Getting Worse Before You Get Better

Despair is an interesting emotion, in that it is at once intuitive and totally opaque. If I use it in conversation, people tend to know (or at least, think they know) what I mean, and yet whenever I hear people describe despair, their descriptions tend to differ considerably. Philosophically, one of the most famous works on despair ever written is Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death. But one of the most interesting things about this work is that while Kierkegaard often gives a straightforward description of the phenomenology of despair, his way of viewing the feeling is able to be far more nuanced than many modern discussions. A key component of this, in my view, is that while he talks about despair as if it is a feeling, he does not really view it as simply an emotion at all.