will teach that all of life is a repetition." Kierkegaard As A Religious Philosopher, by Lev Shestov, 1938 Kierkegaard wrote, What kind of power is it that wants to deprive me of my honor and my pride and do it in such a meaningless way! Am I inevitably guilty, a deceiver, whatever I do, even if I do nothing? Or have I perhaps gone mad? Then the best thing to do would be to lock me up, for people cravenly fear particularly the utterances of the insane and the dying. What does it mean: mad? What must I do to enjoy civic esteem, to be regarded as sensible? Why does no one answer? I offer a reasonable reward to anyone who invents a new world! I have set forth the alternatives. Is there anyone so clever that he knows more than two? But if he does not know more, then it certainly is nonsense that I am mad, unfaithful, and a deceiver, while the girl is faithful and reasonable and esteemed by the people. Repetition p. 202 He is always asking himself questions just as Johann Gottlieb Fichte had done in his 1800 book, The Destination of Man, also called The Vocation of Man where he wrote against the easy answer for every question by vain repetitions.The book is therefore not intended for philosophers by profession, who will find in it nothing that may not be found in other writings of the same author. It is intended to be intelligible to all readers who are able really to understand a book at all. Those who have accustomed themselves merely to the repetition of certain sets of phrases in varied order, and who mistake this operation of memory for that of the understanding, will probably find it unintelligible. It ought to exercise on the reader an attractive and animating power, raising him from the sensuous world, to that which is above sense. The author at least has not performed his task without some of this happy inspiration. Kierkegaard was influential in Martin Buber's 'I and Thou' philosophy and Martin Heidegger's development of the "new philosophical category" Dasein. Alicia Borinsky of Boston University took up Kierkegaard's Repetition in her 1981-1982 article On Translation and the Art of Repetition. The two characters talk so they can silence (translate) each other. Kierkegaard imagines still another exchange in his essay, the one between a reader