Philosophy of Mind

The Sickness Unto Death

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Søren Kierkegaard

1849

Published under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus — a figure of higher Christian consciousness than Kierkegaard claimed for himself — The Sickness Unto Death offers the most rigorous analysis of the self in the entire Kierkegaard authorship. The self is not a given substance but a relation that relates itself to itself and to the power that established it. Despair — the sickness unto death — is the failure of this relation: defiant despair that wills to be what one is not, or weak despair that refuses to be what one is. The work diagnoses modernity as a civilisation of unconscious despair: people who have lost their selves without knowing it, who mistake comfort and social adequacy for genuine existence. Faith alone — the self resting transparently in the power that established it — is the cure.