In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

11 x the self to be found in power is free. He or she wills freely in power to act, to be. Of course, any powerful action expresses a confluence of wills, focusing on and in a particular person or group of people. But in any moment of time, the movement in human beings from potentiality to actuality, from indetermination to determination, does not occur without the involvement of will, the wills of individuals. Human will functions in freedom; a choice is made between genuine alternatives. To recognize the reality of choice is not to deny the cumulative efficacy of our choosing. Earlier choices, mine and those of others, shape my freedom in habit’s servitude or in character’s integrity. But this demonstrates rather than denies the power of will’s choosing. Thus, domestic-abuse counselors do not forget this when dealing with the abusive husband who says, “She made me so mad I just couldn’t help myself.” They speak of a bell curve such that, at some point in the relationship, the man is making choices, freely.1 Freedom’s task If we are to maximize power, we must somehow lay claim to what freedom we can. That is at the heart of what Søren Kierkegaard says about the self. This theme of freedom was there already at the beginning of his authorship. Chapter 1 imaging god’s love in Freedom: a KierKegaardian invitation 12 love’s availing power In his first major publication, Either/Or, he asks, “But what is this self of mine? If I were to speak of a first moment, a first expression for it, then my answer is this: It is the most abstract of all, and yet in itself it is also the most concrete of all—it is freedom.”2 How does one claim one’s freedom? That calls for decision, bringing actuality out of potentiality. A human being brings about freedom as actuality when that person, in Kierkegaard’s language, “wills one thing,” “acquiring a history.”3 Those two elements stand out: the individual’s choosing (freedom as means) and giving that choice continuity in his or her life (freedom as end). So it matters what we choose. In a major work ironically titled Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard writes, “The difficulty for an existing person is to give existence the continuity without which everything just disappears .”4 Thus, “for an existing person, the goal of motion is decision and repetition.”5 In effect, the person whose life is constituted by the togetherness of decision in repetition has brought the times of his life together in a willed oneness and so has realized a kind of contemporaneity. Later in the Postscript, he uses that term to describe the challenge uniquely facing humans: “In the individual the point is to ennoble the successive in contemporaneity. To have been young, then to have grown older, and then finally to die is a mediocre existence, for the animal also has that merit. But to unite the elements of life in contemporaneity, that is precisely the task.”6 The key, we shall see, is to choose oneself in one’s “eternal validity.”7 But that will entail concreteness. Earlier, in his ethical second half of Either/Or, he provides ample exposition of the theme. When has a person chosen himself ethically? “Not until a person in his choice has taken himself upon himself, has put on himself, has totally interpenetrated himself so that every movement he makes is accompanied by a consciousness of responsibility for himself.”8 Such a person is “sovereign” over himself, “transparent” to himself.9 Calvin Schragg’s summary sentence can serve us: “In Kierkegaard’s narrative of the self, it is the act of choosing that centralizes the self and occasions its unity and continuity.”10 That choosing, the exercise of power in freedom’s awesome responsibility and the calling to contemporaneity via repetition, will be Kierkegaard’s constant drumbeat. How, then, does a self come to be free, to act freely? What elements come together in any moment in freedom? Kierkegaard provides a tutorial in the coming about of freedom. I will present his understanding of freedom in a human self, drawing particularly on The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death. First, though, I pause for a moment to note the remarkable efficacy of these just-mentioned books. Looking back at them from the perspective of the twenty-first century, it is particularly striking that Kierkegaard...

Share