To the question “who or what are we,” Kierkegaard suggests that we are beings with an intrinsic understanding of ethics (of what’s good or right). The content of our personality emerges when we behave either in accordance with these ethics or in accordance with our own desires.
Reading The Sickness Unto Death helped clarify a question I faced while reading another Kierkegaard text, Either/Or, in a different philosophy class. One aspect of the interplay between A (the man who lives for sensual pleasure) and B (the man who lives for ethical commitments) was B’s point that “choice itself is decisive for personality’s content; in choice personality immerses itself in what is chosen, and when it does not choose it wastes consumptively away” (Either/Or, 11). B means that the self emerges when we make commitments (choices); we perform actions, and those actions define who we are. The issue with B’s argument—an issue relayed by my class—is that B looks towards traditional institutions such as marriage and law as the stage for ethical choice (his task is “to show the aesthetic value of marriage” pp.7). It is not evident that actually existing legal marriage really embodies the utmost ethical good. At this point, I doubted the validity of a statement that read something like this: the self can only emerge through commitments made in traditional social institutions. This seemed to fit B’s argument.
In Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard seems to do two things with B’s argument. First, he accepts that the self is defined by the choices we make. Second, he provides a much broader framework for the self to make choices. At the very end of the passage from Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard (writing as Anti-Climacus) argues that “to understand and to understand are two things” because to understand without doing the thing that is understood is different from mere understanding (367). There’s a definition of understanding where you merely accept something as truth. This is different from a kind of understanding that impacts your actions. This conclusion, Anti-Climacus argues, points to “the ethical conception of everyday life” (369). The purpose of this distinction becomes clear as Anti-Climacus points out that humans can understand an ethical choice and then make a different, unethical choice. This is the difference between knowing and “willing” (370). Anti-Climacus explains if a person does not choose an ethical course of action at the moment that course becomes clear, their “willing appraises what’s known” (370). Willing is related to the “lower nature of man” (their desires or their vanity), and once it simmers, it eclipses ethical choices. To think is not to be; to choose is to be. This is a substantive critique of Descarte’s premise cogito ergo sum (as Anti-Climacus points out at the bottom of page 369) because to think is not to be; to choose is to be. This gets at a larger philosophical question of who or what are we: we know what ethical choice is; we have the ability to make or to reject ethical choice; we are what we choose.
In Either/Or, B’s asserts that ethical choices occur within institutional frameworks; the “criterion” of the self is a legal marriage. Anti-Climacus broadens “criterion” to mean any direct relationship in which we feel an obligation. He writes, “The criterion for the self is always: that directly before which it is a self” (363). Importantly, relationships must be equal or co-realizing in order to serve as a criterion. They have to face the self “directly.” This is why, in the relationship between “a cattleman” and a “his cattle,” the criterion “is lacking” (363). If the criterion for the self is a lord/bondsman relationship, then there really isn’t a self; the self can’t express itself. Going back to my qualms with B, Anti-Climacus might contend that legal marriage is a low criterion because it does not require that both spouses give each other equal recognition. The choices that play out in marriage don’t always produce a self because spouses have unequal legal obligations to each other (at least under antiquated marital tenets). Moving from Kierkegaard’s first point, then, we are what we choose, and our choices are measured against a criterion of equality.
