Self-Love and Selfhood

Self-love is a central yet somewhat neglected theme in Works of Love . While the mission of this text is to distinguish the spiritual from the worldly conception of love, when it comes to self-love commentators tend to presuppose our merely worldly understanding. But there is an essential split between the spiritual and worldly conceptions of self-love, hence this cannot be what Kierkegaard has in mind. To illustrate this, I identify two places where the worldly conception and Kierkegaard’s claims clash. My aim is to explain the spirit’s conception of self-love, thereby to explain Kierkegaard’s claims. I propose to reduce self-love to "willing to be oneself," a self-relation figuring in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death . A person loves herself in that she wills to be herself. Yet she may do this properly or improperly: properly when she takes God as the criterion for the self she wills to be, improperly when she takes a merely human criterion. This account clarifies Kierkegaard’s claims about self-love in Works of Love.