A Night With Kierkegaard

Sickness Unto Death:

-self as self-relating relation of temporal and eternal

Upbuilding Discourses:

-soul as contradiction of temporal and eternal

Concept of Anxiety:

-self as synthesis of psyche(soul) and body, constituted by spirit

Ergo: soul not the eternal

-perhaps the soul is the original contradiction/relation, without second relation -- the "immediate relation"

-second relation (relation's relating to itself) is the spirit/self -- "relation as becoming"

How can man be a self and also the soul of which the self is part?

Answer: he is a soul as he is a body -- as a synthesis, peripherally. Authentically self through spirit; inauthentically (passively) without spirit (spiritlessness).

I am my body essentially because I have senses and am constituted by matter.

I am a soul because I have consciousness, meaning, reason, possibility, etc., and am constituted immaterially.

*I am simultaneously both, however, but only through spirit or freedom, which is my self in the deepest sense, and comprehensively all these elements are my self in the broadest sense.

Dualism: one over the other; Cartesian "ghost in the machine", soul controlling the body.

Is eternity identified as God or the soul?

-If God, then the soul must be other than eternity

-If the soul, then the soul is eternity

UD:

Soul as a contradiction of temporal and eternal

CA:

Self as synthesis of soul and body

Ergo: Self is a self-relating relation of a contradiction of temporality and eternity and a body

(temporality--->soul<---eternity)----->self<-----body

Soul as subject to temporality by virtue of being associated with a self which exists by definition within time.

-As if the soul were defined according to temporality and eternity *after* spirit defined selfhood.

Could it be that God provides salvation for the soul in the sense that He provides us with possibilities?

-When I have possibilities, I breathe.

-Too much possibility is a form of despair; absurd to think the soul fully exists during despair. It is dampened in despair.

--This points to the soul as more than eternity/possibility/infinity; if it were such, then losing the self in these extremes would mean the fulness of the soul. However, the soul is dampened by despair; ergo, the soul is not this.

:. Soul is found in a balance as well -- contradiction/synthesis

Perhaps the soul is the self in a more peripheral form:

(1)Spirit, (2) soul, (3) body

(1) Relation self-relating (active), (2) the relation (immediate), (3) an element in the relation

If the body is an element in the original relation, what is the other element? Soul.

How can the soul be a part of the synthesis and also the synthesis?

The soul must be a *different* synthesis than the synthesis for the self. Cannot be the "self in a more peripheral form."

"According to Kierkegaard’s anthropology, man is a paradox, an inter-esse which is composed of contradictory aspects (body and soul, time and eternity, necessity and possibility)*. The self is a third, synthetic element which founds these opposite aspects and holds them together. This means that the self is the opposite of an immediate given self (defined by Kierkegaard as a synthesis between these contradictory aspects). Only the awareness of the contradiction makes subjectivity concrete. The more self-development, the more contradictory existence, and the other way around" (Moonen, "Touching From a Distance: In Search of the Self in Henry and Kierkegaard")

*"Man is always both aspects at the same time, so there is no dualism involved: man cannot be one aspect without the other. If he is not capable of understanding the significance of temporality, then eternity in him will also fade."

"Freedom means to be capable" ( appendix to CA)

We must eschew the belief that we are more our souls than our bodies. It is not the case as Lewis said, and virtually every half-thinking contemporary Christian believes, that we properly don't have souls but rather are souls which have bodies. To be one is to be the other; to place emphasis on one is to deemphasize the other, to negate the other, and in doing so we lose both.