Another working paper. Click through the link and you can download the PDF.
Abstract
Despair was a major theme of 19th and early 20th century continental philosophy, notably among the existentialists, but has received minimal philosophical attention in recent decades. In this paper, I resuscitate despair as a topic of philosophical inquiry by analyzing insights from recent empirical psychology that may hold solutions to its subcomponents, namely nausea, anguish and seriousness. I draw together several streams of psychological research for this, including the evolutionary psychology of moral cognition, terror-management theory, self-discrepancy theory, self-determination theory, the literature on self-concordant goal pursuit, flow and self-verification theory. The end result is a new theory that I call “the coalescence of being”, which extends the work of Nietzsche and the French existentialists, especially with regards to how we can “become who you are”. This new theory ties up some loose ends in existentialist thinking and gives that philosophy a more solid empirical foundation.
Keywords: despair, faith, eudaimonism, self-discrepancy theory, self-determination theory, terror-management theory
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3010028
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