Book: The Sickness Unto Death

Overview
Søren Kierkegaard’s 1849 book The Sickness Unto Death, written under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, presents a Christian psychology of the self centered on the problem of despair. Borrowing its title from the Gospel scene of Lazarus, it argues that the true “sickness unto death” is not bodily mortality but a spiritual condition: the self’s misrelation to itself before God. The book unfolds as a diagnosis of that sickness and a prescription for healing, insisting that authentic selfhood is achieved only by “resting transparently” in the power that established the self.

The Self as a Relation
At the heart of the argument lies a precise definition: the self is a relation that relates itself to itself, held by a third term that grounds it. The human self is a synthesis of opposing elements, finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, necessity and possibility. To exist is to be tasked with holding these elements together. Despair arises when this synthesis misrelates, either by failing to become a self or by attempting to become a self on one’s own. Thus despair is not mere mood or misfortune but a condition of spirit, a distortion in the self’s relation to itself and, ultimately, to God.

Forms and Degrees of Despair
Kierkegaard outlines three fundamental forms. There is despair that is unaware of being despair, the everyday inauthenticity in which a person is absorbed in busyness, social roles, or worldly success and so never becomes conscious of having a self before God. There is despair that does not will to be itself, a weakness that flees responsibility for individuality by hiding in necessity, habit, or fate. And there is despair that wills to be itself without God, a defiance that exalts autonomy, magnifying possibility while refusing dependence on the power that established the self.

These forms can be cast in the balances of the synthesis. Too much infinitude dissolves the self in fantasy and abstraction; too much finitude shrinks it to conformity and triviality. Overweighting possibility breeds anxiety and empty dreaming; overweighting necessity hardens into resignation. In “demonic” despair defiance crystallizes and refuses any cure. What unites all forms is a failure to achieve the transparent self-relation grounded in God.

From Despair to Sin
The second part reinterprets despair theologically: before God despair is sin. Sin is not merely the violation of ethical rules; it is the willful refusal of dependence, the misrelation made conscious and obstinate. Here Kierkegaard introduces the concept of offense: the human spirit stumbles over the paradox of Christianity, that the eternal has entered time in the God-man. One either takes offense, deepening defiant despair, or one believes. Thus the psychological diagnosis culminates in a religious decision; the problem of the self cannot be solved by self-mastery alone.

Faith and Healing
The cure is faith, understood not as assent to propositions but as a mode of existence: the self resting transparently in the power that established it. Faith secures the synthesis by holding together finitude and infinitude, necessity and possibility, in dependence. This does not remove struggle; it transfigures it. The individual still acts, chooses, and suffers, but does so in truth, no longer hiding from God or self. Kierkegaard’s tone is both surgical and pastoral: he exposes self-deception relentlessly so that awakening can begin.

Style and Legacy
Anti-Climacus writes from an ideal Christian standpoint, more “advanced” than the ironic Climacus of other works, to press the claim that modernity’s distractions mask a pervasive despair. The book has shaped existentialist thought, depth psychology, and theology by making selfhood a task of relation and grounding freedom in dependence. Its enduring insight is stark: to avoid the sickness unto death, one must become oneself, before God.