The forms of despair in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death

In The Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard presents both his famous relational ontology of the self and a fourfold typology of the forms of despair grounded on the idea that the self is a synthesis of finitude-infinitude and necessity-possibility. However, commentators have often failed to find any significant differences between these two polarities, with the result that the categories of infinitude and possibility on the one hand, and the categories of necessity and finitude on the other, are thought to be equivalent. Consequently, the fourfold typology of despair is in effect reduced to just two forms: the despair of infinitude/possibility and the despair of necessity/finitude. Against this widely held interpretative consensus, in this paper I offer an interpretation of both Kierkegaard’s ontology of the self and of the fourfold typology of despair aimed at showing that the constitutive polarities of the self are not equivalent and, accordingly, that there are subtle but undeniable differences among the forms of despair he diagnoses.