Despair and the Crisis of Meaning

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“The thought of suicide,” Nietzsche quips, “is a powerful comfort: it helps one through many a dreadful night.” Taking one’s own life is, of course, no laughing matter, and few, if any, of us can say that our lives have not been touched in some profound and tragic way by the problem of suicide. Yet to give the philosopher his due, the wisdom of his aphorism resides in this—it recognizes that an attraction to death is a symptom, a sign of a deeper malady hounding its sufferer day and night.

Those of us who have felt desperate enough to find solace in such morbid musings recognize the despair inherent therein. Self-slaughter is a desperate act, a last-ditch attempt to escape a life that has become unlivable or no longer worth living. What truly stands behind it is, as Camus rightly notes, an inviolable mystery: “An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart . . . The man himself is ignorant of it.” Who can claim to glean one’s true motives? Who sees into the secret recesses of another human being’s soul?

And yet, certain essential qualities can be said to characterize the feelings that express themselves in suicidal thoughts. Despair, in the abstract, can be interrogated and understood. For Kierkegaard—whose book The Sickness unto Death is a prolonged meditation on despair—such despondency evinces not so much a dissatisfaction with life as a desire to escape the burden of being oneself.

In a previous post, we delved into Kierkegaard’s views on anxiety and how anxiety is rooted in the fact that, as free beings, we live with an infinite number of possibilities ahead of us and an infinite number of unrealized possibilities already behind us at all times. Our psyches, we said, are racked by possibilities that have never or will never occur, and this inability to live in the present but always exist in the past and future gives rise to the anxiety that grips our inner lives.

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It should come as no surprise that, according to Kierkegaard, despair is born of anxiety. If, psychologically speaking, we are always living in the past and future, then we never truly exist as ourselves. We are, rather, what we imagine ourselves to be, who we think we once were, or who we hope to someday become. We live by denying who we are. We refuse to accept ourselves in our present condition—think of the myriad ways you strive to recapture lost pleasures and pursue future goals and aspirations—and insist that we will only ever be happy when we attain our desired version of ourselves.

The truth, of course, is that the cause of our discontent is the desire to be different from who we are in the first place. Longing to not be ourselves, we flee into idealized images of who we would like to be but will never actually become. For Kierkegaard, despair is the despair we feel over this discordance, the agony of not wanting to be oneself, of desiring to be a phantom, an imaginary vision of someone else. It is the desire to escape oneself or to not be a self at all, to be freed from the frailty and dependence of the human condition.

In the novel Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky, the character Kirilov views suicide as a means of overcoming his fear of death. Were he able to walk to the edge and then take that final fatal step beyond it, he says, he would transcend his anxiety and annihilate the weakness inherent in his miserable existence. Kierkegaard disagrees and so ultimately does Nietzsche. For both existential thinkers, the task of human life—the hard yet not impossible lot we’ve been given—is to find a means of affirming life’s goodness without denying its struggles.

Stańczyk by Jan Matejko (1838–1893)

Source: National Museum in Warsaw / Public Domain

Despair, by Kierkegaard’s reckoning, is another name for nihilism which Nietzsche spent his life fighting against. It is the insistence that life has no meaning and is, therefore, expungeable, a thing to be fled from or wiped out. In that way, it is not merely a precursor to suicide but an actual attempt, albeit in the mind, to negate one’s existence. It is a “No” to life, an unwillingness to accept oneself as one is. Such feelings are not always fully conscious but they impact those of us who suffer from despair all the same. What, then, are we to do?

An example might be gleaned from the thinkers with whom this piece engages. They are, without question, eccentric to the point of folly. Kierkegaard, for instance, authored multiple works under various names, pseudonymously citing his own writing in order to attack and critique it. Nietzsche’s intellectual autobiography consists of a series of chapters with titles such as Why I am So Wise, Why I am So Clever, and Why I Write Such Good Books. And Dostoevsky couldn’t resist naming his most objectionable characters after himself; in Demons, a vile murderer bears his first name, and in The Brothers Karamazov, he lends it to the brothers' roguish father.

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Is such literary tomfoolery a bit absurd? Perhaps. And yet finding a way to laugh at ourselves, to not take ourselves so seriously, can enable us to confront our despair by putting our tongues out at it. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky, these fundamentally serious thinkers, looked at the problems and agonies of human existence in the face and insisted that life was nevertheless worth living. They did so with humor and grace and the power that comes from being willing to play the fool. We all might take a page out of their books.

If you or someone you love is contemplating suicide, seek help immediately. For help 24/7, dial 988 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, or reach out to the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. To find a therapist near you, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.