Kierkegaard's Concept of Despair
David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Jack Alan Reynolds
Learn more about PhilPapers
Princeton University Press (2005)
The literature on Kierkegaard is often content to paraphrase. By contrast, Michael Theunissen articulates one of Kierkegaard's central ideas, his theory of despair, in a detailed and comprehensible manner and confronts it with alternatives. Understanding what Kierkegaard wrote on despair is vital not only because it illuminates his thought as a whole, but because his account of despair in The Sickness unto Death is the cornerstone of existentialism. Theunissen's book, published in German in 1993, is widely regarded as the best treatment of the subject in any language. Kierkegaard's Concept of Despair is also one of the few works on Kierkegaard that bridge the gap between the Continental and analytic traditions in philosophy. Theunissen argues that for Kierkegaard, the fundamental characteristic of despair is the desire of the self "not to be what it is." He sorts through the apparently chaotic text of The Sickness unto Death to explain what Kierkegaard meant by the "self," how and why individuals want to flee their selves, and how he believed they could reconnect with their selves. According to Theunissen, Kierkegaard thought that individuals in despair seek to deny their authentic selves to flee particular aspects of their character, their past, or the world, or in order to deny their "mission." In addition to articulating and evaluating Kierkegaard's concept of despair, Theunissen relates Kierkegaard's ideas to those of Heidegger, Sartre, and other twentieth-century philosophers.
|Keywords||Despair Sin Christianity|
|Categories||categorize this paper)|
|Buy the book||$28.78 used (50% off) $29.98 new (48% off) $46.79 direct from Amazon (19% off) Amazon page|
|Call number||B4377.T47313 2005|
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server
Configure custom proxy (use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy)
|Through your library|
References found in this work BETA
No references found.
Citations of this work BETA
Roe Fremstedal (2011). The Concept of the Highest Good in Kierkegaard and Kant. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 69 (3):155-171.
Jason Kido Lopez (2013). Kierkegaard's View of Despair. Res Philosophica 90 (4):589-607.
Similar books and articles
Michelle Kosch (2006). 'Despair' in Kierkegaard's Either/Or. Journal of the History of Philosophy 44 (1):85-97.
Daniel Watts (2008). Kierkegaard's Concept of Despair. Journal of Moral Philosophy 5 (1):166-168.
Jeffrey Hanson (2006). Kierkegaard's Concept of Despair. Review of Metaphysics 59 (3):685-687.
Alastair Hannay (1985). II. Hamlet Without the Prince of Denmark Revisited: Pörn on Kierkegaard and the Self. Inquiry 28 (1-4):261-271.
Daniel Dahlstrom (2010). Freedom Through Despair: Kierkegaard's Phenomenological Analysis. In Jeffrey Hanson (ed.), Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist: An Experiment. Northwestern University Press.
David James (2011). The 'Self-Positing' Self in Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death. The European Legacy 16 (5):587 - 598.
Daniel Berthold-Bond (1998). Lunar Musings? An Investigation of Hegel's and Kierkegaard's Portraits of Despair. Religious Studies 34 (1):33-59.
Gregory Beabout (1991). Existential Despair in Kierkegaard. Philosophy and Theology 6 (2):167-174.
Sorry, there are not enough data points to plot this chart.
Added to index2009-01-28
Total downloads1 ( #434,761 of 1,098,996 )
Recent downloads (6 months)0
How can I increase my downloads?