Abstract

I show how Kierkegaard’s work offers a cogent alternative to the standard view which interprets despair as hopelessness and evaluates despair as unambiguously bad. On Kierkegaard’s alternative account, despair is not to be equated with feelings of futility or hopelessness, or any other sort of psychological state. It is instead a distinctive sort of ability: the ability to give up on oneself, that is, the ability to decline or refuse to take up one’s own life as a task. So conceived, despair inheres in the very structure of human selfhood, as a continually activated potential. While it may remain latent in a person’s life, when despair comes thematically to consciousness, it has a vital role to play in disclosing self-becoming as a task – a task that requires continually resisting the pull of despair and acknowledging one’s dependence on others. As a potentiality that is always at work in human life, and while thoroughly bad and destructive if allowed to become fully actual, despair can even be appreciated as a force for our good.