Despair
I have certainly felt spiritual despair during my journey of clinical depression. Sometimes my psychiatrist and different therapists pass this off as a part of the depression. Not knowing if there is a God or how to relate to Him/Her; not knowing if I am acting in a moral way; not knowing if my life can ever make a difference. Certainly those feelings contribute to the feelings that life doesn’t matter and uselessness that are hallmarks of a clinical depression diagnosis. But I hesitate to say they are the same.
I hadn’t thought it through very much until just now when I saw this NY Times op-ed piece bringing up Kierkegaard’s opinions on despair. I was ready to reject it at first because of it’s flippant comment about our society’s dependence upon Prosac (one wonders if the people who say these things have ever been through depression or its treatment. The drugs are certainly no magic pill that flips a switch on your mood. They just make your mood more manageable). But further in it gets interesting.
despair according to Kierkegaard is a lack of awareness of being a self or spirit. A Freud with religious categories up his sleeves, the lyrical philosopher emphasized that the self is a slice of eternity. While depression involves heavy burdensome feelings, despair is not correlated with any particular set of emotions but is instead marked by a desire to get rid of the self, or put another way, by an unwillingness to become who you fundamentally are. This unwillingness often takes the form of flat out wanting to be someone else. Kierkegaard writes: ‘An individual in despair despairs over something. … In despairing over something, he really despaired over himself, and now he wants to be rid of himself. For example, when the ambitious man whose slogan is “Either Caesar or nothing” does not get to be Caesar, he despairs over it … precisely because he did not get to be Caesar, he cannot bear to be himself.’
Oh God, how many times since childhood have I wished to be someone else. I cannot even imagine numbering them. Like the sands of the sea, made all the worse by the end of childhood and realizing that the dreams that seemed remotely possible no longer are…”Either Emma Thompson or nothing.”
Again, for Kierkegaard, despair is not a feeling, but an attitude, a posture towards ourselves. The man who did not become Caesar, the applicant refused by medical school, all experience profound disappointment. But the spiritual travails only begin when that chagrin consumes the awareness that we are something more than our emotions and projects. Does the depressive identify himself completely with his melancholy? Has the never ending blizzard of inexplicable sad thoughts caused him to give up on himself, and to see his suffering as a kind of fever without significance? If so, Kierkegaard would bid him to consider a spiritual consultation on his despair, to go along with his trip to the mental health clinic.
