Editing Existentialism (section)

=== Despair ===
{{Main|Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard#Despair|l1=Despair}}
{{See also|Existential crisis}}

Despair is generally defined as a loss of hope.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.tfd.com/despair |title=despair – definition of despair by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia |publisher=Tfd.com |access-date=2010-03-08}}</ref> In existentialism, it is more specifically a loss of hope in 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 their being-thing compromised, they would normally be found in a state of despair—a hopeless state. For example, a singer who loses the ability to sing may despair if they have nothing else to fall back on—nothing to rely on for their identity. They find themselves unable to be what defined their 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 they are not overtly in despair. So long as a person's identity depends on qualities that can crumble, they are 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 (Kierkegaard book)|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."<ref>Either/Or Part II p. 188 Hong.</ref> In ''[[Works of Love]]'', he says:

{{Blockquote|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.|author=Søren Kierkegaard|title=Works of Love|source=}}