The Sickness unto Death

A short, dense work published in 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, with Kierkegaard named as editor, and described on its title page as a Christian psychological exposition for upbuilding and awakening. The title comes from the story of Lazarus, whose illness was not unto death; for the Christian, the truly mortal sickness is despair. Part One opens with a famous definition of the self as a relation that relates itself to itself and, in doing so, relates itself to the power that established it. Despair is a misrelation within this self. Kierkegaard analyses its forms through pairs such as finitude and infinitude, possibility and necessity, and through degrees of consciousness: not knowing that one has a self, not willing to be oneself, and defiantly willing to be oneself. Part Two argues that despair before God is sin, and that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.

Its analysis of despair as a failure to become oneself is among the most searching accounts of selfhood ever written, and it lies behind much later writing on anxiety, identity and authenticity.