ABSTRACT
Anoop Gupta clarifies that while Kierkegaard’s philosophy only possesses the first of these principles, this alone is significant enough to consider him a romantic. The analysis begins with the relationship between selfhood and despair explored, under the pseudonym of Anti-Climacus, in The Sickness unto Death. Gupta follows the general outline of the text, from the definition of the self as a set of dualities—of necessity and possibility, eternity and temporality, infinity and finitude—which relates itself to itself, to the state of despair characterized by an imbalance in one of these relations, and finally to the conception of selfhood as resting in one’s faith in God. Gupta resolves the proposed dichotomy between Kierkegaard’s individualism and Durkheim’s sociality through the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s developmental view of the self, which traces the subject from the dependence of infancy, to independence gained through self-consciousness, to the interdependence characteristic of mature, socially integrated people.
