***** [...With regard to this category one may compare _Repetition_ by Constantine Constantius (Copenhagen 1843). This book is in fact a whimsical book, as its author meant it to be, but nevertheless it is so far as I know the first which has energetically conceived repetition and let it be glimpsed in its pregnance to explain the relation between the ethical and the Christian, by indicating the invisible summit and the _discrimen rerum_ where science breaks against science until the new science comes forth. But what he has discovered he has hidden again by arraying the concept in the form of jest which aptly offers itself as a mode of presentation. What has moved him to do this it is difficult to say, or rather it is difficult to understand; for he says himself that he writes this "so that the heretics might not be able to understand him." As he has only wished to employ himself with this subject aesthetically and psychologically, he might have planned it all humoristically, and the effect would have been produced by the fact that the word at one moment signifies everything, and the next moment the most insignificant thing, and the transition, or rather the perpetual falling from the stars, is justified as a burlesque contrast. However, he stated the whole thing pretty clearly on page 34: "Repetition is the _interest_ of metaphysics and at the same time the interest upon which metaphysics founders," etc. This sentence contains an allusion to the thesis that metaphysics is disinterested, as Kant affirmed of ethics. As soon as the interest emerges, metaphysics steps to one side. For this reason the word is italicised. The whole interest of subjectivity emerges in real life, and then metaphysics founders. In case metaphysics is not posited, ethics remains a binding power; presumably it is for this reason he says that "it is a solution of every ethical apprehension." If repetition is not posited, dogmatics cannot exist at all; for in faith repetition begins, and faith is the organ for the dogmatic problems. In the sphere of nature repetition exists in its immovable necessity. In the sphere of spirit the problem is not to get change out of repetition and find oneself comfortable under it, as though the spirit stood only in an external relation to the repetitions of the spirit (in consequence of which good and evil alternate like summer and winter), but the problem is to transform repetition into something inward, into the proper task of freedom, into freedom's highest interest, as to whether, while everything changes, it can actually realise repetition. Here the finite spirit falls into despair. This Constantine has indicated by stepping aside and letting repetition break forth in the young man by virtue of the religious. Therefore Constantine says several times that repetition is a religious category, too transcendent for him, that it is a movement by virtue of the absurd, and on page 42 it is said that eternity is the true repetition. All this Professor Heiberg has failed to observe, but he has very kindly wished by his knowledge (which like his New Year's gift-book is singularly elegant and up-to-date) to help this work to become a tasteful and elegant insignificance, by pompously bringing the question back to the point where (to recall a recent book) the aesthetic writer in _Either/Or_ had brought it in "The Rotation of Crops." If Constantine were really to feel himself flattered by enjoying in this instance the rare honour which brings him into an undeniably elect company -- then to my way of thinking, since it was he who wrote the book, he must have become stark mad. But if on the other hand an author like him, who writes in order to be misunderstood, were so far to forget himself and had not ataraxia enough to account it to his credit that Professor Heiberg had not understood him -- then again he must be stark mad. And this I have no need to fear, for the circumstance that hitherto he has not replied to Professor Heiberg indicates that he has adequately understood himself.]
(Søren Kierkegaard _The Concept of Dread_ [1844], <http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/dk/kierkega.htm>) *****
-- Yoshie
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