Kierkegaard’s work on authenticity and his suggestion that each of us is to “become what one is” (1992 [1846]: 130), is best seen as linked to his critical stance towards a certain social reality and a certain essentialist trend in philosophical and scientific thought. On the one hand, he (1962 [1846]) condemned aspects of his contemporary social world, claiming that many people have come to function as merely place-holders in a society that constantly levels down possibilities to the lowest common denominator. In more contemporary terms, we can say that Kierkegaard provides a criticism of modern society as causing “inauthenticity”. Living in a society characterized by such “massification” lead to what he refers to as widespread “despair” that comes to the fore as spiritlessness, denial, and defiance. On the other hand, he rejected the view that a human being should be regarded as an object, as a substance with certain essential attributes.  Rather than being an item among others, Kierkegaard proposes to understand the self in relational terms: “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself…” (Kierkegaard 1980 [1849]:13).  This relation consists in the unfolding project of taking what we find ourselves with as beings in the world and imparting some meaning or concrete identity to our own life course. Thus, the self is defined by concrete expressions through which one manifests oneself in the world and thereby constitutes one’s identity over time. In Kierkegaard’s view, “becoming what one is” and evading despair and hollowness is not a matter of solitary introspection, but rather a matter of passionate commitment to a relation to something outside oneself that bestows one’s life with meaning. For Kierkegaard, as a religious thinker, this ultimate commitment was his defining relation to God. The idea is that passionate care about something outside ourselves gives diachronic coherence in our lives and provides the basis for the narrative unity of the self (Davenport 2012).