Can a Human Being Move?

Kierkegaard, Caputo, and Repetition

I have met outreach social workers who have worked with the same people for twenty years. People who live with substance use, who spend their lives on the street, and who return year after year to the same places.

An obvious question arises: Have they really changed?

After twenty years, some are still using drugs. They are still on the street. They may have been through treatment programmes, institutions, prison, housing arrangements that did not last, failed attempts and new attempts. Seen from the outside, life may resemble a circle. The same thing repeats itself.

I have asked social workers who know this life far better than I do: Can these people move?

Their answer has been simple:

Yes. They move every day.

They walk.

They move through the streets, between meeting places and people. Movement is not necessarily a transition from substance use to abstinence, or from the street to another kind of life. It has a value of its own. As these social workers describe it, the street can be what keeps a person moving and therefore alive.

As the social workers put it: Without the street, some of them may die.

This makes the question of movement more difficult than it first appears.

What Does It Mean to Move?

We usually associate movement with getting from one place to another. The same is true when we speak about human change. A person moves when they leave something behind and move forward.

This idea is also deeply embedded in the language of the helping professions. From substance use to abstinence. From homelessness to housing. From unemployment to work. From exclusion to participation.

These are good aims. A person who wants help to leave a destructive life of substance use should, of course, receive that help. To speak of the intrinsic value of movement must never become a romanticisation of suffering, poverty, or addiction.

And yet the question remains:

Is this the only form of movement?

Søren Kierkegaard posed the question at a much more fundamental level. In Repetition, he asks whether repetition is possible at all. He distinguishes repetition from recollection. Recollection turns backwards towards what has been. Repetition moves forwards.

What is to be repeated has already been. But when it is repeated, it happens again.

And so the paradox arises:

It is the same – and yet not the same.

The Same Street Corner

A man walks down the same street he walked yesterday. Perhaps he stops at the same street corner. He meets the same social worker he has known for many years.

From the outside, we may say:

Nothing is happening here.

But yesterday is not being mechanically reproduced.

The man is one day older. The social worker is one day older. Something has happened since they last met. Perhaps almost nothing. Perhaps something decisive. Neither of them necessarily knows yet.

And this meeting has never taken place before.

Repetition is therefore not merely the reproduction of what has already been. It also contains the possibility of something new.

This is what makes Kierkegaard's concept so difficult – and so alive.

In earlier reflections on repetition, I have been concerned with movement as something forward-directed, something that lasts throughout life. We do not become finished human beings who then merely repeat what we already are. We become through living.

John D. Caputo makes this connection between repetition and movement the starting point of his Radical Hermeneutics. He uses the Greek word kinesis: movement.

The question is not simply whether bodies can move through space. The question is whether the existing human being can truly move – whether there is a kinesis that cannot be measured by distance travelled, but only by the fact that a human being continues, day after day, to make themselves available to a new moment.

The Moment

But if repetition simply means that life continues, we are not saying very much. Each morning follows the one before, like beads on a string – and that is not what Kierkegaard is after.

Kierkegaard has another concept that makes repetition more demanding: the moment.

The moment is not merely a point on the clock. It is the place where what has been meets what may become. This is where the human being stands.

Now.

It is also here that the paradox from the previous section becomes intelligible without being abolished. What is repeated is the same – because the history really is the same history, the same street corner, the same face. And yet it is not the same, because no repetition takes place anywhere other than in the moment, and this moment has never existed before.

Without the moment, repetition would collapse into mere recollection: an attempt to retrieve something already completed. With the moment, repetition instead becomes an opening. It is here that it is decided, once again, whether something may become.

Two people can therefore meet a thousand times without the thousandth meeting being merely a copy of the previous 999.

This has practical significance.

The social worker who has known a person for twenty years possesses enormous experience. She knows the history, the relapses, the conflicts, the attempts, and the defeats.

But this very knowledge also carries a danger.

She may begin to think:

I know him. I know who he is.

Then the experience that was supposed to help her understand may begin to obstruct understanding.

For whom does she meet?

The man she has known for twenty years?

Or the man standing before her right now?

Perhaps the answer must be: both.

History cannot be erased. But neither can the moment be reduced to history.

The Street Finds Them

It was during conversations about the experiences of these social workers that a phrase occurred to me:

The street finds them.

It is easy to say that people find the street. For many and very different reasons, people end up there and make it part of their lives.

But after many years, perhaps the relationship can also be described in the opposite direction.

The street has found them.

I recognise something in this reversal, although the experiences must in no way be equated. Many years ago, I walked the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. I thought I had found a road that I was going to walk. Only later did I understand it differently:

It was the road that had found me.

Here I must stop at a difference that is not merely important, but on which the comparison itself depends.

I chose to walk. I could have gone home at any time.

None of the people described by the social workers were equally free simply to choose to leave the street behind – some of them may hardly be able to choose at all. If I allow the analogy to stand unqualified, I risk turning a form of constraint into a form of pilgrimage, and that would be an injustice to those concerned.

The similarity I am looking for therefore lies not in the situations themselves, but in the structure of what happens to a human being over time, however freely or unfreely that person came to be there: through repeated movement through a place, that place may cease to be something one merely moves through and become something that moves with you.

This is probably true of any place to which a human being returns for long enough – whether chosen or not, whether it carries freedom or hardship within it.

We walk on the road.

Eventually, the road walks with us.

The Street Finds the Helpers Too

But the thought does not stop there.

For the street also finds the social worker.

A person who works on the street for twenty years cannot simply remain outside and regard the others as the only ones who are supposed to change.

The helper, too, repeats her movements.

She goes out again.

Meets again.

Listens again.

Is rejected again.

Tries again.

Sometimes something succeeds. Sometimes it does not.

And slowly, the street may also change her understanding of what help is, what a good life is, what change means, and perhaps what a human being is.

This does not mean that the distinction between the helper and the person receiving help disappears. Their roles are different, and power and responsibility are unequally distributed.

But both are within the movement.

Neither stands outside it.

When Hermeneutics Becomes Radical

This is where Caputo's radical hermeneutics enters.

Hermeneutics concerns interpretation and understanding. But it becomes radical when we relinquish the idea that we can eventually find a secure place outside life from which its entire meaning can be determined – a place outside kinesis itself, where movement has stopped and interpretation can be laid to rest.

Life does not submit so easily to being concluded in an interpretation.

Nor does another human being.

After twenty years, the social worker may know a great deal about the man she meets. But she can never legitimately place the final full stop after who he is.

For the man is still alive.

And as long as he lives, he moves.

Therefore understanding, too, must move.

This does not mean that every interpretation is equally good. Radical hermeneutics need not imply that everything is fluid and nothing can be said. We can know a great deal. We can learn from experience. We can make professional judgements and act upon them.

But we must remain capable of interpreting again.

Perhaps this is precisely what repetition teaches the helper.

Meet him again.

Not as though you had never met before.

But neither as though the meeting had already taken place.