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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 oneÆs 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 ôS Unto Dö, the ôspirit is the selfö, and the self a ôrelation which relates to itselfö (43). It is this characterization that forces the conclusion that a self ômust either have established itself or been established by something elseö (43). Despair, then, is a sickness of the self, and this despair can have two ôauthenticö 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 of a self that has been established by something else. The despair of not wanting to be oneself is, by contrast, the despair of a self that feels that it is self-established; in such cases there can be only the despair of not wanting to be ones own self, as the reluctance to move towards an ideal of selfhood is the only reluctance that can conceivably exist (44).

In these two authentic forms of despair, it seems that S.K. is attempting to strik...

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The Sickness Unto Death. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 01:53, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1701329.html