The Sickness unto Death: Kierkegaard on Despair and the Self

In the last article, I argued that anxiety is not first and foremost a disorder to be eliminated. For Kierkegaard, anxiety is the dizziness that comes with freedom, the felt weight of the fact that you must decide how you will relate to your own life. I ended that article by promising to discuss where our most fundamental decisions place us. That question brings us to Kierkegaard's most penetrating psychological work, The Sickness unto Death, published in 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. Kierkegaard often wrote under invented authors, each of whom views life from a particular standpoint, and Anti-Climacus is the most demanding of them, a voice that speaks from the height of Christian ideals. The Concept of Anxiety describes the moment before the decision, whereas The Sickness unto Death describes the condition of the self after it has decided wrongly. Kierkegaard's name for that condition is despair.

Despair, in Kierkegaard's sense, is not the same thing as feeling hopeless. Most of us use the word to describe an emotion, the sinking feeling that nothing will ever get better. Anti-Climacus means something deeper and more unsettling. Despair is a misrelation in the self, a way of standing wrongly toward who you actually are. In his words, "Despair is the misrelation in the relation of a synthesis that relates itself to itself."[1] That sentence likely sounds like nonsense if you aren't used to how he writes, but the idea underneath it is straightforward. A human being is made of tensions that must be held together: the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, necessity and possibility. Despair is what happens when we do not hold these together in authentic integration.

Because despair is a misrelation in the self, it is not simply something that happens to us. A person in despair usually speaks of it as a misfortune, as though it had fallen on him from the outside like a bad diagnosis. Anti-Climacus insists that the responsibility lies in the self. Because the self is spirit, "upon it rests the responsibility for all despair at every moment of its existence, however much the despairing person speaks of his despair as a misfortune."[2] That is a hard word, but it is also a hopeful one. If despair were simply part of human nature, there would be no cure for it. Because it is a misrelation that we sustain, it is also a misrelation that can be set right. This is a cause for hope.

Kierkegaard's account of the self is the key to everything that follows. Anti-Climacus writes that "the self is a relation that relates itself to itself."[3] In plainer terms, you are not simply a collection of traits, a body plus a mind. You are the one who takes up a stance toward your body, your mind, your past, and your future. A beast has a body and a temperament, but a beast does not have to decide what to make of itself. You do. That act of relating to yourself is what Kierkegaard calls spirit, and it is the same capacity that produced anxiety in the last article.

The crucial addition is that the self did not create itself. Anti-Climacus describes the human self as "a derived, established relation, a relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another."[4] This is where Kierkegaard parts ways with the secular existentialists who later claimed him. For Jean-Paul Sartre, human beings have no given nature and must invent themselves through their choices. For Kierkegaard, you have a given nature, established by God, and your task is to become that self rather than to manufacture a new one. As I argue in my dissertation, the attempt to self-create is not freedom at all. It is precisely what Kierkegaard diagnoses as despair.

Anti-Climacus describes several forms of despair, and two of the clearest involve possibility and necessity. These forms show concretely what it means to hold the tensions of the self badly. Necessity is everything about your life that is simply given: your body, your family, your history, your limits. Possibility is everything you might yet become. A healthy self needs both. "A self that has no possibility is in despair," Anti-Climacus writes, "and likewise a self that has no necessity."[5]

The first error is to run away into possibility. This is the person who lives in plans, daydreams, and endless reinvention, but never actually becomes anyone. Anti-Climacus describes how one possibility leads to another until "finally these phantasmagoria follow one another in such rapid succession that it seems as if everything were possible, and this is exactly the final moment, the point at which the individual himself becomes a mirage."[6] What such a person lacks, he says, is "the power to obey, to submit to the necessity in one's life, to what may be called one's limitations."[7] Many of us know this temptation well. It is the life lived in the conditional tense, always about to begin. Such a person may be full of energy and ideas, yet he never arrives at the one place where a self can actually be formed, which is his own concrete life.

The opposite error is to lose all possibility. This is the fatalist, the person who believes that nothing can change and that he is simply the product of forces he cannot resist. Anti-Climacus is blunt: "The fatalist is in despair, has lost God and thus his self, for he who does not have a God does not have a self, either."[8] A close cousin of the fatalist is the person who loses himself in the crowd. Such a person, Anti-Climacus writes, "finds it too hazardous to be himself and far easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, a mass man."[9] Notice that this kind of despair is often rewarded. The world praises the person who fits in, earns well, and never asks too many questions about what his life is for.

One of the most helpfully unsettling claims in The Sickness unto Death is that despair is common, and that most people in despair do not know it. Anti-Climacus compares himself to a physician who does not simply trust a patient's report that he feels fine. In the same way, "the physician of the soul" is "satisfied neither with a person's declaration that he is not in despair nor with his declaration that he is."[10] This is not cynicism, and it is not a refusal to take people at their word. It is the recognition that a person can be comfortable, successful, and well liked while never having faced the question of who he is before God.

Kierkegaard even suggests that despair prefers to hide in happiness. "Deep, deep, within the most secret hiding place of happiness there dwells also anxiety, which is despair; it very much wishes to be allowed to remain there, because for despair the most cherished and desirable place to live is in the heart of happiness."[11] He offers a memorable image for this condition. A human being is like a house with a magnificent upper floor, built to be spirit, but most people "prefer to live in the basement," and are indignant if anyone suggests that they move upstairs.[12] The tragedy is not that they suffer. The tragedy is that they never discover what they were made for. Comfort, in other words, can be one of the most effective ways of avoiding the self.

The hidden character of despair connects directly to what we saw about anxiety in the last article. Anxiety lies underneath the security of the person who has never faced his freedom, and Anti-Climacus says that despair lies underneath in the same way. "When the enchantment of illusion is over, when existence begins to totter, then despair, too, immediately appears as that which lay underneath."[13] This is why a crisis so often reveals what was already there. The job loss, the diagnosis, or the betrayal does not create the despair. It exposes the fact that the self was resting on something that could not hold its weight.

The title of the book comes from the story of Lazarus, where Jesus says that Lazarus's illness is "not unto death." For the Christian, physical death is not the end, so no bodily sickness is the sickness unto death in the strictest sense. Despair is different. Anti-Climacus describes it as the condition of a person who longs to die and cannot. "To be sick unto death is to be unable to die, yet not as if there were hope of life; no, the hopelessness is that there is not even the ultimate hope, death."[14] The self in despair wants to be rid of itself, but the self cannot be destroyed.

Since the self cannot be destroyed, Anti-Climacus calls despair "an impotent self-consuming that cannot do what it wants to do."[15] Whatever a person seems to despair over, whether a lost love, a failed ambition, or a ruined reputation, the true object of despair is always the self. Anti-Climacus offers the example of the ambitious man whose motto is "Either Caesar or nothing." If he fails to become Caesar, he cannot bear the self that failed. Yet if he succeeds, he has done so in flight from the self he actually is. "To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself," Anti-Climacus concludes, "this is the formula for all despair."[16] Despair, then, is never finally about circumstances, but about the self we refuse to be.

The good news of The Sickness unto Death is that despair has a cure, and it is not the one our culture usually offers. Our therapeutic culture tends to treat despair as low mood, to be managed with coping strategies and affirmations. The opposite of despair is not self-esteem, success, or even happiness. Anti-Climacus states it plainly: "The opposite to being in despair is to have faith."[17] He then gives what he calls the formula for faith: "in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it."[18] To rest transparently means to stop hiding from God and from yourself. It means accepting the self you have been given, with its limits and its possibilities, and receiving it from the hand of the One who made it.

Faith also restores the balance between necessity and possibility. When a person reaches the end of human options, when there is truly nothing left to try, the question becomes "whether he will believe that for God everything is possible."[19] The believer sees his situation clearly and does not pretend it is better than it is. "He leaves it entirely to God how he is to be helped, but he believes that for God everything is possible."[20] That is not wishful thinking. It is the refusal to let either fantasy or fatalism have the last word. Faith holds necessity and possibility together because it receives both from God.

Kierkegaard's account of despair is demanding, but it is also deeply humane. He refuses to treat human beings as mere products of their circumstances, and he refuses to flatter them with the fantasy that they can invent themselves from nothing. He even insists that the capacity to despair is a sign of our dignity: "The possibility of this sickness is man's superiority over the animal."[21] Only a being made for God could be so wrongly related to Him. Our most fundamental decisions place us either in flight from the self we are or at rest in the One who made us. In the next article, I will look more closely at that alternative and at what Kierkegaard means when he says that to need God is a human being's highest perfection.

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Andrew Snyder, Ph.D., is a professor of theology and philosophy, founder of the Mythic Mind Fellowship, and host of all three Mythic Mind podcasts.

[1] Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 15.

[2] Ibid., 16.

[3] Ibid., 13.

[4] Ibid., 14.

[5] Ibid., 35.

[6] Ibid., 36.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 40.

[9] Ibid., 33–34.

[10] Ibid., 23–24.

[11] Ibid., 25.

[12] Ibid., 43.

[13] Ibid., 44.

[14] Ibid., 18.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid., 20.

[17] Ibid., 49.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid., 38.

[20] Ibid., 39.

[21] Ibid., 15.