Kierkegaard and the dialectics of despair

I wanted to take a moment, not so much to reflect upon (for I've little time) but simply record a few notions of Kierkegaard's from The Sickness Unto Death. For Kierkegaard, despair comes in three formulations - in despair being unconscious of having a self, wanting in despair not to be oneself, and wanting in despair to be oneself. Despair before god is sin, it constitutes a wilfulness before god; thus the opposite of despair is not hope but faith - a faith in which one humbles oneself before god. And likewise the opposite of sin is not virtue but the same said faith.

So what of hope in Kierkegaard's formulations? Hope for Kierkegaard is intimately bound with, even a form of despair. Hope is the despair of the possible without what is necessary or determined - the adolescent's despair is founded on hope: "he hopes for the extraordinary both from life and from himself" (2008, 69) The hopeful individual cannot acknowledge the limits of his or her existence; it seems quite natural that this could end in wanting in despair not to be oneself (if one feels one's weakness is the barrier to fulfilment) or wanting in despair to be oneself (if one feel's the barrier is external).

But I suspect this isn't exactly what Kierkegaard was getting at, for one these latter forms of despair depend on more spirituality than he credits the hopeful youth, whose main concern is over earthly things or the earthly in itself. Nor is the process outlined above enough to claim that hope is a form of despair, for it could be argued that what's been shown is a causal sequence; we could claim that love inevitably ends in hatred, but this is not sufficient to claim that love is hatred. And it does seem that Kierkegaard wants to argue for a stronger relation than causation: "Instead of taking possibility back to necessity he runs after possibility - and in the end cannot find his way back to himself" (2008, 41)

If hope leads us away from the self, perhaps hope is then a form a despair in ther first sense - that of being unconscious in despair of having a self. This seems the most coherent interpretation. But personally I am not convinced that this first form of despair is properly despair at all - even if it is a wilful unconsciousness of being in a state of despair, isn't it simply a cover for despair rather than despair itself? And doesn't it fall subject to all the pitfuls of positing something in unconsciousness - that it is far too easy to create an internally coherent system with its use, and near impossible to produce something demonstrable or disprovable? That's not to say Kierkegaard is necessarily wrong; rather that it's very much for Kierkegaard to show that he's right, and I don't think he manages this.