit me that Kierkegaard’s notion of repetition bears some interesting similarities to the hilarious apocalyptic satire by Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins. The book revolves around a southern doctor, Thomas Moore (descendant of Sir Thomas Moore, author of Utopia), who happens to be an alcoholic, a lapsed Catholic, […]
If freedom here [in repetition as a religious movement] now discovers an obstacle, then it must lie in freedom itself. Freedom now shows itself not to be in its perfection in man but to be disturbed. This disturbance, however, must be attributed to freedom itself, for otherwise there would be no freedom at all, or […]
In Repetition, Constantinus suggests that repetition is the “condition sine qua non for every issue of dogmatics” (324). That got me thinking, of course. Dogmatics is a dirty word in philosophy these days, and the reputation is not unwarranted. But perhaps this is a mistake. This called my attention to Berdyaev’s commitment to dogmatics–I think […]
There are some natural similarities between repetition and imitation. Imitation is, itself, a form of repetition, but of a more specialized sort. They both deal with freedom, primarily. All over we see Constantin and Kierkegaard referring to repetition as a “task for freedom,” and this is his criticism of Heiberg, as well, that he did […]
In my research, I’ve been confronted with the problem of whether or not “repetition” is meant to be a term describing reality as it is (an ontology) or something different. After reading an unpublished piece Kierkegaard wrote under Constantin Constantinus, I’m beginning to have serious doubts about the concept as an ontological option. The piece […]
I’ve been reading quite a bit and feel like I’m inches away from cracking this slippery concept. A lot of my conclusions seem elementary now, but I’m glad to have gotten here. Here are some further developments I’m noting: In What Ways Repetition is Impossible: Reality can never have an exact repetition because every thing […]
I’ve been plugging through Niels Nymann Eriksen’s Kierkegaard’s Category of Repetition in the library. It’s very thorough and is probably one of the most clear treatments of the topic I’ve come across so far. One puzzle for me in studying repetition has been my inability to determine why the experiment ends in failure. Constantinus and […]
I thought it would be fun to put up a few thoughts and concerns I have driving my research here at St. Olaf. I have two broad goals: 1) have a more comfortable grasp of the concept of “repetition” and 2) discern more deeply how Kierkegaard relates to some of the marginal figures I’ve been […]
Dean Dettloff 