The Transcendence of Despair

I find the strength to carry on, through a life that has often seemed committed to breaking me, in despair. This is not the self-pitying heartache of the love of your life breaking up with you or having failed some important task and feeling bad for yourself because you think you weren't good enough to succeed. This is a powerful philosophical concept that looks deep into the mystery of life and finds nothingness and finds its  triumph in that very nothingness.

We all get wounded by life. Someone we love dies. We lose an important job. Our closest friends betray us. We have moments of hopelessness, spiritual barrenness, times when nothing seems to make sense. There are remedies for this ranging from religion to the bottle. But few people seek the answer to the problem in the problem itself. Despair is its own victory, when it is taken in one's hands and heart and kept close and used as a guide through what comes after.

 When you suffer from severe depression, you learn very quickly that nothing, not the love of family and friends, not drugs (legal or otherwise), not the God or Gods that we all want to believe in, nothing will just take it away. So, if you want to transform the experience of that depression from something negative to something positive, you've got to work with the depression itself. Despair is more than just an emotion. It is a worldview, as comprehensive as Medieval Roman Catholicism or Marxism. Just ask Nietzsche or Cioran. It colors everything you experience. You go from cooing over how cute a young child is to knowing that someday it will die and sometime after that, unless it's one of the chosen few, will be forgotten, as we all end up forgotten (if, again, we're not of that chosen few) when those who loved us are also gone. This is all-pervasive. You begin to see death and life's powerlessness everywhere. You come to doubt and outright despise the idea of any spiritual agencies who would act to "save" you from the suffering in this world. You know that medicine can take away the edge but, once you've glimpsed into the abyss, you can never un-see what you saw. Hopelessness is something we merely cover up with hope, just as underneath our clothes, we're all naked. Take that away, and you become yourself, bare and defenseless, against the reality of a life that does not love you, does not care one way or another what becomes of you. This is where you find the power in despair.

When you've come to the point where you know for a certainty that life will never deliver what the cliches promise it will, you come to a point where the only thing you trust anymore is yourself. You are the one who survives the slings and arrows. Nothing divine or human survives them for you. And nothing in this life will give you peace; it can only be won, after long struggles, inside oneself. If you think marriage or children or your first home or a new car or some blessed spirituality GIVES you peace, you are underestimating your own power to be the one thing that can be truly relied upon from day one to day final of your existence. A wife or husband can die. So can children. They can decide they hate you, whoever may be at fault. Homes and cars... well... we all know how impermanent those are. And spirituality is only as useful as it applies to practical, everyday life. I have no time for a spirituality that teaches me how to live to be happy in a world after this one. THIS is the life I am living. THIS is the life I am concerned with. If there is anything beyond THIS life, then I blame it for making me so easily overcome by emotional agony. I have made many choices in my life. Depression was not one of them. I do, however, believe in the power of choice. And taking responsibility for oneself involves accepting oneself as the only savior there is. We are each responsible for what gets us through the day. It doesn't come from material things or on high.

Despair hates life because it sees life as either the architect or the idiot god ultimately responsible for suffering. If there were no life, there would be no suffering. That hatred for life contains the seed of strength. Because, if you hate life, you strive to overcome it. Make no mistake, life is a brutal affair. Every time someone speaks admiringly of someone else who rose to a higher state in life through their own efforts, they are tacitly acknowledging the fact that life is cruelly unfair and that success in life only comes by fighting against the odds. If you have everything handed to you, you haven't done a thing. If you never strive for anything better, you also haven't done anything. So, the secret is in not having and fighting for what you do not have. Fighting. Fighting against whom? Against life, of course. Against the life that did not give you what you seek. Fighting to attain that which you seek but do not yet possess.

Hatred for life sounds so negative to many people. They want to say they love life. But, if they have accomplished, truly accomplished, anything, they have done so in a struggle against the entropy and decay that is the end result of life. And, if they haven't accomplished anything, watch how quick they are to blame life. We all know life is the enemy when we're feeling broken.

Only in despair do these insights come. And yes, despair can result in things like suicide. But, a philosophical despair will ensure that one does not impulsively commit suicide based on emotional disturbances that may go away after a few hours, days, weeks, months. Philosophical despair will only permit suicide when one can rationally see that either the pain will not get better or that one's time is truly at an end, that one has accomplished and experienced all one can or wants to in life. I make no one any promises that I will never take my own life. But I will not do so rashly and I will not be unaware of the consequences of such an action. And, I will fight. I will fight for the best life possible for myself because I know that life itself will never give that to me. It must come from my own efforts. And, if I triumph or if I ultimately fall, I will do so as a sovereign being, truly free and truly filled with the unlimited power of despair.