Imagination and Agency

Abstract

As we’ve just seen, The Sickness Unto Death seeks to diagnose a surprisingly broad range of psychological phenomena in terms of the underlying ontological dysfunction of despair: the failure of the elements that compose selfhood to self-reflexively interrelate themselves correctly. In the forms of despair that Anti-Climacus describes, this typically takes the form of a self-relation skewed towards one element within selfhood to the exclusion of its opposite. The self can, in relating itself to itself, neglect or obscure elements within itself, and by not relating to itself in its totality, it thereby fails to actually relate to the synthetic being that it is. Thus regarded, despair is an attempt to evade the synthetic character of the self by only identifying with half of each oppositional dyad.’ Accordingly, much of Sickness is taken up with discussion of despair in terms of the failure or exaggeration of one element in the mass of oppositions that make up the human being. Anti-Climacus, claiming as he does that despair can only be described dialectically (SUD, 30/SKS 11, 146), proceeds to articulate the varieties of despair in terms of what each lacks. Hence he claims that finitude’s despair is to lack infinitude, possibility’s despair is to lack necessity, and so forth.