The Sickness Unto Death
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The Sickness Unto Death (Danish Sygdommen til Døden) is a book written by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. It is about Kierkegaard's concept of despair, which he equates with the Christian concept of sin.
According to Kierkegaard, an individual is "in despair" if he does not align himself with God. In this way he loses his self, which Kierkegaard defines as the "relation's relating itself to itself in the relation." The human self is a synthesis between the finite and infinite, the possible and the actual, and is identifiable with the dialectical balancing act between these opposing features, the relation. To not be in despair is to have reconciled the finite with the infinite, to exist in awareness of one's own self and of God. Specifically, Kierkegaard defines the opposite of despair as faith, which he describes by the following: "In relating itself to itself, and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it."
The book describes a number of ways in which humans turn away from the self and from God, and at one point suggests that some people take pride in their despair, letting it stand as an example of God's fallibility like an error in a manuscript that refuses to be corrected. This text is one of the primary reasons Kierkegaard is defined as an existentialist, as he illustrates ways in which one's subjective self-conception contributes to one's objective identity, which he saw as a collaboration with God in the creative process.
Some have suggested that the opening of the book is an elaborate Hegelian joke; however, some scholars, such as Gregor Malantschuk, have suggested otherwise (Armed Neutrality and An Open Letter, Simon and Schuster, 1969, pp. 65-6 and n. 7 on pp. 165-6).
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