The Sickness Unto Death

Book Overview

The Sickness Unto Death (Sygdommen til Døden), published in July 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, is Søren Kierkegaard's most sustained philosophical analysis of despair. The title itself is paradoxical and deliberately unsettling. Kierkegaard takes it from the Gospel of John, where Jesus says of Lazarus's illness that it "is not unto death" — meaning that the sickness will not end in final destruction. Kierkegaard inverts the phrase to make a spiritual diagnosis: despair is precisely the sickness that does not end in death, because the self that is in despair cannot die away from itself. The despairing person is, in the book's famous phrase, "sick unto death," yet the sickness is not something that terminates in physical dying; it is a condition of the self that continues as long as the self fails to become itself.

The work is subtitled "A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening," and it is best understood as a kind of spiritual diagnostic manual. It describes the human self, anatomizes the forms of despair that afflict it, and finally argues that the only cure for despair is faith — understood not as intellectual belief but as a passionate, existing relation to God. Unlike many of Kierkegaard's earlier pseudonymous works, which are relentlessly ironic and indirect, The Sickness Unto Death is direct, severe, and diagnostic in tone. It was written in the shadow of the public controversy Kierkegaard would later carry on against the Danish state church, and it contains some of his sharpest criticism of the comfortable, nominal Christianity of his contemporaries. Yet the book is not merely a polemic. It is a rigorous work of what Kierkegaard calls "psychology" in the older, philosophical sense: an account of the structures of human selfhood and the ways in which a person can fail to become what he or she is.

The structure of the work falls into two major parts. The first part examines despair as "the sickness unto death" and analyzes its forms and degrees. The second part examines despair as "sin," developing a Christian account of sin against the background of the first part. Throughout, the book's central claim is that despair is not a mood that occasionally overtakes a person but a universal condition of human existence. To be a human self, in Kierkegaard's sense, is to be constituted by a relation that must be consciously owned — and every failure to own that relation is a form of despair, whether or not the person recognizes it as such.

Author Context

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian, and literary writer who is often called the father of existentialism. Born in Copenhagen to a wealthy and devoutly religious family, he was educated at the University of Copenhagen, where he studied philosophy and theology. His life was marked by two events that shaped nearly all of his authorship: the melancholy religiosity of his father, and his broken engagement to Regine Olsen in 1841. Kierkegaard understood both as spiritual trials that forced him to confront the question of what it means to exist as an individual before God rather than to live as a merely social or conventional self.

Kierkegaard's authorship is famously divided into two streams. The pseudonymous works — including Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, and The Sickness Unto Death — present contrasting existential positions through fictional authors, so that no single voice can be taken as a simple statement of Kierkegaard's own views. The upbuilding or edifying discourses, published under his own name, develop the religious dimension of his thought more directly. The Sickness Unto Death occupies a peculiar position in this scheme. It is pseudonymous, yet its pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, is described by Kierkegaard as a Christian of a very high order — higher, in fact, than Kierkegaard himself claimed to be. The pseudonym allows Kierkegaard to articulate the most demanding Christian ideal without pretending to have realized it.

Understanding the pseudonymous structure matters for reading the book well. Anti-Climacus speaks with the authority of someone who knows what faith demands, but the book is not an autobiographical confession, nor is it a systematic theology in the usual academic sense. It is an "exposition for upbuilding and awakening" — a work that aims to provoke its reader into self-examination rather than to convey information. Kierkegaard repeatedly insists that the truth of Christianity cannot be communicated directly, as a set of propositions to be memorized; it must be appropriated subjectively, by an existing individual who is willing to be changed by it.

Historical Background

The Sickness Unto Death appeared in 1849, at a crucial point in Kierkegaard's career and in the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Europe. The preceding decades had been dominated philosophically by G. W. F. Hegel, whose system claimed to comprehend all of reality — including religion, history, and the individual — within a single, rationally articulated whole. Kierkegaard regarded this ambition as a profound evasion of existence. For him, the individual is not a moment in a world-historical process but a singular, responsible self who must choose, suffer, and believe without the guarantee of a completed system. Much of The Sickness Unto Death can be read as a running critique of the Hegelian attempt to dissolve the individual into the universal.

The book was also written against the background of Danish Lutheranism in the age of Bishop Jakob Peter Mynster and, increasingly, against the ethos of "Christendom" — the assumption that because everyone in Denmark was nominally baptized and confirmed, everyone was therefore a Christian. Kierkegaard would later launch a sustained public attack on this assumption in his final years, but The Sickness Unto Death already contains the germ of the critique. Anti-Climacus observes that the majority of people live in a state of despair without knowing it — indeed, without the faintest idea that they are in despair — precisely because the culture around them treats the absence of obvious misery as the presence of spiritual health. The book's diagnosis of "unconscious despair" is thus as much a social criticism as a psychological one.

In the history of philosophy, 1849 also stands between the collapse of the Hegelian school and the emergence of the later existentialist tradition. Kierkegaard's analysis of the self as a relation that relates itself to itself would be taken up, transformed, and secularized by twentieth-century thinkers — most importantly by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time (1927), whose account of Dasein and authenticity is deeply indebted to Kierkegaard even where it rejects the religious framework. The publication history of the book is also notable: Kierkegaard wrote it quickly in 1848, revised it carefully, and published it in 1849 together with a companion work, Two Ethical-Religious Essays, which he signed with the same pseudonym.

Core Ideas

The core of The Sickness Unto Death is a definition of the self that has become one of the most quoted passages in modern philosophy. A human being, Kierkegaard writes, is "a relation that relates itself to itself." He develops this with care. A human being is not simply a body, or a soul, or a synthesis of the two; the human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. But a synthesis is not yet a self. A self arises only when the synthesis relates itself to itself — that is, when the individual consciously takes ownership of the polarities that constitute him or her. Despair, on this account, is a "miscarriage" in this relation: a failure to be what one is, or a refusal to become what one could be.

Kierkegaard then provides a taxonomy of despair that runs through several axes. Despair can be analyzed according to what is lost — despair over the earthly, despair over the eternal, or despair over oneself. It can be analyzed according to the degree of self-consciousness involved — from "unconscious despair," in which the person does not know he or she is in despair, through despair with increasing awareness, up to "despair at its maximum," which is the despair of the demonic. And it can be analyzed in terms of the two basic misrelations of the self: the despair of weakness, in which the self despairs over not willing to be itself, and the despair of defiance, in which the self despairs by willing to be itself on its own terms, without God.

Two of Kierkegaard's most important distinctions are the famous contrast between despair and what he calls the "sickness unto death" properly speaking, and the equally famous distinction between the despair that is overcome by faith and the despair that is not. Despair, he insists, is not the same as suffering or unhappiness in the ordinary sense. A person can be outwardly successful, cheerful, and admired and yet be in despair — indeed, the person who is unconscious of despair is, in a sense, further from the cure, because he or she never suspects that anything is wrong. The "sickness unto death" is thus not death itself but the inability to die: the self that cannot get rid of itself, that is stuck with the burden of its own existence. The only cure, Kierkegaard argues, is faith, which he defines as "the self's relating itself to itself and willing to be itself grounded transparently in the power that established it."

Key Themes

The first major theme of the book is the universality of despair. Kierkegaard argues that despair is not the exception but the rule of human existence — "the more common the sickness, the more dangerous it is, and the more dangerous the sickness, the more common it is." Most people never realize they are in despair because they have never been taught to look for it, and the culture of "Christendom" actively teaches them not to look. This theme connects the psychological analysis of the book to its religious polemic: the comfortable believer who has never been "awakened" is, in Anti-Climacus's judgment, farther from the truth than the passionate sinner who at least knows that something is fundamentally wrong.

A second theme is the relation between despair and the self. Because the self is a relation of the infinite and the finite, every human life moves between two dangers: the danger of "finitude's despair," in which the person loses the infinite, becomes a mere conformist, and forgets that he or she is an individual; and the danger of "infinitude's despair," in which the person loses the finite, becomes abstractly fantastic, and dreams of being everything while being nothing. Kierkegaard's account of the "fantastic" — the self that loses itself in abstract possibility — is one of the most prescient passages in the book, anticipating the critiques of mass society, media, and ideology that would dominate twentieth-century thought.

A third theme is the dialectic of despair and sin. In the second part of the book, Kierkegaard defines sin as "before God, in despair, not willing to be oneself, or in despair willing to be oneself." The crucial phrase is "before God." Sin is not merely an ethical failure measured against a moral law; it is a religious category that can only be understood in relation to God. This is why Kierkegaard says that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith. Despair, understood as sin, is the refusal of the relation that constitutes the self; faith is the acceptance of that relation in the form of a personal, passionate trust in God. Finally, the book develops the theme of the "offense" (Anstød): the claim of Christianity that a human being can be a sinner before God, and that this is the most terrible and yet most healing truth there is. The offense is what the comfortable self cannot bear — and precisely for that reason it is the beginning of the cure.

Philosophical Meaning

The philosophical meaning of The Sickness Unto Death extends far beyond its explicitly Christian vocabulary. At its center is a theory of the self that has become foundational for later existentialism: the claim that the human being is not a thing with a fixed nature but a task — a relation that must be continuously taken over and owned. This is the root of the existentialist insistence, later made famous by Sartre, that "existence precedes essence." Where Sartre draws atheistic conclusions from this insight, Kierkegaard draws theistic ones: the self that must become itself cannot ground itself in itself, because to do so would be to fall into the very despair of defiance that the book diagnoses. The self is constituted by a relation to something other than itself — and for Kierkegaard, that "other" is ultimately God.

The book also contains a profound analysis of anxiety and freedom, though it treats these more fully in The Concept of Anxiety (1844). Here the emphasis is on the refusal of freedom: despair is the self's refusal to become what it is, an unwillingness to bear the burden of being an individual. This is why Kierkegaard can say that the opposite of despair is not happiness but faith, and that "the greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all." The quietly desperate person is the one who has never asked the question the book exists to force: whether one is willing to be the particular, finite, responsible self that one is, before God, in time, without any guarantee.

For the history of philosophy, the significance of the book lies in its refusal of two tempting alternatives. Against the Hegelian system, it insists that existence cannot be sublated into thought; against the romantic cult of feeling, it insists that inwardness is not a matter of aesthetic intensity but of ethical and religious seriousness. The self is not found by dissolving into the universal, nor by retreating into private moods, but by the difficult, lifelong task of becoming oneself in relation to the power that established it. Every subsequent existentialist account of authenticity — from Heidegger's Being and Time to Sartre's ethics of freedom — is, in one way or another, a response to this Kierkegaardian challenge.

Influence

The Sickness Unto Death has exercised an enormous influence on twentieth-century philosophy, theology, psychology, and literature. Martin Heidegger drew on its analysis of anxiety and selfhood in Being and Time, even as he rejected its theological framework; his account of Dasein as a being that is concerned about its own being is a secularized version of Kierkegaard's self that must become itself. Paul Tillich, whose The Courage to Be (1952) engages the book directly, used Kierkegaard's analysis of despair as a springboard for his own existential theology of courage and the "God above God." Karl Jaspers, the psychiatrist turned existential philosopher, was likewise deeply influenced by Kierkegaard's insistence on the irreducibility of the individual and on the "boundary situations" — suffering, guilt, death — in which the self is confronted with its own existence.

The book has also shaped the history of psychotherapy. Rollo May, one of the founders of American existential psychology, drew heavily on The Sickness Unto Death in works such as The Meaning of Anxiety, and Irvin Yalom, whose existential psychotherapy is organized around the "ultimate concerns" of death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness, has acknowledged the Kierkegaardian lineage of his approach. In literature, the book's diagnosis of "unconscious despair" — the despair of those who do not know they are in despair — has been echoed by writers from Franz Kafka to Albert Camus, and its account of the "fantastic" self anticipates later critiques of inauthenticity and mass conformity. Within theology, the work remains a benchmark for any account of sin that takes the individual, rather than the abstract moralist, as its starting point.

Related Quotes

Kierkegaard's most famous lines from the book have entered the general philosophical vocabulary. The definition of the self as "a relation that relates itself to itself" is quoted in nearly every introduction to existentialism. Equally famous is the claim that the majority of people are in despair without knowing it — "the most common form of despair is not being in despair over the fact that one is in despair." The book's definition of faith as the self's "willing to be itself, grounded transparently in the power that established it" is the positive pole of the whole analysis, and its warning that "the greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all" has become a touchstone for the existentialist critique of conformist modern life. For the ZHAIBIAN collection, the most relevant quotation is quote-kierkegaard-on-despair: despair is the sickness unto death precisely because it cannot die. Together with quote-kierkegaard-on-faith and quote-kierkegaard-on-anxiety, these passages capture the arc of the book: from the diagnosis of despair, through the anxiety of becoming oneself, to the cure of faith.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Søren Kierkegaard."
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)."
• Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, translated by Alastair Hannay (Penguin Classics, 1989).
• Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol. XIX), translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1980).