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Kierkegaard’s existential thinking clearly has its roots in the Pensées of Blaise Pascal. Looking at the variety of cultures and religions that were becoming known at the time, Pascal concluded that human beings have no essence, but rather define themselves through their cultural practices. “Custom is our nature ,”1 he wrote. But, although the self has no nature, according to Pascal, it does have a structure. Plato already understood the self as combining two sets of factors: body and soul. On the Greek account, if both sets of factors were equally essential, the self would be in hopeless self-contradiction. It could not fulfill all its bodily, temporal needs while at the same time fulfilling its intellectual , eternal needs and so would be pulled apart by its earthly and heavenly desires. So Plato concluded that the factors were merely combined, and, if one realized that only one set of factors was essential—for example, that one was an eternal soul, stuck with a temporal body and so one “died to the body”—the conflict and instability could be overcome. Thus, for the Greeks, life was a voyage from confusion to clarity and from conflict to harmony. Since the self was potentially whole and harmonious, all one had to do was to realize which factors were essential, and then live so as to satisfy one’s true needs rather than one’s superficial desires, and one would experience peace and fulfillment. Pascal, however, realized that, according to Christianity, both sets of factors are essential, and the self is, thus, not just an unstable combination, but something much more upsetting, an unstable synthesis of two incompatible sets of factors. As Pascal put it: “What a chimera then is man! . . . What a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe!”2 According to Pascal, a person’s highest achievement was not to deny or overcome this contradiction—by getting rid of half the self—but to relate to 1. Kierkegaard on the Self HubertL.Dreyfus 12 · Hubert L. Dreyfus one’s self in such a way as to be fully alive to the tension. He noted that “we do not display greatness by going to one extreme, but in touching both extremes at once and filling all the intervening space.”3 So he held that we must take a stand on our selves in our way of life that expresses both our “greatness and our misery,” avoiding both pride and despair, as Jesus did in humbly accepting that he was both God and Man. But Pascal had little to say about how we normal human beings should do this. Søren Kierkegaard, the first person to call himself an existential thinker, took up the insights of Pascal to combat the influence of Hegel, the last philosopher to attempt to synthesize our Greek and Judeo-Christian heritage. Kierkegaard argued that Hegel did not succeed. As usual, the supposed superiority of detached reflection and the truth, universality, and eternity it allegedly revealed covered up the Christian message. So, instead of trying to understand the Judeo-Christian revelation in Greek terms, Kierkegaard highlighted the opposition. He showed that any attempt to rationalize the Christian experience resulted in claims that, to the Greeks, would have sounded absurd. According to Kierkegaard: Truth is subjectivity; the individual is higher than the universal ; and eternity is only possible in time. To see why he says such outrageous things, we have to begin with Kierkegaard’s elaboration of Pascal’s anti-Greek definition of the self as a contradiction that has to take a stand on itself in its way of life. Kierkegaard affirms that the self is a synthesis between two sets of opposed factors, not just a combination, that is, that each set is essential and requires the other. Let us now look at this claim in more detail. Here is Kierkegaard’s dense definition of the self:4 Despair is a sickness of the spirit, of the self, and so can have three forms: being unconscious of the despair of having a self (inauthentic despair), desperately not wanting to be oneself, and despairingly wanting to be oneself. . . . The human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates to itself. . . . A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the...

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