German idealism and Fichte's theory of the self

German idealism arose as a response to powerful criticisms of Kant's philosophy.Footnote ³ Although Kant published the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, it was not until the pantheism controversy, instigated by Jacobi in 1785, that Kant's critical philosophy gained widespread popularity. This was a result of K. L. Reinhold's Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, the publication of which was, says Karl Ameriks, ‘a world-changing event’.Footnote ⁴

Reinhold's Letters offered a popularized form of Kant's philosophy, tailored to fit the context created by the Pantheism controversy, i.e. a context in which German intellectuals were shaken by serious doubts as to the compatibility of the critical reason of the Aufklärung and faith and social stability.Footnote ⁵ Reinhold's interpretation attempted to show that, in Kant's language (slightly modified) from the second edition of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had truly critiqued reason to make room for faith; critical reason need not lead to atheism and fatalism, as Jacobi maintained, for the proper route to God was not through reason but rather through morality. Following the publication of his Letters on the Kantian System, Reinhold became a celebrity practically overnight. However, his initially uncritical enthusiasm for Kant metamorphosed into the realization that Kant had, from Reinhold's perspective, failed to secure his system's foundations.Footnote ⁶ This led Reinhold to develop his Elementarphilosophie, which became the target of the criticisms that would lead Fichte to develop his Wissenschaftslehre.Footnote ⁷

A central concern that Reinhold and Fichte shared with Kant, and that led them to believe that their major systematic overhauls of Kant's critical philosophy did not prevent them from being Kantians, was autonomy, or self-determining freedom.Footnote ⁸ Kant attempted to defend our knowledge of nature, conceived along deterministic Newtonian grounds, while also claiming that the self, conceived as a member of the noumenal world and a citizen of the kingdom of ends, was rationally self-determining. His transcendental idealism was partially an attempt to harmonize these two apparently contradictory theses, to secure autonomy while defending our knowledge of the natural world. As Reinhold's Letters demonstrate, it was the ‘results’ of the Kantian system that were so relevant for those who feared the dilemma of choosing either dogmatic obscurantism or fidelity to the principles of the Aufklärung, a fidelity that would ineluctably lead to nihilism. Yet the chief result of Kant's system, autonomy, could only be defended by rejecting significant aspects of Kant's critical philosophy, like the thing-in-itself. As Frederick Beiser has noted, the apparent dogmatism and ‘revival of metaphysics’ in German idealism was in fact, from the idealists' perspective, the only move that would save Kant's system from its critics.Footnote ⁹

Although Fichte would have denied that he was regressing to pre-critical metaphysics, he believed that it was crucial that he modify Kant's system to preserve its tenability in the face of the serious criticism offered by G. E. Schulze in his Aenesidemus,Footnote ¹⁰ a task from which his theory of the self originated. Schulze's criticisms of Kant and Reinhold in Aenesidemus had a profound impact on the young Fichte, shaking the foundations of his philosophy.Footnote ¹¹ Fichte's response to Schulze, the Aenesidemus Review, was, says Beiser, ‘a seminal text for the development of his later philosophy’.Footnote ¹² Among the key insights in the Aenesidemus Review, the most important for our concerns is the significance and nature of self-consciousness.

Fichte's development of self-consciousness into the fundamental principle of his philosophy marks him as a quintessentially modern philosopher, for in the importance he assigns to self-consciousness he stands firmly in the modern tradition. Manfred Frank observes that ‘the lowest common denominator of modern philosophy … is self-consciousness’.Footnote ¹³ What is significant about Fichte is thus not simply his emphasis on self-consciousness, but is rather his insight into the structure of self-consciousness.

Fichte's advance on previous thinking about self-consciousness, what Dieter Henrich calls his ‘original insight’,Footnote ¹⁴ was his development of a theory of self-consciousness that was not subject to the weakness of what Frank calls the ‘reflection model’ of self-consciousness.Footnote ¹⁵ The ‘essential feature’ of this theory ‘is that it interprets the consciousness that we have of ourselves on the model of representation: as the result of a turning-back of a representation onto itself, which transforms the representation in question into an object’.Footnote ¹⁶ The problem with this theory, in brief, is that it is unable to account for the identity of the subject with itself prior to its reflection upon its self as an object. As Frank puts it: ‘Every reflection occurs between two distinct terms; its [the reflection theory's] paradoxical character consists in the fact that it must then deny this difference, otherwise the goal reached by my turning back on myself would be something, or someone, else.’Footnote ¹⁷

Schulze had criticized Reinhold's foundational principle of representation, showing that, for reasons related to the ‘paradoxical character’ of any representational theory of consciousness noted by Frank, it could not play the role Reinhold assigned to it, and it violated key aspects of the critical philosophy.Footnote ¹⁸ While Fichte realized that Reinhold's theory had a serious weakness in the way it conceived of self-consciousness, he did not, as Neuhouser observes, think that Schulze had decisively refuted a critical theory of consciousness. Rather, for Fichte:

It was this attempt to develop an account of self-awareness that led Fichte to argue for a form of intellectual intuition and to criticize Schulze in the Aenesidemus Review, for it was in this review that Fichte sketched his insight into the nature of self-consciousness that he would develop in the his 1794 Wissenschaftslehre and throughout his philosophical career.

According to Frederick Beiser, Fichte thought that Schulze hypostatized the Kantian subject by regarding it as something that could exist apart from our knowledge of it. Against this idea of the subject, Fichte argued that:

Beiser notes that this principle ‘means that the ego does not exist, or at least does not fully realize its nature, apart from and prior to its self-conceptions; its very essence and existence is constituted by its self-conceptions’.Footnote ²¹ Thus, against the idea that a subject could exist apart from a relation to itself that is always already present, Fichte characterizes the ‘basic structure of the mind’, according to Henrich, as ‘self-referential’. In the Science of Knowledge (1794), in which Fichte gives systematic formulation to this theory, he says that ‘[t]he self exists only insofar as it is conscious of itself’.Footnote ²² As Henrich observes, Fichte was the first thinker to develop a theory devoted to self-consciousness, and his ideas here had a significant historical impact, leading to ‘the theories of the self … in existentialism, as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre elaborate them’.Footnote ²³

Flowing directly from the self-referential structure of the mind, another key aspect of Fichte's theory of subjectivity is, according to Henrich, the oppositional structure of the mind.Footnote ²⁴ While this could be seen as a way of merely restating the mind's self-referential structure, by arguing that the mind is inherently oppositional, Fichte takes a significant step towards altering the way we think of human identity. Fundamentally, the self or I, for Fichte, is not pure unity. Rather, the self exists inherently in a subject–object relationship to itself. Essential to consciousness is the relation of the subject to itself. Fichte explains this when responding to an imaginary interlocutor's question: ‘What was I then before I came to self-consciousness?’. After he first states that without self-consciousness there is no self, he explains that the question ‘is based on a confusion between the self as subject, and the self as object of reflection for an absolute subject, and is itself utterly improper’. Then, in language which anticipates Kierkegaard's description of the self, he states: ‘The self presents itself to itself, to that extent imposes on itself the form of a presentation, and is now for the first time a something, namely an object.’Footnote ²⁵

What is crucial here is that for Fichte the subject that presents the self to itself as object never does so apart from its positing of the self as such. That is, to speak of the absolute subject positing itself is to speak of the positing of self-consciousness (awareness of one's self as subject–object relationship) along with the self; though they are distinct, they are inseparable. Thus as Henrich says, ‘Fichte concludes that there is no way of finding out what the mind is unless one makes reference to the fact that the mind is already related to itself. It is by virtue of this fact that the mind is defined.’Footnote ²⁶ Contrary to the tradition which sees the self's reflexivity as somehow in relation to an already established subject, which then reflects on itself as an object, Fichte argues that a self just is that entity which is by its nature composed of the subject–object relation; thus, the primordial character of the self is inherently relational and specifically oppositional.Footnote ²⁷

Fichte's account of the self, though striking and original, raises a question that would vex him for the duration of his philosophical career: if the self posits the I, yet also posits the I as limited by the not-I, how is the self able to posit itself, especially since its ‘self’ is necessarily in a relationship with the not-self? Though this question applies generally to Fichte's account of the I-world relationship, it also applies to his account of self-consciousness. The basic problem is that consciousness is a unity of the subject–object relationship, and this relationship is somehow constitutive of, yet posited by, itself. Fichte's uneasy solution to this problem was the ‘absolute subject’.Footnote ²⁸ The finite or ‘empirical’ self is not to be simply identified with the absolute self, the self that posits the I and the not-I. Both the I and not-I must be posited within the (absolute) self, a point Fichte insists on in the Science of Knowledge.Footnote ²⁹ Though it is beyond the scope of this article to explore the problems that the absolute subject poses for Fichte's philosophy, it is imperative to understand that Fichte was at least partly driven to the doctrine of the absolute self to avoid denying his fundamental principle that the I is essentially self-existent: it is what it posits itself to be, or as Fichte puts it, ‘self-positing and existence are one and the same’.Footnote ³⁰

Fichte's deeply problematic emphasis on the self's positing itself absolutely should be understood in the context of the central motivation of his philosophy: to articulate and defend autonomy. The flights of theoretical abstraction characteristic of Fichte's thought connect directly to what Günter Zöller identifies as the thread that weaves its way through all of Fichte's work and life: ‘Fichte's basic belief in the supreme value of free self-determination’.Footnote ³¹ As Neuhouser observes, Fichte's idea that the subject constitutes itself through self-positing ‘ultimately rests upon his (and Kant's) view of the spontaneous, unconditioned nature of subjective activities’. On this view, ‘the activity of self-positing that constitutes the subject is uncaused; it has no ground in anything external to itself’.Footnote ³²

We can anticipate our discussion of Kierkegaard by noting two things: first, the language which scholars use to describe Fichte's position, as well as his own language, already suggests an obvious connection to the opening paragraphs of SD. Fichte is concerned with how the self grounds or accounts for its existence, particularly in light of the illuminating but problematic theory of self-consciousness that he provides. Second, Fichte's motivation as a good Kantian and idealist, is, as noted above, to develop a viable theory of self-determination. In order to accomplish this task, Fichte finds it necessary to build on Kant's theory of self-consciousness, constructing his entire philosophy around the self-positing nature of the self. Thus, while Fichte's theory of self-consciousness is itself a philosophical development and, as both Henrich and Frank see it, an improvement,Footnote ³³ Fichte uses it to articulate and defend autonomy, and it is this motivation that leads him to insist on the problematic idea of the self's externally ungrounded nature.

From Jena to Copenhagen

But how do we move from Fichte, who delivered the first public version of his Wissenschaftslehre in 1794 to his students at Jena and died in 1814, to Kierkegaard, who matriculated at the University of Copenhagen in 1830? While this is a question to which English-speaking Kierkegaard scholarship has given minimal attention,Footnote ³⁴ by selectively sketching the influence and reception of Fichte's theory, we may establish a context within which the influence of Fichte in SD will become plausible, based not only on the internal evidence in SD itself and its similarity to Fichte's thought, but also based on the intellectual context that Kierkegaard inhabited, i.e. post-Kantian philosophy, including both German idealism and early German romanticism (Frühromantik).

The point of such an historical sketch is not to attempt to establish a direct genetic link from Fichte to Kierkegaard, for as Michelle Kosch has observed, ‘Fichte was more than enough “in the air” both in Copenhagen and Berlin (where Kierkegaard did some work) that [one need not] seek a specific written source for Kierkegaard's access to his thought.’Footnote ³⁵ Rather, its purpose is to deepen and broaden our view of the intellectual framework that Kierkegaard inhabited, thereby granting us more clarity in discerning his complicated, and by no means merely antipathetic, relation to post-Kantian thought.

Attending Fichte's 1794 Jena lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre were a number of young men who would become the leading figures of Frühromantik. Aware of and influenced by Fichte's theory of the self, they pursued the question of the identity of the subject in their own thought and writings.Footnote ³⁶ For both Friedrich Hölderlin and Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), for example, the oppositional structure of consciousness was a key part of their philosophy.Footnote ³⁷ Although the Frühromantiker recognized Fichte's advance on the reflection model of consciousness and his insights into the identity of the self, they by no means accepted the radically subjective implication of his theory of absolute self-positing. As Frank notes, the traditional way of viewing their relationship to Fichte is that they outdid ‘Fichte's alleged subjectivism’. Moreover, he says, ‘this view of romanticism’, long dominant in the scholarly tradition, ‘actually reverses the main current of the early romantic continuation of the Fichtean project’.Footnote ³⁸ Indeed, focusing on Hölderlin and Novalis due to the ‘thoroughness and clarity’ of their thought, Frank says that they issued the following criticism of Fichte: although ‘he had been lucid enough to spot the shortcomings of the reflection model of self-consciousness’, he ‘had ultimately failed to find a way around them’.Footnote ³⁹

This criticism, which Frank argues was reasonable and even to an extent acknowledged by Fichte,Footnote ⁴⁰ moved the romantics away from the subjectivist implication of Fichte's theory to an emphasis that we predominantly associate with Schelling, Kierkegaard, and the existentialist tradition. Karl Ameriks summarizes the early romantics' ‘key claim’:

Kierkegaard, as we will see, was far closer to the romantics than he realized.

Kierkegaard, Fichte, and The Sickness Unto Death

As we turn to Kierkegaard and his theory of the self in SD, it will be helpful to survey the English-speaking research on Fichte and Kierkegaard. Currently, David J. Kangas's article, ‘J. G. Fichte: from transcendental ego to existence’ is the only overview of Kierkegaard's relationship to Fichte in English.Footnote ⁴² Based on references to Fichte in journal entries and published works, Kangas characterizes Kierkegaard's relationship to Fichte as one of both appropriation and criticism.Footnote ⁴³ Though he acknowledges the relative sparseness of direct references to Fichte in Kierkegaard's writings, he says that Fichte could be an overlooked resource for Kierkegaard scholarship.Footnote ⁴⁴ Kangas proceeds to note ‘convergences’ between Kierkegaard and Fichte's thought in five areas.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, the theory of the self presented in SD is discussed only briefly in the section on ‘Divergences between Fichte and Kierkegaard’, which does not mention Fichte's theory of the self's structure.Footnote ⁴⁶ Broadly speaking, however, Kangas effectively establishes that Kierkegaard was conversant with Fichte's philosophy and significantly influenced by it, although the only work of Fichte's that we are sure he read is The Vocation of Man. Most if not all of the above data has been recognized prior to Kangas, and thus the value of his article is primarily for those unfamiliar with either scholarship on idealism or with any of the German literature on the subject.Footnote ⁴⁷

With our treatment of Fichte and the reception of his theory by early romanticism, we are now in a position to read Kierkegaard's theory of the self in a new light. Kierkegaard's theory of the self is explicated in six paragraphs in SD, the first, and most famous, of which, we will now analyse:

In this paragraph we have two relations. The first relation is synthetic, and is composed of the three oppositions of infinite/finite, temporal/eternal, and freedom/necessity. The second relation is that of self-consciousness, or self-reference. In light of the our discussion of Fichte's conception of a synthesis, it is clear that Kierkegaard's account of the synthesis as a relation between three pairs of relata accords with a Fichtean,Footnote ⁴⁸ not Hegelian, notion of synthesis (mediation). For here the opposition is not cancelled and elevated to a higher level; rather ‘synthesis’ simply denotes the unity of two opposites, whose tension is preserved. This synthetic relation then relates to itself,Footnote ⁴⁹ and Kierkegaard makes it clear that the self is not the synthetic relation but the act of self-reference, the ‘relation's relating itself to itself’. Thus the self is relational, and, specifically, oppositional in structure. For the self is not merely the synthetic relation of opposing properties, it is self-consciousness of that relation. Like Fichte, then, Kierkegaard builds self-consciousness and its oppositional structure into his definition of the self. The subject–object relationship is fundamental to the self.

The second paragraph is an explanation of the first. Kierkegaard explains that if the only relation is that of the synthesis of the two relata (e.g. finite/infinite), then this is a negative unity or ‘third’; this explains his statement that considered as a synthesis, ‘a human being is still not a self’. A positive unity is where the synthesis is characterized by a second relation, namely a relation to itself. As we observed, then, the self is thus far characterized by a synthetic relation and that relation's self-reference. It is crucial to realize that Kierkegaard is, so far, in agreement with Fichte's analysis of the structure and significance of self-consciousness. What this means, however, is that Kierkegaard is on a trajectory to run into the same problem Fichte did, namely, how one explains the self's foundational structure as oppositional and self-conscious.

And, indeed, the third paragraph, anticipating this problem, speaks directly to it: ‘Such a relation that relates itself to itself, a self, must either have established itself or been established by another.’ The logic of the theory of the self given in the first paragraph demands this issue be raised, and here Kierkegaard avoids the numerous problems Fichte engendered when dealing with this issue. As we saw above, Fichte's concept of the absolute ego was an attempt to explain how the self could posit (or establish) itself. Yet how the absolute and finite self related to each other created significant, arguably insurmountable, problems for Fichte's philosophy. Kierkegaard is willing to contravene the idealist conception of autonomy, which both Kant's transcendental and Fichte's absolute ego attempted to preserve, while affirming the essential contingency of the self. Thus, he says the ‘human self is such a derived, established relation, a relation that relates itself to itself, and in relating itself to itself relates to another’ (SD, 14–15). This is Kierkegaard's major modification of Fichte's theory, the first principle of which is the self's positing of itself. Fichte's idealism has to explain how all experience of necessity (e.g. the external world) and otherness are compatible with the idea that everything that is is posited within the self. By contrast, for Kierkegaard the self does not posit itself but is rather posited by another.

The implication of being posited by another is that there are now fundamentally three relations within the self, one which is synthetic, one which is self-referential, and a third which is the relation of the self to God, that is, ‘the power that established it’. The first synthetic relation and that of self-consciousness generally pose a problem to which the third is a solution.Footnote ⁵⁰ The idea of the self as synthetic relation of opposites like the finite and the infinite raises the question of how such a relation comes to exist. For Fichte, such a relation is ultimately a result of the absolute self-positing of the subject, as we saw above. But if you remove the absolute subject from an essentially Fichtean theory of the self, how is one to explain this primordial synthetic relation? Moreover, how is one to explain this relation and its self-referential structure?

To ask these questions is to understand more precisely the role that God plays in the constitution of the Kierkegaardian self. To think of God as the being who gives unity and existence to the synthetic self-referential relation that is a human being is simply to understand what it means for Kierkegaard to say that the self has been ‘established by another’. Whereas Fichte would have accorded all of this power to the absolute ego, Kierkegaard transfers it to the power that establishes the self. So while the self is genuinely a creation of a kind, it is not its own creator but instead finds itself in and as a relation that it could not itself have constituted.Footnote ⁵¹ For Fichte, to be a self is to be what one posits oneself to be (at least this is the ideal); whereas for Kierkegaard, to be a self is to become what one already is, ‘which can only be done through the relationship to God’ (SD, 30).

Thus, while Kierkegaard is deeply influenced by Fichte, on the crucial point of the self's grounding, Kierkegaard reveals the influence of his quarrel with idealist autonomy as well as the influence of Schelling.Footnote ⁵² Kosch views the ‘complex of problems surrounding the accounts of freedom and autonomy in German idealism’ as being ‘utterly central to Kierkegaard's philosophical concerns and to his project in the pseudonymous works’.Footnote ⁵³ Central to Kierkegaard's theory of agency (the foundations of which we have been looking at in his theory of the self), according to Kosch, is a concern to provide a superior view of agency than those offered in German idealism. Kierkegaard's theory of the self (and agency, which I will refer to under the ‘self’ for the sake of simplicity) allows him to develop an account of despair and sin that constitutes an attack on Idealist theories of agency.

On Kosch's reading of Kierkegaard's project, Kierkegaard saw idealist metaphysics as leading to distorted visions of human agency. Kierkegaard shared with the idealists a ‘commitment to rejecting any metaphysics that precludes making sense of one's own activity in doing metaphysics (or anything else)’. But Kierkegaard ‘disagreed with Kant and the idealists’ about what metaphysical views could make sense of our agency partly because he would not replace the concept of freedom as spontaneity with the concept of freedom as self-determination.Footnote ⁵⁴ Significantly, as Kosch notes, Kierkegaard does affirm a kind of freedom (spontaneity), however, he does not regard it as implying radical self-determination. Indeed, on Kierekgaard's analysis, such a view of freedom is a form of despair. Despair, says Kierkgaard, ‘is not a simple misrelation but a misrelation in a relation that relates itself to itself and has been established by another’ (SD, 14).

Kierkegaard here emphasizes the fact that despair is not a problem with a part of the self; it is problem of the self as a whole, a mis-relation within the complete and positively defined structure of the self. Despair is thus bound up with our self-conceptions, our ways of consciously relating to our nature as we conceive it. On this account, a failure to conceive of one's nature properly would result in a failure to relate to oneself properly; the result of such a failure would be a wrong or flawed view of the self. Using different language but articulating a similar position, Kosch argues that ‘in all instances of despair described in The Sickness Unto Death … the person in despair has the wrong conceptions of himself as agent’. And that ‘in the most general sense despair will turn out to be the unwillingness to accept human agency with all of its particular conditions’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Thus, on Kosch's reading, the problem with autonomy is that it depends on and produces a distorted view of the self, such that we cannot account for features of agency that seem inescapable.

While I agree with Kosch's interpretation of despair, I believe that Kierkegaard's treatment of the self and despair can be further elucidated in light of Charles Taylor's work on human agency, which Kierkegaard in certain ways appears to anticipate.Footnote ⁵⁶ An insight central to Taylor's work on human agency is that human beings are self-interpreting, that is, that we form views of ourselves and these views of ourselves are not merely conceptions or interpretations of ourselves. Rather: ‘To say that man is a self-interpreting animal is not just to say that he has some compulsive tendency to form reflexive views of himself, but rather that as he is, he is always partly constituted by self-interpretation’.Footnote ⁵⁷ This idea of ‘self-interpretation’ provides a stronger way to describe what Kosch calls ‘conceptions’. Despair on this view is not merely a wrong conception of one's agency (although it is that); it is a false self-interpretation, and because our self-interpretations are partially constitutive of who we are as agents, we can speak of despair, as Kierkegaard does, as a state in which we exist, and not merely choices we make or even conceptions we have of ourselves.

Because the structure of the self is fundamentally given, however, our ability to determine the nature of our selves is limited, and it is precisely the presence of an already existing nature that constitutes the human ability to form false self-interpretations, and thus to be in despair and, when considering the self in relation to God, to be in sin. Thus, for Kierkegaard, normativity is not, as it is for Kant or Fichte, derivable from the agent's own willing. On this view, as Kosch notes, sin becomes inexplicable: ‘If the criterion of value is taken to be internal to the will it governs, in the sense of being the law of its operation or the condition of its effectiveness, then willful defiance of the standard is impossible and the idea of intentional, imputable deviations from it absurd.’Footnote ⁵⁸ Kierkegaard's insistence that the source of the self's existence and its nature derive from something external to the self provides the conditions for understanding not only moral evil but also any failure in self-interpretation. Adopting a false, or less than adequate, interpretation of a situation or object, such as the self, assumes that there are some criteria whereby the terms ‘false’ or ‘less than adequate’ derive their meaning.

If such criteria were ultimately only the result of the self's will, then the problem of explaining interpretive failure or inadequacy becomes intractable. For even if one were to concede that there are ‘givens’ of a sort, things that do not in any obvious sense stem from our willing, that does not mean these givens possess normative authority. Rather, such authority would have to derive from the agent's own will in order for autonomy to be preserved. Thus, all situations in which I interpret myself in a way that seems fundamentally inadequate to who I am as a human being are inexplicable as I experience them, viz. as a genuine tension or problem that is not merely the result of my willing to be two mutually exclusive things (a case of irrationality).

Kierkegaard's theory of the self and the nature of despair thus provides an illuminating way of understanding how external normativity need not be an instance of heteronomy: on his view, because the self is constituted by another, to properly account for what it means to be a self entails recognition of the fact that the self is not independent; it has external power woven into its being. On the picture of man often assumed by conceptions of autonomy, the self is an independent datum in the universe, upon which alien forces can exercise binding authority, thus resulting in heteronomy. Kierkegaard rejects this picture of man as a significant distortion of what it means to be a self; human beings are not independent in this way, and their dependence on someone outside of themselves has normative, as well as existential, implications.

It is important to realize that Kierkegaard's view of the self is not a complete repudiation of self-determining freedom. For while our nature is, in one sense, given, we have the freedom and responsibility to become a certain type of self that we are not simply in virtue of existing. The self that ‘rests transparently in the power that established it’ is a self that has become concrete, has become itself, as Kierkegaard says. And this task can only be accomplished ‘through the relationship to God’ (SD, 29–30). A discussion of how Kierkegaard conceives of the process of becoming concrete lies beyond the scope of this article. What is crucial for our purposes is the fact that the nature that Kierkegaard thinks that we have is not fully determinative. We can choose to acknowledge and determine ourselves (with God's help) in accord with it, or we can fail to do so, and the choice always remains our own. Thus our identity is, in a substantive sense, in our own hands.