Individual Essence

Developing the conception of individual essence, or selfhood, which is integral to the view of love that the project defends, the chapter builds on three ideas from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death and suggests that each person possesses the quality of selfhood. This quality amounts to a specific version, unique to each person, of personhood or God’s image; it is complex (in being the integration of many other qualities) and is primarily possessed in a state of a potential. This potential is termed “the kernel of individuality.” The potential is “eternal”: it is invariant and independent of contingent circumstances. Its actualization, however, takes place in “the world”—and hence is changeable and contingent—resulting in what is termed “individual persona.” The latter, then, is the actualized state of one’s individual essence, and it is this that we encounter when we experience a person as an individual, as a self.