Kierkegaard Rise f Modern Psychology. and the

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2 Kierkegaard Rise f Modern Psychology and the

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4 Kierkegaard Rise of Modern Psychology and the Sven Hroar Klempe With a foreword by Jaan Valsiner O Routledge S^^ Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK

5 First published 2014 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright 2014 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Klempe, Sven Hroar. Kierkegaard and the rise of modern psychology / Sven Hroar Klempe. pages cm. -- (History and theory of psychology) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Kierkegaard, Soren, Psychology and philosophy. 3. Psychology--History. I. Title. B4377.K dc ISBN 13: (hbk)

6 To my elder brother Øystein, who raised me intellectually.

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8 Contents Series Editor s Foreword Jaan Valsiner Preface ix xiii I Kierkegaard and Experimental Psychology 1 1 Repetition (1843): A Core Text 3 2 The Concept of Anxiety (1844) 15 3 Stages on Life s Way and Guilty/Not Guilty (1845) 35 4 The Sickness Unto Death (1849) 53 II Psychology in Terms of the German Enlightenment 67 5 Kierkegaard and a Period of Change 73 6 Psychology as a Part of Metaphysics 89 7 Empirical Psychology, Aesthetics, and Natural 107 Sciences 8 Kant and the Rejection of Psychology as a Science 123 III How to Understand Kierkegaard s Psychology Today Kierkegaard and Modernity Kierkegaard and Modern Psychology 179

9 11 Kierkegaard and Modern Science The Actuality of Kierkegaard s Psychology 233 References 243 Name Index 251 Subject Index 255

10 Series Editor s Foreword Psychology at Point Zero: Guilty or Not Guilty? This book puts our contemporary psychology to trial. Its author raises the accusation that the discipline is guilty of crimes against humanism in the building of a science, and that it has been involved in that crime over the last two centuries. As his key witness, he brings to the stand a sophisticated observer of the human condition of the past: the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard, whose literary contributions to philosophy are well recognized, albeit outside the science of psychology. Yet his thinking was psychological at its best, and it is our psychology of today that can be accused, a century and a half later, of trivializing the human psyche and commercializing the soul. Psychology is today, like two centuries ago, at Point Zero. Or better it has been moving around in the labyrinth of the garden of scientific delights, not finding its own place, and ending up in the same location. Despite the ever-growing flow of empirical studies that contribute to the literature, precious little new general theory has been produced. The prevalence of inductive generalization as a socially accepted via regia in psychology is likely to blame for this. Psychology is still in need of a general synthesizer of basic ideas one like Charles Darwin, Dmitri Mendeleev, or Albert Einstein to set up its basics as a general science. There are good reasons for psychology s struggle to be a science and losing its focus on the psyche in the process. According to the author, Psychology as a science has to live with the irreconcilable conflict between objectivity and subjectivity manifested in what man is living in, namely culture. And this is exactly what Kierkegaard s psychology is concerned with no matter how much strain, stress, and worry this may ix

11 Kierkegaard and the Rise of Modern Psychology evoke, not only for those who want to define psychology as a science, but even more so for each one of us who wants to understand actual life. This verdict was true in Kierkegaard s time and continues to be so today. Pushing consenting research participants head-on into a MRI machine does not illuminate our understanding of their subjective life experiences, even if it allows researchers to display colorful snapshots of their functioning brains. It is the need for understanding culture a notion incredibly difficult to clarify theoretically (Valsiner, 2012a), while easily accepted in use in everyday life that has been the obstacle for psychology. Looking for the objectivity that is so much needed in science has not been helped by selecting maze-running white rats, pecking pigeons, salivating dogs, or even gesturing higher primates as targets for investigation of the human psychological functions. Such declarations of proxy species to stand in for our fellow Homo sapiens in the vaudeville of science-building in psychology have been good for transient fashions from behaviorism to cognitivism (and beyond) but not for basic breakthroughs in the new Wissenschaft. Hence, a contemporary look at the ironic view of Kierkegaard on the psychology and philosophy of his time is refreshing. One is just left guessing what kind of treatment the famous psychologists of the twentieth century such as Watson, Vygotsky, Piaget, Skinner, Seligman, Kahneman, and others would have received from the insightful Danish observer. We will never know. The addition of this book to our series of treatises in the History and Theory of Psychology domain at Transaction links our efforts well with the wider social sciences focus that is the home ground of the publisher. Klempe s analysis of Kierkegaard, and his elaboration of new ways of doing psychology, resonates well with the phenomenological efforts (Clegg, 2009, 2013) and search for new methodology (Abbey and Surgan, 2011). New ways of thinking are very much needed in the discipline, and a careful new look at a classic philosopher can provide us with new insights. This book on Kierkegaard comes right after a series of treatises on the key theorists of the twentieth century Svend Brinkmann on Dewey (Brinkmann, 2013), Eric Charles on E. B. Holt and New Realism, and Eduardo Martí and Cintia Rodriguez (2012) on Jean Piaget. Kierkegaard s Advice: Dialectics beyond Hegel As it becomes clear from the analysis of Kierkegaard s observations of his contemporaries in this book, his ironic and incisive presentation of the fashions of his time was constructive. While the scholars in his neighboring German lands were busily taking sides in the mortal combat x

12 Series Editor s Foreword of ideas between Naturphilosophie and materialistic convictions, Kierkegaard penetrated the essence of Hegelian dialectics and saw its shortcomings too much talk around complex issues of multi-level and self-inclusive organization. After him, two centuries of on-and-off efforts to bring dialectical thought into psychology have failed (Valsiner, 2012b) partly because of the resistance of social traditions, but also because of the underdevelopment of the ideas themselves. Hegel failed in the end to specify his own ideas the fluidity of dialectical phenomena gave rise to the unbounded nature of dialogical theories. The latter were easy to exploit for political purposes and they were (Valsiner, 1988). Dialectics as the most flexible system of thought of all versions of logic became historically the most fixed in the political orthodoxy of the Soviet Union. The demise of that political Minotaur in the twentieth century of course indicates the reality of dialectical overcoming of even the seemingly powerful social system that seemed unready to crumble. It did. Yet the precise mechanisms of such overcoming remain out of our theoretical focus. In contrast, Kierkegaard s nuanced and playful look at the dialectical dynamics of phenomena could be developed further in new ways. Which these can be is something a careful reader may find out from this book. Hroar Klempe through a venture into Kierkegaard s voluminous contributions has created a labyrinth of intellectual efforts in which to look for the Minotaur of non-reflexive and empirically accumulative psychology. He also offers an invisible intellectual thread to navigate the labyrinth. Whether the reader reaches the end and decides whether psychology is really guilty of the crime against humanism may remain an open question. In this, the present book is Kierkegaardian par excellence. Jaan Valsiner Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Aalborg, Denmark July 2013 References Abbey, E. and Surgan, S. (Eds.) (2011). Emerging Methods in Psychology. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Brinkmann, S. (2013). John Dewey: Psychology in a Changing World. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Charles, E. C. (Ed.) (2011). A New Look at New Realism. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Clegg, J. (Ed.) (2009). The Observation of Human Systems: Lessons from the History of Anti-reductionistic Empirical Psychology. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. xi

13 Kierkegaard and the Rise of Modern Psychology. (2013). Scientific Self Observation. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Martí, E., and Rodríguez, C. (Eds.) (2012). After Piaget. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Valsiner, J. (1988). Developmental Psychology in the Soviet Union. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Valsiner, J. (Ed.) (2012a). The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press. Valsiner, J. (2012b). A Guided Science: History of Psychology in the Mirror of Its Making. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. xii

14 Preface Much has been written and much has been commented on the works of Søren Kierkegaard, and this wealth of critique is not without reason. He was one of the most mysterious and fascinating figures in Europe in the nineteenth century, partly because his perspectives still appear original and unique, but probably even more so because he was a stylist whose work touches something deep within the reader. In one sense, he was a philosopher, but he was certainly not a traditional one. No traditional philosopher would ever write a Concluding Unscientific Postscript, a footnote running to around five hundred pages, where the footnote is almost five times longer than the work on which it comments, which, moreover, bears the no less awkward title Philosophical Crumbs. His writings are filled with irony from bottom to top, and it is not easy to conclude whether the author is truly serious about philosophy or not. Possibly he is not, and this may be why many prefer to read him as a novelist instead. And this works, of course. To read, for example, The Seducer s Diary is to be whirled into a storm that makes the reader both hot and cold at the same time. The seducer s considerations are both so strange and so familiar that we simply have to continue reading to see if all the paradoxes and contradictions presented really meet with some kind of reconciliation by the end. But they do not. And therefore there is strong reason to continue reading by, for example, completing the whole of Either/Or, of which The Seducer s Diary is only a small section. Then we realize that behind the stormy literary style, behind all the witticisms and pearls of wisdom, a rickety philosophical scaffold appears that can stand on its own but seems to be as open and as unsteady as only a scaffold can be. I realized this for the first time when I approached his work at the age of sixteen. I felt as if I had received a personal invitation from Kierkegaard himself to put all my teenage battles into words. Although there were exactly one hundred years between his death and my birth, xiii

15 Kierkegaard and the Rise of Modern Psychology I immediately identified with all the neurotic struggling he had endured over his fiancée, Regine Olsen. The unacceptable behavior he exhibited was immediately regarded as an inevitable result of the fact that the other sex was attractive, for sure, but at the same time completely unapproachable. So to handle this in a way to allow one to survive was by staying clear of the other sex and hiding oneself in the cave of literary wisdom. So I followed Kierkegaard, not only by drinking from the cup of wisdom, but by doing so in exactly the same way that he did: by falling headlong into it. And I actually did find him still swimming in there. He not only dealt with the problems with approaching the other sex, but also with other critical issues in the same seductive manner. Religious questions were attacked from the most rebellious angle, and in philosophy he turned everything upside down by highlighting subjectivity. The latter was not only a rebellious act; it also allowed for an unrestrained revolution. Yet this was like most philosophical revolutions: fascinating but quite impossible to immediately integrate in a fully systematic way of thinking. This is probably the way many have experienced Søren Kierkegaard. He is highly respected for his work, and he is regarded as a good source for quotations to be applied in many situations. Thus his name may show up in speeches and greetings all over the world, on almost all kinds of occasions, and he is, of course, very well known, both among scholars and others. However, this is probably also his writings destiny: simply to be an endless source of words of wisdom and wit to be applied on both festive and solemn occasions. With some very important exceptions, Kierkegaard now is only mentioned en passant even among scholars, preferably in a footnote that focuses on his shortcomings. Even Theodor W. Adorno, who actually represents one of the important exceptions, did not fully accept the religious turn (Waggoner, 2005). Kierkegaard was regularly evoked in German thinking between the two world wars. And Adorno s counterpart, Martin Heidegger, who is often recognized as one of those who really were highly inspired by Kierkegaard, is the most striking example of someone who only mentions Kierkegaard in a footnote that focuses primarily on his limitations. To build up a full understanding of Kierkegaard s work is probably an impossible task. Yet after having explored the role of psychology, specifically psychologia empirica in German thinking in the eighteenth century, some new perspectives appeared to me. The understanding of psychology in that century has some similarities to our present understanding of psychology, but it is also radically different. Yet there xiv

16 Preface is a continuous line between the two centuries in the sense that they represent the two ends of the historical development of psychology as a science. Thus a contemporaneous perspective on Kierkegaard s psychology came up as a clue to pursue a fuller understanding of Kierkegaard. So this book is not primarily about the psychology of today, but it is hopefully something the reader will recognize as a background for the psychology of today. Yet this background is not restricted to Kierkegaard s private psychological struggles, and his relationship with his fiancée, Regine Olsen, is not an issue in this book, nor is his relationship and contributions to theology and philosophy. It is primarily about Kierkegaard s understanding of the role of psychology, specifically psychologia empirica as a basis for his philosophy, theology, and life. The role of psychology in early modernity has been greatly ignored and to a negligent degree, if I may say so. There are several reasons for this. One is definitely Immanuel Kant. The fact that he banished psychology from the good company of the sciences had an immediate and immense impact on the destiny of psychology. We are still struggling with this part of our inheritance from Kant. It is still hard to decide if psychology is to be regarded as an exact science or not, and in this respect Kierkegaard represents a counterpoint to Kant. In opposition to him, Kierkegaard did not aim at restoring objectivity after the fall of metaphysics. He wanted rather to pursue the reasons for its fall, which was first of all subjectivity, which had been actually introduced by psychologia empirica. This is why psychology became so important for Kierkegaard, and this is also why Kierkegaard s discussions on psychology are still so important today. He is surprisingly clear when it comes to this: psychology contradicts the other sciences completely in the sense that it is about subjectivity, whereas the other sciences are not; and psychology permeates Kierkegaard s whole authorship. Several of his books deal with psychology more explicitly, and these are Repetition, The Concept of Anxiety, Stages on Life s Way, and The Sickness Unto Death. Thus this study primarily focuses on these four books. Although this study is a monograph, there are several people and institutions that have contributed to make this real. The person that deserves most attention in this respect is the editor of this series, Prof. Jaan Valsiner. He not only invited me to write this book, but he also opened up the gates to an unforgettable sabbatical year at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA (2010/2011), during which the draft of this book was written. In this respect, I would also like to thank xv

17 Kierkegaard and the Rise of Modern Psychology the staff at Goddard Library, Giuseppina Marsico, Nikita A. Kharlamov, Kenneth R. Cabell, Craig Gruber, Kirill Maslov, Martin Dege, Johanna Vollhardt, Roger Bibace, Marianne Wiser, Virginia Swain, and Liu Bangchun, for their encouraging support during this phase of the work. I would also like to thank my own institution, the Department of Psychology at NTNU, which has made this project feasible, and my good colleagues Torbjørn Rundmo, Dankert Vedeler, Richard Allapack, Vegar Jordanger, Samar Albarghouthi, Arne Vikan, Berit Johannessen, Bente Berg, and Ivar Bjørgen, who have all contributed immensely by taking part in discussions on historical and theoretical issues. I will also thank Alastair Hannay for encouraging discussions. Yet the person that has made this book readable is Paddy Mahony, to whom I am deeply indebted. And a similar, if not greater, debt is owed to my wife, Jorid, who has selflessly allowed this project the highest priority over the last couple of years. Trondheim December 4, 2012 xvi

18 I Kierkegaard and Experimental Psychology Kierkegaard has always been of interest to psychologists, and some would say that he contributed to modern psychology long before modern psychology was even established. However, many probably have not recognized the fact that the term psychology appears in different forms in the subtitles in several of his publications and that Kierkegaard was, in truth, quite conscious of the psychological content of his authorship. The most fundamental question to pose, therefore, concerns the content of his psychology. What is it about, and does the term have any relevance to the psychology we describe today in the early years of the twenty-first century? The only way to answer these questions is to go back to the books that explicitly state to be about psychology, of which there are four, representing different stages in his authorship from the eighteen-forties. We can trace the first publication of this nature to This was the first year Kierkegaard was published, but it was also the most productive year of his life. The book of interest from this year is Repetition, with the subtitle An Essay in Experimental Psychology (Kierkegaard, 2009a) or A Venture in Experimenting Psychology (Kierkegaard, 1983). The original Danish title lies somewhere in between the two translations, and literally it would have been something like An Experiment in the Experimenting Psychology ( Et forsøg i den experimenterende Psychologi ) or An Experiment in Experimental Psychology (Tang, 2002, p. 93). Just two years after his thesis on Socratic irony, a touch of irony is also perceptible in this subtitle, and that is probably the reason why this text is not taken as a significant contribution to the field of psychology or included in the history of experimental psychology. Kierkegaard wrote even more books about psychology, and the one that has been taken much more seriously by psychologists is The Concept of Anxiety (1844). This book carries a subtitle, which 1

19 Kierkegaard and the Rise of Modern Psychology translated into English is presented as A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin (Kierkegaard, 1980a). This translation reveals the probable reason why the subtitle has been ignored, but the original in Danish is not so illuminating either. The year after saw Stages on Life s Way, and the subtitle of the third part Guilty/Not Guilty is probably even clearer than the title itself: A Passion Narrative, a Psychological Experiment by Frater Taciturnus (Kierkegaard, 1945), or, in a more recent translation, A Story of a Suffering, an Imaginary Psychological Construction by Frater Taciturnus (Kierkegaard, 1988). The final publication, The Sickness unto Death from 1849, is probably also understandable; its subtitle is A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening (Kierkegaard, 1980b), although this is a formulation that likely would not have been applied today. In this section, I will go through these books with a certain perspective in mind, and psychology will be the main subject. The term psychology, however, is not very clear. This is explicitly demonstrated by the major study of 1972 by the Danish Kierkegaard expert Kresten Nordentoft (Nordentoft, 1972). This most thorough analysis is entitled Kierkegaard s Psychology, but psychology is here narrowly restricted to psychoanalysis. In this respect, however, the study is highly recommended, but it was definitely not psychoanalysis that Kierkegaard was referring to fifty years before the term was coined. Thus the objective of this work is to take a historical approach. It seems that psychology was a more open question at the time Kierkegaard lived, and it is also astonishing that Kierkegaard would even refer to a form of experimental psychology, which brings the associations to mainstream psychology of today. To put him in that category would of course be a failure, but he has used the term, although some translators have tried to avoid it, and that is exactly what evoked my curiosity how and why did Kierkegaard do that? 2

20 1 Repetition (1843): A Core Text To give an adequate overview of the small work Repetition is not that easy. Because of many digressions, it is so easy to get lost in all the details. The digressions, however, do not represent weaknesses of the book; rather they must be considered as some of its strengths. Thus those who have gotten confused by this text often find themselves in a rather enjoyable situation. The reason is quite simply that the book is intended to be enjoyable, and it can be enjoyed in all its devious and unpredictable devices because of its ironic undertone. When one thing is said and something else is communicated, the real meaning becomes an open question. Two contradictory statements presented at the same time call for a choice. This requires strategies for interpretation, and the strategy that will be followed here is to go into Repetition for the purpose of finding out if it can lead us into Kierkegaard s understanding of what psychology is about. As a first step in this process, it would of course be of value merely to get an overview of the book from this perspective. The easiest start is to look at its overall organization or its abstract form. Although this may appear as unclear and even unsatisfying at first sight, it is definitely not as loose as it initially seems to be. In musical terms, it would probably be appropriate to state that it follows the ABA form but ends with a huge coda. This implies that it starts with a presentation of the main subject, namely the author s curiosity about an understanding of the term repetition. But he moves on very quickly into another story, which is about a strange, depressive young man he accidentally met and ended up taking care of. This story, however, is effectively a digression from the objective of the book, which is to investigate the content of the term repetition. So the author returns to the main topic before he follows up and fulfills his own plans for an investigation of the term. This is the total content of the first A, which therefore also can be divided into a sub-tripartite form: a-b-a. 3

21 Kierkegaard and the Rise of Modern Psychology The second part, the major B, is about the author Constantin Constantius s arrival and stay in Berlin. The experiment is implemented and fulfilled in this section, and this is the main part, both in regard to content and form. Although this calculation depends on the particular edition of the book, the B part accounts for about thirty pages, whereas the first A accounts for about twenty pages, yet the final A accounts for only around ten pages. The coda, however, contains a series of letters from the young depressive man, signed Your Nameless Friend and addressed to My Silent Confidant! Seen from a musical point of view, the overall form coincides very much with the organization of music from the same time. The overall tripartite form dominated (Rosen, 1988), and the balance between them was exactly as above. The first A had to be longer than the final A, and the middle became huge and dominating, throughout the nineteenth century. This tendency started with Beethoven, and his music was also dominated by presenting two contrasting themes in the first A, followed by reinforcing the conflict, then bringing reconciliation in the central B (developmental section). Even the coda was of huge dimensions, especially after Beethoven. In other words, this text of Kierkegaard is not only enjoyable because of its content, but probably even more so because of its eloquent composition in form. To mention music here is not an incident of digression. It is brought in for strategic purposes. The formal analysis of music is a consequence of the problems in translating its content into words. Despite the fact that it is almost impossible to say what a piece of music is about, we enjoy it anyway, not at least because of its form. We probably are in the same situation when it comes to Repetition. The text is too complex to see very clearly what it is about. Consequently, the many attempts to understand it really have many different directions. Some say it is a novel but also a meta-novel, in the sense that it is about literature as well (Dalton, 2001). Some would say it is about philosophy (Mooney, 2009), and others would say it is about existential-theological problems (Lindhardt, 2001). Not so many, but at least one (Tang, 2002), would say it is about experimental psychology. Yet the author of Repetition insists that this is exactly what it concerns. These almost contradictory perspectives and statements of what this book is about make it necessary to find common ground. The overall form is such a ground, and this ABA-coda form tells us that the book is organized in a rational and symmetric order, although with some dramatic effects provided by the enlarged B and coda sections. 4

22 Repetition (1843) So if we should dare to go into the content, we have to be cautious and take just one step at a time. The formal analysis will probably help us here. The first A section was divided into a tripartite a-b-a form, which was derived from the disposition of the content. Thus the first a was supposed to be a presentation of the main topic, namely the term repetition. Yet the author does not start with the term, but instead he presents the conflict between the Eleatics, who denied motion, on the one side, and Diogenes, who demonstrated the impossibility of this kind of statement, on the other (Kierkegaard, 2009a, p. 3). The humorous way of presenting this conflict, by referring to Diogenes s demonstrative and silent walk as the only argument against the statement of the Eleatics, makes the opening brilliant from several perspectives. The humorous form invites the reader to take part, the striking argument presented by Diogenes signals an obvious direction of the conclusion, but the declination of motion appears as mysterious and appears as an unsolved premise for the whole text. This conflict obviously has something to do with the core term: repetition. Yet this connection is astonishing in the sense that the declination of motion is something very Platonic, first of all because Plato repeats this Eleatic argument in his dialogue Parmenides, but also because the Platonic world of the ideas has almost nothing to do with our everyday life; whereas repetition, on the other hand, is very recognizable. Anyway, this conflict between stasis and movement forms a ground for the core term repetition, which is presented next. A: Introductory Considerations B: The Experiment A : Final Considerations Coda: Correspondences between Constantius and the Young Man What the Experiment Concerns Despite Diogenes s self-evident argument, the solution of the conflict between him and the Eleatics is not that easy to discover. Even the name of the author contradicts Diogenes. Constantin Constantius is unavoidably associated with constancy. And that is exactly what Kierkegaard s perspective on the term repetition contains. Although he admits there are changes in the world, his concern is rather focused on the opposite by saying to himself, You can go to Berlin, since you were there once before, you could in this way learn whether repetition was possible and what it meant (Kierkegaard, 2009a, p. 3). 5

23 Kierkegaard and the Rise of Modern Psychology In other words, repetition is a term that focuses on what is experienced as repeated. Thus this can be tested: if a repetition of an act is perceived as a repetition, then one can conclude that repetition exists. This is what the announced experiment concerns: namely, to see if a recollected memory can be repeated. It also sounds psychological in the sense that it is strongly related to perception and experience. Even predictability is something that Constantius adores and aims to prove. Accordingly, repetition s love is in truth the only happy love (p. 3), and this stands in opposition to the unrealized hope of love, which is strongly associated with anxiety because the outcome is so unpredictable. Constanin Constantius, therefore, has much more in common with the Eleatics than Diogenes. The young, nameless man presented in part b in the first A, however, is the opposite. He is a restless soul that has fallen in love with a young, attractive girl. He lowed with love (p. 7), says Constantius. He admits that he ordinarily [...] relates to other people merely as an observer (p. 5). Yet in this case it appears to be impossible to maintain that position. Thus he involves himself with this person and becomes almost a part of the tragedy that gradually unfolds. This young man cannot accept that love, even the most intense love, has to be related to recollection. His understanding of this makes him regard his own love as if it is just a memory. Like an old man, the young man cites a poem by the Danish author Poul Møller: There comes a dream from the spring of my youth To my old easy chair I feel a passionate longing for you My queen with the golden hair (Kierkegaard, 2009a, p. 7) To realize that love, already from the beginning, is just a memory drives him into a deep depression. Thus Constantius concludes that this man s refusal to accept love as a memory, and that it must be so, will end up with a terrible explosion (p. 8), which will ruin his love, himself, and the girl. As subject of the final a in part A, Constantius returns to the term repetition. Although he insists that the story about the young man is also related to the term, it is simply in a negative manner. In this final a part he tells the reader how relevant the term is for modern philosophy, and Hegelianism is mentioned, but several other philoso- 6

24 Repetition (1843) phers from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are also in his mind. He focuses on the term mediation, which in Hegelian philosophy refers to the synthesis of the thesis and the antithesis in a dialectical process. Repetition [Gjentagelse] is a good Danish word (p. 18), he says. By this he means that repetition is the phenomenon that unites multiplicity in the world. In other words, Constantius is, in many respects, an Eleatic himself, and he supposes that the term repetition would be the best argument against Diogenes. When Diogenes walked around, he also repeated his movements, whether he walked in circles or to and fro. Constantius wants to demonstrate that the Eleatics term recollection prevails in a modern form as the term repetition : Repetition and recollection are the same movement, just in opposite directions (p. 3). Without recollection or repetition all of life dissolves into an empty meaningless noise (p. 19). Chaos will take over if we cannot say that repetition exists, and metaphysics will vanish. So repetition is a necessary condition for our existence, he claims. With these reflections in mind, Constantius goes to Berlin. This forms the major B section of the book. Thus the experiment consists of repeating his previous journey. He finds his old lodgings, and his plan is to follow the same program as the last time he was there. The conclusion of the experiment, however, arrives very early. After having described his experiences in less than a page, his conclusion is very clear and definite: But no! Repetition was not possible here (p. 21). The landlord had changed by being married, and Constantius s impressions of the city were remarkably different. The season was not the same, and salient traits from the last time did not reappear, whereas important impressions this time appeared as totally new. This conclusion is so crystal clear that Constantius almost leaves the topic and talks about a lot of other subjects instead. He is especially interested in telling us about the farces in the Königstädter Theater. He elaborates on what he thinks about this so extensively that this dominates the whole discussion. In addition, there is a lot of sense in what is said, thus there are no problems in understanding why some would say this work is primarily about the farce as a literary genre (Dalton, 2001). Even this focus on the Königstädter Theater includes an aspect of repetition. He visits the theater several times during his stay in Berlin. Yet it was certainly not this aspect he was primarily looking for: After several days repetition of this, I became bitter, so tired of repetition 7

25 Kierkegaard and the Rise of Modern Psychology that I decided to return home (p. 38). What he experiences during this experiment, in other words, is that a repetition of an act is something different from the experience of the same act. He goes to the same theater day after day, but the experiences he has in the theater change profoundly. By realizing the impossibility of repetitions, he also changes his opinions about life, and by this he also changed his own perspective on the young man. Subsequently Constantius goes home to a monotonous and uniform order (p. 44). This return forms the final A section of the text. Then his young friend shows up again, not in person this time, but through letters. The girl now becomes the object of Constantius s observations. Her reactions to the young man s sudden disappearance are of certain interest to Constantius. He concludes that she acts acceptably by at first fearing something terrible has happened to the young man, but after a while her fear changes into pain. Hence the guilt for the couple s misery is, according to Constantius, to be solely addressed to the young man. Nevertheless, he has sympathy for the young man as well, especially because the young girl has not been deceived; rather she has become a victim of the young man s aims to live up to his own ideals. Yet there is another reason why Constantius sympathizes more and more with the young man. The young man s situation could possibly tell him more about the content of the term repetition. This is exactly the nature of the coda. It opens with a silent (but ends up with a clearly articulated) acceptance of the fact that the young man represents an alternative but probably more adequate understanding of the term repetition. In the first letter in the coda, the young man merely attacks Constantius by stating how provocative his attitude appears to him. He wants to escape from him, but he is unable to manage to forget him. Everything reminds him of everything in the past: My name is enough to remind me of everything (p. 56). He realizes that, in any case, recollection is a determining factor. Hence in his second letter he attacks his destiny and compares his situation with the biblical Job, who has lost everything he had: I need you, a man who knows how to complain loudly (p. 59). In the third letter, the young man reveals what he is complaining about, namely being a part of the world and of existing: How did I come to be involved in this great enterprise called actuality? [...] Am I not free to decide? (p. 60). This is the core aspect of the young man s situation: the conflict between his ideals that are universal and eternal on the one hand and, on the other, his existence in time, which makes all his experiences as some- 8

26 Repetition (1843) thing that just passes by and disappears. Simply by being born he has lost all his relationship with the absolute and universal. Hence in the fourth letter he repeats his admiration for Job, which is followed up in the fifth letter. Here he analyzes Job s existential situation by stating, The whole thing is a test [prøvelse] (p. 67). The young man goes deeper into the term test, which in Danish, like in English, has some connotations of the term experiment. Yet the relationship between the two terms is broken by a loose connotation. Test is, first of all, an occasion when human beings in the world meet Almighty God. That is its mythical formulation, which also introduces Job as the most typical example. Job is a man who had everything in this world but who lost it all. A philosophical translation of this situation is that Almighty God represents the universe and eternity, whereas Job s situation represents the particular and temporal. Here is in principle an unbridgeable gap that the human being has to deal with. On the one hand, humans have a conception of the universal, but on the other hand they are determined to live their lives in the temporal, with, naturally, limited particularity. Immanence and Transcendence There are two terms that have been mentioned in this respect: immanence and transcendence. These two terms have appeared in the text from the very beginning, where Constantius defines repetition in terms of immanence. Hence immanence stands for the generic aspects of life, which include stability and predictability. Transcendence, on the other hand, stands for the opposite: instability and unpredictability. The term test is solely related to the latter: This category test is [...] completely transcendent (p. 68). The fundamental question in this text is how to understand the term repetition in the perspective of immanence versus transcendence. The answer appears in the next letter from the young man, the sixth, dated January 13. After Job had gone through all his trials, he became restored: Job is again blessed and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before. That is what I call a repetition (p. 69). In other words, repetition for the human being has no connection with the appearance of the same, which is immanence. It is, in fact, the opposite. Repetition too includes changes and therefore is primarily connected with transcendence. This is what Constantius has to admit after having done the experiment. Just before he gives the word to the young man by presenting the young man s letters, he anticipates the young man s 9

27 Kierkegaard and the Rise of Modern Psychology main thesis: Repetition, on the other hand, is transcendence (p. 50). At this stage of his investigation, Constantius thinks that repetition is strongly connected with movement, and this is why he uses the term on the other hand. In this context he is discussing contemporary philosophy, which principally refers to Hegel. His point is that Hegelian philosophy pretends to take movement into account by apparently describing a process by the terms thesis, antithesis, and mediation. If, however, the world is so predictable that everything can be described through these terms, then they do not grasp the process in which our lives unfold, but only its stable parts. They do not include transcendence, simply immanence. So the young man is waiting for a remarkable change. This is what he calls a thunderstorm in the seventh letter, dated February 17. Yet this term is at the same time related to repetition: I wait for a thunderstorm and for a repetition (p. 70). Despite the fact that Constantius admits that repetition has to be something other than monotony and predictability, he considers the young man with indulgence. Hence there is a lengthy comment addressed to the reader, which is placed just before the eighth and final letter from the young man. Constantius feels sorry for the young girl, who must have experienced so much pain on account of the effectively theatrical behaviour of the young man. One thing is to have discovered something important, but another is to let other people suffer for it. The young man explains his character by the fact that he is a poet, and a poet is born to be a fool for girls (p. 72). In the final letter, he also regrets that the girl has suffered because of him. Yet what is mainly depicted in this letter is that the girl is married to another and that the young man has returned to a kind of departure point: I am back to my old self. This is repetition. (p. 74). It is possible to make a comparison with Job, but this is not ideal. Job experiences his trials and gets twice his worldly wealth back, whereas the turmoil the young man has gone through has nothing to do with wealth. It is spiritual, which also implies a stronger relationship to the other sides of the repetitive aspects of Job s trials. Neither Job nor the young man has to start from the beginning, but they both grow because of their experiences. The young man learns something valuable, and he will probably never start up a new affair with another young girl merely to confess that his considerations were right; rather, he expresses the opposite. He has overcome his depression, and he praises the situation: Long live the wave that slings me up again over the stars (p. 75). 10

28 Repetition (1843) The Universal and the Particular Once more Constantius finds it appropriate to address himself directly to the reader to finish off this section. He still treats the young man with indulgence, but he points out some important points the young man has made him aware of. First of all, the young man has served as an example of something. He has demonstrated how dramatic conflict really is. This conflict is not between people, like that between the girl and the young man, or even that between the young man and Constantius. The conflict is between the universal and the particular. Constantius is afraid that even the reader might ignore how crucial and central this conflict is in this book. The particular, however, is termed as the exception in this text, just to enforce the dramatic effect of this conflict. The reason is quite simple. What counts in a discussion is the general validity of a statement: the more general it is, the better. This allows Constantius to acknowledge that one tires of the interminable chatter about the universal and the universal, which is repeated until it becomes boring and vapid (p. 78). The young man has taught him that there are exceptions. Thus the challenge is not to explain the universal but the exceptions. If one cannot explain [the exceptions], then neither can one explain the universal (p. 78). His point is to underline that the universal is just as big a mystery and astonishing phenomenon as is the exception, in this case represented by the young man. One generally fails to notice this, because one does not normally grasp the universal passionately, only superficially. The exception, on the other hand, grasps the universal with intense passion (p. 78). This formulation is primarily dialectical and, in that sense, also slightly ambiguous. Yet the point is just to underline how dramatic the situation is for the human being, who is drawn between knowledge of the universal on the one hand and situated in particularity on the other. This is not only the destiny for the poet but for human beings in general. So what has all of this to do with psychology? There are certainly no easy answers to this question. Nevertheless, there are some clues that request to be pursued. First of all, one must say that we have been presented with a profound psychological drama in the sense that the young man goes through considerable conflicts in his life. Yet the drama that he experiences probably does not have an immediate appeal to a person of today. It is hard to grasp the ideals he is following and even 11

29 Kierkegaard and the Rise of Modern Psychology harder to understand why these ideals oblige him to break up with the girl. Some premises for understanding this drama are obviously missing, so it would probably be more advantageous to start in another corner. This could possibly be the experimental aspect of the story. Indeed, Constantius presents a hypothesis he wants to test: Repetition exists. This hypothesis is operationalized in terms of certain initial conditions: by repeating a certain act, the act will also be experienced as a repetition, and it is tested out by repeating a journey to Berlin. The hypothesis is even falsified, and it could therefore be called H 0. The initial condition implies that this is a psychological experiment in the sense that focus is not on the physical aspects of the repetition but on the experience of it and self-reported narratives in the text present the data. Nevertheless, even this perspective seems to be leading to a dead end. First of all, it seems to conclude with certain self-contradictory aspects. Setting up hypotheses normally implies an understanding of the world that presupposes its predictability, whereas the conclusions in this short work point directly to an opposite conclusion that the world is not predictable. This is probably telling us a lot about the aim of this book. The whole story presents a critique against the position Constantius introduces at the beginning. He suggests that the world is predictable and that this fact is reflected in the term repetition. Thus to call this work an essay in experimental psychology (as Kierkegaard does in its title) sounds reasonable in the sense that events in the world have to be predictable when experimental research is to be carried out. Tang emphasizes the fact that not only in this book, but also in Northern Europe in the first part of the nineteenth century, the concept of repetition goes hand in hand with that of experiment (Tang, 2002, p. 95). He is also referring to Johann Georg Sulzer ( ), who in his book that pretends to be an introduction to all kind of sciences (Sulzer, 1786) defines empirical psychology as the psychology of experimental physics ( Psychologie die Experimental-Physik ) (Tang, 2002, p. 95). This implies that psychology as a science was regarded as being highly related to physics and the natural sciences. In nature there are some events that certainly repeat themselves in a very predictable way, such as the transition from day to night, the lunar cycles, and the year s seasons, for example. In this sense, Constantius s argument seems to have support from our daily experiences. Thus focusing on the term repetition indicates some of the core issues in the text. But the universal aspects of the physical nature are one thing; our experiences of them, on the other 12

30 Repetition (1843) hand, are something quite different. Thus one thing that Kierkegaard certainly wants to inform us of in this text is that psychology is about our immediate experiences of the world. There is, however, another feature that also has to be taken into account, and that is precisely about the world out there, which may stand in direct opposition to how it is experienced. What Kierkegaard is focusing on in this text is the protagonist s expectations of what aspects the term repetition may imply. Two of these are certainly stability and predictability. In other words, the drama Constantius goes through by means of his journey to Berlin and his dialogue with the young man is firstly that there are two aspects of the term that are contradictory and do not succumb to any kind of reconciliation. On the one hand is the idea of the universal and stable aspects, and on the other, the immediate experience of events that occur in the world. According to this text, psychology can tell us something about the latter, whereas the former aspect seems to go well beyond the field of psychology. Thus the text explicitly focuses on the experiences undergone by both Constantius and the young man, and it highlights their own experiences of the term repetition. To what extent psychology can tell us something about universals is partly an open question; however, the story tend to argue strongly for the fact that it cannot. 13

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