QUOTES FROM Søren Kierkegaard's THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH
"Generally speaking, consciousness, i.e. consciousness of self, is the decisive criterion of the self. The more consciousness, the more self; the more consciousness, the more will, and the more will the more self. A man who has no will at all is no self; the more will he has, the more consciousness of self he has also." - I feel many incels / ND have an overwhelming consciousness BUT a lack of WILL to overcome themselves. The WILL should always be greater than the consciousness, if not, the sufferer will be impotent and immobile. Hikkimori / incel / autist described perfectly.
"One who without affectation says that he is in despair is after all a little bit nearer, a dialectical step nearer to being cured than all those who are not regarded and do not regard themselves as being in despair. But precisely this is the common situation (as the physician of souls will doubtless concede), that the majority of men live without being thoroughly conscious that they are spiritual beings — and to this is referable all the security, contentment with life, etc., etc., which precisely is despair. Those, on the other hand, who say that they are in despair are generally such as have a nature so much more profound that they must become conscious of themselves as spirit, or such as by the hard vicissitudes of life and its dreadful decisions have been helped to become conscious of themselves as spirit — either one or the other, for rare is the man who truly is free from despair." - I was conscious from a young age but I definitely fall into the latter group who were "forced" into full awakening from a hard life.
"The law for the development of the self with respect to knowledge, in so far as it is true that the self becomes itself, is this, that the increasing degree of knowledge corresponds with the degree of self-knowledge, that the more the self knows, the more it knows itself, if this does not occur, then the more knowledge increases, the more it becomes a kind of inhuman knowing for the production of which man’s self is squandered." - I thought of eggheads with this one. The engineer who is "smart" knows many facts, but is unaware that his pocket protector causes him to be the subject of ridicule wherever he goes...
"When the will becomes fantastic, the self likewise is volatilized more and more. In this case the will does not constantly become concrete in the same degree that it is abstract, in such a way that the more it is infinitized in purpose and resolution, the more present and contemporaneous with itself does it become in the small part of the task which can be realized at once, so that in being infinitized it returns in the strictest sense to its self, so that what is farthest from itself (when it is most infinitized in purpose and resolution) is in the same instant nearest to itself in accomplishing the infinitely small part of the task which can be done even today, even at this hour, even at this instant." - he is describing this as negative, but to me it could be a positive trait, the infinitization of the will actualizing a distant goal every second in the present, sounds powerful...
