6 ideas
The self is not a thing but a relation that relates itself to itself, synthesizing opposites such as finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, possibility and necessity. Because this relation was established by another power, it can only rest securely when, in relating to itself, it also relates to the power that established it; despair is any misrelation in this double structure.
Despair is defined by the self's objective condition, not by how the person feels, so someone who appears content and unaware of being a self can be in the deepest despair. Ignorance of despair does not protect a person from it. It is the most common form, because a life absorbed in worldly business can keep the question of the self hidden until death.
Despair can be diagnosed by which pole of the self has swallowed the other. Infinitude's despair lacks finitude and loses the self in fantasy, and finitude's despair lacks infinitude and flattens the self into conformity. Possibility's despair lacks necessity and floats in endless options, while necessity's despair lacks possibility and becomes fatalism, where the person suffocates for want of the thought that all things are possible.
Despair over some earthly loss is really despair over oneself. The person cannot bear to be the self who lost it, and what they cannot tolerate is having to remain that self. Seen this way, apparent grief over circumstances becomes the self's attempt to escape itself, which it can never do because the self cannot die.
The most intensified despair is not the weak refusal to be oneself but defiance. Here the self insists on being itself entirely by its own construction, cut loose from the power that established it. The defiant self rejects help and even clings to its torment as proof against existence, making itself its own master and prisoner at once.
Despair becomes sin once the self knows it exists before God and still refuses to be itself or refuses to rest in God. The opposite of sin is therefore not virtue but faith, in which the self, by willing to be itself, rests transparently in the power that established it. This moves the moral question from behavior to the self's fundamental orientation.