Agape and Personhood. David L. Goicoechea

and Trembling is Kierkegaard’s way of fulfilling his task.

      He wants to make the task young and beautiful as was Regina.

      She awakened him from his unmotivated lethargy and sleep walking.

      By showing us Abraham and his task we can come to love Jesus

      and the task He has given us of spending our lives for others.

      The actual is higher than the possible and the highest of all

      is to live out the highest possible actual which is the gift

      and the task which Paul and Kierkegaard were given and which

      we can all be given if we notice it and become earnest about it.

      Fear and Trembling is a motivational book that wants to move

      us to do nothing less than the best we can dream of for others.

      The promise and the task of faith in that promise so motivated

      Abraham that he lived out his belief that by giving up Isaac

      he would get him back a billion fold as a blessing for all peoples.

      Jesus as the grain of wheat died that all Abraham’s might live.

      II.3 Reconciling the God-Man and Job

      II.3.1 Repetition’s Reconciliation Is the Only Happy Love

      In Repetition, the companion volume to Fear and Trembling, Søren

      also discusses his love for Regina and the engagement breaking.

      When he fell in love with her he became a poet who was religious

      but he believed that if he had faith he would be able to marry her.

      But the engagement breaking was complex and he wrote in his journal:

      If I had not honored her higher than myself as my future wife,

      if I had not been prouder of her honor than my own,

      then I would have remained silent and fulfilled her wish and mine—

      I would have married her—

      there are so many marriages that conceal little stories.

      Such as being gay. Perhaps he worried that if he married her

      the whole network of his melancholy would return and she

      would have to live day in and day out with a depressed husband.

      But he believed that if he really had faith he would be able to remain

      in the enthusiasm of his Divine Madness and be married at

      the same time in the reconciliation of what he calls “repetition.”

      When we think of repetition in English we think of a mechanical

      repetition in which the same thing happens over and over again in

      exactly the same way so that it is boring and completely non-eventful.

      The concept of Kierkegaard has to do with experiencing through

      life a reconciled mix of the old and the new at the same time.

      The young man falls in love poetically and mystically in a

      Platonic recollective love that is captivating for the young girl.

      She loves being adored by the melancholic poet as his muse.

      But this poetic love is an unhappy love for it expects the new and

      the interesting and would be bored with the repetition of the same.

      If a love relation is only aesthetically interesting it becomes unhappy.

      If it is an ethical mechanical repetition of the same it is unhappy.

      But “the dialectic of repetition is easy, for that which is repeated

      has been, otherwise it could not be repeated, but the very fact

      that it has been makes the repetition into something new.”2

      II.3.2 Beyond Platonic Recollection to a New Future

      Kierkegaard argues that “repetition is the interest of metaphysics

      and also the interest upon which metaphysics comes to grief.”3

      He demonstrates that by contrasting faith’s repetition with

      Plato’s metaphysics of recollection and Hegel’s mediation.

      Kierkegaard clarifies his concept of repetition with several kinds

      of definition, nominal or etymological, essential, causal, and

      descriptive and for each of these he uses the method of free

      imaginative variation or the experimentation of comparisons.

      Kierkegaard is proud that Danish has such a good metaphysical

      word as Gjentagelse which contains all the religious, ethical

      and faith based metaphysical meanings that he will bring out.

      Repetition means to bring out or to fetch for Gjen means “again,”

      and tag means “day” and else means “getting” so the word means

      re-getting it again in a new way each day so that even the

      English word re-petition is suggestive for petition as the first

      form of prayer is renewed with repentance, thanksgiving and praise.

      Petition means to earnestly ask for something from the other.

      Repetition for Kierkegaard is the renewal of Platonic Recollection.

      “Recollection” is also etymologically a very rich word for the

      root “lect” is connected with legein which means “to gather”

      and so to collect is to gather together into a logos or one.

      So Plato reconciled the being of Parmenides and the Becoming

      of Heraclitus with the concept of recollection which shows

      the identity of the logos with the ontos which connect the many.

      But repetition is much more humble and other-oriented for

      according to its basic attitude it constantly re-petitions

      the other because one is aware of one’s lack and the need.

      For Plato one recollects by climbing up out of the cave and

      recovering the past truth that the soul knew before it fell.

      For Kierkegaard repletion is a forward recollection that renews

      all things because of the surprises of the unknown future.

      II.3.3 Beyond Hegelian Mediation to a New Past

      So recollection is a process that collects the many into the past

      in order to re-fetch their meaning and significance so that Plato

      would see the fallen soul rising through the remembrance of

      things past until he collected them in their originating form.

      Thus there is no genuine future or freedom in the realm of

      Platonic recollection because the moment of truth only recovers

      what has been and has been previously lost and lost sight of.

      Hegel’s metaphysics of mediation goes in the opposite direction

      to a future and a telos or goal or purpose that makes the past

      only a quantitative, instrumental,