ETHICS to undertake the formation of one’s true self, where ‘self ’ means something like a freely chosen character Instead of merely developing one’s talents one follows a vocation The ethical life is a life of duty; of duty, however, not externally imposed but internally realized The proper development of the individual involves the internalization of universal law Only when the individual himself is the universal, only then can the ethical be realised This is the secret of conscience; it is the secret the individual life shares with itself, that is at one and the same time an individual life and also the universal The person who regards life ethically sees the universal, and the person who lives ethically expresses his life in the universal; he makes himself into the universal man, not by divesting himself of his concretion, for then he would be nothing at all, but by clothing himself in it and permeating it with the universal (E/O 547) In grammars of foreign languages, some particular word is chosen as a paradigm to illustrate the way that nouns decline and verbs conjugate The words chosen have no particular priority over any other noun and verb, but they teach us something about every noun and verb In a similar sense, Vilhelm says, ‘Everyone can, if he wants, become a paradigm man, not by wiping out his contingency but by remaining in it and ennobling it But he ennobles it by choosing it’ (E/O 552) The pattern that he lays out to be followed leads through the acquisition of personal virtues, through the civic virtues, and ends finally with the religious virtues The man whom Kierkegaard most often chooses as a paradigm of the ethical person is Socrates His life illustrates the fact that the ethical stage may make strict demands on the individual, and call for heroic selfsacrifice Judge Vilhelm does not offer us Kierkegaard’s last word on morality, because in his system the ethical is not the highest category Kierkegaard himself neither took a job nor got married, which are the two marks of the ethical life Because of his own and his family’s history he felt incapable of the total sharing of all secrets which he thought was essential to a good marriage Faced with the demands made by the ethical life, Kierkegaard tells us, the individual becomes vividly conscious of human weakness; he may try to overcome it by strength of will, but find himself unable to so He becomes aware that his own powers are insufficient to meet the demands of the moral law This brings him to a sense of guilt and a 236