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In, Søren Kierkegaard’s novel, The Sickness Unto Death, he attempts to reveal and delimit ideas of spirit, self, and synthesis in order to elucidate on how individuals’ dialectical manifestations occupy varying degrees of self-consciousness and self-assertion. Yet, the despair Kierkegaard writes about existence dialectically; it moves beyond objective and possession to a more subjective aspect of individual experience and is put thus one cannot attempt to conceive of the part without reference to the whole. Through his writing he tries to move his readers to see that the highest form of existence is when one can progress beyond and ascend above the lower levels of selfhood. So, in acknowledgement of the despair, I write this paper as a symptom of my growing awareness of the “sickness unto death.” First, two words must be differentiated from their customary employment: “despair” and “self.” Kierkegaard implements them kinetically, uprooting them from their previously stagnant actuality to reflect the motion and engage they mean to address.

Kierkegaard writes that the task of becoming a synthesized self is described as “the relations relating itself to itself”(Kierkegaard 44). For example, the synthesis that makes A and B a relation does not count unless A and B’s relation is “relating itself to itself.” To clarify, the initial relationship between A and B is an objective one as it has only 2 components (A and B). It is in a state of stasis and “Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self” (Kierkegaard 44). The self is not an objective thing; it is not the relation alone- the “human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom, and necessity” (Kierkegaard 43). Th...

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... to take , is not one of existing on the side of the finite, the necessary, or on the side of the infinite, the possibility but one of recognizing and identifying the dialectic synthesis between them and “self”. The synthesis in an individual existence’s dialectical is what constitutes the tension, the irony, of now and/or ever. For Kierkegaard, spirit is the flame that brings the body to it boiling point yet the unity and ascension to self-hood that leads us out of the sickness (despair) occurs is in the volatility of the combination. We must imagine that the merge between body and spirit is like a substance that never reaches its boiling point but exists as a continual transformation in which we decompose, combine, and interchange with/between ourselves. We simultaneously exist as the substance, its vapor, and the heat that catalyzes the reaction.