Guises of Despair

Abstract

In ‘Is Hope A Secular Virtue?’ (2024), Bob Stern and I argued that despairing involves being unable to stop desiring something we deem of great value while believing that this good can neither be obtained, nor return on its own. We characterised despair as one of the two vices hope sits between as a virtue (the opposite vice being unwarranted optimism) because (a) despair is bad for the agent, (b) it deprives the agent of their agency and (c) it involves an inappropriate use of our epistemic abilities. I argue here that despair is multifaceted and focus on a second guise of despair, ‘Despair from Loss’ (DFL). DFL involves believing that something we deem of great value has been lost, and that this good can neither be retrieved, nor return on its own. I turn to literary works to explore various aspects of DFL, namely loss of the highest good (in Oscar Wilde's De Profundis), loss of the evaluative framework from which the very possibility of the good makes sense (in Jack London's Martin Eden) and what I call ‘ontological’ loss: the loss of our pre-reflective abilities to relate fittingly to self, others and world (in Jean Améry's At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities). I discuss whether our previous arguments (a)-(c) still hold against DFL and conclude that for the most part, they do. I end by pointing towards a possible third guise of despair, ‘Despair from Ethical Failures of Agency’, namely the despair that may result from acting under the guise of the bad or, to a lesser extent, from failing to act under the guise of the good. [Correction added on 5 October 2026, after first online publication: ‘Abstract’ section was added to this version.]