You could also change it to say that the self has the task of being itself too.

"The more consciousness, the more self; the more consciousness, the more will; the more will, the more self. A person who has no will at all is not a self; but the more will he has, the more self-consciousness he has also."

So is Kierkegaard saying that consciousness precedes will?

There's personal will and God's will. If a person can do no other than God's will, then it would appear they have no will of their own.

Kierkegaard pictures this in Of Fear and Trembling. Abraham takes his son up the mountain to kill him. He has no will but God's. If his own will was operational it would represent resistance to God's will. In fact personal will could be seen to have it's foundation in resistance to divine will otherwise known as nature.

So it's not that he's suggesting some state of lacking will. The more a person surrenders to God, the less personal self they have. Abraham has the love which is "hatred of one's self."

This can happen as a matter of practicality. Imagine a person whose job is to respond to emergencies in a hospital. Prior to entering a room where someone is fixin' to die (ftd), they say a prayer to God: "whatever your will may be, let it be done." This surrender makes the person immune from the potentially paralysing stress. Can you see how they're taking themselves out of the equation, so to speak? They aren't passive, far from it, but they allow a will that's beyond themselves to animate them.

Kierkegaard points to how otherworldly and unfathomable the ultimate acceptance is and how it relates to identity.

There's personal will and God's will. If a person can do no other than God's will, then it would appear they have no will of their own.

Kierkegaard pictures this in Of Fear and Trembling. Abraham takes his son up the mountain to kill him. He has no will but God's. If his own will was operational it would represent resistance to God's will. In fact personal will could be seen to have it's foundation in resistance to divine will otherwise known as nature.

So it's not that he's suggesting some state of lacking will. The more a person surrenders to God, the less personal self they have. Abraham has the love which is "hatred of one's self."

This can happen as a matter of practicality. Imagine a person whose job is to respond to emergencies in a hospital. Prior to entering a room where someone is fixin' to die (ftd), they say a prayer to God: "whatever your will may be, let it be done." This surrender makes the person immune from the potentially paralysing stress. Can you see how they're taking themselves out of the equation, so to speak? They aren't passive, far from it, but they allow a will that's beyond themselves to animate them.

Kierkegaard points to how otherworldly and unfathomable the ultimate acceptance is and how it relates to identity.

That's not what I got out of Fear and Trembling. Faith is more at issue than Will in that book. Abraham is ready to go ahead and kill his son because he believes by the strength of the absurd that it will all work out for the best. I don't see this as the same as surrendering ones will. A surrender of the will would be to believe that it wasn't going to work out alright and kill the son anyway. The believing precedes the willing. It is the faith that makes the willing possible. This is somehow different from having no will of ones own.

In the story of Abraham killing his son, you have the story of a primitive man who could no more ignore the voices in his head as the commands of God than a modern day schizophrenic can deny the voices in his head... There was no psychology or psychological explanation... What the voices said do, people did...In addition, primitives were ethical in every sense because their conception of self came from their communities, and their connection to their people was natural and organic...

Today, people find themselves by breaking with their communities, and they cannot be a part of their communities after except by consciously accepting the morals of their community... It does not matter where a person lives... What makes a person a part of their community, what meakes him/her moral is the way he/she lives, which is a choice, an exercise of will...

Yea. Fundamentally Fear and Trembling is about the paradox of being transparent to God and being a particular human at the same time. The absurdity referred to involves suspension of teleology. Kierkegaard's (SK's) Abraham isn't thinking about the outcome for himself or the world. SK goes on to contrast Abraham with one who is operating within the ethical.


Many choose the path of standing against the moral outlook of their society.

Wouldn't that be a mistake, since paths are not for standing in...

Abraham was particularly ethical, and that is why he is a hero to Judah.. When He first defended Israel from Ishmael, and then slew Israel, perhaps for being the idiot he no doubt was, he was acting in a very moral fashion... If as the father of his nation, he was morality and law all wrapped up with a bow, what does it matter... It is always moral for the father to slay the son, and never moral for the son to slay the father, and who better to trim the blighted branch than the man to whom it belongs???

"I brought you into this world... I can take you back out." In fact the Mosaic law teaches that if a man's son isn't assimilating properly one of the options is to take the boy to the outskirts of the city and kill him. The Bible says Abraham had a special love for Isaac though. As SK points out: it was supposed to be through Isaac that the prophecy of Abraham's legacy would come true. When you kill what you love, you're killing yourself.

God; there is a task... Who else would the self want to be...

The self only wants to be God? Perhaps a deluded self would desire that.

The self only wants to be God? Perhaps a deluded self would desire that.

When you kill what you love, you're killing yourself.

Imitation of God-made-flesh is quite different from the self seeking to become God.

The self is a relation that relates itself to its self, or is the relation relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation relating itself to its self. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity; in short a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered this way, a human being is not a self. Kierkegaard.

The self is the despairing relation. The self is not a substantial thing, but a relation, but it is not that relation, but the relating of relations; a synthesis. That is Kierkegaard's message of the self here.

We soar into the abstracts, the infinite, the utopics and paradises, but we are rooted to the finite-material-banality of our everydaynesses. We are deep felt aspirations, passions and care, but also brutal necessity. And because of this relation we are incomplete. The self is not a self, but a despairing relation. And this is not a mood which can be fixed, but accordingly, the ontological structure of our being.

Despair? Can we even use the term today? Has our modern times not banalised and cheapened it? Sold it and numbed it - comfortably? Perhaps despair in a contemporary setting means not being conscious of having a self - that fundamentally, we are aware that there is no fundamental connecting narrative, no connecting thread in our life, no meaningful purpose to it.

In its place are just the scenes, scenes upon scenes, daily plods through an everyday much the same as any other day; otherly directed aspirations, otherly timetables, needs and desires. That's despair. That's the kind of despair which fills people with emptiness when they ask themselves, What does my life mean?

Perhaps the modern malady is really the despair that is unaware that it is despair, that there is no fundamental crisis at the very core of one's existence. That, surely, is hopelessness. The problem of old time society was always the unbeliever, the contemporary problem - the nonperson. The new social malady: what is left of self in these modern conditions? Despair being the ultimate refuge-struggle of being human in inhuman conditions.