“I prefer talking to children, with them one can still hope they may become rational beings; but those who have become that -- Lord save us!” - Kierkegaard
Philosophy is the discipline concerned with how one should live and what is the essential nature of existence. Then, as Kierkegaard wrote in his journals, if “philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward”, one is perfectly right to ask when one should start questioning the past and consider the future. There is obviously a time issue in the above sentence and in the totality of Kierkegaard’s works. The distinction between the past, the moment and the future, in its ambiguity, is related to the matter of becoming and being in Kierkegaard’s universe. The case with the children, being unaware of the past, is that they are constantly living in the moment. The problem starts after reaching a certain point when one becomes conscious with his actions. This is the point when one is able to recall and appreciate the past activities and starts making plans for the future. This consciousness is also related with the realization of death. Kierkegaard refers to the problem as despair, sickness unto death;
“Despair is a sickness of the spirit, of the self, and accordingly can take three forms: in despair not to be conscious of having a self (not despair in the strict sense); in despair not to will to be oneself; in despair to will to be oneself.”
According to his above classification, it is obvious that what he calls despair is to be aware of oneself. What is more important for him than being aware of the self is what to do with the self. The distinction is clear, either one is aware of the self and is not happy with it, or he is aware of the self but cannot achieve to be a whole. On a broader sense, this the problem of existence related to time. The problem with the time can be discussed on two different levels, one is the process of becoming aware of the self and the second is the process of being the self. To explain the first level it will be appropriate to bring in the discussion of Greek philosophy. What Greek philosophy teaches, especially Socrates, is the methodology to take one out of his blindness. This methodology can be explained as questioning the nature of existence by using dialectics. Given that there is a form of the good, the individual should reposition his existence relating to the transcendent. He should search for the truth first by looking at the ultimate good, and with the acquired knowledge he should then turn inwards and find its correspondence in his soul to realize the reason of his existence. It is possible to say that Kierkegaard is in favor of Greek philosophy in his search for truth. His inquiry on Christianity relies on his belief in the transcendent, but he is not happy with the Christian methodology. He rather emphasizes the importance of dialectics than a blindfolded acceptance of what has been told. In that sense, his categorization of being aware of the self again coincides with Greek philosophy. Socrates explains the experience of self realization as painful, because the soul which is not ready for the truth will be afraid of the result of its search and will try to fit in the norms of the society again, this is the category in Kierkegaard who are not happy with the self and try convert it to something else. The second category contains the people who try to unify with their self to become a whole.
Kierkegaard refers to the experience of the second category and takes the inquiry to a further level claiming that repetition is the way for the ones in that category to live a happy life;
“Repetition is the new category that will be discovered. If one knows anything of modern philosophy and is not entirely ignorant of Greek philosophy, one will readily see that this category precisely explains the relation between the Eleatics and Heraclitus, and that repetition-proper is what has mistakenly been called mediation.”
In that passage, he refers to Hegel’s ‘dialectical unity’ that is a cognitive process of reconciling mutually interdependent, opposed terms as what one could loosely call "an interpretation" or "an understanding of". Given the explanation it is hard to separate repetition from Hegel’s dialectical unity as Kierkegaard also implies above that Hegel mistakenly calls it ‘mediation’. What I understand from repetition that Kierkegaard describes is that it is the action of acknowledging the self and unifying with it. That is to say, in order for one to repeat himself, he should be very well aware of the nature of his existence. It requires an understanding of his past actions, a reconciliation between the past and the present, and approval for the future actions in the same pattern.
“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. Repetition, therefore, if it is possible, makes a person happy, whereas recollection makes him unhappy—assuming, of course, that he gives himself time to live and does not promptly at birth find an excuse to sneak out life again, for example, that he has forgotten something.”
What he claims above is that a life lived backwards, this is not to be confused with ‘understood backward’, makes a person unhappy. Living backwards, for me, is the same to be stuck at some moment in the past. Kierkegaard relates that position with hope. If a person has deadly hope, it is more likely for him to stick with the past because that expectance is never likely to be satisfied. To put it differently, if there is hope, the person will choose to stick with the beauties of the past not to ruin those image by taking any brave actions.
To conclude, repetition for Kierkegaard is the way for the individual who realized his self and wants to unite with it in order to live a happy life. The ones who avoid that painful journey will be lost in recollection and never be able to achieve the outcomes of a happy life. He claims that if a person who wants to actualize himself in this life, he should refer to repetition because it is an understanding of life backward and at the same time living forward;
“He who will merely hope is cowardly; he who will merely recollect is voluptuous; he who wills repetition is a man, and the more emphatically he is able to realize it, the more profound a human being he is. But he who does not grasp that life is a repetition and that this is the beauty of life has pronounced his own verdict and deserves nothing better than what will happen to him anyway—he will perish.”
