Commonly defined as a loss of hope. Despair in existentialism is more specifically related to the reaction to a
breakdown in one or more of the defining qualities of one's self or identity. If a person is invested in being a
particular thing, such as a bus driver or an upstanding citizen, and then finds his being-thing compromised, he would
normally be found in state of despair—a hopeless state. For example, a singer who loses her ability to sing may
despair if she has nothing else to fall back on, nothing on which to rely for her identity. She finds herself unable to be
what defined her being.
What sets the existentialist notion of despair apart from the conventional definition is that existentialist despair is a
state one is in even when he isn't overtly in despair. So long as a person's identity depends on qualities that can
crumble, he is considered to be in perpetual despair. And as there is, in Sartrean terms, no human essence found in
conventional reality on which to constitute the individual's sense of identity, despair is a universal human condition.
As Kierkegaard defines it in Either/Or: "Let each one learn what he can; both of us can learn that a person’s
unhappiness never lies in his lack of control over external conditions, since this would only make him completely
unhappy." In Works of Love, he said:
When the God-forsaken worldliness of earthly life shuts itself in complacency, the confined air develops poison, the moment gets stuck and stands still, the prospect is lost, a need is felt for a refreshing, enlivening breeze to cleanse the air and dispel the poisonous vapors lest we suffocate in worldliness. ... Lovingly to hope all things is the opposite of despairingly to hope nothing at all. Love hopes all things – yet is never put to shame. To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good is to hope. To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of evil is to fear. By the decision to choose hope one decides infinitely more than it seems, because it is an eternal decision. p. 246-250
Recommended books on Existentialism:
