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.