The Structure of Consciousness

Abstract

For a thinker so centrally concerned with the irreducibility of human subjectivity, Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms devote relatively little time to the nature of consciousness — the key category in terms of which subjectivity is generally discussed in contemporary philosophy. Kierkegaard’s only sustained treatment of the issue of consciousness occurs in a very short, unusually schematic section of the unfinished, unpublished Johannes Climacus, or, De Omnibus Dubitandum Est. This apparent lack of attention is perhaps surprising, as the pseudonyms who do the dialectical work of outlining the schematics of Kierkegaard’s self-ontology make several claims that appear to centralize the role of consciousness in the development of selfhood. Indeed, in The Sickness Unto Death, the progression from what we might term ‘basic’ consciousness (something like mere sentience, and which, as we will see below, Kierkegaard claims hardly warrants the name ‘consciousness’ at all) to self-consciousness is coterminous with becoming a self:

In general, consciousness, self-consciousness, is decisive in relation to the self. The more consciousness, the more self; the more consciousness, the more will; the more will, the more self. A person who has no will at all is not a self; but the more will he has, the more self-consciousness he has also.

(SUD, 29/SKS 11, 145)