Soren Kierkegaard was a 19th century Christian philosopher and existentialist who spoke about the meaning and causes of despair in his Sickness Unto Death. His book is an exploration of consciousness, despair and individuality. According to Kierkegaard, individuality is constituted by or in consciousness itself. There are many different degrees in which the self exists. These degrees depend on and conform to each person's own awareness of individuality. There is no self of which an agent cannot be conscious; the self exists only by virtue of self-awareness or self-awareness. And further, as Kierkegaard says in the first section of Sickness Unto Death, “the mind is the self,” and the self is a “relation which relates to itself” (43). It is this characterization that leads to the verdict that a self “must have established itself or been established by something else” (43). Despair is therefore an illness of oneself, and it can take two authentic forms: ; each form relates directly to a caliber of consciousness, to self-cognition (as an attitude towards oneself) and to God. With each of these forms of despair, one is the despair of not wanting (or desiring) to be oneself and the other is the despair of wanting (or aspiring) to be oneself. The despair of wanting to be oneself is, in a certain sense, the desire to be oneself, that is, a self that does not owe its presence to God. It is a denial of our possibility, an unwillingness to recognize that our character/identity is the consequence of our connection to God. In this, the despair of wanting to be oneself is the despair of a self created by something else. The despair of not wanting to be oneself is, by distinction, the despair of a self which f...... middle of paper ......ast, it is quite simply because it has “managed to lose himself completely”. » (51), but it doesn't matter: the self goes home all the time to settle down. A return to self is a return to conscious misery, and so unconscious despair has less to do with sadness as it exists than with our sense of self. Despair exists whether we actually perceive it or not. It is therefore essential to note, as Kierkegaard does, that being unconscious of discouragement is itself a type of despair (53); as with illness, we are not less ill because we are not informed about it. However, it is the fact that despair is actually conscious or not that allows us to distinguish a particularity of despair from another type of despair (59). This is a complex thought; the self can be sad whether it knows it or not, but then the knowledge somehow characterizes the despair that exists..