Søren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling/Repetition : Kierkegaards Writings, Vol. 6

FEAR AND TREMBLING

REPETITION

KIERKEGAARDS WRITINGS, VI

REPETITION

by Sren Kierkegaard

Edited and Translated
with Introduction and Notes by

Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright 1983 by Howard V. Hong

Published by Princeton University Press,
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

ISBN-13: 978-0-691-02026-6
ISBN-10: 0-691-02026-4

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Kierkegaard, Sren, 18131855.
Fear and trembling; Repetition.

(Kierkegaards writings; 6)
Translation of: Frygt og b; ven and of Gjentagelsen.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. ChristianityPhilosophy. 2. Sin. 3. Repetition (Philosophy) I. Hong, Howard Vincent, 1912
II. Hong, Edna Hatlestad, 1913. III. Kierkegaard, Sren, 18131855. Gjentagelsen. English. 1982.
IV. Title. V. Series: Kierkegaard, Sren, 18131855.
Works. English. 1982; 6.
BR100.K52 1982 201 829006

Preparation of this volume has been made possible in part by a grant from the Translations Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Printed in the United States of America

14 15 16 17

Fear and Trembling
by Johannes de Silentio

[P ART O NE ]
[Report by Constantin Constantius]

[P ART T WO ]
REPETITION

Of all Kierkegaards pseudonymous writings, Fear and Trembling and Repetition are perhaps the most closely personal. At the same time, they exemplify Kierkegaards view of the optimal relation between a writers experience and his writing, a relation he formulated later in Two Ages (1846):

The law manifest in poetic production is identical, on a smaller scale, with the law for the life of every person in social intercourse and education. Anyone who experiences anything primitively also experiences in ideality the possibilities of the same thing and the possibility of the opposite. These possibilities are his legitimate literary property. His own personal actuality, however, is not. His speaking and his producing are, in fact, born of silence. The ideal perfection of what he says and what he produces will correspond to his silence, and the supreme mark of that silence will be that the ideality contains the qualitatively opposite possibility. As soon as the productive artist must give over his own actuality, its facticity, he is no longer essentially productive; his beginning will be his end, and his first word will already be a trespass against the holy modesty of ideality. Therefore from an esthetic point of view, such a poetic work is certainly also a kind of private talkativeness and is readily recognized by the absence of its opposite in equilibrium. For ideality is the equilibrium of opposites. For example, someone who has been motivated to creativity by unhappiness, if he is genuinely devoted to ideality, will be equally inclined to write about happiness and about unhappiness. But silence, the brackets he puts around his own personality, is precisely the condition for gaining ideality; otherwise, despite all precautionary measures such as setting the scene in Africa etc., his one-sided preference will still show. An author

This text and also the text and the draft on loquacity clearly express Kierkegaards view that an authors private experience can legitimately be used in his writing only in transmuted form, that is, as the universally human, not as personal disclosure. Therefore, a reader does not need to know anything at all about the writer and the leaden personal particulars that have been transmuted into the gold of the imaginatively shaped pseudonymous work.

Kierkegaard expressly employed indirect communication in works such as Fear and Trembling and Repetition in order to take himself as author out of the picture and to leave the reader alone with the ideas. The pseudonymity or polyonymity of the various works, Kierkegaard wrote in A First and Last Declaration, has not had an accidental basis in my person... but an essential basis in the production itself, which, for the sake of the lines, of the psychologically varied differences of the individualities, poetically required a disregard for good and evil, contrition and exuberance, despair and arrogance, suffering and rhapsody, etc., which are limited only ideally by psychological consistency, which no actual factual person dares allow himself or wishes to allow himself in the moral limitations of actuality.

A historical and biographical approach to any work may afford some illumination, but such an approach becomes eccentric if it diverts attention from the authors thought to the authors life. Throughout his authorship, Kierkegaard took special care to prevent his readers from being so diverted, from committing the genetic fallacy. No writer has so painstakingly tried to preclude his readers collapsing writer and works together and thereby transmogrifying the works into autobiography or memoir. Yet few writers have been approached so consistently from the biographical angle. And none of Kierkegaards other writings has been so consistently treated from that perspective as have Fear and Trembling and Repetition.

Kierkegaard was well aware, however, that one reader would inevitably use a biographical approach to whatever he wrote, for she was part of that personal history, the incidental occasion for poetic productions that in their universality are addressed to every individual. She was, of course, Regine Olsenin a special sense, that single individual (hiin Enkelte). In a retrospective journal entry from 1849, Kierkegaard reviewed his motivation for writing Either/Or (published February 20, 1843):

when I began as an author I was religiously resolved, but this must be understood in another way. Either/Or, especially The Seducers Diary,

The prototype for Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, and the other polyonymous works was the maieutic method of Socrates. Viewed Socratically, every point of departure in time is eo ipso something accidental, vanishing, an occasion,

The point of departure and, viewed from the vantage point of the completed work, the vanishing occasion of Either/Or was the breaking of the engagement between Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen on October 11, 1841. According to a journal entry from May 17, 1843, Kierkegaard broke the engagement primarily out of concern for Regine: If I had not honored her higher than myself as my future wife, if I had not been prouder of her honor than of my own, then I would have remained silent and fulfilled her wish and mineI would have married herthere are so many marriages that conceal little stories.me, and into his life during the period of estrangement from his fatherall of which he thought would crush her. The diary of the imaginary and imaginative seducer was intended to be read by Regine with himself in mind and thus to dissemble and to ease her out of the relationship and the pain of its fracture. This was achieved more easily and more quickly than he had expected, for in June 1843 she became engaged to Johan Frederik Schlegel, who had been her teacher before Kierkegaard met her.