‘Plenty of hope – for God – an abundance of hope – only not for us,’ Franz Kafka told his friend, the writer and composer Max Brod. Today we could go further. There is no hope, not even for us. Ours is an age of despair. The Doomsday Clock – a symbol that represents our closeness to disaster – was set to 89 seconds to midnight in January. But this existential mood, this sense of hopelessness, may yet prove our deliverance.

That would be the view of 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, whose work, The Sickness Unto Death, is the greatest philosophical exposition of despair ever written. Kierkegaard is our contemporary. His insights apply far better to our despairing age than the parochial Copenhagen where he – never marrying nor fathering children – devoted his entire short life (he died at 42) to the production of over 30 books, mostly composed in a frenzy in the 1830s. Kierkegaard is remembered as a philosopher, but he was also a psychologist, social critic, poet and theologian, whose works deal with a whole range of subjects, from aesthetics to the media to religion. He was above all concerned with what it means to be a living, finite being: a self. For this reason, he is often credited as the ‘father of existentialism’: that 20th-century school of philosophers for whom ultimate meaning can only be found by looking inwards.

What is a self? This might sound like the wrong question – our times are very self-obsessed. But Kierkegaard asks us to go deeper than the shallow ego. This is how Sickness Unto Death begins:

Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self. Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self.

The temptation here is to close the book in despair, but this is, I think, a deliberate strategy on Kierkegaard’s part. This work is not only an exposition of despair. It is a diagnosis and you – the reader – are the patient. What Kierkegaard is saying here is that the self – the spiritual self – is extremely difficult to find. He wants us to despair as we vainly seek it. And as he later reminds us: ‘the greatest danger, that of losing one’s self, may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife etc., is sure to be noticed’.

How, then, might the spiritual self be rescued? To answer that, we should briefly look at his earlier companion piece, The Concept of Anxiety. Anxiety, or angst, for Kierkegaard, the natural consequence of our fallen nature, is, far from being a negative emotion or an illness, the thing that marks us out as spiritual. Unlike animals – which are not, strictly, selves – we are conscious of myriad choices about how to live our lives. This produces in us anxiety – the ‘dizziness of freedom’ – as though we were looking into a chasm. The chasm is the boundlessness of our own possibilities. There is something infinite about possibility. Where we have possibility, we have imagination, desire, a movement toward becoming. In short, God. For Kierkegaard, God is that ‘all things are possible’.

If we lack possibility we live by pure necessity, from moment to moment, as animals do. Or in a world of triviality. This, for Kierkegaard, is spiritlessness. The spiritless subject ‘tranquilises itself in the trivial’ and, therefore, does not even know it is in despair. Spiritlessness manifests itself today in a rational-scientific attitude that whatever cannot be measured does not exist, in the banality of consumer culture, in the distractions of modern media. Kierkegaard asks: what are we distracting ourselves from? Without the distractions that prevent us from seeing the emptiness at the heart of our lives, we would have no choice other than to despair. For Kierkegaard, that would be a very good thing. The closer we come to despair, the closer we come to the remedy.

There are two forms of self-conscious despair he highlights. The first is the despair of not wanting to be ourselves. The desire here, really, is to be rid of the despair of being ourselves. We may despise being ourselves or pine after being someone else, perhaps a famous actor. But this – wanting to be rid of our despair – only intensifies our feelings of despair, which Kierkegaard calls ‘the rising fever in this sickness of the self’. The second type of despair he mentions is the despair of ‘wanting in despair to be oneself’. Though we may earnestly want to be ourselves, in perhaps trying to invent some better, less despairing version of ourselves, we avoid actually becoming ourselves. We may decide we must become prime minister, for example, but this is not really our self, so our despair intensifies even further.

Yet it is only when we are brought to the ‘utmost extremity, where in human terms there is no possibility’ that, for Kierkegaard, we accept ‘for God all things are possible’, which is to have faith. The person of faith puts his or her trust in God – for whom ‘all things are possible’ – knowing full well ‘that humanly speaking his destruction is the most certain thing of all’. This is irrational: ‘to have faith is precisely to lose one’s mind’.

Kierkegaard is fond of the biblical Book of Job, the story of God’s suffering servant who keeps his faith in the unknowable, capricious Yahweh despite his suffering (‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him’). But one does not necessarily need faith, in the conventional sense, to agree with Kierkegaard. Whenever we find ourselves despairing, is it not true that the only thing that revives us is possibility? In despair we may listen to music or look at a piece of art and new territories of the imagination suddenly open up. Desire carries us toward them. To believe, as we must, that life has any meaning or ultimate purpose for us is an act of faith.

Whether we rid ourselves of despair is, ultimately, our choice alone. But this notion of the single individual standing alone before God in fear and trembling is often held to be the weakness of Kierkegaard, who is criticised – including by some existentialists – for forsaking social relations for religious asceticism. When we dig deeper, we find this is only partly true. In the later Works of Love – his inquiry into the biblical commandment to love one’s neighbour – Kierkegaard writes that: ‘Love is a relationship between: man-God-man, God is the middle term… For to love God is to love oneself in truth; to help another human being to love God is to love another man; to be helped by another human being to love God is to be loved’. If God, for Kierkegaard, is that ‘all things are possible’, then to love another person is to see the infinite possibility that dwells within them and to help them on the way to their realisation of the spiritual self. As we cannot fully know the other, this is an act of faith. It is to hope. ‘To lay hold expectancy on the possibility of the good is to hope,’ writes Kierkegaard.

Philosophers have sometimes dismissed hope as a kind of resignation, a state of passivity that disregards life’s necessary struggles and therefore life itself. Albert Camus called it a ‘fatal evasion’. But an exception is the French existentialist Gabriel Marcel, who wrote passionately of the virtues of hope in the midst of the despairs of the Second World War. In his Introduction to the Metaphysic of Hope, Marcel echoes Kierkegaard when he writes that: ‘To love anybody is to expect something from him, something which can neither be defined nor foreseen; it is at the same time in some way to make it possible for him to fulfil this expectation.’ Love, in other words, is to place one’s faith, one’s hope in the other. Marcel calls this ‘creative fidelity’: the part of ourselves we give away, that we devote to others, whether through love, friendship or creative work. When we do this, we access the spiritual self. According to Marcel, ‘the meaningfulness and the authenticity of one’s existence as an “I” is totally conditioned by the generosity with which I make myself available in mutual love, fidelity, faith and availability to thou’. The dark passage of despair, then, leads us to encounter this thou upon whom all hopes rest. Or as Marcel puts it: ‘I hope in thee for us.’