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Full Idea
A human being is essentially spirit, but what is spirit? Spirit is to be a self. But what is the Self? In short, it is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.
Gist of Idea
The self is a combination of pairs of attributes: freedom/necessity, infinite/finite, temporal/eternal
Source
Søren Kierkegaard (Sickness unto Death [1849], p.59)
Book Ref
Kierkegaard,Søren: 'Sickness Unto Death', ed/tr. Hannay,Alistair [Penguin ], p.59
A Reaction
The dense language of his first paragraph was to poke fun at fashionable Hegelian writing. The book gets very lucid afterwards! [SY]
| 276 | My individuality is my soul, which carries my body around [Plato] |
| 3609 | I am a thinking substance, which doesn't need a place or material support [Descartes] |
| 5627 | I can express the motion of my body in a single point, but that doesn't mean it is a simple substance [Kant] |
| 16002 | The self is a combination of pairs of attributes: freedom/necessity, infinite/finite, temporal/eternal [Kierkegaard] |
| 15811 | I am picked out uniquely by my individual essence, which is 'being identical with myself' [Chisholm] |