The Sickness Unto Death
Sygdommen til Døden — Kierkegaard's philosophical-theological analysis of despair, by Anti-Climacus
Tradition: Christian existentialism / Danish Lutheranism
Despair is the sickness unto death — the self in misrelation to itself before God
The Sickness Unto Death is Kierkegaard's most philosophically systematic late work, published under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus (paired with the earlier Climacus pseudonym as the "Christian above" the merely "religious" stage). Across two parts the work analyses despair (Part I) as the disrelation of the self to itself, and sin (Part II) as the theological intensification of despair before God. The opening definition — "the self is a relation which relates itself to its own self" — is one of the most philosophically dense single sentences in nineteenth-century philosophy. The work shaped twentieth-century existentialism (especially Heidegger's Being-toward-death and the existentialist analysis of authenticity), psychoanalysis (Rollo May), and Christian existentialism (Tillich).
Author
Editions cited
- The Sickness Unto Death (Howard V. & Edna H. Hong, Princeton, 1980 — Kierkegaard's Writings 19)
- The Sickness Unto Death (Alastair Hannay, Penguin, 1989)
- Sickness Unto Death (Walter Lowrie, Princeton, 1941)
School Embodiments
The Sickness Unto Death is one of the founding texts of existentialism. Heidegger, Sartre, Tillich, May, and the entire existentialist tradition engage it directly.
"The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self." (Sickness Unto Death, opening)
The work's theological framework is firmly Lutheran — sin as ontological category, justification by faith, the human being as before God. Anti-Climacus is the more strictly Christian pseudonym in Kierkegaard's late authorship.
"Sin is, before God, in despair not to will to be oneself, or in despair to will to be oneself." (Sickness Unto Death II)
A theological neighbourhood: Kierkegaard's doctrine of human depravity and the radical priority of grace overlaps with Reformed substance, even where his pietist framework differs.
"To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself, is the formula for all despair." (Sickness Unto Death I)
Kierkegaard's phenomenology of despair shaped Heidegger's analysis of anxiety in Being and Time. The treatment of selfhood is a foundational phenomenological achievement.
"The form of despair which is unconscious of being despair, or the despairing unconsciousness of having a self and an eternal self." (Sickness Unto Death I.A.a)
Kierkegaard's account of the self as a self-relating relation grounded in God is central to twentieth-century Christian personalism (Buber, Marcel, Wojtyła).
"The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself." (Sickness Unto Death I)
Internal Tensions
The Anti-Climacus pseudonym signals an explicitly Christian standpoint Kierkegaard claimed not to occupy himself. Whether the work is genuine Christian philosophy or a literary fiction has been disputed.
I. Time
Time is the medium of selfhood as task. The eternal in the self is given; the temporal self must become itself across time. Death is the genuine philosophical horizon.
Attributes
II. Space
Lived space of the individual before God. Substantival.
Attributes
III. Matter
Created good but subordinate to spiritual reality.
Attributes
IV. Observer
Kierkegaard's observer is the single individual, embodied, active in self-relating, fundamentally plural at the empirical level. Metaphysical agency is unambiguously personal.
Attributes
V. Energy
Not engaged.
Attributes
VI. Information
God's knowledge is total. Personal information conserved across death.
Attributes
Personas that cite this work
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How The Sickness Unto Death resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 7 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas, all mainstream
Matter · 7 dilemmas, all mainstream
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.