“There isn’t any love of life with out despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote as he reckoned with the rudiments of happiness. “We hope. We despair. We hope. We despair. That is what governs us,” artist Maira Kalman noticed in her illustrated chronicle of the pursuit of happiness.
To simply accept that there could be no happiness with out despair is to acknowledge that, moderately than a illness of the spirit, despair is the rudder course-correcting the ship of the self, steering it from the precise to the perfect.
That’s what Søren Kierkegaard (Might 5, 1813–November 11, 1855) explores in his characteristically grimly titled and characteristically deeply insightful 1849 guide The Sickness Unto Death (public library), so radical in a few of its concepts that he revealed it below a pseudonym.
For Kierkegaard, the spirt and the self are one and despair is a illness in them — one exposing the hole between the self that’s, the self that retains us small, and the self that may be, the huge everlasting self of full potentiation. With an eye fixed to this non secular illness, he writes:
The self is a relation which pertains to itself… A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the everlasting, of freedom and necessity… A synthesis is a relation between two phrases. Checked out on this approach a human being just isn’t but a self.
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Despair is the imbalance in a relation of synthesis, in a relation which pertains to itself.
Contemplating the disruption of the self’s relation to itself as the foundation of despair, he traces the inside equipment of the way it units in:
If an individual in despair is, as he thinks, conscious of his despair and doesn’t discuss with it mindlessly as one thing that occurs to him… and needs now on his personal, all on his personal, and with all his may to take away the despair, then he’s nonetheless in despair and thru all his seeming effort solely works himself all of the extra deeply right into a deeper despair. The imbalance in despair just isn’t a easy imbalance however an imbalance in a relation that pertains to itself and which is established by one thing else. So the shortage of stability in that for-itself relationship additionally displays itself infinitely within the relation to the ability which established it.
This then is the method which describes the state of the self when despair is totally eradicated: in referring to itself and in eager to be itself, the self is grounded transparently within the energy that established it.
Kierkegaard observes that, on the floor, you at all times really feel your self despairing over one thing. However beneath that’s actually the self’s relation to that one thing, fomenting a want to rid your self of your self to be able to expunge the detrimental feeling — which, Kierkegaard cautions, is an existential impossibility and, as such, sunders the spirit with despair:
The relation to himself is one thing a human being can’t be rid of, simply as little as he could be rid of himself, which for that matter is one and the identical factor, for the reason that self is certainly the relation to oneself… With despair a hearth takes maintain in one thing that can’t burn, or can’t be burned up — the self… To despair over oneself, in despair to wish to be rid of oneself, is the method for all despair.
And but on this very impossibility lies the life-affirming facet of despair — it asserts our relation to the everlasting. Having devoted his life to bridging the ephemeral and the eternal, Kierkegaard writes:
Despair is a side of spirit, it has to do with the everlasting in an individual. However the everlasting is one thing he can’t be rid of, not in all eternity.
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If there have been nothing everlasting in a person, he would merely be unable to despair… Having a self, being a self, is the best, the infinite, concession that has been made to man, but additionally eternity’s declare on him.
Complement with Might Sarton on the cure for despair and a remedy for it from Gabriel Marcel and Nick Cave, then revisit Kierkegaard on how to save yourself, our greatest source of unhappiness (and what to do about it), and the only true cure for our existential emptiness.
