Kierkegaard: The Self and Ethical Existence

Author(s): George J. Stack

Source: Ethics, Vol. 83, No. 2 (Jan., 1973), pp. 108-125
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Kierkegaard:The Self and
EthicalExistence
GeorgeJ. Stack
StateUniversityof New York,Brockport

The ethical question, "What ought I to do>" is inevitably related to a

more fundamental question. That is, "What can I do>" This question, in
turn, leads to an inquiry concerning the nature of the self. For all ethical
theories presuppose a knowledge of the self. Indeed, how a moral phi-
losopher conceives of the self is a significant determinant in the structure
of his ethical theory. In his journals Kierkegaard said that what was needed
was a philosophical anthropology which would describe the essential
characteristics of human existence. To some extent, he did try to provide
an informal analysis of the various modes of being open to man and to
raise what he called the "primitive" questions about the "universally
human." He believed that he could describe the fundamental features of
human existence while being faithful to the dialectical, paradoxical nature
of that existence.
For Kierkegaard, it was Socrates who first related the problem of the
ethical (ethisk) to the problem of the self, and who held that ethical self-
knowledge was the most important kind of knowledge that an individual
could acquire. He did not believe that Socrates, in a strict sense, taught
anything. Rather, Socrates showed what his ethical commitment was in
his actual existence. Kierkegaard follows Socrates when he says that self-
knowledge is the kind of knowledge which is required in order to become
an ethical being. The ignorance which causes vice and immorality is not
ignorance of moral principles or laws, but an ignorance of one's own self.
Socratic virtue cannot be taught because it is not a doctrine or a subject
matter, but it is "a being-able, an exercising, an existing, an existential
transformation."' Kierkegaard reiterated Socrates's view that one cannot
know what one can do (from a moral point of view) unless one has some
implicit knowledge of himself. To act in ignorance of the self is to open
oneself to injustice and immorality. For Socrates, the kind of ignorance
1. E. Hong and H. Hong, trans. and eds., Soren Kierkegaard's Journals and
Papers (Bloomington, Ind., & London, 1967), 1:463.
108
 109 Kierkegaard: The Self and Ethical Existence

which is blameworthy is not, as Aristotle was to say, "ignorance of the

circumstances of an act and of the things affected by it," but an ignorance
of the self. To yield to the irrational aspects of the self is precisely the
way to lose rational self-control, to lose the possibility of becoming an
integrated self. Ordinarily, men tend to avoid self-knowledge because, as
Kierkegaard puts it, "There is nothing of which every man is so afraid of
as getting to know how enormously much he is capable" of doing and
becoming.2 The question of what we are capable of being (from a moral
point of view) is one which we cannot put off indefinitely since we are
carried forward by the momentum of life toward ineluctable death. One
can refuse to seek self-knowledge, can live an "unexamined life," or can
fall into moral indifference. But the life of such a being is not the life of
a person nor of an authentically existing individual.
The search for self-knowledge is already a movement toward the
ethical possibility. For, once one raises the question of one's ethical possi-
bilities in terms of a reflective self-concern, one can no longer doubt
whether one can lead a moral life. Joseph Butler once wrote (in one of
his Sermons) that a man can doubt everything else, but he cannot doubt
his obligation to the practice of virtue. Kierkegaard, too, remarks that
when it is a question of the ethical either/or one can no longer doubt
whether a moral life is possible. One cannot doubt the possibility of an
authentic existence, even though one can attempt to flee from this possi-
bility. Typically, the immoralist is one who lacks self-understanding, who
flees from himself, who obscures his responsibility for his actions, who is
impulsive and irrational, who, in his most lucid moments, hates what he is
and thereby attests to the faint presence, even in himself, of the ethical
possibility. Not to take up responsibility for oneself is to lose the possi-
bility of being a self. The self is consolidated in and through resolute
choice and a repeated attempt to achieve as much consistency in one's life
as is possible to gain a history. By coming to know the actual self as far as
this is possible, one accepts responsibility for what one has been; and one
is now capable of deliberate choice. Choice integrates the various aspects
of the self, unifies and consolidates the diverse, often contradictory, ten-
dencies of the "potential" self. The important thing in moral develop-
ment is not consistency of thought, but consistency of attitude. Accepting
the actual self with all its imperfections and developing a habit of self-
reflective consciousness, together with a persistent recollection of a sub-
jectively posited ethical telos, are some of the means by which one may
clarify self-knowledge and thereby inhibit tendencies toward immorality.
In order to become the self I ought to be, I must first understand and
accept the self I have been. This is what Kierkegaard means by the admo-
nition (which is often misunderstood or dismissed as mere rhetoric):
choose oneself.
2. Ibid., p. 440.
 110 Ethics

An inauthentic existence is one which is not one's own; it is a mode

of being in which an individual experiences alienation from himself, en-
dures a dispersion of the self which makes resolute choice difficult. The
discontinuity of one's life (not in an external sense in which there may be
a discontinuity of various forms of action) as it is lived from within tends
to lead to the loss of the self. To choose oneself means to choose oneself
as responsible for what one has been and to take up responsibility for one's
life. This act may be described as the negation of the negation of the
necessity which had determined one's life. One may yield passively to
causal factors which have influenced one's moral development and re-
nounce responsibility for what one is, or one can take up his being as his
own responsibility. Not to choose or, in Freudian terminology, to allow
the unconscious aspects of the self to "choose" for one, may lead to the
loss of freedom or the loss of a freedom for possibility. The self is, as it
were, a "product" of inherited dispositions or traits (physical and psy-
chic) and our own choices, decisions, and actions. Our finite freedom is
realized in and through choice. But first of all, we must accept those
characteristics which have been acquired independent of our choices. Our
''natural" characteristics are those which "befall" us or what "happens"
to an individual in the course of his nonintentional life. What is "natural"
in man are his primitive dispositions. Thus, by nature, men have a ten-
dency to pursue pleasure and shun suffering, to avoid self-conscious, criti-
cal reflection, to tend toward a mode of being dominated by instinctive
unselfconsciousness. As in Hegel's thought, the realm of nature is opposed
to the realm of spirit or freedom. The freedom of man is, in a sense, an
anomaly in nature, a signification of man's limited transcendence of na-
ture. Man is free in the most elementary sense insofar as he can transform
his natural being or his natural inclinations in such a way as to give history
and continuity to his existence. Man does, indeed, emerge out of natural
processes, and he is dependent upon a natural world for his being; but,
for the most part, he does not live immersed in nature insofar as he lives
in the spiritual realm of possibility, choice, and responsibility.
To be sure, the more primitive the conditions of existence the more
is man immured in nature. In this regard, it is interesting to note that, for
the most part, there appears to be no concept of an individuated self in
primitive societies. The question of the nature of the self becomes promi-
nent when a nation or a people has attained some independence from its
natural environment. The most important aspects of individual life (apart
from the intrusion of natural catastrophies or the presence of natural
evils) in civilized existence are those pertaining to social relations, con-
ceptualization, and the use of language. The world which develops out of
these relations and activities is no longer a purely natural world. If one
insists upon describing such a realm as a "part of nature" it is surely, as
the early Marx had said, a humanized nature, a "nature" transformed by
 111 Kierkegaard: The Self and Ethical Existence

human praxis, a "nature" constituted by human needs and by an onto-

logical schema.
The necessity which dominates a man's being is overcome by resolute
choice, by choosing to be responsible (within a limited sphere of action)
for one's life. A being who possesses the freedom to choose or not to
choose is a being who has possibilities. Perhaps only a deliberating, self-
reflective being such as man can have possibilities. For, by virtue of con-
ceptualization man can think what is not yet, and by virtue of imagination
he can imagine what is not. Possibilities are not given as such, but are
posited. However, the nisus toward the actualization of a possibility does
not emerge from reasoning or imagination. What is required is a subjec-
tive conatus, a volitional projection towards a possibility. If one does not
voluntarily choose to realize a possibility, it remains merely a hypotheti-
cal or imagined possibility. Not to choose ourselves is not, of course, a
choice, but it is a passive yielding of our life to a necessity which makes
personal self-existence impossible. For one who forgets that his life is
carried forward by a "momentum," "there comes at last an instant when
there is no longer . . . any question of an either/or, not because he has
chosen but because he has neglected to choose, which is equivalent to
saying, because others have chosen for him, because he has lost his self."3
When a choice is postponed, the individual may become subject to un-
conscious influences when he finally does bring himself to choose. For
Kierkegaard, there is a right time to choose, a decisive moment when a
choice will be most effective. Not to choose decisively to realize a possi-
bility is to run the risk of not regaining that possibility again. In retro-
spect it does seem that there have been moments when one was confronted
by choices which, if postponed, are never again encountered in quite the
same way. A change in one's life-situation or in one's pattern of behavior
may make an original possibility of choice far more difficult to realize
now. Insofar as an individual allows his society, his family, his peers, or
his own unconscious drives to "choose" for him, he has not chosen at all
and eventually his own behavior may appear alien to him. One of the most
primitive forms of self-alienation is manifested when an individual does
what "they" (significant others, dominant or influential others) want him
to do, even though it is something which he consciously does not want
to do.
The assertiveness of choice "at the right time" and after sufficient de-
liberation is, Kierkegaard avers, one of the means by which an individual
may begin to acquire self-identity. In our lives significant choices may be
relatively rare events. But when the occasion does arise, it ought not to be
taken lightly or casually, since a choice made on such a significant occa-
sion may condition a number of other future choices. "The act of choice,"
Kierkegaard insists, "is essentially a proper and stringent expression of
3. Kierkegaard,Either/Or, trans. W. Lowrie (New York, 1959), 2:168.
 112 Ethics

the ethical."4 The choice which is the condition for the possibility of
other authentic choices is the "absolute" choice of oneself which, in
Either/Or, is equated with Socratic self-knowledge.
The act of choosing is an expression or signification of an ethical
"movement." A "baptism of the will" brings a choice into the realm of
the ethical insofar as the will to choose is itself already an ethically rele-
vant act. For, volitional choice individuates and is the act by which an
individual may become a person. As is the case for Aristotle, the choice
of good or evil is the overriding choice with which one is confronted.
But even this choice presupposes that one has already chosen oneself. For,
an authentic choice can only originate out of some degree of self-knowl-
edge. Choice is an expression of a being who has the potentiality for per-
sonality and involves a return to possibilities which had been implicitly
present insofar as an individual had attained consciousness. For self-con-
sciousness is described by Kierkegaard as the relating process by which
the relata of ideality (conceptualization of an ideal possibility) and actu-
ality (concrete immediacy) are related, and which entails an awareness of
opposition affected by concern.5 A subjective concern for the actualiza-
tion of a possibility through choice already has ethical significance, since
this concern for the self-being of one's own actuality is central to an ethi-
cal existence. An ethical existence is a concernful or an "interested" exis-
tence. This is not egotism (Egoisme), but I-ness or subjectivity (Ego-
itet). To exist in subjective inwardness as a self is not a narcissistic ego
inflation, but an ethical task which requires self-control, self-mastery, self-
discipline, a kind of spiritual asceticism. Needless to say, such a state of
being (which entails a repetitious commitment to resolute moral decisive-
ness) is difficult to sustain throughout a lifetime. Nevertheless, the means
of realizing the ethical possibility, of moving toward selfhood, is available
for anyone who is self-reflective, who has the potentiality for self-trans-
formation.

THE PROBLEM OF CHOICE

In his phenomenological sketch of choice, Kierkegaard emphasizes

the subjective "moments" or stages through which an individual moves
in relation to choice. While it may be the case that some apparently
insignificant choices may, contingently, turn out to be quite significant,
a choice is truly significant when it concerns ethical or religious com-
mitments, when it is related to what is within one's power, when one's
character is at issue. Most of our voluntary actions are not direct conse-
quences of being confronted with a situation in which a decision is called
4. Ibid., p. 170.
5. Johannes Climacus, or "De Omnibus Dubitandum Est," trans. T. H. Croxall
(Stanford, Calif., 1948), p. 151.
 113 Kierkegaard: The Self and Ethical Existence

for which requires deliberation (e.g., we do not deliberate about driving

our car from our place of work to our home-we simply do it volun-
tarily). There are, however, specific moments when we are confronted
with choices which we know will have important ramifications for our
lives. A person may ask himself, should I pursue this career or that?
Should I live in accordance with ethical categories or not? Should I marry
or not? Should I serve in combat in time of war or should I be a con-
scientious objector? Should I believe in the existence of God or not?
There are some options which one encounters which are, as William James
pointed out, momentous options for ourselves. The important thing is to
choose; since this resoluteness is an affirmation of one's self, an expression
of one's individuality. Irresolution is either an incapacity to choose or an
unwillingness to choose. What is lacking is serious or passionate concern.
But this does not mean that one merely yields to irrational passion, to
uncontrolled emotion. "Let no one," Kierkegaard writes, "misunderstand
my talk about passion and pathos to mean that I am proclaiming any and
every uncircumscribed immediacy, all manner of unshaven passion."6
The act of choice requires passion; but it requires a pursuit of self-
knowledge as well, deliberative concern, reason, the positing of a telos
apprehended as a good. Although the motivating basis of choice is pas-
sion, the act of choice is not itself an irrational act. A psychopath is
precisely the kind of human being who is not capable of choice (as
Kierkegaard understands it) since he has probably not chosen himself
(or sought self-knowledge), not examined his motivations, not accepted
and appropriated the imperfections of his actual self, not submitted to
the anguish of conscience, and not experienced the ironic contrast be-
tween what he is and what he ought to be. Kierkegaard stressed the
importance of passion in order to indicate that significant choices neces-
sarilv involve what James called the "passional" aspects of the self and
because he believed that choice is not possible without affective motiva-
tion.
Unlike some contemporary philosophical psychologists, Kierkegaard
avers that choice is a voluntary mental act. Although it is held that
choice is a volitional act, an act of will, it would be a mistake to assume
that this means that there is a mysterious entity called "the will" which
chooses. Choice is obviously an intentional act which originates in the
individual. By saying that this act is volitional one means that it was
intended by the individual, that a subjective process occurred which
resulted in a decision. By stressing how a choice occurs from a phenom-
enological perspective (that is, how the act of choice is experienced from
within), Kierkegaard avoids the problem of separating overt behavior
or action from the psychological fact of the intentionality of the agent.
To say, as Ryle has said, that "if . . . an act of choosing is describable
6. The Journals of Kierkegaard,ed. A. Dru (London, 1938), p. 133.
 114 Ethics

as voluntary, then ... it would have in its turn to be the result of a prior
choice to choose, and that from a choice to choose to choose,"7 suggests
the logical absurdity of an analysis of absolute choice such as that of
Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard would probably say that there must at some
time in the life history of an individual be an occasion when he is faced
with the choice to choose or not to choose since choice is a self-reflec-
tive, self-conscious, intentional mental act. Like Aristotle, he agrees that
children or animals are not capable of choice. In addition, he assumes
that there is a hypothetical moment in an individual's life when he is
faced with the option to choose to choose. This is most dramatically
presented in his account of one's original choice: the choice to choose
oneself. Aristotle and Kierkegaard hold that choice is a voluntary act;
that is, an act which is within the power of an individual, one which is
done neither in ignorance nor out of compulsion. Thus, if Ryle's criti-
cism is valid in regard to Kierkegaard's account of choice it is equally
valid against Aristotle's view that choice is voluntary.
It would seem that Kierkegaard (in his analysis of the choice to
choose) fills in a gap in Aristotle's account of choice. For, Aristotle's
account of choice presupposes that there is an original choice which a
rational individual makes. The question is whether there must not be a
prior choice to choose since it is possible for an individual to attempt
to avoid making morally relevant choices. What is being sought is some-
thing like Sartre's conception of an original project. It is maintained that
rational, purposive moral choice is not possible unless one has already
"chosen oneself" insofar as this involves an attempt to know oneself and
one's motivations. Kierkegaard's conception of a choice to choose does
make sense if (a) we assume that at least some individuals can avoid
attaining ethical self-consciousness and hence put off ethically relevant
choice and (b) if we assume that prior to a rational, self-conscious
choice an individual did not, strictly speaking, make choices at all. In
order to choose to make a choice, deliberation and not a prior choice is
necessary. Furthermore, if a choice is not construed as voluntary, it is
difficult to know how we can ascribe responsibility for a choice to a moral
agent. Such a view seriously obscures the relationship between choice
and voluntary action. As Aristotle remarks in his Ethics, we cease to trace
the process of decision or action any further when we have traced the
origin of an action to the rational "part" of the self, since it is this which
brings about deliberate choice.8 If one denies that there is an apparent
mental process of intentional volition determining choice, it is difficult
to know how one would be able to distinguish a voluntary from an
involuntary action. Merely by observing the overt behavior of an in-
dividual we cannot know with certainty whether his action is voluntary
7. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, 1949), p. 68.
8. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham (London, 1962), 3.3.17.
 115 Kierkegaard: The Self and Ethical Existence

or involuntary. Ryle's answer that it is "a man" who does this or that
act does not answer this question unless we ask the individual whether
he intended to do this or that. If an action is, in fact, voluntary, we must
assume that the choice to do that act was also voluntary. Finally, if it
is admitted that one can refuse to make an important, decisive choice,
then the conception of a choice to choose does make sense. The avoidance
of making an absolute choice is not regarded as a choice since it sig-
nifies an incapacity for resoluteness. To be sure, it is not "a volition"
or a "will" which chooses on any given occasion, but a complex, psycho-
physical individual who makes a decision by virtue of a conative process
which we designate as a "volition" or an "act of will." We need not
convert "will" or volition" into ontological entities in order to use these
terms meaningfully in a description of the act of choice as it is con-
cretely experienced by an individual.
Kierkegaard appears to have narrowed the range of meaning of
choice and to have distinguished it from what ordinarily passes for choice
in daily life. He conceives of choices having direct relevance to the
development of character as far more significant than the adiaphoric
choices which comprise most of our ordinary decisions. Authentic
choice situations having to do with decisions which will affect future
choices and which are related to life projects are relatively rare. Most
of what in ordinary language is called a "choice" is trivial and of little
relevance for the development of the self. From a purely logical point
of view it may be plausible to argue that it is paradoxical to trace a
choice to choose to a prior choice insofar as this process appears to go
on ad infinitum; but from an existential point of view, from the point
of view of a finite being's existence between birth and death, it does
make sense insofar as it is conceivable that one may never choose to
make an authentic choice. Surely, certain choices are momentous for the
pattern or direction of one's life and are difficult to make. And there are
many who postpone such choices-who do not choose to choose-in-
definitely. That, as a matter of fact, individuals are unaware of the sig-
nificance of their "choices" or that they make decisions carelessly or
casually is not testimony to the insignificance of such choices, but it
may be testimony to the trivialization of human life against which
Kierkegaard rebelled, to the loss of what he described as the dialectical
tension of existence. Socrates held that it is by no means necessary that
everyone become a man, and Kierkegaard held that it is by no means
necessary or inevitable that one become a person or an integral self.
The act of choosing is not only individuating, but is an act whereby
the individual both expresses and attains freedom. The primitive free-
dom an individual has is a freedom for possibility. Before William James,
Kierkegaard insisted that only in a world in which there is possibility
is freedom itself possible. The choice of oneself means the realization
 116 Ethics

of a possibility which has already been there, the acceptance of re-

sponsibility not only for what one is now becoming, but for what one
has been. An individual who chooses himself ethically chooses himself
as this concrete individual who exists here and now and whose present
existence has been shaped by causal factors which he appropriates. That
is, "The individual . . . becomes conscious of himself as this definite
individual, with these talents, these dispositions, these instincts, these
passions, influenced by these definite surroundings, as this definite prod-
uct of a definite environment. But being conscious of himself in this way,
he assumes responsibility for all this."9
Having freely chosen what has been, as it were, imposed upon him,
the individual is now able to bear responsibility for what he does with
these inherited dispositions, these psychological tendencies or charac-
teristics. Freedom is not, as it was for Spinoza, the recognition of neces-
sity, but it is manifested in, and made possible by, the appropriation of
necessity and possibility. Human freedom is not given as such, except
as a possibility that may be actualized. It is the finite freedom of a per-
son who is shaped and influenced by some circumstances which are out-
side his power. Man is determined in his being, but determining in his
becoming. Choosing oneself as determined is a condition for the pos-
sibility of realizing oneself as free for possibilities posited for oneself.
Resolute choice is the actualization of a freedom which may remain
merely abstract or potential. Not to act upon a posited possibility is to
run the risk of losing that possibility as possibility. And not to accept
oneself as one has been is to run the risk of having one's apparent choices
conditioned by aspects of the self which one does not understand and
over which one has no control. By means of resolute choice the individual
transforms his own past and escapes from the apparent necessity which
governs a life in which existential choice is avoided. Without the inten-
tional repetition of decisive choice, what has been gained in terms of
responsibility for oneself may be lost.
An ethical individual is one who has continuity, who has a history,
who is guided in his choices and actions bv a telos which is repeatedly
projected as a possibility. Optimistically perhaps, but with some psycho-
logical justification, Kierkegaard believed that resolute, rational choice
hones the character of the individual. As he puts it, "determination,
decision also open up, and therefore it is also called resolving; with
resolution or in the resolution the best powers of the [self] open up."10
This view is reminiscent of Aristotle's notion that choice is significant
for the development of character. What may appear to be idiosyncratic
in Kierkegaard's view is the assumption that one ought to take respon-
sibility for aspects of the self which have been passively acquired. But
9. Either/Or, 2:255.
10. Hong and Hong, 1:419.
 117 Kierkegaard: The Self and Ethical Existence

this general notion does make sense insofar as one ought (ideally) to
know as much as one can about oneself in order to be free for rational
choice. This view may be compared with the assumption of psycho-
analysis that a recognition of the causal factors which have influenced
one's psychosexual development can enable one to change one's pattern
of behavior or overcome neurotic tendencies. At any rate, it is by means
of choice that an individual is liberated for his own possibilities. Only a
person who has a potentiality for rational choice can attempt to realize
the ethical possibility. As Heidegger will later express it, "Because Dasein
is in each case essentially its own possibility, it can. . . 'choose' itself and win
itself; it can also lose itself and never win itself . . . only insofar as it is essen-
tially something which can be authentic-that is, something of its own-
can it have lost itself and not yet won itself.""
One has made the ethical "movement" if one has taken responsibil-
ity for one's life no matter what the moral condition of that life may
be at present. An individual accepts himself as "guilty" in the sense
that he accepts guilt as a "debt" he owes to what is best in himself. To
know, in Kantian language, that one can be (from a moral point of view)
what one ought to be seems to entail that one also knows that one ought
to be what one can be. What Kierkegaard was sensitive to was that the
individual is, in a sense, a synthesis of necessity and possibility. The
necessary aspects of the individual are all of those factors which affect
what one is but which were acquired beyond one's control. The full
recognition of the necessities determining one's self is required in order
that an individual appropriate himself in his specificity and not be entirely
dominated by "unconscious" tendencies or dispositions.
What may be called "original" choice originates in relation to the
psychic processes of the psychophysical individual who posits this choice
(as possibility) and apprehends his own potentiality for making this
choice. The freedom of the individual is a freedom of self-determination
or self-realization and not, as some interpreters of Kierkegaard have sug-
gested, an absolute freedom. The self which determines itself and strives
to realize itself manifests its freedom in its choice of itself. Thus, the ethi-
cist, by choosing himself as "guilty" (in the sense of owing a debt to what
he ought to be) has done so freely and has, by virtue of this, brought to
actualization a freedom for possibility which he previously had a potential-
ity for (kunnen).
The most elementary form of freedom is a freedom for possibility,
a freedom which can be brought to fruition by virtue of a self-integrat-
ing act of choice. By freely accepting his imperfect, actual self the
individual is free to attempt to realize his projected ideal self. The first
movement in this subjective, teleological transformation is isolating and,
for that reason, individuating. For, as Kierkegaard expresses it, "The
11. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tiibingen, 1963), p. 43.
 118 Ethics

first form which the choice takes is complete isolation. For in choosing
myself I detach myself from the whole world.... The individual having
chosen himself in terms of his freedom, is eo ipso active. This action,
however, has no relation to any surrounding world, for the individual
has reduced this to naught and exists only for himself."'12 This subjec-
tive, ethical epoche' contributes to the consolidation of personality insofar
as the individual is engaged in a concernful self-reflection and is involved
in a search for concernful knowledge in which the self is at issue.

THE SELF

Reflecting upon himself, the individual knows at once his actual,

imperfect self and the ideal, possible self. Both are significant aspects of
the self insofar as one can only be free for the choice to seek to realize
one's possible self if one has accepted and appropriated one's actual self.
Subjectively apprehended possibilities are as much a "part" of the self
as present, actual characteristics or dispositions.'3 Self-knowledge is an
approximation process by which one understands one's imperfect actual-
ity and one's existential possibilities. It involves a retrospective under-
standing of what one has been and a prospective understanding of what
it is possible for one to be. The self is never a transparent "object" of
knowledge since it is a dynamic process of becoming.
In most of his generalizations about man, Kierkegaard proclaims that
man is essentially spirit. At times, he equates spirit with the self. And the
self understood as spirit is self-consciousness. In his paradoxical defini-
tion of the self he asserts that "the self which relates itself to its own
self . . . is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own
self."''4 Although this "definition" of the self has often been criticized
or described as absurd, it is not entirely different from conceptions of

12. Either/Or, 2:244.

13. This general notion is later appropriated by Heidegger and translated into
ontological terms. For Dasein is described as more than what it is factually since it
has a possibility for being what it is not yet, a possibility recognized in and through
self-knowledge (Selbsterkenntnis) (cf. Sein und Zeit, p. 146).
14. Soren Kierkegaard,The Sickness unto Death, trans. W. Lowrie (New York,
1954), p. 146. Despite the pseudonym under which this work was written, Kierke-
gaard uses the precise terms in this work that he uses in his journals to describe the
self. In addition, what is said about the relationship between the self and ethical self-
becoming in this work is consistent with Kierkegaard'sdescriptions of this relation-
ship in other works. Thus, for example, in The Sickness unto Death it is said that "a
self every instant it is, is in process of becoming, for the self kata dunamin potentially
does not actually exist, it is only that which it is to become" (p. 163). The self is con-
ceived of as a goal to be sought and as a dialectical, relational synthesis of necessity
and possibility. This is tantamount to Kierkegaard'sdescription of the self-becoming
of the ethical individual in Either/Or insofar as it is said that the ethical goal is the
realization of the "ideal self" and insofar as the "absolute"choice of one's self means
(in one of its uses) the acceptance of the necessity which had conditioned one's exis-
tence in terms of the influence of causal factors over which one had no control on the
shaping of one's life.
 119 Kierkegaard: The Self and Ethical Existence

the self presented in Kierkegaard's journals and is related to his general

conception of consciousness.
Consciousness or self-consciousness is conceived of as that which
relates ideality (conceptualization or language or a posited ideal) and
actuality (immediacy, concrete experience). In Johannes Climacus
Kierkegaard equates self-consciousness and spirit. Consciousness is in the
process of relating diverse relata, specifically antinomies or oppositions.
A heightened self-consciousness occurs when the oppositions which are
related are a matter of subjective concern; it arises in simultaneity with
the emergence of the awareness of duality. The "energizing force" behind
the process of relating various relata is consciousness or spirit. Although
consciousness is real, it is not an actuality in the sense in which imme-
diate sensory experiences are actual or are related to concrete actuality.
However, consciousness itself is not an ideality insofar as it cannot be
completely described in language or conceptualized and is the condition
for the possibility of concept formation and for linguistic expression.
I-consciousness cannot be an "object" for itself, but is that which we are
acquainted with in subjective consciousness. At one point in his analysis
of self-consciousness it is said that it is the "in-between;" that is, that
man, as self-conscious spirit, is "in between" actuality and ideality, "in
between" the realm of brute facticity and the realm of abstract concep-
tualization.
Consciousness, as spirit, is that by which the psychophysical, dy-
namic synthesis of individual being is sustained. That is, it is in its rela-
tional activity. Self-consciousness is capable of synthesizing the various
aspects of the self in such a way that one's existence has a semblance of
continuity and integral self-being. The self is a particular dynamic
synthesis, a dialectical relationship among body, consciousness, and
spirit. Ultimately, the spiritual intensification of personal existence is
the ethical goal for man.
While Kierkegaard was intent upon upholding the notion that con-
sciousness is an I-consciousness, it is not clear that he has entirely avoided
the problem of attributing personal identity to consciousness. In Johannes
Climacus he distinguishes, at one point, the ego from consciousness,
suggesting a distinction between consciousness as such and the ego or
personal self. At times, despite himself, he describes consciousness in
Hegelian terms.15 More typically, the self, as spirit, is equated with the
existing individual who is a synthesis of necessity and possibility, a
psychophysical unity. The problem for such a view of the self is that
it is difficult to understand how a consciousness of the self (the self as

15. G. W. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York,

1967), p. 459. For Hegel, spirit is consciousness in general and consciousness under-
stands that the reality objective to itself is nothing other than the objectification of
its own self-existent being.
 120 Ethics

a synthesis of actual characteristics and possibilities) is possible since

that which is conscious of the self is itself that which it is conscious of
in this self-reflective process. While Kierkegaard would never proclaim
that phenomena for consciousness are "objectifications" of consciousness
itself (insofar as he entirely accepted the brute facticity of the body and
those entities which are encountered through perception and which com-
prise nonhuman actuality), the question of how it is possible to know
the personal self without positing a consciousness which knows this
self remains. Thus, if consciousness is intentional, as Husserl insisted,
then how is it possible that the intentional object of consciousness (the
personal self) is itself the consciousness for which it is a phenomenon?
Once it is assumed that consciousness is the central characteristic of an
individual being are we not led to posit an impersonal, transcendental
consciousness which can know the self, but which itself cannot be an
individual or personal self? We tend to believe that the personal ego
which is conditioned by temporality can be a phenomenon for con-
sciousness. It seems to me that Kierkegaard did not adequately distin-
guish consciousness from self-consciousness. What he did suggest is that
there are impersonal functions of consciousness in which the self is
not, as such, involved (e.g., in speculative philosophy, in mathematical
or logical reasoning, etc.). In subjective reflection the individual is fo-
cused upon his own personal being and, hence, relates himself to him-
self in an intensified state of consciousness. Strictly speaking, the "lived
self" cannot be an object of knowledge at all, but it can be the "subject"
of reflective concern and can express itself in this concern. Given the
relational, dynamic nature of the self, it is clear that the self is not a
substance or an impersonal consciousness-in-general.
In Either/Or there is repeated reference to the "ideal self" which one
ought to try to realize in a subjective teleology. There is an analogy
between this conception of self-development and Aristotle's general view
that the "what is" of a being (specifically, man) is a moment, as it
were, in its movement toward its "what it was meant to be" (i.e., its
essence). Applying the distinction between possibility and actuality to
Aristotle's ethics, it is clear that the actualization of one's ethical pos-
sibilities is not necessary, but contingent. What a man ought to be is a
type of entelecheia which serves as a goal to be attained. Complete
ethical self-realization may never be attained, but the essence of man is
revealed in his endeavor to realize his highest ethical possibilities. The
ideal self must be potentially present in the actual self of the individual
insofar as it is he alone who assumes the project of striving to become
that self. But he can never fully realize it since this would imply "com-
plete actualization."
What I have tried to do in sketching this analogy with Aristotle's
conception of moral development is to indicate that Kierkegaard's con-
 121 Kierkegaard: The Self and Ethical Existence

ception of ethical existence is formed in terms of his interpretation of

Aristotle. For, the conception of actuality as activity (in the Metaphys-
ics), the relationship between possibility and actuality, the conception
of a mode of motion as involving qualitative change, and the distinction
between what a being is at anv stage of its development and what it was
meant to be (i.e., its to ti en einai) contribute to the central notion in
Kierkegaard's philosophical anthropology: that is, that the essence of
man lies in existence. The essence of man is to exist as a person who is
engaged in the persistent striving to realize his highest ethical poten-
tialities, who is open to a multiplicity of individuating acts or states of
being (i.e., choice, anxiety in the face of possibility and in the face
of the possibility of death, inwardness or concernful reflection, the
acceptance of responsibility for what one has been and will be, cultivat-
ing conscience, developing an ironic attitude toward what one is, being
resolute, experiencing the dialectical tension of existence, accepting suffer-
ing as an ineluctable aspect of personal existence, endeavoring to infuse
one's existence with continuity and a history, becoming self-conscious
about the temporality of one's existence, or, in its simplest terms, to be
an existing subject-det existerende Subjekt). Whereas Aristotle's ethical
goal is the emulation of the activity of God, the goal of an ethical
existence for Kierkegaard is to exist as a self. But it is false to assume
that Kierkegaard held that every man exists or that subjective existence
has the character of necessity.16 Authentic existence is a goal to be at-
tained, not something that is passively acquired.
An existential ethics entails the development of a heightened sense
of moral responsibility and an energetic, repetitive commitment to a
subjectively apprehended and posited ethical telos. In the most simple
terms, the ethicist can proclaim only that jeg har sogt at vaere selv, "I
have sought to be myself." Presumably, this project would tend to in-
hibit immorality and lead one to pursue self-understanding, self-mastery,
and rational self-control.
The ethical task of the individual is to exist, to become subjective.
An ethical individual should "strive to develop himself with the utmost
exertion of his powers." He "would . . . choose to remain in ignorance
of what he had accomplished in order that his striving might not be
retarded by a preoccupation with the external.'17 Here there is no ques-
tion, as in Kantian ethics, of universalizing one's subjective principle of
volition or maxim, nor is there any emphasis upon the relationship be-
tween pure will and pure reason. My moral obligation does not arise
from any membership in an intelligible world as a rational being or by
16. F. E. Wilde, Kierkegaards Verstdindnisder Existenz (Copenhagen, 1969), p.
80: "Jeder Mensch existiert, und jeder Mensch existiert als Subjekt .... Die Existenz
hat fur den Menschen geradezu Zwangscharakter,. . . Sie ist sein Schicksal."
17. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. D. F. Swenson and
W. Lowrie (Princeton, N.J., 1941), p. 121.
 122 Ethics

virtue of my capacity to understand the universality and necessity of

moral laws; rather, it arises out of my own acquaintance with my "ought-
ness-capability," the realization of a particular, complex, psychophysical
individual that he has a potentiality for an authentic ethical existence.
Kierkegaard's ethics of subjectivity is primarily an ethics of self-
realization and not an ethics of duty out of respect for universal moral
laws conceived of as universal, necessary laws of nature. In Conclud-
ing Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard expresses this ethics of subjec-
tive realization in its most extreme form: he proclaims that existence
constitutes the highest interest of the existing individual and that his
interest in his existence constitutes his reality. In fact, "ethical self-
existence is the only reality.'8 This assertion is central for an under-
standing of the radical nature of his claim about the ethical mode of
being. Ethical existence is described in the journals as "the aim and
measure of human existence," and it is by means of "ethical reflection
and going through the universal involved in it [that] makes each human
existence a truly authentic existence.'9 Such a position attests to Kier-
kegaard's skepticism about all other interpretations of "reality," to his
Pyrrhonic attitude to claims that one can grasp objective truth. His
skepticism, however, halts before the ethical-there can be no doubt
about the ethical possibility.
An ethics of subjectivity requires a persistent striving toward a goal,
a repeated renewal of resolution. The "how" of this subjectivity is sub-
ject to a temporal dialectic and is, therefore, not a permanent posses-
sion; rather, it is a decisive ethical repetition. The goal of movement for
an existing individual is to arrive at a decision concerning a telos con-
strued as a good, and to renew it.20 The ethical pathos-the pathos of
resolve-is not an intentional act of an impersonal consciousness-in-gen-
eral, but is an act of a finite, existing individual who is a synthesis in
actuality of reflection and action, of the ought (ideality) and the is
(actuality), of necessity and possibility.
Spiritual existence is the dynamic, projective movement of the in-
dividual toward his own unique, subjective reality by virtue of the
attempt to realize his authentic possibilities in accordance with a sub-
jectively posited telos, appropriated in inwardness, which infuses his
life with direction, purpose, and meaning. In an ethical existence man
is spirit insofar as he is engaged in this decisive inwardness of striving
to become an authentic self. The true subject, Kierkegaard insists, is not
a cognitive, knowing subject, but the ethically existing individual.
If one were to synthesize all of the various aspects of Kierkegaard's
existential ethics, it would be seen that it is an "anticipation" (in rather
18. Ibid., p. 291.
19. Hong and Hong, 1:407-8.
20. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 277.
21. Ibid., p. 281.
 123 Kierkegaard: The Self and Ethical Existence

remarkable detail) of Heidegger's general conception of eigentlich

Existenz (if we bear in mind Heidegger's ontologism and Kierkegaard's
consistent existentialism, Heidegger's central concern with das Sein and
Kierkegaard's concern with individual existence). This is especially the
case in regard to the central emphasis of Kierkegaard's existential ethics:
that is, inwardness (det Ethiske er Inderligheden). In its most general
sense, inwardness means a psychological turning-in upon oneself, a kind
of concernful introspection. More specifically, it is the development of
seriousness in regard to one's life, a realization of one's existential condi-
tion. Thus, the aesthete who pursues pleasure is unconcerned with what
he is or has been; his mode of being has no ethical content whatsoever.
For the aesthete, again, actuality has a dreamlike quality and the world
is a kind of aesthetic phenomenon without any meaning at all. Inward-
ness,, on the other hand, requires an intensification of the sense of the
undeniable actuality of one's own existence.
Another significant expression of inwardness is subjective dread
(Angesten). The encounter with the nothingness of possibility, "the
nothing which is the object of dread," is an awareness of freedom as
well as a dread of this freedom. By enduring this dread the individual
is invariably turned back upon himself and his concern for his being is
heightened, since dread is by its nature egoistic. Disinterested reflection
precludes the occurrence of inwardness.22 Only in subjective reflection is
inwardness present. In the face of possibility, in freedom for choice one
lives through an anxious freedom which is a characteristic of inwardness.
This anxiety in relation to the possible is experienced as anxiety in the
face of sheer possibility itself. While Kierkegaard anticipated William
James's emphasis upon the prospective freedom of the individual in rela-
tion to a world in which there is possibility-a notion of Kierkegaard's
with which James was familiar-he also saw that this relationship to the
openness of possibility is the basis of anxiety as well.
Although it may be said that inwardness is a consequence of reflec-
tion, Kierkegaard disagrees with this view. To be sure, inwardness is a
form of understanding; but it is a form of concrete understanding. The
more concrete the content of consciousness, the more concrete is the
understanding of this content. The most concrete form of consciousness
possible for man is not pure self-consciousness, but a self-consciousness
having such specificity and individuation that it cannot, strictly speaking,
be described.23
This conception of the nature of inwardness is clearly related to my
earlier discussion of Kierkegaard's conception of the self. In his analysis
of the self Kierkegaard notes that the concept "self" indicates the in-
22. S0ren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans. W. Lowrie (Princeton,
N.J., 1951), p. 126.
23. Ibid., pp. 70-71.
 124 Ethics

herent paradox of attempting to posit the general as the particular. That

is, the concept "existence" is an ideality and, in this sense, Kierkegaard
agrees with Spinoza that essentia involvit existential insofar as one is re-
ferring to conceptual existence. Kant, too, is correct in holding that exis-
tence is not a true predicate insofar as the concept 'existence' adds nothing
to the subject concept. "Nothing is added to a concept whether [that to
which it refers has actual] existence or not; it is a matter of complete
indifference; it indeed has existence, i.e., concept existence, ideal exis-
tence."24 In the strict sense, existence has reference to a particular, indi-
vidual being (a notion Kierkegaard derived from Aristotle's conception
of primary substance) who cannot be "absorbed" in a concept insofar as
a particular being is obviously not concept existence. We cannot have
complete conceptual knowledge of a particular individual as "this here"
individual, since any expression of that knowledge will be made in terms
of universal categories.25
While the conceptualization of the self is a self-negating enterprise,
it is possible to be acquainted with ourselves in subjective reflection. We
may have a kind of evidential, nontheoretical "knowledge" of ourselves
and our states of being. However, the I-consciousness which character-
izes inwardness is not contemplative self-consciousness, since the indi-
vidual actively engaged in this activity is in the process of becoming and
is, hence, not an object for consciousness at all. I-consciousness, then, is
a deed or activity which is inwardness.26 Such a consciousness of self
is paradoxical insofar as we assume that it is an activity which affects the
being of what it would know and, therefore, could only be an approxi-
mation process. Subjective reflection is an activity of an individual at a
particular stage in his life history; it is a dialectical process which bears
a reciprocal relationship to what it is reflecting upon. The self as spirit
is this particular self-consciousness or this relating, intermediate being
which relates its various aspects, functions, states, or capacities to itself in
a dynamic, "moving" synthesis which is never finished or complete in
time as long as it exists. At one point Kierkegaard describes inwardness
as an overlapping (iibergreifende) subjectivity in which a person relates
himself to himself in seriousness.27
24. Hong and Hong, 1:460.
25. The Concept of Dread, p. 128: "No science can state what the self is, without
stating it in perfectly general terms. The general is only by the fact that it is thought
or can be thought . . . and is as that which can be thought. The point in the particular
is its negative, its repellent relationship to the general; but as soon as this is thought
away, individuality is annulled, and as soon as it is thought it is transformed in such
a way that either one does not think it but only imagines one is thinking it, or does
not think about it and only imagines that it is included in the process of thought ...
every man who gives heed to himself knows what no science knows, since he knows
what he himself is . .. this is the profundity of the Greek saying, gnothi seauton, which
so long has been understood in the German i.e., Hegelian way as pure self-conscious-
ness."
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., p. 134.
 125 Kierkegaard: The Self and Ethical Existence

When Heidegger proclaims, in Sein und Zeit, that Dasein as care is

the in-between, he is epitomizing Kierkegaard's conception of the mode
of being of a self-conscious individual who has his own moral being as
his concern. In fact, one may say that Heidegger's conception of authen-
tic existence in general is an ontological version of Kierkegaard's concep-
tion of an ethical mode of existence. The individual, as a complex, dy-
namic, dialectical synthesis whose existence is expressed in indefinite
striving-Existentsen selv, det at existere, er Straeben-is the only actuality
which can understand itself in its actuality and which can strive for self-
overcoming. The actuality of every other entity is known by virtue of
the mediation of human perception and thought. The paradigmatic reality
man can know is the ethically existing individual.
While an ethical existence requires the intensification of subjectivity,
the individual has, by virtue of this intensification, related himself to what
is universal and essential in man. By "becoming subjective" the individual
also manifests the being of the paradigmatic man. In this sense, a notion
of essence is retained insofar as it is suggested that the essence of man
can be realized or revealed in the personal, authentic existence of an indi-
vidual. The essence of man is not reason or consciousness, but it is to exist
as an ethical being, to endeavor, in temporal actuality, to be what he
ought, from a moral point of view, to be. Before Unamuno and Heideg-
ger, Kierkegaard had averred that the essence of man lies in existence.