CSLC 112 The Sickness Unto Death: Selfhood and Despair in Literature and Philosophy

What is despair and what does it tell us about being human that we alone can seemingly experience it? Is it equivalent to sadness or depression? Can it be relieved by material wealth, fame, success? For Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard despair was not a passing temporal condition but something that in itself points beyond itself to the possibility of its own overcoming. In doing so, despair, for Kierkegaard, forces open the crucial existential question: What does it mean to be a self? This course will examine this question by exploring changing conceptions of selfhood and despair from antiquity to modernity, moving from Achilleus’ despairing rage in the Iliad to Dostoyevsky’s depiction of the individual revolting against society in the Notes From the Underground and culminating in the seemingly irredeemable despair of Cormack McCarthy. Readings will include works by Homer, Plato, Thucydides, the Stoics, Marguerite of Porete, Meister Eckhart, Martin Luther, Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, Cormack McCarthy, and Flannery O’Connor.