I. In Kierkegaard’s The Sickness
Unto Death, the self, “at every moment it exists, is in a constant process
of becoming.” It is at once identical with itself and continuously
projecting into the future, seeking itself or some improved form or fully
realised form of itself. This seems right to me, in being such a self I have my
character traits, memories, opinions, quirks, idiosyncrasies: what I have,
my actuality of self. But I also have hopes, dreams, goals, dispositions or
desires: what I could have, my possibilities of self. He then goes on to say the self is
a synthesis of the finite and infinite (among other things),
which is the subject of this essay. Both can be thought of as psychological
states, or dispositions of the self, that concern how we comport ourselves
towards our possibilities. Of course, each self is not literally one or the
other, nor do they switch between the two discretely, but we each dwell somewhere
along the continuum between the two extremes. Kierkegaard outlines only what it
is to be situated, as a self, at each polarity and the danger posed in being
there.