What Is Despair?

Question

What is despair in Kierkegaard's philosophy? This is a question that takes us into some of the most original and psychologically acute writing in the history of philosophy. Kierkegaard's analysis of despair, developed most fully in The Sickness Unto Death (1849), is not a meditation on feeling sad. It is a rigorous, almost clinical examination of what it means for a self to fail at being itself, and it has profoundly influenced the entire existentialist tradition. Understanding Kierkegaard's despair is essential for anyone trying to grasp why existentialism places such extraordinary weight on the question of the self and its proper constitution.

Quick Answer

Let's start with Kierkegaard's definition, because it is unlike anything you will find in ordinary usage. The self, he says, is "a relation that relates itself to itself." That sounds abstract, but the idea is actually quite concrete. A human being is not simply a thing. You are a synthesis of contrasting elements: the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, necessity and freedom. The self is the relation between these poles, and it is also the activity of relating itself to itself, of being aware of and taking responsibility for this relation. Despair is what happens when this relation is out of balance, when the self fails to hold its constitutive elements together in the right way.

There are two basic directions despair can take. The first is not willing to be oneself, which Kierkegaard also calls the despair of weakness. This is the person who flees from their own self, who loses themselves in the crowd, in convention, in the opinions of others. They do not want the burden of being a particular, responsible self, so they dissolve into the anonymous "public" and let others define who they are. The second direction is despairingly willing to be oneself, which Kierkegaard calls the despair of defiance. This is the person who refuses any limitation on the self, who wants to be entirely self-created, who rejects anything given or finite as an unacceptable constraint. Both are misrelations: the first flees from selfhood, the second absolutizes it.

Here is the part that catches most readers off guard. Kierkegaard insists that despair is not the same as feeling terrible. You can feel perfectly content and be in deep despair, because despair is a condition of the self's structure, not a subjective mood. Conversely, you can feel wretched and not be in despair, if your misery is an honest response to genuine loss rather than a symptom of self-misrelation. The person who is "happy" in the ordinary sense, absorbed in career, social life, and entertainment, but who has never confronted the question of what it means to be a self, is in Kierkegaard's view deeply in despair, even if they would be astonished to hear it. They are in the despair of not knowing they have a self, which Kierkegaard considers the most common form of all.

The way out, for Kierkegaard, is faith. The self is properly constituted only when it relates itself to itself and, in the same movement, relates itself to the power that established it. Kierkegaard is explicit that this power is God, and his account of despair is inseparable from his Christian theology. The self cannot ground itself; it must rest transparently in the ground that is greater than it. This is where Kierkegaard parts ways with the atheistic existentialists who came after him. Sartre would take Kierkegaard's analysis of the self's instability and translate it into a philosophy of radical human freedom without God, while Camus would transform the despair of the self's groundlessness into the philosophy of the absurd.

Historical Wisdom

Kierkegaard wrote The Sickness Unto Death under a pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, which was his practice for works that presented an ideal so high that no actual human being, including Kierkegaard himself, could fully embody it. The title comes from the Gospel of John, where Jesus says of Lazarus's illness that "this sickness is not unto death." Kierkegaard takes this phrase and turns it inside out: the sickness unto death is despair, and it is "unto death" not because it kills the body but because the death it leads to is a spiritual death, the death of the self. The title itself signals that Kierkegaard is operating within a distinctly Christian framework, even as his psychological analysis reaches far beyond any single theological tradition.

The concept must be understood against the backdrop of Kierkegaard's broader critique of Hegel and the Danish state church of his time. Hegel had built a vast philosophical system in which individual existence was subsumed into the march of Spirit toward self-consciousness. Kierkegaard thought this system, however brilliant, had made a catastrophic error: it had lost sight of the existing individual, the single human being who must live and die, choose and suffer. The church, in Kierkegaard's view, had made an equally catastrophic error by turning Christianity into a comfortable cultural identity rather than a passionate, demanding, inward relation to God. Despair, in this context, is both a philosophical and a cultural diagnosis: the system has dissolved the individual into abstraction, and the church has dissolved faith into convention, and both have left the self unconstituted and therefore in despair.

Kierkegaard's analysis of despair builds on his earlier exploration of anxiety, which he treated in The Concept of Anxiety as the dizziness of freedom. Anxiety arises when the self confronts its own freedom and the vastness of its possibilities. Despair is what happens when the self responds to this confrontation by fleeing or by defying, by refusing to be the finite, dependent self it is or by insisting on being an infinite, autonomous self it cannot be. The two concepts are closely linked: anxiety is the condition that reveals the self's instability, and despair is the condition that results when the self fails to hold itself together in the face of that instability.

The influence of Kierkegaard's despair on later existentialism can hardly be overstated. Heidegger's analysis of thrownness and authenticity, Sartre's account of bad faith, and Camus's confrontation with the absurd all bear the marks of Kierkegaard's insight that the self is not a given but a task, something that must be achieved and can be failed. Where they diverge is in the resolution. Kierkegaard's faith is replaced by Heidegger's resolute being-toward-death, by Sartre's radical freedom, and by Camus's revolt without appeal. But the underlying structure, the self as a relation that must properly relate itself to itself, is Kierkegaard's enduring contribution.

Different Cultural Perspectives

Kierkegaard's despair is rooted in a specifically Christian anthropology, but the phenomenon he describes, the self's failure to be itself, resonates across traditions. In Buddhist thought, the concept of dukkha (suffering or unsatisfactoriness) names a fundamental structural problem in human existence. Like Kierkegaard's despair, dukkha is not primarily about unpleasant feelings but about a deep misalignment in how we relate to reality. The Buddhist diagnosis is that suffering arises from clinging to a self that does not ultimately exist as a fixed entity, whereas Kierkegaard's diagnosis is that despair arises from the self's failure to properly constitute itself. These are almost mirror images of each other: Buddhism says the problem is believing too much in the self, Kierkegaard says the problem is not properly becoming the self you are. Yet both traditions identify a structural error in self-relation as the root of human suffering, and both see ordinary complacency as the most dangerous form of the condition.

In the Jewish tradition, the concept of tikkun (repair) offers a different framework. The self is broken and the world is broken, and the task is repair through relationship, law, and action. There is a resonance with Kierkegaard's idea that the self is a task rather than a given, but the Jewish tradition tends to locate the repair in communal and ethical action rather than in the inward, solitary relation Kierkegaard emphasizes. Where Kierkegaard's despair is ultimately an individual's relation to God, the Jewish concept of repair is inherently relational and communal, a mending of the world that cannot be accomplished alone.

In secular psychoanalytic traditions, Kierkegaard's despair finds a surprising descendant. Sartre explicitly acknowledged his debt to Kierkegaard, and the concept of bad faith is in many ways a secularized version of Kierkegaardian despair. Both describe a self that is lying to itself about what it is, and both insist that the condition is more common than people think. The difference is that where Kierkegaard sees the resolution in faith, Sartre sees it in the radical acceptance of freedom without God. Later thinkers like Viktor Frankl developed their own secular responses to the problem of the self's groundlessness, with Frankl arguing that meaning, rather than faith, is what properly constitutes the self. Frankl's logotherapy can be read as a therapeutic translation of Kierkegaard's spiritual diagnosis.

Practical Lessons

The most immediately useful insight from Kierkegaard's analysis is that feeling fine is not the same as being well. We tend to equate psychological health with subjective contentment, but Kierkegaard pushes us to ask a deeper question: is the self properly constituted? Am I actually being the self I am, or am I hiding from it? This question can be uncomfortable, but it is also liberating, because it suggests that the path to genuine well-being does not run through the management of moods but through the honest confrontation with what it means to be a self. A person who is struggling, grieving, or anxious might be closer to authentic selfhood than the person who feels great because they have never looked inward at all.

Kierkegaard's distinction between the two basic forms of despair offers a practical diagnostic tool. Ask yourself: am I fleeing from being myself, or am I defiantly insisting on being myself on my own terms? The first shows up as a tendency to lose yourself in other people's expectations, to not know what you actually think or want, to feel that your life is happening to you rather than being chosen by you. The second shows up as a rigid refusal to accept any limitation, an inability to acknowledge dependence or finitude, a need to control everything and admit no vulnerability. Most of us oscillate between the two, and simply naming the pattern can be the beginning of change.

The concept of the despair of not knowing you have a self is perhaps the most practically urgent. Kierkegaard describes a person who is entirely absorbed in the categories of the crowd, the public, what "one" does and thinks. This person has never confronted the question of who they specifically are, apart from the roles and conventions that define them. The practical antidote is what Kierkegaard elsewhere calls inwardness: the cultivation of a relation to yourself that is not mediated by the crowd. This does not mean becoming a hermit or rejecting all social norms. It means developing the capacity to ask, in any given situation, "what do I actually think and choose here?" rather than automatically deferring to what everyone else thinks and does.

Finally, it is worth sitting with Kierkegaard's claim that the self cannot ground itself. Even if you do not share his Christian faith, there is a practical wisdom here. The attempt to be entirely self-grounding, to be the sole author of your own meaning with no reference to anything beyond your own will, is what Kierkegaard calls the despair of defiance, and he sees it as ultimately self-defeating. The self needs something to rest in that is larger than itself. What that something is, whether God, community, vocation, love, or something else entirely, is the question each person must answer. But Kierkegaard's insight stands: a self that tries to be its own foundation will eventually discover that it is standing on nothing. The honest acknowledgement of this is not weakness but the beginning of genuine selfhood.

Further Reading

For the primary source, read Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death, which contains the full systematic analysis of despair and its forms. For context, explore our overview of existentialism and Kierkegaard's biography. Related concepts that illuminate despair from different angles include Sartre's bad faith, which is in many ways a secular descendant of Kierkegaard's despair, and Heidegger's thrownness, which explores the given condition that despair tries to flee or defy. You can also explore Kierkegaard's reflections on anxiety and his thoughts on faith, or compare Kierkegaard and Camus on the question of whether the self's groundlessness is resolved by faith or by revolt. For a broader perspective on suffering and meaning, visit our Meaning and Suffering collection.