It is a commonly held assumption that man knows himself best. We ask him and he reports to us when he is in good health or bad health. But as any physician worth his salt knows there can be imagined illness, and there can be imagined health. So it is with the commonly held view of despair. We believe that if we wish to know if someone is in despair or not we need only ask and he will report, we hope, truthfully.
But despair is unlike physical health. It is a sickness not of the body, but of the whole of mans being. As such it may well be the case that I am not conscious of being in despair at all. That I experience no symptoms; that life may afford me great fortune and may very well conceal the dread that is despair. Kierkegaard goes so far as to say to have never to have had despair is precisely to be in despair. For this is the awakening to the reality of being in despair. It is fortuitous to acquire this illness, but the mortality rate is staggering.
As such the common place view of despair is incorrect. Despair is not rare but general. The one who says he is in despair is a dialectical step ahead. For it is contentment with life which precisely is despair. For this self that I am, this synthesis of body [temporal] and soul [eternal], being a self is a issue. To be content with the self that I am is precisely to be unconscious of the issue. Kierkegaard argues that the only life wasted is the one so decieved by lifes pleasures as to never become eternally conscious of himself as spirit. This is the real tragedy in despair; that it can be so concealed in a person that he himself is not aware of it.
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