his pseudonymous Anti-Climacus, an advanced Christian, appropriates the seemingly arcane language about the self being “a relation that relates itself to itself,” a vocabulary common in German and Danish Idealist philosophy suggesting that the life of an individual should aim at synthesizing an ideal self with the concrete characteristics of the individual, including historical location, biological endowments, social context, psychological traits, and so on (SUD, 13-42). In a sense, an individual is not born as a “self,” but becomes a self by trying to actualize an ideal in the concrete
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