Kierkegaard on the Self

Greetings,

Well, it's time to talk about Kierkegaard's ontology of the self. What is a person? What is the reference of the word "I"? Once again, we are going to be referencing The Sickness Unto Death. Let's actually start with the first line in Part One.

"A human being is spirit" (XI 127). So far, so good: If [Human] Then [Spirit]. "But what is spirit? Spirit is the self". Sounds like begging the question, eh? What is the "self"?

"The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or it is the relation's relating itself to itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself" (ibid).

Sounds a little more convoluted; let's see if we can make some sense of that. So, in a human, there is a relation. I'll talk in a minute about what the relation itself is, but, for now, just remember that there exists a relation X. If that relation is capable of self-awareness or apperception, and actually does so, it has a spirit and a self. Thus, the following conditions are necessary (and are probably, although not necessarily, sufficient) for having a "self":

1. They must possess relationship X (which, once again, will be defined below).
2. They must actively apperceive X.

Kant's account of pure apperception is likely what Kierkegaard had in mind, here. Consider, for the sake of simplicity, apperception to be self-knowledge. If ([Zach possesses relationship X] AND [Zach apperceives X]), Then [Zach has a self/spirit].

What is relationship X? The relationship is a "synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity" (ibid). Consider my discussion of freedom (possibility) and necessity from my last post on Kierkegaard. Mere animals do not possess the synthesis of any of those; they exist through pure necessity, finitude, and temporal elements. They lack the necessary relationship to be spirit. Even if they apperceive themselves, they are entities with minds-- which perhaps ought to be respected-- but are not actually selves/spirits, in the technical sense.

There's all sorts of places that the discussion could go from here, but I wanted to start out with a small step. That only touched on the first five-ish sentences of the work, but it's not a bad thing, necessarily, to isolate a fundamental argument and work from there. Hopefully, my post on necessity/possibility will help to dispel fears of question-begging about the nature of the relationship; the other two forms, eternal/temporal and infinite/finite, are also dealt with and, depending on what people are interested in, I'd be glad to post about whatever there's a desire for.

Why We Shouldn't Give Christmas Gifts

Here's a very interesting interview with the author of Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays.

There are several good points of discussion for you to think about this Christmas season. While you hurry around the winter wonderland with all the hustle and bustle of buying bountiful gifts, roasting chestnuts on an open fire, dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh, and giving all the necessary tidings of comfort and joy, consider how you're buying the love and good favor of others to stave off your need of companionship and affirmation as a good (or somewhat decent) friend or family member...
Or maybe not!

~ Merry Christmas

Kierkegaard on Necessity, Possibility, and Despair

In The Sickness Unto Death, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard argued at length about despair, the self, and "sin". He argues that humans have "the task of becoming itself in freedom," and both "possibility and necessity are equally essential to becoming" (XI 148). If a person has one but not the other, that individual is in despair. What is meant by these words, and how do they relate?

The necessity of the self refers to what the self already is; the possibility of the self refers to the task one has of becoming oneself. Necessity serves as "the constraint in relation to possibility" (ibid). So, one ought to become oneself(possibility), but one ought not disregard who they already are (necessity). For now, I'm not going to talk about what "the self" actually is; rather, let's talk about what happens if one has an overabundance of possibility or necessity in one's life.

If humans were radically free (as the existentialists, a group I would probably choose not to associate Kierkegaard too closely with), and humans were all possibility with no necessity, "the self becomes an abstract possibility; it flounders in possibility until exhausted but neither moves from the place where it is nor arrives anywhere" (XI 149). This results in possibility seeming "greater and greater to the self; more and more it becomes possible because nothing seems actual. Eventually everything seems possible, but this is exactly the point at which the abyss swallows up the self". After awhile, possibilities "follow one another in such rapid succession that it seems as if everything were possible, and this is exactly the final moment, the point at which the individual himself becomes a mirage" (ibid).

What is missing in a life lived in pure possibility, without necessity or actuality playing a vital role? It is "the power to obey, to submit to the necessity in one's life, to what may be called one's limitations. Therefore, the tragedy is not that such a self did not amount to something in the world; no, the tragedy is that he did not become aware of himself, aware that the self he is is a very definite something and thus the necessary" (ibid). Through this, one loses oneself. There are multiple manifestations of this sort of imbalance, but Kierkegaard identifies the two primary ones as desiring/craving and the melancholy-imaginary. The former involves one chasing possibilities at the expense of who he is, of his necessity. The latter involves one anxiously pursuing a single possibility at a time until he has been led so far away from himself that his is a victim of the anxiety he employed.

The second possibility, that necessity belongs to the self but possibility no longer does, has two possible instantiations: "everything has become necessary" or "everything has become trivial" (XI 152). The former option is held by determinists and fatalists, who Kierkegaard compares with King Midas: he "starved to death because all his food was changed to gold" (ibid). He argues that, "if there is nothing but necessity, man is essentially as inarticulate as the animals" (XI 153). One cannot input or shape themselves, one is as one is, and thus one despairs.

If one has an overabundance of necessity in accordance with the second option, wherein "everything becomes trivial", then one has a "philistine-bourgeois mentality" (ibid). Such a person "lacks every qualification of spirit and is completely wrapped up in probability, within which possibility [which cannot be altogether exterminated] finds its small corner" (ibid). He or she "lives within a certain trivial compendium of experiences as to how things go, what is possible, what usually happens" (ibid). If imagination does not "raise him higher than the miasma of probability", giving him hope and fear, "the philistine-bourgeois mentality thinks that it controls possibility, that it has tricked this prodigious elasticity into the trap or madhouse of probability" (XI 154).

Kierkegaard notes the consequences of each element of the imbalance: "the person who gets lost in possibility soars high with the boldness of despair; he for whom everything becomes necessity overstrains himself in life and is crushed in despair; but the philistine-bourgeois mentality spiritlessly triumphs".

The conclusion? Embrace necessity; you are who you are. You have limits. Know what makes you yourself, and know yourself fully. However, know also who you are (this implies a goal or end for your person), and acknowledge, through hope, faith, and fear, that you can become as you ought to become.