i think. i am thinking. i am having an idea. i have had an idea. “i have an idea,” i declare to the world, and as it was in me, so i am now in the world among it.
whenever we have an idea, we first consider it to be complete because of its very ability to be identified: it’s a thing which exists, it’s a thing which is finished, and therefore it’s a thing which is other than myself, which is not finished. in a narrative sense, we position ourselves after it—the self which has identified the idea as other than itself is a self which already contains it within itself. but how did it get there?
whenever we say, “i have an idea,” what we’re really saying is that the idea has ended, and therefore that i persist. we say that we understand ourselves as being in a relation with ideas. but being oriented towards existence in this way means that the idea is that to which the self is immediately related, that towards which it is immediately oriented, and that through which it is immediately understood. it means that we can’t exist without also understanding ourselves as a story—the story of the unfolding of the ideal, which we present to ourselves as snapshots in ideas.
but it also means that whenever we think, speak, or act, whenever we dream, whenever we live, we’re always doing so in terms of something else—we’re always doing so in terms of the idea. we’d probably already be at the ideal’s doorstep if only all these ideas would get off our back. experience becomes experience of ourselves—as though we were observing ourselves captured in an image—from the lofty, all-seeing vantage point of the ideal. in this mode of consciousness, we understand ourselves only aesthetically.
søren kierkegaard, in his 1843 work “repetition”, seems to suggest that the very ability of the ideal to be thought as an idea is also the reason why it can be so easily deconstructed. understood as a completed idea, the ideal is a set of ideas which have been constituted with the ideal as their basis—it’s an idea about nothing but its own content. to the extent that the ideal is so bankrupt of context, it’s also bankrupt of applicability—the idea that ideas are things we have is so concrete that it becomes abstract.
what it does invariably seem to mean is that, in understanding ourselves as ideas qualified by the ideal, we become a completed story. in the grand scheme of things, we’re already dead. yet we’re painfully aware that we need to keep a clean nose, need to work, need, above all, to move. if we can, we’d like to enjoy some of that while we’re doing it. we’re required to re-evaluate how we’re oriented toward the world; we need fresh eyes, a new way of looking at things.
where do we start? all we can say for certain is that there’s actuality. there’s stuff.
stuff is different than the form which contains the content, or the idea which is contained in the material. in reality, separating one from the other is impossible. it’s just stuff. when we have the concrete experience of love, for example, we have it concurrently with the idea of love by which we identify it and to which we compare it. it’s an idea we’ve received from books, from movies, even from our own experiences as we represent them to ourselves. what happened last time? the scene rolls back, we let the feelings wash over us, we bask in the poignant, in the radiant, in the truth, the warmth, the frigidity. we’ve identified the idea with the experience.
the idea of love tells us what love is, what love does, how it feels. by allowing the experience of love to draw its life from the idea, we allow it to draw its life from itself. we’ve constituted it on itself as its own standard, as completed. we’ve ended love, this love, which once made us so happy, this love which has now grown old, which has long outlived its purpose, which we mourn like the passing of a dear and lifelong friend.
repetition, kierkegaard suggests, restores our ability to experience the world, rather than to experience ourselves in it as though in portraits. it begins with actuality, which already contains the experiencing subject within it. to repeat is to posit that which is repeated, but also to mark it as something new in the repetition. actuality both is and has been, actuality is both idea and material, actuality is both today and tomorrow—the distinction becomes resolved in the generative process of repetition. the subject both maintains the embrace of aesthetic beauty and answers the demands of ethical commitment; their love never grows old.
in this way, repetition is akin to ancient greek recollection, which claims that all knowledge is a kind of remembering. in recollection, there’s order, and there’s the absence of order—what is has been lost. recollection is the process which resolves the tension between them. moving backwards restoratively, it moves in the opposite direction of repetition. repetition is its own genesis, repetition creates. repetition is busy gaining the whole world; recollection has already lost it.