4.1.1 Self
When Kierkegaard speaks about the
development of the self, the question naturally arises: What is the nature of
this self? The process of becoming a self (the self relating to itself)
explains the relational part of the self (the self as self-relation). The
process means that the individual by relating to his or her self is forced to
acknowledge selfhood. The point that Kierkegaard is making is in my opinion that
the self is more than what meets the eye. Our consciousness shows that the self
relates to itself – and is in opposition
to itself. It experiences (erfarer)
itself as a self that one is always already (Heidegger 1926/1962) related to.
If we use only the process-oriented
view of the self (that the self is a relationship that relates itself to
itself), then the result is in my opinion that the self is only what it is and
becomes itself through what it does. The self-relation is a fundamental mode of
self-experience. Relating to one’s self includes both a passiveness (that one
suffers under this relating to oneself) and activeness (that the self is
determined through and in spite of the way one relates to one’s self). This
relation between the active and the passive is in my opinion what the self is
all about.
Kierkegaard starts Sickness unto Death (1849/1980) by
reflecting on the nature of the self, and finds that there is a self-relation
which relates the self to itself. Immediately thereafter he speaks of despair
as a disparity within the self. His exploration of the nature of the self thus
leads, in my opinion, to the subject of shame, even though Kierkegaard is
speaking of despair. Rather than directly explaining the nature of the self,
Kierkegaard discusses the negation of the self by analysing the different faces
of despair, i.e. the different ways in which a person fails to become a self.
What does this definition through the
negative possibility mean? There seems in my opinion to be a connection between
becoming oneself and not being
oneself. The normative process (of becoming one’s self) goes through a negative
process (eliciting shame about not being one’s self) and creates ambiguity. The
normative process (of becoming one’s self in order to be one’s self) partly
presupposes and partly responds to this negative possibility (of not being
one’s self). The task of becoming one’s self presupposes that a person can
indeed lose ones self. A human being first becomes a self by freeing itself
from shame. This negative method is not a superfluous detour, but a normative
goal. Becoming a self requires in my opinion regaining one’s self, but in order
to regain a self it is first necessary to lose one’s self, which implies that
the only way out of shame is through shame.
Kaare T. Pettersen
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