The Sickness Unto Death

Soren Kierkegaard's (S.K.) The Sickness Unto Death ) is, among other things, an exploration of the concept of selfhood, consciousness and ultimately, despair. For S.K., selfhood is constituted by, or in, consciousness itself. The self exists by varying degrees, these degrees contingent upon and in accordance with one's own consciousness of selfhood. There can be no self that an agent is not conscious of; the self exists by virtue of a self awareness, or self-consciousness. And further, as S.K. says in the opening section of "S Unto D", the "spirit is the self", and the self a "relation which relates to itself" (43). It is this characterization that forces the conclusion that a self "must either have established itself or been established by something else" (43). Despair, then, is a sickness of the self, and this despair can have two "authentic" forms; each form relates directly to a level of consciousness, to a relation to the self (understood as an attitude toward oneself) and to God.

Of these two authentic forms of despair, one is the despair of not wanting (or willing) to be oneself, the other, the despair of wanting (or willing) to be oneself. The despair of wanting to be oneself is, in some sense, the desire to be ones own self, that is, a self that does not owe its existence to God. It is a denial of our contingency, an unwillingness to accept that our identity is the result of our relation to God. In this, the despair of wanting to be oneself is the despair

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erlasting, as eternity has an indefatigable claim on every individual; "if there were nothing eternal in a man, he would simply be unable to despair" (51). This condition of despair, no matter how perceptible it may or may not be to the individual, is nonetheless emblematic of that individual's very condition. In this, un conscious despair offers no protection, and certainly no salvation; on the contrary, it is merely a forestalling of an inevitable awareness. Eventually, the unconscious despairer will find that he is in fact in despair, and his "torment will still be that he cannot be rid of his self" (51). If this torment did not formerly plague him, this is only because he had "succeeded in altogether losing his self" (51), but no matter: the self always comes home to roost. A return to self is a return to conscious despair, and so unconscious despair has less to do with despair as it exists than it does with our own sense of self. The despair exists whether we actually perceive it or not. It is thus important to note, as S.K. does, that to be unconscious of despair is in itself a form of despair (53); as with sickness, one is no less ill for being ignorant of the disease. However, it is whether or not despair is actu

Category: Philosophy - T