In the Christian tradition, faith, hope, and charity have God as their object and instigator, and they are the means by which we share in his nature. Hence they are called theological or deiform virtues. But during the Reformation Luther emphatically isolated faith from the other virtues, and from the virtue tradition tout court. This understanding of faith deliberately severed faith from any idea of virtue as human deed, habit, or disposition, and from any works, for that would precisely compromise the exclusive and one-sided donation of faith as a freedom from any necessary conditions of human emotion or thought. In this chapter I examine this trajectory and its logic. I trace the integration of the theological virtues, briefly looking at the allegorical treatment of the virtues in Dante and Spenser, and discussing the implications of this severing in Calvinism especially in its pastoral implications. When it comes to Shakespeare I focus in particular on hope in The Winter’s Tale, and faith in Cymbeline, on the understanding that each play treats these examinations in the context of a ruptured and interrupted love.

Chapter 3 redirects the scholarly trend of characterizing Spenser’s works as defined by personal and political discontent, and it instead examines their relationship to sixteenth-century models of contentedness. This study of The Faerie Queene and the Complaints volume demonstrates that Spenser privileges a situational contentment. In Book I, neither Red Cross nor Una can maintain contentment at all times, but the emotion punctuates experiences like productive sadness and pious anger, and it protects against overly destructive passions. While Book I presents contentedness coexisting with other emotions, Mother Hubberds Tale imagines an uneasy alliance between contentment and complaint. Finally, through the character of Melibee in Book VI, Spenser makes his most explicit case for contentment, yet it is embedded in an episode that emphasizes the sway of sexual desire and the intense threat it can pose when unrestrained. In his last concerted representation of contentment, Spenser emphasizes its appeal and fragility. Thus, Chapter 3 highlights the affective continuities between the 1590 and 1596 Faerie Queene, and between Spenser’s major and minor works.

This chapter explores Albert Murray’s diagnosis and refusal of key elements of 1960s-style Black cultural politics. In books like The Omni-Americans he repudiated the pessimism and particularism that he found in figures like Baldwin and replaced it with a life-affirming concrete universalism rooted in the blues as a mode of phenomenology and in the sense that a fully American Blackness could stand as an instance and emblem of universal human experience. The chapter provides a brief sketch of Murray’s life; discusses the intellectual commitments he shared with his most important interlocutor, Ralph Ellison; explains how Murray turned these shared commitments into his own distinctive philosophical apparatus; and explores what may be the clearest difference between Murray and Ellison: Murray’s willingness to cultivate followers like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Wynton Marsalis, pivotal culture workers in the post-civil rights shift in U.S. racial politics.

This chapter considers Romantic surgery from the patient’s perspective. It uses Astley Cooper’s rich archive of personal correspondence to explore the complex emotions associated with the experience of surgical illness and its treatment, as well as the ways in which emotional expression functioned as a form of agency within the private surgical relationship. In addition to considering private patients, this chapter also examines how emotions expressed and mediated agency within what, following Michel Foucault, we might consider the ‘disciplinary’ space of the hospital. The pre-anaesthetic surgical patient was a deeply unstable and ‘messy’ ontological entity whose pre-operative health and post-operative recovery were determined by a complex melding of constitutional, nervous, and emotional factors. Thus, as this chapter demonstrates, the patient’s own body could exert an unconscious material agency, often frustrating both surgical intervention and the patient’s own will, something that was most evident in the associations between irritability and obstreperousness that characterised contemporary discourses on amputation and its discontents.

In the epilogue, I offer a coda on the pursuit of leisure. While schools (teachers and administrators) can make strides toward cultivating leisure in students, the art of leisure is fundamentally a subjective task. It is learning how to be a person – how to live with and contend with the angels and demons that plague human existence.

In this chapter, I begin by considering Poet A – Kierkegaard’s compelling pseudonym who embodies how we usually understand and respond to this mood state. Poet A’s account reveals three key facets of boredom: the incessant striving of our voracious ego, the onset of existential fatigue, and our ever-resilient attempts to fend off boredom, seeking both to maximize freedom and maintain control. I then turn to Kierkegaard’s analysis in Sickness unto Death, penned by the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. Rather than understanding boredom as a neutral mood state that comes and goes, Anti-Climacus diagnoses it as laced with forms of despair that easily overtake us. When we maneuver to escape this kind of boredom, we only become further mired in it. Anti-Climacus’ framework illuminates and brings conceptual depth and insight to the two dominant boredom responses I noted in the introduction, avoidance and resignation.

Focusing on the Christian concept of sin, this chapter explores the way in which Anti-Climacus in Part Two of The Sickness unto Death analyzes the concepts of despair, selfhood, spirit, sin, offense, faith, paradox, and God from the standpoint of a Christian understanding of these concepts in contrast to that of classical paganism and Christendom, especially the way in which these concepts are rooted scripturally in Christianity in not willing or doing what is right rather than not knowing or understanding what one should do, as in paganism. It focuses in particular on the Christian doctrine of hereditary sin and the paradox that sin is not a negation but a position before God that cannot be comprehended but must be believed through a revelation from and relation to God, thereby creating the possibility of offense.

Although signed pseudonymously, The Sickness unto Death is taken to reflect Kierkegaard’s authorized view of the value and content of the religious life. This chapter argues that the ideal of religiosity that Kierkegaard develops it in this text is primarily existential, namely focused on the believer’s way of living in the world. To demonstrate this, a detailed analysis of Kierkegaard’s conception of selfhood is presented. Distinguishing between “being a self” and “becoming the self that one is intended by God to be,” it is shown how the latter is achieved by way of living correctly. While one’s quality of selfhood – the quality that makes one a self, an individual – is possessed in a state of potential, the actualization of this potential is a function of one’s worldly existence. There is therefore a tight connection between unfulfilled life, unfulfilled self, and unfulfilled relationship with God. And on the other hand, one “rests transparently” in God (in Kierkegaard’s words), when one becomes the self that God intends one to be. And we become who God intends us to be by living correctly.

The Sickness unto Death is one of a few pseudonymous texts designated “psychological” by Kierkegaard: taking this designation seriously, the chapter examines what The Sickness unto Death can contribute to our understanding of moods. A promising approach taken by recent philosophical analyses of depression has focused on the concept of possibility, and has argued that possibilities are typically a feature of the world as experienced by human beings, but that a depressed person feels that possibilities are severely impoverished or utterly absent. Manic and hypomanic states tend toward the opposite extreme, of an overabundance of possibility. This chapter draws upon the resources of existential thought in order to develop an understanding of cyclothymic spectrum conditions, demonstrating how Kierkegaard’s work provides resources for a non-reductive phenomenological psychology of moods.

Kierkegaard’s writings are a mosaic of explorations of such spiritual excellences as faith, love, hope, patience, compassion, forgiveness, and bold confidence, explorations designed to “build up” the reader in these traits. The treatment of faith in The Sickness unto Death follows the classical pattern of virtue as an actualization of a creature’s potentiality. Faith is that state in which people realize the human telos; it is the completion of human nature. In Kierkegaard’s thought, all the other virtues presuppose the virtue of faith. But The Sickness unto Death also presents sin, the psychological condition that underlies wrongdoing, as deep and pervasive in a way that rules out some of the classical features of human virtues, for example that they are realizable perfections developed by habituation, and that virtue has not been achieved in a person who still has to struggle against vicious impulses. The features of Christian virtues that make them compatible with sin are that they depend on grace, that their development is subject to an “inverse dialectic,” that the conceptual grammar of many of the virtues makes reference to sin and sinfulness and more broadly accountability to God, and that the Christian virtues are not, at least in this life, perfections.

This chapter first offers an overview of key concepts in The Sickness unto Death, such as human nature, self, despair, and wholeheartedness. It then discusses the relation between Part One and Part Two of The Sickness unto Death, offering a comparison of different types of despair (or doublemindedness). In this connection, it discusses the relations between faith and reason, and philosophy and theology. It is argued that the relatively neglected Part Two of The Sickness unto Death, entitled “Despair is Sin,” reinterprets the problem of despair from Part One by introducing the Christian concept of sin. In Part Two, sin represents an unwillingness to be oneself before God that involves self-deception. Overcoming despair, on the other hand, requires an unconditional will to be oneself before God. However, the latter does not accept everything as it is but rather hopes against hope to reconcile ideals with reality. For Kierkegaard, this hope is interconnected with Christian faith, charity, and moral commitment. Indeed, overcoming despair by forming a wholehearted or coherent self represents a fundamental moral and religious task according to Kierkegaard.

One of the nagging uncertainties that besets the interpretation of The Sickness unto Death is the vagueness that attaches to the promised cure for the disease of despair – faith. Presented in algebraic form at the beginning, middle, and end of the book, it is otherwise left without much expatiation. This chapter reconstructs from the text what we might be able to claim confidently about faith as the cure for despair according to Anti-Climacus. Faith has a therapeutic function: It is meant to extirpate from the self the only genuine danger, which is persistence in unforgiven sin, while maturing the self to cope with the ordinary hazards of human life and to avoid its false consolations. This twofold function of faith – positively warning the self against its only real threat and negatively clearing away false consolations and imagined dangers – is grounded in the definition of faith Anti-Climacus supplies, which involves two distinct elements: willing to be yourself and resting transparently in God. This chapter explores the precise sense in which the faithful self relates to God and the therapeutic benefits that come from the faithful person’s ability to genuinely will to be themselves.

This chapter presents the second part of The Sickness unto Death, “Despair as Sin,” as the Aufhebung or recontextualizing of the first part in which the concept of sin does not function.  Both parts portray the self as existing “before God,” but that concept is so indeterminate in the first part that it fits just as well with Spinoza’s or Hegel’s “God” as with the biblical God Kierkegaard has in mind. Sin, along with essentially related concepts such as atonement and forgiveness, is the decisive category that distinguishes biblical religion (Jewish or Christian) from “theologies whose foundations are scientific naturalism (Spinoza) or socio-historical pantheism (Hegel). The latter are “Socratic” in that they rely on some version of recollection theory (Reason), while the former rests on a concept of revelation that is not reducible to a truth already within us. Reason turns out to be as sectarian as the faith that rests on some extra-rational revelation. While both parts of the text are psychological/phenomenological, neither permits the reduction of despair to depression.

Chapter 2 deals with the critique of the aesthetical stage by focusing on Either/Or. It is shown that this critique offers an original answer to the “why be moral?” question relevant to contemporary debates on amoralism and practical moral skepticism. Specifically, Either/Or develops an original critique of amoralism that escapes a difficult dilemma associated with justifications of morality. According to this dilemma, any such justification must either offer moral or nonmoral (prudential) reasons for being moral. But the former seems circular and question begging, whereas the latter seems like the wrong kind of reasons, which could only support egoism and legality, not altruism and morality. However, Kierkegaard develops three different argumentative strategies that all escape this dilemma, providing strong motivation and reasons for assessing ourselves morally. He thus offers a powerful critique of amoralism that is relevant to contemporary concerns, while being rooted in historical discussions of Kantianism, German Romanticism, and idealism.

Chapter 1 deals with Kierkegaard’s influential account of selfhood and anthropology. This account is decisive for understanding his importance for theories of personal identity, human nature, and action theory. In addition, it provides the necessary conceptual and historical background for understanding his contribution to ethics and religion on the one hand and existentialism and continental philosophy on the other. Chapter 1 particularly relates Kierkegaard’s views on selfhood and anthropology to Kantian and post-Kantian philosophical anthropology. It focuses on Kierkegaard’s contribution to anthropology and discusses the relation between philosophical and theological anthropology. The chapter gives a synopsis of these issues by focusing on The Sickness unto Death, which approaches selfhood and anthropology negatively by focusing on despair, a double-minded or incoherent form of selfhood.

Chapter 7 explores the thought of the Danish philosopher and writer Søren Kierkegaard. It gives a close reading of the chapter “The Unhappiest One” from the first part of Either/Or. Kierkegaard brings up Hegel’s idea of the unhappy consciousness for comparison, thus signaling the importance of the concept of religious alienation. A discussion is also given of Kierkegaard’s critical assessment of his own age in his work A Literary Review of Two Ages, which was published on the eve of the Revolutions of 1848. Finally there is an analysis of Kierkegaard’s account of the nature of the alienated human being in The Sickness unto Death. An overview is given of his system of the forms of despair of which humans are victims. The chapter concludes with a comparison of the concept of alienation in Kierkegaard and Hegel.