radical disappointment
28 Feb 2026 - 27 Jun 2026
- This phrase popped into my head, I'm kind of surprised there isn't much literature.
- A Dash of Pessimism? Ernst Bloch, Radical Disappointment and the Militant Excavation of Hope
Bloch’s ontologisation of hope, that it is grounded in the very matter of the world as such, would seem to make despair, pessimism and disappointment impossible phenomena; if the world is always directed towards the not-yet become, then hope is a viable disposition even in the grimmest moments of history.
- Something existentialist about it. Sisyphus. How to go on in the face of futility (or off yourself). It sounds very inflated but it is in fact the fabric of life, how we actually live it.
- So aside from Sisyphus what did existentialism have to say about going on in the face of futility and disappointment?
- Ask Claude
- The core existentialist responses to futility and disappointment:
- Camus is the most direct. The Myth of Sisyphus is explicitly about this - his answer is "revolt." Not hope, not resignation, but a kind of defiant lucidity. You know it's absurd, you do it anyway, you "must imagine Sisyphus happy." It's almost a spite-based ontology.
- Sartre reframes it through radical freedom - disappointment reveals that you chose wrongly, which means you can choose again. But this can feel like a cruel answer because it loads all the weight onto you. Bad faith is partly the refuge people take from this burden.
- Heidegger is more interesting here than people give credit for - Geworfenheit (thrownness) is basically the condition of finding yourself in a situation you didn't choose and can't escape. Authentic existence isn't overcoming this but owning it.
- Kierkegaard (proto-existentialist) had the most psychologically honest account - his stages of despair in The Sickness Unto Death essentially map forms of disappointment, and his answer was the leap, which many find unsatisfying precisely because it acknowledges there's no rational resolution.
- The honest through-line is that existentialism mostly reframes disappointment rather than resolving it. Which is either its strength or its limitation depending on where you're standing.
- Yeah well thanks. I prefer to reconceptualize the problem. Disappointment means that you had expectations (of self or others or the world) that did not come to pass.
- With an unavoidable urge to blame something. The first reflex is to blame the others, but it comes down to self. If only in the sense of having wrong expectations, a defect.
- A desire to avoid it in the future, since its very painful.