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 Reference
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]