The Sickness Unto Death

Summary

The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening was published in Copenhagen on 30 July 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, with Kierkegaard named as editor. Its title comes from Jesus' words about Lazarus in John 11:4, 'This sickness is not unto death.' The introduction argues that for the Christian even death is not the sickness unto death, since there is hope beyond it; the true sickness unto death is despair, a condition in which one cannot die and cannot live, a perpetual dying without end. Part One analyses despair. It opens with a famously dense definition of the human being as spirit, and of spirit as the self: a relation that relates itself to itself and, in doing so, relates to the power that established it. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, the temporal and the eternal, freedom and necessity. Despair is a misrelation in this synthesis, and it takes three forms: being unaware of having a self, not willing to be oneself, and willing to be oneself in defiance. Anti-Climacus insists that despair is universal. Like a physician who says no one is completely healthy, he holds that almost everyone is in despair, including the many who feel content and do not know it; not knowing one is in despair is itself a form of despair. He then classifies its forms. Considered abstractly, despair can lack finitude, losing itself in fantastic infinity, or lack infinitude, shrinking into worldly conformity; it can lack necessity, dissolving in endless possibility, or lack possibility, as the fatalist and the philistine do. Considered with regard to consciousness, despair runs from spiritless ignorance through the despair of weakness, which despairs over earthly losses or over itself, to the despair of defiance, in which the self insists on creating itself, culminating in a demonic rage against existence. Part Two declares that despair is sin: sin is despair before God, either not willing to be oneself or willing to be oneself in defiance. Anti-Climacus rejects the Socratic definition of sin as ignorance, since Christianity holds that sin lies in the will, and argues against speculative theology that sin is a position, not a negation. He traces the intensification of sin: despairing over one's sin, despairing of the forgiveness of sins, which is offence at Christ, and finally declaring Christianity untrue. The opposite of sin is not virtue but faith, defined by the formula that in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it. The book became a founding text of existentialism and of existential psychology.

Top Lessons

• The self is a task, not a given

  Anti-Climacus defines the self as an activity of relating to oneself, a synthesis that can be held together well or badly. On this view selfhood is achieved rather than possessed, and despair is the failure to become the self one is. The idea underlies much existentialist and humanistic psychology.

• Despair can hide inside contentment

  The most unsettling claim of the book is that the person who feels perfectly fine may be in the deepest despair, because they have never become aware of themselves as spirit. Despair is therefore not identical with feeling bad; it is a structural condition that moods may reveal or conceal.

• Two shapes of failing to be oneself

  Despair either flees the self, in weakness, or clutches it, in defiance, insisting on making oneself without dependence on anything beyond. The defiant form, which ends in a rage against existence, sharpens the book's diagnosis of modern self-assertion.

• Faith as the opposite of sin

  Against moralism, the book claims that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith: resting transparently in the power that established the self. Sin is located in the will rather than in ignorance. The argument is theological, but it also offers a picture of healing as trust rather than self-improvement.

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Medical Lens

The Sickness Unto Death is framed throughout by medical analogy: Anti-Climacus writes like a physician at the bedside, insists that almost no one is wholly healthy, and distinguishes the sufferer's self-report from the expert's diagnosis. Its concept of despair is not depression, and the book explicitly separates despair from mere mood, yet its descriptions of hopelessness, the wish to die and the inability to die, and the self-consuming quality of despair are frequently cited in psychiatry, existential psychotherapy and suicide studies. Kierkegaard's own melancholy (tungsind), inherited, as he believed, from his father, is often read into the book; such readings are biographical interpretation, and any retrospective diagnosis of Kierkegaard should be presented as speculative. For clinicians, the book is a reminder that patients' suffering may concern meaning and identity as well as symptoms, and also a caution against equating spiritual categories with disorders.

• Preface and Introduction

  The physician's bedside manner as a model for Christian exposition; the Lazarus story and the claim that despair, not death, is the mortal sickness.

• Part One, A

  Despair as a sickness one cannot die of: the torment of wishing to die and being unable to, of the self wanting to be rid of itself.

• Part One, B

  The analogy of the physician who knows that apparent health may hide illness, applied to the universality of unrecognised despair.

• Part One, C (forms of the synthesis)

  Despair of infinitude lost in fantasy and despair of possibility, set against fatalistic and philistine despair of necessity; descriptions often compared to grandiosity and to depressive hopelessness.

• Part One, C (despair of weakness and of defiance)

  Despair over the earthly and over oneself, inclosing reserve that hides despair from others, the risk of suicide in the inclosed person, and demonic defiance.

• Part Two, B

  Despair over one's sin and of forgiveness as intensifications of despair, relevant to religious guilt and scrupulosity in clinical settings.