Sickness Unto Death By Soren Kierkegaard Essay

Soren Kierkegaard was a 19th-century philosopher and Christian existentialist who talked about the meaning and causes of despair in his Sickness unto Death. His book is an exploration of consciousness, despair and self-hood. According to Kierkegaard, selfhood is constituted by, or in, consciousness itself. There are many varying degrees in which the self exists. These degrees are dependent upon and in accordance with one’s own consciousness of selfhood. There is no self that an agent cannot be conscious of; the self only exists by the virtue of self-awareness or self-consciousness. And further, as Kierkegaard says in the opening section of Sickness Unto Death, the “spirit is the self”, and the self a “relation which relates to itself” (43). It is this characterization that drives the verdict that a self “must either have established itself or been established by something else” (43). Therefore, despair is a sickness of the self, and it can have two authentic forms; each form relates directly to a caliber of consciousness, to a cognation to the self (as an attitude toward oneself) and to God.

With each of these forms of despair, one is the despair of not wanting (or eager) to be oneself and the other is the despair of wanting (or eager) to be oneself. The despair of wanting to be oneself is, in some sense, the craving to be one’s own self, that is, a self that does not owe its presence to God. It is a refusal of our possibility, an unwillingness to acknowledge that our character/identity is the consequence of our connection to God. In this, the despair of wanting to be oneself is the despair of a self that has been created by something else. The despair of not wanting to be oneself is, by distinction, the despair of a self that fe...

... middle of paper ...

...ast, this is simply because he had “succeeded in altogether losing his self” (51), yet regardless: the self comes home to settle all the time. A return to self is a comeback to conscious misery, and thus oblivious hopelessness has less to do with gloom as it exists than it does with our feeling of self. The despair exists whether we really see it or not.

It is hence critical to note, as Kierkegaard does, that to be unconscious of despondency is in itself a type of despair (53); as with sickness, one is no less sick for being uninformed of the sickness. Nevertheless, it is whether or not hopelessness is actually conscious that can distinguish one peculiarity of despair from another type of despair (59). This is a complex thought; the self can be in sadness whether it knows it or not, but then the knowing in some way or another characterizes the despair that exists.