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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Kierkegaard's Concept of Despair

Kierkegaard's Concept of Despair

Theunissen, Michael
Harshav, Barbara
Illbruck, Helmut

Paperback

Series: Princeton Monographs in Philosophy, Book 15

PhilosophyChristian Living

ISBN10: 069116312X
ISBN13: 9780691163123
Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr
Published: Sep 13 2016
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.50
Height: 0.40 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

The literature on Kierkegaard is often content to paraphrase. By contrast, Michael Theunissen articulates one of Kierkegaard's central ideas, his theory of despair, in a detailed and comprehensible manner and confronts it with alternatives. Understanding what Kierkegaard wrote on despair is vital not only because it illuminates his thought as a whole, but because his account of despair in The Sickness unto Death is the cornerstone of existentialism. Theunissen's book, published in German in 1993, is widely regarded as the best treatment of the subject in any language. Kierkegaard's Concept of Despair is also one of the few works on Kierkegaard that bridge the gap between the Continental and analytic traditions in philosophy.

Theunissen argues that for Kierkegaard, the fundamental characteristic of despair is the desire of the self not to be what it is. He sorts through the apparently chaotic text of The Sickness unto Death to explain what Kierkegaard meant by the self, how and why individuals want to flee their selves, and how he believed they could reconnect with their selves. According to Theunissen, Kierkegaard thought that individuals in despair seek to deny their authentic selves to flee particular aspects of their character, their past, or the world, or in order to deny their mission. In addition to articulating and evaluating Kierkegaard's concept of despair, Theunissen relates Kierkegaard's ideas to those of Heidegger, Sartre, and other twentieth-century philosophers.

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