Wanting, or not Wanting, to Be Oneself
An Analysis of Desperation in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death
Keywords:
Kierkegaard, despair, self, self-consciousness, willAbstract
The main purpose of this article is analyze The Sickness unto Death. This book, written by Kierkegaard in 1849, discusses the idealistic theory of the subjectivity. Kierkegaard begins his book with one of the most important philosophical questions: “What is a self?”. The Sickness unto death answers that the human self is a self-relation established by an other. This self-relation is, at the same time, an action. When the man despairs (when the man doesn’t want to be himself) the self-relation is broken. In this case, the self-relation can be repaired only with the help of the other who has established the relation. Kierkegaard describes two forms of authentic despairs: not wanting to be oneself (despair in weakness) and wanting to be oneself (despair in defiance). Kierkegaard says that the second form of despair (defiance) is the fundamental one because the others forms of despair can be read as a kind of defiance. In this article, we discuss this affirmation. We propose that Kierkegaard doesn’t give enough arguments to establish that the defiance is the basic form of despair without introducing the category “before God”.
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