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Structure of the Self
For Kierkegaard, though we must make our selves, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. His understanding of self fits well with the ethos of Aristotelian metaphysics, where what a thing isis defined by what it is meant to be. I shall argue, therefore, that the proper perspective for understanding the metaphysics of Kierkegaard's notion of the self is that of teleology.
There is generally a lack of appreciation of how traditional Kierkegaard's seemingly iconoclastic theory of the self is. In this chapter, we will see that he does in fact retain a metaphysical conception of the self.
Below, I consider Kierkegaard's definition of selfhood, and what goads us to develop despair. Then I explore his notion of despair, specifically why he thinks it to be necessary for human development.
Despair
Anti-Climacus, the pseudonym used to write Sickness unto Death, provides valuable insight in what the self was for Kierkegaard. Anti-Climacus says, "A self is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self."1 Anti-Climacus also remarks, "The self is not a relation but the relation's relating to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity."2 According to Kierkegaard, the self is a synthesis, such that we cannot have the conception of infinitude without the finite, of freedom without necessity, of the eternal without the temporal. For him, each item is metaphysically related to its opposite. There is also the further relation that relates to itself. "This relation is the positive third, and this is the self."3
For Kierkegaard, the self is reflection. Anti-Climacus says that imagination also is reflection. It is by imagining that we in fact represent ourselves to ourselves. We do not simply look in a mirror and say, "yes, there I am." We have a certain conception of ourselves as lazy, courageous, worthless, independent, and so on. The self represents itself as possibility. Anti-Climacus says, "The imagination is the whole of reflection's possibility; and the intensity of this medium is the possibility of the self's intensity."4 If we are to admit that we imagine ourselves in a particular way, it is clear that part of this imagining is that of thinking of what we can be. Thus we have people who always knewthey were going to be doctors, lawyers, musicians, or amount to nothing.
