CONCEPT
The Self as Project
The self is not a fixed substance discovered but an activity continuously undertaken — becoming who you are through choices honored across time, never completed, always in process.
Kierkegaard's radical anthropology: the self is not a thing but a task, not a possession but a project under continuous construction. The opening of The Sickness Unto Death — 'the self is a relation that relates itself to itself' — establishes that selfhood is constituted through reflexive activity: the self choosing how to be itself, relating to its own existence, accepting or refusing the conditions it did not choose. This means the self is never finished. There is no completion state, no final version that can be achieved and then maintained through inertia. The self must be actively sustained through ongoing choice, commitment, and the confrontation with freedom. To stop choosing is not to preserve the self but to lose it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
This framework dissolves both the Cartesian self (a thinking substance behind the eyes) and the empiricist self (a bundle of perceptions with no underlying unity). For Kierkegaard, the self is neither substance nor bundle