QuestionsWho am I, really?Despair and the self
Who am I, really?A self to build

Despair and the self

Søren Kierkegaard 1813 · 1855Truth is subjectivity: one must take the leap of faith.
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What it claims

The self finds rest (the end of despair) only by willing to be itself while being grounded, transparently, in the power that constituted it.

Why

Trying to escape despair by one's own strength makes it worse; the self finds rest only by resting on what established it.

In short

"Despair and the self" is an argument by Søren Kierkegaard (The Sickness unto Death, I, A (Anti-Climacus)) on the question "Who am I, really?" (answer: a self to build). Its claim: The self finds rest (the end of despair) only by willing to be itself while being grounded, transparently, in the power that constituted it. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the conclusion does follow from its 4 premises. AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The Sickness unto Death, I, A (Anti-Climacus)
Valid

Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard's pseudonym, signs The Sickness unto Death (1849); Kierkegaard presents himself only as the editor, and explains in his Journal that Anti-Climacus is a more demanding Christian than he is. The book starts from a definition: "the self is a relation that relates itself to itself". Being a self is not a thing one has, it is a way of relating to oneself. Despair is a failure of that relation: not willing to be oneself, or willing to be oneself all alone. The argument tries to show where the self comes from, and how it is healed.

P1A self has either constituted itself or been constituted by another.
P2If it had constituted itself, there would be only one form of despair: wanting to get rid of oneself. One could not despair in willing to be oneself.
P3Yet this despair exists: whoever wants, by his own strength alone, to get out of despair and be himself sinks deeper into it.
P4A self constituted by another finds balance and rest only by relating, at the same time as to itself, to what constituted it.
Therefore the self finds rest (the end of despair) only by willing to be itself while being grounded, transparently, in the power that constituted it.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Valid with no hidden premise: from P1, P2 and P3 it follows that the self was constituted by another, then P4 yields the conclusion. Everything rests on P2 and P3: the failure to be oneself by one's own strength would be the mark of a dependence. Anti-Climacus calls this power God, but the argument itself does not prove it.
Analogy. A letter cannot read itself: someone wrote it. If it tries to give itself meaning on its own, ignoring its author, it goes round in circles. It only "holds" when it reads itself as written by another.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness 1943 · attacks premise 2

There is no need for another who constituted us to explain this failure. Consciousness never coincides with itself: it is always ahead of what it is. Willing to be oneself and never managing it is part of its structure: consciousness "is what it is not and is not what it is". A self that makes itself can therefore fail to be itself, with no God involved.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
No reply possible: objection raised in 1943, after the author's death (1855).
O
Objection anticipated by Anti-Climacus: exaggeration attacks premise 3

This despair everywhere is a gloomy exaggeration. Many people say they are not in despair, and live happily.

Kierkegaard replies
Kierkegaard Reply of Anti-Climacus (Kierkegaard's pseudonym)
A doctor does not rely only on what the patient says: he knows there are imaginary illnesses, but also imaginary health. Likewise, one who knows the soul does not stop at what each person says about himself.
The debate goes on (our summary) A critic would reply that a doctor can run tests that confirm or refute his diagnosis. Here, calm counts as a sign of hidden despair, and so does anguish: nothing could show the diagnosis to be wrong.
A
A secular objection: who is this "other"? attacks the conclusion

At best the argument shows that the self depends on something other than itself. It does not show that this is God: it could be nature, the body, history, other human beings.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
We have not yet found a direct reply by Kierkegaard in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Anti-Climacus writes as a Christian, "for edification": he says it is God who made man this relation, without trying to prove it. That is consistent with Climacus, for whom God cannot be objectively demonstrated; but it leaves the objection without an argued answer.