Kierkegaard on the Value of Despair

“To despair over oneself, in despair to want to be rid of oneself, is the formula for all despair.”

“There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote as he reckoned with the rudiments of happiness. “We hope. We despair. We hope. We despair. This is what governs us,” artist Maira Kalman observed in her illustrated chronicle of the pursuit of happiness.

To accept that there can be no happiness without despair is to recognize that, rather than a malady of the spirit, despair i...