The Sickness unto Death by Søren Kierkegaard

First published:Sygdommen til Døden: En christelig psychologisk Udvikling til Opbyggelse og Opvaekkelse, af Anti-Climacus, 1849 (English translation, 1941)

Type of work: Philosophy

The Work

Søren Kierkegaard gave The Sickness unto Death the subtitle “A Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and Awakening,” and he used the pseudonym Anti-Climacus when the book appeared. Walter Lowrie, in an introduction to his translation of this work, calls The Sickness unto Death “one of the most important productions of that most productive period” of Kierkegaard’s life. The subtitle and the pseudonym reflect not the wit and eccentricity of a pedant but the conscience and intellect of a modest, though self-assured, philosopher in the service of God. The “sickness unto death” that Kierkegaard reveals in his psychological exposition—in so forceful a manner that the work has affected the course of modern philosophic thought—is the sickness of a self that wills to tear itself away from the Power that constituted it.

According to Kierkegaard, human beings are in despair, which they may not recognize, because they are always critically “sick unto death.” For a spirit in such a condition, death is no escape; the sickness is “unto death” precisely because it is a despairing longing for death—not for extinction alone but for the experience of not being the self that one is. It is as if human beings were longing for the experience of death—an impossible experience because death, as death, is the end of all experience. Because the self is not content to be itself, because it is not content to relate itself to God, and because it cannot be satisfied with extinction, the result, in Kierkegaard’s view, is “the sickness unto death.”

Another way of understanding Kierkegaard’s account of this dreadful malady of the spirit is through a consideration of what he means by health. Kierkegaard maintains that “to have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession made to human beings, but at the same time it is eternity’s demand upon them.” Yet the self is a relation between the infinite and the finite, the temporal and the eternal, freedom and necessity—and as a relation, a synthesis, the self cannot exist before the synthesis is achieved. For that reason, there is some sense in which, as Kierkegaard claims at the outset, “human beings are not yet self”: They have not achieved a synthesis with God, with the Power that constituted them. Sickness is this alienation; health is the elimination of despair, achieved when the self, recognizing its dependence on the Power that constituted it, wills itself to be itself.

Using language other than Kierkegaard’s to explain the book’s central thesis, it is possible to say that Kierkegaard is arguing that human beings, considered not as animal but as spirit, can realize themselves only by admitting that they become something worthy of the name “self” when they accept the whole of their condition. This acceptance of limitations, of opposing powers, even of God’s eminence, is not resignation; it is a willingness to live “no matter what” and to be what human beings are in the world as it is.

It is tempting to make Kierkegaard’s thesis broader than it is, to argue that the great Danish philosopher has more sense than to suppose that significant acts are possible only by relating the self to God. The term “God” is, however, not a convenient symbol for power; for Kierkegaard God is the power that relates itself to every spirit and makes possible, through the self’s acknowledgment of that relation, the existence of every self.

Atheistic existentialists have found much that is helpful to them in Kierkegaard, but only by eliminating all references to God. Philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre are interested in arguing that in humans “existence precedes essence” and that only through action can human beings “make themselves” into some particular self. “Authentic” existence is not given to human beings, but they can create themselves through the lives they choose and live. For Kierkegaard also, health of the spirit is possible whenever people choose to be themselves—but only because to be themselves they must relate themselves to God. For Sartre, by contrast, health of the spirit consists not in relating to God but in recognizing the self’s freedom from all such dependent relations. Sartre writes of the nausea and anguish that grip a human being who recognizes creative responsibility, but for Kierkegaard anguish is the condition of a self that is not yet a self, of a self that tries to escape from God and, consequently, from itself.

The despair that is the sickness unto death may take any one of three forms: It may be the despair of not being conscious of having a self, it may be the despair of not willing to be oneself, or it may be the despair of willing to be oneself. If human beings are in despair, how can they fail to be conscious of it? Kierkegaard asserts that those who are primarily sensuous can be in despair without being conscious of their condition. Those individuals “live in the sensuous categories agreeable/disagreeable, and say goodbye to truth.” People who are sensuously happy will resent any attempt to take happiness from them; they refuse to acknowledge the despair that is deep within them. This form of despair—unconscious despair—is the most common. Since the sickness of not being willing to be oneself before God is sinful, it is important that all who are in the anguish of dread come to be conscious of that dread as the first step toward creating a self that is a synthesis. Kierkegaard defines sin as “before God, or with the conception of God, to be in despair at not willing to be oneself, or in despair at willing to be oneself.” Both kinds of despair are eliminated by being willing, before God, to be oneself.

The formula that enables someone to escape the sin of dread is, at the same time, a definition of faith: “By relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the Power that constituted it.” The opposite of sin, according to Kierkegaard, is not virtue but faith.

To emphasize his conviction that the opposition of faith to sin is a Christian concept that is fundamental to all ethical concepts, Kierkegaard stresses the importance of the qualifying phrase “before God.” Human beings come to have a reality, a self, “by existing directly in the sight of God,” and because of this, their sin—not willing to be themselves before God—concerns God. Kierkegaard admits that the notion of people being invited to exist before God and of God’s being concerned for them is unacceptable to many because it is both strange and demanding. Just as it would be puzzling and disturbing if an emperor were to invite a peasant to be his son-in-law, so it is puzzling and disturbing to suppose that God takes enough interest in individual people to wish to have them come to exist before him. Yet this is the Christian idea, Kierkegaard insists, and it is an idea that illuminates the entire area of ethical being and action.

The despair at not being willing to be oneself is called the despair of weakness, and the despair of willing to be oneself is called the despair of defiance. Such forms of despair result from a concern with self as if the self could exist by itself; this delusion is made possible by an absorption in matters that do not properly concern the spirit—matters of business or pleasure.

The sin of despair may give rise to new sins or to a continuation of sin. One may despair over one’s sin, so concentrating attention on it as to make impossible the emergence of faith, or one may despair of being forgiven. In the latter case, sinners choose, out of weakness, to be sinners by rejecting the forgiveness that would enable them to be themselves before God. Finally, one may commit the sin of abandoning Christianity, of declaring it to be false. This sin is “offensive warfare,” according to Kierkegaard, and it is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

Kierkegaard’s conception of God is often difficult to grasp because he explains the relations between God and humanity in a dialectical way, claiming that one understands either God or humanity only by appreciating the subtle effects that the actions and attitudes of the one have on the other. An interesting feature of his account is his conception of God as a being who “can do no other” than make the possibility of human offense a part of the human condition. Dread must be possible for human beings because God is concerned to allow them the possibility of faith.

The influence of Kierkegaard in modern philosophy can be explained, paradoxically, by reference to the widespread loss of religious faith in later times. Dissatisfaction with unexamined creeds quickly leads to the rejection of those creeds. Human beings are then in anguish over the void they find before them, and the writers tell of “wastelands” and “lost generations.” At such a time the existentialists are able to arouse interest by declaring that through action a person creates his or her self; the Christian existentialist turns to God as the factor to which a person must be related in order to be a self, while the atheistic existentialist makes virtues out of lucidity, courage, and action. Of the Christian existentialists, none has been more original and persuasive than Kierkegaard.

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