The Sickness unto Death

"It’s not the most appealing book title, but The Sickness Unto Death is one of the clearest statements of Kierkegaard’s mature philosophical position. He wrote it at the end of the 1840s, when he’d already written some of his most famous works. In it, he defines human beings as spiritual beings. He says that human beings are not self-sufficient; we’re not autonomous, but rather all dependent on God. Whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not, we all have a relationship with God. Obviously, that’s a view situated within a particular religious tradition. For Kierkegaard, that’s what a human is: a being who is not self-sufficient. And he argues that when we fail to understand our own relation to God, we’re in despair. So, he diagnoses this condition of despair which, actually, turns out to be something that everyone suffers from, he says. To a greater or lesser extent, we’re all turning away from God and so turning away from our true nature as dependent beings. But then, he diagnoses various different forms of this despair. It might take the form of a kind of melancholy, or it might take the form of a more defiant attitude to life where you think that you don’t need (and don’t want) God. It’s a very psychologically acute book. No, this is a book that he wrote under the name of a pseudonym: Anti-Climacus. Many of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authors are people who say they’re not religious. They don’t really have faith; they don’t understand what it is to be a Christian, or what it would be to have faith in God. But Anti-Climacus is a pseudonym who claims to be more religious than Kierkegaard would want to assert himself. Kierkegaard was very hesitant to claim authority for himself as somebody who had it all sorted, who knew what it meant to be human being, who really did possess faith and who had a relationship to God. When he wants to explore the question of living in relation to God, he uses a pseudonym with more authority on that question than he himself wanted to claim. In a way, he saw himself as a reader of this book rather than the author. He didn’t want to put himself above his readers and preach to them, but he still wanted to explore a question that required a more religious standpoint than the one he wanted to adopt as an author. It does connect with a famous book by Kierkegaard called The Concept of Anxiety . In The Concept of Anxiety , Kierkegaard identifies anxiety as a fundamental human experience. Again, it has the sense of a diagnosis of anxiety as part of the human condition. It’s not a psychological phenomenon for Kierkegaard, but something that belongs to the very structure of being human. It’s in our constitution as human beings, he argues, to be anxious, and this has to do with our consciousness of our freedom and our mortality and so on. The Sickness Unto Death follows on from this, because his diagnosis of despair is quite similar. It’s not a psychological state—it’s not about feeling miserable or unhappy or hopeless—but to do with the fact that we have a certain constitution as spiritual beings, and that we’re somehow incomplete unless we really live in God. He also thought that really living in God was extremely difficult to do, perhaps impossible. So, again, we have that sense that everyone is, to some degree or other, in despair. Yes, definitely. He became an increasingly anti-institutional and anti-establishment figure, and the two establishments that he had complicated, ambivalent relations with were the university—the whole institution of academia—and the Danish State Church. He was a student at the University of Copenhagen for ten years, so that was the world he was in, and yet he was very critical of it. It was the same with the Church. Like almost all of his Danish contemporaries, he was baptised into the Danish State Church, grew up in the Church, and nearly became ordained in the Church. But he had a very ambivalent relationship with it from his childhood onwards. As time went on, this ambivalence actually shifted into outright opposition, and he became very polemical and launched a public attack on the Church in the last year of his life. “Kierkegaard is a very undogmatic writer. He’s not telling readers what to believe; he’s not expounding a doctrine” In his own time, his writing tended to appeal to people who felt that they didn’t necessarily fit in with organised religion. For example, there are some surviving letters from a couple of women who read his books, which describe how whenever they went to church, they found it difficult to concentrate on the sermon. They were going for some kind of guidance—ethical or spiritual—but they just didn’t connect with what they heard. Then, they found Kierkegaard’s books and in them discovered something that really did connect with whatever it was they were searching for. For the last century and a half, Kierkegaard’s appeal has continued. He’s often read by people who are part of an organised religion, and he’s now a staple part of the undergraduate philosophy and theology curriculum. But he also continues to appeal to people who are unsure of their religious identity, yet interested in exploring those questions. He’s a very undogmatic writer. He’s not telling readers what to believe; he’s not expounding a doctrine. He is much more interested in what you might call spiritual questions than in defending religious belief and identity in a more conventional way."