What is Despair?

[I hope you want consdier it breaking some kind of unwritten blog rule but I've decided to post papers that I got either a B or an A on]

 Kierkegaard wrote a book entitled The Sickness unto Death under the pen name of Anti-Climacus. The title of the book may be a joke on Hegel’s idea the struggle onto death between lord and bondsmen. The name of the pen name may also be a slight against Hegel. The book is also written as a parody of Hegelian writing. Given all of this, The Sickness does have interesting points about the nature of despair. It talks about what it is and where it comes from. It states simply that despair is to wish for death but be unable to die. Kierkegaard gives a solution in the end of the book but it may be more existentialist for this paper to focus on despair and let the reader dig him or herself out of the pits of despair with only faint reference to a solution.
 Anti-Climacus starts this book with the famous line “A human being is spirit.”(Hong 351) Spirit is self, which is a relation of a being relating itself to itself. This writing style may be a connection to Hegel’s way of writing. A way of thinking of this is that the self is split between a desired self and the real self. Despair often comes from a kind of cognitive dissonance where this relation of selves breaks down. On page 355 of the Hong anthology a famous example of Caesar is brought up. In this example a man lives by the code “Caesar or nothing,” implying that he will only be happy if he becomes Caesar. When the person fails to become Caesar, the person despairs over the failure. Anti-Climacus says that the person is not despairing over his failure; he is despairing over the person who has failed. He wishes to rid himself of himself. It’s a desire for a nonphysical suicide. His despair comes from the inability to die.
 There is also a categorizing of despair in this book. There are three kinds of despair, or sickness of spirit/self: despair to will oneself to be oneself, despair not to will one self, and in despair not to be conscious of even having a self. The will to not will to be oneself establishes itself entirely in the frame of the relation but does not break free of the relation of itself and itself. This can cause the person to become suicidal in a sense because their method leads them into an infinity loop. The will to be oneself leads someone to establish himself based on the thing which created the relation in the first place. It is not entirely clear from what Anti-Climacus wrote but that appears to refer to god. This establishing oneself based on god may be the key to surviving despair.
This marks Kierkegaard as different from Stirner, as Stirner was an atheist and had only himself to establish himself. There were no gods to fall back onto for him. Anti-Climacus would say that Stirner, and atheism in general, would fail to handle despair because it would try to handle despair on its own. Someone who is conscious of his own despair and tries to solve that despair alone will fail to break the framework and near prisonlike relation of the self relating itself to itself. It also causes the person to live in a misrelation of self to self. In other words, the person doesn’t have god to help him out and lead him out of himself. Stirner would reply that god is imaginary and nothing to him as all things are nothing to Stirner. God is simply a sanctified spook of humanity who ought to be ignored like all other spooks of history.
Despair is what separates humanity from animals; being cured of despair is what separates Christians from normal people according to Kierkegaard. Despair isn’t all bad because of this. Humanity would be a vastly different creature if it were unable to feel despair. Despair is to not be able to be in a possible state of despair (you are already there). It gets rid of being in a state which despair could come and puts a person in the situation they need to be in, in order to choose the solution to their despair. Thus bring the problem in a state of relative safety.
Despair comes from the misrelating of self only to self and also from the immense weight of ultimate choice. One is held down by the fact that no matter what they do, they destroy all other possible lives. The person must live with the self they have created and this sickness may lead to the spiritual (in other words non-physical) death of the person if they cannot accept this self they are in. They are stuck wishing to rid them self of their self. This is not a death in the Christian sense, which is simply passing on into eternal life. It is the death of the person as the person can become a sort of zombie in the philosophic sense; a being wishing to die but unable to die.
It is important to remember that this book was written under a pen name so may not be what Kierkegaard himself believes. Regardless, it still presents ideas that can be used and then argued against. If this book is true, then despair is an inescapable part of human life. Even if it is, no philosopher may come across the perfect solution. It is up to each solitary individual, to borrow a term from Kierkegaard, to solve despair. Not only is this book in parody of Hegel’s style it still is of the kind of importance of Hegel to understanding the self. Even if Kierkegaard would disagree, this is kind of a sequel to Hegel. In Hegel the struggle was between two minds. In Kierkegaard it was a conflict of one mind against itself with only the divine as a rope out of crisis; the crisis of the inability to die.

Stirner

(Disclaimer I may not agree with a lot of what Stirner says but I want to portray his views in a fair way. Also a book called the Nihilistic Egoist and Stirner‘s the Ego and his Own are the best books on the subject.Here is my video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i55lqh88_8)
 Imagine a throne of god. A new atheism comes by and god comes down from the throne. These atheists think of what to do with this throne they now have. They put all sorts of things on the throne: Love, humanity, community. Stirner is the man who plants the dynamite under the throne to blow the throne up so that nothing will ever be god like again. Stirner rejected creating concepts or ideals and then treating them as axiomatic ideals. Such ideals result in the hampering and destroying of the individuality of the ego. Stirner starts his philosophy in nihilism, rejecting everything that is held religiously. In his sense of the term anything held lofty and high over the individual is incorrect and religious. There is nothing above the individual and all things external to the individual are nothing.
 Stirner advocated a kind of nihilistic egoism in which the only cause that he excepted was his own cause. He doesn’t make himself into this new god. He does not put himself on the pedestal. Instead he sees himself as something to be used up as he sees the external world as something to be used up. It is a kind of radical hedonism based on the meaninglessness of life.
 This where the next interesting topic comes in: Stirner and existentialism. Both types of thinking start out in a nihilistic position that life is essential meaningless and the external world dubious. This is where the sameness ends. Existentialists often have a solution to over coming this nihilism. For Kierkegaard it was god, for Sartre community, etc. Not for Stirner. For Stirner, this escapism does not prove the validity of absolutes or fixed ideas as he calls them. These escapes do not give meaning to life as nothing truly can give meaning to life. In fact these are merely denials of a terrifying nihilistic truth. For Stirner the way to go is to live in this nihilism to use the creative nothing which is the self to produce and push forward the self against anything which will hold it back with its dogma. Be that a god, love, morality, or the state.
 Stirner even rejects freedom and liberty as candidates for godhood. Freedom is simply freedom from. The better alternative to freedom is owness, a kind of self ownership. A freed slave is only a freed slave unless he pushes with his owness and takes liberty. His freedom from bondage does not make him a free man, his making himself and freeing himself internally is what will truly fulfill his liberty externally.
 On property, Stirner says that power is what makes property appropriated by the ego. I own something because I can make others not use what I own. Ideas too are property of the egoist. I own an idea to use the idea. Here Stirner sounds similar to pragmatism except that truth is something to be own and used rather then something that happens to be useful. In a way this also leads to a detachment from external realty and truths to the point to were the egoist could potentially see the world apart from himself rather than see himself with in the world.
 Stirner is really in a category of his own. He really can not be placed anywhere as his ideas are so unusual that it would be difficult to find a group that would except him. Although he was an anarchist, his arguments are very different from other anarchists. He is not promoting anarchism in the name of peace like the anarcho-capitalists and he is not promoting it in the name of equality like the anarcho-socialists. He is an anarchist out of nihilism, a rejection of all moral concepts. This rejection leads to a further rejection of the states authority. His anarchism is still similar to normal anarchist thought in that it advocates replacing the state with some kind of system of groups. His argument is simply creating unions of egoists who will self-interestedly apply their self-interest and individuality in a stateless society. Like he often does, he does not develop this idea enough in order to truly be able to picture what a society would look like. Few would try such a thing with so little to go on.
 Given that he still comes up with usable ideas along the way. One of his ideas is similar to Franz Oppenheimer’s idea of the political/violent and the economic/voluntary means of attaining wealth. Stirner’s union of egoists is a voluntary organization where everyone gets to assert their self-interest and individualism. Contrasted with the state which demands the ego submit to the state. The state fights the egoist and the egoist fights the state. Again it is unclear how this kind of society would operate.
  A more radical anarchist idea that Stirner had was that crime is a good way to asset ones individuality and rebel against the state. He developed a similar concept of insurrection. Basically, insurrection is a kind of passive civil disobedience where one does not out oneself at to much risk of being arrested but rather where one asserts oneself by getting away with repelling against the systems structure and ideals(all ideals in fact)
 Stirner, an odd philosopher of the 20th century. His massive influence on Marxism, existentialism, and atheism make him important to read. His philosophy terrified the philosophic community at the time and caused a reaction to him. Stirner’s ideas strike at the very heart of the modern world. Can you read him and not be changed some how?