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'Despair' in Kierkegaard's Either/Or
- Journal of the History of Philosophy
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 44, Number 1, January 2006
- pp. 85-97
- 10.1353/hph.2006.0013
- Article
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The category of despair plays a central role in Kierkegaard's pseudonymous corpus, but its meaning is controversial. This paper offers an interpretation of its use in Either/Or (in particular, in the claim the aesthetic life is despair and the ethical life freedom from despair). After examining and rejecting two recent alternatives, I argue that despair is the conscious or unconscious assumption of a passive or fatalistic attitude toward one's existence, which attitude is informed by a misconstrual of the nature of human agency.