A hope pinned to a date, falsified repeatedly, with nothing underneath it.
Despair
In Kierkegaard's technical sense, a misrelation in the self's relation to itself - not a mood but a structural condition.
- Theme
- Life, death and meaning
- Tradition
- Continental
- Term
- Fortvivlelse
- Term fixed
- 1849
In plain terms
Ordinarily despair means having given up. Kierkegaard uses the word for something stranger: a structural fault in how a person relates to themselves, which he says most people have without noticing.
His picture is that a self is a relation that relates to itself, held together between opposing terms - the finite and the infinite, necessity and possibility. Despair is that relation going wrong, and it can take opposite forms: wanting desperately to be someone else, or refusing to be anyone in particular.
What makes the account unusual is that it does not require feeling bad. Someone perfectly comfortable, absorbed in their circumstances and never troubled, is on this account in the commonest form of it - which is a claim about a person's situation rather than about their mood.
As a philosopher would put it
The Sickness unto Death opens with the formulation that the self is a relation that relates itself to itself, and despair is the misrelation. It appears in three forms: unconscious despair, being in it without knowing; despair at not willing to be oneself, in weakness; and despair at willing to be oneself, in defiance.
The crucial claim is that most despair is unconscious, and that its absence from awareness is a symptom rather than an exemption. Absorption in the everyday - in what Heidegger later calls the they - is one of its most common shapes.
The title is theological: the sickness is unto death in that it is a relation to the eternal that has gone wrong, and Kierkegaard's resolution is faith, the self resting transparently in the power that established it. That makes the analysis inseparable from his religious commitments, and secular readers have taken the structural account while declining the cure - which is either a legitimate appropriation or a removal of the argument's point.
Where you meet it
James Stockdale was the senior American officer held at Hoả Lò prison in Hanoi for seven and a half years from 1965.
Asked much later who had not come home, his answer was reported by Jim Collins as counter-intuitive: the optimists. They said they would be out by Christmas, and Christmas passed; then by Easter, and Easter passed; then by Thanksgiving, and then Christmas again. Stockdale's account is that they died of a broken heart.
His own position was the one Collins named the Stockdale paradox: never lose faith that you will prevail in the end, and simultaneously confront the most brutal facts of your current situation.
Whatever one makes of the psychology, the structure is exactly Kierkegaard's. The failure Stockdale describes is not a lack of hope but a misrelation between the infinite and the actual - a hope pinned to a date, repeatedly falsified, with nothing underneath it. What survived was a relation that held both terms at once.
What is actually disputed
Whether despair can be structural rather than felt.
Kierkegaard's claim that most people are in despair without knowing it is either a profound diagnosis or an unfalsifiable one: if contentment is a symptom, no evidence could count against the theory. Critics have pressed exactly this since the book appeared.
His defenders reply that the same form of argument is accepted elsewhere - false consciousness, bad faith, denial - and that a condition can be real while the person in it is the last to see it.
The second question is whether the analysis survives the theology. Kierkegaard's resolution is faith, and the structure of the self he describes is defined by its relation to the eternal. Secular readings retain the account of a self held between opposing terms and drop the term that was supposed to hold them together, which is a substantial alteration rather than a translation.
Commonly confused with
- giving up The technical sense includes people who have given up nothing and are entirely comfortable.
Defined against
- Hope The pair is not simple: Kierkegaard's despair is compatible with cheerfulness, and Camus rejects hope as an evasion, so the opposition runs differently in each account
Philosophers
- Søren Aabye Kierkegaard The technical account of despair as misrelation
- Martin Heidegger Absorption in the everyday as a related structure
- Jean-Paul Sartre Bad faith as the analogous flight
- Blaise Pascal Diversion as what keeps the condition from being noticed
- Arthur Schopenhauer The pessimist alternative, where despair is warranted
Works
- Concluding Unscientific Postscript Kierkegaard's framework
- Pensées Diversion, and what it conceals
- Being and Time Falling and the anonymous they
- Being and Nothingness Bad faith
- The Myth of Sisyphus The refusal of both despair and hope
Schools
- Existentialism Where the analysis is developed
- Augustinianism Where restlessness precedes it
- Lebensphilosophie Where the diagnosis is cultural
- Phenomenology Where the structures are described
- Roman Stoicism Where the response is training rather than faith
Related concepts
Hope c. 1270 · Anxiety 1844 · Authenticity 1927 · Meaning of life 1942 · Absurdity 1942
Kierkegaard's Fortvivlelse in The Sickness unto Death of 1849 is a technical term for a misrelation in the self, and he holds that most people in it do not know they are - which is deliberately at odds with the ordinary sense of the word.