"Escolhe a ti mesmo!": do fenômeno do desespero ao si-mesmo (Selv) na filosofia de Kierkegaard

Abstract

This master's dissertation aims to develop an interpretation on the problem of the self and human despair from the perspective of Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855). The command expression of the title – “Choose oneself!” – has an interiorization throughout this work, it is not just about “choose oneself”, but, rather, know what it means to be oneself and then build yourself. Reflections on the subject will be unfolded in three chapters, and our method consists of a hermeneutic analysis, mainly, of the work The sickness unto death, published by Kierkegaard in 1849. To develop a hermeneutic key that can structure the interpretation about the Kierkegaardian anthropology, based on his psychological and theological analysis, it is necessary to start the argument from the definition of “self” and – as antagonistic correspondence – the analysis of despair: reality, possibility, universality and deadly sickness. In addition, despair will be studied according to the imbalance of the synthesis and its potentiality, according to the individual's degrees of awareness about his finite existence and, in the highest degree, despair in the qualification of sin, which is characterized by being before God or the idea of God. Despair is all over the work regarded as a sickness, never as a remedy or as something proper to the individual by nature. As a cure for any sickness is always sought, we finally take into account the work The Lilies of the field and the Birds of the sky as an attempt to show lilies and birds as masters who teach to be oneself.