What Does It Mean To Be Human

What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to have consciousness? What does it mean to be a self in light of the concreteness of humanity and the spirit of consciousness? Soren Kierkegaard writes, “A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way, a human being is still not self.”1 Defining the meaning of the self requires a third party to properly contextualize this synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. For the Christian the God of the Bible, who is the one God being revealed through the three persons: Father, Son and Holy Ghost, is this third party. Encountering God enables …show more content…
Kierkegaard writes, “The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself which can be done only through the relationship to God.”4 The nature of the synthesis of the self requires something outside the self to contextualize the self in a way that instills meaning to the self. As the individual confronts the nature of this synthesis the response is one of what Kierkegaard terms as …show more content…
The self cannot independently define itself completely so the self seeks to derive the meaning of itself in the other. The denial of God in despair leads the self to seek out context from other sources, principally the other. Levinas writes, “The self is the very crisis of the being of beings in the human. A crisis of being, not because the meaning of this verb would also have to be understood in the secret semantics and would call on ontology, but because I myself already ask myself in my being is justified, if the Da of my Dasein is not already the usurpation of someone's place.”5 The concern for the other, or rather the attempt to rationalize being of the self compared to the existence of the other, leads to the despair that the existence of the self comes at the expense of the other. This rationalization only leads to a deepening of despair because of the lack of relation of the self to the being that brought it into existence,

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