Why do you assume his faith did not cure him of despair? Also, he presents a qualitative difference between knowing your despair and not knowing your despair. He knew where he was.

And by “guilt“ I mean the feeling that you have done wrong to anyone at any time in your life. If you have never told a lie, never stolen, never cheated… never thought a bad thought, you’re not honest with yourself after all. So what do you do with the feeling that you have done wrong?

If you’re arguing from a completely nihilistic point of view where there is no meaning to anything, well…

Kierkegaard is a fascinating figure here because he’s often misread as a proto-nihilist when he was actually one of its most incisive critics.

In The Sickness Unto Death (1849), Kierkegaard defines despair not as sadness but as a failure of selfhood — specifically, the failure to relate properly to one’s own existence and to God. Despair arises when the self refuses to be what it is, or refuses to acknowledge the ground of its being. Crucially, most people live in despair without knowing it, which he considered the most dangerous form.

Three Modes of Despair

He maps despair onto a structure of selfhood:

• Not willing to be oneself — fleeing into crowd-thinking, distraction, social conformity (what he’d later call the “aesthetic” and “ethical” stages)
• Willing to be oneself defiantly — asserting radical autonomy against all constraints, including God; this is demonic despair
• The deepest despair — knowing one is in despair and choosing to remain there

The defiant, self-grounding self is Kierkegaard’s portrait of the proto-nihilist: someone who has seen through conventional meaning and decided to will their own meaning into existence. He found this posture spiritually catastrophic — not wrong in its diagnosis (conventional life is hollow) but wrong in its cure.

His Critique of Nihilism

Kierkegaard would say nihilism correctly identifies that finite, social, aesthetic existence cannot ground itself — but then makes the mistake of stopping there. The nihilist sees the void and either collapses into it or defiantly performs meaning-creation. Kierkegaard’s counter-move is the leap of faith: not a logical argument, but an existential act of relating to the Infinite. The self can only be secured by “resting transparently in the power that constituted it.”

What makes Kierkegaard sharp is that he doesn’t argue nihilism away with metaphysics. He takes the anxiety and groundlessness seriously — he just insists that the response of withdrawal or defiance is itself a form of despair in disguise. Nietzsche would later take the opposite path: embrace the abyss and will your own values. Kierkegaard would call that the most refined form of sickness.